Amazon cracks thorny cloud problem

cloud computing - the ability to run high-performance databases, Cloud Pro reports.

Applications with I/O intensive workloads rely on consistent response times and that's not always been easy for cloud to deliver.

AWS' attempt to tackle this problem is a new service called Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS. The system has been designed to offer AWS customers the ability to specify volume size and volume performance so that Amazon EBS will deliver that specified performance.

Amazon's release of provisioned IOPS is wrought from a customer demand for manual control of the “performance rate” in the cloud, and Amazon has delivered, Channel Nomics says.

Customers can now log into the AWS Management Console and create an EBS volume with the storage and IOPS they need and attach it to an Amazon EC2 instance, all within a few clicks. At the present rate, EBS will support 1 000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume but multiple EBS volumes can be linked to EC2 for data striping, allowing for many more thousands of IOPS.

Notable proponents and users include Stratalux, a custom cloud solution builder. CEO Jeremy Przygode touted the flexibility as a key technology which allows customers to scale their own databases on demand, while also allowing Startalux to more easily grow its customer base.

But the biggest customer win is likely NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, where EBS with Provisioned IOPS have allowed NASA to leverage massive databases for radar data crunching and unravelling the mysteries of black holes.