It looks like Amazon Web Services may be launching a new workflow manager called SWF. First spotted by TechCrunch reader Michael Hood, SWF is listed as a service under AWS’ Free Usage Tier. Unfortunately, clicking on SWF takes you to a ’404′ page.
Upon further digging, it looks like SWF stands for ‘Amazon Simple Workflow Service.’ It basically starts, runs, and retains workflow executions, as well as schedules tasks, adds markers, receives signals, and starts timers for those workflow executions. According to the information listed, with the free usage tier, “1,000 Amazon SWF executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free.” → Read More
After launching distributed database DynamoDB last week, Amazon Web Services is debuting another product—AWS Storage Gateway, which is a service that provides enterprises with a new option to securely upload and backup data to the AWS cloud from on-premises software appliances.
Basically, the Gateway connect san on-premises software appliance with Amazon’s cloud-based storage for a more secure integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage infrastructure. Via the Gateway, data is uploaded to AWS, where it is encrypted and stored in the Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The Gateway provides a solution fir enterprises looking for effective backup and rapid disaster recovery between on-premise applications and the cloud.
Many government agencies have been slower to adopt the cloud because of the specific regulatory requirements, compliance issues and security regulations. To mitigate this, Amazon Web Services is launching AWS GovCloud, a new secure region specialized for U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud.
Amazon says that many government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations were not allowed to manage and store defense-related data in a cloud environment that could be accessed by anyone outside the U.S. → Read More
In 2009, Amazon launched the Virtual Private Cloud (also known as Amazon VPC), which makes it possible for customers to create their own isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection to a datacenter. This promises enterprise-level security. Today, Amazon Web Services is extended the functionality of VPC, allowing users to make their VPC directly accessible to the internet (bypassing the need for a VPN).
Users can actually specify which of their Amazon VPC resources they wish to make directly accessible to the Internet and which they do not. Customers have more control over the virtual networking environment, including selection of IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. → Read More
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business of Amazon.com, this morning announced a new offering dubbed AWS Elastic Beanstalk, aimed to simplify the deployment and management of AWS cloud applications developed by third parties.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed to let developers upload their application and then keep their hands off while the system automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring, although AWS points out that they can still access and fully control the underlying resources at any time.
Best part of the announcement is the price: there is no extra charge – customers pay only for the AWS resources needed to run their applications. → Read More
Looks like Amazon has reduced the storage costs on its popular Amazon Web Services’ “Simple Storage Service” (S3) yet again. As of November 1st, S3 users in the US Standard, EU – Ireland, and APAC – Singapore regions will be paying up to 19% less in overall monthly storage charges.
Along with these changes Amazon has also rejiggered its pricing tiers; adding a new tier at 1 Terabyte, and removing the 50-100 Terabyte tier, therefore extending the volume discounts to more users. → Read More
YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache’s open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work.
Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so “You don’t have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like.”
Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibilty, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device services, in essence “small companies with big data.” → Read More
Amazon Web Services this morning announced the general availability of AWS Import/Export for Amazon Simple Storage Service (aka S3), with a new web service interface that enables easy management of data transfers and migrations.
According to the press release, the new feature accelerates moving large amounts of data in and out using portable storage devices for transport. For large data sets, AWS Import/Export is said to be ‘significantly faster’ than transfers over the Internet. → Read More
You backup the data on your computer. Why not backup your data on the Web? That’s the basic premise of Backupify, a startup based in Louisville, Kentucky that backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Wordpress, Blogger, and YouTube.
Backupify, which was launched last June, just closed a $900,000 seed round of funding led by First Round Capital. Other investors included General Catalyst, Betaworks, as well as angel investors Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Andy Swan, and Bob Saunders. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting together TechCrunch50). Prior to this round, the company raised $125,000 in seed capital last summer from HubSpot co-founder Darmesh Shah (who is also a co-founder of Backupify) and other angels. → Read More
Wanna extend your existing IT infrastructure to the cloud? Amazon can help.
Amazon Web Services is today announcing the limited public beta of Virtual Private Cloud (aka Amazon VPC), a service that essentially makes it possible for customers to create their own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection. That means Amazon Web Services is taking a major step in making its cloud computing services even more enterprise-friendly than they already were.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has published a lengthy but read-worthy blog post for the occasion, in which he acknowledges that enterprises tend to find it challenging to transition applications and services to the cloud when they have often invested years of resources and tons of money setting up their own IT infrastructure (datacenters, networks, etc.). → Read More
Amazon Web Services just launched the beta version of Import/Export, a feature that lets users move large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS will transfer large data sets into Amazon S3 faster using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. Amazon says that AWS Import/Export can often be faster than the internet for large data sets and more cost effective than upgrading a user’s connectivity. The Import/Export feature, which costs $80.00 per storage device and $2.49 per data-loading-hour (Partial data-loading-hours are billed as full hours), can be used for data migration, offsite backup, direct data interchange (you can have data sent from outside sources directly to AWS to be imported into S3 buckets), and disaster recovery, which can be used when a business needs a large backup stored in Amazon S3 and can use AWS Import/Export to transfer the data to a portable storage device and deliver it to your site. Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, writes in a blog post that enterprises are steadily processing more and more data and Amazon’s new feature helps businesses to handle the challenges of these large data sets. Vogels also included a chart to show the time it takes to move large data sets over the internet: AWS also recently unveiled a suite of new and useful features for Amazon EC2 which will help users monitor cloud capacity, scale on demand, and spread incoming traffic across multiple web servers. CrunchBase Information Amazon Web Services Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Amazon Web Services unveiled a suite of new features for Amazon EC2 which will help users monitor cloud capacity, scale on demand, and spread incoming traffic across multiple web servers. Amazon originally announced these features last fall, but the applications didn’t enter public beta until today. The first feature, Amazon CloudWatch, provides customers with real-time visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. The metrics are rolled-up at one minute intervals and are retained for two weeks. Amazon’s scaling feature, Auto Scaling, allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to metrics you receive from CloudWatch. With Auto Scaling, you can make sure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Elastic Load Balancing will automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The feature will detect problem instances within a group and will automatically reroutes traffic to working instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Users can also implement “Health Checks” to figure out the viability of each instance via pings and URL fetches. The new features, which were added due to customer demand, are aimed to give EC2 customers greater visibility of the cloud while still being able to scale on demand, direct traffic and manage overloads easily. It appears that these features would be fairly useful for customers and definitely makes AWS a more powerful cloud computing platform. CrunchBase Information Amazon Web Services Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
McKinsey & Company released a report, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” today that claims that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study also says that while cloud computing is optimal for small and medium-sized businesses, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. Virtualization is the optimal way to go, says McKinsey, and by implementing virtualization in-house, corporations can reduce costs when factoring in depreciation and tax write-offs. Virtualization, which McKinsey says can boost server utilization to 18% from 10%, lets you treat one machine like many, by carving the servers into many virtual engines, so that software can maximize power from one machine and add scalability. Not only is this cost-effective for companies, but cloud computing takes advantage of virtualization.
The report makes some thought-provoking points but neglects to address a few key trends that are occurring in cloud server services. Innovation is rapidly changing in the cloud. The space is still very much a work in progress and big cloud computing services, like AWS, Google, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, are regularly coming out with different products. As these companies throw their hats into the “cloud computing ring,” AWS will face increased competition in the market and could cause prices to go down to fight for market share. → Read More
Slowly but surely, Amazon keeps adding capabilities to its cloud computing services. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). And today Amazon added a web-scale file system with Amazon Elastic MapReduce
This is actually a big deal because it allows developers to better take advantage of the massive computing power Amazon has to offer and create applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel. MapReduce is the name of the file system Google created to index and search the Web. It literally breaks up huge computational tasks and spreads them to different servers. This is called mapping the data. Once each processor is done with its portion of the math problem, it sends the result back so that all the different partial answers can be combined and then “reduced” into one final answer.
Amazon is using Hadoop, which is the open-source version of MapReduce. Yahoo also started using Hadoop last year. While Google and Yahoo use this technique for searching the Web, it can be used for any data-intensive computational problem → Read More
Earlier today, I sat in on a keynote presentation at Salesforce.com’s analyst event in New York City. CEO Marc Benioff and other Salesforce execs went over the earlier news that companies can now track Twitter conversations inside Salesforce. Naturally, I Twittered my notes (reproduced below). Salesforce is basically implementing Track (the ability to search and monitor conversations by keyword and topic) inside Salesforce.com in a way that hopefully Twitter will make possible for all of its users.
But the data point I found most interesting had nothing to do with Twitter. Salesforce talked about its own back-end infrastructure and revealed that all of Salesforce.com runs on only about 1,000 servers. And that is mirrored, so it is really only 500. Think about that for a minute. Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines. Amazon’s Web Services, in comparison, runs on about 100,000 machines I am told by someone with knowledge of Amazon’s server infrastructure. → Read More
Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service, which has been providing developers with programmatic access to millions of thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index since July 2006. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009. The service hits the deadpool.
Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services.
Update: commenters are pointing to Girafa and PageGlimpse as alternatives. There’s also Websnapr, bluga webthumb, scURLr, etc. → Read More
Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.
Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again? → Read More
We learned something today: Amazon EC2 wasn’t available in Europe up until today. That’s news to us, because we thought it already was. Amazon Web Services just released a statement announcing that European developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances locally.
With today’s launch, European developers and businesses with European customers can take advantage of the latest features for Amazon EC2 including multiple Availability Zones, Elastic IP addresses, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). In the near future, Amazon EC2 will also add support for Windows Server and SQL Server in the EU which is a new feature that was recently introduced on Amazon EC2 in the U.S.
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