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 S3 low-cost storage. Backup and disaster recovery are a notorious enterprise burden and anything that alleviates risk and system administration is a welcome relief.
One could argue that backup is the killer app for the Cloud. The Cloud offers a higher degree of reliability and accessibility than tapes with faster time to recovery. It removes some of the human intervention required for a recovery and overall makes it easier for companies to back things up on a regular basis.
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 Akamai for edge-caching to Memcached to alleviate database load.
Just by offloading the images from the repository, I bet Europeana would have fared just fine. If searching the database brought the site down then those guys are in for some very tough times.
It's one thing to be a victim of your own success (as the site says they are) and quite another to be hamstrung by not following best practices.
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 get free updates on a number of Cloud services from Hyperic's Cloudstatus.com and Amazon's Service Health Dashboard .
Sisense, a developer of business intelligence software, has introduced a new dashboard that it says will allow developers to keep better track of their Amazon S3 usage.
This is an interesting first step toward Cloud management. The big question is what happens to the emerging ecosystem if the Cloud vendors decide to shut this kind of thing down (which presumably as long as you pay they won't) or if they start offering the services themselves.
Via TechcrunchIT
This weekend we moved our Mule Enterprise distribution to Amazon's S3 service and so far it's been pretty fantastic. A couple of simple calls not only allow for a file to have download permissions but also allow for time-bombed URLs if you need them.
Add to that the fact that the bandwidth is blazingly fast (shockingly fast, I dare say) and the move to the S3 cloud is a huge win--and a major market disruptor.
Despite having blogged about Amazon's EC2 and S3 before, I didn't understand the full impact until now. Kudos to Amazon.
I have been working like a dog for the last few weeks and more often then not I am finding technology to be annoying. Stuff like this renews my faith.
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