The VAR Guy

Those guys at Amazon Web Services never seem to sleep: they’ve made two more EC2 moves since we last looked their way. For starters, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), the cloud computing giant’s software bridge between EC2 and existing IT infrastructure, has entered free unlimited public beta. For their encore, they announced that Amazon CloudFront, their cloud content delivery system, has added support for audio and video streaming. Here’s a deeper look into what these new features can do for partners.

Amazon VPC had been in private invitation-only beta for some time, at least according to the official announcement. Now, all EC2 users have the option to leverage the service for zero dollars up front and zero dollars per gigabyte. In Amazon’s own words: “Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources.”

The fact that Amazon is thinking about this means that there may be something to Azaleos’ theory that hybridizing existing infrastructure with the public cloud is going to be a rising trend for resellers in 2010.

The new Amazon CloudFront functionality may be of less value to resellers, but it’s still worth a look. Says Amazon in yet another official announcement: “We’ve designed Amazon CloudFront to make streaming accessible for anyone with media content. Streaming with Amazon CloudFront is exceptionally easy: with only a few clicks on the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you’ll be able to stream your content using a world-wide network of edge locations running Adobe’s Flash® Media Server.”

AWS says there’s no extra charge for using the media streaming functionality, only the normal per-gigabyte fee for bandwidth served.

When Amazon wants to move, it moves. Obviously, we’ll keep following them into the new year, and when they announce 15 more new features next week, we’ll be ready.

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