Today Amazon unveiled some great new features for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the most important ones for those of us in agency land being General Availability (i.e. no more Beta) and an honest-to-goodness actual SLA!
Here’s a quick list of what they’ve just announced:
- General Availability - Beta period is over
- EC2 SLA - 99.95% uptime
- Windows machine instances
- Features planned for next year:
- Load balancing
- Auto-scaling
- Cloud Monitoring
- Management Console
Ess Ell Ay - Lite
The SLA target of 99.95% means that EC2 can finally be presented as a valid alternative to traditional dedicated hosting to clients who care about SLAs (which includes, er, all of them). Although 99.95% doesn’t compare very favourably to some hosting providers’ 5 nines guarantees, it’s a lot better than no SLA at all! Developers have been clamouring for Amazon to step up and deliver the goods for a looong time now, and now can rejoice.
Windows in the Cloud
Also of interest is the possibility of running Windows machine intances - we have always been committed to using Free/Open Source server platforms, but occasionally get a request for Windows servers (mostly from big, multi-national clients). An unholy mix of Windows Server running on Amazon’s Xen setup may sound scary to us OS purists - but may be just the way to satisfy those clients who insist on the Microsoft platform.
2009 for the really good stuff
With the announced 2009 features (Auto-Scaling etc), Amazon looks poised to crush the various businesses that have created user-friendly offerings that leverage EC2 as a hosting platform (RightScale, Scalr et al). However, we reckon that the new Amazon features will, like the existing features, still lack a full-featured web-based management toolset. So expect RightScale and friends to shift focus to bolstering their product usability and support systems instead of the hard technology.
So here are the key components that make the Amazon cloud a viable hosting solution:
Like many people, we have been toying with EC2 and using S3 for backups for a long time. Now we can finally justify investing in AWS as a production platform.
Just doing a quick bit of maths - 99.95% uptime is the equivalent of about 43 seconds of downtime every day. Not ideal, but not a nightmare either.