AWS Blog

IMO terminal protocols are more suited to UDP than TCP and I use ssh over UDP all the time. There are three main advantages:

* There is no connection session, so you can close your laptop or put it to sleep and open it up again and the connection will still be there.

* You don't have the lag of sending and then responding, it appears locally immediately

* It is much easier to get UDP around firewalls and it can't be blocked easily in the same way most VPN protocols or SSH can. I have yet to find a network where I can't get my terminal UDP packets through.

The alternative to Mosh is setting up OpenVPN[1]. It is especially worthwhile if you have a network of public servers that you administer. It is easy to setup[2] and works on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD etc.

The best tip is to add a second interface to all your machines and setup a private VLAN across them. This way if you are experiencing a DoS attack or high traffic you can still login and administer the machine (this also applies with standard ssh - you put it in a different range of IPs and on your public machines then only have 80 and 443 open).

EC2[3], Linode[4] et al all support adding a second network interface to each machine (or to just one of the machines, which is then used as a gateway to the remainder) which can be assigned an IP address in a different range. You then setup a separate hostname to this network, or even register a separate administrative domain name (eg. company-admin.com) which you keep on a…

What does running on Amazon mean (in 2006)? Remember, the company is officially Amazon.com, Inc., i.e. the ecommerce site turning tens of billions in revenue.

Here's an excerpt from the Businessweek cover story[1] a few weeks after EC2's launch:

> Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.

Weeks later Bezos discussed the $2 billion investment in Amazon.com's infrastructure [2]. In effectively the same breath he mentioned 200,000 developers signed up for AWS. This is deliberately deceptive. Bezos linked AWS with Amazon.com's infrastructure, when the two are totally separate.

Signs point towards EC2 coming about through the intransigence of a couple people [3], not through a deliberate effort by top brass to rent out Amazon.com's infrastructure. Implicating the main site was a tactic to inspire confidence and provoke experimentation. It's unclear whether EC2 would have found the same success had Amazon not papered over the inchoate AWS architecture by invoking the Amazon brand.

I love AWS. Their blog is the only corporate blog I subscribe to, because everything they post is so friggin' cool. Sentences like these...

> If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the…

I typically appreciate tptacek's security remarks, and agree that once you trust someone to view a photo, you're trusting them to not repost it.

However, I disagree that "everyone is doing it this way" is a good reason to do it this way.

Flickr, as I noted separately in this thread, doesn't do it this way. Changing privacy settings changes the URL, so someone using the URL (a common use case for images) can't use it any more. That's the "user expected" behavior. Facebook's behavior is a generally unwelcome surprise.

Additionally, since you're considering building image hosting: "token protected" URLs are well understood and often applied as a best effort solution to this problem. A token protected URL typically has an expiry, and in typical use is only valid briefly when issued for the visitor requesting the (authenticated) page containing embedded photos.

See: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/11/new-amazon-cloudfront-feature-private-content.html

Of course, the CDN edge cache servers have to cache the object yet respect the tokens, which requires a bit more intelligence from the cache, which is why "general industry practice" is to take the easier shortcut of not protecting the URL and image object at all.

Disclaimer: We offer token protected video and image CDN delivery, calling it "deep link protection". Our DLP, and token schemes in general, protect the link from misuse, not the asset.

"The New EC2 High Storage Instance Family"

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/12/the-new-ec2-high-storage-instance-family.html

"
The High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances are a great fit for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 117 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.

This instance family is designed for data-intensive applications that require high storage density and high sequential I/O -- data warehousing, log processing, and seismic analysis (to name a few). We know that these applications can generate or consume tremendous amounts of data and that you want to be able to run them on EC2.
The storage on this instance family is local, and has a lifetime equal to that of the instance. You should think of these instances as building blocks that you can use to build a complete storage system. You should build a degree of redundancy into your storage architecture (e.g. RAID 1, 5, or 6) and you should use a fault-tolerant file system like HDFS or Gluster. Of course, you should also back up your data to Amazon S3 for increased durability.
"

My business (LabSlice) was just announced as a semi-finalist. I didn't even realize it was publicly announced until I clicked this link in the poster's blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/aws-start-up-challenge-2010-finalists.html.

I am just a data point, but it's worth mentioning that LabSlice has no VC funding at all, and is truly a startup (ie. the website has only been online for a month or so). So on the one hand I can attest to some success, even without serious VC backing. On the other hand I will admit to surprise that the AWS competition classifies a startup as a business with less than $10M in revenues or $10M VC funding. Sure, they may technically be a startup, but they are in a much different league to the guy in the basement.

In some ways it would be pragmatic to have a VC funded tier and a non-VC funded tier. That's the only way to differentiate businesses to give a better chance to the little guy. But in reality this is a competition that Amazon funded out of their pocket and they can call whatever rules they see fit.

I was also disappointed in the statement of price drops - that marketing-statement of price drops alone makes me look around for alternatives. And the statement below, "Our limits exist primarily to prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot" - well that is just arrogant. If I aim at my feet, let me be a fool and pull the trigger. It is nice to see that Amazon now offers Postgresql: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-rds-for-postgresql-now-available.html

The old plans with 1TB and 500 connections made me feel comfortably ignorant of our needs, but with the new plans I must contemplate connection limits and storage capacity, and I really like not thinking about that at all.

With that said, the new features with HA and rollback is a needed addition. But I would be more likely to use HA if I could just create a follower and for an extra $50 make it automatic failover.