cloud computing Archive

Amazon’s CloudFront service is part of their Amazon Web Services offering. CloudFront is a content delivery networks or CDN. If you aren’t familiar with how a CDN works, here’s an easy way to think about it. When you upload your files to a webserver, the files generally sit in one place at your hosting company’s physical location. CloudFront (and any CDN) takes your files and puts them in a variety of locations to speed up the delivery to the end user. The idea is that the shorter the trip, the faster the delivery. We added CloudFront to CN last and it has helped the site to load both faster and smoother.

Amazon has made three important announcements today related to the CloudFront service. First, they have dropped the price of using CloudFront by 25%. Pricing  now starts at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.

Next, CloudFront now supports SSL for secure transfers. To use the new SSL option, just change the links from http to http to your CloudFront content.

Lastly, and most importantly for Yankees fans, Amazon has opened a NYC edge location. This means people accessing your content from NYC and the northeast will grab your content quicker. We do believe that Mets fans will also be able to use the new edge location.

The Amazon S3 storage service is currently showing elevated error rates. We’ve noticed several images not loading correctly and we’ve heard from multiple CN readers with the same issue on their sites. The issues are apparently only hitting the U.S. Standard centers — other S3 centers including Northern California, Europe and Asia are functioning correctly.

The Amazon service health dashboard shows an update as of 5:01 Pacific Time noting, “We are investigating elevated error rates.”

As of November 2009, Amazon S3 stored over 82 billion objects.

Leave a comment if you use the S3 service and are experiencing issues.

Last December, Amazon Web Services lowered their pricing  for the S3 storage service. Today Amazon announced that they have reduced the outbound data transfer chages for all of their services by $0.02/GB. The affected services include: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon VPC.

The new outbound data transfer pricing will be:

• First 10 TB per Month: $0.15 per GB
• Next 40 TB per Month: $0.11 per GB
• Next 100 TB per Month: $0.09 per GB
• Over 150 TB per Month: $0.08 per GB

Amazon CloudFront, their content delivery network (CDN), has also reduced rates for the service by $0.02/GB. Amazon’s Jeff Barr noted, “We are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices.”

In other cloud computing news, last month Rackspace raised their cloud service monthly base pricing by 50% to a base rate of $150/month and reduced their overage charges.

Update: Om Malik has a related post from a chat he had with the Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in Munich.

This evening Rackspace sent a notice to all current customers of the Rackspace Cloud service (formerly Mosso) about some changes to the pricing structure for their Rackspace Cloud service.

The big change is a 50% increase in the base price for all new accounts. The old pricing had a base of $100/month and the new pricing has a base of $149/month. Current customers will remain at the previous $100/month pricing.

Rackspace notes the reasoning for the increase, “Although the price for Cloud Sites has not been changed for over three years, the cost of managing the Cloud Sites platform has increased.  We felt it was necessary to update prices for new customers to reflect the value provided from the service, while still remaining very competitive versus other cloud platform as a service offerings.”

The reduction comes in a change to the overage charges which are now $0.22/GB which is a reduction from the $0.25/GB previously charged. Rackspace notes that this decrease is to align better with their other cloud service offerings.
Continue reading “Rackspace Raises Base Cloud Sites Pricing 50% and Reduces Overage Charges” »

Last month Amazon announced that 82 billion objects are stored on the S3 cloud computing storage service.

Today Amazon has made two announcements regarding pricing for the S3 storage service. First, Amazon has setup a dedicated “sales” site to help convince business users to switch to Amazon cloud computing services. It’s called the AWS Economics Center and has lots of charts and graphs.

The other change Amazon has made is regarding the pricing for S3. Pricing for the largest users — those using multi-petabytes will see a 15% reduction on their usage fees. The discount is for the US and EU regions. The EU region is also receiving a discount for overall S3 usage at any level and EC2 computing usage as well.

The other change applies to all customers through June 30, 2010, “data Transfer into AWS will be free of charge from now through June 30th, 2010, making it even easier for customers to get their data into AWS.”

Looks like Amazon is on a mission to acquire customers.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has posted a chart (displayed below) of Amazon S3 storage usage over the past three years. The latest number for Q3 2009 is 82 billion objects inside of S3. Pretty amazing growth considering that the service was barely used in 2006. Early 2007 shows 2-3 billion objects.

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.

IBM has published an announcement of a new partnership with Chinese city Dongying. IBM notes that they are bringing cloud computing the Dongying in the hopes of making the city “smarter”. From the announcement, “Dongying will use IBM cloud technology to build a common platform to promote e-government, and support the city’s transition from an industrial to services-based economy.”

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.