Google IO 2011

I am so bummed that I could not get tickets to the Google IO 2011. I wanted to be there this year but tickets were sold out in 59 minutes and I could never get to the site.

As expected, a lot has been going on at the IO this year with big announcements coming from Google including its Cloud Music Service. My previous post was about Amazon’s cloud storage and music player and now we have another tech giant jumping into the same arena. I think Google has an advantage since it can immediately have an Android app and accessibility from Android phones will be high. However, I am not quite sure if I would use it from a mobile device especially if I have to use my 3G data plan. With telecom companies limiting the data plans, it is difficult to take advantage of such cloud based players.

One thing I would like to see is Google coming up with something totally radical and not just follow some other company’s game plan. Google is better than that and somehow, It trying to imitate others especially in the social network playground and now the cloud, leaves me a bit disappointed.

There were bunch of other announcements too including Movie rentals for Android, Icecream sandwich etc. You can find more of the google announcements here.

To watch it live, go here.

A lot of twitter activity is going on too and you can track it with tag #io2011. Google IO site has a cool around the globe tracking that you can see at http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/io2011.html .

I hope 2012 will be the year I can make it to this annual event.

Cloud Computing News This Week

Cloud computing has been gaining a lot of popularity, disapproval as well as media coverage lately. As a new technology comes along and starts to become mainstream, there is a section of adopters and a section of naysayers. We have already seen security as a major hurdle to the adoption of cloud computing. But there is good news for cloud as well. This has been a mixed week for cloud technology.

Wikileaks 

With Amazon ousting Wikileaks due to an apparent policy violation, there was huge uproar about free speech and so on. But I do not want to get into the politics of Wikileaks here. The question that arose for me was about cloud reliability. One of the main advantages for any enterprise for moving data to the cloud is reliability – the assurance that their data will be stored safely, will be available anytime they need and no fear of losing that data. But what about the cloud service provider? Since the data is stored with a third-party who do have complete access to it, do they have the discretion to cutoff your data or website? We all know service agreements are huge and convoluted and they do keep changing. In such a case, how do you ensure with your provider, the reliability of your data? Do you need to establish a relationship with your service provider?

Software Piracy

As cloud computing gains more popularity, software piracy may start to die. This is great news for software companies who struggle with this problem everyday. In fact, as companies move towards cloud applications (“no software”), the threat of piracy goes away automatically. As enterprises get rid of their IT resources and employ cloud services, they will pay for the service including any software hosted on it. They won’t find the need to buy low-cost pirated software as the clouding pricing will remain competitive. This will ensure more security for their data and applications.

Green Cloud

 Cloud computing got another positive news this week from Pike Research. It seems cloud computing is also gaining popularity amongst environmentalists who believe that it is a greener choice, As data centers host multiple enterprise, the energy consumption will be more efficient and they will be reduced emissions.

According to a new report from Pike Research, the energy efficiency benefits of cloud computing are substantial, and growth in the market will have important implications for both energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts that the adoption of cloud computing will lead to a 38% reduction in worldwide data center energy expenditures by 2020, compared to a business as usual (BAU) scenario for data center capacity growth.

While conflicting reports also exist, it does seem to make sense sharing resources means less usage per person making cloud technology more energy-efficient.

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.