Film and The Cloud So how are cloud companies and film companies working together, and what’s new? Let’s find out. Did you know that Channel 4, PBS, Fox Entertainment Group and many more media companies all use Amazon’s public cloud service? Of course Amazon with it’s billions behind it will be at the forefront of cloud technology. Which didn’t stop it going down of course. Amazon AWS was the reason Netflix dropped offline in June after a power outage at Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, in North Virginia, made services go offline. Amazon Instant did not go offline though. Silver lining
Amazon AWS
Why Did Amazon Cut Cloud Computing Rates? Part I Last month, Amazon had announced a considerable reduction in S3 cloud storage rates. Effective 1 February 2012, the following rates apply in the US Standard region: Information on rates for other regions – US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (Sao Paulo) – are available at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing. The Sao Paulo operations are a recent addition to the Amazon portfolio (See: Amazon Expands Cloud Footprint with Brazil Operations). According to Amazon, this price decrease translated to a 12% reduction in costs
AboveNet Enables Access to AWS Cloud Platform AboveNet has become an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect Solution Provider to help provide high performance access to the AWS cloud platform. AboveNet, a provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has signed an agreement with AWS to this end. The company notes that companies of all sizes can leverage AWS Direct Connect to benefit from a web services platform in the cloud. Customers can use compute power, storage, and enjoy other services-gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services to keep up with business demand. Following this agreement, AWS customers
Run Microsoft Windows on Amazon EC2 Cluster Instances Starting today you can run Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows SQL Server Standard 2008 R2 on Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances for Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute Instances provide customers with high CPU capability within a high bandwidth, low latency network for IO intensive computing. Cluster GPU instances allow customers to additionally take advantage of NVidia Tesla GPUs for general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing using the CUDA or OpenCL programming models. A number of customers with database workloads and applications in areas such as media processing, rendering, and computational
The Cloud Lock-In (Part 2): The Great Lock-In of PaaS As we climb up the cloud layers scale, the complexity increases hence the vendor lock-in. PaaS as well as SaaS layers present stronger vendor lock-in than the IaaS layer. Did you read the 1st part on IaaS Lock-In ? The Cloud Lock-In (Part 1): Public IaaS is Great ! The PaaS vendor releases the “cloud applications’ developers” from the need to maintain the script or the database environments. The PaaS vendor takes responsibility of aspects such as the application deployment, the big data, scalability and availability by enabling features such as multi-tenancy and cluster
The Cloud Lock-In (Part 1): Public IaaS is Great ! It always good to start with Wikipedia’s definition as it helps to initiate a structured discussion, here is Wiki’s definition for Lock-In: “In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. Lock-in costs which create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly.” Read more on Wikipedia Does the cloud present a major lock-in ? Does the move create substantial switching costs? “Yes !” is the
Amazon AWS – Small Bump In The Night Amazon AWS service was down for close to 25 minutes last night . Based on their status page: http://status.aws.amazon.com/ 7:39 PM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region. 7:50 PM PDT We can verify connectivity issues between instances in the US-EAST-1 region and the Internet. 8:03 PM PDT Full connectivity has been restored. The service is operating normally. Some of the more recognized companies affected by the outage were Netflix, Foursquare and Reddit to name a few. The 25 minutes of downtime is a lot more forgiving than it was
Amazon Announces: Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) The global rollout of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) plus new enterprise capabilities for dedicated networking and identity management. These new capabilities are designed to support the security, network management, dedicated connectivity and access control requirements of enterprises when deploying mission critical applications in the cloud. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is now out of beta and is generally available in multiple Availability Zones in all AWS Regions (US East, US West, EU, Singapore, and Tokyo.) Using Amazon VPC, you can provision a private section of the AWS cloud where you can a
