Rent a virtual desktop from Amazon: 35 bucks a month (PC not included) Re:Invent 2013 Amazon is bringing its margin-destroying, no-fun business model to the thrilling world of virtual desktop infrastructure – and could upset the balance sheets of traditional VDI providers along the way.
The Amazon Workspaces technology was announced today during the inaugural keynote speech for the web bazaar's second-ever re:Invent annual cloud conference in Las Vegas. The tech represents another step by Bezos & Co into the traditional enterprise, and will send a chill down the spine of VDI kingpins Citrix and VMware. "You get to live that dream of centrally managing your desktops, but [with] no hardware, no software, no infrastructure, no long-term commitments," said Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy in his keynote speech, tiptoeing over the physical machines needed to display said centrally managed desktops.
"It's half the price of what the typical virtual desktop infrastructure solution is today," he says. "It's a very compelling value proposition. " Updated to add. Amazon's weekend cloud outage highlights EBS problems. High performance access to file storage Problems in the Amazon cloud over the weekend crushed apps like Vine, websites like Airbnb, and numerous other services that depend on Bezos & Co's hulking cloud, and the problems were due to a familiar culprit – Elastic Block Store (EBS).
EBS is a network-attached block level storage service for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon says it is "suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage," – in other words, everything. Sunday's failure marked the third significant outage in two years to come about from EBS failures, and brought to mind the characterization of EBS as "a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability" by a former Reddit sysadmin after a major outage in April 2011. Amazon found that the problem was a network issue that led to elevated EBS-related API error rates in a single region. Besides the 2011 incident, EBS also went down in December 2012. AWS Server Issues Take Down Instagram, Vine, Airbnb And IFTTT. Those of you looking to spend the rest of today watching people do other things on Instagram or Vine probably just had a rough time trying to do it.
Both services went offline for over an hour, most likely because of issues with Amazon Web Services. Instagram was the first of the two to publicly acknowledge its issues on Twitter, and Vine followed suit half an hour later. The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — Netflix, IFTTT, Heroku and Airbnb to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today. 2:21 PM PDT We have identified and fixed the root cause of the performance issue. And then moved onto load balancing issues:
The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Web Services. Microservices makeover propels Carsales' global expansion - Software - iTnews. The multi-year rebuild of Carsales’ core platform around a microservices-based architecture has allowed the company to expand its full retail stack into new markets in Mexico and Chile.
The automotive classifieds site started re-architecting its core website - previously “one monolithic piece of code” - around four years ago in a push for more flexibility and resiliency. It culminated in the migration of its production environment from a hosted Hostworks facility into Amazon Web Services earlier this year, while flipping its disaster recovery environment the other way around. With the microservices architecture - written predominantly in .NET with interaction provided by the RabbitMQ open source messaging system - now bedded down, Carsales has for the first time been able to expand its full platform into new markets. Its core platform has been replicated identically on the back-end into Mexico (with soloautos.mx) and Chile (chileautos.cl, still in beta) within the past few months.