VPN connectivity and private networking within EC2 are now available, this is great news – I mused on the possibilities of this sort of thing previously in this post.
This is a key step to gaining corporate acceptance, and proves that there is definitely still a use case and demand for a private cloud,
This new offering provides better opportunities for integrating internal systems with large-scale commodity service from people like Amazon, extending your own address space into EC2 opens up interesting opportunities for selective offloading and “cloud-bursting” of services as well as DR.
Private or shared/dedicated cloud infrastructures take the principals of public cloud computing (on-demand, pay as you go, scalability) and apply them to private infrastructure (along these lines through the adoption of virtualization technology) some people see this as a bit of a cheat, or not “real” cloud computing… however, in the real world* they are very appealing where outsourcing to a commodity provider isn’t an option due to regulatory, compliance or security issues and it can provide extra assurance levels because you have the ability to “look the service provider in the eye” via a traditional business relationship, rather than an anonymous entity on the web.
I like the quote “virtualization is a technology, cloud computing is a business model” and to me that means that you can apply that “cloud” business model internally or externally (chargeback/leasing/outsourcing), it really doesn’t matter – it’s just how you do the sums, not the technology.
See this post from the AWS team for more details, and some analysis from the hoff here.
<flame>*I define real world as not in the land of whiteboards, workshops and architectural models, but in the non green-field land of doing business, making money and delivering service </flame>
Posted in Amazon, Cloud Computing, EC2
