The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand.

While Amazon’s EC2 has been great so far in allowing companies to run large, computational-heavy distributed tasks on the background, it has been really lacking on allowing companies to run online services in a manner that’s efficient and reliable.

The reason for this lack of support is basically because there was no way to do load balancing on EC2 machines allowing a service to efficiently scale across multiple EC2 instances.

With the launch of Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon is effectively making EC2 a viable host for online services, not just background jobs. Using these services you can not only scale a service across machines for reliability, you can also automatically add and remove computing resources as demand increases\decreases driving your operation costs down.

You can find more information at the detail pages for Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing and on the AWS developer weblog. Also, check out Werner Vogel’s blog post for some background on how Amazon is horizontally scaling its services.

Tags: Amazon, AMZN, AWS, EC2, fault-tolerant applications, load balancing

Amazon’s shares jumped by more than 9% following Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney predicting its Kindle to become the “iPod of books”:

In a report to clients, analyst Mark Mahaney said Amazon could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 units of the Kindle this year. This would match the number of sales for the iPod digital music player in its first year on the market, leading the analyst to predict that the Kindle “is becoming the iPod of the book world.”

Mahaney predicted that the Kindle will likely top the lists of holiday “gadget gifts” this year. He warned that his projections do not account for a possible launch of an updated version of the device.

Personally, I want one! I just can’t wait for Amazon to release a Wifi version that’ll work world wide and will save me delivery costs and time when ordering my books.

I’m exactly the kind of person the Kindle appeals to – a techie who reads lots of books (mostly tech too) via Amazon.
I don’t think its a very large niche…  at least, not as large as the iPod’s target market…

I find it ridiculous comparing Kindle success to the iPod simply because of one people fact: People don’t read anymore!

Apparently, I’m not the only one holding this opinion:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

By the way, the US is ranked 18 in literacy rate…  Just a fact worth mentioning…

Tags: Amazon, AMZN

Via TechCrunch:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task – the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

If you’d like to help, go to this task on Mechanical Turk. You’ll be asked to view five satellite images and note any that should be looked at more closely.

This initiative took the web by storm. “Jim Gray” is already ranked 3rd on Technorati’s search terms.
Just an indication of how powerful the net could be with today’s technology…

I’m off to look at some photos of the water outside the San Francisco Bay…

Technorati : Amazon, Jim Gray, Web 2.0

Tags: Amazon, AMZN, Jim Gray