Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Beefs Up Its Cloud Ahead of MS Announcement
Amazon has announced several major improvements to its EC2 service for cloud computing. The service is now in production (no longer beta); it offers a service-level agreement; and Windows and SQL Server are available in beta form. ZDNet points out that all this news is intended to take some wind out of Microsoft's sails as MS is expected to introduce its own cloud services next week at its Professional Developers Conference.
According to wikipedia it's a fancy way of saying "the internet" to people who don't understand the infrastructure of the internet.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Risk vs Reward. Cash strapped startups can use Amazon Web Services to scale their app to hundreds of servers temporarily when they have that initial spike of interest. There is no affordable way to do this with traditional dedicated servers. When the traffic spike ebbs, server instances are terminated and costs go back to normal.
The risk is trusting your infrastructure and data to a third party, but if this is the risk you have to take to make it in business, I would say it is acceptable, at least until you can afford dedicated machines.
I think what Amazon is doing is amazing. Google got it all wrong by forcing you into their way of doing things. You must develop in python (this may have changed) and use their API. With Amazon, you can use any language and nearly any flavor of OS (mostly linux) you want to use. You can use any software or framework to build your apps. It's total freedom. There is no vendor lock in. If you decide to go dedicated one day, you can do it, no problem.
After reading the SLA at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/, I see it as all a big show with no real guts behind it:
# Availability is averaged over the last 365 days, but you only get credit for the current month's costs.
# You only get a service credit for 10% of the current month's costs. If you decide to move your business elsewhere, you may not apply the credit toward any past charges, including for the month in which the outage occurred.
# Availability refers to the "region" availability, and makes no guarantees about instance (computer) reliability, storage consistency/reliability. As far as I can imagine, it might be rather hard to figure out what constitutes a region's "availability" independently. The official measure stated in the SLA is basically a measurement made solely by Amazon.
# To receive any of this pathetic service credit (again, it is not a refund), you are required to send Amazon an email documenting (dates, times, regions) and providing evidence (heartbeat request logs, etc). *Yes, they want logs.* For almost all of their customers, the time and effort involved in filing a claim would outweigh the benefit of the credit.
It's not just the remote hosting that's appealing - it's the scalability.
If I write an app and put it on a dedicated host, I'm okay until I exceed the capacity of that host. Then I have to find another box or boxes and I may even have to change my software since I had assumed it would only be on one server. Finding additional capacity, refactoring and load balancing not only add cost, but effort (and therefore time).
On a service like EC2 (or even Google Apps), I'm renting space on the massive infrastructure of Amazon or Google. Their frameworks restrict you from developing anything that can only run on a single server. And if I need more capacity, I just right a bigger check that month.
That scalability goes for bandwidth as well. If you poke around the internet, you'll find lots of folks using Amazon's storage service for that reason.
This reservation baffles me every time I hear it.
For most small-to-medium size businesses, there is a MUCH greater chance of theft or natural disaster leaving them without infrastructure (or worse, their data) than there is of Amazon fucking up.
Amazon has been doing this FOREVER, do you really think one morning you're going to wake up and find out that Amazon has forgotten how to run their global hosting operations? Give me a break.
My advice is this: Back up all your data locally, but run your services at Amazon. If the shit hits the fan hard enough and Amazon is shut down for so long that it has severely impacted your company's bottom line, then you may find yourself looking for another job. Fortunately the chances of that actually happening are less then the chances of a natural disaster annihilating your home town, so don't lose any sleep at night.
while AJAX & Web 2.0 are overused as marketing buzzwords, that doesn't take away their value as terms that usefully describe meaningful ideas or concepts.
if you're not web developer, then these words are naturally meaningless to you. so VCs, managers/CEOs, and general "armchair web developers" have no business speaking about these terms most of the time.
to actual web developers, the term Web 2.0 usefully describes the maturing of the web as an application development platform. compared with websites from 1992, modern websites are much more advanced/complex, interactive, and useful beyond just serving up static documents. this includes the rise of social networking, collaborative editing/filtering, and other web applications that are centered around user-generated content.
similarly, AJAX allows developers to create much more responsive web interfaces that behavior more like desktop applications. compared to iframe+JavaScript hacks used in the past to attempt to emulate these characteristics, AJAX is much more elegant and effective because it establishes a standardized technique for integrating various existing technologies in a seamless/transparent manner. this opens the web to new programming paradigms that has in part been responsible for the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
i think it's useful to have a term that describes these significant changes in web development. the web is no longer just a place to look up video game cheat codes & cooking recipes, or a haven for geeks and computer nerds, but it's actually becoming increasingly integrated into the everyday life of the average person. just look at the rise of Smartphones and other smart devices/web appliances. this is all at least partly due to the web growing beyond just a collection of static HTML pages.
and as more and more cities roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax networks and wireless internet access becomes just another basic public infrastructure, we'll see another revolution of internet applications--smart VoIP handsets replacing carrier-locked cellular phones, portable internet radio receivers giving you access to thousands of internet radio streams, digital cameras that upload your snapshots to a Google Maps mashup letting your friends follow your travels with an online map, and countless other applications that integrate the web/internet into our daily lives.