What's up with Amazon?

jfriend

Any comments on why many smugmug site images (not personal images) are now hosted at this amazon.com-owned location?
http://s3.amazonaws.com/SmugImages

Something major going on with amazon.com?

marlof

May be it has something to do with this?

rainforest1155

jfriend wrote:

Any comments on why many smugmug site images (not personal images) are now hosted at this amazon.com-owned location?
http://s3.amazonaws.com/SmugImages

Something major going on with amazon.com?

Can't access the site. Do you have a screenshot on how it looked? Were it images like on the site Don created for Amazon?
Marlof pointed you to the right thread. There's something going on between Amazon and smugmug.

Sebastian

devbobo

Hey Guys,

I thought the same thing the other day.

Read this

Cheers,

David

jfriend

It's not a viewable site

rainforest1155 wrote:

Can't access the site. Do you have a screenshot on how it looked? Were it images like on the site Don created for Amazon?
Marlof pointed you to the right thread. There's something going on between Amazon and smugmug.

Sebastian

This is not a site you can view. What I noticed is that the images on many smugmug pages like http://www.smugmug.com are coming from the amazon site. For example, on smugmug's main page, the "Take A Tour "image is coming from http://s3.amazonaws.com/SmugImages/homepages/baldy-base/QuickTour.jpg. So, apparently, Smugmug is using this S3 Amazon hosting service for their own images. I'm just wondering why they're doing this because they obviously have tons of bandwidth and storage since they host and serve all our images.

colourbox

Maybe they're simply testing a way to cope with famous tennis stars and other unanticipated overages.

bwg

jfriend wrote:

This is not a site you can view. What I noticed is that the images on many smugmug pages like http://www.smugmug.com are coming from the amazon site. For example, on smugmug's main page, the "Take A Tour "image is coming from http://s3.amazonaws.com/SmugImages/homepages/baldy-base/QuickTour.jpg. So, apparently, Smugmug is using this S3 Amazon hosting service for their own images. I'm just wondering why they're doing this because they obviously have tons of bandwidth and storage since they host and serve all our images.

i'm thinking it may have something to do with the safe & secure promise...

http://www.smugmug.com/price/

rainforest1155

jfriend wrote:

For example, on smugmug's main page, the "Take A Tour "image is coming from http://s3.amazonaws.com/SmugImages/homepages/baldy-base/QuickTour.jpg. So, apparently, Smugmug is using this S3 Amazon hosting service for their own images.

Oh, that's new to me too. Interesting find! I wonder why they outsource this one - it doesn't appear anywhere except on the homepage, does it? Apparently the homepage is visited quite often.

Sebastian

jfriend

Not just the home page

rainforest1155 wrote:

Oh, that's new to me too. Interesting find! I wonder why they outsource this one - it doesn't appear anywhere except on the homepage, does it? Apparently the homepage is visited quite often.

Sebastian

The gallery pages have some images hosted there too, not our personal images, just images involved in the site look and feel.

mcgil

Today's press release
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060712/20060712005340.html

Growing photo-sharing company SmugMug was on the brink of becoming the victim of its own success in early 2006. Growth was accelerating rapidly and CEO Don MacAskill was concerned his storage solution for the hundreds of millions of images SmugMug managed would not reliably or cost-efficiently meet the scaling requirements he would soon have. With just one programmer and a tight budget, SmugMug needed storage that was inexpensive, simple and reliable. "We looked at Amazon S3's pricing, design and ease-of-use, and were blown away. Amazon S3 is simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in addition to our current infrastructure," said MacAskill. SmugMug took just five days to integrate with Amazon S3 and has saved $500,000 in storage expenditures since starting to use the service in March while adding more than 10 terabytes of images each month - all with zero increase in staff or data center space. "Amazon S3 makes it possible for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocketed companies without having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware," said MacAskill.

Andy

mcgil wrote:

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060712/20060712005340.html

Growing photo-sharing company SmugMug was on the brink of becoming the victim of its own success in early 2006. Growth was accelerating rapidly and CEO Don MacAskill was concerned his storage solution for the hundreds of millions of images SmugMug managed would not reliably or cost-efficiently meet the scaling requirements he would soon have. With just one programmer and a tight budget, SmugMug needed storage that was inexpensive, simple and reliable. "We looked at Amazon S3's pricing, design and ease-of-use, and were blown away. Amazon S3 is simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in addition to our current infrastructure," said MacAskill. SmugMug took just five days to integrate with Amazon S3 and has saved $500,000 in storage expenditures since starting to use the service in March while adding more than 10 terabytes of images each month - all with zero increase in staff or data center space. "Amazon S3 makes it possible for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocketed companies without having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware," said MacAskill.

thanks for noticing it, and pointing it out!

Andy

jfriend wrote:

Something major going on with amazon.com?[/FONT]
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You could say so... Stay tuned for Onethumb's posting later.

Baldy

Hey John,

Been meaning to ping you so we can grab lunch. I'm back from Europe.

Not to steal Don's thunder, but we've been working with Amazon for some time now because they've developed quite an impressive storage solution.

For one thing, they can serve from many geographies, making image serving faster for customers who live far from our current data centers. For another, they give un another layer of backups. Now backups span two-companies and multi-geographies.

Drop me a note with possible days for lunch if you get a chance.

Thanks,
Baldy

rainforest1155

Here's another story (this time not a press release) more focused on smugmug.

Sebastian

Andy

rainforest1155 wrote:

Here's another story (this time not a press release) more focused on smugmug.

Sebastian

Nice - thanks Sebastian!

rainforest1155

Another short article on it with some critique comments (what if Amazon would pull the plug or how the smugmug numbers add up) offering food of thought.
Maybe Don can also post an inside view over there and say in how far smugmug would be prepared for the 'what if Amazon pulls the plug'?

Thanks,
Sebastian

Andy

rainforest1155 wrote:

Another short article on it with some critique comments (what if Amazon would pull the plug or how the smugmug numbers add up) offering food of thought.
Maybe Don can also post an inside view over there and say in how far smugmug would be prepared for the 'what if Amazon pulls the plug'?

Thanks,
Sebastian

Thanks Sebastian!

Baldy

rainforest1155 wrote:

Maybe Don can also post an inside view over there and say in how far smugmug would be prepared for the 'what if Amazon pulls the plug'?

Thanks,
Sebastian

Hey Sebastian,

It's set up so that we can toggle between Amazon and SmugMug for fetching photos. John noticed that at the moment we're serving non-gallery images from Amazon but we can flip that back at any moment should they have problems.

Same goes for gallery images. If for some reason we have a problem with a disk array or see some benefits in serving from Amazon, we can quickly toggle to Amazon.

If they pull the plug, we'd just toggle to SmugMug and hardly anyone would notice. In the meantime, we can offer more uptime with the option to toggle to them.

Thanks,
Chris

jfriend

Backup or lower cost storage?

Baldy wrote:

Hey Sebastian,

It's set up so that we can toggle between Amazon and SmugMug for fetching photos. John noticed that at the moment we're serving non-gallery images from Amazon but we can flip that back at any moment should they have problems.

Same goes for gallery images. If for some reason we have a problem with a disk array or see some benefits in serving from Amazon, we can quickly toggle to Amazon.

If they pull the plug, we'd just toggle to SmugMug and hardly anyone would notice. In the meantime, we can offer more uptime with the option to toggle to them.

Thanks,
Chris

So, right now are you using it more as a backup system or for periods when you need more bandwidth?

Or are you beginning to use it as a lower cost storage system than what you can build and run yourself? I checked out their pricing and it's not bad. It's not cost effective for me to back up all 300GB of my images I have at home, but not bad for you for the 10GB I have at Smugmug in two accounts.

Baldy

jfriend wrote:

So, right now are you using it more as a backup system or for periods when you need more bandwidth?

Yes.

We definitely use it for a backup system, both to prevent against data loss and when we have a failure of some kind.

But also, when Rafael Nadal stunned the world and won the French Open at age 20 and then played the most anticipated Wimbledon final in recent memory, Amazon had the ability to deliver his photos out of a firehose if we needed them to.

Nadal's fan base is similar to a rock star's because he's a teen idol for Spain and Latin America, and he has these singular moments of glory when the world wants to see him hoist the trophy. Amazon's enormous capacity to the rescue.

jfriend

Makes sense

Baldy wrote:

Yes.

We definitely use it for a backup system, both to prevent against data loss and when we have a failure of some kind.

But also, when Rafael Nadal stunned the world and won the French Open at age 20 and then played the most anticipated Wimbledon final in recent memory, Amazon had the ability to deliver his photos out of a firehose if we needed them to.

Nadal's fan base is similar to a rock star's because he's a teen idol for Spain and Latin America, and he has these singular moments of glory when the world wants to see him hoist the trophy. Amazon's enormous capacity to the rescue.

Sounds like a good plan, especially for the peak bandwidth needs. If you're serving images from S3 during some peak load, will we see different image URLs then? Anything new we need to think of when grabbing URLs for external linking?

Andy

jfriend wrote:

Sounds like a good plan, especially for the peak bandwidth needs. If you're serving images from S3 during some peak load, will we see different image URLs then? Anything new we need to think of when grabbing URLs for external linking?

At the moment, no, and no.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

At the moment, no, and no.

Cool, thanks.

Baldy

Flickr was down for several hours in prime time on Wednesday for a storage failure.

By coincidence, we had some storage go offline the day before, but no one noticed because Amazon took over serving the images.

This isn't to be critical of Flickr, because during the outage no one posted about it at places like dpreview, and we haven't seen much made of their outages past. They're not serving a customer base who sells prints for profit, for example.

But hopefully it does shed light on why we do think the Amazon deal is important for us.

Andy

See Don's Blog for a detailed write up