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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Firefox Add-Ons I Use
Continuing from Heidi Cool’s post about Firefox plugins, I wanted to talk about some that I use. Then, we’ll jump back into web videos.
YSlow
Yslow is a Firebug addition that helps you examine the technical nature of your site. It gives you a “performance report card,” and recommends actions that you can take to improve the performance of your site. This includes things like making less HTTP requests, using a content delivery network and adding “expires” headers to your files. It’s been a great resource for me in trying to eke out every bit of performance I can from my sites. That second or two of improvement will probably never be noticed by my users, but it makes me feel better knowing I’m doing all I can to give them information quickly.
S3Fox
S3Fox gives you access to Amazon S3 directly in Firefox, so you can work quickly to add files, delete files, or change permissions. Sometimes you just want to make a quick fix and you don’t want to open another program, like an FTP client, to do this.
NoScript
The Noscript plugin gives you protection against javascript and flash if you desire it. It’s well developed and easy to use. You can whitelist certain domains you trust, and access info about the scripts running on any page by clicking the icon in the status bar.
Extension for Amazon EC2
EC2UI is only important to you if you regularly run EC2 instances and need an easy way to control them.
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Bringing the cloud to eduWEB!
We’re bringing the thunder cloud to eduWEB!
After having such a good time at HighEdWebDev ‘07 presenting about the Facebook platform, my colleague Josh Tysiachney and I are packing up the show and bringing it to eduWeb in July. I’ve never been to eduWEB, and now that the schedule has been posted, it looks like a great conference. I’m glad to see some technical sessions there.
Josh and I will be presenting a session called “Head in the Cloud: On-Demand Solultions for Processing, Storage and Content Delivery Needs” on Tuesday, July 22 at 9:45 am. In this session, we’ll explore the possibilities for IHE’s when it comes to content delivery, off-site processing and more. Here’s a quick snippet:
On-demand services like cloud computing, storage, and content delivery have become near commodities in their pricing and scalability, and implementing them may be easier than you think. It’s a win for you, it’s a win for your institution, and it can take a significant load off of your already stressed IT resources.
We’ve been using the “cloud” at Allegheny College for nearly a year. This presentation will showcase our implementation of this exciting technology, focusing especially on Amazon’s Web Services offerings.
We hope to see you there - stay tuned here for more information about the session as we work on the presentation.
I’d like to tape some video interviews with some great higher ed web people about stuff you’re doing and get your takes on technology. Brad? Matt? Kyle? Karine?
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