Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s cloud services arm is a giant that towers almost all competitors offering similar services. It looks like that reputation will continue to stick with the announcement that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing two trillion objects in the cloud.

S3 is used by many developers and companies for scalable and relatively cheap cloud infrastructure. Last June, Amazon announced that S3 had hit one trillion objects stored. That was a big milestone at the time. And now it has doubled that amount in less than a year.

“I’m pleased to announce that there are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second,” Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post today. “It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year to double that number.”

While Amazon has a big lead in the cloud infrastructure space, it faces a lot of heavy competition, especially from Rackspace, Microsoft, Google, and SoftLayer. This week, Microsoft opened up its Azure infrastructure product in general availability, and it made the commitment to match Amazon’s prices on services such as compute, storage, and bandwidth.

Photo credit: Jeff Attaway/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Dave Wright is the founder and CEO of SolidFire.

The initial rush to the cloud has been led by businesses moving data for backup and archival purposes and for less mission-critical use cases such as testing, development, and web hosting. This mirrors the early days of server virtualization where test/dev was the predominant early use case. As virtualization technology matured, security, performance, and availability concerns were addressed and server virtualization reached into production environments.

Heading into 2013 and beyond, the evolution of cloud computing will likely take a similar path. Using the cloud as a “cheap and deep” repository to host data is now well established. More than 1 trillion objects stored in Amazon Web Services’ S3 object storage should serve as sufficient evidence. What is exciting is that we are only scratching the surface of the cloud opportunity.

From an enterprise perspective, the public cloud is an extension (albeit sometimes rogue in its current form) to traditional on-premise IT resources such as compute and storage. While accounting for only a small percentage of IT operations today, there is little debate that a significant percentage of incremental workloads are being executed in the cloud.

For the cloud market to realize its full potential requires a continued push into the business and mission-critical application workloads that remain mostly on premise today. If Cloud 1.0 is about hosting business data in the cloud, Cloud 2.0 will be defined by the move to host production applications in the cloud. But where does the burden lie to drive this shift?

There are two constituencies that bear the responsibility of pushing this movement forward: the service providers that build and run clouds, and the technology vendors crafting the key infrastructure building blocks. Many players are vying for market leadership within each segment. Service providers going after this opportunity span everyone from basic web hosters, managed/dedicated hosting providers, co-location providers, telcos/operators, data center outsourcers, and IaaS pure-plays. Heck, even online bookstores and search engines are already part of the game.

The magnitude of the opportunity at stake in the cloud is also driving a massive innovation cycle from start-ups in the infrastructure vendor community. Without the right tools for the job, service providers will fail to drive the economics, performance, security, and reliability necessary to realize the full potential of the cloud. Legacy systems and software were not designed with this job in mind, and few service providers have the engineering resources to build the infrastructure themselves. Cloud infrastructure presents a whole different set of operating constraints that were not a consideration when most legacy vendors were crafting their wares. The scale, quality-of-service, automation and efficiency demanded from a cloud environment are unlike anything we have seen from traditional enterprise IT environments.

One area where innovation is occurring in cloud infrastructure is high-performance storage. Unlike compute, where wide ranges of price and performance options are available, cost-effective storage with predictable performance is not readily available in the cloud today. Attacking this problem is central to driving more and more applications to the cloud.

A key enabler of this innovation is solid-state storage and the dramatic price/performance advantage of flash over spinning disk. Applied to traditional IT cost centers, this technology is interesting, but when applied to profit-driven cloud services it is game-changing. Amazon’s Provisioned IOPS, launched earlier this year, is an early example of this extended innovation sequence where component level technologies, enable new architectures that drive new services. The combination of infrastructure innovations (flash) and the execution environment shift (cloud) are feeding on each other to enable a new opportunity for enterprise CIOs: run business-critical applications in the cloud with confidence.

So where do we go from here? Heading into 2013, the burden of proof is squarely on vendors and cloud service providers to deliver evolutionary new products and services. These innovations will drive the performance and economics required to extend the public cloud to an even wider range of workloads. If all goes well, 2013 will be the year that the industry comes together to move beyond “cheap and deep” and really start advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

Dave Wright helped start GameSpy Industries in 2008, and he led the team that created a backend infrastructure for millions of gamers. GameSpy merged with IGN Entertainment in 2004. Dave served as Chief Architect for IGN and lead technology integration with FIM/MySpace after IGN was acquired by News Corp in 2005. In 2007, Dave founded Jungle Disk, a pioneer in cloud-based storage and backup solutions for consumers and businesses. Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace in 2008, and Dave worked closely with the Rackspace Cloud division. In late 2009, Dave left Rackspace to start SolidFire.

Dusting photo via Richard Harrison/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon is the largest cloud infrastructure provider in the world, and it’s having to keep innovating on many fronts. It’s latest new feature: detailed billing reports that show usage by the hour to help customers control cloud costs.

Cloud services can cost your company a lot of cash if you don’t use them properly. Startups such as Newvem and Cloudability have already done a great job of starting to address this issue. Newvem has several tools, including a slick iPhone app, while Cloudability offers a variety of analytics tools for tracking costs.

Now Amazon is taking inspiration from these other player and will help its many users better understand their cloud usage. Jeff Barr, Amazon Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions, writes on the company’s AWS blog:

We’ve had a number of requests for better access to more detailed billing data. We took the first step earlier this year when we announced Programmatic Access to AWS Billing Data on this blog. That data, along with the AWS Billing Alerts, provided you with additional information about your AWS usage, along with a notification if your spending for the month exceeded a particular amount.

Today we are going a step further, providing you with new AWS Detailed Billing Reports. You now have access to new reports which include hourly line items. If you use a combination of On Demand and Reserved Instances, you will now be able to ensure that you have enough Reserved Instances to meet your capacity requirements for any given hour.

As part of this release, we are also making it easier for you to track and manage the costs associated with Reserved Instances when used in conjunction with AWS Consolidated Billing. This report provides an additional allocation model for linked accounts, with two key features — RI Affinity and Unblended Rates:

• With RI Affinity, the allocated benefit of the less expensive hourly rate for a Reserved Instance is now prioritized to the linked account that purchased the RI first.
• Currently the consolidated bill uses a blended rate (the average of On Demand, Free Usage Tier, and Reserved Instance) when allocating costs to linked accounts. The detailed billing report will continue to include blended rate and cost information, but will now be supplemented with unblended rate and cost as additional columns.

You can turn on detailed billing in Amazon on the AWS Billing Preferences page.

Newvem VP of Marketing Cameron Peron told VentureBeat via email that Newvem appreciates the new feature and thinks it will help attract steer more people to use Newvem for even deeper analytics.

“We applaud AWS’s new feature,” Peron said. “Anything that can help AWS users improve their usage is a win for AWS users, AWS, and Newvem. Cost is a function of usage … so any tool that will give users better visibility into cost structure is a great benefit and means to improve over all usage.”

Businessman looking at cloud via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings took the stage at Amazon’s big cloud event in Las Vegas today with Amazon’s senior VP Andy Jassy, and told the audience that he wanted Netflix to be the largest business in the world that runs entirely on Amazon Web Services.

In spite of the fact, of course, that Amazon and Netflix are die-hard competitors.

“The biggest benefit is the scale,” Hastings said. “Now we’re on a cost curve and an architecture that, as more people use it, gets cheaper.”

Netflix, of course, sells streaming entertainment. So does Amazon … and Amazon also sells DVDs and Blu-Rays. But Hastings said that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has assured him that it is safe to be on Amazon’s cloud services, and Jassy told him that to Amazon Web Services, Amazon streaming and Netflix streaming are just two equal clients.

“Netflix is every bit as important a customer to us as Amazon retail,” Jassy said.

While cost and scalability are the huge benefits of the cloud — especially since Amazon just reduced most clients’ data storage costs by about 25 percent — Hastings also talked about what is not great with the cloud: configuration.

“When you have to pick individual instance types, you know something’s wrong,” the very technical Hastings said, referring to how Amazon packages and prices cloud usage. ”It reminds me a lot of when I started in computing and had to handle register allocation manually before compilers came out … we’re kind of at that stage before the compiler.”

Hastings also provided some insight into how Netflix uses the cloud beyond basic storage and streaming.

“Netflix’s biggest problem is ranking,” Hastings said, saying that the company has the impossible task of fitting 10,000 videos into 10 inches of screen real estate.

When the company gets it right, people watch what Netflix is showing them. When the company gets it wrong, he says, people go watch cable. So Netflix analyzes gigabytes of subscriber data on the cloud to optimize its ranking methodology … and ensure that what users see on the first page of Netflix is something that’s actually interesting to them.

The service, which has already been tested in beta by web startups such as Flipboard, big data stalwarts such as NASA, and massive streaming media service Netflix — an Amazon competitor — is available today in limited preview. It’s designed for companies with datasets in the hundreds of gigabytes to the petabyte range, and it’s intended to reduce the price of big data warehousing and analysis by an order of magnitude.

“Enterprises are tired of paying such high prices for their data warehouses and smaller companies can’t afford to analyze the vast amount of data they collect (often throwing away 95% of their data),” Amazon’s VP of database services, Raju Gulabani said in a statement.

With RedShift, Amazon promises to reduce data storage costs below $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions, it says. Amazon’s talking about data warehousing companies such as Teradata, but also about its own solutions, saying that RedShift is just 10 percent of the cost of existing Amazon Web Services solutions.

On-demand pricing starts, Amazon announced, will start at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, which will scale linearly up to a petabyte. In other words, more data doesn’t mean a better deal. Customers who choose to purchase reserved instances to guarantee access get lower pricing: $0.228 per hour, which translates to under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

But it’s not just about the cost. It’s also about speed.

“Our internal tests have shown over 10 times performance improvement when compared to standard relational data warehouses.” Gulabani added. “Having the ability to quickly analyze petabytes of data at a low cost changes the game for our customers.”

Customers can buy in at the 2TB level — a single RedShift node — and scale up to one hundred 16TB nodes, a total of 1.6 petabytes. Amazon, of course, handles all provisioning, backup, and maintenance tasks. All data is continuously backed up to Amazon S3, the company said.

Amazon worked with data analytics technology company ParAccell to build the new solution. ParAccell enables high-performance analysis of massive datasets — more than a thousand JOINs in an SQL database, for example — and features real-time mid-query integration with Hadoop and other technologies.

It looks like the data storage and management industry just changed again.

Image credit: Star Wars

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than one trillion objects for its cloud customers, the company announced Tuesday in a blog post.

The S3 service is used by many developers and engineers for scalable and relatively cheap cloud-based infrastructure. Back in early April, S3 announced that it was storing 905 billion objects, so it only took a matter of months for the service to add another 100 billion. And that growth continues even as Amazon makes it easier to delete objects.

“Lately, we’ve seen the object count grow by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day (that’s over 40,000 new objects per second),” Jeff Barr, Amazon Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions, wrote on the blog. Our customers have taken advantage of S3′s relatively new object expiration feature and have used it to delete over 125 billion objects since we released it at the end of last year. In other words, even though we’ve made it easier to delete objects, the overall object count has continued to grow at a very rapid clip.”

In describing just how big 1 trillion objects is, Barr writes: “That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.”

That’s a lot of cloud.

Clouds photo: Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Keep your eyes to sky because clouds are in the forecast. Amazon Web Services has reported massive growth for its number of objects stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), with a 192 percent increase year-over-year.

Amazon Web Services is by far the most popular cloud infrastructure provider in the world, so measuring the number of objects stored in S3 can help us quantify just how ubiquitous the service is. Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions at Amazon, wrote in a company blog Monday night that at the end of 2011, there were 762 billion objects stored in Amazon S3. That’s 500 billion more objects than were stored at the end of 2010.

Barr also noted that Amazon Web Services now processes over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times. A year ago, Amazon S3 had a peak request rate slightly above 200,000 requests a second.

“Where are all of these objects coming from?” Barr wrote. “Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export.”