This new widget is ideal for creating shopping carts, e-commerce platforms, and marketplaces. Prior to the introduction of this widget, developers would need to make multiple calls to FPS and to juggle several tokens to implement the same functionality.

Once you are signed up for FPS, you can use our interactive builder tool to create the HTML for a Marketplace Widget in minutes.You'll need to write a bit of server-side code to insert the proper request signature into the HTML, but that's about it.

We've also added some new features to FPS itself and to the existing Pay Now Widget:

• API-level support for the fee mechanism used by the Marketplace Widget.
• The Pay Now Widget now supports "reserve and settle," allowing funds to be reserved on a credit card without making an actual charge.
• Both widgets now support an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) feature. An HTTP POST call is made to a third-party URL each time that a payment or refund is processed.
• A new Refund call automates the process of generating refunds.
• Additional transaction details, including the buyer's email address, are now available to sellers.

-- Jeff;

This team is responsible for the heavy duty infrastructure pieces which are common to our line of web services. These vital pieces of our infrastructure take care of authenticating and authorizing requests for AWS services, capturing usage information, billing customers for usage, analyzing large volumes of data for internal and external reporting, and so forth. Needless to say, these internal components need to be perfectly reliable, highly scalable, and very efficient. The team is also responsible for SQS, the Amazon Simple Queue Service.

The team is in expansion mode and wanted to make sure that the world was aware of their open positions. Here's what they are looking for:

Principal Software Development Engineer - "As a Principal Engineer on the AWS Platform team, you will drive, architect and implement core functionalities in the Billing, Accounts, Products and Payments domains that has stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Availability, Reliability and Performance. You will play a critical role in shaping the overall structure of Amazon’s web-service offerings."

Software Development Engineer - "As a software developer on the AWS Platform team, you will work independently with software engineers and program/product managers to create distributed applications and services, front-end API’s for developers and website owners to consume and be responsible for the design and development of various aspects of the AWS Platform."

Software Development Engineer, Amazon SQS - "As a software engineer for SQS, you will find some challenging projects from our rapid growth that need creative solutions.  You should be somebody who enjoys working on complex system software, is customer-centric, and feels strongly not only about building good software but about making that software achieve its goals in operational reality."

Technical Program Manager - "The AWSP Authentication and Authorization team is seeking a dynamic, entrepreneurial Technical Program Manager (TPM) to drive the technical strategy and execution of key security services. As a key member of a small team, you will have the unique opportunity to influence and shape the entire AWSP strategy.  You will have complete end-to-end technical responsibility for the component you own from defining the product roadmap to initiating, defining and executing the projects necessary to make the roadmap a reality."

Technical Program Manager, Authentication and Authorization - "The AWSP Authentication and Authorization team is seeking a dynamic, entrepreneurial Technical Program Manager (TPM) to drive the technical strategy and execution of key security services. As a key member of a small team, you will have the unique opportunity to influence and shape the entire AWSP strategy.  You will have complete end-to-end technical responsibility for the component you own from defining the product roadmap to initiating, defining and executing the projects necessary to make the roadmap a reality."

Technical Program Manager, Business Intelligence - "The AWS Platform (AWSP) team delivers business intelligence to over 100 internal customers, and the technology gets leveraged to deliver reports to a diverse community of external customers. Amazon Web Services has a culture of data-driven decision-making, and demands business intelligence that is timely, accurate, and actionable. If you join the AWSP team your work will have an immediate influence on day-to-day decision making at Amazon Web Services."

You might want to learn more about Amazon, about our values or our benefits.

As someone who has been at Amazon for almost 6 years, I have to say that this is truly a great place to work! The work itself is varied, interesting, and ever-challenging. There's a very deep, and very solid technical and managerial backbone in place. People aren't afraid to dive deep in order to solve thorny problems, and are rewarded for doing so. Our environment is friendly to dogs, and we like to have fun while we change the world.

-- Jeff;

ShareThis has been deployed to over 30,000 web sites. Faced with rapid growth, the team considered three storage options and chose SimpleDB for  its responsiveness, reliability, zero software cost, minimal staff costs, and low barrier to development. They used EC2, SimpleDB, S3, and SQS to build a complete loosely coupled and fault tolerant system in the cloud, with an estimated savings of $200,000. Read all about it!

The Alexa Site Thumbnail  Service uses SimpleDB to store intermediate status and log data, allowing them to store and deliver millions of thumbnails. They store over 12 million objects in SimpleDB and perform over 5 million queries every day. Read all about it!

-- Jeff;

As part of his work at 3rd and Urban, he has implemented redundant, fault-tolerant, read-write disk storage on Amazon EC2 using a number of open source tools and applications including LVM, DRBD, NFS, Heartbeat, and VTUN.

Mark notes that "the primary focus of this paper is to present both a detailed overview as well as a working code base that will enable you to begin designing, building, testing, and deploying your EC2-based applications using a generalized persistent storage foundation, doing so today in both lieu of and in preparation for release of Amazon Web Services offering in this same space."

The article provides complete implementation details and links to source code for the scripts that Mark developed.

You can read the article, and you can also follow progress via the discussion group.

-- Jeff;