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Jeff Barr, the Evangelist for Amazon Web Services has agreed to hold a Q&A for the readers of shmula. Similar to my interview with Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Barr will field questions entered through the comments section of this post. Here’s the plan:
If you have a question for Jeff Barr, place enter it in a comment on this post. Jeff will answer a subset of the questions and I’ll post the Q&A here on shmula. I will stop accepting question submission on February 16, 2007 and I will post the Q&A on February 26, 2007.
Here’s a little information about Jeff, taken from his personal blog:
I have been in the software business since I was 16, starting out at one of the first retail computer stores in the world. As you can see from this resume, I’ve done all kinds of interesting things throughout my career. I’ve worked at startups, I’ve worked at big companies, and I’ve even had my own consulting practice. I bring a lot of energy, passion, and experience to the table. I relish jumping into new environments and new technologies with both feet, and I enjoy "living in the future," always working on the bleeding edge of practicality. I still write code, but currently focus on technical evangelism, coupling my software development background with my speaking and writing skills to get developers excited about new techologies. Developers still see me as "one of them" and this gives me a lot of credibility when I go out and speak with them. I am a geek at heart and never mind getting my hands dirty. I’m not afraid to dig into kernel level source code, but I am just as comfortable traveling around the world and presenting high-level business and technical concepts to a professional audience.
Here’s a little about Amazon Web Services, taken directly from the Amazon.com Website:
Amazon E-Commerce Service
Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) exposes Amazon’s product data and e-commerce functionality. This allows developers, web site owners and merchants to leverage the data and functionality that Amazon uses to power its own e-commerce business. ECS 4.0 makes it extremely easy for developers to build rich, highly effective web sites and applications.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Limited Beta
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.
Amazon Historical Pricing
The Amazon Historical Pricing web service gives developers programmatic access to over three years of actual sales data for books, music, videos, and DVDs (as sold by third-party sellers on Amazon.com). Sellers can use Amazon Historical Pricing to make informed decisions on pricing and purchasing.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (Beta)
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call – the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.
Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.
Alexa Site Thumbnail
The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa’s large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl.
This web service enables developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories, blog entries, and other web real estate with Alexa thumbnail images. Including web site thumbnails improves user experience by allowing end users to preview sites before clicking on the thumbnail’s associated link.
Alexa Top Sites
The Alexa Top Sites web service provides access to lists of web sites ordered by Alexa Traffic Rank. Using the web service developers can understand traffic rankings from the largest to the smallest sites. The service enables users to page through the list 100 web sites at a time, and by making multiple requests, to retrieve lists of any size – be it the top 1,000, 5,000, or 100,000 web sites.
In addition to Alexa Traffic Rank, the information returned for each web site includes the number of page views the site receives per million users, the average page views per user, and the number of Alexa users visiting the site.
Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS)
The Alexa Web Information Service makes Alexa’s vast repository of information about the traffic and structure of the web available to developers.
Service Highlights
- Gather information about web sites, including traffic data, contact information, related links and more.
- Access historical traffic data for web sites to analyze growth and understand the effects of specific events on web site traffic.
- Build a web directory into your web site or service using an Alexa enhanced DMOZ-based browse service.
- Access the list of sites linking to any given site.
- Use the Alexa web map to analyze the link structure of the web without the content. Use the page-to-page links-in and links-out information to invent wholly new search engine algorithms.
Alexa Web Search
The Alexa Web Search web service offers programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine. Developers can use this service to incorporate search results directly into their web sites or services.
Service Highlights
- Comprehensive: Based on 300 Terabytes of Alexa’s web crawl.
- Relevant : Advanced relevance algorithms provide highly pertinent search results.
- Configurable: Filter search results by passing in over 50 different search fields.
- Customizable: Advanced users can build new search index files that can be incorporated into the Alexa search engine.
- Cost-effective: Pay a low rate, and only for what you use.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m really looking forward to hearing from Jeff. I’ve been watching what’s going on in the service space at Amazon with great attention. Here’s two questions for Jeff:
1) Most businesses use some measure of return (ROI, ROE, etc) to measure the success of a venture. How does Amazon measure the success of these new services, and how does Amazon take into account these services being extensions of the architecture that was built to support other core business lines. In other words, does the Web Services group have to get a return on the fixed cost of development or just the marginal costs of expansion to be considered successful internally.
2) I work for a financial services firm that is interested in bundling parts of our operations into services that we then market to other firms. What lessons have you learned from the Web Services project that are applicable in other industries, like financial services?
Looking forward to hearing more!
-JD
My company uses both EC2 and S3, and they’ve been very convenient. There are still several pieces of infrastructure that I’m forced to think about manual scaling (particularly the database). Any chance Amazon is working on some way to store more structured data?
In terms of ROI, which webservice do you think has the most $$$ potential??
Two questions:
(1) I’d like to run a web crawler (Nutch) on EC2 and S3. Does Amazon allow outbound HTTP connections?
(2) I’m thinking about hosting a public website using EC2, with dyndns. It’s not a high-volume website — about a page view a second. I know EC2 is still in beta, but is it ready to host a low-to-medium volume website? Are others hosting websites using EC2?
-dallan
Jeff,
There are many critics of Amazon’s seemingly hacked strategy — is amazon a online store, fulfillment shop, a web services shop, etc., etc. Can you comment on where AWS fits in the overall Amazon strategy?
-Pete
It was a fantastic talk, Amazon has some interesting services, maybe upset Microsoft and Google?
Jamie