Web Hosting Panel : aws

Janitor Monkey Will Clean Up Your Old AWS Instances

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:12:00 GMT

If you’re like me, you probably sat down with your family over the holiday break to relax and watch something on Netflix, only to find that its service was uncharacteristically down. Well, it seems that the company has corrected this problem, and now wants to share what it learned with the rest of us. Netflix officially released a new open source tools for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances this week known as Janitor Monkey. This solution, which is part of the company’s “Simian Army” of internal management tools, is meant for enterprise organizations that employ a public cloud through AWS, particularly when they are unknowingly spending unnecessary money because they have forgotten to shut off an old instance. “It is pretty easy to lose track of the cloud resources that are no longer needed or used,” say Netflix’s Michael Fu and Corey Bennett in a recent blog post. “Perhaps you forgot to delete the cluster with the previous version of your application, or forgot to destroy the volume when you no longer needed the extra disk.” Janitor Monkey works largely with Netflix’s open source Asgard tool, which lets administrators delete their unused resources; this process is streamlined thanks to Janitor Monkey, which does the work of automatically tracking down these useless instances and allowing Asgard to clean them up. According to Netflix, Janitor Monkey had deleted over 5000 resources from the company’s...(read more)

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:09:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wanted to give its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) users a present, and what better way to celebrate the holidays than with family – a new instance family, that is. The cloud computing services provider from Amazon recently announced High Storage instances for EC2. This additional instance family is optimized for applications that required rapid access to large amounts of data, while also providing AWS customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives. Moreover, these instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB of sequential I/O performance per second. In other words, because High Storage instances provide such massive amounts of direct attached storage per instance, they are ideal for data-intensive applications like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems for processing and analyzing large datasets in the AWS cloud. High Storage instances follow eight other EC2 instance families, including Cluster Compute and High I/O instances, to help meet the evolving application requirements of Amazon EC2 customers. Like the others, High Storage instances were designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of even the most demanding applications. They also power the new petabyte-scale data warehousing service Amazon Redshift and can help Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers process larger quantities of data more resourcefully, who helps significantly...(read more)

Riak CS Lets Users Replicate Data Globally

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 14:46:00 GMT

Customers can now replicate Riak Cloud Storage (Riak CS) data across multiple data centers to assure its users that they can avoid disruptions from outages and serve content faster to multiple geographic locations, all while building upon its existing compatibility with Amazon S3. The cloud storage service from Basho Technologies will now allow customers to spread their stored data over a series of data centers located around the world, and the integration of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure guarantees high availability. Basically, Riak CS customers will now be able to replicate their stored data on any data center they want on their own terms, in addition all of the benefits of using AWS, just to sweeten the deal. This solution also reduces some of the risks commonly associated with AWS. Moreoever, these new replication capabilities will break large data objects into smaller blocks that will be streamed to the underlying Riak cluster, where they will then be replicated for high availability. A manifest for each object will be maintained, allowing the service to retrieve each block from the cluster and present the full object to the end-user. Global information, bucket information and manifests will all be streamed in real-time from a primary implementation to a secondary site for multi-site replication, and objects can be replicated in either “full” or “real-time” sync modes. Riak CS, built upon Riak, the open source distributed NoSQL database...(read more)

NetApp Brings AWS to the Enterprise

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:41:00 GMT

NetApp , the cloud storage provider, recently brought the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to its customers. The company’s new solution, NetApp Private Storage for AWS, will use the AWS Direct Connect service to allow enterprise users to establish a dedicated network connection that links their existing infrastructure to AWS. This means they can now replicate data from their on-premises NetApp storage environments in a Direct Connect facility. Enterprise companies will now be able to use NetApp with a variety of AWS services, including Amazon EMR for more cost-effective big data analysis, disaster recovery deployments with Amazon EC2 and disk backup through Amazon S3, in addition to being able to seamlessly move enterprise applications to the cloud and between AWS regions. Right now, there is a fear on the part of some enterprise organizations when it comes to moving workloads (especially larger ones) to AWS, but by going through NetApp, which has been serving enterprises for 20 years, these companies may feel more comfortable using Amazon’s service. “Our work with NetApp provides customers with the performance, security, compliance, and availability benefits of AWS with the high value enterprise offerings customers have come to expect from NetApp,” says Terry Wise, the head of Worldwide Partner Ecosystems at AWS. Currently, NetApp Private Storage for AWS is available to select resellers in North America, but it should be available in Europe and Asia...(read more)

AWS Comes to CoreSite's New York Datacenter

'Net Features : wm-webhosting — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going metropolitan. For the first time, AWS Direct Connect will have a presence in New York thanks to a new partnership with datacenter provider CoreSite . CoreSite provides datacenter products and interconnection services to over 750 customers, including enterprise-level organizations, communications providers, cloud and content companies, financial firms, media and entertainment companies, government agencies and more. And now, the company boasts AWS Direct Connect availability in its New York datacenter. This move helps CoreSite meet the increasing customer demand for access to the AWS cloud, and will help improve its ability to service digital content communities, financial organizations and managed service providers, as Direct Connect allows customers to directly access cloud services using a secure private network connection. Direct access provides increased scalability for throughput and a more consistent network performance for reduced network costs. It also helps reduce bandwidth costs while increasing capacity. More than anything, this decision makes it easy for CoreSite customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their location to the AWS cloud without accessing the public cloud over the Internet. This leads to improved application performance and enhanced security – two of the biggest concerns for companies using the cloud. Customers can access Direct Connect using a standard, single-mode fiber 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet...(read more)

SunGard Pairs with AWS for Cloud Offering

Michael Garrity — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:13:00 GMT

Software and technology services company SunGard's cloud computing division, SunGard Availability Services, is partnering up with good ole Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its customers with highly available cloud backup via Amazon Direct Connect for both AWS and SunGard customers in 2012.

Initially, SunGard Availability will provide LAN-like connectivity from AWS's U.S. East Coast data centers by leveraging Direct Connect so that the company can provide customers with bi-directional disaster recovery services from both cloud service providers without having to transfer data over the publically used Internet.

SunGard customers will also be able to use Amazon S3's Storage Gateway to write customer data bi-directionally and asynchronously between the SunGard Enterprise Cloud and AWS's storage infrastructure, ultimately providing customers' data with an additional layer of protection.

And that's not all; SunGard will also use AWS to offer customers a broader set of cloud solutions for production and testing/development environments, which means users will be able to select from a series of different cloud platforms based on the needs of their applications.

Store On-Premise Data in the Cloud with AWS Storage Gateway

Michael Garrity — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:02:00 GMT

The online and offline worlds are becoming increasingly linked, and Amazon wants to continue to drive that connection with the release of AWS Storage Gateway, a tool designed to connect on-premise software appliances with their corresponding cloud storage services.

This new service will make cloud products more readily accessible to people working almost exclusively with on-premises IT. Customer data centers will be backed up in AWS's S3 storage as EBS snapshots for full recovery on on-premise hardware in the future. These files will also be available as Amazon EBS volumes, "enabling you to easily mirror data between your on-premises and Amazon EC2-based applications."

"Gateways" will run in a data center and support as much as 12 volumes and 12TB of storage.

Eventually, a range of technologies will be supported by the Storage Gateway; however, the service will only use VM image for VMware ESXi 4.1 at launch.

Current AWS users will be able to test out a free trial of Storage Gateway. After that, it will run at $125 a month, with additional rates for EBS snapshot storage and outbound data transfer.

Check out the AWS blog for more information on AWS Storage Gateway, including a fun chart and video.

New Amazon NoSQL Service Improves Scalability

Michael Garrity — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:23:00 GMT

More big news from Amazon Web Services (AWS) today. The company has just launched a new managed NoSQL database service called Amazon DynamoDB to improve database scalability.

Apparently, the company was inspired to create DynamoDB because it felt that traditional databases just weren't adequately prepared to scale to the needs of modern applications.

AWS says that customers using DynamoDB will be able to launch a database table quickly and manage the scale of the system's capacity up or down with no downtime or performance degradation. DynamoDB will automatically partition and re-partition data anytime it's needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements put forth by different applications.

All data in the new database will be stored on SSDs and replicated across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS region to help provide the highest availability and performance possible.

"Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology," says Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. "Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS."

DynamoDB will be offered with pay-as-you-go pricing.