Just how open are Amazon’s clouds?
Dare Obasanjo has a great post up about Amazon’s web platform offerings — S3, an online storage and hosting service, and EC2, a pretty fascinating virtualization platform, or as they describe it:
…a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.
Right now EC2 is a private beta, but I can’t wait until it opens up a little so I can test it out.
I’m not sure I’d want to place myself completely at the mercy of Amazon especially since there doesn’t seem to be any SLA published on the site.
I agree, to an extent — but isn’t one of the main benefits of going to a virtualized platform (based on open-source Xen no less) the ability to shift these domU machines around? I haven’t played around with these services yet, but it seems to me you could start migrating servers as soon as Amazon starts choking — instant failover, maybe using something like VMcasting. You don’t like Amazon’s [as yet unpublished] SLA? Migrate those boxes to another cloud — if one ever materializes — or just hedge your bets and keep them replicated in a few clouds. Don’t like the uptime, then just build out your own iron for partial redundancy and be done with it.
I don’t know too much about AMI yet, Amazon’s “Machine Image” format, but I would imagine Amazon’s smarter than trying to lock you in when the platform’s main benefit is its openness. Time will tell. Cloud computing, especially if done with this kind of open, flexible approach, will certainly make life easier for a lot of developers — and in the process send a shit ton of bad sys admins looking for work.
But things don’t look too bleak for hack admins, Microsoft may be looking to get in on the action. And if history is any guide…