The process of getting started with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Simple Storage Service (S3) is extremely easy. A entrepreneur with minimal knowledge of Linux and computer systems in general could have a server with Elastic Block Store (EBS) up within a day. The pricing is laid out before hand and demoing the software can be done for under $5 if executed properly. Manipulating resources using command-line tools has been expedited to an even greater degree with the two FireFox extensions ElasticFox and S3Fox Organizer or JetS3t.
Tutorials
There are a number of tutorials and blogs on getting up and running on EC2 and/or S3. Of the ones that I read, none of them offered anything that the Amazon Developer Tutorials do not already cover. The EC2 tutorial will walk you through the various features and setup process. The S3 tutorial is much more in-depth. Specifically, it deals with the concepts of storage containers, sample code, and API Specs. For those users not wishing to jump into code immediately, I would recommend looking over the getting started guides and then using the FireFox plug-ins listed below to look around and get a feel for the overall environment.
Amazon Developer Tutorials
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/DeveloperGuide/index.html?Welcome.html
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/gsg/
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/
Blog Tutorials
http://www.robertsosinski.com/2008/01/26/starting-amazon-ec2-with-mac-os-x/
http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/04/05/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2
http://arope99.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-started-with-amazon-elastic.html
Pricing Guide
* Don MacAskill, CEO at SmugMug, has been one of the primary supporters of continued S3 usage. Specifically, his claim of saving $500,000 – $1,000,000 over the last year and a half. His post on the subject can be found here. * Instance hours or hours that the server simply stays online are fairly cheap. A simple http server running 24/7 for a month will cost you 0.10 per hour (small instance) and 0.17 per GB transfer (first 10 TB/month out). This adds up to $2.40 per day and approx. $70 per month. Averaging 10-50 GB worth of outbound traffic per month, monthly cost is $1.7 – $8.5 at most, not including inbound costs.
* If your server does not have bandwidth constraints on any particular bandwidth greedy IP address, then your bill can quickly balloon. EC2 has been fully tested with Bittorrent seeding in order to mitigate some types of costs.
Amazon Expense Calculator and Official Prices
Monthly Price Calculator
EC2 Pricing
S3 Pricing
Popular Opinion
There are a number of positive and negative opinions regarding the two services. Furthermore, the services can considered on a variety of issues. Latency, reliability, price, and scalability.
The searchstorage article with interviews of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill report that the latency of the Amazon S3 service is 2 times slower than his own servers and nearly 3 times slower than CacheFly. Any fears of increased latency and any loss of reliability will cause cloud computing to
be used primarily as backup as opposed to direct content distribution.
Reliability has been a major issue for live 24-hour services. Customers have no access to the business’ services if they are hosted solely from S3. Additionally, recent outages over the past months have made this vulnerability particularly noteworthy. This has prompted many users of the S3 service to rethink their overall plan. Although, I have not found any direct examples of users leaving the service all together. Rather, it seems that users are adapting to the changes in reliability by locally caching information temporarily and providing additional safeguards that the information entered the S3 storage before deletion of any local copies.
Users may not completely agree on the price comparison of S3 vs self-hosted services. But, it is not deniable that the pay as you go and instant scalability of cloud computing is far superior. This cost structure is ideal for start-ups that require no up-front cost and can scale as the business grows. Don MacAskill makes the case of constant Raid5 server scaling vs S3.
Noted users are SmugMug, Spanning Sync, Pownce, Justin.tv, some portions of Twitter, and the PhotoShare service. While there are some detractors, the response of the user community to the recent outages has prompted Amazon to create their Service Dashboard in order to allow users real-time feedback on AWS services’ status. I believe that S3 reliability will continue to improve as well as the number of users relying upon it. I anticipate additional competition from Microsoft and Google as their own cloud computing products continue to develop.
AWS makes the case for S3’s scalable media hosting here.
Blogs and Articles Regarding Use and Outages
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-slowdowns-and-problems/
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/03/remote-storage-on-amazon-s3.html
http://blog.spanningsync.com/2008/07/amazon-s3-outag.html
http://satoshi.blogs.com/uie/2008/07/amazon-s3-issue.html
http://www.lowter.com/blogs/2008/10/14/cloud-computing-and-amazon-s3
http://gigaom.com/2006/07/13/startups-embracing-amazon-s3/
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/amazon_hey_spammers_get_off_my.html
http://hashtags.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/did-someone-say-ec2/
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid5_gci1246658,00.html#
FireFox Plugins
If managing EC2 and/or S3 from the command-line is not your cup of tea, then luckily there are FireFox extensions for both.
ElasticFox
– This is a FireFox extension for EC2 management. The extension and its tutorial are hosted by Amazon Web Services.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/elasticfox.xpi
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=17717&tstart=0
S3Fox Organizer
– This is a Firefox extension for S3 management. The extension and tutorial are hosted and distributed via third-party(Suchi Software Solutions, R. Jonna ). This application does not appear to be capable of deleting folders(empty or otherwise).
http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php?isnew=true
JetS3t
A Java implementation for viewing and managing your S3 buckets. JetS3t provides command-line scripts for easy user interaction. I found the interface to be more natural than the S3Fox Organizer.
https://jets3t.dev.java.net/
