Jesse Newland

Last Thursday’s Start-Up Seattle event put on by the Amazon Web Services Team and Medrona Venture Group was an enlightening look at the endless possibilities Amazons Web Services present to small companies. Even though I’m fairly familiar with the inner workings of Amazons Web Services – this blog is hosted on an EC2 instance, and I recently released Capazon, a Capistrano extension library to manage EC2 instances – this event shed new light on how much they mean to the internet.

Jeff Barr, Amazons Web Services Evangelist, revealed that in Amazon’s research, engineers at small web-based companies revealed that they spent only 30% of their time developing features unique to their product. The other 70% was spent doing “undifferentiated heavy lifting”: buying and configuring hardware, dealing with data centers, implementing load balancing solutions, and dealing with growth issues. With these issues being handled by Amazons Web Services, small companies are able to focus more of their time on their product’s unique features instead of repeating the work of others throughout the world.

This, in effect, shifts downward the cost of starting a new company, or cycling the improvement loop in an existing company. There’s no hardware to buy, no hard drives to swap, no data centers to visit – only time spent on the core product itself.

Andy Jassey, Amazons Web Services Senior Vice President, revealed something very interesting: Amazon is no longer offering these services with excess capacity at Amazon’s data centers, rather, they are actively purchasing new hardware dedicated to Amazons Web Services. “We’re going to scale Amazons Web Services as big as users demand”, he said in response to a question pertaining to the capacity Amazon has to offer.

I also had a great chat with Matt Garman, Amazon Web Services Product Manager, during the wine tasting after the event.

I emerged from this event with pages and pages of notes detailing how LexBlog could use Amazon Web Services for future product offerings, and even to replace a good bit of our current hardware. Events like these are few and far between, and I consider myself very lucky to have been able to attend.

UPDATE: For those looking for Capistrano 2.0 support, check out Capazon 0.2.0

Just a quick note to announce Capazon 0.1.0, a Capistrano extension library to manage Amazon EC2 instances. If you are familiar with Capistrano and have an Amazon EC2 account, give it a whirl:

• gem install capazon
• Edit your your config/deploy.rb:

require 'capazon'

#AWS login info
set :aws_access_key_id, 'XXX'
set :aws_secret_access_key, 'X'

# Name of the keypair used to spawn and connect to the Amazon EC2 Instance
# Defaults to one created by the setup_keypair task
set :aws_keypair_name, "#{application}-capazon"

# Path to the private key for the Amazon EC2 Instance mentioned above
# Detaults to one created by setup_keypair task
set :aws_private_key_path, "#{Dir.pwd}/#{aws_keypair_name}-key"

#defaults to an ubuntu image
#set :aws_ami_id, "ami-e4b6538d"

#defaults to, um, default
#set :aws_security_group, "default"

• $ cap describe_images

  * executing task describe_images
IMAGE   ami-0386636a    rbuilder-online/nuxleus-1.3-x86_9327.img.manifest.xml   099034111737    available       true
IMAGE   ami-08866361    rbuilder-online/test1-1.0-x86_9326.img.manifest.xml     099034111737    available       true
IMAGE   ami-1281647b    rbuilder-online/mw-tour-1.6.8-x86_9458.img.manifest.xml 099034111737    available       true
IMAGE   ami-1681647f    rbuilder-online/mw-tour-1.6.8-x86_9459.img.manifest.xml 099034111737    available       true

• $ AWS_AMI_ID=XXXX cap run_instance

This release just scratches the surface of what I hope to accomplish with Capazon – my end goal is to provide a shared AMI as a companion to Capazon which will encapsulate some Rails deployment best practices.

Please report any bugs you may come across, and stay tuned for updates!

Soylentfoo and Tweet, a Twitter action for Quicksilver that I made some updates to, were shown for around 15 milliseconds in today’s episode of Rocketboom. This is both nothing and everything at the same time. Watch it here.

In other meta-news, earlier this morning I moved Soylentfoo from my Textdrive Mixed Grill account to a Amazon EC2 server (domu-12-31-34-00-02-4e.usma2.compute.amazonaws.com, to be exact). For those thinking of using EC2 as a Ruby on Rails host in the future, stay tuned for a release of Capazon, a Capistrano rubygem plugin that aims to make deployment of a Rails application to an Amazon EC2 instance a ridiculously simple process. I’m getting very very close to a release.