Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I am assuming that it was not just the experimental excel sheet that John put up on his blog that prompted Amazon to get him over to their shop. Amazon, with its clear strategy to go to the EU are sure to be racing ahead. Motto: The time to hire smart and hard-working folks is...NOW! The word on the street is that James Hamilton - one of the chief nerds that has helped Microsoft plan its containerized data center strategy for its forthcoming Azure compute cloud - is leaving to take a job at Amazon. And perhaps not coincidentally, this is happening at the same time as the local papers in Oregon are reporting that Amazon is looking to build a new data center near the cheap electricity generated by hydroelectric dams along the fast-moving Columbia River. Hamilton, who has one of the smarter blogs dealing with data center issues, has spent a decade at Microsoft Research and a decade at IBM before that. Back in 2006, Hamilton was one of the earlier proponents for modularized data centers, t...

In a move that will extend the Web's biggest cloud to encompass much of the globe, the company that began as an online bookstore is opening its commercial server hosting platform to the EU. The basic Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now open to customers in the European Union. While this will bring Amazon's managed hosting alternative closer to potentially thousands more customers, they'll be paying slightly higher fees than in the US. Instance charges -- the flat rates for each guest operating system hosted within the EC2 cloud -- will be 10% higher for EC customers than for those in the US. Prices will range from 0.11 cents (in US currency) per hour for the smallest virtual CPU to 0.88 cents per hour for the highest capacity virtual CPU, compared to 0.10 cents and 0.80 cents, respectively, in the US. Data transfer rates, however, will be identical, with input rates at 0.10 cents per GB, and declining output rates starting at 0.17 cents per GB for the first 10 TB, dow...

To use Amazon SimpleDB you: * CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data. * GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item. Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. Each item can have up to 256 attribute values. Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes. * QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, =, STARTS-WITH, AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION. QUERYWITHATTRIBUTES enables developers to retrieve the information associated with items returned as a response to a particular query. Your QUERY or QUERYWITHATTRIBUTES results can be sorted using the SORT operator. Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds. Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimized for those use cas...

Capgemini has announced an agreement signed between Capgemini UK plc and Amazon Web Services, extending its Outsourcing portfolio with cloud computing services. Capgemini's new Center of Excellence, focused on cloud computing, will help its enterprise clients take full advantage of integrating cloud computing into their IT and business strategy. Capgemini's Cloud Computing Center of Excellence will initially have a team of Amazon Web Services-trained professionals located in North America, Europe and India to help clients evaluate and implement Amazon's current offering; this will evolve as other provider's cloud computing capabilities mature. The centre will also offer Cloud Consulting, Development, Migration and Back-up Services. Under the right circumstances, leveraging the fast developing cloud computing market has the potential to create significant value for enterprise customers in terms of scale, flexibility, reducing time to market, environmental efficiency and ...

Amazon is beginning to get my attention and coming closer to what I would like in a typical Cloud Services vendor. Why? These all are what I call pre-requisites for Global Sustainable Cloud: Service Highlights Fast – Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your content close to end users, lowering latency when they download your objects. The service also gives you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale. Simple – A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket through the CloudFront network. And, since there’s no need to negotiate with a sales person, anyone can get started in just minutes. Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon CloudFront is tightly integrated with Amazon S3, which holds the definitive versions of your content. CloudFront also integrates with other AWS Services, like Amazon Elastic C...

But Microsoft and other more traditional software companies may struggle with an even more fundamental issue as they move to supplement their standard offerings with software-as-a-service and cloud development platforms. Ozzie hinted at it with his acknowledgment of Amazon’s success to date. Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, the company that created the Zoho suite of online productivity applications, highlights it in a smart blog post. Amazon is a giant in a business with notoriously slim profit margins, which is likely part of the reason it was so quick to recognize and capitalize on the cloud computing opportunity. Its retail business models are designed around obtaining the maximum amount of efficiency from its operations. That’s not the case with traditional software suppliers. Companies like Microsoft aren’t particularly eager to make huge infrastructure investments to support what could end up being a low-margin business — especially when at least some of its customers will likely...

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is the king of cloud computing. Two very smart guys just said so: Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Ray Ozzie of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). Gurley I met live, at his office overlooking Stanford University, during an "innovation tour" of Silicon Valley with my Rule Breakers teammates. He had just bought shares of Amazon, explaining that the retailer can be a low-cost leader in cloud computing services. Ozzie, Mr. Softy's chief software architect, is less a fan than an admiring rival. On Monday, he said that "all of us are going to be standing on [Amazon's] shoulders" in introducing Windows Azure, a cloud computing environment that CEO Steve Ballmer foreshadowed earlier this month. The technical idea is intriguing. Windows Azure runs applications and resembles Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud in that it's a massive cluster of processing horsepower made available via the Web. A "Fabric Controller" governs the environ...

AWS blog Here's what's happening today: Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone. There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2. Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2. Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2. We plan to release an interactive AWS management console. We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services. Let's take a look at each of these items in turn. Production - After a two year beta period, Amazon EC2 is now ready for production. During the beta we heard and responded to an incredible amount of customer feedback, adding support for powerful features such as Availability Zones , Elastic Block Storage , Elastic IP Addresses , multiple instance types , support for the OpenSolaris and Windows operating systems, and (as of today) a Service Level Agreement. Regular EC2 accounts are allowed to run up to 20 simultaneous instances. Requests for hundreds a...

Mike Arington reporting... Web hosting provider Rackspace has acquired JungleDisk, an online backup service, and Virtual Machine provider Slicehost in a deal designed to help bolster its offerings against top competitor Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition price is $11.5 million in cash and stock, with the possibility of up to an additional $16.5 million depending on performance. Jungle Disk is a file storage and backup service that up until now has relied on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). With the new announcement the company says that it will begin offering the service using Rackspace’s similar service Cloud Files, but will continue to support storage using Amazon with plans to support even more services in the future. Slicehost offers developers “slices” in Xen-based virtual servers that are much cheaper and generally easier to use than a traditional dedicated server. The service is a direct competitor to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Source

I am glad to announce that Amazon will help us promote Cloud Computing's adoption and adaption by sponsoring the events EMEA wide and hopefully soon to travel to APAC. We have speaker slots filling up pretty soon. Want to speak and/or sponsor? Mail me at tarry.singh AT gmail.com!

Mary has some thoughts on that: Amazon currently is conducting a private beta for testers of hosted Windows Server and SQL Server, according to its site. Amazon is requesting developers interested in using the service fill out a form on the site. The form asks what kinds of applications and services developers plan to build in an Amazon-hosted Windows environment. Amazon is positioning its hosted Microsoft offerings as “an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based aplications.” Amazon is touting the new Microsoft offerings as part of its plan to “support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform.” Microsoft, for its part, has been rumored to be building a hosted development platform for more than a year . The company is slated to announce the platform officially at its Prof...

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 22, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Oracle OpenWorld -- News Facts -- To help customers benefit from the economies of Cloud Computing, Oracle today announced that customers can license Oracle(R) Database 11g ( http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html), Oracle Fusion ( http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html) Middleware ( http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html) and Oracle Enterprise Manager ( http://www.oracle.com/enterprise_manager/index.html) to run in a cloud computing environment. The first products will be available for Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011) environment. Customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees. -- Enabling customers to deploy Oracle solutions on Amazon EC2 quickly ...

3Tera Inc.: Appliance-driven virtual servers 3Tera's AppLogic is a grid engine that has evolved over time into a full-fledged cloud computing environment. The company said its offering is designed to enable data centers to replace expensive and hard-to-integrate IT infrastructure -- such as firewalls, load balancers, servers and storage-area networks -- with virtual appliances. Each appliance runs in its own virtual environment. AppLogic combines servers into a scalable grid that's managed as a single system via a browser or secure shell. According to 3Tera, data centers can add or remove servers on the fly, monitor hardware, manage user credentials, reboot servers, install software, build virtual appliances, back up the system, repair damaged storage volumes, inspect logs and perform every other management task from a single point of control, all while the system is running. Amazon.com: As-you-need-them basic IT resources Amazon was an early cloud computing proponent, and ...

Amazon's new Elastic Block Computing initiative raises the bar for what will be possible with cloud computing. And when you think about how much more efficient this technology is compared to that in use by traditional data centers, it's obvious that companies like Amazon and Google have a huge advantage compared to incumbents like AT&T . Amazon's EBC is a very cool way of achieving storage in the network cloud: it preserves the "instance" when data is retrieved or a transaction executed, so that the instance can be re-used without the database being queried again. I'm thinking of it as a sort of cache-in-the-cloud. NYT

Because they are not there yet despite the fact that they may be in most of those data centers. Just look at the Wikipedia definition of cloud: Cloud computing means Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology ('Computing'). It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”[1], allowing users to access technology-enabled services "in the cloud"[2] without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them[3]. It is a general concept that incorporates software as a service, Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, where the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data is stored on the servers. And then go ahead and do a search for EMC, Cisco or VMware. They aren't...

LOS GATOS, Calif.--( BUSINESS WIRE )--VendorRate ( www.vendorrate.com ) announced today that IT professionals attending the LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Conference in San Francisco this month gave their highest customer satisfaction scores to technology vendors Amazon, VMware, Shoretel, Apple and Google. VendorRate.com, the only Internet site that offers quick, confidential performance ratings and comparisons of technology vendors, said hundreds of vendors were rated during the August 5-7 show attended by some 10,000 Linux users. Attendees were invited to rate any IT or telecom vendor, regardless of whether they were among the 200 exhibiting at the show. While raters at LinuxWorld 2008 demonstrated their general propensity for alternative technologies in their ratings, they also proved to be more scrutinous in their evaluations, delivering lower overall performance scores than vendors h...

Nice overview and a bit of the history on Cloud Computing: Increasingly, big firms are launching into "the cloud" to sell services, while small firms plug in, waving goodbye to the server hidden in the closet. "The future is about having a platform in the cloud," Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer said of the trend in a July e-mail to employees. The company has invested heavily in new products that will be announced in upcoming months. About four years ago, Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. began hatching a way to sell access to its complex computer systems. The company had already built up a robust infrastructure to support the world's largest online retail operation -- so why not let other businesses tap in? Amazon launched its Web Services in 2006, and more than 400,000 developers have signed on to pay for services such as storage space, database access and computing power. "Over the next decade you are going to see an incredible transformation, in my opinion...

Amazon knows somehow that listening to the voices and walking in the footsteps of IBM will eventually help them get there somewhere. Today I had an investor call and funny thing is that lately I am getting people asking me and mixing invariably technology trends such as virtualization and outsourcing. Obviously, if you saw one of my presentations, you'd understand that mixing business talk with technology cakewalk is what we are all heading towards. Versatilists will understand that talk and will be able to walk that walk. Should Indian outsourcing firms like Wipro, Satyam, Infosys, Patni, TCS, HCL etc want to maintain and sustain the typical growth trend then they will have to be just more that "preferred outsourcing parties", being number one on such a list can be a terrible thing. They have to get on to other things. They have to go after global footprints and with globalized leaders. They cannot afford to have those "typical indians" who may be technology sa...

Here'e the program: Emerging paradigms for software products/solutions August 23, 2008, 10am, @ Google, Hyderabad Experts from Hyderabad, Bangalore, and US will share their perspectives and experiences with Virtualization, SaaS and PaaS. Sessions will include cloud evolution, infrastructure & tools, design patterns and case studies. Cloud Evolution An overview of SaaS Infrastructure, Platforms, applications and tools options. Infrastructure & tools An introduction to infrastructures on which cloud computing runs: Google Application Engine, Process Factory, and Microsoft Live Mesh. Design Patterns An introduction to frameworks which provide tools to create and deploy applications: SQL abstraction on Web-based SaaS solutions. Case Studies A presentation on the business applications used for the personal or business productivity: Case Study on re-engineering a financial solution for SaaS. Speakers: Jinesh Varia (Evangelist-Amazon(USA)), Prof.Vasudeva Varma(IIIT-Hyderabad), and...

"In the coming weeks, Amazon EC2 will be launching a new persistent storage offering," the online retail giant said in an e-mail to EC2 users. The e-mail was posted on the Elastic Vapor blog, among others. Elastic block storage allows you to attach persistent, unformatted or "raw" data storage to "instances" of applications or services that reside on EC2. Previously, users could allocate up 1.7 terabytes of attached storage to the EC2 applications they were running, but as soon as the instance was shut down, the storage went away also. Now you can create non-temporary data storage volumes of up to 1 terabyte, available through the EC2 application but not directly associated with it. It's like "having a really big SAN [storage-area network] in the cloud," writes Thorsten von Eicken, CTO and founder of RightScale, on his blog. The upgrade also allows developers to create a "snapshot" of the data that then resides on Amazon's S3 cl...