Greenpeace creates bogus Green AWS site

Greenpeace has launched a GreenAWS site that makes it seem like it is Amazon, but it is not.  How do you know?

For more information about the energy that AWS and other companies use to power the cloud, please read our April, 2012 report "How Clean is Your Cloud?" or contact us via direct message on Twitter@cleanourcloud or email cleanourcloud@greenpeace.org

You contact greenpeace.  :-)

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher posts on this as well.

About AWS Green Team

At AWS, we are always working to make our cloud options the best in the world. Now we are starting a new initiative to make the AWS cloud the greenest too.

Powering a cloud of AWS's size requires a lot of energy, and recent events have demonstrated the need for us to ensure that our energy supply is both more secure and more sustainable. Too much of our energy supply comes from coal and nuclear power plants, and as we are seeing increasingly from Japan to New York City to Northern Virginia, these traditional energy sources are increasingly vulnerable to disruption. While AWS has worked hard and has been successful in preparing for electricity service disruption, we're constantly looking for ways to decrease risks even further.

Amazon Web Services has another outage, is there a pattern

Amazon Web Services has another outage.  The news is about the sites that are down.

Update: Amazon Web Services Down In North Virginia — Reddit, Pinterest, Airbnb, Foursquare, Minecraft And Others Affected

ROMAIN DILLET

posted 10 hours ago
amazon web services

What started as a small issue affecting some instances of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in North Virginia became a full-blown outage of AWS in North Virginia. Major services, such as Reddit, Foursquare, Minecraft and Heroku, are down. GitHub, imgur, Pocket, HipChat, Coursera and others are affected. 

CTO of Fast Company tweets on what this outage can look like.

Here’s what an aws outage looks like from within: notice the dip to zero, then how chaotic things are to the right.

Amazon Web Services outages are so common there is a possible pattern.  

Google Image Search - Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon DC

With Google's release of an Insider's look of its data centers, I was curious what Google Image Search shows for Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.

The below are top 20 images from searching for "<company name> data center"

Some have made the point that Google's image publication was a PR move.  One thing that did work well from a PR move is most of the top 20 images are from what was published yesterday. You can make your own conclusions from looking at the images.  Note: the amazon pictures are many times not amazon facilities, but images that are embedded on a page where Amazon is mentioned. 

I included the links to image searches if you want to get to the original source of the images

Google

NewImage

Facebook

NewImage

Microsoft

NewImage

Apple

NewImage

Amazon

NewImage

 

Netflix open sources its middle-tier load balancer, Why?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on Netflix's latest open sourcing of its middle tier load balancer.

According to the blog:

In AWS cloud, because of its inherent nature, servers come and go. Unlike the traditional load balancers which work with servers with well known IP addresses and host names, in AWS load balancing requires much more sophistication in registering and de-registering servers with the load balancer on the fly. Since AWS does not yet provide a middle tier load balancer, Eureka fills a big gap in that area.

The consistency of Netflix open sourcing its infrastructure makes it a pattern.  And, to understand the a pattern you need to ask what problems is Netflix trying to solve.  Why is Netflix sharing its infrastructure?

  1. The process of open sourcing the code gets the developers to clean up their code and document.  There is some bad open source code out there, but there is also some very good.  The Netflix team takes pride in their sharing, so they want it to look good. 
  2. Sharing this infrastructure makes Netflix an active member of the open source community.
  3. The open source community then comments and makes input on Netflix contributions which are resources not  paid for.
  4. The above makes the developers feel good about their participation in solving plumbing type (fundamental infrastructure) of problems that are not critical for protecting their IP.
  5. The above allows Netflix to recruit new people.  Note almost every one of these postings ends with sentence, and we are hiring more people.  Finding really good people is a priority for Netflix.
  6. Netflix gets positive PR consistently at conferences as they get mentioned for sharing and innovating in their IT infrastructure.

There are probably many more, but you get the basic idea.

Amazon makes Cold Storage sexy, Glacier has a bunch of chatter

I saw the Amazon Glacier announcement and decided to watch how things progress.

NewImage

The news is pretty high.

Amazon Glacier Offers Low-Cost Data Archiving

InformationWeek - ‎2 hours ago‎
Amazon Web Services expanded its cloud services portfolio Tuesday with the launch of Amazon Glacier, a low-cost archiving option. Befitting its chilly namesake, the new service aims to be the data equivalent of cryogenic storage--that is, it's designed for ...
 

Amazon Launches Glacier Data Archiving and Backup Service

TalkinCloud (blog) - ‎2 hours ago‎
Amazon isn't pulling any punches as it launches Glacier either. According to the cloud provider, “companies typically overpay for data archiving” due to required upfront payments and their inability to accurately guess what their capacity requirements will be.
 

Amazon launches Glacier cloud storage, hopes enterprise will go cold on tape use

ZDNet - ‎Aug 21, 2012‎
"Using Amazon Glacier... unlimited archival storage is available to [AWS customers] with a familiar pay-as-you-go model," Werner Vogels, the company's chief technology officer, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "The service redundantly stores data in multiple ...
 

Amazon Glacier: Low-Cost Cloud Archiving, But Not If Data Needs Occasional ...

CRN - ‎15 hours ago‎
Amazon Glacier is slated to be a highly reliable service. AWS claims average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent, or 11 nines of availability, which is the same durability as that of its Amazon S3 standard storage. Amazon estimated that a durability of ...
 

Amazon Glacier: Back Up All Your Data for Pennies a Month

Wired News - ‎21 hours ago‎
Amazon Glacier, as the new service is known, stores a copy of your data in archived format for less than a penny per gigabyte per month. The only catch is that getting the data back out can take some time since Glacier is primarily intended for backup and ...
 

Is There a Landmine Hidden in Amazon's Glacier?

Wired News - ‎19 hours ago‎
On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled a new online storage service known as Glacier. It's called Glacier because it deals in “cold storage” — i.e., the long-term storage of things like medical records or financial documents that you may need to archive for regulatory ...

But what I am finding even more interesting is the twitter traffic. "amazon glacier" is getting a fair amount of tweets per minute.

Amazon Glacier punts cloud-based backup at enterprise

 

アマゾン、低価格アーカイブサービス Amazon Glacier を開始。GBあたり月1円以下さんから 氷河だけに凍りそうなアクセス時間…

 

Llega Amazon Glacier, un servicio cloud low cost

 

[Digital Inspiration] Amazon Glacier – The Most Affordable Online Backup Service Ever!  via