Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities

My colleagues and I have spent the week building up anticipation for this post on Twitter. After you read this post I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worthwhile.

The hallways at Amazon have been buzzing with excitement of late. After working for years to build and to run our line of highly scalable infrastructure web services we are happy to see that developers large and small are putting them to good use.

Here's what's happening today:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

Let's take a look at each of these items in turn.

Production - After a two year beta period, Amazon EC2 is now ready for production. During the beta we heard and responded to an incredible amount of customer feedback, adding support for powerful features such as Availability Zones, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic IP Addresses, multiple instance types, support for the OpenSolaris and Windows operating systems, and (as of today) a Service Level Agreement. Regular EC2 accounts are allowed to run up to 20 simultaneous instances. Requests for hundreds and even thousands of additional instances are granted all the time and can be made here.

SLA - The new EC2 Service Level Agreement works at the Region level. Each EC2 Region (there's only one right now but there will be more in the future) is divided into a number of Availability Zones. The SLA specifies that each Region will be available at least 99.95% of the time. Per the SLA, a Region is unavailable if more than one of its Availability Zones does not have external connectivity.

Windows Support - Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form. All of the powerful EC2 features listed above can be used with the new Windows instances and we'll be adding support for DevPay in the near future.

Once launched, the Windows instances can be accessed using the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop client. I've spent some time using Windows on EC2 and it works really well. I used the EC2 command line tools to launch a 32 bit instance, opened up an additional port in the security group, and then logged in to it using Remote Desktop.

 

We'll be running Windows on EC2 at next week's PDC in Los Angeles, so be sure to stop by and to say hello if you are there. Rumor has it that we'll be giving out a really cool badge to the people who stop by our booth.

RightScale founder Thorsten von Eiken has written up a helpful post which outlines the differences between Windows and Linux with respect to launching, accessing, bundling, and using the Elastic Block Store. He also describes current and planned support for Windows in their products.

We've updated ElasticFox with a number of new features, including direct access to EBS and Elastic IP addresses from the main tab, one-click AMI bundling on Windows, better key and security group management, and the ability to directly launch Remote Desktop sessions. There's also a brand-new (and very helpful) ElasticFox Getting Started Guide.

We are looking forward to seeing how our customers will put Windows to work. We expect to see ASP.Net sites, media transcoding, HPC (High Performance Computing), and more. I've talked to a number of developers who will deploy hybrid web sites using a mix of Linux and Windows servers. This really underscores the open and flexible nature of EC2.

We are also planning to offer some new capabilities in 2009 to make managing cloud-based applications even easier. As usual, we'll start with a private beta and you can express your interest here.

Management Console - The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.

Load Balancing - The load balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.

Automatic Scaling - The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.

Cloud Monitoring - The cloud monitoring service will provide real time, multi-dimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has done a very nice job of explaining why services of this type are needed to build highly reliable and highly scalable applications. His blog is a must read for those interested in cloud computing. Werner has spent so much time talking about AWS of late that I've asked him to be an honorary member of my team of AWS evangelists!

I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking. We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis.

So, there you go. What do you think?

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Florent Ramiere]

This is absolutely terrific, especially for the Load Balancing and automatic scaling future features.
Thanks for providing this amazing ecosystem !

[Michael Buckbee]

I recently heard a talk from the 37 Signals admin regarding their setup and deployment of all their apps and he stated that the number one thing holding them back from using EC2 was the lack of a load balancing service, so this seems more or less wonderful.

If you want to hear the talk it's at: http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/2008/10/22/how-37-signals-deploys-their-software/

[George Moschovitis]

I think AMAZON rules!! This is the stock to buy!

[Steve Bjorg]

I all I can say is W00t! :)

[Alex Pinkin]

Great news! Can't wait to see new mgmt console, load balancing and auto scaling.

[benb]

Is there any plan to add Windows Server 2008 support? While having Windows support is great, 2008 is really far superior both performance wise as well as feature and functionality.

Thanks,
Ben

[excited]

love it!

[Tross]

Wow, how do partners like RightScale feel about your new management console and related features? Are you competing with your VAR community?

[David Geller]

Great news! Very exciting stuff. Would love to see managed MySQL instances to compete with SQLServer.

[Daniel]

It's great to see all this new stuff in EC2, EBS made my month and the load balancing will be great to have.

Now that you have Windows on EC2 it looks like you can do HVM. When can we start to use custom kernels? I'm working on a product that needs some features (checkpoint and namespace related) that are partially in newer mainline kernels and fully available in an out of kernel patch. Right now I'm doing all kinds of ugly hacks in userspace to get things working, but not to the level I'd like. Is that something that's on the roadmap? If it is I'd abandon my userspace hacks and try to convince Amazon to let me in on a custom kernel beta. :)

Keep up the great work!

[Benjamin Dyer]

Jeff,

Firstly this is great news. The lack of any sort of SLA has been holding me and a grea many other back from getting into the Amazon cloud. Having SLAs shows that you are serious about this side of your business.

Good work and nice FOWA talk BTW.

Ben

[Jeffrey McManus]

Jeff and team,

Great work. You are the master Twitter showmen.

We will begin the process of migrating Approver.com to EC2 immediately. We estimate that this will cut our hosting bill in half, as well as give us the flexibility to instantly spin up new capacity as the site grows.

Jeffrey

[Oren]

SLA, monitoring, auto-scaling and load balancing are the greatest things you could offer right now! The suite of services is almost complete, the migration to EC2 from traditional hosting is becoming easier than ever.

[Sascha Konietzke]

Awesome improvements. We just started with AWS and are completely overwhelmed by the features. And it is getting better and better!

Keep on the great work!

[Thomas Pischke]

Now you just need to add the AMI bundling and remote desktop features for linux.

[Miichael]

Great Work, but unfortunate about Windows 2003. If you're aiming at scaling out a new ASP.Net web system, Windows 2008 with IIS7 is the way to go - it has many enhancements that make this possible and eliminate work required and problems from the past versions.

Will you be supporting Windows 2008?

[Avi Flax]

Very impressive!

[Matt Sherman]

Hi, I am glad you are getting into Windows. Thrilled about the 64-bit. Two things jumped out:

- I would only consider EC2 if there is Windows Server 2008 support. When starting clean, why take a step backwards?
- Microsoft has SQL Server 2008 Web edition which is made for monthly pricing at ISP's. Amazon seems to be going with Standard edition, at a premium of $400-800/mo. Will the Web edition be an option?

Thanks!

- Matt

[Gil Megidish]

Awesome! Zomgbbqhax! FTW! And everything else you can think of, I love you, AWS!!!

[Dave]

Hah! I've been spending all week writing a position paper on how EC2 is the bees knees except that it's still in beta. Time to revise...

[Son Nguyen]

I really look forward to load balancing and auto scaling features. They would make existing SaaS providers like ourselves consider going hybrid, using our own core infrastructure with EC2 serves as a backup and during surges.

[hernan]

Great update, the new features sound amazing. Can't wait to use them.

[Wickedness]

Mmmm. Countless exposed RDP interfaces.

[Headline] Massive RDP Worm Takes Down Amazon And 1/4 Internet Sites [/Headline]

In 5..4..3..2..

Frankly, the fervor over AWS and cloud mania in general seems strikingly similar to the irrational exuberance that lead up to the dot com bubble and today's financial system collapse. I'm dying to see how it all turns out.

[Lloyd]

"Requests for hundreds and even thousands of additional instances are granted all the time"

The largest request I've seen publicly mentioned was limited to only 550 instances.

What is the largest number of instances that has ever been granted?

In theory, if someone were to use all of EC2 at once, how many small instances could be run simultaneously?

[Anthony Nemelka]

Terrific news! We've been doing testing and making plans to move our SaaS operations to EC2 for several months, and now we can make the switch. But when are we going to get a "Powered by Amazon Web Services" logo that we can include on our website?
Anthony Nemelka, CEO, Helpstream Inc.

[Morten]

All sounds great. In particular the load balancing, automatic scaling and monitoring.

The biggest problem now is lack of EC2 hosting in Europe!!

[John from Backupanytime]

I have complemented Amazon from a value and scalability perspective in the past. The possible downsides were in the areas of SLA and service monitoring.

Given these areas are being addressed in no small way it is hard to see any other major player taking the high moral ground. The only way new entrants can try to compete with Amazon is on price and there isn't much leway there. This is great for the comsumer and the cloud.
Well done, great job.
John

[Rush]

I would like to see Windows Web Server 2008 supported along with SQL Server 2008 Express. Hope this can be setup soon as I would like to use this instead of my current hosting provider. :-)

[Aaron Cox]

Jeff,

We are in the process of moving our hosts to ec2 and using software load balancing. Of course, would love to already have it available through Amazon. Could you point us in some direction that should go - scalr, weo, etc - so we could, if wanted to, easily move to Amazon's LB services when they become available?

I did "express interest" under the main account we use for our ec2 instances - ec2.1@jamwd.com.

Thank you for the updates and any insight.
A