Multi-Cloud 101: 7 Things You Need to Know
At an AWS Summit event today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it is making available a faster load balancing capability that gives IT organizations more granular control over where and how application workloads run on the AWS cloud.
Dr. Werner Vogels, chief technology officer for AWS, told attendees the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) is more content aware and much faster than any of the load balancing services the public cloud service provider has made available to date. The result is not only an ability to better serve different classes of application workloads, but to gain more efficient usage of AWS cloud infrastructure, says Vogels.
“We think the savings will be ten percent or more,” says Vogels.
At the same time, AWS also announced the availability of Amazon Kinesis Analytics, a managed service through which AWS enables organizations to query streaming data using SQL in addition to providing support for IP V6 addresses on AWS.
Also new is an S3 connector for its Snowball appliance for accelerating the migration of data into the AWS cloud along with a Job Management application programing interface (API).
Finally, AWS announced it is now making it possible for organizations to bring their own encryption keys to AWS. It’s also moving to cut the price of snapshots on AWS by 47 percent at the same time it is increasing the number of IOPs customers can provision per GB of storage.
Vogels says that having access to a content-aware load balancer is critical because IT organizations are now trying to deploy workloads across three distinct types of computing models. The first of those is traditional virtual machines. The second involves the deployment of containers to drive microservices. And the third is a functions-based approach using serverless computing based on an event-driven model that manifests itself in the form of the AWS Lambda cloud service. The challenge IT organizations now face, says Vogels, is that they need a common framework for integrating and managing workloads running on these diverse architectures.
AWS is essentially making a case for using its public cloud as a common platform to automate the hosting of workloads that make use of all three architectures. It’ll be up to each organization to discover which of those three architectures ultimately makes the most sense for them. But regardless of the approach, Vogels says, AWS is adamant that IT organizations should not have to master separate tooling to manage any particular one.
