As expected, Google has also released details on future pricing for App Engine.  Though the service will remain free for applications with less than 500 MB of storage requirements and 5 million page views per month, there will be a charge for applications exceeding the limit.  The expected fee structure announced by Google is very similar to that of Amazon Web Services:

Unlike Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services do not offer any type of free services but provides greater flexibility to developers.

You can sign up for Google App Engine account to start building and deploying applications.

In October 2007, both the companies started deploying their cloud computing platform at various universities including MIT and Stanford as an experiment and now they believe that it is ready for a commercial roll out.

Google had recently opened its Google Apps Engine, a platform for hosting applications in the cloud,  for developers as well as other cloud based enterprise services like email archiving and enterprise security.

While the Google Apps Engine may be focused on consumer applications, this partnership between Google and IBM wants to pull the IT infrastructure of small and medium businesses to the cloud.

Apart from offering the cloud computing services, Google and IBM are also likely to offer hosted business, collaboration, security and productivity applications from Google Apps, Postini and Tivoli suite of products.

Learn more about cloud computing

AWS Service Health Dashboard

The Health Dashboard provides the status of all the services included in the AWS package such as S3, EC2, Simple DB, SQS, FPS etc. It includes the current status as well as the status history for the services.

The Health Dashboard also provides any informational messages for the listed service and allows for subscribing for the health status updates through RSS.

AWS Premium Support

AWS Premium Support will provide personalized support to the customers who wish to build and run applications on AWS and face problems while developing, testing and integrating the applications.

The Premium Support service includes support for operational issues as well technical queries related to Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Simple Queue Service which the customers might have during the development, testing or integration phase.

The premium support is a paid service which comes with two plans viz. Premium Support Silver and Premium Support Gold. Both the plans provide options to subscribe on a fixed monthly cost basis as well as pay-as-you-go basis. Here is the list of the key features included in the plans

The difference between the two plans comes in the form of non-availability of telephone support and 24×7 coverage for the Premium Support Silver plan.

Amazon is taking the AWS business very seriously and working on making the service more reliable and easy to use. Today’s launch of SLA driven Premium Support will surely attract some of the business towards Amazon Web Services. With almost a complete set of services and personalized support, Amazon has taken a lead over other players in the Cloud Computing arena.

With Google’s launch of Apps Engine last week, Cloud Computing again became a buzzword.  Everyone is seeing and talking about everything to be in the cloud in the near future.  But there are still so many clouds over cloud computing that there is no common understanding about it.  Even the IT folks swear by Cloud Computing when it comes to defining it.  So, what is cloud computing and what it does?

Let’s First See What Cloud And Cloud Computing Is not and Cannot …

• Software-as-a-Service is not Cloud Computing
• All types of Remote Computing is not Cloud Computing
• Everything cannot be in the cloud
• Customers cannot have a separate cloud

Then What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing, according to Gartner is,

a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers

This means that cloud computing is a kind of highly scalable, multi-tenant, IT-related capability provided for storage and processing of data delivered to customers across the Internet as a service.  The customers can access these services from anywhere on-demand independent of location of the underlying infrastructure.

This takes me to another buzz term, PaaS or Platform as a Service.  Is PaaS Cloud Computing?  Yes and No both.  Yes, because it enables on-demand computing ability.  No because PaaS is a collection of development and deployment tools, languages and APIs used to build, deploy and run applications in the cloud.  In this way, PaaS comes across as a middleware between the web application and Cloud Computing resources.

What are the limitations of  Cloud Computing

Cloud computing with all its benefits also has its own set of limitations which restrict enterprises to move their applications in the cloud.  Some of these limitations are:

• Customization is nearly impossible
• Scalability problems with Sequential processing
• Data privacy issues because of the common resources
• Lack of high speed Internet connectivity
• Reliability problems related to SLAs.  Alex Iskold wrote a great post on cloud computing which also mentions about the SLAs for cloud computing and what to expect.
• Cost surpasses traditional hosting in case of very high usage

Who All Are In The Race Of Providing Cloud Computing

Here is the list of service providers making cloud computing resources available for developers

Amazon is the first one to provide true cloud computing resources with Amazon Web Services.  The offerings include S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queuing Service) making it a full set of services for cloud computing.

Google launched its cloud computing offering named Apps engine last week.  Comes across both as cloud computing resource as well as Platform as a Service for developing, deploying and running applications.  See our previous post to know more about Google Apps Engine and what does it offer.

IBM has announced its cloud computing offering named Blue Cloud which is expected to launch very soon.  The Blue Cloud is a distributed computing architecture based on an open-source project called Hadoop.  It is built on IBM’s own software Tivoli and hardware BladeCenters and System z mainframes.

Joyent uses its software called Accelerator to offer cloud computing service which can run web applications written in PHP, Java, Python and even Ruby on Rails with high scalability.  The web application set up is open and standards based which provides high degree of portability to other systems.

Nirvanix offers Storage in the Clound with its service called Storage Delivery Network.  Nirvanix’s offering is very similar to any CDN which stores, delivers and processes storage requests in the best (closest) network location in its global cluster of storage nodes.

Elastra’s Cloud Server is a combination Amazon Web Services and Elastra’s various proprietary tools and services.  It includes Cloud Cluster templates and Cloud Designer for database system architecture, Elastic Computing Name Service for automated deployment on EC2 and a web based front end for managing the service.

Red Hat also provides cloud computing using Amazon Web Services on the open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system which uses instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service.

Cloud Computing, till now, has been used by startups mostly barring few established services and enterprises.  However, it is making it in-roads into the enterprises by offering easy scalability and reliability; perhaps beginning with smaller applications.  The future of computing is surely on cloud 9!!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched two new features for its EC2 (Electronic Computing Cloud) service which are Multiple Availability Zones and Elastic IP addresses.  These two features, as per Amazon, will help developers build failure resilient applications in the cloud.  Basically, EC2 now has become a cloud CDN (Content Distribution Network) which places your computing instances at multiple locations.

Multiple Locations

Now developers can keep and execute their instances from multiple Amazon EC2 Locations which are composed of regions and Availability Zones.  An Availability Zone is distinct location that is insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provides connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.  This way, developers do not need to worry about one of their instance locations getting down due to unforeseen reasons.

Elastic IP Addresses

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing and are attached to developer’s account and not to any instance.  Unlike traditional static IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses can be dynamically remapped on the fly to point to any computing instance in a developer’s Amazon EC2 account.  This means that rather than waiting for some technician to reconfigure or replace a host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of their customers, developers can now remap their Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

Amazon Web services has really been making strides in cloud computing and addition of these failover mechanisms will surely make it more attractive for developers.