Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed
specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create
volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes
behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and can be
formatted using a file system such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and
mounted on an EC2 instance; files are accessed through the file system .
They have user supplied device names and provide a block device interface.
For a 20 GB volume, Amazon estimates an annual failure rate for EBS volumes
from 1-in-200 to 1-in-1000. The failure rate increases as the size of the
volume increases. Therefore you either need to keep an up-to-date snapshot
on S3, or have a backup of the contents... (more)
Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the
cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best
practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier
technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsourcing and even
internal enterprise centre management, as well as from experience with
vendors such as Amazon a... (more)
With Virtualization becoming intertwined with cloud computing it is worth
taking a step back and looking once again what virtualization is, and is not.
Virtualization and Emulation are often compared, but there are a set of
important differences. Emulation provides the functionality of a target
processor completely in software. The main advantage being that you can
emulate one type of pr... (more)
We’re hosting an event in the city of London on 11th November which is
focused on practical implementations of public, private and hybrid
clouds. We have speakers from British American Tobacco and Razorfish
discussing implementations of private and hybrid clouds as well as
GigaSpaces demoing enhanced VMWARE integration.
If you want to learn about real implementations of Cloud Computing th... (more)
It is great enthusing about the benefits of Cloud Computing, but what are the
consequences when it goes wrong ? Of course, there are different levels of
’going wrong’. We have often publicised outages from the likes
of Amazon and Google, but given the publicised SLA’s of each some down
time is expected. However things can get much more serious than this.
Microsoft have just suffered a d... (more)