Addition touted as making it easier to deploy applications in disconnected areas.

The Snowball Edge device from Amazon Web Services has gained the ability to handle block storage volumes. Available from today, AWS said the addition was made thanks to customers asking for it.

"With both block and object storage options on Snowball Edge, you have the flexibility to deploy a wider set of applications in rugged, temporary or mobile environments that have limited or no network connectivity," AWS said in a blog post

To make use of block storage, customers use the EBS API to attach volumes to Amazon Machine Images.

"You do not have to pre-provision volumes, you can create them in the field as needed, and they will grow elastically to their defined size."

In July, AWS unveiled the ability to run EC2 instances on Snowball Edge's 16 vCPUs, where data can be worked on remotely before the unit is returned to AWS and migrated to its cloud. AWS then double the compute power of Snowball Edge in November and allowed for an optional GPU.




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Infographic URL: https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/aws-facts/ 

Rackspace said the suite of services is designed to help companies leverage adoption of Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena.

Rackspace on Thursday announced a key expansion of its managed services for Amazon Web Services. The Windcrest, Texas-headquartered company is launching a managed database service for AWS, a suite of services designed to help companies leverage adoption of Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena.

According to Rackspace, the database service gives customers the ability to prep, load and query data sets while reducing operational costs and time to market.

With an end-to-end data management service, Rackspace also said customers will be able to architect, integrate, and optimize their environments with the relational database management system, data warehouse, and serverless services on AWS.

Rackspace left the public market following a $4.3 billion deal with the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Since privatizing, the company has pivoted away from competing as a cloud provider and has instead focused more squarely on customer support services.

Rackspace said the Managed Database Services is available today to customers in all AWS regions.



SOURCE ZDNet:

With all the hype, one would think that Machine Learning would have dominated the spotlight at re:Invent. Maybe it did, but for us, AWS's announced preview of a hybrid cloud stole our attention.

It is all too easy to get jaded by the scale of AWS's annual re:Invent extravaganza: 50,000+ plus attendees, jamming multiple hotels the length of the Vegas strip, from Mandalay Bay on the south to the Wynn and Encore on the north. Not to mention the stream of announcements. My colleagues have already provided wall-to-wall coverage over the past week, from partner announcements to machine learning, IoT, data lake "formation," to Werner Vogels' official goodbye to Oracle.

At the analyst preview event on the day before the announcements started going live, one of the questions was whether the 60+ announcements being delivered before the group signified a slowdown from the 80 or so announcements delivered last year. AWS's answer? The analyst relations group took a Sharpie to edit down the list.

AWS expected that the headline would be machine learning. They polled the analysts before the event. We wanted machine learning. Now hold that thought.

It's hard to ignore that there is an arms race over AI from which no technology vendor is exempt. Consider AI, or machine learning, as the newest enterprise computing checkbox item. Regardless of whether your organization is ready to adopt AI, you probably don't want to buy from a vendor that is behind the curve.

AI and machine learning are races for which no good deeds go unpunished. Google has the reputation for being the AI company, but by virtue of its dominance of the cloud computing market, Amazon Web Services is the place where most AI workloads go into production. While Google created TensorFlow, arguably the most popular machine learning and deep learning framework, AWS rolled out stats showing that 85 percent of all TensorFlow workloads are running on AWS.

While there will continue to be debated on whether AWS contributes to or consumes from the community (it is open sourcing a new compiler for deep learning jobs), its core message is all about production. Yes, there were some announcements aimed at building the community. Opening a new section of AWS Marketplace specifically for machine learning models will provide a clearer path for developers and creators to monetize their ML algorithms.

But the direction of AWS's ML announcements centered on reducing cost and the headaches associated with data wrangling and making the process easier and more frictionless. Ovum's research shows that data wrangling easily hogs the bulk of the data scientist's time. If you can automate enough steps and get decent support from data engineers, maybe you can get that burden reduced to about half the data scientist's time.

At one end of the spectrum, the agenda was about the arms race for crunching ML workloads -- a new Amazon EC2 P3dn instance promises 4x the network bandwidth and twice the memory of the existing P3's, targeting larger, more complex models. At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon Elastic Inference was announced to help customers utilize compute infrastructure more efficiently, through scaling up and downloads to minimize consumption of precious GPU resource. Additionally, AWS is introducing a custom chip -- AWS Inferentia -- adding an economic alternative to GPUs.

Focusing on process, AWS is adding a new service to Amazon SageMaker targeting the ordeal of labeling training data. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth provides three options: taking advantage of Mechanical Turk to mobilize workforces on demand for labels, plus a private workforce option, and an automated labeling option.

OK, that's just a sampling of AI and ML announcements that AWS made last week. But let's get back to our core point: while AI dominated the spotlight, AWS's announcement of a private preview of a new hybrid cloud offering proved the sleeper. AWS Outposts packages a rack of AWS compute and storage for installation in the customer's own data center where they can run many of the same services that are offered by AWS. The initial announcement did not specify which services would initially run and what computer and storage instances would be supported on Outposts. It will offer two options: one for packaging your workloads using the familiar VMware control plane you already use on premises, or the native EC2 environment that you are using in the AWS cloud. That makes Outposts the most significant (and logical) extension of the AWS-VMware relationship since it was announced a couple years ago.

Given that there are five categories, 16 instance families, and 44 instance types of AWS infrastructure, we'd be totally shocked if AWS offered every single permutation of EC2 instance on Outposts.

What's important is that Outposts is not a private cloud offering, but instead, a hybrid cloud. It is an extension of the VPC that the customer is already running in the nearest AWS region. The idea is being able to choose which AWS workloads run inside the firewall.

In our mind, we have this totally ridiculous image of an AWS Snowmobile 18-wheeler making roundtrips -- carting off a hundred petabytes of data from some customer to the nearest Availability Zone (AZ), and then taking a chunk of that AZ and delivering it back to some other customer. OK, we're just making that one up.

Outposts are not the first move for AWS outside the confines of its AZs: Amazon Greengrass for remote, IoT use cases and Amazon Snowball Edge for preprocessing of data were the first forays. And at re:Invent, AWS added to this family with a more compute-heavy Amazon Snowball designed specifically for bringing ML out to the edge.

AWS's move to a hybrid doesn't come in a vacuum. While enterprises are moving more workloads to the cloud, there are a host of legal and practical reasons why at least some workloads and data will always remain on-premises. As a pure cloud provider, this is the one place where AWS has been at a competitive disadvantage. Microsoft already offers a limited replica of Azure services with Azure Stack, and in the database realm, offers several options for SQL Server customers to have their workloads managed or transitioned to the cloud. Meanwhile, Oracle offers a completely managed cloud with Cloud at Customer; IBM, in turn, offers IBM Cloud Private (ICP), software that implements IBM Cloud services on the hardware of the customer's choosing.

Re: Invent was hardly short on database and storage announcements. AWS, the cloud platform provider with purpose-built databases, has added a couple more. Amazon Timestream is a new time series database that, as the name implies, is optimized for time series data. While time series data is hardly new, IoT has pushed the urgency for more efficient storage and retrieval of time series data to the front burner. InfluxData and Timescale are among a series of new time series database providers whose introductions have invaded our inbox over the past year. Among cloud providers, AWS has fired the warning shot.

Under the heading of buzzword compliance, AWS has introduced Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), which contrary to its branding, is a blockchain, not a quantum computing database. But at least it got your attention. It's targeted at one form of use case: the need for a centralized, immutable ledger where there is a central trusted authority. For use cases that require de-centralized trust and need blockchain, AWS is introducing Amazon Managed Blockchain Service, which technically, is not a database.

AWS has also introduced several extensions to its existing database platforms: Amazon Aurora MySQL adds a Global Database feature that allows updates in a single region to be replicated across other regions rapidly. It extends Aurora's in-region log-based replication to cross-region replication. In turn, Amazon DynamoDB has added new ACID transaction support that, in essence, batches updates associated with a single interaction; consistency will be strong within a region and eventual in outside regions. And there is a new On-Demand feature targeted at application with unpredictable or infrequent usage where customers pay per request.

But going back to that elusive theme of machine learning, one of the advantages of the cloud is that is supposed to simplify computing. But as one size does not fit all, AWS has grown its portfolio of EC2 instances and managed services over the years to the point where choosing the right mix can be daunting. A helpful move toward that direction is a new intelligent tiering service for S3 storage that uses machine learning to determine if your data can be moved to a cooler, cheaper tier. But we're awaiting the day when AWS finally unveils a machine learning tool that analyzes your workload and data to recommend the best combination of EC2 instances.

That's where we'll briefly direct your attention to another startup that we discovered on there Invent expo floor: Accelerate is about to introduce a new tool for analytics that introspects your data and recommends, for instance, whether Amazon Athena, Redshift, or EMR would be your most economical option. Stay tuned. We'll dish out the dirt after they release their product next month.


SOURCE:

The new offering expands the partnership AWS has with VMware.

After announcing a partnership with VMware two years ago, and unveiling VMware Cloud on AWS earlier this year, Amazon Web Services will be launching its own data center hardware, AWS Outposts.

AWS Outposts essentially brings AWS cloud hardware on-premises.

AWS Outposts comprises configurable compute, storage racks, and is fully managed, which will allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises and connect to the rest of AWS's cloud.

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CEO Andy Jassy said AWS Outposts provides a way to run AWS infrastructure on premises for a "truly consistent" hybrid experience.

It's available in two options, with the first through the VMware Cloud on AWS and the second as AWS native.

Option 1: For customers who want to use the same VMware control plane and APIs they've been using to run their infrastructure, they will be able to run VMware Cloud on AWS locally on AWS Outposts.

The companies said this delivers the VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) compute, storage, and networking infrastructure on-premises, and is managed as a Service from the same console as VMware Cloud on AWS.

Option 2: For customers who prefer the same exact APIs and control plane they're used to running in AWS's cloud, but on-premises, they can use the AWS native variant of AWS Outposts.

"Customers want to work on-premises and in the cloud the exact same way," Jassy said.

Joining Jassy on stage during his keynote at re:Invent on Wednesday, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said AWS Outposts was another example of where the two technology behemoths have joined forces to innovate.

"We're excited," Gelsinger said. "We're committed to this partnership and we're seeing it expand."

Gelsinger also announced new capabilities -- bringing many of VMware's technologies to AWS -- that will complement AWS Outposts such as VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2.

"These customers will have the opportunity to run other software with native AWS Outposts, starting with a new integrated offering from VMware called VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, which will feature popular VMware technologies and services that work across VMware, and Amazon EC2 environments, like NSX, VMware AppDefense, and VMware vRealize Automation," the companies explained in a statement.

"Customers are telling us that they don't want a hybrid experience that attempts to recreate a stunted version of a cloud on-premises, because it's perpetually out of sync with the cloud version and requires a lot of heavy lifting, managing custom hardware, different control planes, different tooling, and manual software updates," Jassy added.

"There just isn't a lot of value in that type of on-premises offering and that's why these solutions aren't getting much traction."

In a post-keynote press briefing, the SVP and GM of VMware's cloud platform business, Mark Lohmeyer, described the AWS Outposts effort as data center infrastructure delivered as a service, "bringing all of the benefits that exist in VMware Cloud on AWS, but now to our customers in their own datacentres."

Neither VMware nor AWS have disclosed how the service will be sold to customers, but Lohmeyer pointed to its existing model with VMware Cloud on AWS as a likely scenario.

"We haven't announced or shared all of the details on the sales and go-to-market model," Lohmeyer said. "I can tell you that just like with VMware Cloud on AWS, we enabled our partner ecosystem to participate in that. We will, of course, enable that same ability for them to engage with this solution."

Speaking with media following his keynote in Las Vegas, Jassy was asked if the roadmap for Outposts included every product and service that AWS offers through the cloud.

"I think it remains to be seen how many tools or services we will have in Outposts or not," he said in response.

"Our initial goal is not to re-create all of AWS in Outposts -- they're kind of different delivery models ... but there are some really basic components that we're hearing consistently that are wanted on-premises."

Gelsinger also joined Jassy in the post-keynote press event and was also questioned over whether or not Outposts was eating into VMware's on-premise business.

"I want customers to use as much as VMware as possible," he said. "So we'll of course be favouring the full VMware cloud option ... but we fully recognise customers want choice."

Jassy offered a bit more detail around how customers can get their hands on AWS Outposts.

"It will be a managed service, it will be delivered -- we will deliver the racks -- they will have hardware on it, it will have software on it," Jassy said

"It will be the same partners that we're using in AWS Regions, we will deliver the racks, we will install the racks ... we will prepare and maintain the racks."

Disclosure: Asha McLean traveled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of AWS.



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The AWS Global Accelerator is expected to boost the performance of global workloads and the AWS Transit Gateway is aimed at simplifying network architecture.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has lifted the lid off a handful of products and services ahead of its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, announcing on Monday night a network service that allows for the automatic routing of traffic to multiple regions.

The AWS Global Accelerator has been touted by VP of global infrastructure at AWS Peter DeSantis as improving availability and performance for AWS customers' end users.

Essentially, user traffic enters AWS Global Accelerator through the closest edge location. The accelerator then routes the user traffic to the closest healthy application endpoint within the global AWS network. Lastly, at the endpoint, the application response returns over the AWS global network and reaches the user through the optimal endpoint.

Users are directed to an AWS customers' workload based on their geographic location, application health, and weights that the AWS customer can configure.

The new service also allocates static Anycast IP addresses.

In AWS Global Accelerator, customers are charged for each accelerator that is deployed and the amount of traffic in the dominant direction that flows through the accelerator. The company expects customers will typically set up one accelerator for each application, but more complex applications may require more than one.

Users will be charged a fixed hourly fee -- $0.025 -- for every accelerator that is running, over the standard Data Transfer rates.

The standard Data Transfer rates -- also called a Data Transfer-Premium fee (DT-Premium) -- is calculated every hour on the dominant direction of traffic, which could be inbound traffic to an application, or outbound traffic from an application to end users.

DT-Premium is charged at a rate per gigabyte of data transferred over the AWS network, and the cost is dependent on the AWS Region that serves the request and the AWS edge location.

AWS Global Accelerator is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

AWS TRANSIT GATEWAY

Also announced on Monday was the availability of the AWS Transit Gateway, touted by the company as the way to build a hub-and-spoke network topology.

DeSantis explained that users can connect existing VPCs, datacentres, remote offices, and remote gateways to a managed Transit Gateway, with full control over network routing and security.

According to AWS, it is a way to simplify network architecture, reduce operational overhead, and centrally manage external connectivity.

DeSantis said users can also use Transit Gateways to consolidate existing edge connectivity and route it through a single ingress/egress point.

Customers can attach up to 5,000 VPCs to each gateway and each attachment can handle up to 50 Gbits/second of bursty traffic, AWS said. AWS VPN connections can also be attached to a Transit Gateway, with Direct Connect planned for early next year.


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Yes, everyone shopped their wallets dry on Amazon during the big holiday sales push. But don't forget that the AWS public cloud side of Amazon is likely to drive valuation and operating income going forward.

Amazon will be the talk of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but if you follow the money the more important event this week may be Amazon Web Services' re: Invent conference in Las Vegas.

Rest assured Amazon's e-commerce division will get most of the headlines this week, but you'd be an idiot to ignore the AWS roadmap and customer powwow taking place right after Cyber Monday concludes. Why? AWS' reInvent conference has become a big customer event where the company outlines its AI roadmap, new services, and architecture overview.

And if the economy goes shaky and consumer spending falters a bit, Amazon's market capitalization will be mostly driven by AWS, which is the public cloud computing leader. Certainly, Amazon's operating income will be driven by AWS even more than it is now.

Consider the following:

• For the nine months ended Sept. 30, Amazon's North America e-commerce operation delivered operating income of $5 billion on net sales of $97.24 billion.
• The international e-commerce division had an operating loss of $1.5 billion on net sales of $45 billion for the same time frame.
• AWS delivered operating income of $5.2 billion on net sales of $18.22 billion.
• In other words, Amazon's North America e-commerce unit had operating margins of 5.14 percent for the nine months ended Sept. 30. AWS had operating margins of 28.54 percent for the same period.

So while we all count Amazon's e-commerce revenue during the holiday shopping season don't forget cloud services bring in more net cash. Everything you need to know about the cloud explained

What's interesting is when you plot AWS's operating income out over a few years. Evercore ISI analyst Anthony DiClemente recently modeled out AWS operating margins through 2022. His conclusion: Long-term operating income margins are likely to top 35 percent by 2022 under what he calls "bullish, but still undemanding assumptions."

Indeed, AWS will account for half of Amazon's total enterprise value in 2020.



DiClemente's argument is that AWS could generate operating income north of $25 billion through 2022. AWS will continue to become more efficient and deliver operating income of $24.8 billion in operating income for 2022.

AWS at this year's re: Invent has already announced new features that'll add up to better efficiency. For instance, AWS has added predictive scaling to its Auto Scaling system. In a nutshell, AWS is using machine learning to predict your expected traffic and EC2 usage. The model needs one day of data to start making predictions and then refines from there. This machine learning approach gives AWS and the customer more visibility into computing needs and capacity.

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DiClemente argued that AWS is likely to only become more efficient over time. He wrote in a research note:

By mapping AWS's availability zones (AZ), we track the age of the AWS footprint over time; taken in conjunction with industry estimates that peg the fixed/variable cost of a data center at a 65%/35%, we are able to back into the trajectory of costs per new AZ, as well as the efficiency of AWS's footprint. Since 2014, AWS efficiency (which we define as incremental revenue per AZ adjusted for the average age of the footprint) has expanded at a 24% CAGR, offset by fixed costs per AZ also growing 18%.



Evercore ISI analysts also noted that Microsoft Azure operating income margins are likely to be more than 20 percent by 2022. Why? AWS has more experience running cloud infrastructure at scale.

What's interesting about DiClemente's note is that he uses AWS operating margins as a way to conclude that investors are getting a massive retail business more cheaply than currently appreciated. It's a thought worth banking with all the focus on Amazon's e-commerce sales.



SOURCE:

Amazon Web Service (AWS) suffered an hour-long network failure that halted services of South Korean online shopping malls and cryptocurrency exchanges.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an hour-long network failure in South Korea during the early mornings of Thursday, which halted the services of major local online shopping malls and cryptocurrency exchanges.

The webpage and mobile app of South Korea's largest e-commerce firm Coupang could not be accessed from 8:50 am to around 9:50 am.

The homepages of Market Kurly, a fresh food delivery service, POOQ, an online media service company, and hotel booking service Yanolja, were also shut down during the same time period.

Cryptocurrency exchanges Coinone and Upbit were also affected by the AWS network failure.

There was a domain name server issue within AWS, Upbit said, but services have since gone back online.

AWS reportedly underwent an emergency inspection of the problems that arose in its network within Asia, and found that the problems also affected South Korea.

The cloud company said it was looking into the matter and apologized for the inconvenience caused.

AWS is widely used by South Korean firms due to its price-competitive services. The country's largest conglomerates, Samsung and Hyundai, use AWS services for their overseas operations, and more local firms have also started using the cloud vendor's services for local operations purposes.

Earlier this month, Korea Air announced that it was moving all of its data from data centres to the cloud that AWS and LG CNS will provide.

Amazon also announced that it will update its Auto Scaling with machine learning which will help customers avoid over provisioning and reduce EC2 costs.


SOURCE:

The deployment of in-memory databases is becoming more common as enterprises process more real-time data.

Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced new High Memory EC2 instances designed to run large in-memory databases like SAP HANA. The instances currently deliver 6 TB, 9 TB, and 12 TB of memory, with 18 TB and 24 TB instances coming in 2019.

These High Memory instances enable customers to run in-memory databases in the same Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as the rest of their enterprise applications. That means they can scale their in-memory database and easily connect it to storage, networking, analytics, IoT or machine learning services.

The deployment of in-memory databases is becoming more common as enterprises process more real-time data. AWS noted that the company Fast Retailing, known as the UNIQLO brand, has been running HANA on Amazon EC2 X1e instances with 4 TB memory. The retailer plans to transition to the new Amazon EC2 High Memory instance with 6 TB memory to support its fast-growing business.

"Our fast-paced industry requires data and analytics in real time, and we use SAP HANA database to support us," Fast Retailing CIO Makoto Hoketsu said in a statement.

Other cloud providers have also noted this trend. Earlier this year, Google said it was beefing up support for SAP HANA and other workloads on the Google Cloud Platform with Intel's upcoming Optane DC Persistent Memory.


SOURCE ZDNet:

Coming soon, Amazon Relational Database Service on VMware will convey the abilities of RDS to VMware clients. 

Lightsail is a private virtual server offering for small businesses and others who can't afford or don't need public cloud services.

• 16 GB - 16 GB of memory, 4 vCPUs, 320 GB of storage, and 6 TB of data transfer.
• 32 GB - 32 GB of memory, 8 vCPUs, 640 GB of storage, and 7 TB of data transfer.

La Trobe has started accepting the first intake for its online Applied Cloud Technology bachelor's degree, based on internal training content from Amazon Web Services.

Updated: It is believed information belonging to thousands of GoDaddy systems was leaked due to the failure.

AWS once again accounted for a significant portion of Amazon's net income, growing 49 percent year-over-year.

Intuit said it is selling its largest data center and recording an operating loss on the infrastructure sale.

Amazon Web Services execs spent a lot of time on machine learning and artificial intelligence, but CTO Werner Vogels made it clear compute still matters.

It's another win for Amazon Web Services in the ongoing cloud wars.

The goal for AWS is to put more machine learning services into the hands of developers.