Lydia Leong

How much capacity does Amazon EC2 have? And how much gets provisioned?
Given that it’s now clear that there are capacity constraints on EC2 (i.e., periods of time where provisioning errors out due to lack of capacity), this is something that’s of direct concern to users. And for all the cloud-watchers, it’s a fascinating study of [...]

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Rackspace has recently launched a community portal called Cloud Tools, showcasing third-party tools that support Rackspace’s cloud compute and storage services. The tools are divided into “featured” and “community”. Featured tools are ones that Rackspace has looked at and believes deserve highlighting; they’re not necessarily commercial projects, but Rackspace does have formal relationships with the [...]

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The various reactions to Amazon’s VPC announcement have been interesting to read.
Earlier today, I summarized what VPC is and isn’t, but I realize, after reading the other reactions, that I should have been clearer on one thing: Amazon VPC is not a private cloud offering. It is a connectivity option for a public cloud. If [...]

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Today, Amazon announced a new enhancement to its EC2 compute service, called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, has, as usual, provided some useful thoughts on the release, accompanied by his thoughts on private clouds in general. And as always, the RightScale blog has a lucid explanation.
So what, exactly, is VPC?
VPC offers [...]

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Interesting recent news:
Amazon’s revocation of Orwell novels on the Kindle has stirred up some cloud debate. There seems to have been a thread of “will this controversy kill cloud computing”, which you can find in plenty of blogs and press articles. I think that question, in this context, is silly, and am not going to [...]

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This is just a round-up of links that I’ve recently found to be interesting.
Barroso and Holzle (Google): Warehouse-Scale Computing. This is a formal lecture-paper covering the design of what these folks from Google refer to as WSCs. They write, “WSCs differ significantly from traditional data centers: they belong to a single organization, use a relatively [...]

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I’ve turned one of my earlier blog entries, Smoke-and-mirrors and cloud software into a full-blown research note: “Software on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud: How to Tell Hype From Reality” (clients only). It’s a Q&A for your software vendor, if they suggest that you deploy their solution on EC2, or if you want to do so [...]

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Catching up on some commentary…
Amazon recently introduced three new features: monitoring, load-balancing, and auto-scaling. (As usual, Werner Vogels has further explanation, and RightScale has a detailed examination.)
The monitoring service, called CloudWatch, provides utilization metrics for your running EC2 instances. This is a premium service on top of the regular EC2 fee; it costs 1.5 cents [...]

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Amazon’s announcement for today, with timing presumably associated with EclipseCon, is an AWS toolkit for the Eclipse IDE.
Eclipse, which is an open-source project under the aegis of IBM (who also offers a commercial version), is one of the most popular IDEs (the other is Microsoft Visual Studio). Originally designed for Java applications, it has since [...]

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Tossing a few links out there…
In the weekend’s biggest cloud news, Microsoft’s Azure was down for 22 hours. It’s now back up, with no root cause known.
Geva Perry has posted a useful Zoho Sheet calculator for figuring out whether an Amazon EC2 reserved instance will save you money over an unreserved instance.
Craig Balding has posted [...]

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