Cloud Computing Info

Ok, now they’ve gone and done it. Amazon just doesn’t know when to quit. Is there a web service they don’t want to own? I josh. I like Amazon and like to see them put new and useful services out there and I am a big proponent of competition. I think competition is good for everyone as long as it doesn’t become predatory.

Now, Amazon has been going after Paypal for a while now with Amazon Checkout. But now, they have made this a super simple, no login, purchase tool with PayPhrase – the easy-to-remember shortcut for paying on Amazon.com and other websites.

Using and Managing Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I personally believe that AWS is perfect for any development and testing environment. Regardless of how sensitive your data is, you can build your applications and test them in a cloud environment using bogus data.

For production environments, the choice is much harder. Does the country(ies) you operate in have strict privacy, or data on-shoring, laws that would be impact your applications? If you can easily offshore your applications, you can easily use cloud computing.

Does the area where you work have reliable infrastructure?

CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN puts very large servers with high throughput at the edge of the network. That means that a CDN provider put cached data in multiple locations through out the network (internet). Requests for data are routed to a local server cache instead of the main server at a host. This improves performance, customer experience and possibly even costs (via lower bandwidth requirements).

An example would be a company that serves many pages to many users. Rather than have all of the pages stored in a central location and be accessed by many people all at once, the pages are distributed throughout the network and sit on many different servers.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

For most of its life in beta, EC2 offered only two kinds of storage, AMI based transient storage and S3. The transient storage was mounted as a filesystem and S3 was used for backup. To save data during downtime for instances, data had to first be saved off to S3 and the instance brought down. When the instance was brought back up, data was restored from S3. It was a painful process.

Enter EBS, the Elastic Block Store.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Cost

Storage is cheaper in the US than in Europe. If you are based in Europe, you may want to decide which is more important when getting or adding data: price or latency.

Table 3: S3 Storage Costs

Table 4: S3 Data Transfer Costs

Table 5: S3 Request Costs

These prices are accurate as of the time of writing them.

I just got an email from Amazon Web Services.  In honor of their 3 year anniversary, they are offering 3 cents per GB data transfer (that’s external transfer) instead of the normal 10 cents per GB.  This is planned to last for 3 months.  If this was IN and OUT, this would be a significant savings for companies using S3 to serve up large files.  Still, while not as big as it could be, it does mean that this is the time to get all of your files loaded up.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

The AWS S3 service is an API driven storage service. The API provides get, put and delete. Data is stored using a bucket concept that is not unlike directories and sub-directories. A bucket can hold one or more buckets and one or more objects (i.e. files). You can nest buckets as many levels deep as required by your application or other needs. Objects can be up to 5GB per and you can store an unlimited number of objects.

At the top level is a global bucket. All S3 accounts share the global bucket.

Have you been wondering what the differences between S3 and EBS are? I recently gave a high level overview of S3 and I plan to do one on EBS. I also plan to follow with a detailed looked at both S3 and EBS.

In the meantime, Cloudiquity has posted an entry, Differences between S3 and EBS. This is a nice overview. It provides some excellent technical details as well as some pricing info. Well worth a read.

LewisC

Technorati : amazon, aws, ebs, s3, storage

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I am checking out some of the lesser known (to me at least) cloud computing providers. I ran across Flexiscale. It looks promising. It’s related to xcalibre, a web hosting provider. Flexiscale is run by the same people who founded xcalibre. It looks like it is run out of Scotland and the only pricing I can find is in pounds (and pence).

The sign up form is still working, as is the rest of the site. I wonder about their viability though as the latest blog entry is October 16, 2008. The only recent activity I can find in the forums is spam.

You might not think of remote desktop as a cloud tool but MS has added cloud storage to remote desktop and called it Live Mesh. I have been using it recently and it is pretty nice. I use VNC fairly extensively and, when I’m not using VNC, I tend to use SSH. Well, I heard about this Live Mesh thing and decided to download it and give it a try. It is currently a beta product but I haven’t had any issues.

My first thought on using it was that it was a clone of gotomypc.

InformationWeek has a good article, Behind The Storage Cloud. This article gives something of the plumbing behind the available storage in the cloud. Something they didn’t talk about in that article are the limitations I have been running into using the cloud.

For infrastructure providers like Google or Force.com, who are offering a PaaS (Platform as a Service), the storage is built into the application. If you chose them to develop your application, that works out fine. However, if you are looking for archiving or storage scaling (grow storage as you need it), it’s not so good.

Amazon offers a different kind of storage.