OpenID55 items tagged “amazon”
The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.
— Werner Vogels 
5th January 2011, 3:13 pm
Amazon S3: Versioning Proposal. The us-west-1 S3 bucket region now optionally supports versioning—once enabled on a bucket, all previous versions of keys will be preserved. 
24th January 2010, 1:38 pm
Since we moved to EC2, the number of unique users has gone up 50%, and pageviews are up more than 100%. To support this growth, we have added 30% more ram and 50% more CPU, yet because of Amazon’s constant price reductions, we are actually paying less per month now than when we started.
— Jeremy from Reddit 
7th January 2010, 10:10 pm
One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.
— James Surowiecki 
9th November 2009, 10:06 am
OpenStreetMap Rendering Database. Amazon have added an OpenStreetMap snapshot as a public data set, thanks to some smart prompting by Jeremy Dunck. 10th October 2009, 1:05 pm
When I worked at Amazon.com we had a deeply-ingrained hatred for all of the SQL databases in our systems. Now, we knew perfectly well how to scale them through partitioning and other means. But making them highly available was another matter. Replication and failover give you basic reliability, but it’s very limited and inflexible compared to a real distributed datastore with master-master replication, partition tolerance, consensus and/or eventual consistency, or other availability-oriented features.
— Matt Brubeck 
4th October 2009, 9:50 am
Tile Drawer (via) The most inspired use of EC2 I’ve seen yet: center a map on an area, pick a Cascadenik stylesheet URL (or write and link to your own) and Tile Drawer gives you an Amazon EC2 AMI and a short JSON snippet. Launch the AMI with the JSON as the “user data” parameter and you get your own OpenStreetMap tile rendering server, which self-configures on startup and starts rendering and serving tiles using your custom design. 26th August 2009, 9:32 am
Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Amazon now let you create a network of private EC2 instances completely isolated from the internet and the rest of the EC2 cloud, then link them back to your home network via a VPN. 26th August 2009, 8:42 am
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
— Jeff Bezos 
24th July 2009, 12:48 am
Evidence of OpenID at Amazon. It looks like Amazon are using OpenID for SSO between their different properties—I clicked a link to sign in to AWS and the URL had OpenID query string parameters. 6th July 2009, 1:25 am
You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.
— Jared Spool, via Jeremy Keith 22nd June 2009, 5:13 pm
AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! Andrew Tanenbaum said “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway”, and now you can ship your storage device direct to Amazon and have them load the data in to an S3 bucket for you. 
21st May 2009, 11:22 am
EC2: Creating an Image. Here’s the easier way of creating your own AMI: start with a running instance in EC2, then customise it to fit your purposes and create a new bundle (and then AMI) using the ec2-bundle-vol command. 19th May 2009, 7:50 pm
HOWTO Building a self-bundling Debian AMI. Not as terrifying as you would have thought. Also contains some neat hints as to how some of the more magical parts of EC2 work (like the way your SSH public key automatically ends up in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys). 19th May 2009, 7:49 pm
New Features for EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch. EC2 now fulfils the promise of “magic scaling in the cloud” out of the box—CloudWatch monitors performance of your EC2 instances without needing to install any monitoring software, Auto Scaling allows you to configure “scaling triggers” which start up new instances based on information from CloudWatch, and Elastic Load Balancing balances requests across all available instances. 18th May 2009, 10:07 am
Amazon Says Listing Problem Was an Error, Not a Hack (via) “A friend within the company told him that someone working on Amazon’s French site mistagged a number of keyword categories, including the ’Gay and Lesbian’ category, as pornographic, using what’s known internally as the Browse Nodes tool. Soon the mistake affected Amazon sites worldwide.” 14th April 2009, 8:32 am
How to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code. Looks legit—the author claims to have sparked this weekend’s #amazonfail moral outrage (where Amazon where accused of removing Gay and Lesbian books from their best seller rankings) by exploiting a CSRF hole in Amazon’s “report as inappropriate” feature to trigger automatic takedowns. EDIT: His claim is disputed elsewhere (see comments) 
13th April 2009, 7:48 pm
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2. “At OpenX we recently completed a large-scale deployment of one of our server farms to Amazon EC2. Here are some lessons learned from that experience.” 10th April 2009, 9:43 am
Finding similar items with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop streaming. Tutorial for running Hadoop jobs on Elastic MapReduce using Python and the 2005 Audioscrobbler dataset. 7th April 2009, 9:19 am
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (via) Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop—you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job. 2nd April 2009, 10:25 am
Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console. Finally! I’m amazed it took Amazon so long to do this. Managing EC2 instances from a custom Firefox extension was pretty bizarre. It’s a very nice interface, built on top of YUI. Unfortunately you still have to manage your entire virtual server farm using a single shared Amazon account. 9th January 2009, 9:34 am
Amazon SimpleDB—Now With Select. So now all three of Yahoo!, Amazon and Google have invented their own SQL-like languages (YQL, SimpleDB and GQL)—though it looks like Yahoo!’s is the only one that attempts to provide joins. 18th December 2008, 8:59 am
Amazon CloudFront. The Amazon CDN front end for S3 has launched. Traffic is 2 cents per GB more than S3. I’d like to see a price comparison with existing CDNs; I have a hunch it’s an order of magnitude less expensive. 18th November 2008, 2:37 pm
Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows. It’s not instantly clear if you need to source your own Windows licenses or if the license comes as part of the hourly VM charge. If it’s the latter, I can see this being fantastically useful for both automated and manual cross-browser testing—throw up a Windows VM for just as long as you need to run your tests, running them through rdesktop. 1st October 2008, 9:16 am
Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk. Andy Baio’s in-depth tutorial on submitting HITs to Mechanical Turk. I hadn’t realised how straight forward and powerful the interface has become. 25th September 2008, 6:37 pm
Google’s Usability Research on Federated Login. Fascinating—suggests an approach to federated auth based on the Amazon.com “Yes, I have a password” login flow. Feels convoluted to me but apparently it tests really well against a mainstream audience. The more research shared around this stuff the better. 22nd September 2008, 8:56 pm
We’re Never Content. Amazon will be releasing a proper edge caching CDN on top of S3 “before the end of the year”. 18th September 2008, 12:30 pm
Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS—the easy way. Useful tutorial on getting Django up and running on EC2 with EBS for a persistent PostgreSQL database. 21st August 2008, 9:32 pm
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). EC2 just got a whole lot more useful—you can now create “block level storage volumes” (think virtual hard drives) and mount them to an EC2 instance for real persistent storage—but because they’re virtual you can clone them, snapshot them and benefit from automatic replication. 21st August 2008, 10:15 am
Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008. Don’t let the newspeak put you off; this is an honest and informative description of the bug that took down S3 last Sunday, although it does include the world’s longest way of saying “we turned it off and on again”. 27th July 2008, 5:42 pm
Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms. I didn’t know you could do this: create a regular HTML form that gives people permission to upload direct to your own S3 bucket, using a signed JSON policy statement in a hidden form field to prevent third parties from abusing your S3 account. 27th June 2008, 12:11 pm
[Amazon’s] forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.
— Jeff Barr 14th April 2008, 7:50 am
EC2: Introducing Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. Big news from Amazon: EC2 can now provide static IP addresses which you can dynamically map to one of your instances, along with “availability zones” so you can specify that instances run in different data centres. Hosting an entire application on EC2 just got a whole lot more practical. 27th March 2008, 10:33 am
Amazon.com: amazon oddities. Warning: reading the user reviews on these items has the potential to soak up hours. 21st March 2008, 2:54 am
Eventually Consistent. Werner Vogels explains the trade-offs involved in building scalable, highly-available data stores such as Amazon’s SimpleDB. 20th December 2007, 5:59 pm
Amazon SimpleDB overview. Attribute values are limited to 1,024 bytes; Amazon suggest that you store larger fields in S3 and use SimpleDB to query metadata about those objects. 14th December 2007, 11:39 am
What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon have finally launched the database component of their web service suite. It fits a bunch of current trends: key/value pairs, schemaless, built on top of Erlang. “Eventual consistency” is an interesting characteristic. 14th December 2007, 11:21 am
“The Definitive Guide to Django” is now shipping from Amazon. The book looks absolutely fantastic (bias disclosure: I contributed the newforms chapter)—huge congratulations to Adrian and Jacob. 
11th December 2007, 9:12 pm
ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware. 10th December 2007, 3:27 pm
Amazon Gets an SLA (But I Still Can’t Use It). “Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act.” 9th October 2007, 3 pm
Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement (via) Went in to effect on the 1st of October. Promises 99.9% uptime over a monthly billing cycle or you get “service credits” towards future S3 payments. 9th October 2007, 12:52 am
Amazon makes you lie to log off (via) Amazingly, the only way to sign out of Amazon these days is to use the “If you’re not XXX, click here” link—the traditional “sign out” link has quietly vanished. 
2nd October 2007, 1:19 pm
DRM-free MP3 downloads from Amazon. The good: they have what looks like the entire Universal and EMI catalogues in DRM-free 256bit MP3s. The bad: you need a US billing address! So close... 25th September 2007, 4:30 pm
Amazon guide to ripping your CDs. “Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves.” 21st September 2007, 11:20 pm
Amazon EC2 Basics For Python Programmers. Detailed introduction and tutorial from James Gardner. 3rd September 2007, 6:20 pm
Processing Web Documents using Alexa Web Search, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. I’m not sure when it happened, but Alexa Web Search can be hooked in to EC2 now—presumably with free bandwidth between the two. 1st July 2007, 7:19 pm
Mass Video Conversion Using AWS. How to use S3, SQS, EC2, ffmpeg and some Python to bulk convert videos with Amazon Web Services. 3rd April 2007, 11:44 pm
Oxford Geek Night 2
If you missed the last Oxford Geek Night, you really owe it to yourself to make it to the next one. If you were there then you shouldn’t need any convincing. [... 180 words]
Chris Shiflett: My Amazon Anniversary. Chris Shiflett discloses an unfixed CSRF vulnerability in Amazon’s 1-Click feature that lets an attacker add items to your shopping basket—after reporting the vulnerability to Amazon a year ago! 16th March 2007, 10:16 am
boto. Python library for accessing Amazon’s S3, SQS and EC2 Web Services, with excellent documentation. 11th February 2007, 12:17 am
Abusing Amazon images (via) Amazon have an amazingly flexible API for generating and modifying product images. 14th December 2006, 7:38 pm
How I’m using Amazon S3 to serve media files. Adrian’s saving server overhead on ChicagoCrime by serving media from S3. 7th April 2006, 6:51 pm
Backing Up Flickr Photos with Amazon S3. 25 lines of Python. 22nd March 2006, 6:53 pm
BitBucket—Experimenting with Amazon S3 Service in Python (via) Nice pythonic API. 22nd March 2006, 6:05 pm
Amazon S3. Game changing. 22nd March 2006, 5:59 pm
