No reason to buy your own boxes.
Retail and cloud giant Amazon opened its Sydney operations yesterday and brought its range of hosted services and low-cost virtual servers to the Australian market.
This suddenly makes buying and owning a server an expensive and arduous alternative by comparison. Business owners can now get rid of their existing servers by moving them to virtual servers on Amazon (the hosting part of the business is called Amazon Web Services) which is the biggest, cheapest and most advanced hosting provider in the world.
Amazon is not just suitable for running applications. It can act as a file server for storing documents and files of all sorts; many companies use it for disaster recovery by running virtual servers that can swing into action if their office servers fail; and it has an unbelievably cheap storage option (1c per gigabyte) that is well-suited for archiving.
I spoke to a couple of IT consultancies that work with Amazon Web Services about what this meant for the business case of running your own server.
‘I think the business case for owning a server hasn’t existed for the duration that Amazon has been around,” said Andy Pattinson from ProQuest Consulting. “The fact that they’re now local eases their business case around data sovereignty and latency, primarily. Latency is the big win.”
Latency is the time it takes to access an application over the internet. This was a drawback for some Australian users who had servers running in Amazon’s Singapore data centre, previously the closest location. Amazon’s Sydney data centres eliminated the small delay with Singapore-based files, making access almost instant.
“If you’re copying files latency has a real impact on how fast all those transactions happen. That whole process is ridiculously faster,” Nick Beaugeard from HubOne. (For the tech-minded, latency in Singapore was sometimes a couple of hundred milliseconds. Amazon Sydney promises single digit millisecond latency.)
The best thing about Amazon is that businesses can try before they buy, said Lorenzo Modesto, COO of Bulletproof Networks. An IT consultant can create a virtual server instantly and run it for a couple of dollars a day.
They can easily move over the application and business data running on their office server to a virtual server and run the two simultaneously.
“The vast majority of businesses will have applications that will be as happy as anything on cloud infrastructure,” Modesto told me. Customers could save between 25 percent to 50 percent on buying and running their own servers.
The launch day, held in Sydney’s Westin Hotel in Martin Place, was absolutely packed. Over 750 people attended, the event was oversubscribed by double that, and the atmosphere was electric. Amazon threatens to wipe out hosting providers in Australia and New Zealand who can’t compete with the scale, the pricing and the technology.
One of the biggest cheers went to the Commonwealth Bank CIO, Michael Harte, who told the audience that concerns about the security of the cloud were “garbage”, as reported by iTnews.
“Our traditional suppliers came to us and said, ‘This on-demand stuff doesn’t look very secure, mate’. I’m here to tell you those concerns are garbage,” Harte told the audience, to a round of applause.
“We’ve halved our storage costs, halved our app testing costs, and overall saved 40 percent across all the resources we consume as a service.
“What’s harder to quantify is the happiness this provides our business partners, when we can now deliver services in minutes and days, and focus our IT guys on services our customers want. This can free up an enormous amount of capital and time in the business.
“If it’s easy enough for us as a large organisation, it will be easy enough for you to do it.”