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Since the whole internet finds it incredibly important — Google now allows to deploy not only all of your data, but also all of your code on their proprietary, tightly controlled, fully integrated and infinitely scalable platform. As far as I understand it’s inferior to Amazon offering in every way, but one — it has a decent distributed database. May the Python empire rejoice!

In the end the Clowd track contained a lot of talk and little useful information. Amazon was the most interesting in the end.

Google guy talked about a unified Atom-based API to their services. It is a nice feature, but there was little real information to add to that description.

Yahoo showed off the pipes. It was cool to play with, but I both managed to crash it and couldn’t get very far with printing a map of Tartu with restaurants on it.

The panel was discussing whether transactions are necessary to no end. Really was a great cloud of fog. Hopefully tomorrow will be more substance.

Amazon web services is an offering to host your data and software at Amazon with massive virtualization and an interface over web services.

The first part of the talk is about S3 file hosting, which is done through a Firefox plugin (which I mistook for FireFTP first). You can upload files, assign ACLs, get the URL for publishing and pay proportionally to storage used, requests done and bandwidth used (all three have assigned fees). Nothing technically fancy, but cool nevertheless.

The next part is about EC2, which is a virtual server on-the-fly renting. You basically store a (special) disk image on the S3 service and then boot from it a number of virtual servers. You get root access to your servers and pay per hour of use. You can add/remove servers both programmatically and from a Firefox extension.

The next part is about SQS, which is a queuing communication service. Basically the main use for that is for communication among the EC2 servers to enable scaled processing.

The last part is SimpleDB, which is a simplified database service. Basically provides a fully indexed collections of key-values pairs (multiple values!). It’s kinda like a flat JSON (one object per row, values can be arrays). Provides a simple query language (isn’t this very similar to CouchDB???). Useful for services that don’t need too complex queries.

In the end a quick overview of payment services. One cool thing is that you can use DevPay to charge your users for the services hosted on S3/EC2. Nice stuff, but only applicable in the US in the foreseeable future.

Lastly I asked whether there is any load balancing provided by Amazon, but turned out that you need to set up your own and add a registration call to the server instance startup.

Generally the talk focuses on the business side, whereas I’d like to know how do they actually implement the services.