by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 26, 2009
As I’ve written before the Enterprise industry is extremely leery of the cloud – both because of security and data ownership. The idea is that if their data is not on their servers – they can’t protect it and they don’t “own” it. Yesterday I had a discussion with a colleague who was tasked with migrating a legacy SQL Server Environment into the company’s new virtual server environment. I said – “You know it would take a lot less work, time, infrastructure, money, and maintenance if you moved your data operations to the cloud”.
I got a blank stare… “I’d never get approval for that”, he said.
This is why – so far – the cloud has been relegated to the SMB (small-medium sized business) market. Companies like mine have been able to take advantage of the cloud in so many ways while remaining a small, low budget company.
Amazon took their first step in the direction of the enterprise market late last year by offering an SLA (service level agreement) to its users with a 99.95% availability commitment.
Today’s announcement takes the next logical step – private “clouds” that addresses one of their primary issues, security.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection. 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.
What this means in RPS (real people speak) is that you can create your own private networks in the cloud that connects to your own private network – for authentication among other purposes.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on June 24, 2009
Today Amazon announced an update to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) console supporting its CDN infrastructure CloudFront.
Manage Amazon CloudFront through an easy to use interface. The AWS Management Console lets you review all your CloudFront distributions, create new distributions, or edit existing ones. All the features of the CloudFront API are supported: you can enable or disable distributions, configure CNAMEs, enable end-user logging, and more.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on September 18, 2008
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting ready to launch a new Content Delivery Service. While there have been little technical details let out they do say the new service will be delivered before the end of the year. This is a natural progression for the Amazon Web Services team as these CDS/CDN’s are growing in popularity as companies figure out how to scale heavy multimedia requirements – from video to podcasts to mobile content.
This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. Our goal is to create a content delivery service that:
- Lets developers and businesses get started easily – there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.
- Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
- Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
- Has a global presence – we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.
I like that they are building this new service on top of their existing S3 storage infrastructure. Although I am a little confused as of yet what kind of value this brings over just hosting your content on S3 publicly (which is what we do).
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