Copacetic

If Amazon (AMZN) keeps going at its current rate its going to cross a significant milestone, namely topping out its 1999 .com boom price of 100 $USD and change.  This is from a low of 5.97 $USD in 2001. Is this just down to its fantastic success with S3 and EC2? Or are there other fundamentals at work?

Whats even more amazing is that Jeff Bezos has held onto the reins through this rollercoaster ride.

Amazon have release a cool Firefox extension for managing your EC2 Instances. Very Nice.

Had first play around with Amazon EC2 today. Its great but it needs few things to really make it fly (these could be provided by Amazon or third parties).

1. Decent key management tools (preferably linked to smart card or USB storage devices)
2. Web based management interface
3. Swing based graphical tools to augment the command line tools
4. DNS management to allow allocation of sensible names to the nodes
5. Network monitoring for all live nodes (liveness, CPU load, disk space at least)
6. Scalability infrastructure that adds new nodes based on thresholds set by user and removes them in the same way
7. S3 filesystem integrated directly into Linux Kernel
8. Diff tool to compare two AMI images for differences
9. The ability to load and store AMI images somewhere other than S3
10. Support for Windows and OS-X images

So now you have unbounded programmatic access to computing and storage resources via EC2 and S3. Anybody who has a moderate amount of programming skill (skilled in the art as the patent people say) and has access to a credit card can slap together their own grid in no time at all. More importantly you can resell a grid to a vertical market.

Now a whole plethora of companies have been trying to flog Open Source stacks to corporate America, and to my mind corporate America (and corporate everywhere else) is not ready to take these companies offerings on board for a number of reasons,

• Certification is no good without delta change detection. Your stack might be good the day it deploys, but is it good after 6 months of production tinkering?
• Most customers need some kind of customised stack, rather than an off the shelf offering, so configurations proliferate and the costs for both the vendor and the customer escalates
• None of these guys wants to play nice with the rest, so how do you integrate stacks from different vendors
• Isn’t Open Source supposed to be free as in beer

However the whole game changes if instead of offering an installable package you offer a managed EC2 image with all the good juice pre-canned and ready to go, and you manage the customers application deployment on top of that image and then cut a new precanned EC2 image with all the good stuff in one bundle. Tinker away all you want and deltas can easily be identified by comparing the production image with a clean install of the original.

Customisation becomes delta management with everything being a managed delta of a base kit and integration of different stacks can be easily tested because the base infrastructure is already deployed into an image ready for merging.

Expect to see lots of people offering layered services on EC2 fairly rapidly with simple Apache, MySQL and J2EE and ESB instances appearing in short order and more complex three tier and N-tier packages  following on rapidly. Also expect the monitoring and management vendors to offer layer packages that plug straight into these environments.

Can Google trump this?

I’m just catching up on my blogs and the one thing that rocks my world is news of Amazon’s new web service EC2. They’ve jumped the gun on Sun and Google to provide a global grid facility to anybody with a credit card. USD$ 0.10 (10 cents) an hour gets you,

… the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

You get prebuilt Linux instances to layer your own images on and free interconnect to your S3 storage.  We already use S3 so this is going to increase the security of our application, improve scalability and make it cheaper all in one go!

Total cost for a years worth of compute power 0.10 * 24 * 365 = USD$ 876. Moving stuff from out current hosted environment to our S3 storage was going to cost us a fortune but this could have a radical impact on our most significant cost, bandwidth, where’s that spreadsheet…..