[..] *AWS is Enterprise Ready [..]
Image via CrunchBase
With PDC in the horizon and the expected cloud announcements by Microsoft, Amazon just took a giant step forward in positioning its cloud offerings to be ready for enterprise adaption. Today they made quite a few announcements that is likely to gain the enterprise attention.
Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta and it can be deployed in production level (Aren’t startups doing it already?). They are also offering an SLA which guarantees a 99.95% availability of their EC2 services. One of the biggest criticisms of EC2 was the lack of any service level agreements. With this move, Amazon has once again proved that they listen to their customers. This also makes Amazon’s EC2 offering complete. When they started off with the barebones plan, customers badly wanted persistent storage, IP addresses and different configurations of their instances. They have added all three of them already in the form of Elastic Block Storage, Elastic IP Addresses and standard and high CPU instances.
We reported about Amazon’s Windows based EC2 plans here at Cloud Avenue and, today, Amazon has announced that Windows EC2 gets beta level support. It is also competitively priced at $0.125 per hour. With this announcement, Amazon has tried to deflate any Microsoft’s cloud announcement during PDC. This announcement is very important because it is now possible to build a heterogeneous server farm by using Amazon EC2 instances. Apart from different flavors of Linux (RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Opensuse, Gentoo and Oracle Enterprise Linux) they offered from the beginning, they now support Opensolaris and Windows too. They are offering Windows Server 2003 (both 32 bit and 64 bit) and MS-SQL (64 bit) at this point. With the possibility to implement Hadoop Mapreduce on Amazon EC2 and S3, any company can have a highly scalable heterogeneous architecture at a very low cost.
They are also planning to offer Management Console (are they buying Rightscale?), Load Balancing, Automatic Scaling and Cloud monitoring services in 2009. This is going to be huge and it has the potential to put many companies in the current AWS ecosystem out of business.
In short, Amazon’s announcements today will force enterprises to have a second look at the cloud infrastructure. It will definitely lure some medium level companies to shift their operations to Amazon cloud infrastructure. In fact, the credibility of Enterprise 2.0 got a boost today and depending on Microsoft’s announcement at PDC, there is a strong potential to accelerate the enterprise adaption of cloud computing. Are you convinced about the potential of cloud computing in the enterprise segment? If you are not, I strongly recommend you to read this excellent post by Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels.
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