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Blog: Pete Loshin

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April 9, 2008

Good news for cloud computing?

TechCrunch reports Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service. Now, this is just a rumor, but:according to the article:

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch.

For the record, BigTable is Google's "compressed, high performance, and proprietary database system" (per Wikipedia). And Amazon's SimpleDB should sound familiar: I've written about it before, here Amazon SimpleDB and here More about Amazon's SimpleDB....

So--if true--this could be very good news for anyone who wants enterprise (and I mean BIG ENTERPRISE) database systems, for minimal up-front investment, from two of the very biggest Internet database businesses.

Posted by at 8:00 AM | | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Cloud Computing with Amazon

I just mentioned Amazon EC2 the other day, as being in limited beta--now Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is open to the masses in an unlimited beta. EC2 "is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers."

From the EC2 page:

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

So now you can create your own virtualized data center, optimized for the web, and it'll cost you next to nothing, at least to start. Amazon's AWS calculator lets you estimate your usage of the Amazon Web Services, which include EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (that's middleware, and worthy of a separate discussion here, soon) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). If you think you know what you need, you can figure out about how much it'll cost you, monthly.

You get the use of Amazon's infrastructure, worth who knows how many millions of dollars, but you pay for what you use. Kind of like having a limo/private aviation service available on-demand, where you pay only for what you use, when you use it--but you get instant transport in state-of-the-art cars/planes/helicopters.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

Amazon S3, Now with SLA!

Thinking about building or buying your own datacenter for a web-scale application? You probably know just how expensive it can be. Now there's an alternative: Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). (If you're an S3 subscriber and you want some compute cycles on demand instead of buying your own hardware, you can try the beta version of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), too.)

From S3 page:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

That's not news; S3 was announced back in March 2006. What's news is that now Amazon is offering an SLA . Which means that enterprises can now confidently use Amazon's big big datacenter for next to nothing to try out new web applications. Pretty cool.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | | Comments (0)

April 5, 2006

More Free and Open Virtualization News

If you haven't read my article, A Virtualization Primer, go read it; if you have, read it again. And then go read these articles about the latest virtualization news.

First off, VMware took the next step in turning their standard for virtualization into the industry standard for virtualization. Monday's announcement, VMware Introduces Open Virtual Machine Disk Format Specification , speaks directly to the need for a strong move toward openness. VMware stated "its virtual machine disk format specification for defining and formatting virtual machine environments is now openly available, downloadable and free of charge. This will enable use by all developers, software vendors and projects and includes open licensing compatible with those operating under open source licenses such as the GPL. In addition, VMware is committed to supporting any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by customers and working toward converging on open standards in this area."

It's nice to see a company that "gets it". In other news on Monday, Microsoft showed that they don't quite exactly "get it": Market Bulletin: Microsoft Announces New Price, and Availability of Linux Support, for Virtual Server 2005 R2.

The gist of the announcement is that the new price for Virtual Server 2005 R2 is $0.00. In other words, you can download it for free (though the software is still proprietary and still subject to restrictive Microsoft licensing terms). More interesting, though, is news that Microsoft will now officially support nine different Linux distributions! Count 'em: SUSE and Red Hat. That's right, NINE! Five different releases of Red Hat, and four versions of Novell's SUSE Linux.

Further muddying the waters is maneuvering by Microsoft and newcomver XenSource to flank VMware. This article in the Register, Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux spells out how XenSource, in a move that may prove either brilliant or disastrous, is aligning itself with Microsoft by licensing Microsoft's VHD, or Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification. Microsoft hasn't offered VHD to VMware, which may have prompted VMware to actually release their own Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK), without licensing restrictions.

Posted by at 6:25 AM | | Comments (1)