Customers Shrug Off Amazon S3 Service Failure
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Amazon's virtual storage service, S3, suffered a 2.5-hour service failure Friday morning, causing outages and other problems at a wide range of web businesses. Most customers remained unconcerned, however.
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The vendor issued an alert to some customers, telling them to run the flawed application in order to get it fixed.
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At HP World this week, company officials scrambled to reassure customers that it is working hard to fix its order processing problems by the end of this month.
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By ELIZABETH M. GILLESPIE   Associated Press writer  SEATTLE -- Amazon.com Inc. launched a digital video downloading service Thursday, ending months of speculation that the Internet retailer would be getting into the online TV and movie business.
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SEATTLE Amazon-dot-com says things are running normally again on its Web site after a sometimes sluggish Monday. A spokeswoman says the world&#39;s largest Internet retailer began experiencing &quot;a slowness&quot; Monday morning.
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United Parcel Service shrugs off sputtering U.S. economy to top third-quarter expectations.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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Service interruptions reported across the U.S.
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At the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT in September, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos gave a keynote talk on the slew of new and innovative Web services his company has recently launched. His discussion of MTurk, S3, and EC2 held no surprises for me, or for readers of this column and of my blog. But one of the questions posed by an attendee, in the Q&A period following Bezosâ talk, was a stunner.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Businesses that think their employees aren&#39;t using IM or some type of peer-to-peer file sharing application may be living in ignorant bliss.
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(InfoWorld) - Best known as an online retailer, Amazon.com has been gradually building up the number of Web services it offers to developers, with the ultimate aim of turning that operation into a profitable business. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, dubbed the company's growing move into developer Web services as "the hidden Amazon" during a keynote address at the Emerging Technologies Conference on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Cambridge campus Wednesday. About 200,000 developers have registered to use the 10 different Web services Amazon.com is providing so far, including three that Bezos highlighted in his talk -- Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Mechanical Turk is a Web service that allows developers to post questions to a large group of people to gain their insight on a particular issue. S3 and EC2 are Web services that let AmazonÂ sell excess storage and excess compute capacityÂ respectively to third-party developers. "These are all pay-by-drink services," Bezos said. "You can use and experiment." The S3 and EC2 Web services are proving particularly popular with developers at companies that can't afford to invest in huge amounts of hardware and storage that they only require on an occasional basis, to test out the scalability of their software. With EC2, a developer could pay Amazon.com $70 for continual access for one month to the computing power of one of the company's high-level servers or alternatively, pay the same amount of money to have access to 700 servers for a single hour, Bezos said. "It completely changes what's possible," Bezos said. "Everyone who's started a company wants to go directly from their idea to a successful product." Instead, the inventor faces a host of obstacles, such as lengthy purchasing decisions on what computer hardware to invest in and how to manage heterogenous environments. Bezos terms those IT obstacles as "muck" and is hoping that Amazon.com's Web services can help alleviate some of those issues. "We're working on a Web service to get rid of tax lawyers, but it's not working yet," he quipped. Amazon.com plans to make its Web services operation into "a very profitable business," Bezos said. The company intends to keep its focus on developers with the hope that third-party companies will then use Amazon.com Web services to create consumer-facing applications, he added. All of the services are work that Amazon.com has already done internally to run its own vast online operations. "The last few years, we've been exposing those things that we have to do anyway," Bezos said. "It's a relatively small step to say we're eating this dog food, we should share it with others." One area Amazon.com has had to figure out is what business model to use in selling the services. "It tickles me that we routinely send people bills for 18 cents," Bezos said. He added that such a process isn't cost effective at present, but is more about experimenting with a potential new business model.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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NEW YORK - These days, technology providers take nothing for granted, especially their customers: There are plenty of stories of providers going to extraordinary lengths to win and keep customers.
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No-show at 9am as promised Amazon.co.uk disappointed eager buyers today when its pledge to begin offering its entire launch allocation of 60GB PlayStation 3 consolea to pre-order customers first thing this morning went awry. The firm was supposed to start taking advance orders for the PS3 from 9am this morning, but the sale didn't commence until 1:35pm.â¦
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As the case of Amazon.com reveals, maybe taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company.
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Enterprise software vendors are having their last hurrah at customer expense.  But not for long.
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Despite more than a decade of experience with e-commerce, many major online retailers continue to experience outages, slowdowns and outright glitches on their websites. Why can't they get it right?
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Some Rhapsody users are huffing and puffing but the service won't let them in. Second outage since March blocks an unknown number of customers and some are frustrated that the company doesn't know when it will be fixed.