s3

Last week Oracle and Amazon Web Services held a webinar to outline how Oracle works on Amazon's EC2, including database backups to the Cloud.

Running Oracle on EC2 is not too thrilling, though it's likely welcome for many organizations. Oracle database licensing fees are similar to on-premises pricing with no immediate way to leverage an on-demand usage model. Basically, if you want/need to run Oracle in the Cloud you can. But you aren't looking at a huge cost advantage.

More interesting is the ability to run backups to the Cloud and take advantage of Amazon's … Read more

When I read today that Europeana, a digital library of Europe's cultural heritage "crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks" I was pretty shocked.

How a website could crash and be offline for weeks in this age of flexible-scale Cloud offerings and caching technology is a bit mind-boggling--especially considering that a properly architected website should be easily portable to larger hardware or a scaled-out system.

There are a great many ways to deal with traffic bursts, from using Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 for more machines, to … Read more

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 … Read more

Amazon.com has announced that it is dropping prices for heavy users of its hosted storage service, S3. The baseline monthly fee of 15 cents per gigabyte of storage remains, but high-volume users will be able to take advantage of a tiered pricing model.

After 50 terabytes, the cost goes down to 14 cents a gigabyte; for more than 500TB, it's at 12 cents. See the new pricing chart.

I asked an Amazon representative if the company is reducing prices just because it could, or if it was the company's way of helping to bail out tech companies … Read more

Yes, we talk about politicians, and we crack a couple of non-jokes about politics, but we're definitely not talking about politics. Because we want us all to get along. Natali Del Conte joins the Buzz crew today to bid a (fond?) farewell to the Gates-Seinfeld ads, talk about Mark Zuckerberg and all his money, and whether Windows 7 can save the day.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Latest Microsoft Vista ad defends “I’m a PC” guy: Seinfeld out http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007763.html http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2639

Windows 7 … Read more

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?

No. In short, the computing industry is making up what's called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that's one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it's notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.

Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of … Read more

More downtime for Amazon S3 doesn't make the Cloud any more appealing for enterprises.

One of the main reasons enterprises won't be quick to embrace the Cloud for meaningful applications is due to the lack of visibility associated with downtime. Most companies are too paranoid (rightly so) to have no idea what caused system downtime or to have a clear mean-time to resolution.

As an S3 customer we should definitely be able to get notifications and have the ability to ask for refunds. I couldn't figure out how to do either one.

For basic monitoring you can … Read more

Update at 8 p.m. PDT: Amazon's Service Health Dashboard reported around 5:25 p.m. PDT that U.S. and European service "has been fully restored" and that the company "will provide more detail on this event once we have completed a full investigation."

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service--a major component of its online computing services--is apparently experiencing problems Sunday.

The e-tailer's "Service Health Dashboard" reports that the S3 service in both the United States and Europe is experiencing "elevated error rates."

The outage is causing CenterNetworks images … Read more