If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud. Most importantly, the paper discusses some specific strategies on how to architect your application to leverage the benefits of the cloud benefits. Although you’ll see some specific tactics on how to use different Amazon Web Services features and services (the paper is written by Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon), the principles can be applied using any cloud providers (Windows Azure).

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Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and other compliant languages. .NET developers get a special treatment with a dedicated .NET Forum and a special Windows & .NET Developer Center.

The SDK includes: Continue reading…

Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks.

Using the RDS APIs or the command-line tools, you can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in a matter of minutes. You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time.

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Amazon is adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store  (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list of EC2 customers, or share it publicly.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store lets you create block storage volumes in sizes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB. You can create empty volumes or you can pre-populate them using one of our Public Data Sets. Once created, you attach each volume to an EC2 instance and then reference it like any other file system. The new volumes are ready in seconds. Last week I created a 180 GB volume from a Public Data Set, attached  it to my instance, and started examining it, all in about 15 seconds. Continue reading…

The AWS Management Console now has complete support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can enable CloudWatch for any or all of your EC2 instances using the console and data will be available in a moment or two. You can select one or more running EC2 instances to see the CloudWatch data in graphical form. You can observe CPU utilization, disk reads, disk writes, and network traffic (both in and out). If you select more than one EC2 instance, the console will automatically display aggregated values.You can also get a larger and more detailed view of the data.

Here are some pictures of the console in action: Continue reading…

Amazon Web Services announced today a limited public beta of Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a service that makes it possible for customers to create their own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection. With this, Amazon is taking a major step in making its cloud computing services even more enterprise-friendly than they already were.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels published a detailed blog post regarding this service, in which he acknowledges that enterprises tend to find it challenging to transition applications and services to the cloud when they have often invested years of resources and tons of money setting up their own IT infrastructure (datacenters, networks, etc.). He also says ‘private clouds’, which are basically emulations of cloud computing inside private networks, are not true clouds as far as he’s concerned and that Amazon VPC adequately fills the void.

What can you do with Amazon VPC: Continue reading…

Amazon announced a significant price cut in its EC2 service offerings. The one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances will now be 30% cheaper than previously offered.

The reserved instances program essentially allows users to make a one-time payment for instances, ‘reserving’ them in order to receive discounts in subsequent hourly usage rates. The program was implemented earlier this year as an effort to reduce the cost of cloud services for frequent users, and with the announcement it appears that Amazon is looking to lure customers into long term service deals.

More from the press release:

Starting today, we have lowered the one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances by 30%. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices. With Linux Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, you could reduce the cost of your instance usage by up to 56% compared to an On-Demand instance. When using Reserved Instances, you pay a low, one-time fee to guarantee capacity for each instance during a 1 or 3 years period. You then have the option to run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate. You can find more information about pricing on the EC2 Detail Page and Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instances Detail Page.

The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is tested and deployed on Yahoo!’s clusters, which are the largest Hadoop clusters in the world. The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is a source distribution that is based entirely on code found in the Apache Hadoop project.

Hadoop is a free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

A wide variety of companies and organizations use Hadoop for both research and production. Users are encouraged to add themselves to the Hadoop users wiki page.

Amazon announced in April the beta release of a new service called Amazon Elastic MapReduce which they describe as “a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Continue reading…

Amazon just released the BETA of a really useful service if you’re dealing with huge amounts of data. 

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWSImport/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

How does it work? Continue reading…

Microsoft is set to deliver Windows Azure to the public by the end of this year, with an imminent announcement at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles on November 17, 2009. 

When Steve Ballmer mentioned this February that Windows Azure “will reach fruition with the PDC this year” I didn’t really believed it, considering where the product was and how much we knew about the progress Microsoft was making on delivering Windows Azure and related services. Even TechEd this year was surprisingly quiet about Windows Azure, but this is just the silence before the storm. Microsoft is revving up the software development and marketing machine so at this year’s PDC cloud computing and Windows Azure will take again center stage.

Starting this summer with the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), New Orleans, July 13-16, we will see more and more announcements about Windows Azure. So what to expect in the next months? Continue reading…