Windows Azure and AWS

The two entities that dominate the enterprise Cloud Computing landscape are undoubtedly Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services. Though Google App Engine is maturing rapidly, I am not planning to cover it in this series. I may compare Windows Azure and Google App Engine in a separate article.
With the latest announcements from PDC, Microsoft is inching closer to Amazon Web Services to match the offerings. Windows Azure is also blurring the line between PaaS and IaaS by offering VM Role that enables businesses to bring their legacy applications to the Cloud. Microsoft is leveraging the leadership in the platform and tools by seamlessly integrating the Cloud with .NET and Visual Studio.

Amazon is a very credible player in the Cloud Computing space and enjoys the leadership position in the IaaS offerings. Their fast paced innovations ensure that they have a lead and help them differentiate from the competition. They have a very healthy ecosystem of partners and developers who build rich and complementary tools on AWS.
This series of articles attempts at comparing the Windows Azure Platform and Amazon Web Services. The objectives of this series are the following –

• Provide objective comparison between the two
• Enable enterprises and ISVs to take an informed decision
• Avoid marketing speak and buzz words
• Be neutral and unbiased in the approach

The following table provides a quick comparison of both the platforms.

 Looking at the above, it is evident that these two stacks will go head-on to secure the mind share and market share. While Microsoft is moving some of the middleware components from BizTalk Server to Azure, Amazon is leveraging it’s payment mechanism and components for AWS. Windows Azure will be the most comprehensive PaaS offering once all the above components are delivered.

From http://www.janakiramm.net/

Amazon S3 Security

With any shared storage system, the biggest question is whether unauthorized users can
access information either intentionally or by mistake.  To ensure that customers have the
utmost in flexibility to determine how, when, and to whom they wish to expose the
information they store in AWS, Amazon S3 APIs provide both bucket- and object-level
access controls, with defaults that only permit authenticated access by the bucket and/or
object creator.  Write and Delete permission is controlled by an Access Control List
(ACL) associated with the bucket.  Permission to modify the  bucket  ACLs is itself
controlled by an ACL, and it defaults to creator-only access.  Therefore, the customer
maintains full control over who has access to their data.  Amazon S3 access can be
granted based on AWS Account ID, DevPay Product ID, or open to everyone.

Data Management  

Another potential concern is whether or not data can be intercepted while “in transit”
from one node on the Internet to AWS.  For maximum security, Amazon S3 is accessible
via SSL encrypted endpoints.  The encrypted endpoints are accessible from both the
Internet and from within Amazon EC2, ensuring that data is transferred securely both
within AWS and to and from sources outside of AWS.  

Customers may wish to secure data even when it is being stored within Amazon S3.  Data
stored within Amazon S3 is not encrypted at rest by AWS.  However, users can encrypt
their  data before it is uploaded to Amazon S3 so that the data cannot be accessed or
tampered with by unauthorized parties.

When an object is deleted from Amazon S3, removal of the mapping from the public
name to the object starts immediately, and is generally processed across the distributed
system within several seconds.  Once the mapping is removed, there is no external access
to the deleted object.  That storage area is then made available only for write operations
and the data is overwritten by newly stored data. 


From www.amazon.com

WSO2 Stratos - Free BPaaS on public and/or private cloud

WSO2 Stratos Services is the publicly hosted version of WSO2 Stratos, the cloud version of WSO2’s award-winning WSO2 Carbon platform.

To sign up for a free trial account please visit http://cloud.wso2.com . For full access, domain verification may be required. As a registered user you will have instant access to the following WSO2 middleware applications:

• WSO2 Web Services Application Server
• WSO2 Governance Registry
• WSO2 Gadget Server
• WSO2 Mashup Server
• WSO2 Business Activity Monitor
• WSO2 Identity Server

The remaining WSO2 Carbon-based products and additional cloud-native features will be available soon.

WSO2 Stratos Services is currently offered as a free alpha version. As such we reserve the right to impose reasonable limits on user accounts, and can’t guarantee five-nines uptime nor data preservation. Nor have we established pricing for the final release version. For now we recommend WSO2 Stratos Services to users with the following needs:

• Evaluation of WSO2 Stratos for private cloud deployment.
• Development and testing of WSO2 Carbon applications without the overhead of server acquisition and provisioning.
• Small-scale, non-mission-critical applications, that can easily be migrated to traditional WSO2 Carbon server runtimes.

Existing WSO2 Cloud Services (Governance as a Service and Cloud Identity) remain intact, but we will be working with account users there to migrate their accounts to WSO2 Stratos Services.


From http://wso2.com/cloud/stratos-services/

WikiLeaks and Amazon: A free speech issue?

On Wednesday, WikiLeaks – the organization behind one of the largest diplomatic data dumps in history – was ejected from Amazon cloud-based servers, apparently under pressure from US politicians. According to CNN, Amazon was contacted this week by several US senators, including Joe Lieberman, who urged the company to immediately terminate its relationship with WikiLeaks.

From http://www.csmonitor.com/

Amazon EC2 Tutorial

Deploy a web server on Amazon EC2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBajLxeKqoY&feature=related

Free usage of Amazon cloud services

To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Below are the highlights of AWS’s new free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except Amazon SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely):

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch alarms**

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

From www.amazon.com

What is the so called Cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams. 

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.

A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage on demand. Customers use the provider's application program interface (API) to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-you-use model resembles the way electricity, fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes referred to as utility computing.

Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the Internet. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Developers need to know that currently, there are not standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud. Some providers will not allow software created by their customers to be moved off the provider's platform.

In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.