Amazon Web Services reads my mind
The other day, I was chatting with a friend who is trying to start a company. This friend was worried about the infrastructure costs associated with building up her company. I mentioned Amazon Web Services, which I thought nicely solved a lot of the issues. There were 3 big issues that I saw in making this successful:
- Getting DNS wired up properly with all IP addresses being dynamic
- Implementing some real form of redundancy when everything is behind a hazy curtain
- Making your application fit into Amazon’s model (S3, SDB, etc.)
Today, I get an email from Amazon saying they’ve fixed the first two, Huzzah! After playing a tiny bit with it, I think it’s 99% of the way there. Here’s a few observations:
- Redundancy still seems to only come from the east coast, and it’s unclear if that’s a temporary thing or otherwise. It’d be nice to also be able to solve the geography thing.
- I think dynamic DNS is an arguably better solution than static IP reservations. I’m quite sure Amazon already uses this internally for a lot of management, why not expose it and tie it together? Static IPs only solve the “public” facing part of the problem.
- Charging to use a static IP (when you don’t have it bound to a running EC2 instance) isn’t really a fiscal issue, so much as it’s a reasonably polite way of discouraging people from “sitting” on IPs.
Overall, though, great progress. That just leaves the whole model issue. What I’d love to see is a S3-like storage rental for EC2, but implemented using iSCSI or something similar. Then I could grab it anytime I had to restart a machine, and not have to, quite honestly, create kludges around it. There’s still issues, like filesystem stability, etc., but it is a thought.
This entry was posted at 2:42 pm on 27 March 2008 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
[...] While most or perhaps all of the major systems vendors were talking a great deal, and working in a few cases with similarly sized entities, Amazon quietly got on about its business: continuing the relatively rapid evolution of the single most relevant cloud computing infrastructure on the planet. As Ozzie admitted, “[the cloud market] really isn’t being taken seriously right now by anybody except Amazon.” This particular iteration managed to knock off a few more reasons not to use the platform, including the oft-lamented DNS wiring issues. [...]
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