The Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit has been making headlines in recent days, unveiling new auto scaling features last night, while securities analysts speculate how much revenue the AWS business is generating. Meanwhile, the New York Times examines Amazon's cloud growth in Europe. Here's a roundup:
- Auto Scaling - Notifications, Recurrence, and More Control - From Jeff Barr on the Amazon Web Services Blog: "We've made some important updates to EC2's Auto Scaling feature. You now have additional control of the auto scaling process, and you can receive additional information about scaling operations. You can now elect to receive notification from Amazon SNS when Auto Scaling launches or terminates EC2 instances. You can now set up recurrent scaling operations. You can control the process of adding new launched EC2 instances to your Elastic Load Balancer group. You can now delete an entire Auto Scaling group with a single call to the Auto Scaling API."
- Amazon's Next Billion-Dollar Business Eyed - From Reuters: "Amazon.com Inc's cloud computing unit may be its next billion-dollar business and analysts will be watching for clues on how fast this secretive unit is growing when the Internet retailer reports results next week.
- Amazon Cloud Computing Unit Drives Analysts Crazy - From Paolo Gorgo at Seeking Alpha: "Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't disclose exact numbers on its AWS revenue stream. These services are included in the "other" category, with miscellaneous marketing and promotional agreements, other seller sites and co-branded credit card agreements. In Q1 2011, this category delivered about $311 million in sales (+65% Y/Y), mostly in North America. In 2010, UBS estimated that AWS would represent roughly $500 million revenues in 2010, about $750 million in 2011 and approximately $ 2.5 billion in 2014.
- Europe Turns to the Cloud - From the New York Times: "Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest sellers of cloud services, helped clinch deals with Shutl and other European businesses, like the French railroad company S.N.C.F. and Bankinter, a Spanish bank, by effectively moving the cloud to Europe by setting up a data center in Dublin. While cloud computing remains the exception, not the rule, in Europe, the trend is gaining momentum. According to Gartner, the research firm, annual sales of cloud services in Europe will rise 4.3 percent, to $29.5 billion, in 2015 from $24.7 billion this year.
