Remember that RDS is a very easy service to leverage from enterprise Java applications because the databases can be made available through a standard JDBC interface. This means that there is absolutely no difference in terms of the Java code when using an RDS hosted MySQL instance, versus a MySQL instance hosted on your own in-house server, or even hosted on an EC2 instance for example.

Here is the official announcement:

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS, a new high-performance storage option for the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server database in the cloud — and now enables you to provision up to 10,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) with 1TB of storage for your new database instances.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. We are delivering this functionality to you in two stages. Starting immediately, when you create new database instances using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon RDS APIs, you can provision from 1,000 IOPS to 10,000 IOPS with corresponding storage from 100GB to 1TB for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server then the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS.

In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing RDS database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export the data from your existing database instance and import into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS can be used with all RDS features like Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and with all RDS-supported database engines (MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server). Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions. We plan to launch in our other AWS Regions in the coming months.

The class is 100% online and can be completed from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

Check this link for more information:

http://unex.uci.edu/courses/sectiondetail.aspx?year=2012&term=FALL&sid=00319

This week is Orientation Week (a chance to test your login information) and the real material begins next Monday the 2nd of July. So this really is your last chance to enroll!

If you want to find out a little more about the class before signing up, you can watch this recorded webinar that goes over everything you need to know.

All that you need to participate is an internet connection, an interest in Java development and a desire to take your code to the next level by deploying it on the most dominant cloud solution out there now, Amazon Web Services.

Ready to enroll? Perfect! Enrollment is 100% online and can be done via this University of California website.

The CQ Blueprints Maven Archetype can be used to bootstrap a fully Apache Maven enabled, multi-module, Adobe CQ project. By using the generated Apache Maven project you no longer need to use tools such as CRXDE and can instead develop and work in a tool like Eclipse and simply build and deploy to a running CQ Server using common Apache Maven commands.

This new release fixes several reported bugs, and adds complete examples of best practices for writing JSPs and custom tag libraries and integrating these with OSGI services.

Visit the CQ Blueprints site for further information about the CQ Blueprints Maven Archetype.

Remember, if you need assistance with your current or future Adobe CQ project, don’t hesitate to contact myself directly or alternatively contact Ruben Reusser and the team at Headwire who generously provide the CQ Blueprints project.

In a short blog post on the Amazon Web Services Blog today, Jeff Barr announced that Amazon is adding an edge location in Sydney, Australia. The location will initially only host CloudFront (CDN) and Route 53 (DNS) resources. However, those two services alone will help AWS customers based in Australia and serving content to their own Australian customers to improve their response times greatly.

Prior to this announcement, AWS customers who wanted to deliver content to Australian based customers were delivering it from offshore locations like the US and Singapore. Having CloudFront resources hosted “locally” in Sydney delivering all that static content (including streaming media) to Australian based consumers will result in a much more pleasurable end-user experience.

The Route 53 addition also means that those AWS customers who host their DNS data with AWS will now also experience quicker DNS response times which will also improve the end-user experience by lowering overall in-browser response times.

With the appointment of Joe Ziegler as the AWS Evangelist for Australia and New Zealand recently, and now this new edge location announcement, Australian based AWS customers should be feeling reassured in their AWS investments.

Here is the official abstract that was accepted:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an ideal platform to develop on and to use for hosting enterprise Java applications. The zero up-front costs and virtually infinite scalability of resources enable Java EE developers to start small and be confident that their infrastructure will grow with their application. In addition, the nature of AWS and the services available help solve some of the problems Java developers often face in more-traditional environments. In this session, you will be introduced to AWS concepts, gain an understanding of how existing Java EE applications can be migrated to the AWS environment, what advantages there are in doing that, and how to architect a new Java EE application from the ground up to leverage the AWS environment for maximum benefit.

The dates for the conference in 2012 are September 30th through October 4th.

http://unex.uci.edu/pressroom/releases/pr.aspx?id=323

But now to the point of this post. I was just notified that the AWS in Education team has stepped up to the plate in a big way and has provided an “AWS in Education grant award” to help the students in the class cover some (possibly all) of the costs of using the AWS services while they are taking the class and carrying out the various assignments and completing the class project. This is a huge deal to the students who will already be paying for the class itself, now they will not need to worry about the costs of using Amazon’s services and can concentrate on learning instead.

Thank you to everyone in the AWS in Education team!

You can find out more about the AWS in Education team here:

http://aws.amazon.com/education/

Remember, the UCI course is 100% online and open to anyone, anywhere on the planet!

To register for the Webinar please visit the University of California website.

Further details on the class and information on how to enroll can be found here.

via Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution — Cloud Computing News.

via SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree… | SlideShare Blog.

via Amazon Web Services Blog: Save The Date! AWS re: Invent – Global Customer and Partner Conference.

As you can imagine I quickly requested to talk to the staff on duty as soon as I arrived and proceeded to explain to them that their policy basically told me that the medical facility would rather risk the medical health of my two children than risk my wife choosing not to take responsibility for her own actions and suing them later for driving into an electric pole on her way home hopped up on pain killers. I even used the term cover-your-ass policy making, which apparently one of the nurses decided was an unacceptable use of the word ass and decided to make an issue out of it. Seriously? What a colossal failure on her part. My use of the word ass was the least of her problems at that point in time, and the fact that she failed to comprehend that only further serves as evidence of the lack of customer service we received today. The doctor was also a customer service “super star” – at one point she turned her back and walked away, leaving the two nurses to deal with me (great way to lead from the front doc!) and when she did return she stood behind one of the nurses and stared at the floor. For someone who I assume attended college and has at least average if not above average intelligence, the simple art of customer service has escaped this doctor entirely.

Not one of the three staff members I spoke to in any way tried to proactively address the situation by writing my complaint down, or even verbally telling me that my complaint had been registered and would be raised at the next policy meeting (even if they had no intention of doing so) [2]. Nothing even close to that. Instead what I got was the standard two robotic responses from people in customer service positions these days – “not my fault” and “I’ll get my manager”. As I mentioned for the reasons above, it is absolutely your fault, and by not taking responsibility for it, you are only making the issue worse. I also don’t want to speak to your manager. Your manager works for the same company you do, therefore I assume they have taken on the policies of the company just as you have (or should have), so I shouldn’t expect to get a different answer from them. I also don’t want to speak to your manager because your manager did not make the decisions that immediately led to the situation I am registering a complaint about, you made the decision, therefore you are responsible.

Of course, the three medical staff I had the misfortune of dealing with are only half the problem, the other half of the problem of course is the employer. By legislating your employees to within an inch of their lives, you not only strip them of the right to apply common sense to situations and to take responsibility for their own actions, but you are often stripping your customers of the same rights. The three staff members in question are probably so weighed down by policies and procedures that they have given up any notion of applying creative thinking or just plain common sense in any situation for fear of being reprimanded (or worse). That of course doesn’t excuse them from taking ownership of those policies, but it does explain why they made no attempt to resolve the situation in any way and the best response to a complaint they can possibly hope to give is to take note of the complaint and pass it along to a higher power. Unfortunately the three staff members in question failed to even pay me that courtesy.

This is normally a technology focused space, so what’s the tech spin on this situation? Well, I do not know if there is a specific tech angle on this story, but this story applies to all businesses including tech companies. I have picked on the medical industry in this piece, but it could easily have been airline employees, cable company employees or employees of any number of high-tech related businesses. And don’t forget customer service is not only an external facing issue, it can also be an issue between teams or departments within your own company. If the marketing team is coming to the IT team with complaints about a project, how the IT team is set up to handle those complaints can radically change the face of the project for better or worse.

You are who you work for. If you don’t believe that, you are probably doing poorly at your job, either because you are miserable doing the work you are doing, or because you are being feeble and disingenuous when representing your employer.

Also, when writing policies for your employees to follow, it is important to decide what the purpose of the policy is (is it defensive, or empowering?) and what the side effects of the policy are (intentional or unintentional). But even before you write a policy, you need to decide if the policy is necessary in the first place. If you are spending the time up front to hire the right people, then you will need fewer policies, as common sense will cover many more situations. And with fewer policies in place, you empower your employees to make a wider range of decisions to solve problems not only for themselves, but also for your customers. If you don’t trust your employees to make the right decisions, you either hired the wrong people in the first place, or you haven’t spent the time to educate them about the culture of your company [3] and their responsibilities within it. Empower your employees, don’t handicap them – it’s better for them, it’s better for your customers and as a result it will be better for your business in the long run.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass
[2] http://www.customerservicemanager.com/dealing-with-customers-complaints.htm
[3] http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values

From the email:

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

Here is a video that describes Storage Gateway in more detail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPyc0q4MYsM

This presentation will be a variation of the presentation I did at JavaOne at the start of October on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk tool for creating PaaS environments for Java web applications.

Please refer to the OCJUG website (www.ocjug.org) for exact timing and location.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

We are excited to announce that Amazon Simple Notification Service now supports SMS text messages as a new method for notifications. SMS (also known as Short Message Service) is one of the most widely used messaging applications in the world. With support for SMS text messaging, Amazon SNS messages can be delivered to SMS-enabled cell phones and smart phones.

Amazon SNS is a web service that makes it easy to send notifications from the cloud to applications or people. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective way to publish messages and have them immediately delivered to any number of subscribers or other applications. Previously Amazon SNS supported message deliveries via http, email or to Amazon SQS queues.

Notifications can now be sent as text messages to cell phones, smart phones or any other device that supports SMS. Amazon CloudWatch users who monitor their applications running on AWS services can receive timely updates for any event of interest or alarm they set. Existing Amazon SNS users who receive content via email can now also have that content delivered to their mobile device. SMS notifications with Amazon SNS can also be used to relay time-critical application events to mobile applications and devices. Mobile applications increasingly deliver and integrate real-time information from a variety of sources, including weather, traffic, social-media updates, and even multi-player games. Developers can easily integrate mobile applications with Amazon SNS today, to send messages and receive notifications over SMS. This new Amazon SNS feature can be easily accessed from the AWS Management Console available at: http://console.aws.amazon.com. While Amazon SNS is supported in all AWS regions, SMS notification support is currently supported in the US-East region, and will be available in other AWS regions and countries in the coming months.

From the announcement:

Today we’re excited to announce the immediate availability of the Management Console for Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), AWS’s highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.

The Amazon SES Management Console is a simple and intuitive web-based user interface for Amazon SES that allows you to do the following with a few clicks of your mouse:

- Check your sending quota and usage
- See your Amazon SES bounce, complaint, and rejection metrics over time
- Verify sender email addresses
- Send both formatted and raw test emails

Of course, all of this is still available via the API as well, so you can choose whichever method works best for you. Please note that you will still need to send your production email to Amazon SES through its APIs. Please see the API Reference for actions and data types.

Additionally, Amazon announced a public webinar to demonstrate the new Management Console features. You can register for the webinar here.

Hello,

We have noticed that one or more of your instances is running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.

i-XXXXXXXX

The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you take appropriate action.

If your instance was launched from an EBS-backed AMI, issuing a stop and start from the AWS Management Console will migrate your instance to new hardware and help avoid any unforeseen downtime.

For more options to stop and start your instance please see:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/starting-stopping-instances.html

If your instance was launched from an instance store-backed AMI, you should launch a replacement instance from your most recent AMI and migrate all necessary data to the replacement instance.

Should have you have any additional questions, we offer AWS Basic Support via our Community Forums for free, or Premium Support for one-on-one assistance direct from an AWS Developer Support Engineer at http://aws.amazon.com/support.

Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 Team

So I dutifully went and followed the instructions and stopped and started (not just rebooted) the specified instance using the EC2 Web Management Console.

PROBLEM: The instance came back up as expected in the Web Management Console, however I could not ping it or SSH to it or connect to it in any way for that matter using my DNS name. I could however connect to it using the Amazon assigned public DNS name. It took me a few minutes to figure it out (all the while my site was down of course), but I eventually noticed that the Elastic IP address assigned to that instance was no longer shown in the instance details view. I went over to the Elastic IP management screen and sure enough that Elastic IP address was shown as not being associated with any instances. I reassigned the Elastic IP address to the instance and a few moments later, everything was back up and running.

CONCLUSION: This scenario is exactly why you need to be using an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed EC2 instance for any of your important servers, so in the event that the hardware fails, your actual server image is still safe and can be restored on other hardware. It also proves that while “the cloud” is awesome, it can fail and you need to be prepared for it. Also, one last curious piece about Elastic IP addresses becoming disassociated with instances – not sure if this is related to the hardware failure, or to the stop/start of the instance, but definitely something to keep an eye out for in the future.

From the email:

We are excited to announce three new Amazon SQS features today: delay queues, message timers, and the ability to send or delete multiple messages in a single API call (batch operations). Delay queues can be used to apply a uniform delay to all messages. Alternatively message timers can be used to apply delay to specific messages that can be sent individually, or in a batch.

New support for batch send and delete operations complements the existing batch receive functionality. With batch operations many workloads will benefit from improved single thread message throughput, reduced connection overhead and lower API call latencies.

As distributed applications become larger and more complex, greater scalability and control of message-based systems becomes increasingly important. With support for both queue delays and message timers, a wider array of real world distributed application scenarios can be addressed. With batch APIs, developing Internet-scale distributed applications is easier and more cost effective than ever.

Abstract

The cloud has promised a lot to Java Web developers but has delivered on only some of the hype. Many issues still exist that have the ability to kill many a project. Elastic Beanstalk, a Web service announced by Amazon in early 2011, takes the cloud to the next level for Java Web applications. It aims to eliminate the remaining issues the cloud presents. No hardware purchases? Check! Low setup costs? Check! No software installation? Check! Automatic resource scaling? Check! Resource monitoring? Check! This presentation takes a deep dive into Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service, including what problems it can help solve and opportunities it provides to deliver better Java Web applications.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzTMnvBDBC0