There’s been some interesting developments in the cloud computing universe recently with Amazon upping the ante in the VPC (virtual private cloud) arena.
Organisations can use a VPC to move corporate applications, including e-mail, financial systems and CRM applications, into the cloud without having to lose control; end users can continue to access the application as if nothing has changed. Faced with the perennial problem of over-capacity, hard pushed IT departments can also use storage within the VPC to add additional servers for disaster recovery or more web servers during a traffic spike for example.
Reuven Cohen, one of the sharpest cloud commentators has this to say at his blog Elasticvapor:
“I am also curious to see how other IaaS providers such as Rackspace respond to the move, it may or may not be in their interest to offer compatible VPC services that allow for a secure interface between cloud service providers. The jury’s still out on this one.
“Let me also point out that although Amazon’s new VPC service does greatly improve network security, it is not a silver bullet and the same core risks in the use of virtualization still remain. If Amazon’s hypervisor is exploited, you’d never know it and unless your data never leaves an encrypted state it’s at risk at one end point or another.”
Another savvy cloud commentator Guy Rosen at his Jack of All Clouds blog says:
“To a very high degree, much of this new service offers functionality that was already doable. Extending your network into the cloud with a VPN and securing your instances from any external network access was not impossible – it just required some work. Amazon have done a great job at realizing what people are trying to do anyway and turning it into a seamless part of the product experience.
“VPN or no VPN, at the end of the day when you run in the public cloud you are still outside your hardware, outside your premises and outside your control. Only when businesses realize that full control is more of a liability than an asset will they truly embrace the cloud and realize its potential.”
The Amazon service is still in beta but its blog lays out the advantages that the company sees in its facilities:
- Create a VPC. You define your VPC’s private IP address space, which can range from a /28 (16 IPs) up to a /18 (16,384 IPs). You can use any IPv4 address range, including Private Address Spaces identified in RFC 1918 and any other routable IP address block.
- Partition your VPC’s IP address space into one or more subnets. Multiple subnets in a VPC are arranged in a star topology and enable you to create logically isolated collections of instances. You can create up to 20 Subnets per VPC .
- Create a customer gateway to represent the device (typically a router or a software VPN appliance) anchoring the VPN connection from your network.
- Create a VPN gateway to represent the AWS end of the VPN connection.
- Attach the VPN gateway to your VPC.
- Create a VPN connection between the VPN gateway and the customer gateway.
- Launch EC2 instances within your VPC using an enhanced form of the Amazon EC2 RunInstances API call or the ec2-run-instances command to specify the VPC and the desired subnet.
The full blog can be seen here.
From my own take, as I have explained elsewhere, is I am not bothered about the techy stuff, it is how people use it that I concentrate on and my initial feeling is that Amazon’s move will push cloud computing, particularly among SMEs because it is a trusted brand. From my own experience of Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) Amazon VPC will provide robust security and a high level of tweakability that will encourage the non-corporates to enter the cloud and enjoy the flexibility and cost benefits that entails.
It will also provide what I have been hammering on about for some time – scalability. If for whatever reason a company has to increase its capacity for any length of time VPC is a godsend. With a clear pricing structure in place, companies can plan migration of services and facilities without leaping into the dark and having to face a substantial invoice at the end of it.
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