Cloud Hosting Mag » AWS

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.

Using Amazon S3 and CloudFront on WordPress

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:42:30 +0000

For the past six months I have used Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) to store all the newly uploaded images on my WordPress installations and it works like a snap. But why should you host all your images on S3 when your can simply upload them to your own hosting account? There are several reasons why S3 storage is a superior solution to using your own hosting :

Hosting images on a separate domain speeds up site load times as most browsers can only make two simultaneous requests to a domain. Thus if all your file are on a single domain the requests are queued and handled two at a time which slows the load time.
Moving hosts is easier if the file locations do not change (a major difficulty in changing hosts is downloading, then uploading all the images and finally changing all the references in your articles).
If the files are on S3 it is very easy to transfer them to Amazon’s CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN). CloudFront will give an additional performance boost for user’s who are located geographically far away from your server as CloudFront caches the files in 14 locations around the world.
If you are approaching your hosts storage limit then using S3 will probably be cheaper than purchasing additional storage space on your host.

The S3 for WordPress plugin modifies the standard WordPress image upload dialog to upload the images to your designated S3 bucket, from there uploading files to S3 is seemless as it is the standard file uploading process.
You will of course require an S3 account, and you should add a separate ‘bucket’ for file storage (buckets in AWS are similar to directories).

CloudFront in WordPress

Any file stored in S3 can be used with AWS’s CloudFront CDN. To use CloudFront you are required to sign up for it separately to S3 (you can sign up here) Files served by CloudFront must exist in S3 and when a file is requested from CloudFront, CloudFront initially requests the file from S3 and then caches it at one of its edge locations.

Once you have an account at CloudFront, login to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the CloudFront tab. Under a single CloudFront account you can have various Distributions which are essential ‘buckets’ of storage which can have different attributes. Click the Create Distribution button which will open the setup dialog, where you choose whether to use Download (for images) or Steaming (for video) and associate the Distribution with an S3 bucket. Once the Distribution is created, you will be given a unique domains which will look like dxabw2ae51eqo.cloudfront.net , to request your files from CloudFront simply replace your S3 domain (in the format bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com) with your CloudFront domain on all your file URL’s – the file names will remain unchanged. Unfortunately the S3 plugin in WordPress only works with S3 and you must manually change the file URL’s after uploading although a global find/replace plugin can be used for this.