AT&T announced the global launch of AT&T Synaptic Hosting(SM), its next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses.
More information on the Synaptic Hosting Service can be found on their website.
It is good to see more companies jumping into Cloud Computing. Competition and variety of services is a good thing.
Amazon announces that they are making another type of EC2 instances available.
These instances have proportionally more CPU resources than RAM (compared to our Standard Instances) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications such as rendering, search indexing, and computational analysis. These new instances include High-CPU Medium and Extra Large Instances – the Extra Large Instance includes 8 virtual cores to meet your computing needs.
The specs look pretty good.
High-CPU Medium Instance
* 1.7 GB of memory
* 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
* 350 GB of instance storage
* 32-bit platform
* I/O Performance: Moderate
* Price: $0.20 per instance hourHigh-CPU Extra Large Instance
* 7 GB of memory
* 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
* 1690 GB of instance storage
* 64-bit platform
* I/O Performance: High
* Price: $0.80 per instance hour
Today Google announced they have opened up Google Apps so that anyone can signup. They also released the planned pricing for people who exceed the free quota. However, they are not yet offering the ability for developers to purchase additional resources.
- $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
- $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
- $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
- $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
I am curious how the CPU core-hour is going to be defined. Will it be like Amazon where it is the time you instance is running whether or not your instance is actually processing anything. Or will they just charge for the cpu used while processing requests to your application.
Google also announced that a new image manipulation API is available. This is the same infrastructure that is used for the Picasa Web Albums. The other new one is the Memcache API which is a high performance caching layer.
I came across an interesting article on the New York Times site that talks about how they used Amazon EC2 and S3 to help make their articles from 1851 -1922 available to the public online. There was a total of 11 million articles. They had to take sometimes several TIFF images and scale and glue them together to create one PDF version of the article. They used 100 EC2 instances to complete the job in just under 24 hours. They started with 4TB of data that was uploaded into S3 and through the conversion process created another 1.5TB.
In an articles on Forbes.com, “The Death of Hardware”, they discuss Zillow and their recent use of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform to recalculate the values of some 67 million homes for their site. Zillow estimated the task would take 6 months and millions of dollars before they went with the EC2 platform which was about $50,000, roughly 3 weeks and used 500 servers.
In the article Forbes also mentions that Microsoft is expected to roll out their own form of the computing cloud (Windows Live Core) this month which is aimed at large businesses. Yahoo is expected to release theirs later this year. With the talk about Microsoft purchasing Yahoo we will have to see if the cloud happens for Yahoo. I hope Yahoo does as I would think their platform would be linux based and that is what I am looking for. Would be nice to see more competition in the space which would help drive more advancements and hopefully even lower prices.