Above The Cloud

Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced they are now offering Windows instances in the EU region. This means you can now spin up a Windows Server 2003 with either IIS or SQL Server (or Linux/Unix if that’s your cup of tea) closer to your consumers (if you are a European based company). On initial inspection, it appears that the European pricing structure is approximately 10% more expensive than the US pricing. If you are interested in finding out more, there is a webinar available for free on March 17th that will focus on cloud computing in Europe.

If you haven’t seen Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) it is a virtualization provisioning service that allows you to provision a new virtual machine in the cloud from the click of a button (or a PowerShell command).

You can select from a set of existing pre-baked virtual machines, or you can upload your own. The selection screen looks like this:

When you select a machine, you then create a public and private key pair. This is used so that you can securely connect to your virtual machine. The key is saved to the user’s desktop. The next step is configuring firewall security. We do this by creating a security group that all our instances will belong in. Finally, we specify how many instances of our VM we want to spin up. It will usually take a few minutes for your instances to spin up.

Using the EC2 console you can do a lot of things including provisioning more images, arranging your IP addresses (and assigning static IPs), manage storage (which uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service [S3]), manage your individual instances (shutdown, reboot, etc), and more. The cheapest virtual machine comes in at USD$0.10 per hour, so you can happily spin up a few VM’s to play with, without breaking the bank!

One of the services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Amazon CloudFront network. This is a pay-as-you-go service for distributing content world wide. The great thing about this service is that it operates under a pattern known as ‘Edge Services’, which means that your data is distributed to clients from a decentralized location. In other words, each client will hit a data store closer to them, much the same way as ‘mirrors’ work. These ‘edges’ serve your content even though you store it in one place. Amazon CloudFront takes care of the propagation. In this case, you store your content in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

AWS has recently dropped pricing on their CloudFront services, as follows in a recent media release:

Effective February 1st, AWS has announced new pricing tiers for Amazon CloudFront, our high-performance, pay-as-you-go content delivery service. The new pricing tiers decrease the price of delivering content to as low as $0.05 per gigabyte delivered for high volume users. Find the new pricing tiers on the CloudFront detail page.