Cloud Migration Whitepapers

Amazon's AWS team has published a series of whitepapers covering various scenarios for migrating into AWS cloud infrastructure. Links to these whitepapers are provided below for your convenience:

- Migrating applications to the AWS cloud
- Migrating web application
- Migrating batch processing applications
- Migrating backend processing pipelines

Cloud Computing - Executive Seminar

Tomorrow, I'll be attending the Executive Seminar on Cloud Computing at NASDAQ MarketSite (NY). Speakers include Dr. Werner Vogels and Mårten Mickos (ex-CEO of MySQL). Big thanks to Amazon and RightScale who were able to accommmodate my RSVP even when the registration had formally closed.

I hope to be able to catch up with Mårten Mickos during the event. In case I do succeed in catching up, is there any question you want me to ask him? You can email me or post a comment.

It's funny that the event site still shows Mårten's title as "SVP of Sun Microsystems’ Database Group."

Google App Engine Announced - Limited to 10,000 Accounts

Google's announcement tonight is much bigger than I thought. Google is releasing Google AppEngine (site goes live at midnight EST) tonight, a fully-hosted, "automatically scalable" web application platform that consists of Python App servers, BigTable and GFS.

By making App Engine available only for Python, Google is giving the language a big boost.

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows developers to choose their own stack. Furthermore, Amazon's S3 allows third party applications to connect directly. With Google AppEngine it seems one must interact with BigTable using Python application.

Here's what Google's AppEngine promises developers:
- Write code once and deploy
- Absorb spikes in traffic
- Easily integrate with other Google services

Google App Engine is limited to first 10,000 developers
The website for Google App Engine (http://appengine.google.com/) goes live at 12:00 AM EST tonight. Only the first 10,000 developers will be given beta accounts. So hurry now before you are left out.

What is offered
The current limits imposed by Google include:
- 500 MB storage
- 200 million megacycles/day CPU time
- 10 GB bandwidth per day

Google App Engine Pricing
During the beta period, the service is completely free. Google has not announced the pricing after beta period finishes.


UPDATE:
I tried gaining an account right at 12:01 AM but thanks to Google "profiling" (which they have complete right to :) ), I got the following message:

Unfortunately, space is limited during Google App Engine's preview release. As we expand, we'll invite more developers, but for now you'll have to wait.

Would you like to be notified by email when space becomes available?

It seems like an "invite only" service. If you have invites or figure out how to get an account, please let me know. I'd love to get one.

UPDATE 2:
Many thanks to Nick Johnson of Google and others for sending me invites. Also, thanks to those who posted a comment. I was able to get an account and couldn't be happier.

Sources:
- Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google AppEngine.
- Google App Engine readies for brawl with Amazon
- Google Launching App Engine for Python Developers
- Google Cloud Now on Tap for Python Developers

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"The apps all appear on the appspot.com domain. Each developer currently gets three application ids. When apps are uploaded they will appear at http://application-id.appspot.com. Developers can, of course, bring their own domains. You can see the current set of apps in the application gallery. I love the Appspot domain name; it's an homage of sorts to Blogspot and fits in nicely with Jotspot."
- App Engine: Host your Python Apps with Google
- Google App Engine Blog- Introducing Google App Engine

Amazon S3 Storage Engine

Mark Atwood, a good friend of mine, is presenting a session on Amazon S3 Storage engine for MySQL.

Primary key has to be utf-8. Results coming back in less than 70ms. "If you build it, they will come".

A bucket is fully virtually hosted, it gives you a virtual SQL CMS for S3. You can put billion photographs.

Transactional engine? No it's not. S3 service is not transactional. There are no temporal guarantees in S3. If you start doing writes on a table and someone else starts then it may take some time for it show up. The reason is S3 is very distributed. Amazon S3 replicates it all over.

If you put no WHERE clause then you can "make money fast" for Amazon.

There are many opportunities. It keeps MD5 hash of contents of Blob. There is also ACL. S3 handles HTTPS but it isn't implemented yet in the storage engine?

There are other Amazon services that can use storage engines like replication distribution via S3 and cluster persistent storage via S3.

Where to get it? It uses MySQL 5.1 storage engine interface and is available at http://fallenpegasus.com/code

He is disappointed about little feedback from community on his efforts.