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Amazon Cloud Storage
Amazon launched Cloud Drive and Cloud Player last week to enable users to upload their music to a virtual drive and play it from anywhere via PC or Android phones. I think that is a great idea because I for one find it painful to sync my music between all the devices I own. However, a lot is being said about legality and controversy has been stirred up by the record labels.
But why is there a legal problem? People can upload music to any virtual drive and use it from anywhere. Amazon has just added another layer through its player to enable them to listen to the songs directly. People would have bought that music and own it. It doesn’t matter how they store it or listen to it or from where they access it. Granted, there might be users who may upload pirated stuff, but I think the days of purely pirated music are gone. People do buy and own the music and it should be their right to use it anyway they want for personal use.
Currently, one can still play music stored on home PC using other mechanisms to access your PC. So the idea is not really new, but simply been made easier by Amazon. The recording industry already has deals for the music Amazon legally sells and that should suffice. In fact, the promotions Amazon generally has might encourage users to purchase more music directly from Amazon and use it through the drive. This scenario can be easily compared with the e-reader market and how Kindle has actually increased the book sales. People tend to read and buy more e-books when using Kindle because the buying action is so simple.
Old-fashioned industries need to understand that simplicity and accessibility are really important for this fast-changing generation of users who are addicted to their mobile devices.
Amazon Web Services
AWS is the big umbrella under which Amazon offers various cloud computing products and services. Amazon’s main product is the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2. Many other services provided by Amazon support EC2 so it enables users to easily store, transfer, compute, monitor and maintain in the EC2 cloud environment.
Providing comprehensive solution to users working with cloud services has given Amazon an edge over other competitors in this arena. Users would prefer getting all the support from one place and not having to worry about working with multiple cloud vendors. Amazon also has been one of the first companies to invest majorly and succeed in the cloud computing arena, and effectively diversifying its business model.
According to a report, Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue will reach $500 million in 2010 and $750 million in 2011, going all the way up to $2.54 billion in 2014. In a February 2010 report, Goldman Sachs said that 77% of companies it surveyed using cloud computing development tools were using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service. About 17% were using software from Google and Salesforce.com, and 10% chose Microsoft’s Windows Azure. [article]. Amazon’s customers include not only small startups, but well established and larger organizations such as Zynga, Netflix, Adobe Systems and more. One can safely say that even sky is not the limit for Amazon’s cloud computing capabilities.
Here is some brief information on Amazon’s cloud products and services –
Compute
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud delivers scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data.
Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define.
Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that makes it easy to distribute content with low latency via a global network of edge locations.
Database
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon SimpleDB works in conjunction with Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 to run queries on structured data in real time.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon Relational Database Service is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
Storage
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Amazon Elastic Block Store provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance.
AWS Import/Export
AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport.
E-Commerce
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service allows merchants to deliver products using Amazon.com’s worldwide fulfillment capabilities.
Messaging
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service provides a hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers, making it easy to build automated workflow between Web services.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Amazon Simple Notification Service is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud.
Monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2
Networking
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources.
Elastic Load Balancing
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
Payments & Billing
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)
Amazon Flexible Payments Service facilitates the digital transfer of money between any two entities, humans or computers.
Amazon DevPay
Amazon DevPay is a billing and account management service which enables developers to collect payment for their AWS applications.
Support
AWS Premium Support
AWS Premium Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel to help you build and run applications on AWS Infrastructure Services.
Web Traffic
Alexa Web Information Service
Alexa Web Information Service makes Alexa’s huge repository of data about structure and traffic patterns on the Web available to developers.
Alexa Top Sites
Alexa Top Sites exposes global website traffic data as it is continuously collected and updated by Alexa Traffic Rank.
Workforce
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk enables companies to access thousands of global workers on demand and programmatically integrate their work into various business processes.
Cloud Players
There are many big and small players in the cloud computing arena. Since the emergence of cloud technology, many cloud service providers have differentiated themselves by offering strengths in different areas such as PaaS, SaaS and IaaS. I will discuss each of these providers in detail in subsequent posts. For now, here is a look at who is part of the cloud race.
The top five major players are:
Amazon: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has number of products such as EC2, CloudFront, SimpleDB, SQS, S3 and more. Amazon has been the leader in cloud technology and at the forefront, definitely getting the first-mover advantage.
Google: Google Apps has been around for a while and we have all used Google’s various services such as Gmail, Docs, Calendar and so on. Google Apps also provides enhanced services for business users and is now stepping more formally into the cloud arena.
Microsoft: Azure is Microsoft’s latest offering with windows platform based cloud system and offering developer services. Microsoft is going after the top player to become the cloud computing leader.
IBM: Blue Cloud is IBM’s computing platform designed to enhance software development and delivery capabilities, particularly in large enterprises. IBM also provides one of the largest private clouds and is certainly trying to make its mark.
Salesforce.com: Salesforce’s CRM platform has been around for a long time providing software as a service and has been a leader in that area. Its new Force.com platform geared towards businesses provides more than just software aiming for collaboration and development platform along with cloud infrastructure.
Some of the other smaller but definitely powerful and growing players in this field are:
Cloud Notions 