OpenSolaris Available on Amazon EC2
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (JAVA) today said its OpenSolaris Operating System (OS) will be available on Amazon EC2, part of the Amazon utility computing platform. Sun also is adding premium technical support for its MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2 to its global support and services offerings.
In case you were wondering, this is the news Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was hinting about yesterday at Startup Camp. It coincided with today's official launch of OpenSolaris. "Support for OpenSolaris and MySQL on Amazon EC2 expands the reach and convenience for developers who want to quickly deploy their applications on the Web by taking advantage of Amazon Web Services," said Rich Green, executive, vice president of Software, Sun Microsystems. "Sun aims to continue to offer additional options to use and deploy our open source platforms - covering the spectrum from small home-grown installations through to on-site data centers and hosted environments such as Amazon EC2."
Posted by Rich Miller 
May 05, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 04, 2008
Cloud Alliance Between Sun, Amazon?
Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is set to announce a cloud computing alliance with Amazon (AMZN), with details expected Monday. That news comes from Om Malik at GigaOm, who interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz at Startup Camp in San Francisco. Here's the news from Om:
When I asked him about Sun — and cloud computing especially — in light of the recent trend in which startups now have more of an affinity with Amazon Web Services than Sun, Schwartz replied with a question: “Do you think it would make sense for us to partner with Amazon to offer free info on the cloud?” I guess, I said. "Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon."Sun already has its own utility computing platform, Network.com, and is developing a new platform-as-a-service called Project Caroline to compete directly with Amazon.
Posted by Rich Miller May 04, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 23, 2008
Amazon Cuts Data Transfer Prices on EC2 and S3
Amazon (AMZN) has lowered prices for data transfer on its utility computing services (link via James Hamilton). That includes a new pricing tier for the heaviest users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) with data transfer of more than 150 terabytes a month, who will pay just 10 cents per GB of outbound transfer, compared to 17 cents for those with less than 10 terabytes. The new rates take effect May 1.
"The result of this pricing change is that all customers will see a reduction in the price of transfer out," Amazon said in its announcement. "For example, a customer transferring 50TB a month will save 16% and a customer transferring 500TB a month will save 26% on transfer with the new pricing."
Posted by Rich Miller April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 22, 2008
Amazon Growth: Boost for Rackable?
I was reading Wired's feature about Amazon Web Services over the weekend, and was struck by the same paragraph that grabbed Nick Carr's attention:
And the idea that AWS is mostly about wringing extra bucks (especially off-season) out of Amazon's data centers? "We've far exceeded the excess capacity of our internal system," (Amazon's Andy) Jassy says. "That ship sailed 18 months ago." For a company at which operational data is a state secret, that's a telling detail: AWS is now big enough to be piling up its own silicon.According to Amazon (AMZN), up to 10,000 new developers are signing up monthly. Given Jassy's statement that AWS now requires its own servers, that growth is bound to be good news for Rackable (RACK). Amazon is one of Rackable's four largest customers - along with Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Facebook - and the growth of Amazon's utility computing platform has been cited as boosting results at Rackable.
Posted by Rich Miller April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 14, 2008
Amazon EC2 Adds Persistent Storage
Amazon announced last night that it has added persistent storage capabilities to its utility computing platform. This is a feature that Amazon's developer community has been seeking for some time. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains how it works:
Persistent storage for Amazon EC2 will be offered in the form of storage volumes which you can mount into your EC2 instance as a raw block storage device. It basically looks like an unformatted hard disk. Once you have the volume mounted for the first time you can format it with any file system you want or if you have advanced applications such as high-end database engines, you could use it directly."Reviews are rolling in, and many Amazon-watchers and cloud bloggers see this as a very big deal.
Posted by Rich Miller April 14, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
February 18, 2008
Encrypted Traffic Cited in Amazon S3 Outage
Friday's outage on Amazon's utility computing platform, which had a ripple effect on many sites using the Amazon S3 storage service to serve images or widgets, has been blamed on a surge in encrypted traffic. Network traffic using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocols uses more network resources because it involves a more complex "handshake" between servers than regular old web pages. This overhead is why many bank web sites have shifted their online banking logins to non-SSL pages in recent years.
In its report on Friday's outage, Amazon (AMZN) said its servers experienced an unexpected jump in traffic using authentication and encryption. "While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests," Amazon reported. "Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types." By about 4 am Pacific time, the level of authenticated requests "pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place."
Posted by Rich Miller February 18, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
February 15, 2008
Major Outage for Amazon S3 and EC2
Many users of Amazon's utility computing platform report that their services are inaccessible this morning. The outage is having a ripple effect on many sites using Amazon to store images (such as Twitter) or widgets. Users are reporting issues with errors on both the S3 and EC2 services, and at least one user is reporting file loss. Amazon hasn't provided any explanation yet on what has happened, but is trying to centralize discussion on a thread in its developer forum.
UPDATE: As of 10 am Eastern time, users are reporting that their services are back up after about 3 hours of downtime. "We’ve resolved this issue, and performance is returning to normal levels for all Amazon Web Services that were impacted," Amazon says. A more complete incident report has been promised.
UPDATE 2: As of noon Eastern some customers are still reporting that their Amazon services are down. Amazon says "the system is continuing to recover. However, we are currently seeing slightly elevated error rates for some customers, and are actively working to resolve this." More updates and discussion at TechMeme and Appistry.
The last major outage for Amazon (AMZN) web services was in October, when issues on EC2 resulted in data loss for some users. That incident was among the factors prompting Amazon to adopt a service level agreement (SLA) for S3 storage.
Posted by Rich Miller February 15, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
January 31, 2008
AWS Growth: Really Big, Really Vague
While most of the financial analysts and press are focusing on shrinking profit margins at Amazon (AMZN), TechCrunch and Read Write Web have picked up on a paragraph in the company's earnings report that briefly discusses its utility computing initiatives. Here's what Amazon reported:
Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.I don't think the bandwidth growth is that surprising. The service now hosts content for 330,000 developers (up 30,000 from last quarter) and its customers include growing services like 37 Signals, Powerset, SmugMug, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk and Webmail.us (Mailtrust). Many of these startups are attracted to S3 because it allows them to host large files cheaply. But big files like photos and backups are bandwidth hogs. So amid the enthusiasm about the "growth" of AWS, allow me to be the cranky guy who wants more data.
Posted by Rich Miller January 31, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
December 16, 2007
Amazon SimpleDB Expands Web Services
Amazon (AMZN) generated some buzz in the blogosphere Friday by announcing SimpleDB, a new addition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will allow users to store and query databases on Amazon's servers. It will be several weeks before the new service opens its beta test. But that hasn't prevented industry observers from weighing in with their thoughts. Here's an overview of some of the initial discussion:
- GigaOm provides Amazon SimpleDB 101 and Why IT Matters, predicting it will be "hugely disruptive."
- Todd Hoff at High Scalability weighs The Current Pros and Cons List for SimpleDB.
- Phil Windley, writing at ZDNet, says the SimpleDB model is compelling. "When you can build large, distributed systems and avoid pouring precious dollars into fixed capital assets, startups can do things that just weren’t possible before."
- Protoblogger Dave Winer makes similar observations about SimpleDB's value proposition for startups, and expresses surprise that others aren't following Amazon's lead: "It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response."
Posted by Rich Miller December 16, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 06, 2007
Amazon: 10 Billion Objects on S3 Storage
Amazon (AMZN) said today that its S3 utility storage service now holds more than 10 billion objects, meaning that S3 has doubled in size since its April announcement that it had reached 5 billion objects. Amazon said that more than 290,000 developers have signed up to use AWS since its launch in March 2006.
The company also announced that it was expanding S3 to allow customers to store objects on the company's infrastructure in Europe, a development that could broaden international adoption of the service.
S3 is a "cloud" storage service offering scalable storage infrastructure, with fees based on usage. It has been widely used by Web 2.0 providers such as the photo sharing service SmugMug, which said S3 helped it save $1 million over the course of a year. The service, along with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing offering, has had periodic performance issues, leading Amazon to offer a service level agreement (SLA) last month.
Posted by Rich Miller November 06, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 02, 2007
Amazon S3: 99.99% Uptime in October
Amazon's S3 utility storage maintained 99.99 percent uptime in October, the first month in which the service offered a service level agreement (SLA), according to performance measurement firm WebMetrics. That uptime tops the minimum standard of 99.9 percent Amazon promised to deliver under its SLA.
WebMetrics monitored the response times and availability for the REST- and SOAP-based APIs for Amazon S3, which had monthly uptime percentage of 99.9915 and 99.9912, respectively. The S3 APIs were tested every five minutes, with timeout thresholds defined at 30 seconds. WebMetrics offers monitoring of all of Amazon's utility computing services on a subscription basis.
Posted by Rich Miller November 02, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
October 09, 2007
Amazon Offers SLA for S3 Storage
Amazon (AMZN) has announcedthat it is implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for its S3 utility storage service, making the platform more appealing to enterprise customers desiring performance guarantees from their service providers. The Amazon SLA offers a credit for any month in which S3's uptime falls below 99.9 percent. The credit works out to 10 percent of charges for any month in which S3 has uptime between 99.0 and 99.89 percent, and a 25 percent credit if uptime falls below 99 percent. The SLA took effect Oct. 1.
Developers on Amazon's platform had been requesting an SLA for some time. That pressure was stepped up a notch after some customers lost data during a Sept. 29 outage of Amazon's EC2 service, which runs virtual appliances stored in S3. "We know that many of our customers, including a multitude of teams within Amazon, are using S3 in mission-critical ways and need a formal commitment from us in order to make commitments to their own users and customers," said Amazon web services evangelist Jeff Barr Barr in announcing the SLA.
Posted by Rich Miller October 09, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
October 04, 2007
Amazon's Dynamo and Massive Scalability
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels yesterday released a paper on Dynamo, a technology Amazon created to engineer its infrastructure for reliability at massive scale. "Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system," Vogels says. "The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability." He emphasizes that Amazon has no plans to offer Dynamo as part of its utility computing platform, which currently includes S3 and EC2. The paper on Dynamo is pretty technical, but is generating interest around the web. Here's a sampling of the reaction:
- Nicholas Carr says Dynamo "will be of great interest to other engineers engaged in building the massive and massively reliable data-processing systems that will define the future of computing."
- Jesse Robbins at O'Reilly Radar says the paper is an "excellent read for anyone thinking about scalable web sites ... The operational challenges and solutions presented in the paper are particularly interesting."
- Larry Dignan at ZDNet: "Amazon’s paper details how storage technology is critical to managing SOA – a point I haven’t heard in many places."
- Todd Hoff at High Scalability notes that Amazon calls Dynamo "another real-life example to learn from. As many top websites use a highly tuned key-value database at their core instead of a RDBMS, it's an important technology to understand."
- At TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld writes that Dynamo "sounds like a rethinking of what a relational database should be when computing scales to massive Web proportions (i.e., systems running on tens of thousands of computers).
The paper on Dynamo is being presented at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, which runs from Oct. 14-17.
Posted by Rich Miller October 04, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
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