Amazon Web Services (AWS) officials say there are at least five key features that fly under the radar and can be useful for cloud computing customers, including flexible pricing options and virtual private cloud capability.
Think
you know all there is to know about
Amazon Web
Services (AWS) and its cloud computing strategy? Think again. AWS says
there are several underrated features, or "unsung secrets," many
users and observers do not necessarily know about.
Since
Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, the company has worked to continuously
provide customers with an evolving and diverse portfolio of Web services in the
cloud. Today, AWS has customers in more than 190 countries leveraging an ever-expanding
platform of technology services. Looking back over the last four years,
observers can see that the AWS pace of innovation is quick. From new
service launches to added features and functionality to geographic expansion of
the services, the AWS goal is to rapidly innovate on behalf of its customers, Adam
Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at AWS, said
in an interview with eWEEK
The
AWS approach to innovation is to release a service when it is useful to many
developers and businesses, and then quickly add new features and services based
in large part on customer feedback.
With
the rapid pace of innovation at AWS, if you blink you may miss a few of the
features that make the AWS cloud unique, Selipsky said. While these
attributes of AWS may not be secrets to some, to others, they are the "unsung
secrets" of the AWS cloud, according to Amazon.
Five
AWS features that have been flying under the radar are as follows:
1.
Availability Zones-for more affordable fault tolerance
Historically,
building highly fault-tolerant applications to withstand a range of failure
scenarios from fire to flood meant leveraging multiple data centers and
multiple network providers and required significant investment of both capital
and time. Multiple Availability Zones for AWS make it possible for
customers who cannot afford to or do not want the hassle of deploying in
multiple data centers to dramatically improve their fault tolerance without
having to spend any capital or invest in multiple provider negotiations,
Selipsky said. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are
engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Customers
who architect their applications across multiple Availability Zones can protect
their applications from failure of a single location.
2.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)-for the warm and fuzzy feeling when
making the move into the cloud
As
enterprises with existing legacy applications build migration plans to make
their move to the cloud, many will operate in a hybrid mode as they gain
experience in the cloud. One of the ways that larger companies are
jumping into the cloud is via the
Amazon
Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Amazon VPC is a secure and
seamless bridge between a company's existing IT infrastructure and the AWS
cloud. The service enables enterprises to connect their existing
infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a virtual private
network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities
such as security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems to include
their AWS resources. Amazon VPC provides end-to-end network isolation by
utilizing a customer-provided IP address range, and routing all network traffic
between the customer's VPC and data center through an industry-standard
encrypted IPsec VPN.
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