Amazon Cloud Computing Review

Amazon Web Services (AWS) [IaaS]

A very large data center (50,000 servers)
enjoys a 5 to 7 times reduction
in networking, storage, and IT administration costs
versus a medium-sized data center (1,000 servers).
--Amazon's James Hamilton

Amazon is a clear 800-pound gorilla in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space.

They provide a collection of on-demand services for computing; (EC2), Storage (SimpleDB, S3), Queuing (SQS), a relational database (RDS), and a content distribution network (CloudFront) as well as many others. For services like EC2, pricing can be for on-demand usage or reserving instances for longer periods at much lower rates. See Geva Perry's summary of Amazon's reserved price breaks for (EC2).

Amazon provides a cloudburst web service called Elastic Map Reduce to enable businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to process vast amounts of data. It uses a Hadoop framework running EC2 and S3.

As of August, 2009 Amazon stated S3 contains 64 billion objects up from 40 billion in February. Independent analysis from Guy Rosen has concluded that Amazon is provisioning 50,000 instances of EC2 per day as of September 2009. In July 2009, Rosen on his Jack of All Clouds blog reported that 1422 of the top 500,000 websites are running on EC2.

AWS sales made up less than 1/20th of Amazon's 1H 2009 revenue. Randy Bias' CloudScaling blog post estimates $220 million 2009 annual revenue for EC2. Further analysis on their SEC filings from competitor Rackspace, comes up with about $167 million.

In part because of the complexity of managing a large AWS environment, a large ecosystem has formed with security, cost-management and provisioning as major areas needing assistance. Notable vendors delivering complimentary products and services include RightSpace and 3Tera.

Amazon supports multiple technology stacks including Linux, OpenSolaris and Windows Server.

Amazon is fairly consistent with new services and improvements to existing services. They recently rolled out a VPN-based semi-private cloud for improved security and support of hybrid environments. Sam Johnston provides a helpful architecture diagram and further discussion.

According to security expert Bruce Fryer, "I can only speak from experience using Amazon Web Services since early 2006, but all the [security] tools are there if only they are used. For instance you can have rotating keys and my favorite is private VPN's. If you have a good working security structure in place you can now use a private VPN from within your existing system to scale cloud resources without opening your system to the outside. These are a lot of the same issues we faced when we hooked up those pesky LANs to the transactional mainframe systems via SNA gateways in the early 80's."

Amazon completed a SAS70 audit, although Randy Bias' explains notes why SAS70 isn't a robust standard. In particular, SAS70 is a methodology for performing an audit, not the audit rules themselves. The SAS70 can prove whatever a company decides it needs to prove and Amazon's SAS70 is not publicly available. Amazon has provided further insight on their controls and measures.

IBM’s BlueCloud, Microsoft’s Azure and Rackspace’s Rackspace Cloud all provide viable alternatives to AWS, but each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Here's a comparison of Amazon's SLAs with Rackspace.