Public Cloud provider Amazon Web Services is extending its reach with a new service for creating private Clouds. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) provides business customers with their own, "isolated" computing resources in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, accessible by a virtual private network. Amazon says that Amazon VPC will have no long-term contracts, requires "minimum" upfront investments, and customers will only pay for the resources they use.
“We have developed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to allow our customers to seamlessly extend their IT infrastructure into the cloud while maintaining the levels of isolation required for their enterprise management tools to do their work,” explained Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer. “One important piece of feedback that mainly came from our enterprise customers was that the transition to The Cloud [from] more complex enterprise environments was challenging,
“We have been listening very closely to the real requirements that our customers have and have worked closely with many of these CIOs and their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as a seamless extension of their data centre where their standard management practices can be applied with limited or no modifications. This needs to be a solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above while treating it as a part of their data centre.”
Maintaining control
Companies can use a VPC to move corporate applications, including e-mail, financial systems and CRM applications, into the Amazon cloud without having to lose control, and users continue to access the application as if nothing has changed. The IT department can also use Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances within the VPC to add additional servers for disaster recovery or more web servers during a traffic spike.
"As more and more enterprises leverage the cloud, they want a simple, seamless way to migrate their large and complex IT infrastructures to AWS, and to use the security and management controls that their IT teams already know," says Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS. "We built Amazon VPC for this purpose - to allow any company to seamlessly connect their existing resources to the AWS cloud as if it were a part of their own data centre."
The new service connects internal resources and Amazon's cloud using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection based on IPsec (Internet Protocol security). Companies can run Amazon EC2 instances running Linux, Unix or Windows, Elastic Block Store for storage, and CloudWatch to monitor utilisation within a VPC.
Early adopters
Amazon Web Services cites Eli Lilly as an early adopter of VPC. For about a year, the pharmaceutical company has been using Amazon EC2 and other cloud computing services to provide faster performance on demand to hundreds of its scientists and technical staff. The service allows the company to easily integrate internal computing platforms with Amazon EC2. “We can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with computing resources we’ve deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome configuration or management hassles," said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly.
Amazon also cited vendor support from firms such as Citrix and Computer Associates. "By leveraging Amazon VPC, our mutual customers now have access to resources that appear as a natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based applications," said Frank Artale, vice president of business development at Citrix.
Amazon is also adding more secure authentication to its web services. AWS Multi-Factor Authentication lets users add two-factor authentication when accessing account settings. Users must provide a six-digit, rotating code from a device in their physical possession, in addition to their standard AWS account credentials, before they are allowed to make changes to their AWS account settings. It will be offered as an optional feature of Amazon Web Service accounts.
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