Experiences with Amazon Web Services and thoughts on Cloud Computing presented at Cybera Summit 08 in Banff, Canada.

1. Cloud Computing in Practice
King Chung Huang
Technical Solutions Analyst, University of Calgary

2. “Using services in the cloud,
develop a large-scale
video conversion system.”

3. What is Cloud Computing?

5. “Cloud computing is simply a buzzword used to repackage grid
computing and utility computing, both of which have existed for
decades.”
whatis.com
definition of Cloud Computing

6. “The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve
redefined cloud computing to include everything that we
already do. […] The computer industry is the only industry that
is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot,
but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s
complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
Larry Ellison
during Oracle’s Analyst Day

7. “The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve
redefined cloud computing to include everything that we
already do. […] The computer industry is the only industry that
is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot,
but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s
complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
Larry Ellison
during Oracle’s Analyst Day

8. Getting Started

9. Infrastructure Services Payments & Billing Web Search & Information
Elastic Compute Cloud Flexible Payments Service Web Search
Simple Storage Service DevPay Web Information Service
Simple Queue Service Top Sites
SimpleDB Fulfillment & Associates Site Thumbnail
Fulfillment Web Service
Associates Web Service On-Demand Workforce
Mechanical Turk

10. Infrastructure Services Payments & Billing Web Search & Information
Elastic Compute Cloud Flexible Payments Service Web Search
Simple Storage Service DevPay Web Information Service
Simple Queue Service Top Sites
SimpleDB Fulfillment & Associates Site Thumbnail
Fulfillment Web Service
Associates Web Service On-Demand Workforce
Mechanical Turk

11. Infrastructure Services Payments & Billing Web Search & Information
Elastic Compute Cloud Flexible Payments Service Web Search
Simple Storage Service DevPay Web Information Service
Simple Queue Service Top Sites
SimpleDB Fulfillment & Associates Site Thumbnail
Fulfillment Web Service
Associates Web Service On-Demand Workforce
Mechanical Turk

12. Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Marketplace for work that requires human intelligence
■ Enables programmatic distribution of tasks that require
human intelligence
• Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs)
■ Desired output
■ Format of output
■ Pay rate
• Only pay for quality work
■ Review results and pay for accepted work

14. Ten Thousand Cents
• Drawing collected from November 2007 to March 2008
• Total labour paid: US$100
■ 1¢ per part × 10 000 parts
• Prints available for purchase
■ $100 each

15. Video Conversion Plan
• Upload source content to Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Instantiate virtual machines on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
to perform conversions
■ Be able to instantiate more conversion machines as needed
to scale to demand
■ Use Simple Queue Service (SQS) to queue requests
• Log status and results in SimpleDB (SDB)
■ Was not able to gain access during beta period
• Deliver conversion results from S3

16. Accessing Infrastructure Services
• Web service APIs
■ SOAP and REST
• Many applications/plugins support S3
■ Transmit on Mac OS X
■ S3Fox for Firefox
• AWS Developer Community provides lots of documentation
and sample code
■ JavaScript, PHP, Python
• Many public machine images for EC2 are available
■ Use them as a starting point for custom machines
• In actuality, you rarely have to start from scratch

17. Pricing
• Pay only for what you use
■ Data transfer
■ Data storage
■ Instance time
■ Transactions

21. Pricing
Simple Storage Service (United States)
Storage 15¢ per GB-month
Data Transfer In 10¢ per GB
Data Transfer Out 10¢–17¢ per GB
PUT, POST, or LIST 1.0¢ per 1000 requests
GET 1.0¢ per 10000 requests

22. Pricing
Simple Storage Service (Europe)
Storage 18¢ per GB-month
Data Transfer In 10¢ per GB
Data Transfer Out 10¢–17¢ per GB
PUT, POST, or LIST 1.2¢ per 1000 requests
GET 1.2¢ per 10000 requests

23. Pricing
Simple Queue Service
Storage none
Data Transfer In 10¢ per GB
Data Transfer Out 10¢–17¢ per GB
Requests 1.0¢ per 10000 requests

24. Pricing
Simple Queue Service (Old API, prior to 2008)
Storage none
Data Transfer In 10¢ per GB
Data Transfer Out 10¢–17¢ per GB
Requests 1.0¢ per 10000 requests
Messages 10¢ per 1000 messages

25. Pricing
Simple Queue Service (Old API, prior to 2008)
Impact of the Price Change
We examined the effect that the new pricing would have
had on Amazon SQS charges billed at the end of
December 2007. Under the new plan, 76% of customers
with bills greater than $1 would have received lower bills,
saving an average of 71% each compared to their actual bill.
source: http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

26. Pricing
Elastic Compute Service
Instances 10¢–80¢ per hour
Data Transfer In 10¢ per GB
Data Transfer Out 10¢–17¢ per GB

27. Pricing
Freebies
• Data transfer between EC2 instances are free
■ Instances must be in the same availability zone
■ Instances must address each other by private IP addresses
• Data transfer between EC2 instances and S3 are free
• Data transfer between EC2 instances and SQS are free

28. Pricing
Elastic IP Addresses (EC2)
• IPv4 Addresses are scarce
• Instances are dynamically assigned a public IP address
and a private IP address
• IPv4 addresses can be statically allocated and used for instances
■ No cost while in use
■ 1¢ per non-attached Elastic IP address per hour

29. Nuances

31. Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Storage is organized in buckets
■ Like a namespace for the objects it contains
■ Accessible via http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com
• It’s not file storage, it’s a key-value store
■ Like a big hash table or dictionary
■ Key-value pairs
■ Movies/My Movie.mp4 ➜ ftypmp42isom5eiomdat9af…
■ UserHomePage ➜ http://www.ucalgary.ca/~kchuang/
• Implicit BitTorrent seeding for all keys

32. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Machine images are templates
■ Run multiple instances from the same image
■ Appliance model
• Data can be passed to instances at startup
■ Provide input to an instance
■ Negates the need to communicate to an instance
• Storage is independent of the machine
■ By default, instance storage is transient
■ Elastic Block Storage can be attached/detached as needed
■ Lifecycle is independent of instances

33. Beyond Raw Utilities
• Additional facilities around traditional infrastructure elements
increases their usability
■ Fits well with on-demand, only what you need usage model
■ Enables uses that were previously not possible

34. Speed Bumps

35. Reality Bites
Simple Storage Service
• S3 objects have a maximum size of 5 GB
■ Split objects like machine images
• Changing one byte means reinserting the entire object
• Renaming (re-keying) an object also means reinserting
■ New beta API allows for object moves within a bucket
• Various bugs in third-party apps and S3 itself
■ Inserting objects between 2 to 4 GB can be difficult
• Bandwidth can be a significant barrier
■ Project goal of inserting 1 TB would have taken 168 days

36. Reality Bites
Elastic Compute Cloud
• Making a change means recreating an entire image
• Default storage is transient
■ Lasts only as long as the instance it is attached to
■ Elastic Block Storage can only be attached to a single
instance at a time
• Instances are billed by the hour
■ Constantly starting and stopping short-run instances
can be costly

37. All Together, Now!

38. Cumulus
• Completely implemented in JavaScript *
■ Calls Amazon services directly via REST APIs
• Contacts S3 to retrieve stored videos
• Converts video on demand
■ Writes jobs to an SQS queue
■ Invokes EC2 instances, which reads from job queue and
performs conversion
* time constraints necessitated the use of some existing PHP sample code

39. Demo

40. Project Timeline
August 26
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28 September 29

41. Project Timeline
8/26: project kickoff
8/29: project planning
August 26
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28 September 29

42. Project Timeline
9/2: work begins
August 26
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28 September 29

43. Project Timeline
August 26
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28 September 29
9/5: slow upload speeds
9/8: daapd server abandoned

44. Project Timeline
August 26
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28 September 29
9/11: attempting video conversion
9/12: visiting clouds

45. Project Timeline
9/18: bandwidth increased
9/18: first video converted
August 26
31
7
14
21
28 September 29

46. Project Timeline
9/22: creating front-end web app
August 26
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28 September 29
9/26: starting presentation

47. Project Timeline
August 26
31
7
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28 September 29
9/29: still working on presentation

48. Project Timeline
August 26
31
7
14
21
28 September 29

49. By the Numbers
19 working days
2 weekends
70 GB transferred
321 instance hours
$41.60 spent
16324 miles
as of September 27, 2008

50. Lessons Learned

51. Cloud Computing is more than
Raw Utilities

52. Cloud Computing
Enables Tinkering

53. Bandwidth Can Be Problematic

54. Centralization Results in
Centralization of Risk

55. Be Aware of
Service Level Agreements

56. More Information
King Chung Huang
Technical Solutions Analyst, University of Calgary
kchuang@ucalgary.ca
Patrick Mann
Chief Technology Officer, Cybera
patrick.mann@cybera.ca
Cloud Computing White Paper
coming soon
http://www.cybera.ca

57. Q&A