Toluu

Amazon Web Services Blog

Amazon Web Services, Products, Tools, and Developer Information...

AWS Links - Wednesday, January 7, 2009Today

As usual, I've got plenty to blog about. Here's a glimpse at some of the interesting things that have recently landed in my inbox.

On Thursday, January 8th, Information Week and Amazon will present a Webcast titled How To Plug Into The Cloud. Attendees will learn how Eli Lilly has used Amazon's EC2 servers and S3 storage to support its pharmaceuticals research. Presenters will include Dave Powers from Eli Lilly and Adam Selipsky from Amazon Web Services. Attendance is free but you do need to preregister.

 

The folks at rPath will be conducting a series of tech events on alt

Bits For Sale - The New Amazon S3 Requester Pays ModelJanuary 2

We rolled out a powerful new feature for Amazon S3 in the final hours of 2008.

This new feature, dubbed Requester Pays, works at the level of an S3 bucket. If the bucket's owner flags it as Requester Pays, then all data transfer and request costs are paid by the party accessing the data.

The Requester Pays model can be used in two ways.

First, by simply marking a bucket as Requester Pays, data owners can provide access to large data sets without incurring charges for data transfer or requests. For example, they could make available a 1 GB dataset at a cost of just 15 cents per month (18 cents if stored in the European instance of S3). Requesters use signed and specially flagged requests to identify themselves to AWS, paying for S3 GET requests and data transfer at the usual rates — 17 cents per GB for data transfer (even less at high volumes) and 1 cent for every 10,000 GET requests. The newest version of the S3 Developer Guide contains the information needed to make use of S3 in this way.

 

SimpleDB Developer's ForumDecember 30 2008

You are invited to join the Amazon SimpleDB team on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 9am PST for the first session of our new Developers’ Forum. During these once monthly webinars, developers will hear from the technical experts behind SimpleDB, and have the opportunity to engage in live Q&A.

Interested developers may register by emailing simpledb-developer-forum@amazon.com. Please include name & AWS account ID. In addition, developers are encouraged to pre-submit any questions they may have, to allow for a more thorough response during the live webinar. For those struggling with the development of a new application, sample code and a description of the intended application may also be submitted for review and discussion.

The team is looking forward to speaking with developers on the 20th.

-- Jeff;

Please Vote: AWS and AWS-Powered Applications Are Crunchies FinalistsDecember 29 2008

AWS is a finalist in two categories of the Crunchies awards, Best Enterprise and Best Overall.

In addition to that, AWS-powered applications from Animoto and SlideRocket are candidates for Best Design; eBuddy and Fotonauts are up for Best International; DropBox for Best New Startup of 2008; and Twitter (competing with AWS) for Best Overall. GoodGuide is a finalist in the Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place category, as is Akoha. Meebo is a candidate for Best Application.

If you could take the time to vote that would be great! Here are some direct links to make it really easy:

Best Enterprise - AWS

Best Overall - AWS

Solve for Efficiency With Amazon Mechanical TurkDecember 29 2008

This is a quick post about another great use of Amazon Mechanical Turk. Over on Friend Feed Jean-Claude Bradley posted a blog post called “Mechanical Turk Does Solubility on Google Spreadsheet”, which talks about using Mechanical Turk to process solubility data for the Open Notebook Science Challenge.

What I believe is revolutionary here is that rather than rely on government funding to help process results, scientists are able to use Crowdsourcing to process results in real time—and at a very fine unit of granularity. When you combine those characteristics with the Open Notebook Science Challenge, the result is unprecedented transparency.

The blog post referenced above inspired another, titled “ Generalizability coefficient for Mechanical Turk annotations”, that describes using Ama