Amazon Web Services, Service Health Dashboard

Found a cool AWS Web Site, reporting Service Health.

Amazon guys are thinking of customer support.

Amazon Web Services publishes our most up-to-the-minute information on service availability in the table below. Check back here any time to get current status information, or subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified of interruptions to each individual service. If you are experiencing a real-time, operational issue with one of our services that is not described below, please inform us by clicking on the "Report an Issue" link to submit a service issue report.

Jun 4, 2008

Report an Issue

Current Status
Details
RSS


Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (API)
Service is operating normally.


Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Instances)

[RESOLVED] Severe Weather - Instances Unavailable

more

12:29 PM PDT We are currently experiencing severe weather near one of our Amazon Web Services locations. We are investigating impact and will provide updates on the dashboard.

1:01 PM PDT During the transition to backup generator power, we had a small number of EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone shut themselves down. We will be restoring these instances and will post here when this is complete. We continue to monitor the situation closely.

2:26 PM PDT A brief update to let you know that all instances affected by this issue have been restored. We'll also be following up with additional information about this event.


Amazon Flexible Payments Service
Service is operating normally.


Amazon Mechanical Turk (Requester)
Service is operating normally.


Amazon Mechanical Turk (Worker)
Service is operating normally.


Amazon SimpleDB
Service is operating normally.


Amazon Simple Storage Service (EU)
Service is operating normally.


Amazon Simple Storage Service (US)

[RESOLVED] Severe Weather - timeouts and 503s

more

1:52 PM PDT Amazon S3 US customers may currently be experiencing an elevated rate of timeouts and 503 errors due to the severe weather events near one of our locations. We are investigating.

1:56 PM PDT Quick update to let you know that we are currently in the process of recovering.

2:14 PM PDT Recovery is proceeding, though some customers may still be seeing timeouts and/or errors at this stage. We'll post another update shortly.

2:35 PM PDT Amazon S3 US has recovered and system-wide performance has returned to normal. We'll be posting here with more information about this event once we've completed our investigation.


Amazon Simple Queue Service
Service is operating normally.

and, here is an example of an incident report.

image

Read more

Amazon.com Data Center

I've been searching for information on amazon.com data centers, and there isn't a whole lot out there.  Found one Turner Construction project with reference to one facility.

Amazon.com Data Center
Seattle, WA
This phased fast-tracked demolition, renovation and structural upgrade of approximately 10,000 sq. ft. basement and approximately 18,000 sq. ft. of first floor in existing downtown five-story office building. Electrical support for data center included construction of Seattle City Light electrical transformer vault, N+1 redundant power and cooling, and structural reinforcement of the existing structure for seismic upgrades. In addition open workspace and offices were carved out of the area. Intensive just-in-time pre-construction sessions with the design team, city utilities and Amazon.com staff has made it possible to design, obtain permit and substantially complete in record time - five months from formal Notice to Proceed to an operational data center

There is the UC Berkeley/Stanford paper.

Despite significant efforts in the field of Autonomic Computing,
system operators will still play a critical role in administering
Internet services for many years to come. However,
very little is know about how system operators work,
what tools they use and how we can make them more efficient.
In this paper we study the practices of operators in a
large-scale Internet service Amazon.com and propose a new
set of tools for operators. The first tool lets the operators
explore the health of system components and dependencies
between them; the other monitors the actions of operators
and automatically suggests solutions to recurring problems.

I think I need to talk to some other data center friends who work in Seattle to find more about amazon.com.

Read more

Amazon and Google, Winning the Battle

And, the news continues about amazon and google, claiming these 2 will be the winners as the US Internet matures. Reuters reports on a new study.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An Internet analyst for a major Wall Street firm argues in a new report that Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc will be long-term winners, while Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp fall by the wayside and eBay Inc becomes a merger target.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report entitled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning" to be published on Tuesday that Google and Amazon are best placed to withstand the current economic downturn.

"We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon," Lindsay writes. "Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight."

Read more

James Hamilton's Comparison Google Application Engine vs. Amazon Web Services

James Hamilton attended the Google IO conference and posts his comparison of Google Application Engine (GAE) vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Last week at Google IO, pricing was announced for Google Application Engine. Actually it was blogged the night before at: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/announcing-open-signups-expected.html.

The prices are close to identical with Amazon AWS although GAE differs substantially from the AWS offerings.  The former offers a easy to use Python  execution environment whereas Amazon offers the infinitely flexible run-this-virtual-machine model. Clearly the Amazon model costs more to provide so, by that measure, AWS pricing is somewhat better:

Google Application Engine Pricing:

· $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour

· $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage

· $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

· $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

· From: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/announcing-open-signups-expected.html

Compared with AWS Pricing:

· $0.10 - $0.80 per VM hour (depending upon resources allocated)

· $0.15 per GB-month of storage

· $0.100 - $0.170 per GB outgoing bandwidth

· $0.100 per GB incoming bandwidth

· From: http://www.amazon.com/S3-AWS-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA and http://www.amazon.com/EC2-AWS-Service-Pricing/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=201590011&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA.

There are some important differences that make the pricing comparison somewhat biased in a couple of ways. Two important differences: 1) as mentioned above, Amazon gives an entire virtual machine so EC2 is much more flexible than GAE both in that it can run arbitrary applications in arbitrary languages and that it supports all execution models whereas GAE only supports HTTP request/response.  Another key difference is the storage subsystem.  In the numbers above, we’re comparing the Amazon blob store (S3) with the more structured storage model offered by GAE.  The more comparable AWS SimpleDB pricing is considerably higher than the GAE storage pricing. SimpleDB charges $1.50 GB/month in addition to machine usage and network transmission costs.  GAE is offering much more affordable semi-structured storage and the GAE storage model actually supports data types rather than having to force everything to character format.

And, James makes a good point about the Amazon as a retailer vs. google.  Amazon understands as any good retailer, Wal-mart, Costco - the pennies added up, and are important given your low margins.

GAE is still free to start with under 5M page views/month and up to ½ GB storage for free.  Obviously this helps developers get started without strings and that’s a good thing. But, more importantly, it avoids Google from having to go to the expense of billing very small values.  In a weird sort of way, I’m more impressed with AWS billing $0.04 on some accounts in that it shows there billing system is incredibly lean. Scaling down billing is hard, hard, hard.

Read more