Amazon Web Services: where to get help? - amazon-web-services

I'm working with Amazon's Product Advertising API and need some help on a few issues. The questions I have posted on SO and Amazon developer forums have gone unanswered. Where can I find help?

Looks like your best bet is going to be to pay amazon for support: http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/
My guess is that there aren't many people using that API hence the problem getting regular programmers to help you. This is evidenced by a notice on the main AWS page (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html) about a number of discontinued API operations and responses due to low usage.
"low usage" in this scenario is usually marketing speak meaning "no one except that one guy in Minnesota".

Related

Group Chat Solutions With AWS

EDIT: The original question asked for a real-time solution. I am not sure this is necessary. It should be about as fast as sending a standard SMS text message.
I want to integrate group chat in my android / ios app. There is a similar question found here, but the answers are old and I would like to see if there are any new / better solutions.
I am currently using multiple AWS services in my app, and would like to keep my chat solution in the same ecosystem. However, if there is a solution outside of AWS that is much easier to implement with good results, I am open to the suggestion.
Based on my research I have come across a couple of possibilties:
This AWS blog lightly covers using ElastiCache for this purpose
This LinkedIn slideshow demonstrates the possibility of using AWS IoT
Requirements for my chat:
Would like to be able to support up to 500 people per chat group
Usable from the web via online portal that has the same general functionality as the mobile app
Needs to be scalable to handle thousands of groups
Needs to handle emojies (cross platform)
Needs to allow for file transfers. Images and GIFs at the very least.
Send push notifications to users who have elected to recieve them when they are not currently active in the group
Are either of my possiblities a good fit for my requirements? Which would be the easiest to implement? Are there other, easier solutions inside of AWS? Outside of AWS?
Take a look at https://github.com/tinode/chat
It's not a 100% what you want but close. There is a third-party DynamoDB adapter for it: https://github.com/riandyrn/chat
I am posting this answer to close the question. I ended up switching from AWS to Google Firebase in order to use the Real Time Database.
There is a chat example here that might help anyone that stumbles onto this question.

Buidling an ecommerce frontend for Amazon cloud services

I have deployed atmospheric modeling instances in Amazon EC2. I can launch via command line interface, and this sets up a server that I can then query and control via REST-like methods. It's great for free use but I want to find a way to charge for its use to cover costs plus a little profit. For the life of me I don't know where to start, and I've searched in all the wrong places.
The scenario I have in mind is to have users register and pay for the time and resources they have used (which could be hours, even days or weeks, plus disc and transfer). I don't want to have to deal with the payments and registrations if I don't have to.
I guess Amazon has some means to facilitate it, but it requires approval and such (not necessarily a bad thing). I have thought of Shopify, but I'm not sure I see a path. I can do crude stuff with Django, but again I don't really understand the path I would take. Likewise with Joomla ecommerce.
Is it typical that people would generally roll their own for this kind of thing, or is there an existing framework out there that might help? Most importantly, are there books or links that help someone at least get a grounding to start on a path? I find nothing in my long searches.
I suspect this may be off topic, but I don't know where else to ask. It's all about programming "something" and surely must be relevant to a community out there.

AWS and Railo setup

I wondered if anyone can point me in the right direction in regards to installing Railo on AWS.
In my spare time I've put together a website to sell illustrations, but due to cost I'm unable to keep on spending money hosting it on a dedicate CF server with almost zero budget for marketing. I've been toying with the idea of setting up an account with Amazon and installing Railo.
Over the past few months I've had different advice, such as get a S3 account to host the images and an EC2 account for Railo for the website and DB with SSL, or just have S3 account where I will be able to host Railo and have my images on the same server. I'm not sure what is best and I was wondering if you can advise what you think a good solution would be.
I've read a few blogs some with good details on setups but they seem to be over a year+ old, so I'm not sure if they are valid solution any more. It's very much over my head, as I'm a developer, but I'm very eager to learn new things especially about the cloud service as it's not a common area to get involved in when working for companies. In the past I used to tag a long to server rooms and understand the infrastructure but now everything is done remotely and it's not so easy to get involved.
Any basic advice/advanced advice from your experiences of what I should follow and if you know of any good resources would be very much appreciated.
Should I get an S3 and EC2 AWS setup or will one of them do (will need DB connectivity)?
Load balancing two EC2 instances will that be hard to configure, I will need to web servers.
I just posted this very topic a few weeks ago. Should still be more than up to date:
http://blog.nictunney.com/2012/03/railo-tomcat-and-apache-on-amazon-ec2.html
HTH

Programmatically make Amazon purchase?

Is anyone aware of an Amazon API that allows you to purchase items programmatically?
I looked at tons of their web services (Product Advertising, MWS, etc.), and none of them seemed to do this.
I found this thread that seemed to suggest there was no solution, but there was no definitive answer: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=45127
Just to be clear, I want to make a purchase with MY payment details, not on behalf of any user. I figured if ANYONE supported this, it would be Amazon. But I realize there may be business (security?) reasons not to support this as well...
http://www.zinc.io/ shows that it is, in fact, possible to do this.
I've read around the net that you could do this by sending crafted _GET responses, although I, myself, am currently trying to figure out which ones to send.
UPDATE 2019/12/10 Even though my answer was accepted as the best answer it's outdated. Please see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17180929/799155
It's not possible – I guess for a bunch of security reasons. Read through the thread you posted in your question ;)
Lorraine#AWS, Aug 13, 2010 2:02 PM
Amazon does not offer APIs to place a customer order. Neither a
Corporate Account or the Associate Program will allow you to build the
type of solution you are describing.
Lorraine#AWS, May 13, 2011 4:17 PM
Amazon still does not offer this service, to the best of my knowledge,
and this isn't something I would ever expect to see included in the
Fulfillment Web Service which is specific to the FBA program.

Amazon Advanced FPS programming tutorial

I'm struggling to find any good library for Amazon FPS for Ruby language, and so
I'm looking for a suggestion on a good explanation (other than amazon docs) or perhaps a tutorial to get me up to speed quickly with Amazon FPS.
What I am looking for is information on how to set up user registration form and do recurring payments which vary in amount charged to the user.
I've already wasted 4 hours going through amazon docs and received a lot of errors when sticking to their information, and the only result I got is getting hungry.
As a side note, I've set up sandbox business account and Amazon keeps notifying me that I did not set up sandbox business account.
Could someone possibly please redirect me to some insightful resources on using Amazon FPS but different than crappy sample FPS apps, and twisted amazon documentation ?
There's a Ruby Library called Remit for working with Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS) and a blog post with someone's experiences working with it and some samples. I'm new to Stack Overflow and not allowed to use hyperlinks yet :) but if you search RubyForge for "remit" and google for the string "Software as a Service with Amazon FPS using Remit for Ruby" you should be able to find them. Find it here.