Amazon Web Servicesを利用したウェブサイトの事例紹介： WalkScore.com

Google Mapの地図情報を利用してアプリケーションを開発しているWalkScore.com社がどのようにしてAmazon Web Servicesを利用して短期間で安くサイトを立ち上げる事が出来たかを説明した記事。

 

WalkScore.com - Another Web Hosting Success Story

Everyday, we hear new stories about a cool new startup and its success story.

Today, It was WalkScore.com. The website offers some great information about which neighborhood/city is more walkable than the rest (San francisco was #1 and Seattle was #6). Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. I think it is a great site for those who are consider moving to a new neighborhood or those who simply like the car-free lifestyle, especially because the gas prices are setting new records everyday.

This Seattle-based innovative startup hit almost all the major newspapers, blogs and websites last week from SF Chronicle to Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Blog to ABC News, From USA Today to MSNBC.

In an email, Matt Lerner from WalkScore says:

We would never have weathered being the #1 story on Yahoo! yesterday if it weren't for Amazon!  THANK YOU!

We're a hybrid-philanthropy business which means we prioritize social good over profit--and therefore we're on a pretty tight infrastructure budget :-)  What's so great about Amazon cloud computing is that it was very cheap from an infrastructure and dev standpoint for us to scale up quickly.  In a nutshell we have only one physical web server and didn't want to deal with the expense of a hardware upgrade so:

• We set up 4 EC2 instances to serve the walkability heat map tiles you see overlaid on top of the Google maps. Here is Seattle for example.
• We moved all of our images, CSS, and JS files to Amazon S3 which took a big load off of our one web server.
• We were able to accommodate a spike of about 80K unique visitors during a three hour period thanks to Amazon

One great article which I would like to highlight is How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2. Its a nice read if you are trying to host your website on Amazon EC2.

Cloud Computing導入事例

Cloud Computingを導入した事例として１０社を紹介した記事。

すべて、自社のサーバではなく、Amazon、もしくはGoogleのサービスを利用しているところがポイント。

アプリケーションベンダーとPaaS/IaaSベンダーの構図がよく見えてくる事例集である。

 

Top 10 Enterprises in the Cloud

By John | July 13, 2008

I decided to put together a list of 10 examples of entpereises using the clouds.

1. The NY Times
   Amazon EC2
2. Nasdaq
   Amazon S3
3. Major League Baseball
   Joyent
4. ESPN
   Rightscale using Amazon EC2
5. Hasbro
   Amazon EC2
6. British Telecom
   3Tera
7. Taylor Woodrow
   Google Apps
8. CSS
   Amazon EC2
9. Activision
   Amazon EC2
10. Business Objects (A SAP Company)
    Rightscale using Amazon EC2

If you know of any others please feel free to add in the comments section.

Here are some other cloud related links…

Cloud Vendors A to Z

Is Everyone an aaS?

Also check out "Cloud Cafe" podcasts

http://www.johnmwillis.com/best-of/

Cloud Computing企業の新たな分類方法

Cloud Computing関連企業が多く登場しており、そのビジネスモデルも多様介している。 

従来のSaaS/PaaS/IaaSによる分類学は少々時代遅れであり、更なる細かいセグメントに分けて市場を分析する必要性が出てきている様子。  下記はその一つ。

Inside the Cloud: 9 Sectors to Watch

There's already a ton of activity taking place in the cloud computing space, so much so that it can be hard to know who to watch. In many cases, it's too early to pick winners. But there are distinct sectors of the IT industry that are particularly well suited to the on-demand, pay-as-you-go economics of cloud computing. Here are eight segments — and one company that's a segment all its own — that we're tracking closely.

Hosting companies that make the jump: When it comes to reliable managed hosting, Rackspace leads the pack. (Its VMware-based Mosso offering may appeal more to enterprises trying the cloud for the first time.) Clouds like XCalibre's Flexiscale and Joyent are already there, but don't have Rackspace's installed base.

Stack-specific clouds: While Google and Amazon get the headlines, Engine Yard is heavily involved in the Ruby on Rails development community. Competitor Heroku is also Rails-focused, but relies on Amazon for its hosting platform.

Tools to wrangle virtual machines: To manage your EC2 machines, you're going to need help. RightScale makes software for managing machines in the cloud; its tight focus on Amazon has made it an early favorite. Elastra, Enomalism and others have similar solutions.

Testing sandboxes: For many enterprises, a testing sandbox is the perfect way to start using on-demand infrastructure. CohesiveFT's Skytap (a sister to Flexiscale) spins up testing machines in a cloud, but incumbent Surgient and recent entrant StackSafe aren't far behind. And once you've tested a machine and seen that it works, why not leave it in the cloud?

Cloud-based development platforms: Companies like Rollbase and Coghead let non-developers build data-driven applications of any sort (as opposed to more specialized platforms like those of Salesforce and Ning.) But Intuit's Quickbase, which now has access to Quickbooks data, has a head start: Millions of small businesses. Is this how SMB gets cloud?

Scaling frameworks: Wall Street needed fast, reliable applications that grew easily. Instead of adding more, bigger servers, they used Gigaspaces to bundle whole server clusters into discrete "processing units" that can be cloned to add capacity. In addition to being faster and scaling better, these units don't care whether they're in a private data center or a cloud.

Application delivery networks: What has tens of thousands of servers worldwide, a global network connecting them, and isn't Google? Akamai. What was once a way of getting bits to far-flung corners of the Net is an often-overlooked cloud: Akamai has been able to run code at the edge since 2000. Its 2007 acquisition of Netli made it matter to enterprises even more. Akamai can weather heavy load and may be able to withstand attacks better than centralized clouds.

Cloud builders: 3Tera lets companies get into the cloud business. Enterprises can make in-house clouds on existing data centers; or service providerscan build their own cloud offeringsin the way Enki and others have. In 3Tera's model, subscribers drag and drop the firewalls, servers and appliances they need. The company's software then maps these virtual application stacks to servers and network segments. The results are impressive: On seeing 3Tera for the first time, ESM guru John Willis was so impressed he insisted on logging in to the icons on his screen to verify that it wasn't just a demo.

The obvious one: Of the three big virtualization firms, only one (Microsoft) also has millions of desktops, two handset platforms, licensing for desktops, servers and applications, synchronization, and a huge online presence. Up until now, the Redmond giant has been treading carefully; it has to convert billions of dollars of shrink-wrap sales to on-demand revenue streams. But Microsoft's going to be a huge player in the cloud.

SaaS系の会計パッケージの料金比較

SaaS型のビジネスモデルで会計パッケージを提供するベンダーが数社あり、このサイトはその各社の料金を比較した表を提供している。 

表はGoogle spreadsheetで提供されており、下記のURL。

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pQmdKURtC-JM6MOhY4LOJOQ

The cost of saas accounting

July 23, 2008

One of the key benefits put forward by the SaaS operators is the reduction in total cost of ownership because the saas vendors offer a rental model and the service is accessible via a web browser.

Without commenting on feature/functions or relative bang per buck, I've set out the monthly per user cost from some of the major accounting players I've found on the 'net. I've created a Google spreadsheet that you can view here. The spreadsheet lists a dozen players. I'm sure there are more. I'll endeavour to keep it updated but if there are others you know about, companies I've forgotten or whatnot then leave a comment and I'll update.

What's interesting is the variety of pricing models out there. Variations depend on the add-ons, number of users and feature set required. Who said that selecting software was easy??

Appirio社、Sequoia Capital社から＄１．１M Series A ラウンドの投資を受ける。

Appirio社はSalesforce.comのForce.com環境でのアプリケーションを開発しており、さらにGoogle Apps環境にも同様の開発を行っている、SaaSアプリケーションのスタートアップ。 

 

Sequoia bets on enterprise apps in the cloud

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is well known for making smart bets on big opportunities (its track record of mega-exits includes Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and YouTube). So what are we to make of today's news that it has led a $5.6 million series B investment round in SaaS pureplay integrator Appirio? Especially when, as The Industry Standard notes, it's only a few months since Appirio raised a $1.1 million series A round from Salesforce.com and angels.

Sequoia's bet is that Appirio will prove to have been an early mover in bringing the cloud to the enterprise, in the process carving a substantial slice of the $300 billion currently spent each year on traditional on-premise computing solutions. Appirio is a leader in cloud integration in three core ways:

• A strong focus on Google Apps projects alongside Salesforce.com
• Specialization in 'serverless' (ie cloud-to-cloud) projects (more on that below, plus a controversial prediction on Exchange)
• Its combination of 'trusted advisor' professional services with productized on-demand services

The combination of professional services with productized offerings was a key part of the proposition that Sequoia has backed, co-founder Narinder Singh told me on Friday, as opposed to other potential funders that wanted to focus on either one or the other. "The Sequoia investment doesn't change our business model, it just accelerates it," said Singh.

The combination means that in addition to Appirio's current 60+ enterprise customers for its professional services, there are another 1100 using the products. It's effectively a trickle-down of concepts forged in the best-practice foundry of large enterprise and then made available to the masses. Of course this notion of productizing intellectual property has always been the Holy Grail of professional services, but finally it seems the Web is making it possible.

"I do believe that a company like Appirio wasn't possible five years ago," Singh told me. "A company that lives in the cloud and sees a synergy between products and services." Perhaps one of the factors here is that the products are provided as automated services, while the professional services are provided (at least in part) via the Web. So there are more similarities between the two categories than conventional wisdom suggests.

But Appirio has also carved out a fairly unique profile for itself in focusing on Google Apps projects as well as Salesforce.com. It already has over 30 enterprise projects built around Google Apps. More than most of its competitors, the company is truly a cloud integrator in that its core expertise (and indeed its product set) is around making cloud applications work together better. This makes it a leading enabler of the serverless enterprise, ie running businesses entirely on the cloud without any servers installed on-premise at all (I described last year how Appirio runs its own business that way).

"The serverless enterprise is a blueprint for the future," said Singh. "The only thing that's stopping customers from doing this is legacy." Appirio offers expertise in helping those companies break free from their legacy and going serverless. "We've seen enormous interest in the serverless enterprise in companies up to 1000 employees," he said.

Microsoft's email platform Exchange is set to be a victim of that interest, added Singh, even in larger enterprises. Even though most companies start out using Google Apps for collaboration — which at $50 a year per seat is very keenly priced, noted Singh — they often then go on to evaluate whether they really need to continue carrying the cost of Exchange for those users. Worsening economic conditions will only accelerate that trend, he predicted:

"Almost every company has someone looking at what it would take to take out Exchange," said Singh. "Every time someone mentions the R-word, ten more people look at Google Apps."

Amazon Web Servicesのシステム事例

Amazon Web Servicesのシステム事例を紹介した記事。

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White Paper on 'Cloud Architectures' and Best Practices of Amazon S3, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS

I am very happy to announce my white paper on Cloud Architectures is now ready. This is one incarnation of the Emerging Cloud Service Architectures that Jeff wrote about a few weeks ago.

If you are new to the cloud, the first section of the paper will help you understand the benefits of building applications in-the-cloud. If you are using the cloud already, the second section of the paper will help you to use the cloud more effectively by utilizing some of the best practices.

In this paper, I discuss a new way to design architectures. Cloud Architectures are Services-Oriented Architectures that are designed to use On-demand infrastructure more effectively. Applications built on Cloud Architectures are such that the underlying computing infrastructure is used only when it is needed (for example to process a user request), draw the necessary resources on-demand (like compute servers or storage), perform a specific job, then relinquish the unneeded resources after the job is done. While in operation the application scales up or down elastically based on actual need for resources. Everything is automated and operates without any human intervention.

As an example of a Cloud Architecture, I discuss the GrepTheWeb application. This application runs a regular expression against millions of documents from the web and returns the filtered results which match the query. The architecture is interesting because it is runs completely on-demand in automated fashion. Triggered by a regex request, hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances are launched, a Hadoop Cluster is started on them, transient messages are stored on Amazon SQS queues, statuses in Amazon SimpleDB, and all Map/Reduce jobs are run in parallel. Each Map task fetches the file from Amazon S3 and runs the regular expression - and aggregates all the results in the Reduce/Combine Phase and then disposes all the infrastructure back into the cloud (when the Hadoop job is processed)

GrepTheWeb is one of many applications built by Amazon that uses all our services (Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3) together.

A wide variety of different types of applications that can be built using this design approach - from nightly batch processing systems to media processing pipelines.

An excerpt:

Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing. In traditional data processing it is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs. Second, it is difficult to get the machines when one needs them.  Third, it is difficult to distribute and co-ordinate a large-scale job on different machines, run processes on them, and provision another machine to recover if one machine fails. Fourth, it is difficult to auto-scale up and down based on dynamic workloads.  Fifth, it is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done. Cloud Architectures solve such difficulties.

Applications built on Cloud Architectures run in-the-cloud where the physical location of the infrastructure is determined by the provider. They take advantage of simple APIs of Internet-accessible services that scale on-demand, that are industrial-strength, where the complex reliability and scalability logic of the underlying services remains implemented and hidden inside-the-cloud. The usage of resources in Cloud Architectures is as needed, sometimes ephemeral or seasonal, thereby providing the highest utilization and optimum bang for the buck.

In the first section I discuss the advantages and business benefits of Cloud Architectures and how each service was used. In the second section, I discuss best practices for the various Amazon Web Services.

You can download the PDF version or access it on AWS Resource Center

• PDF Version - Cloud Architectures
• HTML Version
  Building GrepTheWeb in the Cloud, Part 1: Cloud Architectures
  Building GrepTheWeb in the Cloud, Part 2: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

I talked about this briefly at the Hadoop Summit 2008 and QCon 2007. I got some good reviews after the talk and hence I decided to put all my thoughts in this paper along with some Best Practices for the use of Amazon Web Services (Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB together). Many developers from our community have been asking for a real-world example of a complex, large-scale application. I will presenting this paper at the 2008 NSF Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Workshop at UW and 9th IEEE/NATEA Conference on Cloud Computing later this week.

I believe this new and emerging way of building applications, that run in-the-cloud, is going to change the way we do business.

 

Amazon Web Servicesシステム事例集

AWSを利用したシステム事例を集めた記事。  EC2、S3、SQSなどの各種サービスを利用して、さまざまなアプリケーションを構築している状況がよく見える。 

 

こういった事例が多く登場している状況は、GoogleのPaaS環境より進んでいる状況が見える。

 

 

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Wanted: AWS Architecture Blog Posts & Diagrams

From time to time, potential users of AWS ask me about the best way to set up a highly scalable architecture using Amazon EC2, S3, SimpleDB, and SQS. I'd like to challenge readers of this blog to document their AWS-powered architectures in a blog post, preferably with a diagram, and to leave comments with a link back to their posts. I'll collect them all up in a future post.

Here are a few that I have already:

Doug Kaye described the architecture behind GigaVox Audio Lite in his post, Amazon for Infrastructure-on-Demand. Doug used EC2, S3, and SQS to build the highly scalable podcast processing system behind The Conversations Network.

Doug's implementation regulates the number of EC2 instances in use by tracking the amount of time it takes to process each work item in the queues which drive the Transcoding and Assembly processes.

 

Don MacAskill described SmugMug's master controller (SkyNet) in SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug). Don's post doesn't include a block diagram, but it does include a cool usage graph (included at right).

Don's master controller watches 30 to 50 factors in order to make high quality scaling decisions. It was called RubberBand until it became sentient and attempted to take over the world launch several hundred Extra-Large EC2 instances simultaneously. It was then renamed SkyNet.

 

The architecture behind online social media dating site Zoosk is described in Elastic Computing with Amazon Web Service, written by Zoosk CEO Shayan Zadeh.

Per the blog post, they use SQS to maintain a queue of uploaded photos. The photos are processed on EC2 and then uploaded to S3. The graph in the blog post indicates that they are adding approximately 4 TB of new photos every month.

 

The AWS Developer Connection has some worthwhile how-to articles as well. In Monster Muck Mashup - Mass Video Conversion Using AWS, Mitch Garnaat shows how to use SQS, EC2, and S3 to do video conversion in a scalable way.

The article Auto-scaling Amazon EC2 with Amazon SQS also has a whole lot of really good information.

 

Once again, I invite you to write an architecture post of your own and to leave a link to it in the comments. I would also like to see posts which make reference to load management tools such as Scalr, RightScale, and Elastra.

Updates (before I write the next big post):

• David Kavanagh wrote in to tell me that there's a good picture in his recent article, Automated Server Pool Management in Java.
• Scaling on EC2 tells the story of WebMynd, which looks like a pretty cool Firefox extension.
• Mike Brittain has a lot of great details in his blog post about How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2.

-- Jeff;

Amazon Web Services Blog / Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:17:51 GMT

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