Within our Developer Relations team at Amazon, any public picture of a team member is considered fair game for use in parodies. Look what just showed up in my Inbox:
Mike, Jinesh and I, would like to wish you some Happy Holidays and offer our thanks for reading (and responding to) our blog posts. We love to hear back from our readers.
– Jeff;
PS - I should point out that this is a really fun place to work and that we do have some great job openings.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk team has been hard at work on a couple of important new features: credit card funding and transaction history. Both of these features are available from the Your Account page.
With the debut of credit card funding, Mechanical Turk Requesters (the people and organizations who create the HITS) can instantly add funds to their accounts using a credit or debit card or from an existing balance in an Amazon Payments account. It is no longer necessary to fund work using a bank account.
This new feature simplifies and accelerates the process of getting work done. Requesters can pre-fund their account at any level (the minimum is one dollar). Once this is done, the prepaid balance can be used to create and pay for work right away.
You now have access to your detailed transaction history from Your Account as well. You can check on your account balance and you can see the last 18 months of prepayments into your account and payments to workers. You can even download this data in CSV form.
– Jeff;
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may recall my Ka-Ching post this past summer. In the course of announcing the Amazon Flexible Payments Service, I also tried to make clear the fact that we are doing our best to enable and encourage developers to build profitable businesses around our line of web services.
We are now taking another big step in that direction with the introduction of Amazon DevPay. This new service allows entrepreneurial developers to wrap their own business models around Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, taking advantage of Amazon’s existing customer base and billing infrastructure. With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us.
Developers use DevPay’s web-based registration interface to create pricing plans for their applications, monitor customer signups, and track usage. The developer’s customers use another web-based interface to sign up and enter payment information for the applications that they wish to use.
You can think of DevPay as an enabling technology for our other services. As as developer you will spend most of your time working with the other AWS services while counting on DevPay to allow you to monetize your hard work.
One thing that I really love about DevPay is the fact that it builds on years and years of work in a multitude of areas! We’ve been putting the building blocks in place for a long time. Starting from Amazon’s early focus on providing customers with a great online experience, to the creation of our ever-growing line of scalable and powerful web services, we can now measure and bill Amazon customers for the use of applications built by our 290,000-strong developer community. We’ve taken what we know about creating a great online shopping experience and applied it to every aspect of DevPay, from the application registration and purchase pipelines to the user billing statement and the developer information dashboard.
Like all of our services, DevPay offers a lot of flexibility. You can create your own pricing plan for your EC2 AMIs or your S3 objects using any combination of one-time charges, recurring monthly charges, and metered Amazon Web Service usage. You have total flexibility to price your applications either higher or lower than your AWS usage.
DevPay includes a complete "pipeline" (series of web pages) for you to use as part of your application’s sign up process. When your customers travel through the pipeline they will sign in to their Amazon account, choose a payment method, agree to the pricing plan and gain access to the application using a private identifier generated by DevPay.
Your customers will be billed for usage of their DevPay-powered applications on the first day of each month. We will then deduct a 3% fee plus another 30 cents, and deposit the remainder in your DevPay account. We will then charge your account for the usage of the Amazon services. You can transfer the profits (your DevPay balance) to your bank account whenever you want. You will also be able to log in to the DevPay portal to check on the status of your business at any point.
You can also use DevPay with your Amazon S3 applications. If your application adds value above and beyond raw storage (backup, indexing, personalization, or recommendations all come to mind) you can charge more than the base prices for storage and bandwidth.
You can adjust your pricing plan at any point if need be. DevPay even allows you to customize the email notification that will be sent to your customers when this happens. This is another way that our focus on customers really comes through, and it is one less thing that you will have to do yourself.
We’ve already got two interesting examples of DevPay in action…
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available on Amazon EC2 via DevPay. New users simply click the Subscribe Now button, agree to the payment terms, and have access to the RHEL AMIs in a matter of minutes. The monthly fees includes the ability to run the RHEL AMIs on EC2, a Red Hat Network Update Entitlement and unlimited email support with 2-day turnaround.
Zmanda Internet Backup is a plugin for the Amanda Enterprise backup software. Amanda Enterprise is a certified, tested, and supported version of the popular Amanda open source backup and recovery tool. Amanda can now use Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet.
A number of other developers now integrating DevPay into their
applications and I’ll be blogging about them in the very near future. If you build a cool application with DevPay, send us some mail, leave a comment to this blog post, or write your own post with all of the relevant information.
– Jeff;
Timbervision (Audio CD)
By The National Parcs
A Night At the Roxbury (Special Collector’s Edition) (DVD)
By Will Ferrell
Monster’s Ball (DVD)
By Billy Bob Thornton
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (DVD)
By Burt Reynolds
We are now accepting applications for the limited public beta of Amazon SimpleDB!
Amazon SimpleDB makes it really easy and straightforward to store and to retrieve structured data. You no longer need to worry about creating, maintaining, or migrating database schemas, monitoring and tuning the performance of your queries, outgrowing the storage or processing capacity of your database server, making backups, or replicating data.
Instead you simply create up to 100 SimpleDB domains (each of which can hold up to 10 GB of data, for a total of 1 TB) and then start to store structured data in the form of items. Each item consists of multiple name/value pairs (which we call attributes), and there can be more than one value for a particular name. You can have a different set of attributes for each item in the domain. With SimpleDB there is no need for a time-consuming schema change when you need to store additional information in your database. You simply store the additional attributes as desired.
For example, if you were building a tag cloud to represent information about a collection of web sites, you could store the site URL as the first attribute and the entire set of tags as the second. After the system has been running for a while, you decide to add a thumbnail for each URL (of course the Alexa Site Thumbnail Service would be perfect for this) and simply add a third attribute to the new entries. Later, as desired, you can go back and add this attribute to the older entries. This ability to improve your data model on a dynamic, as-needed basis makes Amazon SimpleDB a perfect match for today’s fast-paced world of agile development, where flexibility and adaptability are of paramount importance.
I believe that the "new-age" model espoused by SimpleDB should cover about 80% of all database requirements. Applications which require long-running queries and/or complex table joins, such as those for data warehouse applications, are probably not a good fit for SimpleDB today. While RDBMS offerings provide deep functionality, for many use cases, they introduce more complexity (and more cost) than is necessary. Many developers simply want to store, process, and query their data without worrying about managing schemas, maintaining indexes, tuning performance or scaling access to their data.
All data stored in SimpleDB is replicated multiple times in geographically disbursed data
centers, so customer databases don’t need to be backed and will
automatically fail over to another replica if one is not available.
Our key strengths are availability, durability and scalability. Customers can make SimpleDB requests via HTTPS and they are also free to encrypt their data for additional security.
As the name implies, the SimpleDB API is quite clean and simple. Here is the entire roster of calls:
The query language includes Boolean operations, lexicographic comparisons, and set operations.
As is the case with all of our web-scale services, you pay for exactly what you use in terms of bandwidth, storage, and processing, making it perfect for startups. SimpleDB doesn’t require any up front hardware investment or DBA
skills.
Bandwidth is priced the same for all of the AWS services, 10 cents per GB for data flowing into the Amazon data center, and 18 cents down to 13 cents per GB for data flowing out, depending on volume. Query processing costs 14 cents per machine hour. This is slightly different than EC2 which is based on wall clock time rather than on CPU time. As an aid to understanding what this means in practice, the SimpleDB calls return the actual amount of machine time used by the call.
Want to learn more? Take a look at the SimpleDB Detail Page, the Developer Guide, the Getting Started Guide, and the FAQ.
Reaction from the online world has been swift, with good articles at Information Week, O’Reilly Radar, ZDNet, Gigaom, TechCrunch, CNET, Read/Write Web, and Satine. Bloggers Deepak Singh and Don MacAskill have also weighed in. There’s even more on the AWS Buzz.
We’ll be letting developers into the beta program as fast as we can, so sign up today if you are interested in participating. We are really looking forward to seeing some SimpleDB applications emerge from our community in the very near future.
– Jeff;
Welcome to the Grindhouse (Las Vegas Lady / Policewomen) (DVD)
By Sondra Currie
