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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Amazon Announces…something
This morning, Amazon Web Services announced a new content delivery service, but hasn’t given much in the way of specifics, costs or details.
It’s interesting they’d create a content delivery network since that’s what many people, myself included, are using S3 for. Perhaps this network will have less latency and better response times then S3 sometimes has.
In an email sent to customers, Amazon writes:
You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.
From the email, the new content delivery service sounds separate from S3. Here’s what we do know.
1. There are no minimum fees and no commitments to use the new content delivery service. You will only pay for what you actually use.
2. A single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
3. Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
If the only difference between this CDN and S3 is a slight increase in performance at an additional cost, I don’t see why I should stop using regular old S3 as a delivery tool. How about a little more direction, Amazon.
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