Amazon AWS continues to become more awesome
It is no surprise to readers that I think that Amazon is one of the few tech companies in the world that consistently gets it. As long as I can remember I think they’ve been doing new and interesting things that were unsung by the media - their big problems with patents taking up most of the bits travelling around the matrix. But now that their efforts aren’t being quietly rolled out to sell you more widgets and are also now being focused on their services division, I suspect we’ll start hearing a little more, at least. Take for example the two new features they’ve rolled out for EC2 - Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. I got their update in my mailbox yesterday and was really impressed.
EC2 competes in a new hot space of grid/virtual/what-have-you computing - ill defined, but basically, computing as a service. Lots of folks are trying to get into it, but it’s the big boys like Amazon that have the edge - they’ve been living with this high availability business for a long time now and just spit polished it to have a friendly consumer face. They’ve already got a leg up, but now their innovating on top of that with real consumer facing features like these two additions.
Availability Zones let’s you choose completely geographically and infrastructurally distinct areas to launch your EC2 instances into. Companies always want to do this for two primary reasons. Redundancy, if one data center experiences problems (say… an earthquake) you know you’re pretty safe because your backup is in another part of the country (or world). Or for putting your data closer to your clients - geographic load balancing so that you can more quickly and efficiently respond to requests. Right now Availability Zones seems to be more geared towards the first - given that it seems they have only opened up zones on the East Coast and also don’t provide any interesting means for actually doing geographic load balancing. But in either case, this is typically an expensive proposition - maintaining servers in two separate locations - but with EC2? No problem at all, it’s no more expensive than launching two instances in the same zone (with the caveat that you do pay for interzone data transfer).
Elastic IP Addresses is similarly awesome, making what can sometimes be an annoying task filled with agitation and flushing router arp caches into a very easy task. What it allows you to do is to easily take a public facing IP address and move it from instance to instance, so if one instance goes down you simply bring up another, run a command and everyone’s back on board. Rolling out a new version? No problem, just start a brand new instance, rollout the new code and move your Elastic IP from old to new and you’re done. Seamless and easy.
I wonder how long it will be before Amazon starts extending Elastic IP’s first two do load balancing among several instances in the same Availability Zone and then beyond that to providing geographic load balancing across zones. They could charge a pretty penny for both those services and still come in significantly cheaper than current solutions, especially for geographic balancing. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before this happens.
These are really practical things to provide - things that people want and could do in other infrastructures but tended to be costly and/or a pain in the butt. Amazon just quietly rolls that out with an email to your box. Happily, I’ve just come up with my own little starter project to try and come up with something interesting using a few of these new services - hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to try it. More on this later.
In any event, while Amazon AWS isn’t a big part of their revenue at this moment, I think this is going to be a quick growing segment of their business. It is just too compelling an offering for a lot of startups to ignore. It’s still a little raw right now - but give it some time to mature and fill in the needs of its early adopters and before long there’ll be a lot of people thinking long and hard about this vs. traditional hosting.
