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In a recent article, Talkibie reported on the increase in software and services that are jumping from the desktop to the web. Large, infrastructure-rich companies are enabling this change by allowing smaller web-based businesses to rent scalable portions of their massive computing clouds. Amazon, one of the largest web companies in the world, has taken this concept to the next level with their Web Services division. To coin a term, Amazon Web Services is making a mark in the Cloud As A Service (CAAS) industry, and their dedication to providing a good user experience is paying off.

Amazon has created this division as a way to leverage unused portions of their infrastructure. Their network is massive, designed to withstand peaks of activity, but it’s power is not needed consistently. By renting it out for reasonable rates to smaller companies, they are enabling their customers to enhance and scale applications that otherwise would be impossible (both financially and technologically). As their website puts it, “We innovate for you, so that you can innovate for your customers.”

One new service Amazon is offering is known as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides web-scale computing capacity to help developers manage applications as they grow or decline in popularity. EC2 is in beta at the moment, but it works in conjunction with Amazon’s storage, database, and queuing services (code-named S3, Amazon DB, and SQS respectively). For developers, their website explains how to use EC2:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

The service is not for the casual user, as it takes a baseline of knowledge to scale and backup applications. As the last bullet suggests, Amazon is trying to keep their EC2 service affordable and appropriate to actual usage. This is also true for Simple Storage Service (S3), which allows storage and access to any amount of data through the web. Their huge infrastructure allows unlimited objects from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes to be held and retrieved using a unique developer-assigned key. Users can grant access to others on their team as well, enabling web-based collaboration.

Amazon Web Services has experienced a few outages, most notably this February. As TechCrunch notes, other startups (including Twitter) who rely on S3 or EC2 experienced problems as a result. No doubt as Amazon’s reliability will increase as they perfect their new role. Astoundingly, the bandwidth AWS customers use has now surpassed that used by all of Amazon’s global sites combined! If you’re measuring by bandwidth, that means that Amazon’s cloud tenants are now larger than Amazon’s retail customers.

As Amazon Web Service’s official blog notes, “There are any number of references on the Web to Amazon’s focus on being the ‘earth’s most customer centric company’.” For this reason, Amazon has opened the flood gates of user opinion, allowing developers to share their experiences with each new service as it’s unveiled. “I encourage each you [developers] to read the spec and send us your thoughts on whether the team’s work meets your needs…We’re serious about making certain our Web Services are the best on earth for you, the customer.” And that excellence, in turn, is passed on to the customers of businesses who benefit from Amazon’s cloud.

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Haley January Eckels