Recently I was in NY at the AWS Summit and heard of about the company Kris described below. You can view the slides from the presentation at the link below. In short, 50,000 core cycle computing cost this company $4,828 per hour. This is how AWS is changing the way we think about business and what is possible for us to accomplish.
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/aws-customer-presentation-cycle-computing-aws-summit-2012-nyc
Jeff
Monday, April 30, 2012
Friday, April 27, 2012
How Cloud Computing is transforming scientific R&D!
Every once and awhile you run across something to do with Cloud Computing that makes you stop and say "Wow that is cool!".
Last week we had the privalege of being at the AWS Summit in New York to launch our beta of 2W Insight, our new billing application for AWS. While at the summit we had a chance to listen to how innovative companies are using AWS to solve real business problems.
The most interesting of these to me was a company called Cycle Computing. Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing was on stage during the keynote to describe the AWESOME work he and his team are doing around building supercomputers on AWS. I've posted lots of blogs on how to run a server or utility for <$1 month on AWS and while these are neat tricks they pale in comparison to the social importance of Jason and his team's work.
Cycle Computing built a supercomputer on AWS with over 50,000 cores to do cancer research. I will explain it terribly so please go over to their blog - blog.cyclecomputing.com and read about it yourself. It is impressive to say the least.
Jason - keep it up!!
-Kris
Last week we had the privalege of being at the AWS Summit in New York to launch our beta of 2W Insight, our new billing application for AWS. While at the summit we had a chance to listen to how innovative companies are using AWS to solve real business problems.
The most interesting of these to me was a company called Cycle Computing. Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing was on stage during the keynote to describe the AWESOME work he and his team are doing around building supercomputers on AWS. I've posted lots of blogs on how to run a server or utility for <$1 month on AWS and while these are neat tricks they pale in comparison to the social importance of Jason and his team's work.
Cycle Computing built a supercomputer on AWS with over 50,000 cores to do cancer research. I will explain it terribly so please go over to their blog - blog.cyclecomputing.com and read about it yourself. It is impressive to say the least.
Jason - keep it up!!
-Kris
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Corner Booth Media Features 2nd Watch Case Study
Corner Booth Media has featured our Gravity Jack case study video in their blog "Are Case Study Videos Right for You?"
Corner Booth Media has helped us create all of our case study and testimonial videos, and they have been a great resource for us in getting the word out about 2nd Watch. As the blog quotes Jeff saying, "It’s easy for us to tell people how great we think we are, but much more effective when our clients do it." They've provided us with a really effective medium to let our clients speak on our work.
Corner Booth Media has helped us create all of our case study and testimonial videos, and they have been a great resource for us in getting the word out about 2nd Watch. As the blog quotes Jeff saying, "It’s easy for us to tell people how great we think we are, but much more effective when our clients do it." They've provided us with a really effective medium to let our clients speak on our work.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
2nd Watch Unveils Beta Billing Application Today
Kris and Jeff are at a summit in New York today to unveil the beta version of 2nd Watch's new cloud billing application, 2W Insight. 2W Insight will allow AWS customers to manage billing and consolidated billing environments in an easy to understand, streamlined manner. It will give customers easy visibility into their AWS bills - no more confusion in deciphering your bills!
2W Insight updates billing costs on a regular schedule, allowing accountants the most accurate billing information of any tool on the market, not just estimates. 2W Insight provides an organization's management with simple, clean and easy to understand summaries of AWS use. Services are organized into compute, storage and network categories with charges summarized by region, size and VPC. 2W Insight also enables analysts to create more detailed drilldowns of AWS charges, giving them control over how they view and organize thier bill. Users can sort and filter detailed cost and usage information, view instance level details and multiple department costs. The printing feature also allows users to print a PDF summary of bills, delivering easy reporting capabilities.
Are you an AWS Solution Provider? The application will also be available as a platform to manage customer billing. It will generate accurate bills across the consolidated billing set up, enabling solution providers to apply AWS pricing to end consumers in a consumer-friendly format.
We are very excited about the new application and plan to have a production version available in early June.
2W Insight updates billing costs on a regular schedule, allowing accountants the most accurate billing information of any tool on the market, not just estimates. 2W Insight provides an organization's management with simple, clean and easy to understand summaries of AWS use. Services are organized into compute, storage and network categories with charges summarized by region, size and VPC. 2W Insight also enables analysts to create more detailed drilldowns of AWS charges, giving them control over how they view and organize thier bill. Users can sort and filter detailed cost and usage information, view instance level details and multiple department costs. The printing feature also allows users to print a PDF summary of bills, delivering easy reporting capabilities.
Are you an AWS Solution Provider? The application will also be available as a platform to manage customer billing. It will generate accurate bills across the consolidated billing set up, enabling solution providers to apply AWS pricing to end consumers in a consumer-friendly format.
We are very excited about the new application and plan to have a production version available in early June.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Launching this week....
2nd Watch is headed to NY this week.
We will be unveiling something big at the Amazon Web
Services Summit….stay tuned.
We will be unveiling something big at the Amazon Web
Services Summit….stay tuned.
Friday, March 30, 2012
The Cloud creates jobs AND ideas!
Microsoft sponsored a study with IDC about job growth related to Cloud computing. The headline - "Cloud Computing to create 14 Million New Jobs by 2015".
You can read the entire article here - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2012/mar12/03-05CloudComputingJobs.mspx
The article has a bit of sales in it - it does quote several partners and the VP of enterprise sales. That aside it's an interesting take on something I believe in strongly - the power of Cloud Computing to enable creators to create in a way not previously possible!
Here at 2nd Watch we are very proud to be a part of this new job creation! Since 2011 2nd Watch has created 15 new jobs in the Cloud Computing industry!
The Cloud is a technology industrialization that will help empower business owners in a way not before possible. Let me give you a case study of something that was not feasible before Cloud Computing:
Here at 2nd Watch we are working on a number of utilities to make the Cloud easier to consume. One such utility requires very large datasets to be stored for each customer. Our application stores 21 Million data points per month, and that is only for 10 customers. In the old world of technology if I wanted to mass market an application at this scale I would need to buy and provision several servers and massive disk storage to keep up with the demand.
In this instance I estimate that I would have purchased $65-75,000 worth of equipment. Forget depreciation and useful life - for a startup this is just money I don't have. Today my almost Terabyte of storage costs me less than $10 per month, and I only pay for what I use. My servers are several hundred dollars a month, and I can scale them up or down based on usage.
Big data problems are no longer big dollar problems. This is a huge shift in an industry built around selling and consuming hardware. This new wave of technology will spur the thinkers and doers in our society to create new and compelling business ideas that could not have existed before.
Welcome to the industrial age of technology. I for one am looking forward to the opportunities this new world will bring!
-Kris
You can read the entire article here - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2012/mar12/03-05CloudComputingJobs.mspx
The article has a bit of sales in it - it does quote several partners and the VP of enterprise sales. That aside it's an interesting take on something I believe in strongly - the power of Cloud Computing to enable creators to create in a way not previously possible!
Here at 2nd Watch we are very proud to be a part of this new job creation! Since 2011 2nd Watch has created 15 new jobs in the Cloud Computing industry!
The Cloud is a technology industrialization that will help empower business owners in a way not before possible. Let me give you a case study of something that was not feasible before Cloud Computing:
Here at 2nd Watch we are working on a number of utilities to make the Cloud easier to consume. One such utility requires very large datasets to be stored for each customer. Our application stores 21 Million data points per month, and that is only for 10 customers. In the old world of technology if I wanted to mass market an application at this scale I would need to buy and provision several servers and massive disk storage to keep up with the demand.
In this instance I estimate that I would have purchased $65-75,000 worth of equipment. Forget depreciation and useful life - for a startup this is just money I don't have. Today my almost Terabyte of storage costs me less than $10 per month, and I only pay for what I use. My servers are several hundred dollars a month, and I can scale them up or down based on usage.
Big data problems are no longer big dollar problems. This is a huge shift in an industry built around selling and consuming hardware. This new wave of technology will spur the thinkers and doers in our society to create new and compelling business ideas that could not have existed before.
Welcome to the industrial age of technology. I for one am looking forward to the opportunities this new world will bring!
-Kris
AWS Tip of the Month: Backup Server for less than $1 a month
AWS has a very neat way to backup your server with attached storage called EBS Snapshots. This technology starts with a full snapshot of the entire volume and continues to do incremental snapshots based on the difference between the last snapshots.
Snap shotting is not a new technology, and many people use this in their on-premise environment to take snapshots of a virtual machine or specific disk for backup or copy purposes.
At AWS you cannot schedule these snapshots. You either have to call these via API or use the management console to do this.
Below is the high-level process to automate these snapshot backups at a particular time each day:
By doing this daily we have incurred the costs of our storage for snapshots and the $.02 an hour charge for our T1.micro - effectively $0.62 per month for a backup server.
-Kris
Snap shotting is not a new technology, and many people use this in their on-premise environment to take snapshots of a virtual machine or specific disk for backup or copy purposes.
At AWS you cannot schedule these snapshots. You either have to call these via API or use the management console to do this.
Below is the high-level process to automate these snapshot backups at a particular time each day:
- Build a t1.micro that has a script to run that calls the snapshot API for EBS for the volumes you want to backup. Make sure this script runs on machine start up.
- Setup an Auto-scale group to launch a server based on a schedule (we start ours at 3am and shut it off at 3:50 am). This ensures time to kick off all the snapshot jobs - note: I do not have to run the server while they complete, only to kick off the snapshot and any pre-activities I need to accomplish before I can take my backup.
- Check your snapshots to ensure they are occurring regularly and test them on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure you can recover sufficiently in the case of an outage.
By doing this daily we have incurred the costs of our storage for snapshots and the $.02 an hour charge for our T1.micro - effectively $0.62 per month for a backup server.
-Kris
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