Amazon Web Services (AWS) the infrastructure-selling offshoot of the Seattle-based bookseller, is rightly seen as the cloud leader. No matter where you look AWS is leading the battle to move companies to the cloud. So when AWS introduces something, the world takes note.
And so it is today with the announcement from AWS that it is rolling out a new super-light server instance. To explain, using virtualization, AWS offers organizations the ability to utilize cloud infrastructure in a multitude of different configurations. While recent moves have seen more and more high powered virtual servers being added to the product portfolio, there’s also an opportunity to deliver servers better tuned to really lightweight workloads.
The T2 instances start at a mere fraction of a CPU core and scale up to a full core. While the instance size is mildly interesting, what is really interesting here is something of a departure for AWS, that of giving customers the ability to “burst”, that is to automatically scale up to consume additional resources on the server. The way it works, as detailed by the ever-productive AWS blogger/evangelist Jeff Barr and translated for the masses by noted cloud commentator Paul Miller:
It’s interesting because bursting has always been a value proposition of AWS and other cloud vendors, but actually providing for that bursting in business and technology terms has been left to the customers. Perhaps this is a portent of things to come where AWS customers will be able to pay for a block of capacity and have that capacity shifted and moved automatically between instances.
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The luxury that AWS has is that, being the biggest kid on the block, they can roll out stuff like this and test it extensively in the marketplace – if it goes well they can keep it and if not it can be subsumed into yet another product announcement. It’s one of the benefits of being the preeminent player in the space I guess.
Date: July 1, 2014