Amazon Web Services Blog

We’ve heard from a few folks that it’s not clear what the difference is between some of the Amazon Web Service offerings. This is a very short post to try to clarify two services, plus a product feature. Like most short descriptions, I am short-changing the rich feature set of each offering. Visit aws.amazon.com for more information on each.

Using Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), developers can accept payments on websites. It has several innovative features, including support for micropayments.

Amazon DevPay instruments two Amazon Web Services to enable a new sort of Software as a Service. Amazon DevPay supports applications built on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 by allowing you to “resell” applications built on top of one of these services. You determine the retail price, which is a mark-up above Amazon’s base price. Customers pay for your application by paying Amazon. We deduct the base price plus a small commission; then deposit the rest into your Amazon account.

Amazon EC2 Public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are not a service as such. Rather these virtual server representations are a feature of Amazon EC2, designed with Amazon DevPay in mind. They are usually configured with your value-add software that you want to monetize using a monthly fee and/or markup above the base fee that Amazon charges. One of the best-known examples of a public AMI is Red Hat RHEL, which is available for a monthly fee plus an hourly fee. It’s fully supported by Red Hat, which makes the virtual version of their software viable for many companies who are Red Hat customers.

-- Mike

The very cool EC2 Firefox Extension is now an open source project on SourceForge!

The extension makes it really easy to launch and manage Amazon EC2 instances. After creating your keypairs and security groups, you can simply right-click on any of the listed AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) and choose to launch one or more instances.

All of your running instances are listed at the bottom where they can be identified, controlled, monitored, shut down, and so forth. You can easily capture the public DNS name of any running instance, and then paste it into your favorite SSH client (e.g. PuTTY, my personal favorite) to create a secure connection to your new EC2 instance.

There’s also a very cool menu entry labeled "Launch more of these" for instant scalability (assuming, of course that you’ve built your application in a scalable fashion, a subject of another post).

As-is, the extension is pretty cool but as always seems to be the case with something cool, everyone who uses it has ideas for even more cool features. Some people seem to want a slightly less technical view and others want to go in the opposite direction. A lot of people would like to have more control over the list of displayed AMIs.

We’ve released the extension in source form and are now eagerly anticipating the results. The extension is written in JavaScript and you’ll need to know a little bit about CSS and DHTML to be productive.

Let us know what you come up with!

– Jeff;