
Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/big-day-for-ec2.html
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siculars
"We plan to release an interactive AWS management console. We plan to release
new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services."

how will that play with management providers like rightscale. they go on to
say :

"I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and
cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for
provisioning, control, and status checking. We'll be working with a number of
management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will
support these new services on a timely basis."

small conciliation, but i think it was always a danger that aws would walk up
the value add food chain.

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jwilliams
> small conciliation, but i think it was always a danger that aws would walk
> up the value add food chain.

Indeed - there's the rub... When do Amazon reach a point that their offering
competes with their own customers?

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andr
OK, Microsoft clearly foreshadowed this: <http://i36.tinypic.com/2llnhxk.jpg>

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biohacker42
Weren't there versions of NT that ran on DEC Alpha and EAC MIPS chips?

It's all probably Intel at Amazon, but still - fun to think about.

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DenisM
Yep. I have used both.

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kirubakaran
_Windows is now available_

Introducing 'Cloudy Computing'

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bigthboy
The Windows addition is saying something. I think this clearly represents that
Amazon is wanting to stay up with it and is, in a way, preparing for the
"Windows Strata" announcement that supposed to come at the developers
convention. I'm curious to see how well it all works out, I've never
personally thought of Windows Server as much of a "cloud-ready" server O/S...
if you will.

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lsc
the sla only covers network connectivity, not hardware/systems problems? I
guess that makes sense, but three and a half nines is a lot easier to get on a
network than on PC hardware.

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ezmobius
and it appears that two out of their 3 availability zones have to go down in
order for anyone to collect on sla. This effectively makes the sla meaningless
afaict.

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mdasen
And all SLAs aren't meaningless? Try reading Joyent's. It includes such gem
exceptions as:

* scheduled maintenance and emergency maintenance and upgrades * failure of access circuits to the Joyent Network * inability to obtain raw materials, supplies, or power used in or equipment needed for provision of this SLA

So, power outages aren't their problem. If the server goes down and they
perform emergency maintenance, but can't get the equipment they need for 48
hours that isn't their problem. If the network goes down, that isn't their
problem.

While Amazon is being a little cheap with their SLA, at least there are
circumstances where it could be triggered. That's why I always respected
Slicehost's SLA:

"Do you offer an SLA?

Not for Slices and here’s why: most hosting SLA agreements are just plain
silly. They promise things like 99.9% uptime, but downtime excludes: scheduled
maintenance, network outages, hardware failures and software trouble. Well
what exactly is left to cause downtime? Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to
keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up
ASAP should something go wrong."

And in over a year I've never had any downtime that wasn't me rebooting the
box.

/I have no affiliation with Slicehost beyond being a customer.

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lsc
eh, I've given most customers a free month more than once, on my 99.5 sla.
there's no reason why you can't have a real SLA, the company in question just
needs to have the financial reserves to lose a months revenue without going
into default. I see it as a way to gain credibility while I'm still small (and
my reliability isn't what I'd like.)

