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Windows Azure finally ready for customers

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing service became generally available on Monday with very little flourish. And that might be because this first wave of Azure offerings is frankly a bit odd.

I am sure Microsoft will eventually figure out how to give its users options that are more obviously appealing (perhaps using Amazon Web Services as the model?), but in the near-term the options are not as clear as they could be.

It's still a positive for cloud enthusiasts that Azure has finally reached a place where Microsoft is comfortable offering it commercially. And if you're part … Read more

Putting Amazon's spot pricing in perspective

As reported on CNET, Amazon Web Services has announced a new pricing option that lets its customers take advantage of spare capacity within the EC2 infrastructure at variable, supply-and-demand-driven pricing.

The news has taken the cloud community by storm. For some, it represents the beginning of a long-anticipated move to market pricing for core IT infrastructure services.

While there is some truth to the importance of AWS spot pricing to the history of cloud computing, let's keep things in perspective: this pricing is set by Amazon, not any market. We are a long way from a true commodity market … Read more

Amazon's in-cloud database gets MySQL option

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 … Read more

AWS-4000 collision warning

In urban areas, distractions for drivers abound, both outside and inside the car. The AWS-4000 cuts through those distractions to concentrate on what's directly ahead, sounding a very audible warning when a collision is imminent. With its forward-facing camera, the AWS-4000 is a remarkable bit of technology, able to identify cars in the lane ahead and determine your following distance. It even identifies lane lines, as long as they are prominent, and lets you know when you've drifted over.

Read our review of the AWS-4000 collision warning camera.

Lightning zaps Amazon cloud

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 … Read more

Amazon Web Services: 'Ship us your drives'

Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new service that lets users physically ship their data on drives, to be uploaded to the company's cloud-based S3 storage facilities.

AWS Import/Export, currently in beta, was announced on Thursday. In an Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog post, the team noted that "hard drives are getting bigger more rapidly than Internet connections are getting faster," and said a service such as Import/Export had been frequently requested by customers who wanted their data to be remotely hosted, but who had storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level.

"It … Read more

Amazon offers more cloud control

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 … Read more

Mosso challenges Amazon on cloud storage

On their blog today, Rackspace's cloud division, Mosso, shows off a study they did where they compared the costs and performance of Amazon Web Service's S3 storage service and CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) against Mosso's combination of CloudFiles and their partnership with CDN provider, Limelight Networks. The blog post presents five common use cases, and compares the cost of CloudFiles/Limelight with the Amazon offerings, both with and without Amazon's support option.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Mosso co-founder, Jonathan Bryce, and Senior Cloud Architect for Rackspace's cloud division, Erik Carlin, discussing what they found. The short-short version is that, for the five use cases they analyzed, they claim (not surprisingly) that Mosso beats Amazon's offerings in simplicity, cost and performance, especially when support is taken into account.… Read more