Using Amazon Web Services

Welcome!

A little about me
Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Allegheny College
NITLE Technology Fellow
http://highedwebtech.com
@mrichwalsky on Twitter

What We’ll Talk About Today
Quick Overview of the cloud
Examples
Hands-on

Quick poll
Who’s using cloud services today?

Examining the Cloudscape

What is the cloud?
Use resources only as you need them
Pay as you go
Scale up and down quickly and easily

What is the cloud?
Use external infrastructure to solve internal technology issues and needs.

What is the cloud?
It can cost less to take advantage of existing infrastructure then building your own from scratch, especially for short-term projects.

An Example
Fundraising Video
Mailing list of 45,000 people
Challenge:
Get the video served quickly and economically to the audience
Address both the initial burst + the long tail.

Who are the major players in this space?

Big Players

Lots of little folks

You might be in the clouds already

How do we use this stuff in highered?

What we’re doing at Allegheny
We moved our podcast and video hosting to Amazon S3 in 2007
Served admissions + fundraising videos
Served videos for our partnership with NY Times
Audio, video and SWF hosting for our online tour

What we’re doing at Allegheny
Backups
At least in our web/public affairs group
Looking at campus-wide solutions
Misc. web hosting
PDF, Javascripts, CSS, Image Galleries
Email Outsourcing
Google Apps for Education
Campaign Monitor for marketing

Does the cloud make sense for your project?
Duration of project
Type of service needed
The cloud is better at some things than others
Amount of data to move
May be cist oe

Activate your Amazon Web Services Account

Hands-on

6/4/09
Amazon Simple Storage Service

File storage (up to 5GB)
Allow the world to access the file you post online
Tell S3 you want the file to live in the US or EU
Pay only for what you use

6/4/09
S3

Access from your web application via REST or SOAP
Access via browser plugins like S3 Fox
FTP programs
Transmit, Interarchy, Cyberduck, Cloudberry and many more

6/4/09
S3

6/4/09
Alright, let's do this

Login
Create a bucket
Upload a file
Set file permissions
View your file

6/4/09
S3 + CDN = CloudFront

Additional costs but faster access around the world

6/4/09
EC2

Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances

6/4/09
EC2 in Plain English