For those interested, I came across a great infographic (Source: 2ndWatch.com) that may be of use to you in a presentation you are making or adding to a sales slide. It ranks the top 30 most sold products on AWS (sample size 200,000 VMs). You’ll notice that EC2/S3 are at the top, but what is surprising is AWS Transfer Data and Amazon VPC are also there, which, to me is a bit weird.
I’m no AWS guru, but data transfer costs a fortune at AWS and since everything is on their network, they kinda block you in. It’s not like you can haul in your own last mile and connect your own line to their Meet-Me-Room? Or can you? Hold on…let me Google it!
Back! Well, sort of:
“AWS Direct Connect lets you establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations. Using industry standard 802.1q VLANs, this dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces. This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources such as objects stored in Amazon S3 using public IP address space, and private resources such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using private IP space, while maintaining network separation between the public and private environments. Virtual interfaces can be reconfigured at any time to meet your changing needs.”
This sounds like P2P and really only lets you transfer data from your network to theirs and back and is specifically made for their Virtual Private cloud. Which brings me to my next point; the VPC product. I find VPC growing by leaps and bounds, but there is a flaw in that thinking and this is why I see Hyper-converged and on-prem private clouds a better option. The only issue with Hyperconverged is that most vendors scale per unit and this can be costly; imagine comparing the ability to scale with one VM at a time vs a 40-50 grand server (unit) every time. What you should be looking for is a hyperconverged solution that scales discretely, which means based on resource unit and not based on prepackages hardware.
I digress, getting back to AWS. There are services on here I didn’t even knew existed. Glue? What is that? I am impressed by their business model and their pro-active approach to not only making better products and services, but thinking ahead and really finding out the use cases and digging for things that people really need. This is, BAR NONE, the one reason why most successful businesses die out….they don’t innovate.
By the way, if anyone uses any of these AWS services, I would like to speak with you and set up a Podcast to discuss how and why you are using it. I am sure others would like to listen.