Cloud - Web and Service Cloud

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta, it is about time some of these services actually launched.  It is hard to convince people to use the cloud layer without being out of beta (AppEngine when’s it gonna happen huh?).

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

ElasticFox is a pretty nice tool for managing EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) AMI instances AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances) from preconfigured AKIs (Amazon Kernel Image) or ARIs (Amazon Ramdisk Instances). For instance they have a AMI for fedora core 4 that is loaded with mysql and apache form amazon to get started quickly. Ultimately you end up making your own AMIs with the stuff you run on but these can get you started quickly.

It looks like this, it is built in XUL but could easily be built in AJAX or Flash or even Silverlight using APIs.

Figure 1: Shows the AMIs and your installed AMI instances.

Figure 2: Shows Available Preconfigured instances from Amazon and Others

Pretty nice little GUI to the EC2 service to help people ease into setting up and playing with cloud computing. For people running on the cloud already this is nice to have a quick web developer tool for testing, and quickly changing the dynamics of your resources with in your browser.

I think the cloud will be victorious sooner rather than later if there are great tools to beat out traditional hosting. Finally making tools that aren’t locked to a hosting company with bad applications. At least it makes this area more competitive.

This is what makes Amazon’s model so attractive. Even though it is pieces and components, services will be built on it with great interfaces, probably much better ones than can be designed by the cloud provider themselves via great apis and componentization of cloud infrastructure.

• Download ElasticFox
• Amazon post about ElasticFox

ZDNet reports that Microsoft officially dropped a beta of Live Mesh to a familiar 10,000 developers, of which many slots were taken by Microsoft employees themselves who are programmers annoyingly referred to as ’softies’.

The service or system built on another term called Horizon is their competitor to Amazon’s AWS platform and Google App Engine as well as many other emerging companies and platforms offering scalable cloud based services.

From the looks of the schematics and diagrams it appears closer to a Google App Engine hosted service rather than a componentized Amazon model.

Techcrunch reported that Google, the original research and development behind BigTable, MapReduce and other great cloud technology base architectures, is probably going to launch their own BigTable database in the cloud for developers like Amazon’s SimpleDB.

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.

BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.

Techcrunch seems to think this will be released next week, with other services to follow up. This is the future, Amazon is well ahead but the power of Google is in the wings waiting. Also, Microsoft might show up with CloudDB or the next version of sql server having this capability. Service and pricing will determine the winner as cloud computing and storage is fairly new and very simple (usually the db is almost an active record like system where is it just flat tables and not alot of relational data).

The future of your software initiatives just might not need an entire infrastructure and IT management team…

The services and cloud web are changing software rapidly.