Cloud Insight

Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

April 16, 2008 – 10:01 pm
I am sure we have all wondered why Amazon is in the utility computing business. Kindle, I can understand. AWS, I am not so sure. After all, Amazon is a retailer. An Internet pioneer but it is still in retail business. Retail business in general are very low margins business. So why then would Amazon make heavy investment into these Amazon Web Services? The general explanation given by some gurus, Amazon computing power is built to handle the Christmas season load and more. Rest of the year, the systems utilization is really really low. And thus AWS is lets them monetize that infrastructure. That makes sense to an extent. Does it mean, during the heavy infrastructure usage Christmas season, AWS users will see slower response time? So, again I started with some of their financials to see if they do a better job at detailing this than Google does. I was pleasantly surprised. ...

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Short note - Interesting battle in UK? Can the clouds carry this to other places?

April 10, 2008 – 5:07 am
There is interesting battle between ISPs and BBC on who pays for the extra bandwidth used by BBC's iPlayer which serves up video content. Can the ISPs in US do the same for content on Youtube or video google where you have watched the laughing baby thousands of times, who guarantees the QoS, the content provider or the transporter? If so, where does this stop? If you start using services such as Amazon S3 and pulling large files over the ISP provided bandwidth, who pays for the extra bandwidth usage? Will enterprises use cloud based services if they have to pay for extra bandwidth? Will it be metered or unlimited services? Is this the reason, Google wants to invest in spectrum in the air and fiber in the ground? Again, interesting times!

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Massive Data Centers, at the center of the clouds

April 9, 2008 – 5:35 am
Blue Cloud from IBM, Microsoft rumored to make heavy investment data centers, EMC buys Pi to strengthen its data center operations, BMC answers that by acquiring Bladelogic, HP has opsware and finally has ability to invest in software and services, Dell has a built to order data center business, and Robert X. Cringely wrote an article in 2005 why Google will be way ahead in this game since they have been coached by Uncle Walton. So, this cloud is really massive data centers spread across the globe with lots and lots of servers, both real and virtual serving hardware and software services for customers. (Of course, these data centers better be green and energy efficient.). So the winners in this game will be the companies that can run a data center most efficiently. Google, Amazon, Yahoo and other large portals base operations have had head start. But what about the internal ...

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Cloud is a promise, rain is the fulfillment!

April 6, 2008 – 7:34 pm
Though, I would like to stay away from primers, I want to explain what my own understanding of some of the terms that I will use regularly on this blog. I will try to write this in as simple non-technical English as I can. Let’s start with SaaS, Software as a Service. SaaS as the name suggests is a delivery model to provide software as paid service. The software is not installed on your own machines, but the vendor provides the complete package as hosted solution including the infrastructure. The software vendor may in turn rely on hosting providers who manage their server farms, provide disaster recovery, load balancing, mirroring and other infrastructure needs, but the end user does not have to be concerned with this. The end user is mostly interested in functionality, costs per user, uptime, associated SLAs, ability to integrate data with other systems etc. The customer ...

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