As more and more developers look to put AWS to use in various ways, questions about security practices and policies come to our attention from time to time.

We've just published the first version of the AWS Security white paper. The paper provides answers to a number of questions about certifications, physical security, backups, and issues specific to particular services.

-- Jeff;

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced a hiring event for several hundred full-time hourly positions in its Lexington, Ky., fulfillment centers, which are operated by Amazon.com kydc, Inc.

E-Commerce Service Amazon E-Commerce Service exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality.

We've launched this year’s AWS Start-Up Challenge, a contest for entrepreneurs and start-ups that will award the winner $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, a potential investment offer from Amazon.com, and more. Submissions will be accepted until October 3, 2008.

Learn more about the contest and enter your great idea today.

-- Jeff;

Amazon.com and IMDb have teamed up to launch an online music encyclopedia. Content on the site, SoundUnwound , is vetted by Amazon staff but editable by anyone, ala Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an undeniably helpful resource for researching bands, with fairly accurate data that tends to be updated in near real time.

Amazon and IMDB launched a Wikipedia-like music information database site yesterday called SoundUnwound .

Brian Clark highlights various levels of reading , and how many bloggers fail to go beyond scratching the surface.

E-Commerce Service Amazon E-Commerce Service exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality.

The team behind Amazon SimpleDB is in the process of designing and implementing a new API call. The new call will return information about a particular SimpleDB domain. They have posted the design spec to the SimpleDB forum and would be very interested in receiving some more feedback.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- much of what we do at Amazon is driven by real feedback from real customers. If you are using or are thinking about using SimpleDB, please take a look at the spec and let us know (via a post to the forum) what you think.

-- Jeff;

Yale University has lovingly restored Paul Rudolph's 1963 Art and Architecture building , a severe fortress adored by some and surely hated by more.

E-Commerce Service Amazon E-Commerce Service exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality.

I get to meet with lots of developers and system architects as part of my job. Talking to them about cloud computing and about the Amazon Web Services is both challenging and rewarding. Cloud computing as a concept is still relatively new. When I explain what it is and what it enables, I can almost literally see the light bulbs lighting up in people's heads as they understand cloud computing and our services, and what they can do with them.

A typical audience contains a nice mix of wild-eyed enthusiasts and more conservative skeptics. The enthusiasts are ready to jump in to cloud computing with both feet, and start to make plans to move corporate assets and processes to the cloud as soon as possible. The conservative folks can appreciate the benefits of cloud computing, but would prefer to take a more careful and measured approach. When the enthusiasts and the skeptics are part of the same organization, they argue back and forth and often come up with an interesting hybrid approach.

The details vary, but a pattern is starting to emerge. The conservative side advocates keeping core business processes inside of the firewall. The enthusiasts want to run on the cloud. They argue back and forth for a while, and eventually settle on a really nice hybrid solution. In a nutshell, they plan to run the steady state business processing on existing systems, and then use the cloud for periodic or overflow processing.

After watching (sometimes in real time in the course of a meeting) this negotiation and ultimate compromise take place time and time again in the last few months, I decided to invent a new word to describe what they are doing. I could have come up with some kind of lifeless and forgettable acronym, but that's not my style. I proposed cloudbursting in a meeting a month or two ago and everyone seemed to like it.

So, here we go. Cloudbursting is an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.

Earlier this week my colleague Deepak Singh pointed me to a blog post written by Thomas Brox Røst. In the post, Thomas talks about how he combined traditional hosting with an EC2-powered, batch mode page regeneration system. His site (Eventseer) contains over 600,000 highly interconnected pages. As traffic and content grew, serving up the pages dynamically became prohibitively expensive. Renerating all of the pages on a single server would have taken an unacceptably long 7 days, and even longer as the site became more complex. Instead, Thomas used a cloudbursting model, regenerating the pages on an array of 25 Amazon EC2 instances in just 5 hours (or, as he notes, "roughly the cost of a pint of beer in Norway."). There's some more information about his approach on the High Scalability blog. Thomas has also written about running Django on EC2 using EBS.

I'd be interesting in hearing about more approaches to creating applications which cloudburst.

-- Jeff;

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced a hiring event for more than 250 full-time and part-time seasonal customer service positions for its Kennewick, Wash., customer service center, which is operated by AMZN wacs, ...

E-Commerce Service Amazon E-Commerce Service exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality.

The folks at RightScale will be conducting a webinar on Thursday, August 28th at 10 AM PDT.

They'll focus on the recently announced Amazon Elastic Block Store, discussing application scenarios, mission-critical deployment, architecture, and design considerations. Michael Crandell (RightScale CEO) and Thorsten von Eicken (RightScale CTO) will present.

The webinar is free, but space is limited and pre-registration is recommended.

Post-webinar update: RightScale has posted the slides and the audio from the event.

-- Jeff;

If there's a successful business model in the whole "user-generated content" revolution, it's in compnies getting for free services they used to pay for.

Gamers have been asking for it and Amazon has answered the call. Amazon.com Inc.

E-Commerce Service Amazon E-Commerce Service exposes Amazon's product data and e-commerce functionality.

Amazon SimpleDB just released an update that includes a new feature called QueryWithAttributes. With this update, developers will be now able to retrieve all the information associated with items returned as a response to a particular query. The feature provides additional flexibility because it enables you to retrieve anywhere between one and all attributes for each item. This highly requested feature simplifies application development process for all clients of Amazon SimpleDB.  Instead of issuing a Query request followed by a series of GetAttributes requests, application designers can now use a single API call to retrieve all information about items stored in Amazon SimpleDB.

I am very excited about this new feature because it simplifies my application code. This is useful for developers who are not used to parallel programming or who utilize programming languages that do not support parallel programming.

The updated API documentation is here. I also highly recommend reading the Query 101, Query 102, and the best practices articles from our resource center. Amazon SimpleDB is still in limited beta. However if you sign up for the service at aws.amazon.com/SimpleDB you’ll be the first to know when additional applications are accepted.

If you don’t list specific attributes in your query, then all attributes are returned—which is the default behavior of this new API method.

There’s a FAQ below; however I believe that examples always help developers understand what the changes mean in terms of writing code:

Current Query Syntax:
Domain = ZipCode
[‘State’ = ‘WI’]

Calling the Query method returns

<QueryResult>
  <ItemName>24103</ItemName>
  <ItemName>23724</ItemName>
  Etc…
</QueryResult>

New QueryWithAttributes Syntax
The new query is identical in every way except that the API has a new method. Called—of course—QueryWithAttributes:

Domain = ZipCode
[‘State’ = ‘WI’]

Calling the QueryWithAttributes method returns

<QueryWithAttributesResult>
  <Item>
    <Name>24103</Name>
    <Attribute><Name>state</Name><Value>WI</Value></Attribute>
    <Attribute><Name>zipcode</Name><Value>54936</Value></Attribute>
    <Attribute><Name>city</Name><Value>FOND DU LAC</Value></Attribute>
    <Attribute><Name>county</Name><Value>FOND DU LAC</Value></Attribute>
  </Item> 

<Item>
    <Name>23724</Name>
    <Attribute><Name>state</Name><Value>WI</Value></Attribute>
                  <Attribute><Name>zipcode</Name><Value>53703</Value></Attribute>
                  <Attribute><Name>city</Name><Value>MADISON</Value></Attribute>
                  <Attribute><Name>county</Name><Value>DANE</Value></Attribute>
  </Item>
Etc…
</QueryWithAttributesResult>

FAQ
Q: Can I use the same query language?
Yes, the query language is exactly the same as for the regular Query API call.

Q: Will I get back the same set of items?
Yes, the overall set of items that will match a given query expression is exactly the same as that for the regular Query API call.

Q: How many attributes can I retrieve for each item?
You can retrieve anywhere between one and all attributes for each item.  The default behavior is to return all attributes, but you can specify a list of specific attributes to return.

Q: Will my result set be paginated?
Yes, Amazon SimpleDB paginates the result set if it exceeds specified maximum number of items or a total overall response size of 1 MB.

Q: How many items can I retrieve in one page of results?
You can indicate the maximum number of items to return per page that can be between 1 and 250 (default 100).  Amazon SimpleDB will attempt to return as many items as possible per page without exceeding the maximum byte size limit (1 MB) and the maximum number of items specified.

Q: What happens to page size if my attributes are very large?
Your page size will likely be smaller than the maximum number of items specified, since the overall size of the response object will approach the limit of 1 MB.

Q: Will I ever get one item split across multiple pages of results?
No, an item will never get split across multiple pages of results.  All specified attributes for a given item will be returned within the same page of results.

Q: Does the query timeout apply to my queries?
Yes, the same query timeout applies to long running queries.

Q: How much does each call cost?
The cost of each call is proportional to the amount of system resources that it consumes.  You can monitor the cost through the BoxUsage parameter, which is returned with every response.

Q. Is the Amazon SimpleDB Beta open to all comers now?
Amazon SimpleDB is still in limited beta. However if you sign up for the service at http://aws.amazon.com/SimpleDB you’ll be the first to know when additional applications are accepted.

-- Mike