Blumetech's Tech Blog

Amazon Simple Email Service as an SMTP Relay Server

Recently several Blumetech clients needed an SMTP relay server. In most cases a new application was installed and that application supported sending e-mails for alerts, reporting, etc. In order to send the e-mails an SMTP relay server was required.

In the good 'ole days setting up an SMTP server was fairly simple. Both Linux and Windows have had built-in SMTP servers for years. The install was easy and with a few configuration settings you were up and running.

Now with the rise in SPAM, setting up an SMTP server is pain. The initial setup of the server itself is straightforward, but now there is a whole list of additional requirements: SPF records, Firewall ports, TLS support, DNS entries, Reverse DNS entries, the constant fear of accidentally configuring an open relay, etc. etc.

The astute reader may suggest: "Why not use the existing mail server?" Well, with everyone outsourcing e-mail, the client may not even have an email server to relay through. Second, relaying through the existing email server makes support difficult. You now lose control of who did the message submission. Was it normal email or part of the relay? Of course detailed logging could save you but why give yourself the headache. 

Enter Amazon Simple Email Service to the rescue. (And to be fair a whole list of other hosted SMTP solutions, but since I'm going to AWS for everything else they might as well host the SMTP relay too) AWS SES is a super cheap SMTP relay service. AWS handles all the upgrades, all the reverse DNS records, etc. Basically they make setting up an SMTP relay easy. 

And once it's setup, you effectively never need to support SMTP relay again. 

However there are some key difference between it and the traditional SMTP Windows Relay server

1. TLS is required. Frankly all applications should support encrypting SMTP messages
2. You don't get to pick the UID\Pass. AWS assigns you a UID and pass. The UID and passwords are very long and not something that I would hand out to end users.
3. You need to go though a domain verification process to authorize sending from a specific domain. The process is very easy and in my mind provides a guarantee that the service doesn't become an open relay.
4. You still need to update your SPF records. Any new email servers require an update to the SPF record
5. By default you only get to send 200 messages/24 hours. You need to request additional throughput by filling out a form.

Veeam Backup to the Cloud

Veeam recently announced a new product that will allow SMBs to backup their vmware infrastructure to cloud based storage. This product offers a nice, clean way to combine vmware based hypervisor backup with a cloud based storage solution. 

As an added benefit the solution also support Amazon Glacier. At $.01/GB/Month SMBs can now easily replace their entire tape infrastructure. 

Combining the new Veeam Backup solution, Amazon Glacier, and Amazon EC2, SMBs have an extremely low cost, cold restore DR solution 

http://www.veeam.com/cloud-backup-vmware-hyper-v.html?ad=pr1

AWS Price Reduction

AWS has reduced their pricing again. Pricing on medium class instances has reduced 10-20%. As usually the pricing decrease even applies instantaneously to your already running instances. That is to say you don't need to do anything to your medium instances to get the price break.

Also they have reduced the transfer cost between regions. Previously you were charged the internet data transfer rate to transfer files between regions. For US East this was $.12/GB. 

Many clients want to store their backups in a region diverse from the region that holds their applications and data. For instance, if you are running your app in US-East you may want to replicate your data to US-West. In the event of some catastrophic failure in US-East, you can always bring up your systems in US-West. 

Unfortunately at $.12/GB this backup scenario was fairly expensive. 

The new transfer rate out of US-East to any other AWS region is now $.02/GB a 83% cost reduction. At that rate, there's now a real incentive to replicate your backup data from one region to another. You can now also cheaply build highly available applications using separate regions, e.g SQL server in US East replicating data to US West.

Official AWS Post