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Amazon has made some interesting announcements lately around their cloud computing environment that you should be paying attention to. This platform has really come together and is a viable alternative to offerings by other companies. Let’s break down what Amazon offers:
Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)
- This is essentially “a server in the sky” (or multiple servers). EC2 is the core of the Amazon offering and would likely be the hub of anything you build on their platform. The main cost is my machine hour so you are only paying for what you use. The beauty of this design is that you can scale up and down capacity via web service calls (when your application is busy, or during a holiday season). The pro and con of EC2 is that it is a Linux server and you can use it for whatever you want to. It could be a web server, a database server or a custom back-end. Recently Amazon announced it is now certified to run Oracle and MySQL Enterprise. This is so affordable you should take a hard look at this approach before commissioning an in-house server.
Simple Storage Service (S3)
- S3 is probably the best known offering of the Amazon platform. S3 allows you to utilize their storage in a secure and very affordable manner. Your data is accessible via a wide variety of 3rd party clients, or via a REST or SOAP interface. Just last week the pricing dropped and gets cheaper as you add more data.
Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- This service is very similar to a MQSeries queue or JMS (VERIFY) and is a great way to send messages in an asynchronous manner with guaranteed delivery between various Amazon components.
Mechanical Turk
- This is probably the least known and least understood of the Amazon offering. However it is a brilliant idea and I predict it will continue to grow and expand as people start to harness the power of this offering. We are going to be utilizing it in a big way with our next product. It allows you access to a virtually unlimited “cloud workforce”. The basic idea is that there are tasks a human is better suited to perform that a computer cannot do well. This service allows simple access to this workforce to review pictures for a B2C website (i.e. “Is this shirt green?”), or to perform transcription services.
SimpleDB
- This service provides you with a “database in the sky” and allows for simple entry and query access to this data. It removes the need to design a schema or optimize the setup and provides very fast and efficient access via a simple SOAP and REST interface. It will be great once this moves to an open Beta.
These services are starting to mature and come together in a fashion that could be utilized to build in-house applications or commercial products. The amazing aspect of all of these offerings is the pricing. Amazon has a calculator that allows you to easily estimate your costs. Since it is all pay-as-you-go there is little up-front investment and even as your demand grows it remains a very affordable way to get rid of your servers and minimize hosting costs and risk.
Amazon also offers a variety of services aimed at fulfillment, checkout and payment that I will discus in a future post as well as look at options from other companies such as Salesforce.com and Google.
