The PutPlace Blog

PutPlace is an avid user of Amazon web services applications. Yesterday, in London, we got an opportunity to talk about how we use Amazon here at PutPlace.

Key takeaways for me from listening to the other speakers were,

• Using Amazon doesn’t insulate you from failures
• Lots of people using S3 and EC2, not so many on SimpleDB and SQS
• The per-transaction fees can really start to hurt if you start to get traction
• SimpleDB is a cool place to store your grid topology dynamically especially if you use another provider alongside Amazon
• EC2 nodes come up really quickly compared to other grid providers
• Lots of people use Nagios with EC2 for monitoring

The Amazon guys (Simone and Adam with a later appearance by Werner) gave strong hints that we would see all the following features in 2009,

• EC2 hosting in Europe
• An Amazon supported Content Distribution Network
• Integrated Load balancing and Monitoring

PutPlace is hosted on Amazon’s Grid (called EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud, C squared, geddit!). We store all our user data on the Amazon storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service), as they can offer us unlimited secure storage at a wholesale price of around $0.10 per GB per month. They also make it very cheap to move storage between our grid and our S3 store.

Each EC2 node comes with 250GB of local storage, but that storage springs to life when the node is created and disappears when the node is shutdown or crashes (although we have only had one node die on us in the 12 months we have been using EC2).

This is okay for user data e.g. the files you backup, as we don’t mark those as secure until they have been written to stable storage on the S3 grid. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for our database (Postgres) which expects to have stable local storage directly attached to the node and visible as a local disk device. So until now we have had to bake in a bunch of safety code to ensure that if the database node crashed we could recover sensibly and quickly.

However this week Amazon has announced Elastic Block Storage. Elastic block storage combines the safety of S3 with the utility of a local disk. You can create an EBS volume of up to 1 terabyte in size and attach it to any Amazon EC2. It just looks like a local disk to that node, but if the EC2 instance dies the disk survives.

So we can now attach two EBS nodes and store our log and data on two stable devices either of which can be used to recover the other.

It gets better though. You can take snapshots of your disk and write them to S3. These snapshots can be used to backup your disk in order to copy it to a new EBS instance. Better still when creating a new instance the snapshot can be loaded lazily into the instance so you don’t have to wait to stream a whole terabyte of data into the EBS instance.

So what’s the catch? why wouldn’t you just EBS for everything and ignore S3? Well for one thing you have to allocate all the space on an EBS disk at once so you pay up front for the storage as opposed to paying for it as you use it in the S3 case.  The other problem is each EBS instance is tied to a single EC2 node so if you want to share content between nodes you need to utilise something like S3 and/or SQS (Simple Queueing Service) to provide shared storage.

A big step in right direction for Amazon though and something we have been asking for for quite a while.

Hot off the presses, (tip of the hat to John), Amazon is announcing S3 storage with content stored in European locations.

There are now three players in the OnDemand Storage and compute grid market,

• Amazon with S3 and EC2
• Flexiscale
• Nirvanix (storage only, last time I looked)

Competition in this space is a good thing and we love the idea of a European startup. Many of our potential customers get a little scratchy when we say we are shipping all their data to a service hosted in the US.

Keep it comin’ guys…

ArsTechnica reviews a white paper by the Amazon S3 crew that provides details of the  Dynamo project, the technology behind S3 and Ec2.

S3 and EC2 are key technology components in the PutPlace product and service.

According to this InfoWorld article Facebook is now providing a storage API that in future would allow Facebook users to store their content directly in FaceBook. Here at PutPlace we think this is a great idea and represents a giant leap forward for social networks in providing a more full service offering to their users.

With Nirvanix launching recently with a competitive offering to Amazon’s S3 product we see nothing but goodness for consumers in terms of choice and lower costs. We expect to support all three services over time so that PutPlace users can choose the most appropriate storage solution for their requirements. Expect Bebo and MySpace to make moves in this space in the near future.

Nirvanix which provides a competitive service to Amazon’s S3 launched yesterday. On the plus side they have a price point in the same ballpark as S3 (USD$ 0.18 per GB stored and USD$ 0.18 per GB of banwidth in or out).  However they have no compute environment ala EC2 so any manipulation of the data involves a significant bandwidth cost overhead for Nirvanix while manipulation of data on EC2 is essentially free.

Still good news to see a competitor on the horizon, this can only be a could thing for companies like ourselves who want to eliminate our dependence on a single vendor.