Blogging Roller

Interesting speculation on the make-up of Amazon's cloud:

Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers | ZDNet :

We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2’s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.

Great analysis, as usual, from Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk. Here's the part about Dynamo that concerns me, the lock-in:

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look: Like the initial wave of PaaS platforms, however, DynamoDB is available only through a single provider. Unlike Amazon’s RDS, which is essentially compatible with MySQL, DynamoDB users will be unable to migrate off of the service seamlessly. The featureset can be replicated using externally available code – via those projects that were originally inspired by DynamoDB, for example – but you cannot at this time download, install and run DynamoDB locally.

Worth a read:

Werner Vogels: Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale.