Amazon Aerospace and Satellite Solutions -- integrating satellites and terrestrial services

At this time, Musk has a clear lead in launch technology and Bezos has superior terrestrial resources and is building the infrastructure to connect them to space.

Since its founding, Amazon has reinvested profit in building infrastructure. They began with retail sales and distribution infrastructure and later added Amazon Web Services (AWS) providing data center and hosting infrastructure. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also established Blue Origin, a company to provide satellite launch service and eventually to support space travel, and last year Amazon filed an application for a 3,236-satellite constellation of low-earth orbit Internet service satellites -- Project Kuiper.

Soon after filing the Project Kuiper application, AWS announced a new satellite ground station service, establishing a link between the two companies and now they have announced the formation of AWS Aerospace and Satellite Solutions. Aerospace and Satellite Solutions (I can’t bring myself to type “AWS ASS”) does not add new physical infrastructure but will be marketing and assisting on the design and implementation of complex space/terrestrial systems.

Organizations from space startups to government agencies like NASA and DOD should be able to save time and cost by building their applications on top of this integrated infrastructure. Recognizing the lucrative government market, Amazon has hired retired U.S. Air Force Major General Clinton Crosier, who was most recently the Director of Space Force Planning, to head the AWS Aerospace and Satellite Solutions. (Hiring General Crosier might also help Amazon in their battle with Microsoft over a ten-billion dollar Pentagon cloud services contract).

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos share a common goal -- making homo sapiens a space-faring, multi-planet species. Bezos stated that goal in his high-school valedictorian speech and believes that it is imperative that we do so because humanity is growing too fast and using too much energy to be sustainable in the long run and the SpaceX Web site states that "SpaceX’s family of launch vehicles and spacecraft were designed from the beginning to take humans to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond."

They both also have plans for an interim step of establishing broadband Internet-service constellations -- Musk's Starlink and Bezos' Project Kuiper. At this point in time, Musk has a clear lead in launch technology and Bezos has superior terrestrial resources and is building the infrastructure to connect them to space. Bezos and Musk could move faster toward their shared goal by collaborating, with SpaceX launching Project Kuiper satellites and Starlink satellites using AWS's terrestrial services. I don't know about Bezos, but Musk seems to be willing to share a market in pursuit of a long-range goal.

Amazon's Glacier storage service will disrupt online backup

The bar chart below sums it up -- Amazon's Glacier is cheap -- 1¢ per gigabyte per month. (Follow the link for pricing detail).

Amazon has published a Glacier API, and, for now, you have to be a programmer to use it. But they have committed to releasing FTP access very soon, and it will not take long for developers to release backup programs and services with graphical user interfaces to Glacier.

Developing and deploying applications on the Internet is getting easier

There have been several major changes in the way we develop and deliver IT applications. We began with batch processing in the 1950s and progressed to time sharing, personal computers and now the Internet.  With each new platform, application development has become easier.

To develop an application in the days of batch processing, you had to be a nerd -- a professional programmer.  We used to keypunch assembly language programs then hand the card decks to operators who fed them to the computer in batches.  It typically took a couple of hours to get your results back.  Timesharing shortened the turnaround time, but professional programmers were still needed, and applications took months or years to build.

The personal computer enabled users to develop applications like newsletters, simple accounting systems, small databases and so forth using productivity software.  Today one can develop a complex application like a blog, database, wiki or social network on the Internet with little effort.

But, what if you want to run your own applications on your own server? That is also getting easier and cheaper.

In the early days, you needed a computer to run the service and a connection to the Internet.  It might have been a personal computer in your bedroom or on a shelf in a server room.

If the load grew, you could afford denser server blades in racks, but you were still responsible for maintenance and connectivity.

You could take care of the connectivity by moving your server into a data center, but it was still your server.

As personal computer power increased, we were able to borrow a page out of the mainframe book and partition a single physical server into several virtual servers.  Then Amazon and others took it one step further -- taking care of scaling and connectivity by offering virtual servers in their data centers, but it still took a nerd to configure and manage them.

Today, companies like Bitnami are raising the abstraction level and lowering the nerd bar, making it possible to deploy a server with installed applications in just a few minutes.

To demonstrate the ease of deploying applications, I created a virtual machine on the Amazon cloud and installed Web, wiki and blog servers.  You can visit the server and check the three applications here.  Go there and you will see three fully operational applications.

I am not a system administrator or network engineer, but I was able to create the virtual server in the Amazon cloud and install and deploy the three applications in about ten minutes using Bitnami. (You can see the step-by-step installation here).

Bitnami and others like it are raising the abstraction level. Soon we may be able to describe a virtual machine – its speed, memory and storage – and deploy it and its applications using a form like the one shown here.

In addition to specifying the server and its applications, this hypothetical form allows one to select cloud vendors.  Today, Bitnami is tied to Amazon’s cloud, but one can easily imagine them offering a choice of cloud vendors.

If we were to dynamically allocate the resources needed to run an application -- changing them automatically when some performance thresholds was crossed -- one could just pick a vendor, select the applications to deploy and click submit.

When that happens, your grandmother can be her own system administrator.

Amazon adds .NET support for enterprise developers

We have discussed infrastructure services – services that are intended for developers, not end users.

Amazon jumped off to a lead in this space, and many Web sites now use their virtual machines and storage services. They appreciate not having to invest in servers and the easy scalability of these services. The cost is also low because Amazon enjoys economies of scale and expertise in building and reliably running huge data centers.

Amazon has recently cut prices for their infrastructure services, added a service level agreement, and support for Microsoft .NET and SQL server. (They initially focused on Linux). These moves are designed to appeal to enterprise developers.

In focusing on enterprise developers, Amazon is in direct competition with Microsoft. Microsoft will be announcing their entry in this market soon. Rackspace, a large hosting firm, offers similar support for both .NET and Linux. They call it “Mosso,” which means fast in Greek, and claim that you can get started in only 8 minutes.

Web and enterprise developers will need to be able to use these infrastructure services in the future. Would you like to learn to deploy applications in the "cloud?"

Infrastructure services -- for developers, not users

We have discussed many Internet services intended for applications like editing documents or developing simple applications like blogs or online databases. These are generally intended for users -- people who use the Internet in their work or play, not professional developers.

We can contrast these user services with infrastructure services, which are intended for professional developers building user services or custom applications. Amazon has been a leader in this field. They learned to operate vast, efficient, reliable server "farms" in support of their shopping site, and decided to allow others to use the same infrastructure. Amazon Web services include virtual servers, storage space for large amounts of data, and storage and retrieval of data from flat files.

3Tera's Applogic offers a graphical user interface for designing a virtual server farm and deploying applications. In this example, the drag and drop interface was used to create a site with four firewalls (gray), a load balancer (yellow), two Web servers (blue), a MySQL server (red) and servers storing configuration files and logs (orange).



Each of these is an independent virtual server running Linux. Developers can configure these machines and load software on them as if they were in sitting on their desks. They create "dashboards" to monitor them, and can increase or decrease capacity in seconds. (Check out this Applogic video demonstration).

These services allow one to develop applications without hardware or datacenter cost. They bill for resources used -- CPU time, storage, bandwidth. That means there is essentially no cost while an application is being developed and debugged since there is no traffic. When the application goes live, the capacity, and hence cost, grow and shrink dynamically depending upon utilization.

Storage and computation are not the only infrastructure services. For example, Amazon offers a service for handling monetary payments from computers or users to other computers or users and Lypp.com offers telephony services. For example, a developer can give the user the ability to initiate a call between their telephone and a company. Lypp servers establish the call, interface with the switched telephone network, and bill for minutes used. Again, there is no traffic, so no cost, until the application is put in use.

Infrastructure services are the latest step in server evolution. Would infrastructure services appeal more to large or to small and medium sized organizations? Why? We offer courses today on programming for vendor-specific platforms like ASP.NET. Will we one day offer a course in programming for Amazon Web Services? Would you like to take such a course?

Micropayment for storage service

I just received a bill for the very small amount of storage I had used on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) during the month of July. The charge for my storage and data transfer was 4 cents!

We have talked about micropayments for years, but, until now, I had never made one.

This is a terrific example of Web services. S3 is the base service -- offering reliable, infinitely scalable storage in Amazon's data centers. But, I do not deal directly with Amazon. Jungledisk has virtual disk software that makes my S3 store look like a standard disk drive on my computer. They insulate me from S3, pay Amazon, and bill me. My payment is automatic through another service, Paypal.

Amazon Web Services, a case study

Podcasting pioneer Doug Kaye, Amazon's Jeff Barr and others discuss a complex application Kaye built using Amazon Web Services. Kaye describes both the system architecture (loosely coupled services buffered by queues) and the business reasons (zero startup cost and seamless scalability) for using Amazon's virtual servers and storage rather than his own. He also expresses concern about the lack of a service-level agreement and dependence upon Amazon. Barr talks about Amazon's plans and the important role of the developer community. The show notes contain other links for those interested in more detail and other applications Amazon-based applications.

Amazon Web services

We have talked about data centers and mashups or composite applications. Amazon has exposed application programming interfaces for its applications and will also store your data at their data centers. All you supply is the business idea. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos describes their services in in a short video or you can read more in this Business Week article. Amazon Web services could be used for Internet, intranet or extranet applications.