http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3228389/windows-azure-versus-amazon-ec2/

Windows Azure versus Amazon EC2

Microsoft cloud official says infrastructure and platform cloud lines will blur

By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:36 GMT, 28 June 10

Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud tackle two very different cloud computing technology problems today, but are destined to emulate each other over time, Microsoft cloud official Tim O’Brien says.

Whereas Windows Azure is a platform-as-a-service cloud, giving developers the tools they need to build and deploy web applications, Amazon EC2 is primarily an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, offering on-demand access to customisable virtual machine instances.

Azure simplifies the building of web applications in a way that Amazon does not, but Amazon’s cloud-based virtual machines have the benefit of working with multiple programming models, O’Brien says, predicting that over time Microsoft will move more into infrastructure-as-a-service and Amazon will cross over into platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, discussed his take on the cloud market in an interview with Network World, as well as a public presentation at the recent Cloud Leadership Forum, hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The reason people like infrastructure-as-a-service is because it’s programming model agnostic. The bare metal VM doesn’t care what language you wrote the application in, it doesn’t matter what tools you use and what run times you’ve targeted. If it runs on Windows or Linux, give it a virtual machine and it will run just fine. The problem is it’s a lot of extra work. You’re responsible for that virtual machine the same way you’re responsible for a server sitting under your desk. You’re responsible for turning it on. You’re responsible for turning it off. You’re responsible for applying a patch or an update. If Red Hat applies a Linux patch, and you have a Linux VM running on Amazon, you have to apply that patch yourself. They won’t do that for you.”

But there are shortcomings in the platform-as-a-service model as well, O’Brien acknowledges. The biggest problem with PaaS may be difficulty migrating existing applications from the internal data centre to the cloud.

“Platform-as-a-service has a different set of trade-offs,” O’Brien says. “All of that stuff is completely abstracted away, it’s a friction-free development, you basically code up an application, you hit deploy and it’ll go run on the platform that’s supplied by those run times. So in our case its PHP, C Sharp, in the case of Google App Engine it’s Python and Java.” While building new applications is easy, and removes the need for owning internal hardware and software, other than a Web browser, “part of the challenge there is it’s not necessarily optimal for migrating existing applications.”

Microsoft has already announced that “at some point [in the next 12 months] we will be offering the ability to provision a bare-metal VM, and run your application on that,” O’Brien says. While Amazon provides a variety of Windows and Linux virtual machine images through EC2, the company’s Web Services business offers a variety of other tools that might be useful to developers, including databases, storage services and load balancing.

O’Brien predicts that just as Microsoft moves into IaaS, Amazon will build a PaaS offering that more closely resembles Azure than anything Amazon offers today. Amazon’s public relations department could not be reached for comment Friday.

“It’s not a matter of one is better than the other; they accomplish different things,” O’Brien says. “But I think what you’ll see happen in the marketplace is a convergence of those two, where infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Amazon will move up the stack toward platform-as-a-service. You’ll also see PaaS providers like Microsoft provide some of that infrastructure-like capability, just so we can handle those migration scenarios much easier, and the lines will get blurred.”

In his speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, O’Brien said public cloud services are generally not providing as much customization as customers want, but the cloud model is gaining popularity both among users who want to sidestep their companies’ IT departments, and from small businesses that want to get out of the IT business.

Many small businesses “don’t want to be in the IT business,” O’Brien said. “Private cloud is not in their vocabulary. They want to run their businesses on PCs and mobile phones and get out of the IT business entirely.”

Private clouds simply don’t offer the same economies of scale as public clouds do, he said, claiming that per-server TCO in a 100,000-server data centre is less than half the per-server TCO in a 1,000-server data centre.

Microsoft’s goal in the cloud is to offer customers the same functionality they would expect if they install the software themselves, he said. “If you can write an app for Windows Server you should be able to write an app for Windows Azure,” O’Brien said.

1. Standardized offerings
2. Service catalog ordering
3. Flexible pricing
4. Advanced virtualization
5. Rapid provisioning
6. Metering and billing
7. Elastic scaling

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/medcommons/

One of MedCommon’s offerings, HealthURL is a personal account hosted on Amazon Web Services. MedCommons HealthURL provides a web-based storage repository for consumers to store and share access to their health records. These temporary or long-term accounts live on Amazon S3 where they meet HIPAA requirements of security and redundancy.

“We choose AWS because of their reputation and the scalability of their solution,” states Adrian Gropper MD, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer. “We use Amazon S3, EC2, Elastic IP to store and host individual HealthURL accounts. Compared to traditional hosting providers, Amazon EC2 was easy to set up and pretty inexpensive. The fact that there’s no bandwidth costs between our gateways and long term storage servers will be a huge cost savings.”

With HealthURL, consumers can open an account and upload PDF files, DICOM imaging, CCR information, and other relevant medical data. Then, using credentials, patients can share access with family members, physicians, specialty providers, large hospital networks, or even employers. The patient maintains control of their identity and privacy by granting or revoking access to others as needed.

HealthURL accounts are a $2/month subscription plus a hosting fee. To determine the hosting fee and charge the subscription cost, MedCommons utilized Amazon DevPay to charge and meter customer usage. “DevPay tracks the actual storage and communications expenses for very large diagnostic imaging objects as well as service fees to be paid by the patient/consumer. This billing system saves a great deal of work and enables our transactional business model to compete with the ad-supported model of Google and Microsoft.”

MedCommons also utilizes Amazon FPS to manage direct and third party billing transactions between consumers and MedCommons or patients and doctors. Both Amazon FPS and DevPay allow MedCommons’ customers to simply pay using the existing payment information stored in their Amazon.com account.

With a scalable solution in place, MedCommons also had to consider HIPAA compliance of their application. “Our app was designed to be hosted in the cloud and patient-centric from the ground up. In order to be HIPAA compliant, we had to design our application to allow careful identity management, detailed activity logs, a secure console system that facilitates audit of users and accounts, a clear access consent mechanism, and a locked down app deployment procedure that provides a minimum attack surface—encryption and SSL certificates.”

“We have saved many man-years of work by going with AWS for our in-the-cloud, on-demand healthcare information service. The capability of usage-based pricing at the patient level adds commerce capabilities not available anywhere else. The confidence in the Amazon brand by consumers everywhere makes it our best choice for in-cloud storage and computing,” says MedCommons’ CEO Bill Donner.

I found this article published at PCMag and thought I should highlight some in red

Source > http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2320619,00.asp
Author > John Brandon

Cloud computing is set to take over the world, or at least possibly replace Microsoft Outlook. The cloud concept is simple: It’s a way to access your data and apps from anywhere, via the Internet (or “the cloud”). Yet everyone from Gartner Group to Google has a slightly different take on cloud computing: It can be anything from storing and sharing documents on Google Docs to running your entire company operations using a remote, third-party data center. Some envision it as a way to compute without operating systems, or pesky local client programs, and with minimal hardware needs (just a basic client machine).

“The most important single characteristic of a cloud is abstraction of the hardware from the service,” says John Willis, a noted cloud-computing expert and blogger, explaining that the location of the servers is not as important as easy access to the data. “However you define it, I think cloud technology will have a footprint in every business that does IT within the next five years.”

The particular type of cloud computing that the business world could take advantage of requires massive server cluster farms and superfast network bandwidth. It also requires that companies be ready to hand over their data to a third party. A few small companies, among them Zoho.com (which offers business apps, such as word processing and task lists) and Box.net (which supplies online file storage) have established themselves as SaaS (software as a service) providers, with varying degrees of success. But SaaS is primarily a race between Google and Microsoft to provide advertiser-supported cloud applications to customers.

Security is one critical issue that both companies must address. Depending on the SaaS provider, data can be encrypted from point to point, and since services are Web-based, they’re very easy to patch. Google, for example, can respond to a new security threat without customers even being aware of the problem—or the fix. But end users essentially would have to entrust their data to an outside entity, which is a big leap of faith. Dave Girouard, a VP and general manager at Google, says that the company is working to allay the fears that make trust difficult to achieve.

“Google is investing enormous amounts of capital and sweat equity to ensure that we can protect your data better than you can do yourself,” he says. “Cloud computing will be additive. Usage patterns will change, and users will look primarily to the cloud for most of the things they turn to their PCs for today.”

Yet others aren’t as optimistic about cloud computing. Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett cautions that it’s not quite ready for prime time. He says that the framework is in an early phase of development—it’s almost experimental, rather than a reliable and trusted computing paradigm.

Ironically, even though Google is battling to dominate the cloud, some of its apps, such as Google Earth, still cache a tremendous amount of data locally to speed up operations. Add to that the privacy, network bandwidth, and political hurdles yet to address, and it looks as if cloud computing will have to drop down to earth a bit more before it can enjoy widespread adoption by both consumers and businesses.

What happened about Titanic in year 1912? Let’s check it out

This image comes from http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser – a Times Machine service from NewYorkTimes. You could possibly browse a photocopy of newspaper of NewYorkTimes of any day during 1850 till 1920.

The storage could be in terabyte. Behind NewYorkTimes, Amazon introduces this technology architecture and makes this happen, by using it’s Simple Storage Services (S3) + Apache Hadoop on top of its own Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) . It’s known there are more than 405,000 jpeg or tiff files stored in this cloud environment.

It is a real commercial cloud computing service… Check the detail written by Derek Gottfrid

How does TimesMachine look like?

What is Hadoop? What technology is used? MapReduce

How does MapReduce work?

see the briefing information from Google > http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

And a comprehensive tutorial > http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/mapreduce-tutorial.html

Source: http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/…Web+services

The Web Services Protocol Stack UDDI is used to register and discover Web services, typically described in WSDL. The UDDI transactions use SOAP to talk to the UDDI server, and then the application uses SOAP to request the Web service. SOAP messages are actually delivered by HTTP and TCP/IP.