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Amazon releases CloudFront: a cloud content distribution networkNovember 18

Amazon just made it’s CloudFront service public and in time-honored tradition RightScale offers full support for the new service in its dashboard. You can read Jeff Barr’s announcement and Werner’s blog post for the details. I must say that the folks at AWS have been very consistent in listening to users and reacting to it: many, many users of S3, the Simple Storage Service, have been serving up web assets directly from S3 as if it were a CDN. This works reasonably well in that S3 is very scalable and can sustain very high request rates. But it also has its limitations and lack of geographic replication is one of them in the context of CDN use. So offering a true solution to getting web content rapidly to browsers across the world is most welcome.

CloudFront is a content distribution service that caches S3 content at 14 locations on three continents based on the access patterns to the individual S3 objects. As far as I can tell, it’s a service that is quite distinct from S3, except that it currently uses S3 as the origin

Windows! SLA! Beta bye-bye! All on Amazon EC2 today!October 23

The cloud is coming of age. Amazon has taken another huge leap forward today by announcing that EC2 is now out of beta, together with an SLA that is evidence of Amazon’s commitment to provide top-notch service. Their uptime has been stellar, and they are now standing behind their offering contractually in a much stronger way, and signaling how customers can set their expectations. Read about the announcement on the AWS blog and on their CTO’s blog.

The advent of Windows on EC2 is welcome news too.  Even though Windows is not typically the OS used for serving highly variable workloads, it is a sign of the cloud maturing that even the more static workloads typical of Windows deployments will be more easily allocated and managed using cloud resources. (Mhh, I wonder whether the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference happening next week has something to do with the timing of the announcement…)

RightScale is of course supporting the new features that enable launching and bundling Windows instances, and we’ll have everything on our production systems within a couple of days. (Update: our Windows support went live the same day as Amazon’s announcement and we’ll be adding some more functionality soon; feedback and suggestions are always appreciated!) In case you’re wondering

RackSpace unveils cloud strategyOctober 23

In a very exciting web broadcast RackSpace yesterday announced their cloud strategy. Their commitment to the cloud started to become visible with Mosso and then the CloudFS beta, which is a storage system looking very much like Amazon S3. They have now renamed CloudFS to CloudFiles and unveiled CloudServers, which will offer a service competing with Amazon EC2, which we will support as soon as it becomes publicly available. They are also acquiring Slicehost and JungleDisk. I haven’t used Slicehost, but I’m an avid JungleDisk user and am really happy for the momentum this will add behind JungleDisk!

Rackspace’s announcements are momentous because they come from one of the leading managed hosting providers — one with the foresight to see that cloud architectures are a critical path to the future for both them and their customers. This is more evidence of the groundswell of support that cloud computing is experiencing. With Rackspace’s long history in the hosting business and their focus on ‘fanatical support,’ we expect them to bring an interesting new combination of strategic strengths to the market. As we announced last month, RightScale is working closely with them to support their cloud suite on release.

Posted in cloud computing      

Why Amazon’s Elastic Block Store MattersAugust 21

On the technical side, Amazon’s EBS service may look like “just” another great new feature of the Elastic Compute Cloud, but on the business side it enables a whole slew of new customers. I won’t pretend that I understand all the new uses, but I can talk about those we see and are supporting.

First a couple of words about what EBS is. In short it’s a SAN (Storage Area Network) in the cloud. You can allocate a disk volume of 1GB to 1TB in size from what is now an endless SAN in the cloud and attach it to an instance of yours running in EC2. The volume is stored on redundant disks (i.e. with some form of RAID) and has a lifetime separate from any instance on which it is mounted, so you can unmount it and later remount it on another instance. You can also perform a snapshot backup of a volume to S3, where it is stored with the redundancy and durability of all objects on S3. Moreover, successive snapshots are incremental providing a very powerful and efficient incremental backup capability for volumes.

All this and much more is explained in detail in my other post and there’s yet more detailed EBS information on our support site. The official EBS announcement is on the EC2 detail page, Werner Vogels

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store explainedAugust 21

Now that Amazon’s Elastic Block Store is live I thought it’d be helpful to explain all the ins and outs as well as how to use them. The official information about EBS is found on the AWS site, I’ve written about the significance of EBS before and I’ll follow-up with a post about some new use-cases it enables.

The Basics

EBS starts out really simple: you create a volume from 1GB to 1TB in size and then you mount it on a device (like /dev/sdj) on an instance, format it, and off you go. Later you can detach it, let it sit for a while, and then reattach it to a different instance. You can also snapshot the volume at any time to S3, and if you want to restore your snapshot you can create a fresh volume from the snapshot. Sounds simple, eh? It is but the devil is in the detail!

Reliability

EBS volumes have redundancy built-in, which means that they will not fail if an individual drive fails or some other single failure occurs. But they are not as redundant as S3 storage which replicates data into multiple availability zones: an EBS volume lives entirely in one availability zone.