Socks and Sandals

I just got back from the Amazon Startup Challenge event and I had a really great time. Tracy Laxdal, Alicia Nakamoto and the rest of the team did a superb job of organizing and running the event and everyone was engaging and interesting. I even saw Jeff Bezos jump into a car in front of me and dash off ;)

It was a pretty hectic day, with our late flight and subsequent (relatively) early pitch to the judges. Werner Vogels came down and gave us a very intriguing talk on Amazon’s technology focus and some of their internal processes. Then, we did a Q&A round with the product managers of Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 where we got a chance to grill them regarding upcoming products, features, pricing, etc.

After some downtime back at the hotel, the “lightning round” started up. Here, we pitched to 8 VC firms in less than 2 hours. Wheewh That was really intense but very fun. On to cocktail hour, where a bunch of outside guests arrived prior to dinner. I finally got to meet the RightScale guys in person after having seen Thorsten on the AWS forums for months now which was very cool.

Dinner was great and they showed all of our videos from the contest interspersed throughout the meal. Andy Jassy then got up and announced that Ooyala was the winner and had them smash a 1RU server with a golden hammer (signed by Jeff Bezos). This was to indicate that they didn’t need no stinkin’ servers anymore ;-)

For me, it was a really interesting and fun learning experience. I really appreciated the opportunity to meet with all of the great people at Amazon, the other candidates, VCs and sponsors who attended. Everyone was very impressive. The biggest thing for me, however, was how unbelievably good Lucinda was in all of this. I had never seen her in this capacity before and all I can say is WOW. There wasn’t anything anybody threw at her that she didn’t handle magnificently. I have a new level of appreciation and respect for the opportunity I have to work with her.

Three cheers to Amazon for a great event! I look forward to seeing them run it again in the near future because it was definitely of very high value for all.

The videos for the Amazon Startup Challenge were just posted. Go and check them all out .

My startup Commerce360 is one of the seven finalists for the Amazon Startup Challenge out of close to a thousand entries. I’m very excited that we made the finals of this contest and I’m looking forward to going out to Seattle to pitch our company to Amazon and see what they think. The announcement is here and if you are looking to optimize your online marketing efforts, take a look at our product ClickEquations .

When I started using Amazon’s EC2 service I realized pretty quickly that the traditional load-balancing solution of putting a big, honkin’ F5 BIG-IP in front of the servers wasn’t going to work out. Amazon doesn’t currently rent F5’s ;)

So, I went looking around for a DNS-based load-balancing solution that would be flexible enough to deal with the dynamic environment that EC2 provides. However, I pretty quickly found that the existing dynamic DNS APIs of most of the providers were not up to the task of programmatically updating a DNS record the way I needed. Specifically, I wanted to be able to register and deregister an EC2 instance with a round robin A record automatically upon instance startup and shutdown.

In the end, I was only able to find one dynamic DNS provider whose API was up to this task: Nettica.

Once I found them, it was pretty easy to wrap their SOAP-based API into a binary to drive this type of dynamic management of my DNS records. Apache Axis took care of turning the WSDL into Java (the only library that could do so across three programming languages, by the way) and the code for driving that wrapper was pretty simple. The end result of that effort is now open sourced for all to use.

The way I use the new Nettica client is to have the init script automatically register an instance on startup with the Nettica service. However, I remove the instance from Nettica a bit before shutting down the instance itself in order to deal with DNS caches that sustain the now-removed IP for longer than the specified TTL value. You might be able to automate this by throwing a sleep LARGENUMBER into the shutdown portion of the init script, but I haven’t tried this yet.

In any case, I hope people find this client helpful when using EC2. I look forward to hearing about experiences with it and improving it for others. I’m planning for a release pretty soon to add support for RPM packaging, as most of the AMIs used today appear to be RedHat RPM based. Watch this space for updates.

I’ve just released by code to update EC2 instances on start up and shut down with the Nettica DNS service. You can find it here:

http://code.google.com/p/netticadns/

With this code, you can set up your EC2 instances to automatically register/deregister themselves with the Nettica DNS service on start up and shut down. There’s no RPM packaging at this point, but there is a dpkg available for it.

I’d appreciate any feedback or patches. Have fun with it :)