April 2010 Archives

Today Amazon Web Services has taken another important step in serving customers worldwide: the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region is now launched. Customers can now store their data and run their applications from our Singapore location in the same way they do from our other U.S. and European Regions.

The importance of Regions

Quite often "The Cloud" is portrayed as something magically transparent that lives somewhere in the internet. This portrayal can be a desirable and useful abstraction when discussing cloud services at the application and end-user level. However, when speaking about cloud services in terms of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, it is very important to make the geographic locations of services more explicit. There are four main reasons to do so:

• Performance - For many applications and services, data access latency to end users is important. You need to be able to place your systems in locations where you can minimize the distance to your most important customers. The new Singapore Region offers customers in APAC lower-latency access to AWS services.
• Availability - The cloud makes it possible to build resilient applications to make sure they can survive different failure scenarios. Currently, each AWS Region contains multiple Availability Zones, which are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. By placing instances in different Availability Zones, developers can build systems that can survive many complex failure scenarios. The Asia Pacific (Singapore) region launches with two Availability Zones.
• Jurisdictions - Some customers face regulatory requirements regarding where data is stored. AWS Regions are independent, which means objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU. Customers thus maintain control and maximum flexibility to architect their systems in a way that allows them to place applications and data in the geographic jurisdiction of their choice.
• Cost-effectiveness - Cost-effectiveness continues to be one of the key decision making factors in managing IT infrastructure, whether physical or cloud-based. AWS has a history of continuously driving costs down and letting customers benefit from these cost reductions in the form of reduced pricing. Our prices vary by Region, primarily because of varying costs associated with running infrastructure in different geographies; for example, the cost of power may vary quite a bit across different regions, countries, or even cities. We are committed to delivering the lowest cost services possible to our customers based on the cost dynamics of each particular Region.

Worldwide uniform application deployment

Regions have become a very important tool for worldwide rollout of applications. The uniformity of the environment allows customers who have built applications for one Region to easily launch the application in a different Region. For example, there is a large European Insurance company that is looking to expand their EU-based product offerings to the Asia Pacific market. With some minor configuration changes, they can simply move the software running in the AWS EU Region to the AWS Singapore Region and rapidly begin serving Asia Pacific customers. Before AWS, the cost and complexity of moving these applications in a traditional IT model would have prohibited or delayed the company's entry into the Asia Pacific market.

You can begin using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon CloudFront from the Singapore Region beginning today. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/products for pricing.

You can also find more information on the AWS developer blog. All the RightScale services are available for the new region as well, read more on their blog.

The ecosystem of new application and platform services in the cloud is the future of application development. It will drive rapid innovation and we'll see a wealth of mobile, web and desktop applications arrive that we couldn't dream about a few years ago, and these building blocks are the enablers of that. These services will be delivered not only by new startups but also by enterprises looking to capitalize on their IP.

As examples of such services I always use Twillio (voice &sms) and Simplegeo (location), but it is time to start building out my knowledge of all the different services that are in the ecosystem. If you run such a service or know of one that I should be checking out, please leave the info in the comments below. I'll be using that information in presentations and some future writings on this topic.

I am excited that Amazon Cloudfront has been selected as one of the 10 Editor's pick of 2010 by Streaming Media. Amazon Cloudfront is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is dead simple to use both from a technology and a business point of view. From a technology point it literally takes a single button click in the console or a single API call to have your content CDN enabled. You can find several websites marveling about how simple it is to CDN enable your content with amazon Cloudfront. On the business side Amazon Cloudfront revolutionized the CDN business by providing a true pay-as-you-go service, no longer requiring upfront commitments that are commonplace in the CDN business and which opens up CDN for everyone to use. Customers can switch on Cloudfront whenever they want and disable it when no longer needed and only get charged for what they need.

The Streaming Media editors singled out Cloudfront Streaming Content service as possibly truly disruptive. Here are the laurels given by the editors:

Debuting in November 2008, Amazon's entry into the CDN market quickly became a major player. It's still not a threat to Akamai or Limelight, but the addition in December 2009 of Flash streaming to its offerings could truly disrupt the market. Even without Flash, though, CloudFront was winning customers based on its pay-as-you-go rate structure and its self-service model; take a look at Larry Bouthillier's "How to Get Started With Amazon CloudFront Streaming" to get an idea of just how easy the service is to use. As Dan Rayburn wrote on his Business of Video blog, "Amazon will be in the driver's seat to own the market for small and medium sized content owners who need simple delivery at a great price."

For more information on Cloudfront visit their product page.

Today Amazon Web Services takes another big step in making it easier to migrate legacy storage systems to the cloud through AWS Import/Export support for ingesting Punch Cards. AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage media for transport. Punch cards are paper-based storage media that represent data using the presence or absence of holes in specific positions. With AWS Import/Export for Punch Cards, enterprises can begin using the service to preserve and unlock the large volumes of data that have accumulated over the last century on what was the first broadly adopted digital storage medium.

"Enterprises spent the better half of the 20th century accumulating critical data on punch cards," said Alyssa Henry, General Manager of Amazon S3. "Now that data can be easily transferred into Amazon S3, making it instantly accessible to customers and applications around the world."

AWS Import/Export for Punch Cards initially supports importing 80 and 96 column punch cards that conform to ANSI X3.26 and are encoded using ISO 6586 compliant 7-bit or 8-bit character sets. Customers may send up to 572 sorted cards per package and may send as many packages to AWS as they like. AWS Import/Export loads each card into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a distinct object, uniquely identified by batch and card number.

"We have decades of valuable data stored on punch cards that sit idle in storage cabinets, readable only by specialized, aging systems," said Matt Hunter, CTO of Hollerith Inc. "With AWS Import/Export for Punch Cards, not only are we eliminating large amounts of physical storage space, but we're actively leveraging that data for the first time in years."

For general information on AWS Import/Export, see http://aws.amazon.com/importexport. For details on supported punch card configurations, boxing requirements, and pricing of AWS Import/Export for Punch Cards, see http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/punchcards.