Programming Amazon EC2

Preface

Thank you for picking up a copy of this book. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has amazed everyone: Amazon has made lots of friends, and all its “enemies” are too busy admiring AWS to do much fighting back. At the moment, there is no comparable public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); AWS offers the services at a scale that has not been seen before. We wrote this book so you can get the most out of AWS’ services. If you come from conventional hardware infrastructures, once you are on AWS, you won’t want to go back.

AWS is not easy; it combines skills of several different (established) crafts. It is different from traditional systems administration, and it’s not just developing a piece of software. If you have practiced one or both of these skills, all you need is to be inquisitive and open to learning.

Our background is in software engineering. We are computer scientists with extensive software engineering experience in all sorts of different fields and organizations. But the cloud in general and AWS in particular caught our interest some years ago. We got serious about this by building Decaf, an Android smartphone application that manages Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) accounts. We were finalists in the Android Developer Challenge in 2009. We will use Decaf to illustrate various AWS services and techniques throughout this book.

Around the same time, in early 2010, we decided we wanted to build applications on AWS. We founded 9Apps and set out to find a select group of partners who shared our development interests. Our expertise is AWS, and our responsibility is to keep it running at all times. We design, build, and operate these infrastructures.

Much of our experience comes from working with these teams and building these applications, and we will use several of them as examples throughout the book. Here is a short introduction to the companies whose applications we will use:

Directness

Directness helps customers connect brands to businesses. With a set of tools for making surveys and collecting, interpreting, and presenting consumers’ feedback, this application is very successful in its approach and works with a number of international firms. The problem is scaling the collection of customer responses, transforming it into usable information, and presenting it to the client. Directness can only grow if we solve this problem.

Kulitzer

Kulitzer is a web application that allows users to organize creative contests. Users can invite participants to enter the contest, an audience to watch, and a jury to pick a winner. Technically, you can consider Kulitzer a classical consumer web app.

Layar

Layar is an augmented reality (AR) smartphone browser that is amazing everyone. This application enriches the user’s view of the world by overlapping different objects or information in the camera view, relevant to the location. For example, users can see what people have been tweeting near them, the houses that are for sale in the neighborhood, or tourist attractions near where they are walking.

The Layar application continues to win prize after prize, and is featured in many technical and mainstream publications. Layar started using Google App Engine for its servers, but for several reasons has since moved to AWS.

Marvia

Ever needed to create some “print ready” PDFs? It’s not an easy task. You probably needed desktop publishing professionals and the help of a marketing agency, all for a significant price tag. Marvia is an application that can dramatically reduce the effort and cost involved in PDF creation. It allows you to create reusable templates with a drag-and-drop web application. Or you can integrate your own system with Marvia’s API to automate the generation of leaflets and other material.

Publitas

Publitas does the opposite of what Marvia does, in a way. It lets you transform your traditional publication material to an online experience. The tool, called ePublisher, is very feature-rich and is attracting a lot of attention. You can input your material in PDF format to the application and it will generate online content. You can then enrich the content with extra functionality, such as supporting sharing in social networks and adding music, video, search, and print. The challenge with the Publitas software is that its existing customers are established and well-known businesses that are sometimes already so powerful that exposure ratings resemble those of a mass medium like television.

Audience

Of course, we welcome all readers of this book, and we hope it inspires you to get into AWS and utilize it in the best possible way to be successful. But we set out to write this book with a particular purpose: to be an AWS guide for building and growing applications from small to “Internet scale.” It will be useful if you want to host your blog or small web application, but it will also help you grow like Zynga did with Farmville. (Some say Zynga is the fastest growing company in the world.)

This book does not focus on detail; for example, we are not going to tell you exactly which parameters each command receives, and we are not going to list all the available commands. But we will show you the approach and implementation. We rely on examples to illustrate the concepts and to provide a starting point for your own projects. We try to give you a sense of all AWS functionality, which would be nearly impossible if we were to show the details of every feature.

To get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable with the command line, and having experience writing software will be useful for some of the chapters. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt if you know what Ubuntu is (or CentOS or Windows 2003, for that matter) and how to install software. But most of all, you should simply be curious about what you can do with AWS. There’s often more than one way of doing things, and since AWS is so new, many of those ways have not yet been fully explored.

If you are a seasoned software/systems engineer or administrator, there are many things in this book that will challenge you. You might think you know it all. Well, you don’t!

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Caution

This icon indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Programming Amazon EC2 by Jurg van Vliet and Flavia Paganelli. Copyright 2011 I-MO BV, 978-1-449-39368-7.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

There are many people we would like to thank for making this book into what it is now. But first of all, it would never have been possible without our parents, Aurora Gómez, Hans van Vliet, Marry van Vliet, and Ricardo Paganelli.

Right from the start we have been testing our ideas with many friends and colleagues; their early feedback shaped this book significantly. Thanks to Adam Dorell, Arjan van Woensel, Björn van Vliet, Dirk Groten, Eduardo Röhr, Eric Hammond, Federico Mikaelian, Fleur van Vliet, Grant Wilson, Indraneel Bommisetty, Joerg Seibel, Khalil Seyedmehdi, Marten Mickos, Matt Miesnieks, Pambo Pascalides, Pedro Moranga Gonçalves, Pim Derneden, Roy Chandra, Steven van Wel, Werner Vogels, Wouter Broekhof, and Zoran Kovačević.

Of course, you need “strange eyes” going over every detail and meticulously trying out examples to find errors. Our technical reviewers, Anthony Maës, Ben Immanuel, Graziano Obertelli, and Menno van der Sman, did just that.

And finally, there is the wonderful and extremely professional team at O’Reilly. Without Mike, Julie, and all the others there wouldn’t even have been a book. To Amy Thomson, Adam Zaremba, Julie Steele, Mike Loukides, Sumita Mukherji, and the rest we met and worked with, thank you!