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Amazon Adds Access Logs for CloudFront Streaming

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 14:42:32 +0000

A persistent issue with Amazon’s CloudFront is the lack of analytics available – what’s the point of hosting your video on CloudFront when you can’t tell if anyone watched it or if user’s quit after the first 3 seconds. Today’s announcement of streaming access logs goes some way to address this. Amazon will now log all streaming access events such as play, pause, seek, and stop. In addition user details such as IP address, and other data items are logged.

It’s worth noting that there isn’t an inbuilt analytics solution to view the data and user’s will have to arrange for the logs to be read by third party analytics services.

Amazon Introduces SNS (Simple Notification Service)

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:58:38 +0000

Amazon today announced the Beta of its SNS (Simple Notification Service) service. SNS is a “push” messaging service for delivering real-time notifications to subscribers. Amazon already offers a non-push messaging service (SQS) which is primarily used for distributed applications to communicate. SQS messages are persisted in a queue so that other connected applications can ‘poll’ the queue and pull messages when they are ready. For example, a cloud app taking customer orders may send the orders as SQS messages, these could then be picked up by an on-premise order fulfillment application at the factory.

SNS, by contrast, is intended for real-time communications and will probably be consumed by people as opposed to applications. In the above example, SNS could be used to send relevant parties a confirmation/notification email of the order received. Currently SNS supports HTTP, email, and email-JSON protocols but SMS is due to be added in future. Pricing for HTTP notifications is $0.06 per 100,000 notifications sent (the first 100,000 are free), and $2.00 for 100,000 Email/Email-JSON notifications (first 1,000 are free).

This is a very useful addition to the AWS platform and will greatly reduce the amount of effort developers had to put in to create notification systems.

See the AWS SNS page for full details.

Windows License Mobility for EC2 [News]

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:45:05 +0000

Microsoft and Amazon announced Windows License Mobility which allows enterprise license holders to migrate their licenses to Amazon’s EC2 instances. The program is currently running only as a pilot and Microsoft only allows the license to be used for Windows EC2 instances for a period of one year. After one year (if the program is not extended) the license will revert to a standard Windows Server license to be installed on a dedicated machine and EC2 pricing will revert to standard Windows EC2 rates.

The signup process is quite lengthy, and involves filling out registration forms, requesting Microsoft’s confirmation and then having Microsoft and Amazon countersigning the agreement. The process is unlikely to be completed in less than 10 days.

Windows Server Standard Edition entitles the holder to run a single EC2 instance, whereas the Datacenter and Enterprise editions allow for four EC2 instances. There is no distinction between the various EC2 instance sizes.

Once a user has been approved, pricing drops to same as the Linux EC2 instances (ie approximately 30% less than the standard Windows EC2 instances). Pricing is as below:

Standard On-Demand Instances	Windows Pilot Usage	Windows Usage
Small (Default)	$0.085 per hour	$0.12 per hour
Large	$0.34 per hour	$0.48 per hour
Extra Large	$0.68 per hour	$0.96 per hour

This offering is currently being limited to license holders based in the US.

Akamai Announces Akamai Download Analytics [News]

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:33:32 +0000

Akamai, the leading CDN vendor, just announced the introduction of the Akamai Download Analytics. Getting useful data on files served over CDN’s has long been a pain-point for CDN users. Akamai Download Analytics hopes to address this by providing the following types of analytics:

User engagement data such as download duration and completion rate.
User analysis by geography, network and connection speed
User behavior data, such as start, stop, pause, and cancel
Usage metrics, such as bytes delivered and bytes per download
Custom reporting, such as the ability to define data sets, reporting dimensions, and metrics.

Rackspace Cloud Servers to Offer Oracle [News]

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:18:04 +0000

Rackspace just announced that its offer Oracle on its Cloud Servers product. AWS has had Oracle offerings for some time now and the announcement by Rackspace is clearly a move into the enterprise market which is a major target of … Continue reading →

Cloud Computing Economics

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:59:55 +0000

Great video from James Hamilton of AWS demonstrating the eocnomics of data centers and cloud computing. Ever wonder where the cost is consumed or why cloud computing is more efficient. Did you know that power is only 13% of the cost of running a data center but it is the key reason that Amazon decided to lease out its services? This video explains all!

Check it out here