Helpful Links to Help Get Started with Amazon EC2

The following links take you to introduction and tutorial articles about setting up an EC2 instance, how to integrate it with Eclipse, and help you understand how the infrastructure works, and how the separate Amazon software packages interact with each other. It also contains articles about the Java SDK

This guide walks you through launching and connecting to your first Amazon EC2 instance.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/

 This page provides video guides on setting up the AWS toolkit for Eclipse
http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/

This guide helps you understand the infrastructure components that EC2 provides and how to use them. The guide shows you how to access EC2 with a web-based GUI, with command line tools, and programmatically through the EC2 API.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/

This reference has a single set of topics for both the Query and SOAP APIs (the actions are the same for both APIs). The topic for a given action shows the Query API request parameters. The XML request elements for the SOAP API have names that are very similar to the Query API parameter names. You can view the XML request elements in the WSDL, or look at the proxy classes that a SOAP toolkit generates from the WSDL. Therefore you can look at the topic for a given action and see what you need to provide for either the Query API or the SOAP API. You can also see what the XML response looks like (it's the same for both APIs).
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/

This is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Command Line Tools Reference. It provides the syntax, a description, options, and usage examples for each command line tool. For detailed information about Amazon EC2 features and their associated commands, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/

AWS Management Console Tour
http://aws.amazon.com/console/


Getting started with the AWS SDK for Java
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/3586?_encoding=UTF8&jiveRedirect=1

AWS SDK for Java Tips and Tricks
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/3604?_encoding=UTF8&jiveRedirect=1

AWS SDK for Java API Reference
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/index.html

Google App Engine vs. Amazon EC2

Advantages of Google App Engine over EC2
-no server administration
-free usage quotas
-scalability
-ease of deployment
-sdk able to run on client, and then deploy program onto server
-access to Google user accounts
-eclipse plug-ins

Disadvantages
-inability to tweak server software
-filesystem isn't accessible
-many standard library modules are inaccessible
-only Python and whatever runs on JVM
-Bigtable datastore format, non-relational

-reduced set of features and functions results in strong lock-in

**Bigtable datastore: non relational, 3rd time dimension, no defined set of attributes across records (some records may have properties others do not)

Amazon runs a virtual machine which gives you the flexibility to install and run any software on EC2 instances
They have a windows environment virtual machine along with linux and a few others.

"The bottom line is using Google App Engine will be more restrictive than the development and deployment environments that you are used to. The datastore is more difficult to use than a relational database(which for example has global transactions, joins on tables, and a subset of the types of queries that you can do with a relational database). Not being able to start and manage long-running processes also makes some kinds of applications difficult to write. "

Pricing:
GAE is free until the site gets over 5million hits a month
AWS has a new free usage tier available as of November 2010 that allows free usage for 12 months (Linux) or $.03 per hour for windows