Big Day for Amazon EC2

Today Amazon Web Services made some big announcements. We've been using AWS for over a year now and have been very happy with it.

* Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
* There's now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.

Finally! This will make our customers and investors sleep better at night! It's nice to see something not in a perpetual beta.

* Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
* Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.

Yawn... Microsoft in the cloud doesn't excite me much.

* We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.

I think the command line tools are just fine, but OK.

* We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.


Oh Yeah! To me, this has been the last piece of the puzzle.

Load balancing in the cloud has been a "roll you own solution". The current solution is to use a software load balancer like HAProxy. However, this requires more machines, more management, and more hops and therefore more money. Round Robin DNS is a poor man's solution, do not even go there.

My wish list.

• Better reliability than S3, please!


• L4 load balancing


• L7 content switching/filtering - Sticky Sessions


• HTTP rewrite and compression


• SSL acceleration


• Cheap - cheaper than having small instances running a software load balancer


• An easy web service API to configure all this

Kudos to the AWS team!