Cloud is in Business, Business with SLA and no Beta
Amazon has announcement today that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). I would take this as general reminder to all the web players, especially the Web 2.0 crowd, that a beta version does has a limit life span. Beta has a end. Google, are you listening?
This announcement makes those immortal beta seems very childish and is afraid of responsibilities. Yes, even Google need grow up.
Anyway, here is what Amazon says:
Amazon EC2 has entered General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features. We are also providing an SLA for Amazon EC2, with a service level commitment of 99.95% availability within a Region. If availability falls below this level, customers are eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud. For further details on the SLA for EC2, see aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla.
Beside, Amazon EC2 can run Windows server now. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour. Also, there are all sorts of goodies planned:
- Load balancing - Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
- Auto-scaling - Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
- Cloud monitoring - Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
- Management Console - Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.
All things considered, I think the Could is in serious business now.
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Hi,
betas are ok and even welcome for free services. If you want to ask money for a service though, you had better get serious. As Google’s apps are free, they can get away with this. Being Google also helps
Ariel
I actually wonder which server-side language (Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, …) is the most performant. Of course it should have OO, garbage collection and other features that are considered ‘essential’ these days (therefore please don’t respond with ‘Assembler’). In the end you pay for the CPU cycles used and in case of heavy usage this could lead to a substantial cost when taking the wrong decision. Anybody any ideas?