UPDATED 12:01 EDT / APRIL 01 2013

Cloud Review: Amazon and its Competition

This past week both Amazon and its rivals announced major product updates. The public cloud provider is tweaking its portfolio in order to increase its presence in the enterprise market, while competing vendors are doing everything they can to make sure that they won’t get stomped on in the process.

Amazon launched a new security service for EC2 subscribers. Dubbed CloudHSM, the new offering gives organizations the option of storing their encryption keys in a temper-proof appliance that cannot be accessed by other customers who are tapping into the same data center. The appliance buries the cryptographic data so that it is not exposed when the customer accesses an EC2 instance that runs on shared infrastructure.

NetApp, a storage vendor that sells hardware to the enterprises that Amazon is hoping to lure in with CloudHSM, also announced a new offering.  The company launched a private cloud offering in every international Equinix data center that has AWS Connect deployed.

NetApp Private Storage for AWS is not unlike Amazon’s latest service: it allows enterprises to tuck away sensitive data in a dedicated private cloud environment managed by Equinix.

Traditional data center vendors are not the only threat to Amazon’s growth aspirations: Wikibon’s Stu Miniman recently called out OpenStack as the industry’s response to the company’s success in the enterprise market. One of the reasons that the open-source platform poses a threat to AWS is that it’s maturing at a very rapid place, a trend that was most recently confirmed confirmed this week.

A systems integrator called Mirantis released FUEL, a homegrown library that helped its engineers deploy OpenStack for PayPal, NASA and a number of other clients.  The scripts that are included in the bundle range from convenient hacks to production-ready configurations.


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