OnDemand Speed Links 21 April 2011

Amazon EC2 suffers significant outage on April 21
Amazon’s challenges with getting all services back online following an outage in its US-East  region  is already becoming a hot topic for debate in the Cloud Computing Industry.

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Amazon Elastic Beanstalk Enters PAAS Market

Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week released its Elastic Beanstalk Service to beta.  Elastic Beanstalk is AWS’s new Platform as a Service (PAAS) solution that helps developers deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud.

Elastic Beanstalk runs with Amazon EC2, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto-Scaling and Simple Notification Service on the Amazon Linux AMI.Elastic Beanstalk allows a developer to upload an application to Elastic Beanstalk using the AWS Management Console, API’s or the AWS toolkit for Eclipse and automatically deploys and provisions the necessary services required to run the application.

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Microsoft Announces New Windows Azure Features

Microsoft announced a number of new capabilities and services for Windows Azure at its PDC10 conference.

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CloudShare Democratizes The Cloud

One of the more eagerly adopted cloud services thus far in 2010 has been CloudShare Pro. CloudShare Pro is a “light” version of CloudShare’s Enterprise level product and is aimed at individuals and small teams who want to quickly set up training, sales or testing environments in the cloud and share copies with other colleagues.

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Consoles, Management Tools and Brokers

The web interfaces of cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) have consistently lagged behind third-party consoles in both user experience and functionality. Third party consoles supported rich meta-data around AWS resources in addition to  integrating CloudWatch and CloudFront support long before the AWS console.

The initial lack of capabilities in the provider interfaces created the market for cloud consoles. The initial crop of cloud consoles, however, has grown beyond simply providing a better interface into the cloud. This market has evolved into cloud brokers that act as the trust layer between the customer and their cloud infrastructures. The evolution from cloud console to cloud broker occurred in less than a year. In 2008, the only way to access Amazon Web Services was a command-line tool or writing your own code. As a result, a number of people built their own custom web interfaces for accessing AWS and a number of third-party tools like enStratus appeared in the market to simplify the job.

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Deploying a Web Server on Amazon EC2

Want to learn more about Setting Up Web Servers on Amazon EC2? Subscribe to OnDemand Beat today and be sure to check out the OnDemand Beat Amazon EC2 Resource Page.

Detailed tutorial on setting up and deploying a web server on Amazon EC2.

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