Amazon is a cloud IaaS-focused vendor with a very pure vision of highly automated, inexpensive, commodity infrastructure, bought without any commitment to a contract. Its paid-by-the-hour compute offering is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Xen-based infrastructure; it also offers cloud storage, cloud CDN and a number of PaaS-like services.
Strengths- Amazon is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest cloud IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices.
- Amazon has a very strong partner ecosystem; many software vendors have specially licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, easing deployment and eliminating some of the headaches associated with licensing software to run in the cloud.
- Amazon provides full API access to its infrastructure, emphasizing this over portal capabilities. The API is supported by many third parties that provide associated management tools; we recommend also evaluating RightScale and VMLogix LabManagerCE when evaluating Amazon's services.
- Amazon has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes it one of the few infrastructures that are suitable for intensively "bursty" workloads, such as scientific computing, modeling and simulation, and other applications that may require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time. Amazon also offers specialized infrastructure options for high-performance computing.
- Recommended use: Scale-out computing; self-managed IaaS for test and development.
- Amazon does not offer any managed services. As it expands its service portfolio, it is adding offerings that automate some aspects of infrastructure management, such as its Relational Database Service for MySQL. However, today, these services do not provide the core basic functions of the lightly managed IaaS use case.
- Amazon is the only evaluated vendor that does not also offer the standard options of colocation, dedicated nonvirtualized servers (often used for databases), and private non-Internet connectivity (although Amazon will negotiate peering). These components are critical for many customers, who need hybrid, not pure cloud, environments.
- Amazon has the weakest cloud compute SLA of any of the evaluated competing public cloud compute services, even though its uptime is actually very good. Most providers offer 99.99% or better, with many offering 100%, evaluated monthly, with service credit capping at 100% of that monthly bill. Amazon offers 99.95%, evaluated yearly, capping at 10% of that bill, and requires that at least two availability zones within a region be unavailable.
- Amazon is a price leader, but it charges separately for optional items that are often bundled with competitive offerings. Prospective customers should be careful to model the costs accurately, especially network-related charges. Support is not included — it is a 10% to 20% uplift to the price, and it is geared primarily toward technically knowledgeable, expert users.
- Amazon's offering is developer-centric, rather than enterprise-oriented, although it has significant traction in large enterprises. Its services are normally purchased online with a credit card; traditional corporate invoicing must be negotiated as a special request. Prospective customers who want to speak with a sales representative can fill out an online form to request contact; Amazon does have field sales and solutions engineering. Amazon will negotiate and sign contracts known as Enterprise Agreements, but customers often report that the negotiation process is frustrating.
-Cheers
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