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Posts tagged ‘Amazon Web Services’

Nov 1

Amazon Announces S3 Storage Price Reduction

Amazon Web Services announced a new pricing schedule for S3 storage that takes place immediately today, November 1rst.  Existing customers could see as much as a 19% reduction in monthly fees.  Amazon also created a new pricing tier at the 1TB level and have also deleted the current 50 – 100 TB tier.  Amazon says these pricing changes apply to the US Standard, EU – Ireland, and APAC – Singapore regions.

The full price list can be found on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) page here .

AWS link: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/what-can-i-say-another-amazon-s3-price-reduction.html

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/930660427/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Oct 24

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Overview of Amazon Web Services Security Processes

AWS’ Chief Information Security Officer Stephen Schmidt released this presentation last week on slideshare.net.  At 27 pages, this presentation is packed full of excellent content and great information on the direction AWS is going on for ensuring security and compliance.  He discusses certifications, SAS70 Type II security, physical security, Amazon EC2, network, S3, Simple DB, and SQS security topics as well.  He also covers CloudFront and Elastic MapReduce security initiatives and plans.

It is a great tutorial to the strategies and initiates AWS is pursuing to make their platforms scalable, secure and reliable.   Be sure to check out this page on the AWS site for more information on security: http://aws.amazon.com/security.

Oct 19

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Netflix in the Cloud – Lessons Learned Deploying AWS

Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix recently published a summary slide deck of a presentation he will be giving on November 3rd at QConSF.  It is a fascinating look into how Netflix chose AWS and the lessons learned.  Adrian discusses the presentation on his blog here.

It is going to be very interesting to see the entire slide deck after QConSF, which is when Adrian plans to upload it per a note on his blog.

Oct 16

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Test Driving An Amazon EC2 Micro Instance

Last month Amazon Web Services launched Micro Instances for EC2, the lowest-cost instance type they have offered to date.  A Micro instance includes 613MB of memory and can support 32- and 64-bit platforms on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

The pricing begins at $0.02 per hour for Linux and $0.03 per hour for Windows.  In addition, a Micro instance supports Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for defining applications, data structures and databases in addition to configurations.  Amazon is also including a templated image to get up and running quickly with a Micro instance as well.

Greg Wilson, who is a Sr. Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, produced one of the best tutorials and test drives available, which is shown below. He has also written a blog entry regarding lessons learned which can be found at My dive into the world of Amazon EC2 and the new crazy cheap Micro instance.

Bottom line: Micro instances are going to shift cloud-based development away from compute- and data-intensive application development to smaller applications and web services.  Given the price point, the use of Micro instances could lead to a proliferation of new low-end, utilitarian-like applications as well.

Aug 30

Update on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alexa GrepTheWeb Service

The following presentation from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Jinesh Varia includes an update on the Alexa GrepTheWeb Service and an excellent overview of AWS components. There is also an update on the AWS cloud architecture and definition of the Compute (EC2), messaging (SQS) and Storage (S3, Simple DB, and EC2-EBS) component integration.

Finally there are an interesting series of slides explaining courses at University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University on how AWS is being used to teach data mining and related topics.

This presentation also provides insights into how configurations of AWS can be customized for data mining and content management.

Disclaimer: Amazon and AWS are not clients of mine by the way.  When I write about vendors who are, I will be sure to mention it.

Aug 24

Ingram Micro Seeing Traction with Cloud Conduit Initiative

Bottom line: Reselling cloud computing services shows much potential as a market for technology platform and application providers. The challenge is the ability to tailor the services mix efficiently and accurately enough to capitalize on scalability and selective demand of mid-tier and small business end users.

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Aug 9

Dr. Werner Vogels on Amazon’s AWS Enterprise Strategies

In addition, Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services gave the keynote, which is shown below. Dr. Vogels is an excellent cloud computing evangelist, as this presentation shows. There are also valuable lessons about how AWS has grown to be one of the standards. It is worth flipping through and seeing how AWS is positioning cloud computing platforms and services to the enterprise market.

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Jul 11

Marc Andreessen on Cloud Computing Start-ups

On May 12, Marc Andreessen presented on the topic A Panorama of Venture Capital and Beyond (61 min). During that discussion, he made several points about how entrepreneurs who seek out his venture fund, Andreessen Horowitz, rely heavily on Cloud Computing to alleviate infrastructure and hardware start-up costs. He mentions that 96% of firms seeking funding are running on Amazon Web Services and just a few on RackSpace. He also mentions that few are running Google AppsEngine or Microsoft Azure now.

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Jul 1

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Architectural Design Patterns in Cloud Computing, Excellent Presentation by AWS

Jinesh Varia of Amazon Web Services (AWS) authored the following presentation, which is an excellent overview of the AWS Services and basic terminology used on this specific cloud platform. This presentation describes the lessons learned by AWS in terms of scalability, cloud architectural trade-offs and also provides guidance of which storage option to choose.

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Feb 25

Understanding the Differences between Private and Public Cloud Computing

Included is an assessment of the integration requirements by Cloud type. At just over 3 minutes it’s an excellent summary of the differences between Cloud Computing platforms and provides a useful context to understand these two concepts.

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