Amazon’s SES service may not be the hottest of cloud topics, but email is still fundamental, and SES a tool as useful as any. The focus is on “deliverability”.
Category Archives: Amazon AWS
Cloud Migrator Transfers Files between Amazon S3, Azure, Rackspace
CloudBerry Lab today announced the beta version of its new CloudBerry Cloud Migrator service that allows users to transfer files from one cloud storage to another. The service supports data migration between Amazon S3, Windows Azure Blob Storage, Rackspace Cloud Files and FTP servers.
Cloud Migrator service by CloudBerry Lab is a web application that lets users transfer their files across different cloud storage services without installing any additional software. All copy operations executes inside a cloud and managed through the web interface.
The service allows users to copy files between different locations or accounts within one cloud storage provider as well as between different. It’s a perfect solution to painlessly migrate data from one Amazon S3 bucket to another or from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob Storage or Rackspace Cloud Files and vice versa.
Finally, Cloud Migrator supports FTP so it can also be used to easily copy/move files from an FTP server to any of the supported cloud storage accounts with no need to implement complicated scripts.
In the Cloud Migrator future releases, the new low-cost Glacier storage by Amazon AWS will be added to the list of supported cloud storage accounts.
CloudBerry Cloud Migrator is available at http://sync.cloudberrylab.com/
Amazon “just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper”
Good article in the New York Times on the effect of AWS on startup access to major computing resources. Great takeaway quote:
“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”
He conceded that “I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
Read the full article.
CloudBerry Explorer Adds Support for Cloudian
CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer, an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 storage buckets just as they would on their local computers. This new version offers support for Gemini Technologies’ industry-leading Cloudian Cloud storage solution.
Cloudian is an S3 API compliant, multi-tenant, multi-datacenter cloud storage platform that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to cost-effectively deploy extremely scalable and reliable object storage services within public and private clouds. The Cloudian platform leverages commodity servers and offers a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, with no single point of failure. The solution easily scales from one node up to hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers, supporting petabytes of data. Cloudian also provides a comprehensive user interface for both end user applications as well as administrative functions, including billing, monitoring and provisioning.
CloudBerry Explorer allows end users to accomplish simple tasks without special technical knowledge, automate time-consuming tasks to improve productivity. The new version of CloudBerry Explorer helps users manage Cloudian storage just as they manage Amazon S3. Users can upload files to Cloudian, create buckets and folders and perform other management tasks simply and efficiently.
“Our Cloudian solution is all about accessibility, scalability and affordability, while offering unmatched performance and security,” said Giorgio Propersi, General Manager, Gemini Technologies. “CloudBerry Explorer is a great tool which reflects the same principles and goals as Cloudian. We are pleased to see it help even more customers adopt our leading cloud storage platform.”
CloudBerry Explorer is designed to work on Windows 2003/XP/Vista/2008 and Windows 7. Microsoft PowerShell command line interface allows advanced computer users integrate Amazon S3 storage access with other routines.
“Cloudian is one of the most powerful and accessible storage solutions on the market today,” said Aleksey Serkov, CTO, CloudBerry Lab. “We are pleased to meet growing customer demand by helping companies of all sizes adopt and manage Cloudian regardless of their technical expertise level.”
CloudBerry Explorer for Windows is a freeware. CloudBerry Explorer PRO costs $39.99 (US).
Newvem Launches New Tool to Help Amazon Web Services Customers Make Sense of Reserved Instances
Newvem has launched a new tool as part of its KnowYourCloud Analytics web application. Newvem’s new Reserved Instances Decision Tool helps Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers make the right decision on exactly which On-Demand Instances should be moved to Reserved Instances. With KnowYourCloud Analytics, AWS users have insight into their cloud usage patterns and can now easily determine – based on flexibility, availability and cost considerations – whether a long-term commitment to Reserved Instances is the right decision for their business.
To keep ahead of competitors and give customers more value, Amazon is promoting Reserved Instances, which, compared to On-Demand Instances – the popular pay-as-you-go model that AWS is known for, offer even more cost savings and assured capacity availability. Reserved Instances require long-term commitments to Amazon with contracts ranging from one to three years. The problem is that moving to Reserved Instances is an extremely complex decision for IT and finance managers, who must weigh the tradeoffs between costs and utilization over time and between flexibility and a long-term commitment.
“Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is like Google Analytics for cloud computing,” said Zev Laderman, Newvem’s co-founder and CEO. “It scans AWS usage patterns and lets AWS users know if they can benefit from Reserved Instances, indicates which parts of their cloud would benefit the most, and offers recommendations on how to execute the move.”
Amazon Web Services Launches High Performance Storage Option for Amazon Elastic Block Store
Amazon Web Services today announced new features for customers looking to run high performance databases in the cloud with the launch of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS. Provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times. With Provisioned IOPS, customers can flexibly specify both volume size and volume performance, and Amazon EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume. To get started with Amazon EBS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ebs.
Provisioned IOPS volumes are engineered to allow customers to develop, test, and deploy production applications and be confident that they will receive their desired performance. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create an EBS volume provisioned with the storage and IOPS they need and attach it to their Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon EBS currently supports up to 1,000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume, with plans to deliver higher limits soon. Customers can attach multiple Amazon EBS volumes to an Amazon EC2 instance and stripe across them to deliver thousands of IOPS to their application.
To enable Amazon EC2 instances to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, Amazon EC2 is introducing the ability to launch selected Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances. EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Megabits per second and 1,000 Megabits per second depending on the instance type used. The combination of EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances allows customers to run their most performance-sensitive applications on Amazon EC2, giving them predictable scaling with the same ease of use, durability, and flexibility of provisioning benefits they expect from Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.
“AWS introduced Amazon EBS in 2008 to provide a highly scalable virtual storage service and now, four years later, our customers are running applications on Amazon EC2 using EBS volumes at tremendous scale,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President of Amazon EC2. “Customers have been asking for the ability to set their performance rate to achieve consistently high performance. With EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-Optimized instances and the recently launched High I/O SSD-based EC2 instances, customers have a range of choices for running their most demanding applications and databases on AWS while achieving peak performance in a predictable manner.”
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Amazon EBS is used to support various missions and research programs. Consistent performance of I/O is a major requirement for numerous use cases across NASA ranging from scientific computing to large scale database deployments. JPL now routinely provisions cloud compute capacity in an elastic manner but database latencies have proven difficult. To help meet this challenge, JPL’s missions and its Office of the CIO prototyped the new EBS Provisioned IOPS capability to provision flexible compute capacity and overcome database latency restrictions. The results were highly successful and the release of EBS Provisioned IOPS, coupled with Amazon EC2 High I/O SSD-based instances, will introduce a whole new realm of I/O intensive scientific applications for JPL from radar data processing to the quest of black holes.
Stratalux is a leader in building and managing tailored cloud solutions for customers of all sizes. “A common request we see from both our large and small customers is the need to support high performance database applications. Throughput consistency is critical for these workloads,” said Jeremy Przygode, CEO at Stratalux. “Based on positive results in our early testing, the combination of EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances will enable our customers to consistently scale their database applications to thousands of IOPS, enabling us to increase the number of I/O intensive workloads we support.”
Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes are currently available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), EU-West (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Japan) regions with additional Region launches coming soon.
Box, Dropbox Coming of Age? Ready to Take on Amazon?
“Two of the buzziest competitors in cloud computing are settling into coexistence — and maybe figuring out ways to take on the giant in the market, Amazon.com.”
That’s the lead of a New York Times Bits column today that arrives on the heels of the news that Box has a new round of VC funding to the tune of$125 Million.
“Like its competitor Dropbox, Box offers a little bit of data storage free, then charges for additional amounts. Both companies make money from a relatively small number of paying customers who need large amounts of storage. Mr. Levie said Box has about 125,000 businesses using its service, but only “tens of thousands” of paying customers.
Despite being in the same business, the two companies seem to be finding entirely different customer bases. While Dropbox has a corporate service, it recently announced capacity and pricing changes in its much larger consumer business, aimed at encouraging people to store things like photos taken with cell phones.”
Netflix Chaos Monkeys: “If You Love Something Set It Free”
Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey AWS “test-by-failure” tool as open source for all to use. The tool seeks to improve the resilience if the Netflix AWS cloud by forcing failure.
“We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach.
We have written about our Simian Army in the past and we are now proud to announce that the source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey, is available to the community. Do you think your applications can handle a troop of mischievous monkeys loose in your infrastructure? Now you can find out.”
Read the announcement post.
Google Compute Engine and Cloud Video Transcoding — How Does it Compare?
Zencoder performed some initial comparison tests of Google Compute Engine versus Amazon EC2 for transfering and transcoding video.
“On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.”
Here’s one of their resulting charts:
Read the full post for details.
AWS Outage Postmortum: “the generators did not pick up the load”
Amazon has provided their take on how the big derecho storm that hit the Eastern US (and still leaves millions without power during a heat wave) brought down one of their data centers. Basically it was “hardware failure” — in this case a couple of emergency generators.
In the single datacenter that did not successfully transfer to the generator backup, all servers continued to operate normally on Uninterruptable Power Supply (“UPS”) power. As onsite personnel worked to stabilize the primary and backup power generators, the UPS systems were depleting and servers began losing power at 8:04pm PDT.
Read the AWS statement for more detail.
