Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities | Hacker News Reader

Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities

aws.typepad.com

55 pointsjeffbarr16 comments

"We plan to release an interactive AWS management console. We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services."

how will that play with management providers like rightscale. they go on to say :

"I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking. We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis."

small conciliation, but i think it was always a danger that aws would walk up the value add food chain.

> small conciliation, but i think it was always a danger that aws would walk up the value add food chain.

Indeed - there's the rub... When do Amazon reach a point that their offering competes with their own customers?

OK, Microsoft clearly foreshadowed this: http://i36.tinypic.com/2llnhxk.jpg

Weren't there versions of NT that ran on DEC Alpha and EAC MIPS chips?

It's all probably Intel at Amazon, but still - fun to think about.

Yep. I have used both.

Windows is now available

Introducing 'Cloudy Computing'

The Windows addition is saying something. I think this clearly represents that Amazon is wanting to stay up with it and is, in a way, preparing for the "Windows Strata" announcement that supposed to come at the developers convention. I'm curious to see how well it all works out, I've never personally thought of Windows Server as much of a "cloud-ready" server O/S... if you will.

the sla only covers network connectivity, not hardware/systems problems? I guess that makes sense, but three and a half nines is a lot easier to get on a network than on PC hardware.

and it appears that two out of their 3 availability zones have to go down in order for anyone to collect on sla. This effectively makes the sla meaningless afaict.

huh. well, I imagine they still have the credibility edge over small providers. I guess if you really are using it as a cloud (that is, provisioning as needed, and not worrying about it if your existing systems go down) one out of 3 availability zones seems like it would be enough.

But then, I bet a lot of people use ec2 like an ordinary VPS provider, which is to say they keep their image up all the time. (this is why I see them as a competitor, even though I rent by the month, not the hour, meaning you can do things with ec2 that you can't do with me. I am working on better provisioning/billing scripts, but I've been talking about it for a while, and it hasn't happened, while I have to say the ec2 system is pretty slick)

From the beginning, Amazon has said that individual EC2 instances are not supposed to be reliable and thus you should build some sort of HA. The SLA covers the case where you'd go down even if you have HA.

This does leave the door open for a more reliable cloud provider who takes care of most of the HA for you.

And all SLAs aren't meaningless? Try reading Joyent's. It includes such gem exceptions as:

* scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades * failure of access circuits to the Joyent Network * inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA

So, power outages aren't their problem. If the server goes down and they perform emergency maintenance, but can't get the equipment they need for 48 hours that isn't their problem. If the network goes down, that isn't their problem.

While Amazon is being a little cheap with their SLA, at least there are circumstances where it could be triggered. That's why I always respected Slicehost's SLA:

"Do you offer an SLA?

Not for Slices and here’s why: most hosting SLA agreements are just plain silly. They promise things like 99.9% uptime, but downtime excludes: scheduled maintenance, network outages, hardware failures and software trouble. Well what exactly is left to cause downtime? Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong."

And in over a year I've never had any downtime that wasn't me rebooting the box.

/I have no affiliation with Slicehost beyond being a customer.

eh, I've given most customers a free month more than once, on my 99.5 sla. there's no reason why you can't have a real SLA, the company in question just needs to have the financial reserves to lose a months revenue without going into default. I see it as a way to gain credibility while I'm still small (and my reliability isn't what I'd like.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com