Today in an email to existing AWS customers, Amazon introduced a service known as AWS Storage Gateway which is an on-premise software appliance allowing customers to easily transfer data from on-premise storage to S3. This service could be used for offsite backup and capacity augmentation among other use cases.

From the email:

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

Here is a video that describes Storage Gateway in more detail.

Just a reminder that I will be speaking at the November meeting of the Orange Country Java Users Group (OCJUG) this Thursday (the 10th).

This presentation will be a variation of the presentation I did at JavaOne at the start of October on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk tool for creating PaaS environments for Java web applications.

Please refer to the OCJUG website (www.ocjug.org) for exact timing and location.

This week Amazon announced improvements to the Simple Notification Service (SNS). The new features integrate SMS messaging (ie. the ubiquitous text messaging system found on your mobile phone). With these new features, application developers can integrate real time notifications via SMS into their applications. This has many uses for developer operations (server event notifications) and also real time messaging features for custom applications.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

We are excited to announce that Amazon Simple Notification Service now supports SMS text messages as a new method for notifications. SMS (also known as Short Message Service) is one of the most widely used messaging applications in the world. With support for SMS text messaging, Amazon SNS messages can be delivered to SMS-enabled cell phones and smart phones.

Amazon SNS is a web service that makes it easy to send notifications from the cloud to applications or people. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective way to publish messages and have them immediately delivered to any number of subscribers or other applications. Previously Amazon SNS supported message deliveries via http, email or to Amazon SQS queues.

Notifications can now be sent as text messages to cell phones, smart phones or any other device that supports SMS. Amazon CloudWatch users who monitor their applications running on AWS services can receive timely updates for any event of interest or alarm they set. Existing Amazon SNS users who receive content via email can now also have that content delivered to their mobile device. SMS notifications with Amazon SNS can also be used to relay time-critical application events to mobile applications and devices. Mobile applications increasingly deliver and integrate real-time information from a variety of sources, including weather, traffic, social-media updates, and even multi-player games. Developers can easily integrate mobile applications with Amazon SNS today, to send messages and receive notifications over SMS. This new Amazon SNS feature can be easily accessed from the AWS Management Console available at: http://console.aws.amazon.com. While Amazon SNS is supported in all AWS regions, SMS notification support is currently supported in the US-East region, and will be available in other AWS regions and countries in the coming months.

In an email to customers today, Amazon announced a new addition to their web-based Management Console tool – the ability to manage Simple Email Service (SES) resources. Previously customers needed to use an API to manage SES resources.

From the announcement:

Today we’re excited to announce the immediate availability of the Management Console for Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), AWS’s highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.

The Amazon SES Management Console is a simple and intuitive web-based user interface for Amazon SES that allows you to do the following with a few clicks of your mouse:

- Check your sending quota and usage
- See your Amazon SES bounce, complaint, and rejection metrics over time
- Verify sender email addresses
- Send both formatted and raw test emails

Of course, all of this is still available via the API as well, so you can choose whichever method works best for you. Please note that you will still need to send your production email to Amazon SES through its APIs. Please see the API Reference for actions and data types.

Additionally, Amazon announced a public webinar to demonstrate the new Management Console features. You can register for the webinar here.

I received an email from Amazon today that I have never seen before. Here it is in its entirety:

Hello,

We have noticed that one or more of your instances is running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.

i-XXXXXXXX

The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you take appropriate action.

If your instance was launched from an EBS-backed AMI, issuing a stop and start from the AWS Management Console will migrate your instance to new hardware and help avoid any unforeseen downtime.

For more options to stop and start your instance please see:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/starting-stopping-instances.html

If your instance was launched from an instance store-backed AMI, you should launch a replacement instance from your most recent AMI and migrate all necessary data to the replacement instance.

Should have you have any additional questions, we offer AWS Basic Support via our Community Forums for free, or Premium Support for one-on-one assistance direct from an AWS Developer Support Engineer at http://aws.amazon.com/support.

Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 Team

So I dutifully went and followed the instructions and stopped and started (not just rebooted) the specified instance using the EC2 Web Management Console.

PROBLEM: The instance came back up as expected in the Web Management Console, however I could not ping it or SSH to it or connect to it in any way for that matter using my DNS name. I could however connect to it using the Amazon assigned public DNS name. It took me a few minutes to figure it out (all the while my site was down of course), but I eventually noticed that the Elastic IP address assigned to that instance was no longer shown in the instance details view. I went over to the Elastic IP management screen and sure enough that Elastic IP address was shown as not being associated with any instances. I reassigned the Elastic IP address to the instance and a few moments later, everything was back up and running.

CONCLUSION: This scenario is exactly why you need to be using an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed EC2 instance for any of your important servers, so in the event that the hardware fails, your actual server image is still safe and can be restored on other hardware. It also proves that while “the cloud” is awesome, it can fail and you need to be prepared for it. Also, one last curious piece about Elastic IP addresses becoming disassociated with instances – not sure if this is related to the hardware failure, or to the stop/start of the instance, but definitely something to keep an eye out for in the future.

In an email to customers today, Amazon announced new feature additions to its Simple Queue Service (SQS).

From the email:

We are excited to announce three new Amazon SQS features today: delay queues, message timers, and the ability to send or delete multiple messages in a single API call (batch operations). Delay queues can be used to apply a uniform delay to all messages. Alternatively message timers can be used to apply delay to specific messages that can be sent individually, or in a batch.

New support for batch send and delete operations complements the existing batch receive functionality. With batch operations many workloads will benefit from improved single thread message throughput, reduced connection overhead and lower API call latencies.

As distributed applications become larger and more complex, greater scalability and control of message-based systems becomes increasingly important. With support for both queue delays and message timers, a wider array of real world distributed application scenarios can be addressed. With batch APIs, developing Internet-scale distributed applications is easier and more cost effective than ever.

This is the full presentation I gave at JavaOne 2011 in San Francisco on October 6th, including screencast versions of all demonstrations.

Abstract

The cloud has promised a lot to Java Web developers but has delivered on only some of the hype. Many issues still exist that have the ability to kill many a project. Elastic Beanstalk, a Web service announced by Amazon in early 2011, takes the cloud to the next level for Java Web applications. It aims to eliminate the remaining issues the cloud presents. No hardware purchases? Check! Low setup costs? Check! No software installation? Check! Automatic resource scaling? Check! Resource monitoring? Check! This presentation takes a deep dive into Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service, including what problems it can help solve and opportunities it provides to deliver better Java Web applications.

Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

via Biztech2.com India – Top 10 Strategic Technologies For 2012 – News on Enterprise Solutions.

Enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs.

That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner’s IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.

via Gartner: Private clouds are a last resort.

This screencast shows how the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk plugin for Eclipse allows developers to directly deploy their Java Web Applications from within Eclipse to their Elastic Beanstalk account. The plugin allows developers to create brand new applications and configure the Elastic Beanstalk resources as part of the process.