sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with amazon + Web

It was a matter of when, not if, that Amazon would launch a content delivery business in addition to its current suite of web services that include S3 storage service and EC2 on-demand computing. The Seattle-based company has announced its intention to offer a content delivery service that could shake the very nature of the industry and pose a serious challenge to not only dozens of CDN upstarts but also become a thorn in the side of existing giants such as Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks.

In an email to its customers today, Amazon said that the service will be available later this year and will utilize the company’s points of presence in North America, Europe and Asia.

This new service will provide you a high-performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.

Ironically, Amazon was beaten to the CDN punch by New York-based Voxel, which started offering CDN services based on Amazon’s S3 service. ”We are announcing this right now because we want to give a heads up to our customers,” said Adam Selipsky, VPr of product management and developer relations for AWS. It’s more like putting their competition on notice, but Adam was too polite to say that. “It is a more horizontal and broad offering.” In other words, while it is not going to replace Akamai tomorrow, it is going to make CDNs affordable even for the tiniest startup, without major cash outlays.

Why is this service disruptive? Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like a brokerage firm in the 1980s. Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book. Amazon executives told me that company is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of the long-term contracts current players foist on their clients.

In addition, the company will publish its prices on the web — most importantly it is going to be inexpensive. And that will make the service even more attractive to hundreds of small companies who are already using Amazon Web Services for their web operations, who don’t want to sign long contracts with CDN operators. When I asked Tal Saraf, general manager of the AWS Content Delivery Service, if the company expected the video-delivery to be one of the most used service, he said the company expected to delivery all sorts of content, including web objects (images, JavaScripts etc.)

You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.

Amazon executives declined to talk about the pricing. “We will talk about the pricing when we launch the service,” Selipsky said. He declined to comment on the impact the pricing will have on their competitors -– nearly two dozen content delivery networks –- and how much their business is going to suffer. Dow Jones Venture Source estimates that from 2005 through the second quarter of 2008, almost $980 million was invested in content delivery companies.

If Amazon delivers what it is promising -– a simple, API-based CDN – then it would put then not only ahead of all CDN players, but also force rivals to meet the rules (and pricing) set by Amazon. There is a good chance that it’s going to drive weaker players right out of the game.

My final take on this news: Akamai is less likely to be impacted in the near term, but it further commoditizes the CDN business and forces a big shakeout in the industry, taking down the small and the weak. Akamai has been focusing on value-add services, as a way to stay ahead of the commoditization of the basic CDN services.

Read Amazon CTO Werner Vogels take on the news on his blog.

Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get a little tired of the noise. Cloud computing could become as ubiquitous as personal computing, networked campuses or other big innovations in the way we work, but it’s not there yet.

Because as important as cloud computing is for startups and random one-off projects at big companies, it still has a long way to go before it can prove its chops. So let’s turn down the noise level and add a dose of reality. Here are 10 reasons enterprises aren’t ready to trust the cloud. Startups and SMBs should pay attention to this as well.

1. It’s not secure. We live in an age in which 41 percent of companies employ someone to read their workers’ email. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re regulated by laws such as HIPAA, Gramm-Leach Bliley Act or because they’re super paranoid, which means sending that data outside company firewalls isn’t going to happen.
2. It can’t be logged. Tied closely to fears of security are fears that putting certain data in the cloud makes it hard to log for compliance purposes. While there are currently some technical ways around this, and undoubtedly startups out there waiting to launch their own products that make it possible to log “conversations” between virtualized servers sitting in the cloud, it’s still early days.
3. It’s not platform agnostic. Most clouds force participants to rely on a single platform or host only one type of product. Amazon Web Services is built on the LAMP stack, Google Apps Engine locks users into proprietary formats, and Windows lovers out there have GoGrid for supporting computing offered by the ServePath guys. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
4. Reliability is still an issue. Earlier this year Amazon’s S3 service went down, and while the entire system may not crash, Mosso experiences “rolling brownouts” of some services that can effect users. Even inside an enterprise, data centers or servers go down, but generally the communication around such outages is better and in many cases, fail-over options exist. Amazon is taking steps toward providing (pricey) information and support, but it’s far more comforting to have a company-paid IT guy on which to rely.
5. Portability isn’t seamless. As all-encompassing as it may seem, the so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, and getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like. This ties to platform issues, which can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and also reflects the bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
6. It’s not environmentally sustainable. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, the emergence of cloud computing isn’t as ethereal as is might seem. The computers are still sucking down megawatts of power at an ever-increasing rate, and not all clouds are built to the best energy-efficiency standards. Moving data center operations to the cloud and off corporate balance sheets is kind of like chucking your garbage into a landfill rather than your yard. The problem is still there but you no longer have to look at it. A company still pay for the poor energy efficiency, but if we assume that corporations are going to try to be more accountable with regard to their environmental impact, controlling IT’s energy efficiency is important.
7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. As nebulous as cloud computing seems, the data still resides on servers around the world, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws. For example, Canada is concerned about its public sector projects being hosted on U.S.-based servers because under the U.S. Patriot Act, it could be accessed by the U.S. government.
8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms. Putting data in the cloud means accepting the latency inherent in transmitting data across the country and the wait as corporate users ping the cloud and wait for a response. Ways around this problem exist with offline syncing, such as what Microsoft Live Mesh offers, but it’s still a roadblock to wider adoption.
9. Large companies already have an internal cloud. Many big firms have internal IT shops that act as a cloud to the multiple divisions under the corporate umbrella. Not only do these internal shops have the benefit of being within company firewalls, but they generally work hard — from a cost perspective — to stay competitive with outside cloud resources, making the case for sending computing to the cloud weak.
10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans. Big companies are conservative, and transitions in computing can take years to implement. A good example is the challenge HP faced when trying to consolidate its data center operations. Employees were using over 6,000 applications and many resisted streamlining of any sort. Plus, internal IT managers may fight the outsourcing of their livelihoods to the cloud, using the reasons listed above.

Cloud computing will be big, both in and outside of the enterprise, but being aware of the challenges will help technology providers think of ways around the problems, and let cloud providers know what they’re up against.

Outsourcing compute power is wonderful — until something goes wrong. Unfortunately, when an Amazon Web Service goes down it’s hard to know why, and it’s even harder to know how well a particular cloud is performing in the first place. To make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched www.CloudStatus.com, a web site that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service.

Hyperic sends a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, and according to CEO Javier Soltero, it racks up quite a large bill doing do. The web site views are free, but Soltero says Hyperic also plans to launch a line of services for paying customers. It’s a decent idea, but my worry is that Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Bribery, extortion and other con games have found new life online. Today, botnets threaten to take vendors down; scammers seduce the unsuspecting on dating sites; and new viruses encrypt your hard drive’s contents, then demand money in return for the keys.

Startups, unable to bear the brunt of criminal activity, might look to the clouds for salvation: After all, big cloud computing providers have the capacity and infrastructure to survive an attack. But the clouds need to step it up; otherwise, their single points of failure simply provide more appealing targets for the bad guys, letting them take out hundreds of sites at once.

Last Friday, Amazon’s U.S. site went off the air, and later some of its other properties were unavailable. Lots of folks who wouldn’t let me quote them, but should know, said that this was a denial-of-service attack aimed at the company’s load-balancing infrastructure. Amazon is designed to weather huge amounts of traffic, but it was no match for the onslaught.

When it comes to online crime, the hackers have the advantage. A simple Flash vulnerability nets them thousands of additional zombies, meaning attacks can come from anywhere. During Amazon’s attack, legitimate visitors were greeted with a message saying they were abusing Amazon’s terms of service, which could mean that those visitors were either using PCs that were part of the attack, or were on the same networks as infected attackers. The botnets are widespread, and you can’t block them without blocking your customers as well.

Other rackets give the attacker an unfair edge, too: It takes an army of machines to crack the 1024-bit encryption on a ransom virus, but only one developer to write it.

A brand like Amazon can weather a storm, because people will return once the storm has passed. But just look at the Twitter exodus to see how downtime from high traffic loads can tarnish a fledgling brand. Slideshare survived such an attack in April, and while many other sites admit to being threatened, they won’t go on the record as saying so.

Up-and-coming web sites are often great targets, as they often lack the firewalls, load-balancers and other infrastructure needed to fight back. And it’s not just criminals: In some cases, the attacker is a competitor; in others, it’s someone who just doesn’t like what you’re doing.

Fighting off hackers is expensive. Auren Hoffman calls this the Black Hat Tax, and points out that many top-tier Internet companies spend a quarter of their resources on security. No brick-and-mortar company devotes this much attention to battling fraud.

Wanting to survive an attack is yet another reason for startups to deploy atop cloud computing offerings from the likes of Amazon, Google, Joyent, XCalibre, Bungee, Enki and Heroku. But consolidation of the entire Internet onto only a few clouds may be its Achilles’ heel: Take down the cloud, and you take down all its sites. That’s one reason carriers like AT&T and CDNs like Akamai are betting that a distributed cloud will win out in the end.

Cloud operators need to find economies of scale in their security models that rival the efficiencies of hackers. Call it building a moat for the villagers to protect them from the barbarians at the gate. Otherwise, this will remain a one-sided battle that just gives hackers more appealing targets.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was one of the attendees at this week’s D6 Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., to be interviewed on stage, where he talked about Kindle at length. But right after his chat with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, I caught up with him to discuss Amazon Web Services and his company’s efforts in cloud computing. Here is a short excerpt from that conversation, captured on my Sanyo Xacti. In particular, he talks about…

• How and when Amazon began its cloud computing effort.
• Why Amazon has become an innovator with Amazon Web Services and how it relates to their core business of being an online retailer.
• Whether or not Wall Street recognizes Amazon’s cloud efforts.
• What’s next for Amazon Web Services.
• Whether or not Amazon has plans for a VC fund or for cloud computing startups.

For even more info about Amazon’s cloud computing efforts, join us at our upcoming conference, Structure ‘08, where CTO Werner Vogels will be delivering a keynote address.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz