Posts Tagged Amazon

Google Apps Engine - A Route To Acquisition?

Nov 7

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 2 Comments

Up until recently I hadn’t payed much attention to Google Apps Engine. Last month I attended the Google Atmosphere event in London and got a quick run down on Apps Engine from one of the Google Engineers at one of the stalls, I have to say I was very impressed with what I saw.

Google Apps Engine is one of the Cloud Computing offerings in the rapidly emerging segment of PaaS (Platform as a Service). Other significant competitors in this arena are Salesforce.com with their Force.com platform, Amazon.com with their AWS (Amazon Web Service) offerings and Microsoft’s Azure. Interestingly, Google had invited both Amazon and Salesforce to present at the Google Atmosphere event while Microsoft were at their own event launching Windows 7.

Traditionally when you wanted to build and deploy Web Applications / Sites you had to arrange hosting, or worse deploy servers. This typically had to be in place before you touched a line of code and often times ended up being a messy, time consuming and expensive affair. Now with Google Apps Engine all you need is a Google account and the ability to use Python or Java. The best part is that its free for modest sized apps/sites (up to about 5 million page views per month) and has reasonable usage charges beyond that.

You do have to give consideration to what you are signing up for before you get started. Unlike developing your solution on a LAMP stack, your Google Apps Engine project isn’t going to be easily portable, you do retain ownership of all your data and can export this at any time to migrate it elsewhere, but bear in mind that the data is stored in what Google call “BigTable” database and is accessed via GQL (Google Query Language). GQL has a similar syntax to SQL but the underlying data is stored very differently.

Force.com, Amazon S3/SimpleDB or Microsoft Azure all present similar issues but you have to balance these concerns with the benefits of the platforms.

This is not a statistical fact but I suspect that the majority of web applications that are written are in the “throw away” category, that is that they are either never brought to completion, are not implemented if they are completed, are built as a pilot or are built for a finite short term purpose. Only a small percentage of applications that are launched ever run into the happy problem of scaling but if your application does fall into this category you don’t need to worry if its built on Google platform, you seamlessly get access to the vast resources Google runs its own business on. If on the other hand your application fell into the “throw-away” category you will have benefited because you didn’t wast time, resource or money worrying about the stack.

Some of the really nice benefits of the Google Apps Engine are the ability to seamlessly use most of the other Google service offerings via simple API calls, indexing, mail, docs, image manipulation, Google Talk and Google Maps to name a few.

Additionally I have seen a good deal of discussion on, what I consider to be a plausible argument that Google will be on the market to buy successful and innovative applications / companies that use the Google Apps Engine. Google is renowned for its preference to buy early stage start-ups and after all if they buy a company that has deployed a successful app on its own engine, they will have little integration work to complete besides changing the name and the logo.

As always your thought and comments are appreciated.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Azure, Cloud Computing, EC2, Google, Google Apps, Google Apps Engine, PaaS

Google Atmosphere

Nov 1

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 3 Comments

Last week I was at Google’s Atmosphere event in London. The event was highly informative, entertaining and thought provoking with speakers ranging from Nicholoas Carr (Author: The Big Switch), Nikesh Arora(Google), Dr. Werner Vogels (Amazon), Dave Girouard (Google), Geoffrey Moore (Author: Crossing the Chasm), Marc Benniof (CEO & Founder Salesforce.com), Matthew Glotzbach (Google), Dr. Carsten Sorensen (LSE).

Below are the “Google Atmosphere Videos” from the day which I would recommend watching if you have the time.

Google Atmosphere Highlights

Google Atmosphere Opening Video

Google Atmosphere Opening Session

Nikesh Arora, President of Global Sales and Business Development at Google, and Adrian Joseph, Managing Director Google Enterprise EMEA.

Nicholas Carr on Cloud Computing

Dr. Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon)

The Perfect Storm

On the panel: Dr Werner Vogels - CTO Amazon.com, Nicholas Carr - Author, The Big Switch, Paul Daugherty - Chief Technology Architect, Accenture, Dr. Carsten Sorensen - LSE

Panel - Risk and Reward

Marcello Cordioli - CIO, Permasteelisa, Olivier Carre-Pierrat - Infrastructures & Telecoms Director, Euromaster, Jeremy Vincent - CIO Jaguar Landrover, Claudio Umana - CIO, Fracarro, Jean-Francois Caenen - CTO, Cap Gemini France, Moderated by Guy Clapperton

Making Waves: Google Cloud Innovation

Nelson Mattos - VP EMEA Product & Engineering, Google and Matthew Glotzbach - Director of Product, Google take a look at innovations from the Google Enterprise team.

Panel - Collaboration in the Workplace

Paul Cheesbrough - CIO, Telegraph Media Group, Francois Blanc - CIO, Valeo, Todd Pierce - SVP & CIO, Genentech, Andy Beale - CIO, Guardian Media Group

Marc Benniof (Salesforce.com) on Cloud Computing

Focus on the Core by Geoffrey Moore

IT can help a business focusing on your core and increase innovation - After 3 decades of delivering systems of record, IT must focus on collaboration.

Fireside chat with Dave Girouard and Alan Eustace

An open forum with Alan Eustace - SVP, Engineering & Research and Dave Girouard - President, Google Enterprise. Chaired by Adrian Joseph - Managing Director, Google Enterprise, EMEA.

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Tags: Amazon, Atmosphere, AWS, Cloud Computing, Dr. Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore, GMail, Google, Google Apps, Google Wave, Nicholas Carr, PaaS, SaaS, SalesForce.com

Has Cloud Computing Killed The Operating System?

Oct 3

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 9 Comments

The Operating System originated as a common set of platform management abstractions, to free software developers from the complexity of managing hardware. To many of us that concept has become somewhat distant and when we think OS we usually think in terms of UI or GUI (Graphical User Interface). Most of the current generation of operating systems have become exceedingly bloated primarily because, their creators have been pushing the notion of the OS as a competitive differentiator for many years.

In the early days computers had a single CPU and the obvious thing to do was to build an Operating System that could run many different applications, preferably at once. This created the need for more functionality to manage resources and also manage the applications themselves. Added to this, many OS vendors started to bundle even more widgets, gadgets and applications to their offerings and hey presto - it takes me several minutes to wait for my computer to start-up anytime I want to do anything, this despite the fact that all I want to do is get at Firefox.

My gut-feeling is that Cloud Computing is about to kill the operating system as we know it. The fatal blow has in-fact already been dealt but the demise will not likely be recognised for some time yet.

Desktop Operating Systems

With increasing adoption of Cloud Computing and SaaS it seems to me that, increasingly the tasks I want to complete on a computer are presented to me in a browser. My browser runs on top of my operating system which has a bunch of features and complexity that I would rather forget about. In order to run my operating system with all its bells and whistles the hardware I have is, no doubt vastly over-specked - yet it still takes a number of minutes for me to get going every-time I start-up (Windows Vista in this case is shamefully bloated and slow).

Google recognised this frustration and in July of this year came out and announced its Google Chrome OS. My understanding of Chrome OS is that, in essence it will be a stripped out and hardened Linux Kernel with the ability to run a browser and little or no extra functionality. Google claim they will have users up and running in seconds and promise an end to security vulnerabilities, viruses and malware. This sounds like a good proposition to me - and it will be free, better again.

Meanwhile Microsoft came out and told the world about its research on Gazelle. Gazelle is a research program Microsoft are running under the title “The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser”. Its interesting that Microsoft’s approach is still underpinned by Windows 7, which I admit I haven’t seen or tested yet, but I have my concerns about its bloat-factor having observed many new Microsoft OSes over many years.

I am not aware of significant research efforts by other companies into offerings that will compete head-on with Goggle’s Chrome OS or Gazelle, however many Linux OSes are very nicely placed to jump into this changing eco-system and capture significant market share. In my view there are three primary reasons that have, thus far stopped Linux from taking a much more significant desktop market share;

The Ugly Factor

The inability to install and support mainstream applications

The lack of branding and consumer awareness

Breaking this down a little bit, most Linux OSes are extremely robust and efficient platforms, the GUI in most instances runs as an added application but in my view is pug ugly. So simply by removing the GUI app and running your choice of browser directly on the OS possibly provides a realistic alternative. As mentioned previously, most of what today’s and tomorrows users require is presented to them in a browser, so why bother with the rest of the OS? I guess this is what Google are doing with Chrome OS - but with independent Linux offerings users are not necessarily tied to a specific browser. The problem of installing mainstream applications is quickly disappearing with browser delivered SaaS models, and finally the branding issue? Perhaps there is room here for Firefox, who have a very significant browser market share compared to the resources available to them to jump in and disrupt the market?

So in conclusion, perhaps the Desktop Operating System isnt whats under threat here, maybe we will see the OS going all the way back to its roots again becoming a set of platform management abstractions. Maybe then its the GUI that is at stake? This could explain why Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO) recently went on the offensive talking trash about the Google Chrome OS and Apples Safari browser, calling them “rounding errors”. In the same breath he also noted that Mozilla’s Firefox was (in the browser market) the most successful so-far. Evidently what is really upsetting Balmer is Google’s recent announcement of its “Internet Explorer Chrome Frame Plug-in”, this according to Balmer is Google replacing Microsoft’s browser rendering engine without telling you, and he calls it an “unanticipated competitive attack factor”.

Microsoft after-all has reason to be concerned, there is a lot at stake here, in their fiscal year 2009 they had revenues of almost $15 Billion from selling their Operating Systems. 80% of which was received from OEM’s (computer manufacturers who bundle windows on their products). If there were to be any significant shift in this pattern it would have an immediate impact on what appears to be Microsoft’s most profitable business line. Additionally the broad market penetration of Windows Desktops eases the way for many of Microsoft’s other products.

Server Operating Systems

Over on the server OS front there is likely to be an even more interesting evolution over time. While many IT Departments and Hosting Companies have for the past couple of years put significant investment of time and resources into virtualising their server infrastructure, little has changed because most of this virtualisation still uses the principle of running a single Server OS on a single virtual machine (basically swapping bare-metal for VM’s).

On the Cloud Computing front Amazon offers an excellent alternative to in-house virtualisation with its EC2 offering and recent analysis by Guy Rosen estimates the number of Amazon EC2 instances launched daily in their us-east-1 region at 50,000 (bear in mind that this is only one of a handful of regions for Amazon EC2).

However many commentators are predicting that Virtual Machines and even Amazons EC2 are only a stop-gap measure on our way to something completely different. The argument is that the Operating System as the owner of a single servers hardware (either bare-metal or virtualised) will lose dominance over time as the the abstractions of computing, storage and networking that enable resource pooling, multi-tenancy, high availability, dynamic workload balancing and the other benefits that arise from a virtualised infrastructure become a reality.

This concept is already taking root with a number of vendors. Noteably Microsoft’s Azure platform decouples the infrastructure completely from the application layer providing flexible virtualised compute, storage and networking capabilities for developers. Currently Azure only supports .NET but as I understand it, support for Ruby-on-Rails, Python and PHP will be added in the near future. Over at Amazon there are 2 services in this category that are also gaining traction, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, SimpleDB is a virtualised database service and S3 is a storage service.

With all these compute, networking database and storage resources being presented to us as virtual layers and the availability of other major cloud computing offerings such as Google Apps, SalesForce.com, etc., etc., it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to see where the traditional server operating system fits into the IT puzzle of the future.

As always, your comments are welcome.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Azure, Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft, PaaS, S3, SaaS, SalesForce.com, SimpleDB, VM Ware

Will Cloud Computing Define Your I.T. Career?

Jul 11

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 7 Comments

Despite what many people neatly ignore and categorize as “hype”, cloud computing is slowly but steadily gaining ground. Surprisingly, a recent Rack Space survey indicated that 67% of small business and 47% of mid sized businesses in the U.K. were not familiar with the term “cloud computing”. I am guessing here but, I think the reason that so many IT professionals are not yet familiar with this technology shift is simply down to the fact that they are swamped.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the current economic headwinds haven’t dampened the insatiable appetite for computer storage space and resources and with tighter budgets many I.T. folks are running flat out on daily tasks and are thus fully occupied in maintenance mode, this doesn’t leave any time to take a step back and consider strategic directions for the medium and long term. I have also seen some evidence to suggest that cloud computing is actively being resisted or ignored because some I.T. practitioners see it as a threat to their jobs. I can certainly understand the sentiment, after all, would you walk into your boss’s office and say;

Ever hear of cloud computing?

“hey boss!, you know all this money you pay me to keep all these systems going and all the money we spend on technology, what would you say if I told you that you don’t need to pay me any more and you can buy the same services for a fraction of the cost using this thing called cloud computing?”

Interesting scenario, huh?

In reality this situation is nothing new in I.T., as always, the technology keeps changing and getting cheaper, and tasks that start out requiring specialist I.T. skills to complete soon become mainstream, get packaged with proper user friendly interfaces and are passed off to consumers and end users to take care of themselves. In the greater scheme of things, its not that long ago that I.T. professionals were paid to take a computer out of a box and plug it in, or when an I.T. guru was required to plug a modem into a P.C. and setup an internet connection for an end user. A typical end user today is capable of doing as much (or more) as many I.T. professionals just a decade ago. Think about it, most users today can go down to their local P.C. store, buy their equipment, setup home networks, connect to the internet and create or update their web-pages / blogs or social network profiles, etc.

One interesting trend over the past number of years has been the divergence between what has been seen as corporate systems and consumer systems. For example, most corporates have adopted Microsoft Exchange or Lotus notes as messaging systems while consumers have tended to opt for Yahoo, HotMail or Google Mail. Anyone familiar with implementing and maintaining corporate messaging systems will be well aware of the complexity and cost of this endeavor and most end users don’t understand why they are restricted to small storage limits at work, especially when they can get 50 or 100 times more storage space on their personal email systems. Similar examples can be found all across the spectrum of enterprise systems. The easy (and often free) availability of consumer systems combined with restrictions imposed on end users by corporate I.T. has ignited a trend where many users tend to circumvent corporate systems in favour of their personal services.

Meanwhile there has been something else very interesting happening in the divergent paths between corporate and consumer technology / systems. While corporate systems have in my view been getting more and more complex, costly and bloated, consumer systems have become far more simple and usable. Take the example of Google Docs V’s Microsoft Office, I have used office for many years and like most everyone else, upgraded to the latest version (2007) as soon as it became available. In honesty I find the newer MS Office experience very frustrating because of a number of things including, changed file formats (I have to be mindful when sending documents to others who may not be able to open them) and a whole bunch of new complexity and features that I don’t need, want or use, added to this is the fact that I have to email myself documents to take them from home to work (or vice versa) and I frequently run into versioning problems with documents stored in many places. More recently I have started using Google Docs, Its free, simple, intuitive and I can get at my documents from wherever I go, looking through the menus I can appreciate that the functionality is far more limited than Microsoft Word, but I haven’t yet found anything limiting about it. I have stopped bringing a laptop with me when I travel and instead tend to do everything I want through an internet browser.

This all brings me to the point where I am wondering if we, as an I.T. community need to “press the reset button”?

Are we really adding value to the organisations which we serve or are we so immersed in what we do, that we simply keep blindly doing what we have always done? I appreciate that every organisation is different and many companies need to run very specialist and perhaps niche applications, however, I also believe that the great majority of corporate computer users have been given tools that are, outdated, bloated and not easy or friendly to use. To add insult to injury, we continue to invest heavily in time and money to keep many of these systems alive while users circumvent these systems and embrace technologies and services that we should probably be embracing instead of resisting.

This brings me to the main point I wanted to make, if the I.T. community continues to resist (or ignore) the adoption of cloud computing (where it makes sense), how long do you think it will take before the I.T. department and the people working in I.T. are bypassed and become irrelevant within a company? Many core services that I.T. departments provide to a company are now available to savvy end users who can actually provision the services themselves and get better service at a better price. The same trend is rapidly emerging in more significant ways, particularly in provisioning virtual servers on Amazon AWS, All you need now to setup a server farm is a credit card and a web browser.

It is my belief that we need to re-examine and understand what our users actually want to achieve. After all, does your boss, or the average employee at your company really care what server hardware you use? or what type, let alone what version of a particular type of software you use? I don’t think so! Most people just want to do their day jobs and not wrestle with the systems they use.

In conclusion, my advice would be to look around at the various different solutions you can use to help simplify your users life and pluck up the courage to walk into your boss’s office and suggest how you can make your I.T. department, your systems and your users a whole lot more efficient while simplifying the technology and reducing costs. Wouldn’t it be better for you to suggest this to your boss today, as opposed to him/her telling you that he/she has done this in six months time?

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, EC2, Google, Google Apps, Google Wave, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange

A new way of working

Jun 24

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing, Future Web | 2 Comments

In my last post I outlined the direction that the technology behind cloud computing is heading. This time I would like to talk briefly about a few of the more down to earth changes that the emergence of cloud computing will have and the social impact that will result.

I believe that we are at the precipice of a whole new way of working. Traditional thinking suggests that once we have completed our education we go out and get a job. For my parent’s generation the objective was to secure a job for life, me and my generation took a different take on that and a good deal of people my age change jobs on average every three to five years. I think that a good deal of the next generation will not necessarily hold down regular jobs in the same way that we do today.

Before I dive right into justifying this argument consider a few changes that have happened in the past and think about how they might help us predict what is going to happen in the future.

As the standard (and cost) of living increased in Western Europe and North America the cost of manufacturing spiralled and many companies relocated labour intensive / low margin operations to Asian countries, principally China. These companies typically continued their design and research & development at their headquarters.

More recently there was a huge rush for companies to engage B.P.O.’s (Business Process Outsourcers) to offload some of the non-core processes that were typically carried out in-house. Typically the B.P.O.’s were located in India and did the work at a fraction of the cost. While there is still significant debate over the success of many B.P.O. initiatives, the reality is that there are nearly two million people employed in India today in the industry. In fact the B.P.O. industry in India is so successful that skills shortages, 20% annual wage inflation and skyrocketing real estate & infrastructure costs are threatening the competitiveness of India as a destination of choice for outsourcing. Considering that the companies that provide these services must also charge a margin on the services the cost justification for traditional B.P.O. is diminishing fast.

I can’t remember who coined the expression “we don’t go to work anymore - we just work”, but it wraps up nicely the way I see things moving. Remote working has been on the table for several years but it has been fraught with difficulties, not least of which has been connectivity and security. Consider the impact cloud computing has on this, because the platforms and software are now on the cloud and accessible over the internet it is possible for anyone with a broadband connection to access their systems with the same performance that they would have in the office.

The fact that we are currently in a global recession and unemployment has risen sharply doesn’t necessarily mean that companies don’t have plenty of tasks and projects they want to undertake - it is probably more down to restrictive budgets and commitment avoidance (not wanting to commit to employment contracts). There are many people who have come out of traditional employment are now freelancing and doing task based assignments for companies all over the world.

Some of the facilitators behind this are companies like ODesk, Elance and Guru. These companies provide a marketplace for companies who need to get projects done, and people with the skills to undertake the project work come to bid on the assignments. The geographical limits of traditional employment are no longer a factor with this approach.

While these sites currently cater primarily for the IT market, I think it is only a matter of time before there is much broader adoption of this model in other sectors.

Starting a small business has typically had a number of barriers to entry. The biggest barrier has typically been the range of skills needed to take a good idea and turn it into a tangible product or service. Typically most people starting out in business can’t afford to hire all the skills / buy all the equipment needed to compete with established players. Cloud computing, PaaS (platform as a service) and WaaS (workforce as a service) have changed this. Say for example I wanted setup a business to publish a magazine - what would I need?

Editors, Journalists, Copywriters, Photographers, Printers, Marketers, IT Staff, Accountants, Premises, Printing Presses, Distribution & Warehousing, Servers etc, etc……

I would probably do a little a little mental arithmetic and give up.

However, with the introduction of all the services I can now get on the web, and the cloud, I can now setup my servers on Amazon AWS, buy my images from Getty Images, Hire my editors, journalists and copywriters on ODesk, get my IT support from Guru and get MagCloud to print and deliver my magazines. The same type of scenario is also becoming a reality if I want to design and manufacture consumer goods, there are services coming on stream everyday where providers will design and manufacture nearly anything for you.

From an individuals standpoint there are immense opportunities to become part of many of these service offerings, or for the entrepreneur the availability of skills, talent and services, “on-tap” provides unprecedented opportunities.

I certainly think the future is looking very bright and exciting.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, Employment, Guru, ODesk

The Future of Cloud Computing

Jun 16

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing, Future Web | 1 Comment

I have seen a good deal of commentary lately on cloud computing where people (who should be “in the know”) have put forward opinions that cloud computing is hosting by another name.

To put the record straight, yes you can use cloud computing as an alternative means of traditional server or website hosting, but it is so much more than that. Unlike traditional hosting arrangements cloud computing offers many different layers and opportunities right now, and many new layers and opportunities are either just unfolding or yet to be discovered.

We are all familiar with SaaS (Software as a Service). Well Cloud Computing readily provides the ability to use the cloud as PaaS (Platform as a Service). One of the massive benefits of Cloud Computing is the flexible infrastructural platform it provides and the ability to change computing resource from a capital intensive / skills intensive investment into a utility. Just like your electricity or gas supply, plug in and pay for as much or little as you use.

There are a number of industry heavy-weights investing heavily right now in cloud computing, including Amazon, IBM, Google, HP, Dell, Microsoft & Others. All of these providers currently have their efforts concentrated on providing standalone public clouds. Meanwhile VM Ware, and Red Hat are currently offering customers the ability to build private cloud computing platforms.

My view is that cloud computing platforms will soon reach a tipping point where it will no longer be at the cutting edge but instead will be the de-facto mechanism used for providing computing resources. However, in order for this to happen there is one significant hurdle overcome first, that is, the ability for all the public and private clouds to interconnect seamlessly. Consider it the “Inter-Cloud”. For a comparison consider the growth of the internet, firstly there were a bunch of private networks that were not connected to each other, then with the emergence of the internet private networks began to connect to the internet using gateways. Before too long the emergence and broad adoption of standard protocols (TCP/IP) eliminated the requirement for gateways and everything became connected to everything. Something similar is inevitable for cloud computing and it is probably going to happen sooner than you think.

One technology to watch here is Red Hats MRG. MRG stands for Messaging Real-Time Grid and is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing. With technologies like MRG, Cloud Computing Consultants can now offer clients incredible computing power from existing server and desktop inventory by enabling scheduling to local and remote grids, rented cloud capacity and cycle-stealing from desktop PCs.

This is the start of something big, next time I post I will outline some very specific ideas I have on how these changes not only affect the IT industry but are also going to have a dramatic affect on how the world works.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, Dell, EC2, Google, HP, Microsoft, MRG, PaaS, Red Hat, SaaS, VM Ware

Weather Forecast For Cloud Computing Consultants

Jun 1

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | 3 Comments

There has been a great deal of talk about cloud computing over the past year or two. It seems ironic to me that the recession has slowed down the pace of adoption of this technology because, amongst many other benefits, cloud computing can and will save organisations millions in their IT budgets.

The difficulty seems to stem from an understandable reluctance of many IT departments and companies to commit to making what seems like a non-essential investment while the recession looms large.

There are conflicting reports from the Analysts about where cloud computing is going, Merrill Lynch estimates that within the next five years, the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion. Meanwhile in a Goldman Sachs survey less than 2 percent of the respondents (CIO’s) said cloud computing was a priority. For what its worth, my opinion is that cloud computing will be mainstream within the next two to three years and many companies will forego capital expenditure in favour of the utility server model.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, said technologies like cloud computing deployments may slow down. “The message here is CIOs are looking primarily to tested, well-understood technologies that can result in savings or increased business efficiencies whose support can be argued from a financial point of view,”.

It does seem that CIOs and business executives don’t understand the value and cost benefits of cloud computing. Perhaps then IT consultants need to take a step backwards and focus on what will grab the attention of IT leaders - “Cost Cutting” (yes its a dirty word but hey!!!). After all, the recession hasnt dampned the need for more computing power, storage and connectivity.

My advice is, if you are an IT consultant, go out and educate your clients on the many benefits of cloud computing and help them to understand that it is a win-win proposition. If you suceed, not only will you be helping your clients save money, cut carbon emmisions and get incredible flexibility, you will also probably fill your diary for years to come.

Cloud Computing(WikiPedia)

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing

Why Amazon is one of the most important IT Companies right now

May 30

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | No Comments

When most people think Amazon they think “on-line book store”, however over the last couple of years Amazon has been silently positioning itself as one of the industry leaders in Cloud Computing.

Amazon is currently offering a number of services under the umbrella of Amazon Web Services. The services include;

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing scalable virtual private servers using Xen.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing persistent block level storage volumes for EC2.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), providing Web Service based storage for applications.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), providing a hosted message queue for web applications.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), managing small units of work distributed amongst many people.
Alexa Web Services, providing traffic data, thumbnails, and other information about web sites.
Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S, formerly Amazon E-Commerce Service or ECS), providing access to Amazon’s product data and electronic commerce functionality.
Amazon Historical Pricing, providing access to Amazon’s historical sales data from its affiliates.
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS), currently in limited beta[2], provides an interface for micropayments.
Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.
Amazon SimpleDB, currently in limited beta, allows developers to run queries on structured data. It operates in concert with EC2 and S3 to provide “the core functionality of a database.”[3]
Amazon AWS Authentication is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service provides a programmatic API for sellers to ship items to and from Amazon using Fulfillment By Amazon.
Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects stored in S3 to so-called “edge locations” near the requester.
AWS Management Console (AWS Console), A web-based point and click interface to manage and monitor the Amazon infrastructure suite including but not limited to EC2, EBS, S3, and SQS.

I think EC2 is one of the most exciting offerings here.

I have been using EC2 for nearly a year now and I have to say I think it is a game-changing service. In simple terms it enables anyone to get access to as much or as little server capacity as you want or need. Once setup correctly it is a couple of mouse clicks to add as many servers as you want.

The cost is very competitive too - based on the assumption that an entry level server has a lifespan of 3 years and needs 300 watts of power to run (+another 300 watts to cool) the comparrisson is roughly as follows;

Traditional Server cost €2,500

Electricity .6Kwh X 26,280 = 15,768 Kwh @€.020 = €3,153

Total Cost €5,653 for 3 years (€157 per month)

Amazon Server Cost 26,280 hours @ US$0.10/h = US$2,628 (€1,946) for 3 years (€54 per month)

There is also a cheaper way of using this called reserved instances. This involves a $500 once off payment and a discount rate of $0.03/hour - that brings the cost down to (€954) for 3 years (€27 per month).

All these calculations are based on the “small instance”

The other point to note here is that you can bring these servers up and down at the click of a mouse, so say for example if you have a business with peak requirements at a given time of year you can temporarily buy extra resources and switch them off when they are no longer required.

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, EC2

Blue Skies For Clouds Computing?

Jun 30

Posted by Finbarr McCarthy in Cloud Computing | No Comments

Increasingly companies are realising the vast potential cloud computing has to offer. Like many others the New York Times has recently created a new website which gives users a fully searchable archive of all the articles it published between 1851 and 1922, that’s about 13 million articles.

More impressively, it has done this without installing any new servers or bandwidth.

How did they do this? Simple! They used Amazons cloud computing service offering.

Cloud computing is one of the most promising new uses of technology we have seen in a long time. Just a few years ago if you wanted to do something on the web, you needed to go out and buy servers, software, etc - get it all connected to the internet and then start worrying about your project.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the usage of “The Network as a Platform” this has all changed. Cloud computing has the nice advantage of having software, hardware and bandwidth as a pay as you go service.

Many organisations are now looking at cloud computing and realising that it makes a lot of sense, instead of having to dedicate precious resources keeping their own data centres running they can opt to pay someone like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Dell a modest fee to worry about keeping all the hardware, infrastructure and software running 24/7 for them.

It probably works out a lot greener and less expensive too. Traditionally companies scaled their data centers and bandwidth to deal with their busiest periods. This often meant way over specified connections and processing power that was well under utilised 95% or more of the time. As we all know, servers running waiting for someone to use them cost us all a lot in terms of money and carbon footprint.

Google has been a big proponent of this technology, providing services like GMail, and it Google Apps which provide email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and storage to any web connect device - no software required.

Since Google launched it enterprise apps in early 2007 it has already in excess of half a million subscribers using the service. Microsoft has just followed suit launching “Office Live” and Microsoft On-Line.

These are excellent tools for individuals and small businesses who don’t want to invest in all the software, servers and data centers typically required to run simple tasks like email and word processing.

But what about larger enterprises? It is true that there is some resistance to implementing these services, however, take Coca Cola for example; It has recently signed a deal with Microsoft that will effectively move all it email and documents off its own network and onto Microsoft Live.

There are some concerns about security and data sensitivity, after all if you embrace cloud computing you do need to trust the company providing you with this service and ultimately that is going to be an individual call for each company.

Trust me, this is one of the biggest developments since the sliced pan.

www.amazon.com/aws

www.google.com/apps

http://www.officelive.com/

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Tags: Amazon, AWS, Cloud Computing, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0

Finbarr McCarthy

Cloud Computing & Social Media (Technologies of The Future)

Posts Tagged Amazon

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