With the release of CloudFront, Amazon’s ever-increasing cloud computing service portfolio has increased to include content delivery. This is a new service that caches high-traffic content on the Amazon worldwide network of servers. The basic concept is that the content is served from the closest server on the edge of the Amazon network…leading to fast delivery and low latency.

This isn’t new. Many people do this including Akami and Limelight are already really big in this market. There are several differences between these services. The established brands are rather expensive but in return they provide a full technical and sales support service. They also have extensive networks, much larger than the network that Amazon has.

On the other side, Amazon has built a pay-as-you-go service which is very cheap and easy to use. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service. They have 14 edge locations around the world. These are:

US:

• Ashburn, Virginia
• Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
• Los Angeles, California
• Miami, Florida
• Newark, New Jersey
• Palo Alto, California
• Seattle, Washington
• St. Louis, Missouri

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Dublin
• Frankfurt
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

While this is an impressive list, it’s not a patch on Akami who have 34,000 servers in 70 locations. Interestingly, this means that Akami is a perfect acquisition for Amazon….something that might just be possible because Akami seem to be having a bad time at the moment, they just made 7% of their staff redundant. An acquisition of Akami would give amazon access to a much larger network with more edge locations for content delivery and the other range of AWS services.

scan array in Databanx

We have being really busy over the past 12 months and we have built some really solid sales revenues in the UK and Irish markets. I started looking around last month with a view to putting some of our revenues towards buying some equipment and I was very happy to see how far your money goes these days!

In October we bought all of the European infrastructure of two US companies who are lowering their growth prospects. To wrap off the month we also bought 19 servers of a council in the North East of England. In the various transactions we took control of over $1.5m in servers, switches and load balancers.

While we sold some the equipment as it was far too much for us to use, we are left with the following:
50 servers (4Gb or RAM + 500Mb of disk space each)
1 Foundary switch
2 Citrix NetScaler load balancers
A van load of switches, routers, firewalls, UPS units, PUD’s and racking equipment.

We are using all this new kit to build a new administration system (arachne) in the Databanx facility and three new scan arrays for the emailcloud system (one in Databanx and two in a new facility in Liverpool).

Arachne being built.

Arachne is the name we have given to the new emailcloud administration system. It is a rebuild of our administration system that already manages the network. It uses clustering and some nice network tricks to manipulate our various scan arrays. We scan the email using scan arrays. Each array contains nine servers in a fault tolerant setup. Each array is built so that it can scan over 1m emails a day at around 20% utilisation.

I have around two more weeks of work to do to get all the equipment provisioned…I have already used over 200 cable ties since I started!

After some networking / unstructured discussion, we will convene at 6:45 for the evenings entertainment….Language Wars. This will give us the oppertunity to discuss the relative advantages of a diverse set of computer languages including PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, C#, TCL and JavaScript. 

The line up is: 

Mike: PHP 
Sarat: Java 
Lee: Ruby 
Alex: Python 
Brian: TCL 
Mark: JavaScript 

Each person will have five minutes to introduce their chosen language. After which we will have plenty of time to ask questions, then flame and gloat! After all the buns have been thrown we can then de-camp to a local pub for further discussion.

Please register your interest here: 

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1120643 
Capacity on the night is limited to 100.

Powering Your Business with Cloud Computing

I plan to tell the emailcloud story…how we are using a multi-tenanted, virtualised and scalable infrastructure to deliver an industry leading email scanning service.

In preparation for the event I have uploaded my presentation here:

• Powerpoint 2007
• Powerpoint 2003
• ZIP’ed .PNG files

usual excess...

I spent yesterday at the Future of Web Apps show at London Excel. I was invited by Tony Lucas from Flexiscale.

The show was very well attended by focused speakers, exhibitors and atendeeds.

I gave a short presentation on ‘How to use Cloud Computing in your Web App’. You can download this here:

• Powerpoint 2007
• Powerpoint 2003
• ZIP of .PNG files

Event Registraton

Last month I took part in the Codeworks Connect event called SaaS and Cloud Computing. This event was sponsored by Amazon Web Services and emailcloud.

120 people from the IT sector in the North East of England attended. It was an excellent opportunity to network with other technology based businesses and enthusiasts. 

The event kicked off with some housekeeping jobs for Codeworks, namely pitches by five people (including yours truly) for a position on the advisory board of Codeworks. In my pitch I told people about the Super Mondays range of events and how I can help bring the views of the technology community to the board…lets hope that people vote for me…if you want you can help?

Excellent Networking Opportunity

I gave a very quick presentation on cloud computing where I explained that the term can be used to loosely group together the three business models of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

SaaS describes the business model of ’software as a service’. This concept is growing in popularity with small businesses where you can get access to an application on a pay-per-use model rather than paying a large license fee in advance and running the application on your internal network. By far the most popular application sector for this service delivery method is CRM ( an example is salesforce.com) but there are many other examples in the areas of finance and HR.

PaaS describes the ‘platform as a service’ business model. Estimating system resources on a development project is very hard for developers and once the project has been deployed it can often be hard to manage the infrastructure (such as databases, web servers and file storage servers). The PaaS market has commoditised many of these services and delivered them on a pay-per-use basis. The market is supported by players such as Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Mosso.

The croud gets ready for an awsome evening

IaaS covers the ‘infrastructure as a service’ market, by far the biggest of the three market sectors, the dominant player in this area is Amazon Web Services. AWS gives you access to servers (the full OS), storage and other infrastructure in a scalable and cost effective way on a pay-per-use model.

The common threads between the three business models are pay-per-use, scalability, security, reliability and the ability to integrate using API’s. The market new has access to services that can lower the cost of development, reduce infrastructure wastage and manage scalability in a cost effective way.

The program progressed to a panel discussion, chaired by Andrew Robson. The panel comprised of Ross Cooney (AWSUG and emailcloud, Tony Lucas (Flexiscale.net), Steve Caughey (Arjuna), Sarat Pediredla (Hedgehog Labs) and Duncan Mactear (4Projects).

The pannel discussion

The optimistic view, taken by the majority of the panel, was that we are on a journey towards cloud computing becoming the norm for business computing. Duncan Mactear of 4Projects sounded a more cautious note; his company provides SaaS for the construction industry but does not use cloud; instead their servers are hosted in a third-party data centre. To which Tony Lucas of Flexiscale pointed out that 10 years ago, similar companies weren’t even using hosting services.

Trust was raised as a key issue. Several panellists opined that interoperability was the best answer to this; then if your provider has problems, you can switch your application to another. Rozmic run their EmailCloud application on both Amazon and Flexiscale, switching between them when one has problems. The downside of this is that it is currently expensive to implement applications for multiple providers, although some companies (such as CohesiveFT and Rightscale) are providing systems to aid this process.

engaged

I was initially concerned that the panel discussion would be either too technical or too basic…I feel that on the night that we hit the balance correctly. Here is just one thought from Richard Laverick from UBrands:

 ”It was interesting to hear the for and against arguments for the adoption of cloud computing. I made some great new contacts and look forward to future codeworks connect events.”

I hope that the popularity of the event will spill over into the super mondays events over the next few months.

Thanks to Dave Berry for allowing me to plagiarize his blog

Redundant Servers

I have just spent the weekend helping a friend to build servers and setting up a hosting facility. It was a weekend of cables, kernels and RAID driver patches!

A few months ago we sat down and started a planning session to evaluate the needs of his company and we decided that the current hosting setup was not good enough. The days of using a collection cheap dedicated servers at a US hosting facility were long gone because their customers demanded a more reliable service. After evaluating some of their needs we quickly decided that Cloud Computing is not an option. We had to build our own system on our own servers.

We had many variables to consider including:

1. dedicated resources
2. physical access to the servers
3. load balanced HTTP service across several servers
4. Cloudbursting facility for web and application servers

At short notice we collected 20 people from the following various usergroups:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Ruby
• LUG (Linux User Group)
• ACCU
• Refresh Newcastle

Google Developer Day, Google App Engine Presentation

On tuesday I travelled to London to the Google Developer Day. As expected, the event was very well organised.

Mano Marks gave an excellent set of presentation on Google App Engine. You can view them on YouTube.

I went along to see what I can learn about the Google App Engine and specifically to see if it would be possible to move some of the emailcloud administation system to AppEngine. It seems that this is not possible because of the following reasons:

1. AppEngine currently only supports python…it will support more in the future but google have not announced a date.
2. There is no way to use the service to manipulate a file…so that we can get a file from AWS S3 and then release it to an email user.
3. There is a limit of 5m page views a month…this will increase soon…but no date was announced.
4. there is a limit of 1Mb per transaction…this is too small
5. there is a time limit of 10 seconds for transactions and 4 seconds for external URL calls
6. the only viable database system it can use is BigTable (as to use any SQL database you would need to host it externally and then be limited to access by URL, including the 4 second delay).
7. no SLA
8. EVERYTHING is covered under the Patriot Act

There were more…but I stopped listening after all this.

More Details Here

You can signup for the event here.

Dave Barry has written a blog post about this here.