So many startups I talk to are using Amazon’s cloud computing services in some fashion. For example, Twitter uses S3 for icon storage. We use S3 for storage on all of our projects including all static images and files on CenterNetworks.

Additionally IBM noted, “IBM is helping the Dongying government build a cloud that will provide software development and test resources for software startup companies via the web through a self-service user interface.”

Dongying will create The Yellow River Delta Cloud Computing Center which will be used to foster growth in the city and help its petroleum industry develop more innovative application services.

The release talks about the combined technologies of both companies and the strengths for their customers. The combined companies, “will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services.”

They also discuss cloud computing and note, “As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.”

From the release, “At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit”. The release also notes that a “majority” of NetQoS’ 250 employees will remain on with CA.

The deal is expected to close by December 31.

Rackspace notes that their “cloud” business is what’s driving the expansion. Formerly known as Mosso, the Rackspace cloud computing division is known as the “Rackspace Cloud”. I am not sure if the entire space will be used for the cloud computing division or if other Rackspace customers will be serviced in Chicago (it looks like the latter). We currently host the CN network of sites on Rackspace.

Additional techy notes from the announcement:

• Rackspace believes that this lease with DuPont Fabros will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility.
• The Chicago facility maximizes operating efficiency through an enhanced power capacity and flexible design with N+2 redundancy on all major systems including heat rejection systems, generators and UPS systems.

Assembla

Today Assembla has announced the launch of their “private install” model. Private Assembla is a dedicated server that contains the same software that runs the main Assembla service.  From what I can tell, it looks like a white label plus additional features offering.

There are three options with Private Assembla: download, run in the Amazon EC2 cloud, managed option where Assembla manages the private install.

Pricing for the download option starts at $3,000 for a perpetual license and a year of support. The Amazon option starts at $1/hour and the managed option starts at $2,000/month. There are also additional options for support and installation.

Werner explained that using Amazon web services (AWS) helps companies move from capital expenses to variable costs. The basic idea is that instead of buying enough hardware to make sure you can handle spikes, AWS can grow and shrink as needed.

Here you can see how fast AWS is growing and how in mid-2007, AWS bandwidth passed the bandwidth used by Amazon itself. Werner said if they showed 2008 on the chart, the Amazon line would be gone as the growth has been that big. In fact, he said that Amazon’s ecommerce sites combined is only a moderate customer of AWS.

On a typical product page on Amazon (say for a book), Amazon pulls 200-300 services to generate the page. Each service is managed by an Amazon employee and Amazon gives them the flexibility to build in the language and tools that best fit the needs of the service.

Here you can see the growth in registered developers for AWS. At least count it was 500,000 (I am one of the 500,000).

One of the interesting examples Werner provided came from the New York Times. They wanted to put all of their old editions online but didn’t want to utilize their current TIFF files as they were very large in size per page. They wanted to use PDF files instead. They had to convert 4TB of data and internally they looked at using 6 servers and a lot of hours of development. By using AWS, they got the project fully completed in a weekend and it cost $25 in EC2 processing and S3 storage.

Check out all of my event photos on Flickr.

Amazon describes the half-day seminar as, "this half-day event is designed to provide insight into the state of cloud computing technology today, guide you on assessing which projects are ideally suited for cloud computing, and illustrate best practices for managing cloud deployments."

The speakers include:

• Werner Vogels - VP & CTO at Amazon.com
• Marten Mickos – Sun SVP
• Michael Crandell - CEO and Founder of RightScale

If enough CN’ers attend, we could do a group lunch afterwards.

Mosso

If you are new to CDN services, the simple concept is that servers are placed around the world and depending on where you are located, you get served via the closest or most appropriate server. CDNs cut down on the hops back and forth to handle a request.

Mosso’s pricing for Cloud Files with CDN starts at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 22 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth from any edge location around the globe. Stored files can be up to 5gb in size. Apparently you can activate the CDN service on any file by accessing it via the Mosso admin control panel. It makes sense for large video and audio files along with large volume sites.

As many of you know, we are hosted on Mosso. Mosso has continued to improve reliability and customer service since we joined back in March. However, when I see deals like this I get excited for the possibilities but wish that they would spend more time making Mosso work like a normal webhost. There are several items including IP addresses referrals (every user looks the same) that just don’t work right and cause big issues when trying to process users appropriately.

Last month Mosso/Rackspace announced their cloud computing strategy.

Then, this morning I read an article By Nick Carr where he discussed the significance of open source to buyers. His thesis is that what is most important are the meat and potatoes issues around reliability security, etc. Specifically, Carr says:

We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud’s development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it’s just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won’t blow up in their faces.

This is very much in line with my thinking from yesterday. Azure is a big deal. No one is going to care about the fact that it is not open source. Basic hosting is going to become a commodity business very quickly, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (MAG) competing in the game of creating highly scalable services that use traditional development methodologies. Microsoft is now ahead in that game from a technology perspective. Amazon is ahead in customers, and Google, for now, is left in the dust but can obviously catch up. But I don’t see any of these guys making any of their cloud technology open source, and I don’t think it matters.

I liken open source in this space to DRM in the music business. Its one of those things that a small number of people complain about but will later be proven totally irrelevant to the rank and file buyer. We now have statistics to prove that DRM was irrelevant in terms of sales, and we are beginning to see the outlines of the irrelevancy of openness in the cloud.

The real issue here is that small companies are not going to be able to compete selling basic “get your applications into the cloud” type services. MAG is going to own that business. I think that 10Gen and other companies providing baseline services are going to have a rough time playing that game.

Startups who wish to compete in the cloud business will have to provide great value added services that facilitate unique new application categories sitting on top of one or more of the MAG clouds. The services will have to be hard to copy and/or narrow enough to not attract the attention of MAG.

Given the need to innovate in some unique way, and the need to be interoperable with MAG clouds, I am not at all clear how you can create innovate cloud platform services using an open source business model in a money making way. Being open source in this space is akin to what it might be like if Apple made OSX open source and optimized it to run on standard Intel PCs. Good karma perhaps. Good profits, not so much.

Of course many open source businesses hang their hat on services, consulting and support. I personally hate time and materials type businesses masquerading as scalable software businesses, but my opinions aside, these are by and large tough businesses to succeed at.

In short, while being open source may be politically correct, I fear it may be a grave hindrance towards providing a defensible, unique, money-making offering in the cloud.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

• Cloud Sites– Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, The Hosting Cloud, is now Cloud Sites. Developed by Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud division, it offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud Sites is a heterogeneous environment, supporting both Windows and Linux.
• Cloud Files — Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, CloudFS, is now Cloud Files. Cloud Files gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing infinite scalability. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB. Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses. While continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform, Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system in the coming months. Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
• Cloud Servers — This new hosting solution, which will deliver on-demand server capacity to businesses of all sizes, will leverage key technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualization software. Slicehost will remain as the company’s developer brand, creating innovative new features driven through shared intellectual property in conjunction with development initiatives from Rackspace. As part of the announcement, Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance computing, lower prices as well as IP sharing for high availability computing.

ReadWriteWeb has more information on Slicehost and Jungle Disk. Slicehost has more details on the transaction as well.

For heavy users, the pricing moves to a tiered model. Over 50 TB of storage is 14 cents/TB and it gradually lowers to 12 cents/TB over 500 TB of storage. I wonder how many Amazon S3 clients are using over 500 TB of data storage. It’s like saying if you drive more than 30,000 miles in a month in your car, we will give you 20 cents off each gallon of gas.

We were using S3 for all static files on CN but I’ve found in my travels that the domain didn’t resolve correctly so images and CSS files would appear broken. I must have set something wrong in the DNS.

Send Word Now makes SaaS (software-as-a-service) emergency notification, on-demand alerting and response services. They are heavy in the text messaging space and apparently can send hundreds-of-thousands of text messages in minutes when an emergency arises.

Send Word Now CEO Tony Schmitz noted that the new funding will be used for software development, infrastructure, sales and marketing.

When I interviewed Wuala founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund, I asked him how he defines the Wuala service. He replied, "Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."

The big news today out of the Wuala camp is that today marks their public opening. Previously the service was in a closed alpha for just under a year. The company is self-funded. The Wuala team is based in Switzerland and has worked on the product for three years.

I asked Dominik about the Wuala business plan as many online storage companies have tried a variety of models. Dominik noted, "At the moment, we’re experimenting with ads in the public (World) area. Since our costs are lower, this might work. However, there are also other possible business models such as photo finishing, buying additional storage (you can trade if you want, if you don’t, you could buy some additional online storage for a really low price), or also other forms of sponsoring that we’re working on."

Check out other Wuala reviews on Download Squad and Profy.

With that said, we received the following video today which I thought was worth sharing: