At this 3^rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), it is amazing to see the impact this
service has had on the industry. It is truly disruptive technology and its
impact has reached far beyond a pure technology offering as the benefits of the
cloud have changed the way we view IT Infrastructure. As one of the CIOs at the
ACM Cloud Computing Roundtable summarized it: “IT used to be the blocker in
anything we did, but with our shift to the cloud IT is now the enabler.” From
young businesses and established enterprises to hospitals and governments
agencies, all are equally enthusiastic cloud customers for whom IT
infrastructure has changed forever.

Even though we keep rolling out new services and features,
and several existing AWS services are already very successful, this is still
Day One. We are only at the brink of what is possible to deliver in the cloud and
at Amazon we continue to innovate to make this future a reality.

We continuously listen to our customers to make sure
our roadmap matches their needs. One important piece of feedback that mainly came
from our enterprise customers was that the transition to the cloud of more complex
enterprise environments was challenging. We made it a priority to address this
and have worked hard in the past year to find new ways to help our customers transition
applications and services to the cloud, while protecting their investments in
their existing IT infrastructure.

Protecting investments during the transition

Most enterprises with a datacenter practice have
invested significantly over the past decade into the management of their
systems and applications. CIOs of Fortune 500 companies are responsible for
hundreds if not thousands of applications running in a variety of locations.
Keeping track of those resources and managing access to them is a daunting task
that continues to require significant investment.

The CIO of a large financial services company in the
Northeast explained to me that his teams manage close to 3000 applications and services
in 27 different locations. Consolidation of applications, resources and
locations is a process that never stops in a world where mergers and
acquisitions happen frequently. For him the cloud is attractive as a target for
his consolidated services: it allows him to significantly reduce both his
capital and operational costs, while gaining significant flexibility and
reliability with resources that are globally distributed, without the headache
of owning and maintaining them.

He has set the guideline that their current data center
infrastructure should not expand any further and that all new development will
target the cloud. He expects that the process of moving his existing
applications and services to the cloud will take time to complete, as his road
map is driven by many internal and external factors. And there are certainly some
legacy applications that may never move. He has set the goal of moving 20% of
his applications into the cloud by the end of 2010, but to meet this goal he
needed to find a solution for a significant obstacle: how to integrate applications
running in the cloud into his existing management frameworks. In his world,
this especially applies to those management practices that manage policy-driven
access controls and required, cross-application regulatory auditing.

This story is typical of many of the conversations I
have had with CIOs around the globe. They have bought into the cloud as a
target for a significant portion of their services, as the benefits are too
obvious to ignore, and most expect that their transition will be a continuous
process. They would accelerate the adoption of cloud services if they could
access a form of cloud that would give them the best of both worlds: the
flexibility and cost-effectiveness of accessing a virtually infinite pool of resources
without owning it, while being able to integrate those resources into their
existing datacenter environments such that they could continue to leverage
existing investments in their management and control infrastructure.

Private Cloud is not the Cloud

These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed “private
cloud” does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the
cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. Virtualization and increased
automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still
be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly
higher.

I often get asked to define “The Cloud,” especially
because of the many permutations that different vendors use in trying to make
their existing businesses look like a cloud offering. I define the cloud by it
benefits, as those are very clear. What are called private clouds have little of
these benefits and as such, I don’t think of them as true clouds.

The cloud:

• Eliminates Cost. The
  cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating
  costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its
  on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments
  in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer
  needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a
  significant reduction in operational costs.
• Is Elastic.
  The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex
  procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many
  organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months,
  while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The
  scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to
  think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities
  without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product
  becomes successful.
• Removes Undifferentiated “Heavy
  Lifting.”The cloud let its users focus on
  delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable
  resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT
  infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing
  technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at
  tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of
  operational excellence that power some of the world’s largest distributed
  systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through
  the AWS services.

Elasticity is one of the fundamental properties of the
cloud that drives many of its benefits. While virtualization has tremendous
benefits to the enterprise, certainly as an important tool in server
consolidation, it by itself is not sufficient to give the benefits of the
cloud. To achieve true cloud-like elasticity in a private cloud, such that you
can rapidly scale up and down in your own datacenter, will require you to allocate
significant hardware capacity. While to your internal customers it may appear
that they have increased efficiency, at the company level you still own all the
capital expense of the IT infrastructure. Without the diversity and
heterogeneity of the large number of AWS cloud customers to drive a high utilization
level, it can never be a cost-effective solution.

We have been listening very closely to the real requirements
that our customers have and have worked closely with many of these CIOs and
their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as
a seamless extension of their datacenter, where their standard management
practices can be applied with limited or no modifications. This needs to be a
solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above while
treating it as a part of their datacenter.

Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

We have developed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their IT infrastructure into the
cloud while maintaining the levels of isolation required for their enterprise
management tools to do their work.

With Amazon VPC you can:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud and assign
  an IP address block to the VPC. The address block needs to be CIDR block
  such that it will be easy for your internal networking to route traffic to
  and from the VPC instance. These are addresses you own and control, most
  likely as part of your current datacenter addressing practice.
• Divide the VPC addressing up into subnets
  in a manner that is convenient for managing the applications and services
  you want run in the VPC.
• Create a VPN connection between the VPN
  Gateway that is part of the VPC instance and an IPSec-based VPN router on
  your own premises. Configure your internal routers such that traffic for
  the VPC address block will flow over the VPN.
• Start adding AWS cloud resources to your
  VPC. These resources are fully isolated and can only communicate to other
  resources in the same VPC and with those resources accessible via the VPN router.
  Accessibility of other resources, including those on the public internet, is
  subject to the standard enterprise routing and firewall policies.

Amazon VPC offers customers the best of both the cloud
and the enterprise managed data center:

• Full flexibility in creating a network layout in
  the cloud that complies with the manner in which IT resources are managed
  in your own infrastructure.
• Isolating resources allocated in the cloud by only
  making them accessible through industry standard IPSec VPNs.
• Familiar cloud paradigm to acquire and release
  resources on demand within your VPC, making sure that you only use those
  resources you really need.
• Only pay for what you use. The resources that you
  place within a VPC are metered and billed using the familiar pay-as-you-go
  approach at the standard pricing levels published for all cloud customers.
  The creation of VPCs, subnets and VPN gateways is free of charge. VPN
  usage and VPN traffic are also priced at the familiar usage based
  structure
• All the benefits from the cloud with respect to
  scalability and reliability, freeing up your engineers to work on things
  that really matter to your business.

For more details on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, visit
the Amazon VPC detail page and the posting on the AWS developer weblog. For how our partners view Amazon VPC see for example the posting at RightScale

And happy birthday to Amazon EC2!

View full post on All Things Distributed

At this 3^rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), it is amazing to see the impact this
service has had on the industry. It is truly disruptive technology and its
impact has reached far beyond a pure technology offering as the benefits of the
cloud have changed the way we view IT Infrastructure. As one of the CIOs at the
ACM Cloud Computing Roundtable summarized it: “IT used to be the blocker in
anything we did, but with our shift to the cloud IT is now the enabler.” From
young businesses and established enterprises to hospitals and governments
agencies, all are equally enthusiastic cloud customers for whom IT
infrastructure has changed forever.

Even though we keep rolling out new services and features,
and several existing AWS services are already very successful, this is still
Day One. We are only at the brink of what is possible to deliver in the cloud and
at Amazon we continue to innovate to make this future a reality.

We continuously listen to our customers to make sure
our roadmap matches their needs. One important piece of feedback that mainly came
from our enterprise customers was that the transition to the cloud of more complex
enterprise environments was challenging. We made it a priority to address this
and have worked hard in the past year to find new ways to help our customers transition
applications and services to the cloud, while protecting their investments in
their existing IT infrastructure.

Protecting investments during the transition

Most enterprises with a datacenter practice have
invested significantly over the past decade into the management of their
systems and applications. CIOs of Fortune 500 companies are responsible for
hundreds if not thousands of applications running in a variety of locations.
Keeping track of those resources and managing access to them is a daunting task
that continues to require significant investment.

The CIO of a large financial services company in the
Northeast explained to me that his teams manage close to 3000 applications and services
in 27 different locations. Consolidation of applications, resources and
locations is a process that never stops in a world where mergers and
acquisitions happen frequently. For him the cloud is attractive as a target for
his consolidated services: it allows him to significantly reduce both his
capital and operational costs, while gaining significant flexibility and
reliability with resources that are globally distributed, without the headache
of owning and maintaining them.

He has set the guideline that their current data center
infrastructure should not expand any further and that all new development will
target the cloud. He expects that the process of moving his existing
applications and services to the cloud will take time to complete, as his road
map is driven by many internal and external factors. And there are certainly some
legacy applications that may never move. He has set the goal of moving 20% of
his applications into the cloud by the end of 2010, but to meet this goal he
needed to find a solution for a significant obstacle: how to integrate applications
running in the cloud into his existing management frameworks. In his world,
this especially applies to those management practices that manage policy-driven
access controls and required, cross-application regulatory auditing.

This story is typical of many of the conversations I
have had with CIOs around the globe. They have bought into the cloud as a
target for a significant portion of their services, as the benefits are too
obvious to ignore, and most expect that their transition will be a continuous
process. They would accelerate the adoption of cloud services if they could
access a form of cloud that would give them the best of both worlds: the
flexibility and cost-effectiveness of accessing a virtually infinite pool of resources
without owning it, while being able to integrate those resources into their
existing datacenter environments such that they could continue to leverage
existing investments in their management and control infrastructure.

Private Cloud is not the Cloud

These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed “private
cloud” does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the
cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. Virtualization and increased
automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still
be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly
higher.

I often get asked to define “The Cloud,” especially
because of the many permutations that different vendors use in trying to make
their existing businesses look like a cloud offering. I define the cloud by it
benefits, as those are very clear. What are called private clouds have little of
these benefits and as such, I don’t think of them as true clouds.

The cloud:

• Eliminates Cost. The
  cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating
  costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its
  on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments
  in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer
  needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a
  significant reduction in operational costs.
• Is Elastic.
  The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex
  procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many
  organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months,
  while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The
  scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to
  think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities
  without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product
  becomes successful.
• Removes Undifferentiated “Heavy
  Lifting.”The cloud let its users focus on
  delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable
  resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT
  infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing
  technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at
  tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of
  operational excellence that power some of the world’s largest distributed
  systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through
  the AWS services.

Elasticity is one of the fundamental properties of the
cloud that drives many of its benefits. While virtualization has tremendous
benefits to the enterprise, certainly as an important tool in server
consolidation, it by itself is not sufficient to give the benefits of the
cloud. To achieve true cloud-like elasticity in a private cloud, such that you
can rapidly scale up and down in your own datacenter, will require you to allocate
significant hardware capacity. While to your internal customers it may appear
that they have increased efficiency, at the company level you still own all the
capital expense of the IT infrastructure. Without the diversity and
heterogeneity of the large number of AWS cloud customers to drive a high utilization
level, it can never be a cost-effective solution.

We have been listening very closely to the real requirements
that our customers have and have worked closely with many of these CIOs and
their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as
a seamless extension of their datacenter, where their standard management
practices can be applied with limited or no modifications. This needs to be a
solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above while
treating it as a part of their datacenter.

Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

We have developed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their IT infrastructure into the
cloud while maintaining the levels of isolation required for their enterprise
management tools to do their work.

With Amazon VPC you can:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud and assign
  an IP address block to the VPC. The address block needs to be CIDR block
  such that it will be easy for your internal networking to route traffic to
  and from the VPC instance. These are addresses you own and control, most
  likely as part of your current datacenter addressing practice.
• Divide the VPC addressing up into subnets
  in a manner that is convenient for managing the applications and services
  you want run in the VPC.
• Create a VPN connection between the VPN
  Gateway that is part of the VPC instance and an IPSec-based VPN router on
  your own premises. Configure your internal routers such that traffic for
  the VPC address block will flow over the VPN.
• Start adding AWS cloud resources to your
  VPC. These resources are fully isolated and can only communicate to other
  resources in the same VPC and with those resources accessible via the VPN router.
  Accessibility of other resources, including those on the public internet, is
  subject to the standard enterprise routing and firewall policies.

Amazon VPC offers customers the best of both the cloud
and the enterprise managed data center:

• Full flexibility in creating a network layout in
  the cloud that complies with the manner in which IT resources are managed
  in your own infrastructure.
• Isolating resources allocated in the cloud by only
  making them accessible through industry standard IPSec VPNs.
• Familiar cloud paradigm to acquire and release
  resources on demand within your VPC, making sure that you only use those
  resources you really need.
• Only pay for what you use. The resources that you
  place within a VPC are metered and billed using the familiar pay-as-you-go
  approach at the standard pricing levels published for all cloud customers.
  The creation of VPCs, subnets and VPN gateways is free of charge. VPN
  usage and VPN traffic are also priced at the familiar usage based
  structure
• All the benefits from the cloud with respect to
  scalability and reliability, freeing up your engineers to work on things
  that really matter to your business.

For more details on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, visit
the Amazon VPC detail page and the posting on the AWS developer weblog. For how our partners view Amazon VPC see for example the posting at RightScale

And happy birthday to Amazon EC2!

View full post on All Things Distributed

Tags | Amazon, Center, Cloud, data, Extending, Introducing, Private, Seamlessly, Virtual