Windows Servers Available in EC2
First, let me say I do not work for Amazon. I buy quite a bit from them, but I am not employed by them nor do I own Amazon stock. I blog about them quite a bit, but if they weren’t doing such exciting stuff, I wouldn’t.
Today, if you run one of their on-demand servers (Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2), you’ve been limited to Linux as the operating system. You can choose the distribution of your choice, and even the kernel you run, but it was still Linux. Which, for a lot of people, was just fine.
Today, Amazon announced that starting this fall, you will be able to now run Windows Servers on-demand. This means you can easily setup and provision ASP.net servers, SQL Servers and more. Once your instance is launched, you can use Remote Desktop to administer your server. Here’s a quick snip from the release:
The 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Server will be available and will be able to use all existing EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and the Elastic Block Store. You’ll be able to call any of the other Amazon Web Services from your application. You will, for example, be able to use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to glue cross-platform applications together.
No word yet if the Windows servers will cost more per hour. You can view the release here.
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Who is Mechanical Turk?
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Amazon Mechanical Turk. What’s that you ask? Good question.
Mturk, for short, is Amazon’s human-powered marketplace. Just like you can provision servers on demand, with Mturk you provision small work units that you pay people to complete. These are often small tasks, such as a web search or transcribing a few seconds of audio, and for the work that you do, you get paid, from a penny per unit on up. If you’re concerned about the quality of the responses you get, you can assign each task to multiple people, so it’s done two or three times and you can verify the quality of the response.
Here’s a quick video about the service from the user perspective.
Anyone can also submit work units to Amazon to be completed. Here are three really interesting blog posts about people’s positive experiences with Mturk.
NewsCred.com used the service to help categorize RSS feeds.
iamelgringo.com used the service to verify 6,000 business URLs and addresses. His project was completed in 5 days at a total project cost of $300.
Andy Baio used Mturk to transcribe an audio interview, breaking it down into small chunks for easy transcribing. Transcriping 36 minutes of audio took only 3 hours and cost $15.40.
Are there uses for this type of service in higher ed? It sounds like it could really help on grunt work or large sets of data that need verified or cleaned up.
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S3Stat tracks your cloud usage
One of the downsides of Amazon’s S3 service is that the reporting stats you get back are, to the naked eye, tough to decipher. It’s a spreadsheet full of times and values and bytes. It doesn’t give you a clear idea of performance, trends or popularity of items.
Enter S3Stat.com.
Every night, they will parse your S3 logs and transform them into Apache logs, which can be run through Webalizer and output back to an area on S3 where you can analyze to your heart’s extent. The stats are ongoing, so you can easily go back and check out last month or earlier in the year, which is nice. Here’s a quick screen grab:
S3Stat Screenshot
The one caveat is that you give S3Stat your S3 login and pass. That allows them to grab you logs and post the results back to your S3 account. This is similar to giving your login to RightScale to manage your EC2 resources. S3Stat has done nothing to question my trust in them, so we’ll continue to use the service.
Signing up for the service is easy, and you get a free 30 day trial. After that, the service is miniscule $2 a month. That’s a small price to pay for not having to wade through Amazon’s default stats.
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