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Andras wrote to tell me about Jollat, a new graphical cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) management client for Amazon EC2 and S3. Available for free download (with a purchase option), the client includes a number of interesting features.

On the S3 side, Jollat handles bucket creation in both the US and EU zones, upload and download of multiple files, log file configuration and management, and an access control list (ACL) editor.

On the EC2 side, Jollat's image manager makes it easy to find and launch any AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Once launched, instances can be accessed using an embedded SSH client. The tool also manages availability zones, IP addresses, and key pairs.

You can see Jollat in action by watching the video.

-- Jeff;

It is finally summer here in Seattle and I'm trying to get out of the office as early as possible today. Here are a few cool things that have recently landed in my inbox:

Don MacAskill wrote to tell me about his new product, SmugVault. This new service extends the existing image storage capabilities provided by SmugMug, allowing users to upload a wide variety of image files, as well as files of other sorts, for safekeeping. Don used Amazon's DevPay system to implement a usage-based fee structure -- $1 per month and 22 cents per GB of storage, along with fees to transfer data in and out. The entire contents of a 2 GB memory card can be stored for just 44 cents per month. SmugVault can create finished products from raw video and image data, and it can also bundle together alternate formats of an image (GIF, RAW, and so forth).

Animoto For Business adds professional features to Animoto's existing music video creation service. This version of the service can be used by businesses of all sorts -- sports teams, real estate agents, vacation resorts, and trade shows -- to produce DVD-quality videos in MP4 and ISO formats. Business users have access to a library of music that has been pre-licensed for commercial use. The product is brand-new but there are already some good success stories.

There's a new release of Cloud Studio. It now incorporates an S3 browser!

ElasticFox now includes support for Firefox 3.0, as does the S3 Firefox Organizer.

Jungle Dave wrote to tell me that he's released version 2.0 of Jungle Disk Desktop. The new version includes a revised user interface with a setup wizard, a configuration dialog, and a backup preview dialog; renaming and encryption of files and directories; support for European S3 buckets; bandwidth limiting, and much more. There's also a beta version of the workgroup version (details on it can be found here). This version allows multiple users to share a single Amazon S3 account without sharing account credentials, and also allows for per-user control of access to S3 buckets.

And with that, I am out of here!

-- Jeff;

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.

-- Jeff;

By now many of you are aware that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fully supported by Red Hat on Amazon EC2. You can read more about the offering at http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/. Jeff Barr blogged about this in November, 2007 (aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/11/red-hat-enterpr.html).

I’m posting this from Boston, where I am attending the Red Hat Global Summit -- more specifically helping with a hands-on lab that teaches developers and IT staff how to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2. (It's really easy.) It’s been fun to meet enterprise developers from all over the world, and surprising to find out that no matter what country the developer is in awareness about Cloud Computing is high.

JBoss
Perhaps you already saw the posts in other blogs… Red Hat announced that their JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is available in beta form as a service within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Traditionally we think of Java application servers as building blocks that live in a hallowed enterprise data center; however with this announcement yet another one of those essential technologies is running fully supported by the vendor in the Cloud. In mission-critical applications support is essential--and for Red Hat products that means 24x7 operational support plus developer support. See www.redhat.com/support/policy/sla/production for a menu of offerings to choose from.

This is all quite amazing. Just over two years ago Amazon Simple Storage Service launched, followed in August of 2006 by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. In the short span of time since 2006 we’ve seen Cloud Computing grow from an idea to “of course we use it” for many organizations. With the advent of powerhouse enterprise infrastructure and applications, it seems inevitable that line-of-business applications in the cloud will become commonplace.

Getting started is easy, with just three steps:

1. Sign up for Amazon EC2
2. Purchase a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2 or purchase a subscription to JBoss on Amazon EC2
3. Deploy your applications on the newly-minted application server; then optionally make a custom AMI from this image and save it as your own private version in Amazon S3.

You can learn more at aws.amazon.com/partners/redhat.

Mike