Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Amazon Web Services

For a few months now, I’ve been playing with Amazon’s Web Services, and I have to say I’m quite impressed with where things are going. Today, Amazon released an update to their EC2 service, which allows:

Amazon EC2 is introducing the ability to create Paid Amazon EC2 AMIs. This feature allows AWS developers to charge other EC2 users for the use of AMIs they have created and shared. Sellers of AMIs set the price, and their customers then purchase and are billed through Amazon for their use of these AMIs.

An AMI is an Amazon Machine Image, which is basically a big bucket of data that is the “boot image” for your machines. They’re not hard to create, but the idea that you could basically “buy” one means that it’s possible people like RedHat, etc., might step in to provide “official support” for that kind of grid deployment.

Some people are taken aback by the fact that Amazon doesn’t offer an SLA, but SLAs are effectively useless unless they are draconian, and since most aren’t, they’re simply not worth the paper they are printed on. I haven’t had an EC2 image shut down randomly, but I still have some tools that run that make sure that important things (like PostgreSQL database logs) are backed up constantly. This is actually better than what I would probably do with a normal hosting account, where there is the assumption that it won’t break. It will, but you just haven’t planned for it. Amazon’s approach forces you to truely plan for disaster, which I think, in the end, will give organizations better effective availability.