Bad news for GoGrid customers as today we received the following breach notification by email… Dear Valued Customer: In the normal process of reviewing our system activity, our Security Team discovered that an unauthorized third party may have viewed your account information, including payment card data. We immediately took action to protect our custom […]
PaaS v2.0 should be more open than the current implementations, and cultivate tools communities. But the focus on open development stacks is ignoring the second aspect of PaaS - the management of live applications after they are built. PaaS providers need to allow for communication of SLA and business process requirements by consumers, and cloud management t […]
“Security is a top priority for Amazon Web Services. Providing a trustworthy infrastructure for you to develop and deploy applications is a responsibility we take very seriously. One important aspect of gaining your trust is being open and transparent about our security processes and continually working toward achieving industry-recognized certifications. Other important aspects include providing you with mechanisms for contacting us about potential security issues and enabling you to conduct security tests of the applications you deploy on AWS. I’m pleased to announce today two new policies: one that outlines our vulnerability reporting process and one that describes how to receive permission to conduct penetration tests of the applications running on your EC2 instances.”
This is an ironic story I cam across today posted on informationweek May 13th, 2010 “Recovery.gov Moved To Amazon Cloud”. With all the talk about using the cloud for recovering servers the irony is that the economic recovery trackings system is being moved becuase SaaS and the SLA of Amazon EC2 is more cost effective than attempting to build the data infrastructure required to host such a high volume critical application. I wonder how long it will take the public sector to begin to realize these benefits of using cloud computing as a recovery platform?
“The federal government hopes moving the stimulus-tracking Web site to Amazon EC2 will allow the recovery board to save money and refocus on its core mission.
The federal government has moved Recovery.gov, the Web site people can use to track spending under last year’s $787 million economic stimulus package, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced Thursday. The move marks a milestone for the Obama administration’s cloud computing initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in a conference call with reporters it is the first government-wide system to move to a cloud computing infrastructure. It’s also the first federal government production system to run on Amazon EC2, Kundra said.”
Here are some interesting metrics that Amazon posted on their AWS blog
“If you already have some EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes, stop reading this post now!
Instead, open up the AWS Management Console in a fresh browser tab, select the Amazon EC2 tab and click on Volumes (or use this handy shortcut to go directly there). Click on one of your EBS volumes and you’ll see a brand new Monitoring tab. Click on the tab you’ll see ten graphs with information about the performance of the volume.
For those of you without any EBS volumes (what are you waiting for?), here’s what you are missing:”
”The adoption of cloud computing implies facing and solving a number of remarkable challenges. The security aspect is probably the most discussed ever but another key point that ISVs, cloud providers and customers have to agree on is licensing.
Licensing of guest operating systems and their applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is a critical aspect to consider when evaluating the economics of this technology. And really a few players are actively discussing it.
So it’s with a lot of interest that virtualization.info reports about the activity around Amazon and its Xen-based EC2 IaaS cloud.
Last month Microsoft and Amazon announced a new pilot program that allows their customers to extend their existing Windows Server Enterprise Agreement (EA) licenses, plus Software Assurance (SA), to the instances they have inside EC2.”
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor’s statements.
Double-Take Software has leveraged Amazon Web Services to create a real-time workload recovery platform, Double-Take Cloud, to protect businesses from disaster and keep companies up and running without any upfront costs. Double-Take Cloud leverages the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often reserved for those companies that can afford to build and manage a second data center, complete with back-up servers standing by in case of a disaster or outage — a costly practice that requires significant resources. Other IT departments rely solely on the capabilities of local tape backup, also a time-consuming process with limited recovery capabilities.
Double-Take Software today announced the release of Double-Take Cloud which provides full server protection, failover and recovery using Amazon Ec2 Web Services infrastructure. According to Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Cloud project leader, this is the only solution that allows businesses to replicate entire server workloads, including the operating system, applications and associated data in real-time and failover to the Amazon Ec2 infrastructure in the event of a failure.
Peter went on to differentiate the Double-Take Cloud solution from others who claim they backup to a cloud computing infrastructure. “With the Double-Take Cloud solution, a customer can recover a failed server into the cloud in less time that it would take a traditional vaulting company to deliver a tape. This isn’t like all the on-line backup offerings that seem to be sprouting up; this isn’t some scaled-up, laptop oriented, file-copy application rebranded as “cloud”. This is best-in-class, real-time replication and full system state recovery. It’s an industrial grade solution capable of protecting Exchange, MS-SQL, and Windows Domain Controllers – in fact, it will protect just about any Windows application or file server, and recover it perfectly, in the cloud.“
This is an interesting challenge to the market that could subvert the traditional backup paradigm as there are many companies that claim they provide solutions to backup and recovery full server workloads what they don’t tell you is they haven’t solved the original problem of being able to recover rapidly to dissimilar hardware. So, there may be a backup copy of the server somewhere accessible from the internet but the chances are it isn’t any easier to use than if it was sitting on a tape that needed to be recovered.
Peter Laudenslager from Double-Take Software went on to say: “In the past, businesses had to choose between investing in the equipment, facilities, and expertise to quickly recover critical business systems from a failure, or not investing, and having little or no ability to recover. Double-Take Cloud is simple enough and inexpensive enough that every business can have a great recovery solution. Now, for a monthly fee, they can get all the hardware, software, and infrastructure they need to get real-time data protection and rapid system recovery, in the cloud.“
This is a relatively new model for Double-Take Software as they will be providing the ability to purchase Double-Take Cloud licenses online at https://buy.doubletake.com/cloud for a low monthly fee in a pay-as-you-go service. There are then the Amazon storage fees that would be in addition but according to the Amazon pricing structure for the EC2 this could be as little as a few cents for every gigabyte of data stored.
The Double-Take Cloud release could be a challenge to some storage providers offering propietary storage solutions that realistically don’t reduce the recovery time objective any more than traditional tape recovery solutions. It will be interesting to see if storage vendors and or other cloud providers will open up new opportunities for Double-Take Software to provide the real-time replication and full server recovery capabilities they are missing in order to increase their adoption in the cloud computing marketing.
OK I’m back from the holidays and just recently presented a webinar on how to protect entire virtual infrastructure in the cloud and the risks of having your entire datacenter residing on a few virtual servers. Unlike the old days if a server went down the only impact was what ever the application that was running on that server. Now with consolidated virtualized infrastructure if a physical server goes down there could be a dozen virtual machines go offline simultaneously. I believe Amazon still met the SLA but this article should serve as good information for anyone looking to implement a 100% virtualized environement without some sort of loal failover capabilities.
Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service startup Heroku started off the new year with a nasty surprise. Without warning on January 2, all of the specialized, high-capacity Amazon EC2 instances that run its popular application and development service disappeared in the blink of an eye. Twenty-two virtual machines, approximately $20,000 per month in hosting fees for high-memory m2.2xlarge instances, suddenly vanished, leaving Heroku’s estimated 44,000 running applications in the lurch.
Amazon blamed a routing device in its Virginia data center, and the service was back up in an hour. But Oren Teich, Heroku’s product developer, said this is one of the many important lessons new ventures and businesses need to learn before they decide to work entirely in the cloud. Traditional contingency planning doesn’t go far enough, he said: expect the unexpected.
“Amazon Web Services has attributed a 44-minute outage in part of its Northern Virginia data center last week to the failure of power supply in one “availability zone” in the data center, which was soon followed by a second failure of a component in the redundant system.
Users of the Amazon EC2 cloud with workloads in Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center experienced problems early in the morning of December 9, with some operations in a part of the data center interrupted during a five-hour period.
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Amazon started notifying customers of a problem at 4:08 a.m. Eastern. By 9:41 a.m., it’s Amazon Service Health Dashboard reported that “we have completed recovery of most instances affected by this event.”
The postings first mentioned a connectivity issue, then acknowledged a power issue. In following up on the postings, InformationWeek asked Amazon whether the power issue was inside the data center or an issue with an external supplier.”
Jon Brodkin, Network World
Monday, December 14, 2009
(12-14) 08:36 PST – Amazon’s cloud computing division is unveiling an eBay-style auction service that will let users bid on unused virtual server capacity, potentially allowing customers to lower the cost of running applications on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Known as “Spot Instances,” the price of this cloud-based server capacity changes based upon supply and demand, unlike Amazon’s usual fixed prices for server instances.
“With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price,” Amazon says. “The maximum price you specify is not necessarily the price that you will pay. For example, if you specify 50 cents as your maximum price and the Spot Price is 30 cents for the period, you will pay only 30 cents. If the Spot Price increases, you will pay the new price (until it exceeds your maximum, at which time your instances will be terminated).”
Amazon, whose EC2 service suffered a power outage taking customer instances offline last week, offers several types of Linux- and Windows-based virtual servers of varying sizes. The fixed pricing scheme, which customers can still access instead of the auction-style pricing, ranges from about 8 cents per hour to $3 per hour.
Since Spot Instances can be terminated without warning, once a customer is outbid, they shouldn’t be the only source of capacity allocated to enterprise applications that need 24/7 uptime.
“Spot Instances are well suited for applications that can have flexible start and stop times such as image and video conversion and rendering, data processing, financial modeling and analysis, Web crawling and load testing,” Amazon says. “By being flexible on when their instances run, coupled with the ability to bid what they’re willing to pay for capacity, customers can significantly lower their Amazon EC2 costs. In addition, Spot Instances can provide access to large amounts of additional capacity for applications with urgent needs. When these needs arise, users can specify a higher maximum bid, which will raise the priority of a request for capacity.”
Spot Instances come in the same sizes and software types as fixed-price virtual servers. Amazon says it developed the auction-style system in response to customers who said they wanted additional capacity at lower cost, and were willing to be flexible about when they run their applications.
Amazon Spot Instances appears to be “the first step on a large scale towards ‘market pricing’ for computing based on offer and demand,” the company RightScale, which provides services around the Amazon cloud platform, writes in its official blog.
Starting today, you can now choose to locate your AWS resources in our Northern California Region, which like other AWS Regions, contains multiple redundant Availability Zones. Utilizing this Region can reduce your data access latencies if you have customers or existing data centers in the Northern California area. This new Region is available for Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. For Northern California Region pricing, please see the detail page for each service at aws.amazon.com/products.
