Amazon, Rackspace Add New Cloud Capabilities

miller60 writes "Amazon Web Services has rolled out Elastic Beanstalk, a free feature which automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. AWS execs tell GigaOm that Beanstalk represents a move up to Platform-as-a-Service and is designed 'to address the idea of vendor lock-in and inflexibility that commonly afflicts other platforms for application development.' Meanwhile, Amazon rival Rackspace Hosting has extended its cloud platform to its European data centers, opening the service to customers bound by data protection regulations, and says it now has more than 100,000 cloud customers."

Comments

So, in other words

[Locke2005]

Amazon claims that a feature that only they offer helps prevent vendor lock-in?!?

Re:So, in other words

[farnsworth]

Amazon claims that a feature that only they offer helps prevent vendor lock-in?!?

No:

Today's release of Elastic Beanstalk is built for Java developers using the familiar Apache Tomcat software stack, which ensures easy portability if you ever want to move your applications. Elastic Beanstalk is designed so that it can be extended to support multiple development stacks and programming languages in the future.

Compare this to, say, writing an app using AppEngine and the lack of lock-in becomes clearer.

Re:So, in other words

[cain]

I don't think he'll do it. I mean check out his nick.

Re:So, in other words

[TooMuchToDo]

I'm somewhat disappointed in the moderation on my post. It's not like I'm some PHB who doesn't understand technology.

It's a matter of thinking hard about your app, how it's designed, and the coding based on that design. Architect your environment properly, and have everything accessible via APIs. Want to move your DNS? API calls to replicate the records to another provider and update the nameserver information at the root (with yet another API). Your webservers should be able to scale horizontally, as well as your app servers (if you have them) and your database servers (or, depending on your app, use something like Cassandra that is easier to replicate between 10s to 100s of nodes than MySQL/PostgreSQL/etc). Any app is simply the function of several "cogs" of codes, some apps have more cogs than others (Amazon.com, for example, hence all the services that drive it can also drive AWS).

To dismiss my post is to dismiss the advancements in computing over the last two decades. If you do decide to dismiss me, don't say it's because it's hard and because we can't. That just seems to be an untenable conclusion.

If you don't believe that this is the direction we're going in, I'd think others would disagree: http://twilio.jobscore.com/job_seeker/jobs/job_posting?job_id=bSHjYWq2Sr37U6eJe4aGWH&ref=rss

About the Job:

Twilio runs 100% in the cloud. Technically we run in "the clouds"- using servers in multiple clouds based on the price, availability, failover & bandwidth of different offerings.

We already bring machines up and down and auto-configure them with the push of a button using a first-generation tool we built called boxconfig. (we know - soooooo original & creative)

We are looking for someone to take our mission-critical cloud infrastructure management system to the next level. This system will manage our telecommunications infrastructure cluster – it will orchestrate the provisioning, load balancing, dynamic configuration/re-configuration, monitoring and spend optimization of 10,000+ servers across providers, data centers, availability zones and myriad other variables we haven't even thought of yet.

You've been itching for the opportunity "do server management infrastructure right" for a while and are fired up to absolutely go to town on this - building scaling and healing automation that factors in security, failover, and quality/analytic tools to track stuff like packet loss, performance, latency, and more. You know, the stuff you'd build if world class infrastructure was the priority - and your boss wasn’t breathing down your neck about that i18n feature and the other whizbang things the marketing and sales VPs need yesterday.

Re:Dreadful name

[Juba]

Next services they're going to offer : "rubberized wheelbarrow" to help you migrate from one cloud to another, and "ducttaped showerhose" to ease communication between several cloud-deplyed load-balanced webapps.