Aug 10 2011
Unbelievable – Dublin lightning strike zaps Amazon, Microsoft data centres! Surely, having and testing a UPS is really basic data centre management!
This says an awful amount about the data centre in question, and it is yet another self-inflicted blow to Cloud Computing.
May 27 2011
Wow – I heard this mentioned today:
By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books – hardcover and paperback – combined.
The full press is release is Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books.
It is interesting timing, because in the last month I have been talking to two people who were giving away their Kindles because they use their iPads instead. Maybe it is in evolutionary process :)
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Apr 22 2011
OK – I admit that the title of this blog post is a bit dramatic! I am of course referring to the fact that Amazon‘s cloud infrastructure was out for several hours yesterday. See Amazon fault takes down websites or Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings.
It is a pity really, because this is the sort of incident that moving into the cloud is supposed to prevent! As somebody I know who deals with Amazon said:
Amazon keep promising us 100% reliability, because “Telcos’ five 9s are so yesterday”!
Yes – this has effected his companies cloud strategy!
Apr 06 2011
I read an interesting news release last week from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but for some reason I forgot to add it here :o
Anyway, the article announced that Amazon will soon allow customers to run their machine instances on dedicated hardware within the cloud. For more information see Amazon VPC Adds Dedicated Instances and Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances.
This is an interesting development, because it moves the machine instances slightly away from the original spirit of the cloud. However, it does enable Amazon to compete with other existing cloud providers who were offering dedicated hardware (unfortunately, I cannot remember their names).
Mar 21 2011
Amazon, Microsoft, and many more see Dublin as an ideal location for their data centres according to Dublin Emerges as Cloud Computing Hub.
Some of the linked articles are also very interesting, such as Colocation Dublin that lists all of the data centres in the Dublin area.
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Nov 12 2010
I hate censorship – of all types. So I was delighted to read that Amazon has refused to censor the rather controversially titled book The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure. For more information see Amazon row over paedophile book.
Well done Amazon!
Oct 15 2010
I am just after reading Battle of the apps fuels smartphone war, and I am amazed by the following statement:
Global online trader Amazon.com is reportedly looking at creating its own online store for Android. This would bring the unity, stamp of quality and prestige that Android apps needed from the beginning.
This certainly would be an interesting development by Amazon. Perhaps it would be a good fit, given that Amazon certainly is an innovator, and it is also very well established with consumers.
I really wonder if the iPad, or indeed the entire emerging tablet market, is damaging Kindle sales.
Sep 25 2010
Somebody told me during the week that Verizon was entering the Cloud Computing market place. I think that this is a very interesting development.
Computers can be thought of abstractly being composed of only three capabilities:
The existing Cloud Computing providers (such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)) have already successfully brought the first of those two capabilities into the Cloud Computing environment.
However, nobody has successfully brought network capabilities into the Cloud Computing environment (or alternatively, nobody has brought the cloud outside of the data centre).
I suspect the reason for this is two-fold:
Therefore, it will be very interesting to see if Verizon’s move into the Cloud Computing environment will be the start of true Cloud Computing!
For more details about this read Verizon Introduces New Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Computing for Small, Medium Business Markets.
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Sep 16 2010
I saw today that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released new, low-cost, entry level instances! Very cool! I am extremely happy with the service from Blacknight, but if circumstances changed then I would definitely consider moving some of my sites!
For more information about this see New Amazon EC2 Micro Instances – New, Low Cost Option for Low Throughput Applications.
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Jul 06 2010
A while ago a friend told me about a company called SimpleGeo that develops a geodata infrastructure. It is a bit difficult to understand exactly what it does, but the blog is interesting, and the founders’ biographies are also worth a look.
The infrastructure itself appears to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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