Phil Wainewright, in his “Software As A Service” blog at ZDNet, has a good post on Amazon’s beefed up Web Services, which include a needed dashboard to monitor the services you subscribe to, called a Health Dashboard:
Wainewright praises these new monitoring tools, which up service levels, concluding his post with “AWS is now starting to look like it could fulfil the role of IT utility to the enterprise.”
While I’ve yet to blog on it in depth, Amazon Web Services is a disruptive, very cool and very important “new thing” for enterprises (from startups, a la Cruxy run by my friend Nathan Freitas, to the New York Times and NASDAQ, which all use it). Again (I know, I sound like a broken record), it’s part of the sea change well outlined in Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch–which you need to read, if you’re a provider or consumer of IT at anything other than a home user level.
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, does a great job of explaining complicated things like Amazon Web Services, especially explaining not only the how (with great technical expertise) but more importanly the why, in terms of business case. Check out these various talks and pieces by Werner, to understand more about Amazon Web Services and the sea change of cloud computing in general:
Here’s a nice 5-minute video interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, introducing Amazon Web Services.
And here’s a very excellent 52-minute technical presentation from August 2007 entitled “Availability and Consistency” (streaming video + simultaneous streaming slides) at QCON which describes Amazon Web Services and related technical issues. I watched this in October 2007 and it was highly eye-opening for me, influencing IT architecture decisions for me in a big project I was working on:
Here’s a nice summary of a recent Verner Vogel’s talk.
Here’s a 2-minute clip of Vogels at last week’s MySQL conference:
And finally, check out Werner’s blog, All Things Distributed.
