Iron Mountain, a longtime provider of physical- and digital-records management, on Wednesday announced a cloud storage API that enables developers to take advantage of Iron Mountain's off-site storage facilities.
Despite the recent issues related to T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft's data loss, cloud-based storage is not only here to stay, it's a good use case for organizations that don't have the internal processes or means to deal with off-site data management.
And while you can never know all of the things that can go wrong with your data (meaning that no one would have expected Danger to lose the T-Mobile data), established vendors like Iron Mountain have not only the customer base to support their abilities but also the processes to support customers effectively.
Iron Mountain's cloud storage application programming interface is the next evolutionary step beyond a cloud NAS (network-attached storage) that we've seen from providers like Mozy and others. The cloud storage API is similar in function to Amazon's Simple Storage Service interfaces, enabling developers to access data using restful interactions.
... Read moreAmazon Payments today launched a new service that brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications--including the convenience of Amazon's 1-Click checkout system.
There are already a number of mobile payment providers, but Amazon is the big dog of the e-commerce world with an enormous amount of customer accounts already in use. This could be an excellent option for companies that offer mass-market mobile applications and are looking for ways to easily accept payments.
The service will automatically detect the request origin, meaning a Web or mobile browser, or a mobile application so that developers don't need to re-work their applications.
... Read more
Amazon.com's legal team is "investigating" open-sourcing their various Web services API's including those for EC2, and S3, Amazon's main cloud computing interfaces, according to Enomaly founder Reuven Cohen.
Amazon's APIs are already the de-facto standard used by thousands of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and arguably the best designed method of interaction for various cloud services. By releasing the APIs as open source (creative commons, or no-sue covenant or whatever), Amazon cements its way of doing things into the greater marketplace, while opening up an even broader ecosystem of applications to interact with AWS.
If other companies, such as Eucalyptus can be assured that they won't fall on the wrong side of the legal fence, it only ensures that they will continue to grow their usage of the Amazon systems and methods.
This would be a win for everyone interested in cloud computing. Let's hope it's true.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
I read on Wednesday that Sun Microsystems plans to release open-source application programming interfaces for its soon-to-launch cloud services. The obvious question in my mind is, why wouldn't Sun just support Amazon's APIs, which have become the de facto standard?
The short answer is that Amazon filed a very broad patent titled "Distributed storage system with Web services client interface" related to its Simple Storage Service (S3), and it's not clear if the company will eventually take legal action against those using the APIs in their own products.
We can argue all day about the U.S. patent system being broken, but the point is that Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are locked into the platform, and if the patent is granted, users may well end up without an alternative.
Sun is absolutely doing the right thing in avoiding the risk of Amazon's patent attempt (though it's surprising that it couldn't do some kind of covenant deal) as well as creating true open cloud standards. But the Amazon APIs are the dominant force--in fact, the only real option for the cloud. Unless they become legitimate standards, cloud access will potentially end up in a morass of competing APIs and methods.
I can't see a reason why Amazon wouldn't take the step of making their APIs actual standards. Besides the goodwill, it would also mean that their own services would be accessible to every other system. For now, however, its patent application states the following:
United States Patent Application 20070156842
Distributed storage system with Web services client interfaceA distributed, Web services-based storage system. A system may include a Web services interface configured to receive, according to a Web services protocol, a given client request for access to a given data object, the request including a key value corresponding to the object.
The system may also include storage nodes configured to store replicas of the objects, where each replica is accessible via a respective unique locator value, and a keymap instance configured to store a respective keymap entry for each object.
For the given object, the respective keymap entry includes the key value and each locator value corresponding to replicas of the object. A coordinator may receive the given client request from the Web services interface, responsively access the keymap instance to identify locator values corresponding to the key value and, for a particular locator value, retrieve a corresponding replica from a corresponding storage node.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
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