Future for Amazon's Web services revealed

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By Alex Handy

September 4, 2008 — The cloud has formed on the horizon, and Amazon has laid out a map to get there. At a traveling evangelical event in San Francisco supporting its Web Services offerings, Amazon's future as a platform was revealed yesterday in front of hundreds of startup workers. The company gave hints of a future that included regulation and security compliance, Windows support and the possibility of building new service hosting facilities in Asia.

Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services, said that the company is looking at enterprise needs now that its Web services offerings have matured. “This is a serious business. It's early days, but we like the way the business is shaping up,” said Selipsky.

Jeff Barr, senior Web services evangelist at Amazon, discussed some of the changes the company hopes to make to its existing services. Chief among those relevant to enterprises was the assurance that Amazon is working on ways to fall in line with the myriad compliance regulations and certifications needed to host more serious business applications. Barr specifically mentioned Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliance as targets, but he left the door open for security certifications as well. No timeline was given for these projects, however. “It's an unprecedented level of openness for us,” said Barr, explaining the delays in implementation.

Another need high on the list for enterprises and other users was the addition of Windows Server support in the cloud. Though Amazon has added Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Solaris to the list of operating systems that can be virtualized in its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it has yet to offer Windows in that capacity. Again Barr assured users that this was coming, though he declined to offer a timeline.

Barr reminded the crowd that Amazon's EC2 was still in beta form. When the service does become generally available, however, he said that a service level agreement would also be offered.

Such agreements around the company's Simple Storage Service forced Amazon to repay around 25% of its user fees for August due to an outage, said one attendee who wished to remain anonymous. While technical problems have not been common, Amazon has experienced outages of its entire cloud.

Another point of pain discussed by attendees was the relative lack of access speed to Amazon services in Asia. The company currently runs data centers in Europe and North America, but Barr and others hinted that future material expansions should be coming to Asia.

Barr also discussed the company's new DevPay service. “We need to make sure our developers can build a business around Web Services. DevPay allows you to take basic services and graft your own presentation and billing model around those, and sell those to your customers,” said Barr. Thus, SaaS applications hosted in the cloud can be sold on an hourly basis.

Barr summed up the allure of Web Services with an analogy to a Belgian brewery that once generated its own electricity in its basement.

“Think back 100 years ago. There was no power grid. If you wanted power, you needed to generate it yourself. You needed to distribute it within your organization. You had to have all that low level infrastructure to run your beer business. You had to spend a lot of that time to make sure you had a constant flow of electricity,” said Barr. “The beer didn't taste any different.”

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, SOA & SaaS, Amazon

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