Amazon Web Services Blog

The folks at Intridea have been coding up a storm!

In time for this week's Railsconf, they are rolling out a hosted, on-demand version of their popular Scalr tool, a new release of their MediaPlug media server appliance, and the Acts as Community social network.

Scalr gives enterprise IT professionals the ability to quickly and easily set up and run EC2-powered server farms. Once such a farm has been set up, Scalr monitors and maintains it, with automatic scaling, failover, and redundancy. Scaling is based on load averages, with automatic instantiation of new instances of the proper type once the aggregate load average reaches a configurable threshold. If an instance crashes, Scalr replaces it with a new instance of the proper type. The hosted version is available for $50 per month; the open source version can be downloaded here.

MediaPlug is an EC2-powered media server appliance, packaged and sold as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). It supports transcoding, uploading, and storage of  images, audio files, and video files in a number of popular formats. There's a MediaPlug web service for direct integration into backend code, along with a JavaScript library for the front-end. MediaPlug is priced at double the cost of a Small EC2 instance, or approximately $150 per month.

Finally, Acts As Community, is a social network for Ruby developers. Of course, the site runs on Amazon EC2 and is managed by Scalr. The site includes forums and blogs for open source projects hosted at GitHub; user group creation and management tools, personal profiles, and a number of community features such as forums, questions and answers, media sharing, and code sharing.

-- Jeff;

Amazon EC2 users now have access to a pair of new "High-CPU" instance types. The new instance types have proportionally more CPU power than memory, and are suitable for CPU-intensive applications. Here's what's now available:

The High-CPU Medium Instance is billed at $0.20 (20 cents) per hour. It features 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units Each), and 350 GB of instance storage, all on a 32-bit platform.

The High-CPU Extra Large Instance is billed at $0.80 (80 cents) per hour. It features 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), and 1,690 GB of instance storage, all on a 64-bit platform.

The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator now supports these new instance types.

We've been working with a number of tool vendors to line up early support for this important new feature. I plan to update the blog post several times in the coming days as this support becomes available.

-- Jeff;

Seattle-based Napera Networks has built a really interesting piece of hardware. The Napera N24 Appliance automatically enforces health and identity rules for up to 200 computers, preventing rogue or unpatched machines from accessing a corporate network in an uncontrolled fashion.

The device basically protects access points in conference rooms, sales offices and wireless networks from indiscriminate usage. Napera uses the Microsoft NAP (Network Access Protection) protocol to enforce a fully configurable set of health and safety rules. Logging and monitoring features provide auditing and other historical information.

At this point you are probably thinking "Uh, Jeff, you work for Amazon.com and you usually talk about software on this blog. What’s going on here?"

So here’s where it gets really cool. The Napera N24 appliance securely stores
all of its long-term logging and auditing data in Amazon S3. This way,
there’s no limit to how much can be logged or how long it is retained, unlike
a more traditional design which would retain some logs within the appliance
or require local servers. Further, the administrative
interface (MyNapera.com) leverages Amazon EC2. Ultimately MyNapera.com will
be accessible remotely, making the Napera appliance a great solution for
a company with a number of geographically distributed field offices.

Enterprise solutions to this sort of problem are usually very complex
and expensive, requiring multiple servers. Using AWS has enabled Napera to
build a product for the budget of smaller companies that is incredibly easy
to use and quick to install.

Oh yeah, one last thing. The company is based in Mercer Island (near Seattle). Per their jobs page, they are looking for a web developer and some summer interns with CS or IT experience.

– Jeff;