Business Tech

Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.

The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.

"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."

Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.

"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."

With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.

One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.

The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.

Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.

As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.

Amazon.com is blaming the latest outage to hit its Elastic Compute Cloud service on a lightning strike at one of its data centers.

In a statement on the Amazon Web Services "health dashboard," the online retailer and cloud-computing provider addressed concerns from some U.S. customers whose EC2 service had been disrupted around 6:20 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday.

"A lightning storm caused damage to a single Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in a single Availability Zone. While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances on those racks are down," the company said initially on the health dashboard.

The disruption lasted about seven hours, during which time Amazon asked any affected customers to use alternative parts of the network. "Users with affected instances can launch replacement instances in any of the U.S. Region Availability Zones or wait until their instance(s) are restored," Amazon said.

The company later attributed the outage to a problem on one "availability zone" and that the outage was localized. "We would like to reconfirm that this issue was limited to the single Availability Zone where this power issue occurred, and that a very small percentage of instances in that AZ were affected; this was not a generalized service issue," Amazon said.

Despite acknowledging that Amazon had dealt with the issue fairly efficiently, one user was concerned that a single lightning strike was able to bring down the service, if only in a limited way.

"I was under the impression that your architecture had more resiliency built into it. Yes we can use multiple availability zones to help with a single point of failure, but I thought that even within a single availability zone there was not a single point of failure for hardware/power," the user posted to an Amazon forum on the issue.

The EC2 service provides customers with virtual access to Amazon's computing infrastructure, using virtual machines that can be created using the Xen virtualization platform. First launched in a limited beta in August 2006, the EC2 service went fully live in October 2008.

Not including the latest issue, the service has suffered two major disruptions during that time in February 2008 and October 2007. In June 2008, Amazon's main retail site suffered an outage that the company blamed on the complexity of its own systems.

A series of outages that have hit other online or cloud computing services including Google's Gmail and other applications over recent months have led some critics to question whether the cloud approach to computing is really capable of providing the resilience required by enterprise users.

In mid-May, Google services were hit by an outage which apparently affected one in 10 of its users. In January, software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com experienced an outage that disrupted all its customers for about an hour.

Here is the string of messages from Amazon about this week's outage.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Amazon.com's cloud-computing arm has added new features to help users monitor cloud resources, adjust capacity, and balance traffic loads.

In an announcement Monday, Amazon Web Services unveiled a public beta of the three new features: the CloudWatch monitoring service, Auto Scaling for on-demand capacity adjustments, and Elastic Load Balancing for redistributing traffic.

The new features are available immediately to users in the U.S., according to a company blog, with availability in Europe set to follow in the next few months.

"You can use these services to make your...applications perform better without sacrificing application control, freedom of development, choice of tools, speed of deployment, or any other kind of flexibility," according to the blog post.

For the past three years, Amazon Web Services has been offering on-demand computing and storage through its Elastic Cloud Compute service, known as EC2, and its Simple Storage Service, known as S3. The company says it deals with 80,000 work requests per second and stores 52 billion objects.

Toby Wolpe of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Google App Engine is growing a step more mature, with Google planning on Tuesday to begin allowing people using the cloud-computing foundation to pay for heavy use.

When Google launched App Engine last April, it was available only as a free service with caps on computing and network resource usage. Free use is still available for lower-traffic sites, but Google now lets users pay for higher access as needed.

"It's been one of our biggest developer requests," said Pete Koomen, Google App Engine product manager.

The billing feature makes Google App Engine useful for those who want to run real applications on the site, not just kick the tires, as long as they're willing to pay and to put up with the continued "preview release" status. However, the service hasn't even attained "beta" level, much less a service level agreement (SLA) that promises refunds if the service goes down for too long.

Google offers such an agreement for its Google Apps online tools. "It is something we are exploring" for Google App Engine, spokesman Jon Murchinson said.

Google App Engine competes with various other cloud-computing efforts, including Amazon's lower-level suite of Web services components, but mostly with the alternative of hosting applications on one's own equipment. Amazon Web services also uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Here's Google's description of how billing will work:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage.

• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.

• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.

• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

Koomen wouldn't comment on the matter, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether Google is trying to set prices low to attract users, medium to cover expenses, or high to generate revenue during Google's new era of financial discipline.

App Engine is designed to run Web applications written in the Python programming language, though Google plans to add other language support in the future. One of its chief selling points is that it's built on Google's computing infrastructure, letting applications rapidly scale if demand for them spikes without the organization running the application having to scare up a large number of new servers and network capacity.

IBM announced Wednesday plans to deliver its software via Amazon Web Services, in a move to push its software into the clouds.

IBM will use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to offer its customers and third-party developers its software based on a pay-as-you-go system.

Under the arrangement, users will have access to IBM's DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, WebSphere sMash and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system software.

IBM is also providing free Amazon Machine Images for development and testing purposes, which is designed to allow developers to quickly build pre-production applications.

Big Blue expects to have its software available in an EC2 beta in the coming month and will later announce its pricing.

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Adobe Systems said Monday that it will make its LiveCycle ES Developer Express software available on Amazon Web Services.

With the move, Adobe is using Amazon's EC2 and S3 service to create a development environment for enterprise developers to develop and test using LiveCycle without installing it. The goal appears to be to give enterprise developers a sandbox in which to play with LiveCycle. Think try before you buy.

LiveCycle combines data capture, information assurance, process management, and content services to create rich applications.

As for Amazon Web Services, Adobe joins enterprise partners such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, Red Hat/JBoss, and Sun/MySQL.

In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.

The service, which promises "low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments," uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.

Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is "no minimum fee" for CloudFront; customers pay only for what they use.

There are loads of CDNs out there: it's an on-demand, business-focused offering for which companies are willing to pay good money. But because Amazon already has a big grip on the cloud with its existing Simple Storage Service, or S3, CloudFront is likely to be a power player from the start.

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the service will be available at least 99.95 percent of the time. This type of agreement makes it easier for businesses to place faith in the service. Previously, only the only AWS component with a service level agreement was the Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides online data storage.

Customers pay for AWS according to how much they need: more servers, more storage space, and more network capacity means more charges. But unlike with computing infrastructure built in-house, when customers don't need it anymore, they can stop paying for it. AWS has had outages, but it continues to gain in popularity, and Amazon has been lowering some AWS prices.

Amazon collects multiple gigabits of monitoring data each second for its Elastic Compute Cloud servce.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Barr also described features that signal growing sophistication for AWS overall in 2009 that should make it easier to administer AWS--either manually or by letting it run itself better. Barr listed four areas:

• Management Console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.

• Load Balancing: The load-balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.

• Automatic Scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.

• Cloud Monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real time, multidimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

In a separate blog post, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogel described some of Amazon's work in ensuring reliability and efficiency.

"We relentlessly measure every possible resource usage parameter, every application counter, and every customer's experience. Many gigabits per second of monitoring data flows continuously through the Amazon networks to make sure that our customers are getting serviced at the levels they can expect and at an efficiency level the business desires," Vogel said.

Among the customers using the Windows version of EC2 are Autodesk, RenderRocket, and Eli Lilly, Amazon said.

"This is a huge step forward in maximizing our results relative to IT spend, and now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud," Dave Powers, an Eli Lilly associate information consultant who uses the service to process research data, gushed in a statement.

Autodesk uses EC2 for back-end data processing tasks, said Mike Haley, a senior architect of search engineering, and RenderRocket uses the service for 3D film and TV graphics work for TV and movies, Amazon said.

Amazon has added a Web-based tool to help automate use of its Mechanical Turk program, a marketplace that seeks to unite people across the world with companies that need help with tasks that humans accomplish.

The Mechanical Turk site now has an interface the company says makes it easier to manage large numbers of outsourced tasks. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Amazon.com)

The new interface makes it possible for those offering work to manage many tasks. "The new Web-based interface guides business users through the process of designing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), publishing up to hundreds of thousands of HITs simultaneously, monitoring worker activity, and retrieving work results," Amazon said Wednesday.

Previously, such automation was possible through use of an API (application programming interface), but that required programming expertise. "With these new Web-based tools, any business, in just a few minutes, can submit work that requires human intelligence to a workforce of hundreds of thousands workers from over one hundred countries," boasted Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk, in a statement.

Amazon also began offering templates to ease the creation of tasks.

Mechanical Turk fits into the general idea of on-demand business, in which companies pay for services or technology as they need it. Theoretically at least, that approach lets them rapidly expand or contract operations in response to changing demand and not pay for resources that aren't needed during peak moments. On the more technological side of the equation, Amazon also offers Amazon Web Services, computing technology available over the network that companies can use to expand or contract storage, processing, database activities, and other tasks through a pay-as-you-go structure.

One Mechanical Turk user is Mobicious, which relies on the service to find labor for the process of tagging and moderating photos on its SnapMyLife site. Another is TagCow.com, which also uses Mechanical Turk for tagging images with descriptive labels. "The new tools introduced for Mechanical Turk will help us respond more quickly and efficiently when the images coming into our service spikes," said CEO Michael Droz. "Virtually anyone in our company can now load thousands of images that need tagging into Mechanical Turk and retrieve the results."

To use Mechanical Turk, people must pay or be paid with Amazon Payments, a system that keeps track of debits and credits. Amazon also unveiled other payment services on Tuesday, Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay.