Category Archives: AWS

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Eureka, Load Balancing, Multitier architecture, Netflix, Open Source, Tools

Netflix Open Sources its Eureka Load Balancing Tool for AWS

Netflix has moved its Eureka mid-tier load-balancing tool, formerly known as the Netflix Discovery Service, to open source.Eureka Architecture Diagram

From the Netflix announcement of the move:

Eureka is a REST based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers. We call this service, the Eureka Server. Eureka also comes with a java-based client component, the Eureka Client, which makes interactions with the service much easier. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. At Netflix, a much more sophisticated load balancer wraps Eureka to provide weighted load balancing based on several factors like traffic, resource usage, error conditions etc to provide superior resiliency. We have previously referred to Eureka as the Netflix discovery service.


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Service, AWS, KnowYourCloud Analytics, Newvem, Reserved Instances, Tools

Newvem Launches New Tool to Help Amazon Web Services Customers Make Sense of Reserved Instances

 

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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, Amazon AWS, Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Web Services, AWS, High Performance Computing, IOPS, Storage

Amazon Web Services Launches High Performance Storage Option for Amazon Elastic Block Store

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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.


Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Service, Amazon.com, AWS, Data center, Emergency power system, Outage Alert

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.


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, New York Times, Outage Alert

Eastern US Storms Also Disrupted the Technology Cloud

The New York Times has an interesting article on new concerns over Cloud Computing (that is to say, AWS) reliability in the wake of recent outages caused by the weather.

The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.

As someone who was involved during the pre-cloud era in private data centers and later colocation facilities for startups, small and medium-sized companies, I have a question:

Does anyone really think they can do any better on their own?

Read the article.


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, MySAP All-in-One, Partnerships, SAP, Windows Server 2008 R2

AWS, SAP Announce Cost-saving AWS Infrastructure for SAP Business All-in-One Solutions

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Amazon Web Services today announced the expansion of SAP certified solutions on AWS including SAP Business All-in-One solutions for both Linux and Windows, and expanded certification for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions to include Windows Server 2008 R2. Today’s announcements provide customers the flexibility to rapidly deploy SAP solutions on the scalable, on-demand AWS platform without making long-term commitments or costly capital expenditures for their underlying infrastructure. As more enterprises seek to understand cost savings of cloud deployments, Germany based consulting firm, VMS AG has also announced industry research that finds running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69% compared to the same solution on-premises. For more information on deploying SAP solutions on AWS as well as detailed research on infrastructure cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sap

“LIONSGATE is a $2 billion diversified global entertainment corporation that produces feature films and television programming to a worldwide audience,” said Theresa Miller, Vice President, Information Technology, LIONSGATE. “Faced with IT challenges including expanding infrastructure and costs, and increased enterprise application workloads, LIONSGATE began using AWS in 2010 to avoid acquiring additional data center space, saving an estimated $1M+ over three years. Now utilizing SAP solutions in a Windows environment, LIONSGATE has migrated their SAP development, test and QA systems to run on the AWS cloud.”

Emergency Medicine Business Intelligence (EMBI) provides HIPAA compliant analytic tools for hospital emergency departments to monitor productivity, utilization and patient care. “Cloud computing allows hospitals the ability to buy mission critical software and hardware as a service instead of trying to manage demand internally,” said Scott Richards, CEO at EMBI. “Deploying SAP Business Objects BI solutions on AWS, with solution provider DecisionFirst, allows us to leverage industry-leading business intelligence toolsets to provide our customers web-based, on-demand, key performance metrics they need to manage their operations and business. With these solutions our emergency department clients are able to focus on providing a higher level of service to their customers.”

Merrifield Garden Center, one of the largest and most complete garden nurseries in the US, is using SAP Business All-in-One on AWS to manage inventory, purchasing and accounts. “Our IT operations were simply not keeping pace with the rapid growth of our business,” said Bryan Moore IT Director at Merrifield Garden Center. “Running our SAP Business All-in-One solution on AWS, with systems integrator Savantis and managed services provider Protera, provided dependable infrastructure and offered an affordable solution that enhanced security and the flexibility needed to scale up and scale down during seasonal demand swings.”

Leveraging its industry-leading intelligence VMS AG has developed detailed cost analysis of running SAP solutions on AWS using the best practices of more than 2,600 SAP environments. The research found infrastructure savings of up to 69%, on AWS, compared to an SAP Business All-in-One system running on-premises.

“Customers have experienced tremendous success when running their SAP applications on AWS,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Ecosystem and Channels, SAP. “Today’s announcement offers enterprises and midsized companies alike the flexibility to deploy SAP applications and analytics solutions quickly and scale up as the business grows.”

“We have seen a rapid increase in businesses deploying SAP solutions on AWS,” said Terry Wise, Director of AWS Worldwide Partner Ecosystem. “Whether it’s running SAP applications for development and testing or production applications, businesses can take advantage of the AWS pay-as-you-go model and quickly scale capacity both up and down as needed, paying only for the resources used.”

To learn more about cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://bit.ly/IVsXYI


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, CA ARCserve, CA Technologies

CA ARCserve Now Available on Amazon Web Services Marketplace

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CA Technologies today announced that CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that they need to build products and run their businesses. CA Technologies software products sold on AWS Marketplace are fulfilled on and billed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifying customer deployment of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D.

“AWS Marketplace offers IT buyers a great way to quickly zero in on the products they need to meet their business technology challenges,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management at CA Technologies. “By making CA ARCserve available on AWS Marketplace, CA Technologies is making it as easy as possible for customers to access a complete solution for protecting data across both conventional and cloud-based environments.”

Customers can purchase multiple data protection functionalities of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. They also can acquire the products through traditional licensing models.

“It’s a pleasure to work with CA Technologies and we are excited for their participation in AWS Marketplace,” said Terry Hanold, VP of New Business Initiatives at AWS. “Combining CA Technologies data protection products with AWS’s highly scalable, secure and flexible platform provides our joint customers an easy way to use CA ARCserve software on the AWS platform.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, CA ARCserve, CA Technologies

CA ARCserve Now Available on Amazon Web Services Marketplace

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CA Technologies today announced that CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that they need to build products and run their businesses. CA Technologies software products sold on AWS Marketplace are fulfilled on and billed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifying customer deployment of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D.

“AWS Marketplace offers IT buyers a great way to quickly zero in on the products they need to meet their business technology challenges,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management at CA Technologies. “By making CA ARCserve available on AWS Marketplace, CA Technologies is making it as easy as possible for customers to access a complete solution for protecting data across both conventional and cloud-based environments.”

Customers can purchase multiple data protection functionalities of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. They also can acquire the products through traditional licensing models.

“It’s a pleasure to work with CA Technologies and we are excited for their participation in AWS Marketplace,” said Terry Hanold, VP of New Business Initiatives at AWS. “Combining CA Technologies data protection products with AWS’s highly scalable, secure and flexible platform provides our joint customers an easy way to use CA ARCserve software on the AWS platform.”


Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, IT Management, Private Cloud, Saas, Software as a service

New AWS Marketplace Offers Pre-Configured Software for the AWS Cloud

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Amazon Web Services today launched AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses. Visitors to AWS Marketplace can use 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and pay only for what they use, by the hour or month, while benefiting from the scalable, flexible and on-demand features of AWS. With AWS Marketplace, software and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers with offerings that run on the AWS Cloud can benefit from increased customer awareness, simplified deployment, and automated billing. AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free IT and business software, including software infrastructure such as databases and application servers, developer tools, and business applications – available from popular vendors such as 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Zend, as well as many widely used open source offerings including Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress. To get started with AWS Marketplace please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

AWS Marketplace simplifies many of the traditional challenges software and SaaS companies face, such as acquiring customers, developing distribution channels, and billing for their software. With AWS Marketplace, a simple listing process makes it quick and easy to add products and expose them to AWS’s hundreds of thousands of active customers. Product prices are clearly stated and charges appear on the same bill as a customer’s other AWS services. Customers can quickly deploy products found in the marketplace and software providers can easily add billing to their products by specifying hourly or monthly charges, without undertaking costly code changes. Billing is managed by AWS Marketplace, relieving sellers of the responsibility of managing customer accounts and processing payments, and leaving software developers more time to focus on building great software.

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “AWS Marketplace makes it even easier to run software on AWS because you can find a wide variety of AWS ecosystem providers’ solutions, in one place, where much of the work involved in building and deploying solutions on top of AWS has already been done for you by these solutions providers.”

AWS is the leading cloud platform with a fast growing ecosystem of providers building solutions on top of the platform.

“Zend Application Fabric enables developers to confidently deploy fast, elastic and dependable PHP applications,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. “AWS Marketplace makes it simple for our customers to access Zend on the AWS cloud and pay only for the infrastructure needed to run their applications. By providing customers a single invoice for combined software and server capacity, businesses can operate more effectively than ever before.”

“AWS Marketplace provides companies like ours an opportunity to easily reach new customers,” said Carolee Gearhart, SAP’s National Vice President of OEM & Strategic Partner Group for North America. “We expect our customers will benefit from SAP’s robust BI functionality, while taking advantage of the quick deployment capabilities provided by AWS Marketplace.”

Customers can browse AWS Marketplace or learn more details about its features and benefits of AWS Marketplace by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.