Managing DNS has been considered as an art by many. If you manage your own DNS records, and run your own external DNS servers, I’m sure you have some stories to share. Unfortunately unlike most other infrastructure on the internet, DNS screw-ups can get very costly, especially because caching policies can tend to keep your [...]

In a surprise move Amazon today released a bunch of new features to its cloudwatch service, some of which, till now, were provided by third party service providers. Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks -Auto Scaling can now be instructed to automatically replace [...]

One of the my problems with most cloud ROI worksheets is that they are heavily weighted for use-cases where resource usage is very bursty. But what if your resource requirements aren’t bursty ? And what if you have a use case where you have to maintain a small IT team to manage some on-site resources [...]

I have some experience with Akamai’s WAA (Web applications archive) service, which I’ve been using in my professional capacity for a few years now. And I’ve have been curious about how  cloudfront compares with it. Until a few weeks ago, Cloudfront didn’t have a key feature which I think was critical for it to win [...]

While some of the interest in moving towards public cloud is based on sound economics, there is a small segment of this movement purely due to the “herd mentality”. The slide on the right is from a Microsoft publication shows that larger networks may be less economical on the cloud (at least today). Richard Farley, [...]

 Cloudfront has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Here is what Jeff had to say when he announced that its out of “beta”…. First, we’ve removed the beta tag from CloudFront and it is now in full production. During the beta period we listened to our customers and added a number of important [...]

Building your first web application on AWS is like shopping for a car at pepboys, part by part. While manuals to build one might be on aisle 5, the experience of having built one already is harder to buy. Here are some interesting logistical questions, which I don’t think get enough attention, when people discuss [...]

Summary from James’ keynote talk at Velocity 2010 Pace of Innovation – Datacenter pace of innovation is increasing.  The high focus on infrastructure innovation is driving down the cost, increasing reliability and reducing resource consumption which ultimate drives down cost. Where does the money go ? 54% on servers, 8% on networking, 21% on power [...]

One of the problem with Amazon’s S3 was the inability to take a “snapshot” of the state of S3 at any given moment. This is one of the most important DR (disaster recovery) steps of any major upgrade which could potentially corrupt data during a release. Until now the applications using S3 would have had [...]

Amazon has published another “Best practices” document. This one covers the almost the entire collection of services. Its biased towards AWS (obviously), but its still one of the best description summary of the various services amazon offers today. Just the diagram above tells a lot about how the various AWS services interact with each other. [...]