Laurent’s blog

Amazon EC2 with persistent storage in Private Beta

Last week Google, in an attempt to enter the Clound computing market, launched Google App Engine and, just this morning, a major integration with Salesforce in order to penetrate the enterprise market. In the shadow of these big news, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels has quietly announced this morning that EC2 with persistent storage is in private beta. For startups and businesses this has a great impact as it means that we will be able to have fully hosted and scalable infrastructure with layers that is relatively standard. Where previously you could only plan for some sort of processing on EC2 due to the non persistent nature of their volumes, you could soon start migrating all current servers to virtual machines on the cloud.

As Werner says regurlarly in his talks, you can only be so-good at creating a computing and storage infrastructure. It is a business by itself that too few people know how to do well. Amazon, IBM and now Google are in the race for a fully scalable cloud computing infrastructure. Some other players on the storage cloud side are Nirvanix and Flexiscale.

Read RightScale’s experience with EC2 and persistent storage: “it’s now a fait accomplit: the cloud adopters will have much more computing horsepower and flexibility at their fingertips than those who are still racking their own machines.”