by Lydia Leong | December 7, 2011 | 1 Comment
Randy Bias has blogged about Amazon mandating instance reboots for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of instances (Amazon’s term for VMs). Affected instances seem to be scheduled for reboots over the next couple of weeks. Speculation is that the reboots are to patch a recently-reported vulnerability in the Xen hypervisor, which is the virtualization technology that underlies [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, IaaS
by Lydia Leong | November 17, 2011 | Comments Off
Estimates of Amazon’s revenues in the cloud IaaS market vary, but you could put it upwards of $1 billion in 2011 and not cause too much controversy. That’s a dominant market share, comprised heavily of early adopters but at this point, also drawing in the mainstream business — particularly the enterprise, which has become increasingly [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, IaaS
by Lydia Leong | November 8, 2011 | 1 Comment
I promised the attendees at my Gartner Symposium workshop, called “Using Amazon Web Services“, that I would post the notes from the session, so here they are — with some context for public consumption. A workshop is a structured, facilitated discussions that are designed to assist participants in working through a problem, coming up with [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, conference, Gartner, GartnerSym
by Lydia Leong | August 7, 2011 | Comments Off
Amazon has introduced a new connectivity option called AWS Direct Connect. In plain speak, Direct Connect allows an Amazon customer to get a cross-connect between his own network equipment and Amazon’s, in some location where the two companies are physically colocated. In even plainer speak, if you’re an Equinix colocation customer in their Ashburn, Virginia [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, colocation, EQIX
by Lydia Leong | May 1, 2011 | Comments Off
In the wake of Amazon’s recent outage, we know we have Gartner clients who are interested in what we’ve written about Amazon in the past, and our existing recommendations for using cloud IaaS, and managing cloud-related risks. While we’re comfortable with our current advice, we’re also in the midst of some internal debate about what [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, Gartner, research
by Lydia Leong | April 21, 2011 | 20 Comments
Today is Judgment Day, when Skynet becomes self-aware. It is, apparently, also a very, very bad day for Amazon Web Services. Lots of people have raised questions today about what Amazon’s difficulties today mean for the future of cloud IaaS. My belief is that this doesn’t do anything to the adoption curve — but I [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, risk
by Lydia Leong | March 29, 2011 | Comments Off
Back in December, I blogged about the notion of Just Enough Privacy — the idea that cloud IaaS customers could share a common pool of physical servers, yet have the security concerns of shared infrastructure addressed through provisioning rules that would ensure that once a “private” customer got a virtual machine provisioned on a physical [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud
by Lydia Leong | February 3, 2011 | 1 Comment
Last week, Amazon launched its Simple Email Service (SES). SES is an outbound SMTP service, accessible via API or easily integrated into common SMTP servers (Amazon provides instructions for sendmail and postfix). It has built-in rate-limiting and feedback loop statistics (rejected, bounced, complaints). It’s $0.10 per thousand messages. EC2 customers get 2000 messages for free [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud
by Lydia Leong | January 24, 2011 | 2 Comments
Amazon recently released a new offering called the Elastic Beanstalk. At its heart, it is a simplified interface to EC2 and its ancillary services (load-balancing, auto-scaling, and monitoring integrated with alerts), along with an Amazon-maintained AMI containing Linux and Apache Tomcat (an open source Java EE application server), and a deployment mechanism for a Java [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, news
by Lydia Leong | January 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’ve now seen a number of press reports and some related writing, about the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastrucure as a Service and Web Hosting, that I feel mischaracterize statements made on the MQ in ways that they were certainly not intended to be taken, and in some cases, mischaracterize the nature of a Magic [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, Gartner, hosting, MQ, research
