Thoughts on Amazon AWS and Its Security Whitepaper

I can say that I’m a long time user of Amazon AWS and have used most of what has been  listed.

I think the target market is different and a lot of what AWS spins out seems to be from requests internally and customer generated.  Amazon.com is on AWS and Amazon internal IT is migrating to AWS.  This part if a HUGE asset as these groups do presentations on what they find as they move onto AWS.  The internal Amazon IT move to AWS has been very compelling for customers to listen to as the various webinars have been very candid about what has worked, challenges, etc. so it resonates well with the community.  They continue to roll out building blocks of common IT infrastructure and are working their way up the stack, the biggest gap from what I can see are these building blocks (messaging, queue, rdbms, nossql, and on).

Although Gartner is busy saying Amazon is not a leader, most people that I run into do not agree (unless they only listen to Gartner J).  I personally keep their list of things up to date and compare other offerings against that, as well as Google and IBM. (eg. Google has the cheapest CDN and the fastest of all the generic service providers).

Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S, formerly Amazon E-Commerce Service or ECS), providing access to Amazon's product data and electronic commerce functionality.

Not currently, possibly with release 3

Amazon AWS Authentication is an implicit service, the authentication infrastructure used to authenticate access to the various services.

Amazon has recently added more functionality to this.  Hewlett Packard will offer the same, except for 2FA as I’ve not seen that listed anywhere yet.  The AWS 2FA is a OTP OATH token, I have several and they are pretty cheap.

Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) for distributing objects stored in S3 to so-called "edge locations" near the requester.

I’ve not heard of that being available, although it could be provided through various edge partners today.  Of the various shoot-outs the dedicated CDNs still win out easily over the various cloud providers, so if speed is a concern they should be looking outside to an external CDN.  Maybe not be as easily integrated and 1-stop shopping, but definitely faster with more options to go external.

Amazon CloudWatch, providing monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with EC2.

Same or better as it uses the Blade System Matrix (BSM) stack (mostly SiteScope) which allows you to go far beyond what AWS has.  The ability to put in synthetic transactions into the same monitoring environment is priceless.  I’m not sure to what degree ECS will expose SiteScope to cloud clients.

Amazon DevPay, currently in limited beta, is a billing and account management system for applications that developers have built atop Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, providing quick deployment and management of applications in the cloud.

Semi PaaS, which can be done to some degree with OO, but am unsure as to how much of OO is exposed in ECS to clients.  The cool part for AWS is that it is PaaS, but allows you to go under the covers, not like salesForce.com …

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing persistent block level storage volumes for EC2.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing scalable virtual private servers using Xen.

ECS is similar, but for the next couple of years is going to be on a commitment basis (similar to EC2 guaranteed instances).  About 2 years out we’ll see the pay-as-you-go pieces added in.  I’m unsure what that means for “elastic” and “burst” capabilities.  2 years was the estimated date I heard last week.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of EC2 and Amazon S3.

Not that I’m aware of, they’d have to provision it onto their own VMs, which is not the same as a managed service they can consume.
Not that I’m aware of.  This piece ties into both the Amazon warehouses, delivery & payment systems. 
  • Amazon Historical Pricing, providing access to Amazon's historical sales data from its affiliates. (Appears this service has been discontinued)
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk), managing small units of work distributed amongst many people.
Not applicable, but could easily be added in by subbing in one of the many data processing shops out there. 
Not that I’m aware of.  They could provision their own VMs and use OO maps to spin these up, but Amazon manages a bunch of underlying bits here for you, so I’m unsure what ECS might bring forth as an offering.
  • Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
Not that I’ve seen on any plans.  Most of the domain registrars provide some of that today, but the dynamic DNS portion they would need to do on their own.  I haven’t been hampered by not using it as the Amazon load-balancing hides internal IPs nicely.
I’ve not seen a roadmap showing any real services outside core hardware types of IaaS, not application building blocks such as this.