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.
SimpleDB, one of Amazon.com's suite of online services that people can use to build Web sites or other computing operations, is out of private beta testing.
The service lets programmers store database records at Amazon and extract specific data from them. Along with the shift to public beta testing, Amazon cut the price for storing data from $1.50 to 25 cents per gigabyte per month.
SimpleDB, introduced nearly a year ago, is a newer arrival into the Amazon Web Services suite. Other services let customers process data, store raw data, distribute content, and store messages sent among different computers.
The company also announced basic level of use is free for at least six months--the first time the company has done so with one of its Web services. After various thresholds are met in data transfer and computer processing, customers must pay according to usage.
"We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 500MB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine-hours each month. You can transfer 1GB of data in, and another 1GB out," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog posting Monday.
Among those using SimpleDB are Pluribo, Issuu, and MyMiniLife.com, Amazon said.
To make SimpleDB easier to use, Amazon said it plans to release a new interface similar to the SQL (Structured Query Language) widely used in databases today. It also plans a mechanism to let people more easily upload multiple items.
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.
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