Amazon Adds Redshift

By Corentin Béchade,Redactor, StorageNewsletter.com

Amazon Web Services Inc. the cloud computing subsidiary of the retail store giant, recently launched some new products to continue its push towards IT business.

Started in 2006, the service has grown to become a dominant player in the back-end infrastructure for cloud computing. Dedicated to help businesses expand their reach with large computing capability, the firm have data center availability zones in 9 regions, 4 in the US, one in Singapour, São Paulo, Brazil, Sydney, Australia, Tokyo, Japan, and only one in Ireland for Western Europe.

The business model is based on ‘high volume, low margin’, making very little low profit on each server but hoping for large customer demand. The idea is to rent dedicated servers and data warehouse to enterprise to help them scale in case of computing or storage issue, therefore avoiding customers the need to build their own architecture, allowing a more flexible system with servers ready to run with a command.

In a recent announcement, it claims to have lowered price 37 times since inception and introduce 159 innovations in 2012 only, but few details were given concerning those numbers.

Among its storage and computing services, Amazon also launched Redshift, a data warehousing system for analyzing sets of data ranging from gigabytes to thousands of terabytes. Companies can re-locate their storage and analytics tools in the Amazon cloud to offload in-house system. Data are stored in S3 with optional AES-256 bit encryption. And, like all of its services, it’s a pay-as-you-go system.

The company experimented the service on its Amazon.com website and announced that the heavily analytics based website could operate on Redshift for $4.8/hour.

Among the clients of such services, there are Spanish bank Bankinter, S.A. and Pretty Simple Games SA, editor of Criminal Case

Even if Amazon seems to think that the real differentiating factor nowadays is not where your store data, the recent NSA/Prism scandal probably made a dent in the trust business had in storing their data on third party servers. And although the company advertise that its web services are more reliable than in-house solution, a recent outage of their system took down part of AirBnB, Vine and Twitter.