Amazon Web Services Blog

Many people have told me that they have used the ElasticFox extension for Firefox to get started with Amazon EC2. ElasticFox makes it easy to see the list of available AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), to launch any number of instances of those AMIs, and to monitor and manage the running instances:

We just released version 1.4 of this powerful tool. In addition to wiping out some bugs related to security groups and key management, ElasticFox now supports all of the features of the newest version of the EC2 API - Availability Zones, Elastic IPs, and user-selectable kernels. There are new tabs for kernels and ramdisks, Elastic IPs, and Availability Zones:

An IP address can be allocated and then attached to a running EC2 instance with a couple of clicks:

New instances can be launched in any availability zone, with full control of the kernel (AKI) and ramdisk (ARI):

Finally, you can now filter the AMI list using the box at the top right:

I added this feature myself because I had been spending too much time scrolling through the ever-expanding list of available AMIs during my conference and user group demos.

And that brings me to my last point: ElasticFox is an open source project hosted on SourceForge. It was easy to download the code to my desktop machine (I used TortoiseSVN), install FireBug, figure out how the code worked, and to make and test my changes.

We've got ideas for even more features, but there's no reason to wait for us. If you have some ideas of your own, grab the code, do your thing, and send us your code for review and checkin.

-- Jeff;

PS - We are planning to release a version of this extension which is compatible with version 3 of Firefox. This version is well under way, but we didn't want to hold up release of these great new features in anticipation of the production release of Firefox 3.

Update: If you are brave and somewhat fault-tolerant, you can download and try out the Firefox 3 version here. This version is reportedly faster, and also more responsive -- the UI doesn't freeze when the extension makes background calls to EC2. Please file bugs as you find them (you will need a SourceForge account in order to do so).

My last trip to India was in the pleasant winter and it was packed with action. I met with Wipro, Infosys, Patni, Accenture, Symphony and various other small and large companies. It was 14-day 5-city tour with stops in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad. Met a lot of people and made tons of new friends. This time, I decided to visit India during the red hot summer and get some heat!

I will be in India from May 19 to June 1 to speak at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 in Bangalore. I would love to meet with you if you or your organization is using Amazon Web Services and/or would like to know more about computing in the cloud. I would love to talk to outsourcing companies, consulting companies, system integrators, enthusiasts and passionate programmers.

Please feel free to schedule your meeting using our user-generated calender - Evangelist's Wiki for this trip.

I will be traveling to Japan from June 3rd to June 11th before returning back to Seattle. If you are in Sapporo or Tokyo and would like to schedule a meeting/presentation, use the Japan Wiki Page.

As always, we are always eager to meet you and learn more about your use case and dive into technical discussions.

-- Jinesh

Animoto is a very neat Amazon-powered application. Built on top of Amazon EC2, S3, and SQS, the site allows you to upload a series of images. It then generates a unique, attractive, and entertaining music video using your own music or something selected from the royalty-free library on the site. Last week I spoke to a group of Computer Science and IT students at Utah Valley State College. Before leaving Seattle I spent some time downloading images from their athletics site. I then combined this with some Southern Surf Syndicate music from The Penetrators and ended up with this really nice video:

There's a lot going on in the background. After the images and the music have been uploaded, proprietary algorithms analyze them and then render the final video. This can take an appreciable amount of time and requires a considerable amount of computing power.

Animoto co-founder and CEO Brad Jefferson stopped by Amazon HQ for a quick visit on Thursday. Earlier in the week we had seen their EC2 usage grow substantially and I was interested in learning more. Brad explained that they had introduced the Animoto Videos Facebook application about a month earlier and that it had done pretty well, with about 25,000 users signing up over the course of the month, with steady, linear growth.

The reaction from the Facebook community was positive, so the folks at Animoto decided to step it up a notch.  They noticed that a significant portion of users who installed the app never made their first Animoto video — yet the application (as they themselves admit) relies heavily on the 'wow' factor of seeing your first Animoto video and wanting to share it with your friends.  On Monday the team made a subtle but important change to their application: they auto-created a user's first Animoto video.

That did the trick!

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning. Here's a chart:

We are really happy to see Animoto succeed and to be able to help them to scale up their user base and their application so quickly. I'm fairly certain that it would be difficult for them to get their hands on nearly 3500 compute nodes so quickly in any other way.

-- Jeff;