Category Archives: Amazon AWS

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Cloud computing, Data center, Google

Amazon, Google: a Battle to Dominate the Cloud

The cloud is just a vast mass of computers connected to the internet, on which people or companies can rent processing power or data storage as they need it.

All the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research—some six times Google and Amazon’s combined annual revenue last year.

When that time comes, all the world’s business IT needs will be delivered as a service, like electricity; you won’t much care where it was generated, as long as the supply is reliable.

Way back in 2006, Amazon had the foresight to start renting out portions of its own, already substantial cloud—the data centers on which it was running Amazon.com—to startups that wanted to pay for servers by the hour, instead of renting them individually, as was typical at the time. Because Amazon was so early, and so aggressive—it has lowered prices for its cloud services 42 times since first unveiling them, according to the company—it first defined and then swallowed whole the market for cloud computing and storage.

Even though Amazon’s external cloud business is much bigger than Google’s, Google still has the biggest total cloud infrastructure—the most servers and data centers. Tests of Amazon’s and Google’s clouds show that by one measure at least—how fast data is transferred from one virtual computer to another inside the cloud—Google’s cloud is seven to nine times faster than Amazon’s.

The question is, is Amazon’s lead insurmountable?

 

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Opinion

A Big, Perhaps Watershed Week of Cloud Annoucements

  • Google harmonized its cloud computing business to a single entity, with a pricing model intended to hold customers by enticing them to build ever cheaper and more complex software. 
  • Cisco announced it would spend $1 billion on a “cloud of clouds” project. 
  • Microsoft’s new CEO made his first big public appearance, offering Office for the Apple iPad, partly as a way to sell more of its cloud-based Office 365 product.
  • Amazon Web Services announced the general release of its cloud-based desktop computing business, as well as a deal with to offer cloud-based enterprise software tools to industries like healthcare and manufacturing.

For more detail and opinions read this, and listen to this.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, GitHub

Developers Hit With Big, Unexpected AWS Bills, Thousands on GitHub Exposed

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is urging developers using the code sharing site GitHub to check their posts to ensure they haven’t inadvertently exposed their log-in credentials.

When opening an account, users are told to “store the keys in a secure location” and are warned that the key needs to remain “confidential in order to protect your account”. However, a search on GitHub reveals thousands of results where code containing AWS secret keys can be found in plain text, which means anyone can access those accounts.

From a security perspective it means they can basically go in and gain access to any of the files that are stored in the AWS account.

According to an AWS statement,  ”When we become aware of potentially exposed credentials, we proactively notify the affected customers and provide guidance on how to secure their access keys,”

There is more detail (and some cautionary tales involving big, and unexpected, AWS bills) here.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Web Service, AWS, Glacier, Storage

Cloud Mystery: What’s the Tech Secret Behind Amazon Glacier?

ITProPortal has a good writeup on Amazon Glacier technology: tape? cheap disks they power down? It’s more than just a post filled with wild speculation because it includes informed reasoning on the current state of the art for each of the candidate technologies behind Glacier:

…of all the services offered by AWS, none have fuelled the same level of speculation and interest as Amazon’s Glacier. Though the service is well-known and widely-used in enterprise, no one knows exactly what’s behind it.

Amazon has retained a thick veil of secrecy around its most mysterious web service. The Seattle-based company has always kept the processes behind its services fairly quiet, but the omerta surrounding Glacier has been especially strict, leaving experts in the tech community perplexed about what Amazon could be hiding.

TL;DR: It might be old-fashioned robot tape libraries; it might be cheap disks they fill up then turn off until they need them for retrieval; it might be some clever hybrid of the two.

Read the article.

Amazon AWS, Facebook, Google, Hardware, Magnetic storage, Open Compute Project, Opinion, Research, Seagate Technology, Storage, Tape library

Will Disks Using Shingled Magnetic Recording Kill Tape for Cold Storage?

We previously reported on the rumored Seagate/eVault “cold storage” tech initiative seeking to use disks to supplant tape libraries.

Now come this analysis from The Register.

We know Facebook’s Open Compute Project has a cold storage vault configuration using shingled magnetic recording drives. Both Google (mail backup and more) and Amazon (Glacier) have tape vaults in their storage estate. Shingled drives could change that equation because, probably, the cost/GB of a 6TB shingled drive is a lot less that that of a 4TB drive and, over, say, 500,000 drives, that saving turns into a big sum of dollars.

What are shingled drives, you ask? This video from Seagate explains:

Amazon AWS, EVault, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Magnetic storage, Seagate, Seagate Technology, Storage

Seagate’s eVault Reportedly Developing New “Cold Storage” Tech to Compete with AWS Glacier

Very interesting, though somewhat speculative, article today in The Register that outlines some new technology that may make a disk-based competitor to Amazon’s Glacier as cheap but faster:

“EVault, according to our storage gossips, is going to use disks, next-generation slow and energy-efficient drives from parent Seagate, probably shingled magnetic recording drives, and thus be able to generate restores which are potentially faster than those achieved on Glacier.”

For details and full-on speculation, read the article.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Azure, Cloud Storage, File hosting service, Google, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Storage, Venture Funding

Nirvanix Shutdown: Collateral Damage in Big Players’ Price War?

The sudden shutdown of Nirvanix, an early but recently faltering participant in the “pure-play” Online Storage space dominated by the likes of AWS S3, Microsoft Azure and Google, is in large part a result of downward pressure on prices as the big players continually lower theirs. Amazon, for instance, launched S3 in 2006 and charged $0.15 per gigabyte-month. After many step-wise price cuts S3 is down to $0.095 per gigabyte-month.

Pure online storage is fast becoming the sole province of vendors who either enjoy economies of scale, or who treat their offerings as a loss-leader to get other business (or a combination of both).

Smaller players may have to add value in other ways to survive. Nirvanix was not profitable, and when their latest round of funding came up short it was the last nail in their coffin.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Glacier, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Riverbed Technology, Storage, Whitewater

Riverbed Upgrades Storage Appliances, Seeks to Leverage Amazon Glacier Backup

Riverbed Technology today announced it has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system. The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a critical component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.

Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10 gigabit networking interface that dramatically improves ingest performance.

Customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.

The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes[1] before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.

For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

Amazon AWS, Box, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, DropBox, GDrive, Google, Guest Post, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook.com, SearchYourCloud, SharePoint, Storage

Google, Amazon Outages a Real Threat For Those Who Rely On Cloud Storage

Guest Post by Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud.

It was only for a few minutes, however Google was down. This follows hot on the heels of the other major cloud provider Amazon being down for a couple of hours earlier in August. This even relatively short outage could be a real problem for organizations that rely on these services to store their enterprise information. I am not a great lover of multi-device synchronization, I mean all those versions kicking around your systems! However if done well, it could be one of the technologies that help save ‘Cloud Stores’ from the idiosyncrasies of the Internet and a connected life.

We seem to be currently in the silly season of outages, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all stating that their problems were cause by a switch being replaced or an update going wrong.

These outages may seem small for the supplier. But they are massive for the customer, who is unable to access sales data or invoices for a few hours.

This however, should not stop people using these services. But it should make them shop around, and look at what is really on offer. A service that does not have synchronization may well sound great. But if you do not have a local copy of your document on the device that you are actually working on, and your connection goes down, for whatever reason, then your work will stop.

SearchYourCloud Inc. has recently launched SearchYourCloud, a new application that enables people to securely find and access information stored in Dropbox, Box, GDrive, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint or Outlook.com with a single search. Using either a Windows PC or any IOS device, SearchYourCloud will also be available for other clouds later in the year.

SearchYourCloud enables users to not only find what they are searching for, but also protects their data and privacy in the cloud.

Simon Bain

Simon Bain is Chief Architect and CEO of SearchYourCloud, and also serves on the Board of the Sun Microsystems User Group.