SmugMug Rocks the Cloud
I’m a big fan of SmugMug and CEO Don MacAskil. Their use of the cloud for storage and processing is really interesting to study, and it’s very cool that Don keeps a blog about their software development.
Yesterday, Don announced that SmugMug will now store whatever you throw at it. Seriously - anything.
They’re accepting JPEGs, PSDs, TIFF, RAW files, and raw video. You can also store XMP sidecars, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video archives, and anything else you might want to store with your photos.
That’s very cool, but this is all possible because of their use of the cloud. The storage costs alone for this type of service could easily stretch into the millions of dollars. By using Amazon S3, they can offload the hard stuff and just keep throwing data at the cloud. The software development process is much quicker as well since you don’t have to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure.
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The Cloud Gets Cheaper
This morning, Amazon announced new pricing for it’s data transfer inside Amazon Web Services. This is great news if you’re using Simple Storage Service (S3) or EC2 to serve content, as I do.
Through the end of this month, the pricing for data out and in has been:
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Starting May 1, that will change to:
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Note: Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.
I don’t come anywhere near 10TB a month, so the pricing won’t affect me too terribly, but if you are pushing a ton of content out using S3, you should see significant savings. It’s interesting to watch these types of services come down in price. Soon, it will be a commodity.
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AWS Service Health Reports and New Service Plans
Following the announcement last week of Google App Engine, Amazon is shifting the focus back to their web services with the announcement of two new features of their cloud services.
First is a service health dashboard. This has been an on-going issue for users, and now you can visit a web page and see the current status of all Amazon web service offerings. In addition to this page, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for each service, including S3 and EC2. This is really cool. They’ll also keep a 35-day history so users can go back and review service uptime and/or other issues.
When S3 went down for a few hours a couple of months back, the communication about the outage from Amazon was very poor and Amazon knows it. Hopefully, this new dashboard will allow customers to be more in the loop about AWS services, especially if they are mission-critical.
Secondly, Amazon announced two service plans. For a cost, users can subscribe and get email, phone and web-based support for issues arising from AWS issues, including a named support contact. There are silver and gold levels of support. The main difference is with the “gold” support level, you get 24×7x365 support. Otherwise, it’s business day support. Also, with the gold plan you get one-on-one phone support. Both plans include an unlimited number of support cases.
Cost - for the silver level of support, you’ll pay $100 a month, or $0.10 per dollar of your total monthly S3, EC2 an SQS usage. Gold support is $400 per month, or per dollar rates that go down depending on how much you spend at AWS every month.
If you’re business was dependent on AWS, having dedicated support at Amazon would be critical, and $100 per month for that piece of mind seems like a wise investment. Several blogs and commenters at those blogs are arguing that users are already paying for the service, why should they pay additional for support. I can understand that, but when I’ve had a question about something or something hasn’t worked at AWS, a quick scan of the forums or a quick Google search usually finds me an answer. If my business was built on EC2, for example, I’d want to be able to pick up the phone or open a ticket day or night and get my issues taken care of.
It will be interesting to see if Google comes up with a similar plan once their Google App Engine goes live to everyone and the costs of that service are announced.
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