Amazon Web Services Blog

Before rapper Jay-Z was Jigga Man as you know him today, he was just another wanna-be with a played out Kid n’ Play style Flat top. But you don’t have to take our word for it, watch the video yourself:

click image to watch video
Jay-z would probably like this music video to stay in the deepest darkest dungeon of rap, but it’s always important to know where your stars come from. They seem to forget about their roots when they start getting all that bling bling. Watch the video from beginning to end so you can see how this rap star rolled before being big time.

Nik Rao of Orglex wrote to tell me about his site and about how they are using Amazon EC2, S3, and the Alexa Web Information Service to build their site.

Orglex is focused on providing information services to industry professionals in vertical markets such as health insurance, clinical trials, and venture capital. Their service has three facets: aggregated content specific to the industry, community and networking hubs for the industry, and a targeted recruiting platform.

Orglex usea EC2 and S3 to build and maintain domain-specific ontologies for each vertical market. In contrast to the usual top-down models hand-built by domain experts, their system extracts clues from the information and uses them in a scalable, bottom-up fashion.

The process of building and refining the algorithms is iterative in nature. The scalable nature of EC2 allows them to tune and re-run their algorithms as needed without the need for a dedicated compute cluster. Nik told me that the ability for them to scale up and down has really driven down the cost of experimentation for them and has allowed them to get to market quickly, and with a high quality product.

-- Jeff;

Voting for the 2008 Webware awards is now underway. Please consider voting for your favorite AWS-powered sites including these (direct links to voting pages):

• Mogulus
• Coghead
• Thinkfree
• Jamglue
• Second Life
  

If your site has been nominated and you are not on the list, leave a comment, include a link to the voting page, and I will update this post!

-- Jeff;

Jungle Disk is looking for a C/C++ developer to work directly on the product, and for a C#/ASP.Net developer to work on the web site. More info can be found in Jungle Dave's blog post.

Ronald Lewis is offering a 10% discount on EC2-based consulting jobs.

-- Jeff;

PS - I will be happy to post additional positions offered and positions sought as long as they are directly related to an Amazon Web Service.

We have simplified the process of requesting additional EC2 instances. You no longer need to call me at home or send a box of dog biscuits to Rufus.

You can now make a request by simply filling out the Request to Increase the Amazon EC2 Instance Limit form. We’ll need to know a little bit about you and about your application and the number of instances that you need, and we’ll take care of the rest.

As always, if you are doing something cool with EC2, we really  want to hear about it! Write a blog post that we can link to, or simply send us an email at awseditor@amazon.com .

– Jeff;

If there was ever any doubt about the power each of us have, this week proved that one person makes a real difference. I am midway two-week trip to New Zealand and Australia, and writing this post from New Zealand. The person that I’m talking about is Nick Jones—let me explain how this evangelism trip came about, and along the way I’ll talk a bit about what I found once here.

How the Trip Came About
Amazon’s own Jeff Barr came up with an idea that has changed the course of evangelism—at least here at Amazon Web Services. We have a wiki at evangelists.wetpaint.com that allows community members to request that we come to them, rather than some centralized process where we decide who “should” hear about Amazon Web Services. And so in this case Nick posted a request that Amazon send a Web Services evangelist down under. I replied to Nick to say “sure, but not just for one meeting”. Must have been a challenge—check out the wiki page for this trip and you’ll see just how dense the schedule is. Nick wasn’t responsible for every meeting; however a large percentage of these meetings in both New Zealand and Australia were due to his efforts.

The Result
Lots of opportunity to meet with the academic/research community (Nick works at the University of Auckland), government agencies, startups, and individual developers on this trip. It’s amazing what you learn—especially when others set the agenda. I am going to describe just a few highlights, which will shortchange others who reinforced the same point; but given the number of meetings it’s the only approach possible.

New Zealand is a long way from traditional tech centers, and there is a single undersea cable that serves the country (although a second one is on the way). The result is that Internet access is expensive, with a wholesale cost of $0.03/MB to communicate with North America. So the research community makes use of KAREN, a network that is funded by the NZ government and that eliminates that transit fee—as long as the other end has a peering agreement. None of this seems to affect the local startup scene though, as I'll describe shortly.

	Every city seemed to have a take-charge person. In Christchurch there were two: with Robin Harrington taking the lead at the University of Canterbury, and Christopher Sawtell leading the charge for the Linux group. Robin set up a series of sessions with researches and faculty on campus. It's always exciting to see people think about what these new Web service offerings afford in the way of potential and cost savings. And I was able to learn more about the university and what their needs are. The campus is on a very large piece of land; yet the actual buildings are compact so that there is lots of very lush green space. Kiwis are definitely into "green"--in both the garden and environmental sense.
	As mentioned, the other Christchurch leaders were long-time officers of the local Linux user group. They went well out of their way to accommodate my schedule and arrange a meeting on a non-normal night. Then they even invited me out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Great place to eat! We met on the university campus; you know it's a comp sci department when the name on the lab door says "Crypt 2".
The Kiwi research community has access to the highest number of supercomputers per capita in the world. These were used for at least part of the rendering of Lord of the Rings, a fact that many techies say “thank you” for.
	Wellington has a vibrant Web community, and seems to be a hotbed of tech startups. The original intent was that I'd present to a few local startups. The event kept growing on its own until Catalyst Consulting stepped in and agreed to host it. Then it got bigger yet, presenting venue challenges... Don Christie from Catalyst posted a blog entry about the meeting, where I presented to a group of well over 100 people (believe that it was closer to 150), in a packed incubation center. Wow, what energy! What the folks in the room didn’t realize was that from the balcony outside the meeting I was able to see the neighborhood where I lived briefly many years ago (in the background of this photo). What a distraction! Another blog post by a different attendee is here.
	In Hamilton I met with one of New Zealand’s largest Web design firms. They have all sorts of innovation in their reference list; not least of which was setting themselves up as an Internet registrar. Like so many others, they were enthusiastic and excited about the potential of Web-Scale Computing. At this point I also switched to renting a car--was a combination of destinations in suburban areas and a late-night travel schedule to Auckland. The rental vehicle reminded me that New Zealand uses the other side of the road, and that I should too...

Finally, Auckland is a more traditional business community but still full of tech startups. Had an opportunity to meet with some of them as well. In both Wellington and Auckland I realized how hands-on the government is about promoting their software industry as an export. The folks in NZTE (New Zealand Trade & Export) were impressive--unlike a typical government agency these staff members come from the software industry, and have a very realistic view of the world. There are plenty of success stories in New Zealand's software industry that don't involve government agencies, of course; however being promoted as an export industry definitely provides lift.

I finally met Nick on Thursday.

Who wants to be next? Nick and the rest of the New Zealand community set the bar...

-- Mike