The Cloud Computing Channel is brought to you by ZT Systems

• Cloud Computing Brokers: A Resource Guide

  January 22nd, 2010 : Linda Leung

  Businesses are recognizing the benefits of cloud computing but are often wary of handing over their prized applications to public clouds for fear of insufficient security and lack of direct control, particularly with public clouds. This has spawned a host of cloud brokers to serve as intermediaries between end users and cloud providers. (Read more about this topic in Cloud Brokers: The Next Big Opportunity?)

  Gartner defines three opportunities for cloud brokers:

  * Cloud Service Intermediation: Building services atop an existing cloud platform, such as additional security or management capabilities.

  * Aggregation: Deploying customer services over multiple cloud platforms.

  * Cloud Service Arbitrage: Brokers supply flexibility and “opportunistic choices” – and foster competition between clouds.

  To help you determine which cloud broker fits your needs, we’ve pulled together a list of cloud brokers and open source cloud management projects (in alphabetical order) with a brief description of their offerings. We will continue to update this list as new suppliers come on board. Have we missed someone? Send us your feedback.

  CloudKick
  Launched in March 2009 as part of the winter class at start-up incubator Y Combinator, Cloudkick provides management tools for Amazon and Rackspace. Users monitor their clouds through a dashboard, which also allows for tagging and color coding of nodes for easier identification. Users can see how their clouds are doing through visualized graphs. The service is hosted on the SliceHost service owned by Rackspace. Cloudkick also developed the open source project libcloud, a pure python client library for interacting with Amazon EC2, Slicehost and Rackspace Cloud Servers. In September Cloudkick 2009 raised $750,000 in funding. Its services are currently free and it is working on a suite of commercial offerings.

  CloudSwitch
  CloudSwitch claims to move data center applications to clouds without modification, allowing customer to manage their apps from within the datacenter using existing tools and processes. Established in 2008, its beta customers have been using Amazon EC2, but CloudSwitch plans to support other platforms from Rackspace, Microsoft, VMware and Terremark. CloudSwitch is delivered as a software appliance and contains the management components for discovering applications, orchestrating cloud deployments, and managing cloud usage, the company explains. Its CloudFit function automatically selects the appropriate combination of processor, memory, and storage. Secure communication and storage services are automatically provisioned via a local control point within each cloud deployment. These are virtual instances that run on behalf of the enterprise user and manage the cloud infrastructure, including data management, synchronization, and long-duration data transfers.

  DeltaCloud
  An open source project aimed to develop an ecosystem of tools, scripts and applications for the cloud. The project also aims to write a common, REST-based API to enable developers to write once and manage across multiple clouds. Cloud supported include Amazon EC2, RHEV-M RackSpace and RimHosting, and private clouds based on VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.

  Read More »

• Could A Cloud Computing Exchange Work?

  January 19th, 2010 : Linda Leung

  Amazon’s announcement last month of spot pricing for cloud computing services has prompted some cloud experts to begin discussing the potential for a public cloud exchange. Cloud technologists are intrigued by the potential applications for commodity-style trading of compute capacity, but say a cloud exchange would require the right model and market maker to succeed.

  In December, Amazon Web Services introduced Spot Instances, a pricing approach which allows customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their maximum bid exceeds the current spot price, which changes periodically based on supply and demand.

  A day before Amazon’s announcement, Joe Weinman, strategy and business development VP for AT&T Business Solutions wrote an opinion piece for GigaOm in which he describes similar pricing possibilities for the cloud computing market. Weinman notes that cloud computing shares similarities with other on-demand, pay-per-use offerings such as airlines or car rental.

  “Microseconds Could Mean Millions”
  Among Weinman’s suggestions was the notion of “time-based pricing” in which computing cycles at 2 a.m. should be priced lower than prices at 2 p.m.; and even pricing based on location: just as hotels would put a premium on ocean-view rooms, cloud suppliers offering capacity located near stock exchanges could charge more because “microseconds might mean millions.”

  Other suggestions include dynamic pricing, similar to the way airlines and hotels use “sophisticated yield management algorithms to maximize revenue, reducing prices to increase demand when utilization is low, and raising prices when utilization is high,” Weinman writes.

  Read More »

• Amazon: We Don’t Have Cloud Capacity Issues

  January 14th, 2010 : Rich Miller
  

  A chart from CloudKick looking at latency for resources running on Amazon EC2.

  One of the key selling points for cloud computing is scalability: the ability to handle traffic spikes smoothly without the expense and hassle of adding more dedicated servers. But this week some users of Amazon EC2 are reporting that their apps on the cloud computing service are having problems scaling efficiently, and suggesting that this uneven performance could be due to capacity problems in Amazon’s data centers. 

  The reports emerge as rival services focus on Amazon’s performance in the battle for cloud computing mindshare and customers.

  Amazon says that if customers are experiencing performance problems, it isn’t because EC2 is overloaded. “We do not have over-capacity issues,” said Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton. “When customers report a problem they are having, we take it very seriously. Sometimes this means working with customers to tweak their configurations or it could mean making modifications in our services to assure maximum performance.”

  Performance Issues Prompt Instance Upgrades
  Kinton said Amazon has reached out to Alan Williamson of the cloud consultancy AW2.0, who is also editor of the Cloud Computing Journal and has been using EC2 for three years. In a blog post Tuesday, Williamson wrote that he has experienced growing performance problems running a sizable EC2 installation for a customer, which he believes are tied to growing load on Amazon’s servers. Williamson said he has needed to buy larger instances to maintain the same performance, increasing his client’s costs. 

  Read More »

• Cloud Exchange: AWS Spot Prices, Visualized

  December 18th, 2009 : Rich Miller
  

  A screen shot of Cloud Exchange, which displays dynamic pricing for Amazon Web Services.

  Earlier this week Amazon Web Services announced Spot Instances, which allows customers to buy computing power on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform based on fluctuations in price. This dynamic pricing allows customers to save money by running applications when prices fall below a designated level, or outbid other customers for available capacity. How can you take advantage of these pricing trends?

  Cloud Exchange provides a visual interface for the spot pricing data Amazon is making available to developers. The app was developed by Tim Lossen (who has made the code available via GitHub) and graphs pricing data on different instance types in three availability zones. We found this site via Matt Sherman, who argues that pricing is Amazon’s core competency.

  Here are a couple of additional resources and data points regarding Amazon Web Services:

  • Ryan Kearney’s post on Comparing CDN Performance that looks at how Amazon CloudFront’s content delivery performance compares to similar offerings from Rackspace, Go Grid and Simple CDN.
  • Amazon’s CloudFront began offering streaming video, a development that CDN analyst Dan Rayburn predicts will disrupt the market for content delivery. “While I don’t see Amazon changing the CDN landscape over night, they are already starting to have an impact on the market and as they continue to add more functionality to CloudFront, their impact will only continue to grow,” Dan writes.  
  • Guy Rosen at Jack of All Clouds has an early analysis of adoption of the new West Coast availability zone on EC2 with existing zones for the East Coast and Europe.  
  Read More »

• New From Amazon: Spot Pricing on Cloud Computing

  December 14th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  Amazon Web Services has introduced Spot Instances, a new approach to pricing and purchasing computing capacity on its EC2 cloud computing platform. With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their maximum bid exceeds the current spot price, which changes periodically based on supply and demand.

  This type of dynamic pricing will allow some customers to save money by running applications only when spot prices fall below a designated price point, while also allowing users to quickly run large jobs by outbidding other customers for available capacity.

  Large Scale Market Pricing
  “This is the first step on a large scale towards ‘market pricing’ for computing based on offer and demand,” writes Thorsten von Eiken on the RightScale blog. “I know many people have been dreaming about something like this and a few startups have started to offer a compute market of some sort. But with Amazon’s offering it is now available on a large scale to anyone.”

  Read More »

• Brief Power Outage for Amazon Data Center

  December 10th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  Amazon Web Services experienced an outage in one of the East Coast availability zones for its EC2 service early Wednesday due to power problems in a data center in northern Virginia. Failures in a power distribution unit (PDU) resulted in some servers in the data center losing power for about 45 minutes. It took several more hours to get customer instances back online, with all but a “small number” of instances restored within five hours.

  “This incident impacted a subset of instances in a single Availability Zone,” said Amazon spokesperson kay Kinton. “Most of that subset of instances were back online in 45 minutes.”

  The issues started at 4 am East Coast time Wednesday, and affected one of the three availability zones in Amazon’s East Coast operation. The zones are designed to provide redundancy for developers by allowing them to deploy apps across several zones.

  Read More »

• Roundup: Amazon, Hurricane Electric, Level 3

  November 13th, 2009 : John Rath

  Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

  • Amazon Web Services Asia Expansion.  Amazon Web Service announced Thursday that an expansion of their services into an Asia-Pacific region will take place in the first half of 2010, when developers and businesses will be able to access infrastructure services from multiple availability zones in Singapore, with other zones in Asia following in the second half of 2010.  AWS services included at launch will be Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage (S3), SimpleDB, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Queue Service (SQS), MapReduce and CloudFront.  Pricing for web services in Asia will be announced when launched in 2010.
  • Hurricane Electric Expands Infrastructure at Equinix.  Internet backbone and IPv6 provider Hurricane Electric will extend its presence to additional Equinix data centers outside of the United States. Hurricane Electric will expand into Equinix Tokyo-2, Hong Kong-1 and Zurich-1 facilities.  Citing an increasing demand for IPv6 content in Asia and Europe as a reason for global expansion, the Hurricane Electric presence in global Equinix data centers will also allow other Equinix customers to easily exchange IP traffic with more than 500 associated IPv6 backbones.  Equinix chief marketing officer Jarrett Appleby said “operating also within our TY2, HK1 and ZH1 centers will put Hurricane Electric in the middle of an existing community of international and local networks and carriers for its next generation IP access service.”
  • Level 3 expands in Atlanta. Level 3 announced Thursday an expansion of operations and enhancing local presence in the Atlanta area.  The initiative will provide mid-market enterprises with greater access to Level 3’s services via its extensive backbone network, metro fiber-optic footprint, and a locally focused sales and customer support team.  Level 3 will expand the network in the Atlanta area that already passes nearly 15,000 businesses today.  Following their “link globally and connect locally” mantra, the move will allow Level 3 to provide a competitive alternative for Atlanta area businesses.  Level 3 has announced similar focused expansions in Chicago, Miami and New York in recent months.
  Read More »

• Amazon Offers MySQL in the Cloud

  October 27th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a relational database service (Amazon RDS) to host MySQL databases in the cloud. The company also said it will lower prices on its Amazon EC2 compute service by as much as 15 percent, and introduced new high-memory instances to offer additional scalability for large user apps.

  Amazon says the new service provides a fully featured MySQL 5.1 database, so any code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing MySQL databases will work with Amazon RDS. The service will automatically handle administration, patch management, and backups.

  “Many (AWS) customers have told us that their applications require a relational database,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. ”That’s why we built Amazon RDS, which combines a familiar relational database with automated management and the instant scalability of the AWS cloud.”

  Here’s a roundup of notable resources, analysis and commentary on Amazon RDS and its competitive impact on the cloud ecosystem: 

  • Amazon CTO Werner Vogels discusses Amazon RDS in a post at All Things Distributed. “The service takes much of the hassle out of setting up and managing relational databases, such as backups and code patching, freeing up its users to focus on their applications and business,” Werner writes.
  • AWS evangelist Jeff Barr provides examples of how to get started with Amazon RDS, saying it ”enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware. Once you’ve deployed RDS for production use, you can easily scale up to larger instance sizes, add additional storage space and make backups with ease. You can easily snapshot a production database and then bring it back to the lab to dig in to a problem.”
  • At TechCrunch, Nik Cubrilovic writes that Amazon RDS “makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances.”
  Read More »

• Report: EC2 Running 40,000 Servers

  October 1st, 2009 : Rich Miller

  We’ve long wondered about the scale and profitability of Amazon’s fast-growing cloud computing operation, Amazon Web Services. Recent research by Guy Rosen has gleaned some information about the number of public web sites hosted on EC2, as well as daily instance activity on the platform.

  Now comes an interesting nugget that offers some insight intoAmazon’s data center operations: Randy Bias of CloudScaling says that Amazon is running 40,000 servers to support EC2, citing two sources for the number. Randy uses that as the basis for a calculation of how much revenue Amazon may be generating from EC2 (his ballpark is $220 million to $260 million annually).

  Note that the 40,000 server estimate is just for EC2, and doesn’t include the S3 cloud storage service or the servers supporting Amazon’s massive retail operations. But it’s safe to say the new numbers clearly affirms our estimate that Amazon is in the 50,000 server club. See CloudScaling for additional details and Randy’s analysis.

  Read More »

• Older Articles »