Werner Vogels sees a thousand platforms flowering - InformationWeek

Werner Vogels, a bear of a man of Amsterdam, with his beard, his sport shirt and coat, making him look even more that it is suspended while literally on the run to the cloud connect 2011, an event UBM TechWeb, talking about some things happening with Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Objective of the Amazon with EC2 is not to be all things to all people, but stick to provide a basic infrastructure that allows others to choose what they want in the cloud. "More serious applications today have multiple components." "An application will be combining Java code with Ruby code with a suite (Oracle) E-Business and bring something of SugarCRM," he said in an interview.

Amazon Web Services strives to provide a platform where companies can decide to run some of these components in the cloud and others in the company. In the past, he noted, a vendor of the "platform" tend to provide elements that were owners and locked client. Infrastructure of cloud, of the other hand, "is a platform which allows to blend" elements and their execution where you choose.

This is the first time that I heard Vogels designate EC2 as a platform and the platform as a service is one of the forms accepted cloud computing. The term tends to cover Salesforce.com with Force.com, Windows azure platform when you use it to run the tools and services provided by Microsoft and Google App Engine, with its tools and its gadgets provided by Google. But this is not what was meant by Vogels.

Until now, Amazon has no wading in any typical lock-in plate-forme--other that originating in Amazon Machine Images at a time when there were not many alternatives, I would call "light lock-in." Friends can be converted to run under hypervisors other than custom Xen in the Amazon, which will be done systematically, and some time in the future. Amazon Web Services has not produced tools and development kits which, if you use it, make you a permanent part of EC2. Rather, I think, Vogels meant that AWS built on a neutral platform on which different tools and the development of many services can be built.

In addition to Heroku and Engine Yard for Ruby examples, he noted the SpringSource cloud Foundry Java platform running on EC2, as does the platform PHP, PHP fog.

At the same time as third party build options of EC2, Amazon itself is implementing specific services which facilitate its cloud to use as the elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation and Service of Simple Notification. What is the development environment, the resulting application can make use of these services speed deployment, manage the components of the app and services scale, if necessary, he said.

His comments on this point to stress a fundamental shift going on within the parameter of the Amazon infrastructure. We tend to think that EC2 infrastructure is static, immutable compute cycles attached to static auxiliary services such as S3 storage. In fact, EC2 himself is a rapidly changing environment, offering services more to do with the easiest cloud. She added 43 those services in 2009. Vogels, 50 in 2010, said, and the pace will continue to accelerate.

Locate the AWS and third parties begin to realize with EC2 a most comprehensive mobile development environment. Vogels referred to the example of SimpleGeo, a set of services of location-aware app developers who register for a key to use the SimpleGeo API. Geolocation services would be a natural complement to sit on top of EC2 - notification services for people on the move, services collaboration for distributed teams, temporarily disconnected.

I'm starting to see infrastructure cloud not as all compute cycles but as a core of wounds closely, carefully built basic services that can be used by different clients in many ways. SimpleDB was a prototype but the list of opportunities, as the Outlook for cloud computing itself is infinite.

Think like a service, says Vogels, and the complexion of the infrastructure as a service begins to take on another light. What of the more restrictive definition of the infrastructure as a service, including the well established one of the NIST, I thought that I heard him say that his speech. But it is quickly answered. "We do not ass of rat models of...". We don't want to enter into the business of the platform (but) let thousand platforms bloom.

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