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All Things Distributed

Werner Vogels' weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.

Expanding the Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2October 1

The backend servers that power the world of Internet Services have become increasingly diverse. With today's announcement that Microsoft Windows Server is available on Amazon EC2 we can now run the majority of popular software systems in the cloud. Windows Server ranked very high on the list of requests by customers so we are happy that we will be able to provide this.

One particular area that customers have been asking for Amazon EC2 with Windows Server was for Windows Media transcoding and streaming. There is a range of excellent codecs available for Windows Media and there is a large amount of legacy content in those formats. In past weeks I met with a number of folks from the entertainment industry and often their first question was: when can we run on windows?

There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. Amazon EC2 running Windows Server enables this scenario for building scalable websites. In addition, several customers would like to maintain a global sing

AWS Startup Challenge 2008September 29

The last week for submitting the applications for the AWS Startup Challenge has started. Looking at the proposals that are being submitted it looks like this will be another very inspiring challenge. These proposals are reviewed by a panel and five finalists will be selected. The finalists will come to Seattle to compete for $50K in cash, $50K in AWS credits, 2 years of Premium Support and more. All finalists will receive Rightscale Premium for 6 months and there will be a number of promotional events that includes all the finalists.

Last year there were 900 applications which made for very intense proposal reading sessions. Eventual Ooyala won the challenge and got to smash the server to bits. The videos of last year's finalists are still online.

If you have a brilliant idea/business that we should be evaluating you have until October 10 to let us know.

Expanding the CloudSeptember 18

For many the "Cloud" in Cloud Computing signifies the notion of location independence; that somewhere in the internet services are provided and that to access them you do not need any specific knowledge of where they are located. Many applications have already been built using cloud services and they indeed achieve this location transparency; their customers do not have to worry about where and how the application is being served.

However for developers to do their job properly the cloud cannot be fully transparent. As much as we would like to make it easy and simple for everyone, building high-performance and highly reliable applications in the cloud requires that the developers have more control. For example a reality is that failures can happen; servers can crash and networks can become disconnected. Even if these are only temporary glitches and are transient errors, the developer of applications in the cloud really wants to make sure his or her application can continue to serve customers even in the face of these rare glitches. A similar issue is that of network latency; as much as we would like to see the cloud to be transparent, the transport of network packets is still limited to the speed of light (at best) and customers of cloud applications may experience a different performance depending on where they are located in relation to where the applications are running. We have seen that for many applications that works just fine, but there are developers w

Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store has launchedAugust 21

Today marks the launch of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), the long awaited persistent storage service for EC2. Details can be found on the EC2 detail page, the press release and Jeff Barr's posting over on the AWS evangelists blog. Also the folks at Rightscale have two detailed postings: why Amazon EBS matters and Amazon EBS explained.

With the launch of the Elastic Block Store we complete an important milestone in offering a complete suite of storage solutions as part of the Amazon Infrastructure Services. Back in the days when we made the architectural decision to virtualize the internal Amazon infrastructure one of the first steps we took was a deep analysis of the way that storage was used by the internal Amazon services. We had to make sure that the infrastructure storage solutions we were going to develop would be highly effective for developers by addressing the most common patterns first. That analysis led us to three top patterns:

1. Key-Valu

Root CauseJuly 25

For those of you interested in the details of last Sunday's Amazon S3 Availability issue you should read the detailed explanation posted at the AWS Status Dashboard. Root cause was single bit corruption of internal state messages that are distributed via Gossip techniques.