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Amazon’s popular S3 cloud storage service is turning three years old.  In the three years since its launch S3 has opened up shop in Europe, drop prices, added auto backups for persistent storage on EC2, and plugged into their Cloudfront CDN service.

Three years and 52 billion stored objects later Amazon wants to say thank you by providing some birthday deals to developers out there.  Data transfer costs into S3 will cost $0.03 for the next three months instead of the traditional $0.10.

You can find out more information about the service at http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Not from a design perspective, but from an end to end solution perspective.

Lost of noise today around Cisco entering the server market, some here and here.

Just as Apple loves to own the end to end experience by making specific hardware to fit their design needs while powering their software they pride themselves on writing and bundling with their devices.

This approach is a tough one, but very fruitful if you can pull it off.  By entering the server market Cisco moves closer to owning the end to end “experience” of data, services and applications moving around the worlds pipes and datacenters.

Cisco dominates the high end router/switch market.  By optimizing their network gear to run extra efficient with their server gear that is a pretty nice value proposition for groups looking for plug-and-play capabilities.  You basically end up with a bunch of hubs and pipes that move the data and apps around to virtualized containers sitting in the servers/nodes.

My big question is how will all of this fit into their living room strategy?

More cloud computing news involving Microsoft today via The Register.

At a partner event in London Mr. Ballmer mentioned that at the Professional Developers Conference Microsoft will announce a new OS dubbed “Windows Cloud”.

Ballmer metioned that this is just a working title and that the OS will have an actual name, hopefully one that doesnt have the word cloud in it.  Ballmer hints at geographic based replication and edge style computing will be built into the OS and that it will be one of the unique features that the new OS will provide developers.

This news is on the heals of the announcement from Amazon earlier today announcing that AWS will support Windows images and SQL Server on EC2.  This is all definite evidence that Microsoft’s software + services vision driven by Mr Ozzie will be taking shape over the next 12 months.  Be on the look out also for some big announcements from Microsofts data center team as they have been working away for the past couple years on building out ~$4/5 billion dollars worth of new facilities world wide.

I really do not like to make my own predictions but with a bunch of activity of late I figured I would throw out a couple thoughts/ideas I have been having:

1) FIM will purchase Pandora sometime within the next 12 months.  Pandora has continued pressure for lack of revenue and high streaming costs and with MySpace Music’s launch their IP is a perfect fit especially once their figure out the syndication issues

2) Amazon will continue to dominate the “cloud space” and pull in some big name enterprise customers with some nice PR around them and pull in Microsoft as a partner to offer their solutions on AWS.

3) Palm will turn heads in the first half of next year with their new devices and platform that will be coming down the pipeline

4) Android will get ~5% smartphone market share by the end of ‘09 and wireless devlepment will continue to be a huge pain in the ass till sometime in 2010

5) On their way to the $1 billion revenue mark Facebook will face some serious pushback with their Facebook ID program and continued efforts to push/pull activity stream info everywhere…, possibly also look for them to become a wrapper for LiveID to help move things along on the unified login front.

Amazon steps things up significantly with their continued web services strategy.., I received this from Amazon via email:

Oracle has officially certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform on which to run
their software.  In addition, AWS has worked with Oracle to enable existing Oracle
Database licenses to be transferred to Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.  This means that for no additional cost, you can use an existing Oracle license to run your database in AWS, saving yourself the cost and effort of managing your own infrastructure while keeping the same database software you are already running.  Oracle has also enabled Amazon S3 as one of the default backup locations for their RMAN service, making it easy for you to protect your data. Check out more details about running Oracle in Amazon EC2, http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/oracle, along with some easy-to-use tools,
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html, that can help you get
started.
 

I dont think this will have a huge impact in the short term but what it does say loud and clear is that Amazon wants the enterprise to use AWS for their experimental and initial development of their projects and that they will continue to stay steps ahead of the competition.

Enterprises that do not have super data sensitive projects should love this between the low cost and ability make use of an existing Oracle license.  A perfect example.., although they didnt use Oracle is the New York Times using AWS to process all of their archives into PDF files and make them searchable.

Very timely with my posts of late regarding web computing, Google has announced at the latest Campfire One event the initial unveiling of their web computing strategy.  It is dubbed Google App Engine.

The TC guys attended and have their writeup here.

Even though I am soooooo not a fan of the Big G, it is great to see them finally toss their hat in the ring.  I have no doubt that this will be great for developers by forcing MS and IBM to get their act together within the next few quarters as well as give Amazon some competitive fire in their belly even though this is definitely not a threat to AWS in the near future.

Arrington mentions that the project is ambitious that isn’t only hosting web applications but hosting the full stack to run python applications.

A first knee jerk reaction.., big f’in whoop.  Its a HUGE limitation to support python stacks and not java, php, .NET, Ruby etc.  PHP is the most widely used front end language for developing dynamic web apps on the planet.., you are missing out on a few developers if they cannot write for your platform.

Amazon allows you to custom build any stack (linux only) you want into their EC2 images and spin up machines at will.  Google will most definitely add Java next.., I am very familiar with their love of Python/Java and disdain for PHP.  Of course there will be no .NET support anytime in the very near future.., maybe when MS starts reselling Google Docs.

Another limitation.. which may, or may not be the case, is that a lot of the times developers want custom packages/modules.  It is currently unclear if Google will allow developers to change their stack up on the fly themselves.

A plus that Google is trying to pitch is that they will be providing API’s that plug into their services for authentication, email, etc.  Pretty much they are saying.., “Hey python Google fan boys.., if you ever wanted to create massively scalable web apps and dont want to worry about supporting them.., App Engine is just what your are looking for.”

Without knowing all the details yet one plus I do see for the Google service is that they will handle the autoscaling based on traffic loads.  This is great because Amazon doesnt support this and relies on you to build your own auto scaling logic or go to one of their third party partners such as RightScale.  Hopefully Amazon will just buy RightScale and build their tools directly into their platform.

So Google will mostly likely find some poster child apps/services to start touting within the next couple months.  Become one of them by signing up…, it is supposedly limited to the first 10K developers, so head on over to get in line.

I had the pleasure of attending the Hadoop Summit last week hosted by Yahoo! (Summit review post coming soon).

During the second half of the Summit I had the pleasure of sitting next to Mike Haley an architect at Autodesk, the CAD/Imaging/3D powerhouse located across the Golden Gate from me in San Rafael.

Mike was one of the presenters at the summit, his topic covering ‘Online Search for Engineering Design’.  (The content of his presentation will be covered in my Summit post)

In between presentations I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike about some new development efforts underway at his company including some Amazon Web Services work.  Those guys up north have some really cool technology they are churning out and are looking to take browser based applications to the next level.

People are well aware that the browser has been becoming the center of our digital lives over the past few years.  As broadband adoption has picked up and the prevelence of javascript libraries/development, browser based applications continue to evolve.  From document and spreadsheet to photo editing, applications are getting closer and closer to desktop applications.

That is fine when you are talking about applications that are not too computationally and graphically intentsive and mostly just need a slick javascript, flash, or silverlight UI produced to make things work.  When you start to get into 3D modeling its a whole new ballgame.  As part of the Web Computing Series I will be profiling Autodesk and some things they have cooking internally at their labs.autodesk.com site.  Read this first review on Project Draw after the hop and I will be adding more reviews in the very near future.

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