I’m a big fan of both the principle and theory behind Cloud Computing, so naturally I was quite interested when TechCrunch reported a couple days back some advancements to the Amazon EC2 service. The changes (listed below – as per TechCrunch) will most definitely help get more companies moving off internal infrastructures and costly data centers… onto the Cloud. As Vogel says, it will facilitate the change for IT costs to move from “a capital expense to a variable cost, building clearer relationships between expenditures and revenue generating activities.”
The announced changes are:
- Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
- There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
- Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
- Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
- We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
- We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.
Clearly, the Microsoft Windows and SQL Server implementations are the most significant and will be instrumental in converting the MS infrastructure advocates.
The post also includes this link to a very interesting post by Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels. It helps explain the practicalities of using Amazon Web Services (AWS)… and the efficiencies gained:
- Pay as you go model..
- The ability to Manage Peak Capacity… on a necessity basis as oppose to investing in extra permanent infrastructure.
Culminating in a higher reliability at a lower cost…
As more and more services and infrastructure become available on the Cloud, more companies will being to tap into them… it’ll be interesting to see how things develop. No doubt, the Google App Engine will react and respond with some equally significant improvements….
No Comments on "Amazon enhancements to the Cloud…"