S3 was Down - Back up at 6PM

Bad news for Amazon, AWS and cloud computing in general. S3, Amazon's cloud storage, was down until just a few minutes ago. I was looking over a couple of my blog posts and noticed the images weren't displaying. I use scrnshots.com and they use S3. Bummer.

I realize that this is a beta product for Amazon. I realize downtime happens. What is really bad is that there will now be a month of "cloud computing sucks" and "cloud computing is not ready for the enterprise" and others of that type. I won't argue the validity of those claims.

I just hate the set back this creates for cloud computing in general. Advancements come with adoption. People won't adopt something with mysterious outages. Hopefully, Amazon will be completely transparent on the cause of this outage and what they are doing to prevent it in the future.

I think this is, what? The third time in the last few months that either S3 or EC2 (or both) have gone down? Once a year is too much.

CenterNetworks has a nice blow by blow of the amazon updates on this blog entry.

Technorati : amazon, aws, cloud database, outage, s3

Cloud Tools: Cloud Studio

Amazon ships a handful of tools to use EC2 and S3. There are some freely downloaded scripts that make life a bit easier. Personally, I want to use a GUI. I use SSH enough when I connect remotely. If I'm in Windows, I want a windows tool.

Today I downloaded Cloud Studio from Cloud Services, Ltd. Cloud Studio is an free S3 browser with a little bit of EC2 support. It's a version 1.0 product so you can't expect too much. According to the site:

Cloud Studio is a visual tool designed to make the development of applications for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) more convenient. Developers (or someone responsible for applications deployment) can effortlessly create and destroy instances, manage security groups, keypairs, and allocate and assign IP addresses.

User can choose to run Cloud Studio as a traditional standalone application, or to use it as an extension to Eclipse IDE, which is currently one of the most widely used application development environments featuring support for Java, C/C++, PHP, and other programming languages.

The interface is extremely easy to use. It has a three pane window. Upper left is an AMI browser, upper right is a pane with a set of tabs showing configuration information. The bottom pane is the most useful with an instance monitor, an S3 browser and a progress tab (that shows outstanding tasks).

The instance monitor show any currently running instances. If you right click on an instance, you can terminate or reboot it. You can also associate an elastic IP to the instance.

The S3 browser is the most functional in the program. At the right is a drop down list and a series of icons. The drop down list lets you select a top level bucket. The icons, in order, allow you to get file properties, create a new bucket, delete a bucket, upload a file and refresh the screen. The final two icons are on all the panes and allow you to minimize or maximize a pane. If you right click on a file, you can choose to download the file.

That's about it. It's a very simple program but it does exactly what it advertises to do. I like it. I'll be trying other tools as I find them but for now, Cloud Studio is a part of my cloud computing toolbox.

LewisC

Technorati : aws, cloud computing, cloud storage, ec2, s3

The Storage Cloud, Currently

InformationWeek has a good article, Behind The Storage Cloud. This article gives something of the plumbing behind the available storage in the cloud. Something they didn't talk about in that article are the limitations I have been running into using the cloud.

For infrastructure providers like Google or Force.com, who are offering a PaaS (Platform as a Service), the storage is built into the application. If you chose them to develop your application, that works out fine. However, if you are looking for archiving or storage scaling (grow storage as you need it), it's not so good.

Amazon offers a different kind of storage. S3 is a web based storage system. It's like a bucket for data. It's the biggest bucket you'll probably ever see, but it's just a big bucket. When you create a new directory, you're creating a smaller bucket in the big bucket. The namespace for the bucket is global. That means that your smaller bucket can't have the same name as someone else's bucket. That's a huge limitation.

Another issue with S3 is that it is a web service and not a block device. That means you can't directly attach it and use it as a file system. You need to make API calls. Even from within EC2 (Amazon's Cloud Computing Environment), S3 is only accessible through the API using PUT and GET style commands. Amazon is working on allowing EC2 to attach directly and there are other projects working on the same thing, PersistentFS being one of them.

I haven't found a good, cloud based attachable storage yet. I think Amazon, when they make S3 attachable will be the first (although that might only be attachable from within EC2). What is currently available is a plethora of archival solutions. For home usage, I don't think anything beats EMC Mozy. For $4.95/month, you get unlimited storage for one PC. It's slow to add new files (at least for me it is), but overall, I don't think any of its competitors really compete. I tried two others previously and decided to go with mozy for its price/feature ratio.

For business archival, I don't know that I would recommend Mozy. It's not that I would recommend against them, I just think there are better options. Off site, tape backups are still cheap and reliable. For the SMB market, burning a DVD once a week might even be enough. Just depends on your workflow and volume of data.

As a side note, it would be fairly easy to write a custom application to automatically backup changed files to S3. At less than 20 cents per month per GB, that might be a fairly reasonable solution, especially if you frequently need to access the archived data. I might even write a free giveaway to do just that. Just a POC kind of thing.

Technorati : amazon, cloud computing, cloud databases, ec2, force.com, google, mozy, persistetnFS, s3, storage