Amazon, Apptis Partner on FedCloud

Like most cloud providers, Amazon Web Services is positioning itself to be a player in the Obama administration’s ambitions to shift much of the federal government’s infrastructure to the cloud. Earlier this year Amazon was pitching established government IT contractors on the benefits of building offerings atop its cloud computing platform. AWS is now partnering with Apptis, an experienced player in the government IT arena.

Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure is now serving as the back-end for Apptis’ FedCloud, a service launched last year to offer “Federally Compliant Trusted Computing.” TechFlash reports that Amazon and Apptis filed a joint response to an RFQ from the General Services Administration seeking infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. Apptis spokeswoman Piper Conrad told TechFlash’s Eric Engleman that the two companies are also “finalizing a general partnership.”

Amazon EC2 Adding 50,000 Instances A Day

Amazon doesn’t release a lot of detail about the growth and profitability of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing operation. But a recent analysis found that Amazon EC2 launched more than 50,000 new instances in a 24-hour period in just one region. Cloud technologist Guy Rosen analyzed activity on EC2 using Amazon resource IDs, and estimates that the service has launched 8.4 million instances since its debut.

Amazon EC2 allows customers to rent computer resources in Amazon data centers to run applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which customers can request Virtual Machines (server instances) on which they can load any software of their choice.

The new analysis follows up on previous research by Rosen on the number of web sites hosted on EC2  and other leading cloud providers. He noted that the data is a one-day snapshot, and could be skewed by a number of factors, but says the numbers are “impressive, to say the least.”

No Activity at Amazon’s Oregon Site

Last November we noted reports that Amazon was building a data center in the Port of Morrow in Boardman, Oregon. Information Week’s John Foley has been out to the site and taken pictures, and it’s clear that this is not an active construction project. There is a structure at the site, but weeds are growing around it.

“The local Chamber of Commerce and the Port of Morrow confirmed that the data center’s construction had been halted until sometime next year,” Foley writes. “They cited economic conditions as the reason for the delay.” Check out InformationWeek’s photo gallery for a closer look.

Amazon recently leased a 110,000 square foot property in northern Virginia to expand its data center footprint. The data center expansion may reflect Amazon’s focus on hosting cloud applications for the federal government. In June Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers. As we’ve previously noted, the strength of the northern Virginia market has led some data center builders to prioritize projects there and postpone construction in other areas.

Amazon Seeking Real Estate Manager

There’s an interesting job posting from Amazon, which is seeking a Senior Manager for Data Center Real Estate to oversee its short and long-term capacity requirements. “The person in this role is responsible for locating appropriate properties, negotiating real estate agreements to secure target properties in a timely manner and managing outside real estate brokers providing Amazon services for the Company’s global data center and network infrastructure,” notes the posting.

Amazon’s data center real estate requirements will be driven by the growth of its cloud computing operation, Amazon Web Services, which has prompted the company to keep expanding its infrastructure even as the economy has slowed.   

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

Amazon Launches Virtual Private Cloud

A diagram of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and how it connects cloud-based resources to existing private networks.

Amazon Web Services has introduced Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows companies to connect a set of Amazon EC2 instances with a corporate data center using a virtual private network (VPN) connection over the IPsec protocol. This offers a “cloudbursting” capability that allows enterprises to quickly expand the capacity of in-house applications while buying the extra capacity on a “pay as you go” usage-based model. The Amazon installation serves as an extension of the private network, as the EC2 instances within the VPC have no Internet-facing IP addresses. Amazon VPC is in limited beta and accepting applications.

Here’s a roundup of information and commentary about the new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud:

• “This new offering lets you take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging the investment you have already made in your IT infrastructure,” writes Amazon Web Services tech evangelist Jeff Barr, who provides a step-by-step guide toi deploying resources to Amazon VPC.
• Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the Amazon VPC offering was developed to meet the needs of CIOs frustrated with many private cloud offerings. “These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed ‘private cloud’ does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination,” Werner writes. “Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher … I define the cloud by its benefits, as those are very clear. What are called private clouds have little of these benefits and as such, I don’t think of them as true clouds.”
• Looking beyond Amazon, the must-read post is Christofer Hoff’s colorfully titled analysis: Calling All Private Cloud Haters: Amazon Just Peed On Your Fire Hydrant. “It should be noted that now that the 800lb Gorilla has staked a flag, this will bring up all sorts of additional auditing and compliance questions, as any sort of broad connectivity into and out of security zones and asset groupings always do,” he writes.
• Sam Charrington at Appistry counters Hoff with his analysis, Amazon VPC Pees in Pool, Not Just on Fire Hydrant. “With this announcement, Amazon is attempting, intentionally or not, to co-opt the notion of private clouds by adopting confusing and misleading terminology,” Charrington writes. “By claiming ‘isolation’ and naming the service VPC, the offering at best contributes to industry confusion around private clouds. At worst it may be outright misleading.”

Outage for Amazon Web Services

Amazon’s cloud computing services have experienced performance problems this afternoon, with multiple services affected. There are also numerous reports of users briefly being unable to access the main Amazon.com retail site. 

Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard showed problems on the EC2 computing cloud in the US. “We detected a period of elevated packet loss from 12:31 PM PDT to 12:46 PM PDT in a single Availability Zone,” Amazon reported. “We are continuing to monitor the situation.” The dashboard also showed elevated error rates on its Amazon’s CloudFront CDN, SimpleDB database service and Mechanical Turk freelance marketplace. The downtime was also confirmed by monitoring services CloudStatus and enStratus, which both show the Amazon services available again as of 2 pm Pacific. 

The outage is the second in a month for Amazon Web Services, following a June 11 incident in which a lightning strike damaged power equipment at one of the company’s data centers, disrupting service for some AWS customers. Today’s problems come at a time of growing scrutiny of the reliability of cloud computing providers. EC2 previously experienced extended outages in February 2008 and October 2007.

Report: 1,400 Sites Hosted on Amazon EC2

How many large companies are using the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform to host their public web sites? Of the top 500,000 web sites, 1,422 are hosted on Amazon’s EC2 service, according to data from Infibase, which works out to about 0.28 percent of that sampling. The analysis is based on an analysis of the top 500,000 sites tracked by Quantcast and analyzed by tools developed by InfiBase, a cloud startup.

The data provides only a small snapshot of how companies are using Amazon’s cloud, and doesn’t include the use of EC2 for back-end and back-office systems or for research. The use of EC2 for web site hosting became viable for major sites in March 2008, when Amazon introduced static IP addresses and “availability zones” to provide a backup web site should one instance or data center experience trouble.

Amazon Adds Cloud Data Center in Virginia

As Amazon’s cloud continues to grow, the company is investing in real-world brick-and-mortar data centers to provide additional capacity. The retail/infrastructure company recently leased a 110,000 square foot property in northern Virginia to expand its data center footprint.

The additional space will help accommodate dramatic growth for Amazon Web Services, the suite of services that allow companies to run their applications on Amazon’s infrastructure and pay based on usage. More than 500,000 developers are now using AWS, and Amazon’s S3 storage now houses more than 50 billion objects.

Northern Virginia has always been a key market for Internet infrastructure. But the data center expansion may also reflect Amazon’s ambitions to host cloud applications for the federal government. Last week Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.

While other cloud builders like Facebook add computing capacity by leasing turn-key “wholesale” data center space to save time and money, Amazon is building out its own infrastructure in its new facility in northern Virginia. It’s not clear whether the timing of Amazon’s equipment purchases will allow the company to qualify for the newly-passed financial incentives for data centers in Virginia. The state recently enacted a new law providing a sales tax exemption for companies that buy or lease at least $150 million in computer equipment between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2020 for use in a data center.

Amazon Pitches The Federal Cloud

Can cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services be a major player in the push to move the federal government’s infrastructure into the cloud? Or will newer cloud offerings from system integrators and managed hosting companies be the major beneficiaries of the Obama administration’s efforts to migrate government apps into the cloud?

Amazon is making a major pitch for federal business, as revealed today by Kevin Jackson at Cloud Musings, who describes training sessions in which Amazon Web Services (AWS) Federal is training IT services companies to leverage its cloud as the platform for outsourced government clouds. AWS Federal appears to be building its government pitch around contractors who already have relationships with federal customers, but may not possess the infrastructure to provide scalability for large cloud applications. Jackson writes that the training was “invite-only and attendance was IT services firms that had demonstrated a clear track record of success in the Federal market.”

Amazon’s interest in the federal market was first noted back in January by TechFlash, which spotted a job posting for a business development manager for “Amazon Government Solutions.”