Cloud Expo Europe notes

I didn’t manage to make it to yesterday’s opening day of the Cloud Expo Europe – customer/work stuff takes precedence – but I managed to get to the second day. These events are always a bit of a mixed bag – it feels like I could attend cloud computing conferences every week, although it’ll be big data (or is that BigData?!?!?) conferences soon as the vendor hype machines whirr into life…

First I attended the opening keynote as Dr Werner Vogels from AWS was presenting – as Smart421 is an AWS solution provider I just kinda felt I should be there and hear what he had to say. The noise from the exhibition floor was pretty grim in all the conference rooms so it wasn’t exactly a perfect environment for him or us, but I got a few useful tidbits about how Amazon.com are using AWS (which has been an evolving story over 2010 and 2011). AWS didn’t have a stand at the event and were not a sponsor etc, and yet AWS and their CTO are such a draw that they gave him the opening keynote on day 2 – which tells you a lot about where AWS’s competitors are in the the marketplace really.

I then listened to a presentation from Joan Miller – Head of Parliamentary ICT for the UK Parliament. I didn’t quite catch the end due to having to do a customer call, but whilst I found it interesting to hear what the UK Parliament are up to relating to cloud computing (especially the BYOD – “bring your own device” – trend and how strong a driver it is for them), I disagreed with the black & white conclusion that cloud computing was the answer to their challenges. It’s certainly part of the answer, but many of the implications of making information available electronically to mobile BYOD devices anywhere are still just as nasty “in the cloud” as they are on-premise, e.g. authentication, security of data, coping with different presentation devices etc. I accept that scaling is certainly easier (or at least at a price point that doesn’t keep you awake at night), and the use of SaaS offerings makes deployment of functionality much easier and cheaper for less critical datasets. To be fair to Joan, I missed the end of her presentation, and also the presentation slots were so short that there wasn’t really enough time to get the subtleties of the message over.

I also caught a session from Chris Hinkle from Firehost on the subject of secure cloud hosting – I thought he might talk about data encryption at rest and in transit, key management etc, but he started with some interesting material from Version analysing the nature of security breaches, e.g. they are no more prevalent in public cloud deployments than private data centres, and no hypervisor based attacks have taken place, so the whole public cloud multi-tenancy concern is a red herring really. After some content about the role of web application firewalls, and I was also glad to see that he called out the security elephant in the cloudy corner of the room, i.e. guess what – your SDLC (software development lifecycle) needs to include secure development processes such as code reviews, vulnerability testing, penetration testing (and for every change, not just the first release!) etc. Shocker – insecure code is insecure wherever you run it.

Frank Jennings from law firm DMH Stallard covered some cloud legal contract points, based upon the Cloud Industry Forum white paper #3 (downloadable here) to which he was a contributor. He made some interesting points:

• Cloud contracts are more about “getting out” than “getting in”, i.e. access to data in the event of a failure, lock-in periods etc.
• Negotiation with public cloud vendors just isn’t typically going to happen – they operate at low margins and use a business model that just doesn’t support custom negotiations and terms for each customer – and this means living with the legal jurisdiction that the vendor
• Even in the most custom of contracts, the provider’s financial liability (if you can even get them to sign up for consequential loss etc!) is typically capped at 100-150% of the fees you are paying them. Bottom line – service credits and the like are pretty pointless in a cloud or a non-cloud world and virtually insignificant compared with the potential disruption to your business (as discussed in a previous post)
• The US Patriot Act gets a lot of interest, and it’s real (i.e. you need to use a UK company using a UK-based UK-owned data centre(s) to avoid it), but the reality is that most territories around the world have similar constraints and if you are not in an industry sector that is likely to get the authorities’ interest, then it’s not as big a factor as the press it receives suggests.

The last point I wanted to mention was something I picked up in a presentation about cloud adoption trends by William Fellows from the 451 Group. He observed that their research has shown that whilst security is a key concern when organisations are selecting a cloud-base solution, once they start implementing it falls away to being the fourth largest consideration. This backs up what we see in the market – cloud security is more of a fear issue than a real issue (well – it’s no more real a concern than for any deployment anyway).

 

Today is 1989

Think back to the late 1980′s – the PC is pervading offices and I am running the Information Centre in Mobil Oil, developing small PC applications and running a Help Desk.

Every day a business user would come to me with a well thumbed copy of PC Magazine to show us some whiz-bang PC they had seen or some software they wanted.

My job was to ‘hold the line’ and stick to the strategy – 3 year refresh cycles. More often than not they had greater desktop processing power at home than at work – I certainly did. What we had not grasped was that the PC had become consumer technology – the IT department had to catch up.

Fast forward to late 2011 and we have the Cloud. How many IT managers are still ‘holding the line’ ? Now they face users with well thumbed iPads accessing their holiday photographs from their Cloud storage saying it’s going to revolutionise the way they work.

This time it is the 5 year outsourcing deal that stops them embracing the change.

So has Cloud become consumer technology now ?

My view is that it’s well on the way – with iCloud here and G-Cloud on the way we will be using it as consumers and citizens before we know it.

Should I be worried ? Only if I was back running my old IT Department.

 

London Azure user group meeting – Jan 2012

On Tuesday night last week I attended my first London Windows Azure user group meeting – it’s the second time this new group have met, but the first one I’m managed to make it to. My colleague Simon Hart blogged about the inaugural event here.

There were about 35 attendees or so and it felt like a good crowd, asking intelligent questions and I had some interesting chats during the breaks with some other user group members and I also caught up with Yossi Dahan (a Microsoft technical architect I’ve met before) – it really feels like this young user group has some momentum – so hats off to the organisers for getting this off the ground! The good pizza, chips, and beer also always helps – this must be one of the best catered user group meetings I’ve ever been to – there was even someone opening my beer bottle for me…

Planky (aka Steve Plank from Microsoft) presented on two topics relating to different strategies for identity federation and application access control – Azure’s Access Control Service (ACS) and Azure Connect.

Most of the the presentation time was allocated to ACS – which is pretty intricate to use. Well – it’s probably fairer to say that there are plenty of moving parts and technologies to get to grips with if you want to federate identities from Active Directory on-premise using ADFS2, via ACS in Azure to a set of applications hosted in Azure (which will typically using Windows Identity Foundation – WIF – to process the security token issued by ACS). None of it is particularly tricky in itself, but the great man himself hit some issues along the way (which always makes for a better presentation anyway ) and I was left thinking that it was a bit of nightmare to troubleshoot exactly why user access to the end application (the “relying party”) was being denied (see the image above) – it’s just the joys of debugging a distributed architecture I guess.

Azure Connect is essentially a VPN and IPSEC tunnel offering that I guess is very roughly equivalent to the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering from AWS, but with some significant differences – but it’s trying to address the same key requirement – seamless but secure network connectivity between on-premise and cloud-based networks. It’s still in beta (at least until Summer 2012) and has some inherent limitations such as the fact that it requires a separate installation of agent software on every on-premise server that will talk to/from Azure, but it looks like an interesting technology. My main concern was just whether our customer’s security team’s could live with this model though – as in addition to the installation requirement, it essentially avoids any corporate firewall by creating an out bound SSL (port 443) connection to the Relay Service on Azure, effectively creating a client-to-site VPN from each individual on-premise server to the Relay Service.

So overall – a very useful and interesting evening, I’m glad I attended and I recommend my Smart421 colleagues to make the effort to attend future events (which are planned to be monthly) – the next event (register here) is on the 7th Feb and relates to “Parallel Processing with Azure and HPC Server“, so I’m personally very interested to hear how this compares to AWS’s offerings in this area.

 

Smart421 a launch partner for AWS Direct Connect to the EU region

It’s an exciting day today as it has just been announced that Smart421 is an Amazon Web Services launch partner in the UK for the latest expansion of their Direct Connect offering. Up until today Direct Connect has only been available to certain regions in the US, but now UK customers can get the benefits of this improved connectivity as well. Smart421′s role as an AWS Solution Provider is to help customers reap those benefits by giving them a one-stop shop for full end-to-end connectivity from their premise(s) to the AWS EU region without relying on the Internet at all – except as a backup mechanism.

Our offering is actually a seamlessly managed combination of services from two parts of our parent company, the KCOM group. Smart421 provide an end-to-end experience for the customer and manage the provisioning of the AWS Direct Connect connection at Telecity Sovereign House in London, and we use our sister company Kcom to deploy and manage the “last mile” connection from Telecity to the customer’s premises. The immediate benefit to the customer is that they have one party responsible for a direct private connection from their premises to the cloud – not multiple suppliers to manage and triage etc.

I thought I’d just cover a few basic questions about Direct Connect that I’d expect to come up with customers…

Why would I want it?

The usual mechanism of accessing AWS is over the Internet, with user and/or administration traffic secured using a virtual private network (VPN). This gives privacy and authentication, but the network traffic is fundamentally still sharing your organisation’s Internet pipe and still going via the Internet along with everyone else’s traffic. Many of our customers have a default security policy that certain classes of network traffic must be deployed on a more private infrastructure, e.g. MPLS links etc – to give a greater degree of privacy, predictability and control, especially in terms of improved bandwidth, latency and availability.

Secondly, there is a perception issue with using the Internet – which often becomes more marked the further you move up the management chain . In fact, when talking to customers this is a classic objection that I sometimes hear – “we’re not comfortable using the cloud over the Internet”. Well now you’ve got a real choice – we can deploy an end-to-end private connection to AWS when required.

Also, you might be shifting significant volumes of data into and out of your cloud deployment, e.g. if you are performing big data processing using Hadoop/Elastic Map Reduce etc, or frequent data replication for disaster recovery purposes when you are using AWS as a logical extension to your on-premise data centres. In these circumstances, having greater control and certainty over the end-to-end connection between your premises and the AWS deployment is attractive.

What are the benefits?

In a nutshell, the key benefit is that your traffic is no longer subject to the unpredictability of the general Internet, and so basic metrics such as band with and latency will be far more predictable. For the connection from the customer’s premises to Telecity in London these metrics will be subject to strict quality of service guarantees, i.e. a bandwidth of X (you choose) with a defined maximum latency and an SLA (service level agreement) for the connection. For the second half of the connection from Telecity to the EU region in Dublin, you can expect superior network characteristics but there is not an SLA that defines guaranteed bandwidth etc. The initial adopters of Direct Connect in the EU region can expect an amazingly good network service given the price point – and our expectation is that over time AWS will have to introduce a degree of throttling/bandwidth management in order to maintain service levels…

What will it cost me?

…which brings me on to the costs. The bottom line is that Direct Connect is amazingly good value in our opinion. For a 1Gb/s port at Telecity it’s of the order of $216/month – i.e. virtually nothing. Unless you have your “on-premise” servers co-located at Telecity, then the costs for the “last mile” connection backed up by a strong SLA back to the customer premises will be much more significant. So guess what – you get what you pay for – no surprise there! For organisations relatively close to Telecity Sovereign House in network terms (e.g. in London) this makes Direct Connect a no-brainer really once your AWS usage becomes significant in terms of business criticality or data volumes, and it’s still highly attractive for an UK-based organisation.

Where might all this be going?

Finally – I just wanted to finish on why we think this is a really exciting development. For the EU region, this is the first step on the road for Smart421 to be able to offer a truly end-to-end service management offering – backed by strong SLAs for the end-to-end network connection and the AWS deployment itself. Over time we expect AWS to enhance Direct Connect with QoS (quality of service) guarantees, and we’re delighted to be in there at the start.

 

Being Brilliant with Telefonica

Yesterday I was lucky enough to do a presentation on “mobile money” at the Telefonica Digital Future OIPD Conference at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London. The site with more details is still up at http://www.yourdigitalfuture.co.uk/ which is a great domain to own by the way  The event was sponsored by Smart421 and other companies who are working closely with the Online and Integration teams at Telefonica in the UK (the company also known as “O2″).

After some very amusing if fairly dodgy references by Andrew Pattinson to the growth of digital data he highlighted the stellar success of the “O2 Priority Moments” campaign which as @grahamknox of Telefonica has previously tweeted - With new adds at 50K per week, #O2 #PriorityMoments has more users than #Groupon, #Foursquare and #Voucher Cloud combined. This is the power a mobile operator with around 30 million registered customers in the UK alone has.

My theme compared and contrasted the low-hype and fantastic success of M-PESA in emerging markets with the relatively mooted success of financial/mobile services in the UK with “O2 Money” just having closed in November after initially being the most successful prepaid card product in the country. All the emphasis recently seems to be on NFC-handsets and wallets like the Google Wallet just launched in US and coming here to the UK next year. but it’s interesting (according to Gartner) that there is so much hype around contactless payments and NFC when it is still 5-10 years from maturity. The quiet maturity of other services appears to be being overlooked.

Two other presenters on the day focused on historical themes. I learnt from Julian Browne, overcoming technical microphone problems to shout about the “100 Year architecture” of the web – the fascinating history of hypertext, the web and in particular the objections by Ted Nelson who proposed the alternative Xanadu paradigm - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu. The keynote speaker at the close was @IanSRobinson of neo4j who talked about the history of NoSQL and in particular graph databases.

Other speakers that I saw and enjoyed were:
Chris Perry, Joint CEO Fabric-Faster – Opportunities presented “Using consumer behaviours and patterns to drive faster delivery” which highlighted the power of Big Data and text mining for sharing marketing intelligence.

Drew Cosgrove on “Frictionless Integration” which aims to smarten up the ease with which applications will be able to use the services on offer from Telefonica. There was a great level of discussion and interest from the attendees and everyone seemed to appreciate the day away from the office and day-to-day delivery worries. Thanks to the organisers and the Mermaid Conference Centre.

 

How To: Many-To-Many Currency Conversions in Microsoft’s SQL Server Analysis Services

One of the Smarties in the our Microsoft practice, David Tuppen, has published an article on the SQLServerPro web site (what was called SQL Mag) about how to work around the limitations of the Business Intelligence Wizard in SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS).

It’s very clear and detailed. Have a read!

 

Smart421 at today’s first Amazon Web Services Financial Services event

Today I took part in a breakfast briefing event at The Mercer in Threadneedle Street in the centre of London. It’s the first of hopefully a series of events focusing on the financial services sector.

The two presenters are shown in this “rogue’s gallery” photo.

First up (pictured on the left) was AWS Technology Evangelist Dr Matt Wood (one of the contributors to the excellent  AWS blog) who gave his usual high octane-style overview of Amazon Web Services, the history, what they offer, example customers, etc.

Matt Wood

I then followed up with a presentation discussing where we are seeing traction in the market, going through some example customer deployments that we’ve delivered and support in the UK banking, telco and utility sectors, and wrapped up with some considerations to ensure confidence in the outcome of an AWS deployment.

My Prezi presentation is available here…

Despite today’s public sector strike (which we thought might dent attendance due to childcare issues etc) we had a packed house with standing room only, which was an experience I need to get used to.

Full house at The Mercer

I had some great conversations with the audience afterwards – and the wide divergence in the level of the maturity and understanding was a real eye-opener to me. When you work in the cloud arena all the time, it’s easy to assume that the market understanding is a lot more mature than it actually is…

So, overall a great event, delighted to be involved – and looking forward to the next one!

 

Windows Azure Bootcamp

Last week 4 Smarties including myself were lucky enough to attend Microsoft Tech.Days Windows Azure Bootcamp in London. Usually for days like this Microsoft estimate (and allow for) around a 50% attendance rate, however 90% of the registered attendees for this event showed up which showed how much interest in cloud computing is taking off and required some quick provisioning of additional space from the organisers (akin to provisioning additional storage space in the cloud).

The camp was presented by Steve Plank (http://plankytronixx.com/default.aspx), with the content being a mixture of lecture / demo and try for yourself. This provided the audience with an overview of the current Azure platform and enough knowledge to walk away and start creating cloud based apps capable of exercising a number of basic Azure features.

There was also a quick 10 minute presentation during break time from the recently formed London Windows Azure User Group (http://www.lwaug.net) who’s first meeting is on the 6^th December and sounds like it will be well worth regularly attending to both hear from their guest speakers and touch base with a number of other Azure developers to talk through experiences using the platform. Plus mention was given to the upcoming ‘6 Weeks of Azure’ programme (http://www.sixweeksofazure.co.uk/) beginning at the end of Jan 2012 where 6 weeks of free help will be given to UK companies wanting to have a look at the platform.

Based on the content presented on the day it is clear that a lot of thought has been put into the features within Azure and making sure that these will be easy to integrate into both existing and new developments where appropriate (and not just using Microsoft development tools or languages).

The main area that I am looking forward to diving deeper into is the Azure App Fabric, particularly the Azure Service Bus (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee732537.aspx) as this looks like it will be incredibly useful in stitching together dispersed applications and also hooking existing on-premise solutions into new cloud based offerings and also the Caching Service (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg278356.aspx) which will be really great  for both distributed and high bandwidth apps.

On the day the only part of the App Fabric that was demoed was the Access Control Service which under the covers used SAML.  Before the event I had dismissed as being just another way to validate users. However after seeing how easy this is to implement and use plus the ability to integrate with Active Directory via the use of ADFS2 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=10909)  and a number of other authentication providers such as Google, Yahoo or LiveID I can see it becoming part of most Azure developments.

One question we had been kicking around prior to the event was ‘how production ready is Azure?’ as with other cloud service providers (such as AWS) we have tended to see our customers start by using these services for test / development or disaster recovery environments rather than production.

Although not fully answered it was clear that Microsoft are looking for customers to place production as well as development systems in Azure and have also been doing their homework on the problems previously experienced by other providers architecting the underlying infrastructure accordingly to cope with this.

Microsoft are offering a 99.95% SLA for external connectivity for compute hosted services that meet their criteria (at least 2 host instances configured for a service) which is the same as AWS for EC2 instances however the  Azure terms are measured monthly rather than yearly for AWS.

Azure also contains additional features such as the recently released SQL Azure Data Sync which allows data to be synchronised between SQL Azure instances in different locations and it was hinted that resilience features like this along with a huge number of other enhancements are currently under development across the platform.

Based on what was shown and discussed during the event it looks like there are exciting times ahead in the Windows Azure space and I am looking forward to architecting, developing and supporting applications that make use of its features.

 

DroidCon UK 2011: Two Smarties, and a whole bunch of freebies…

Last year I was lucky enough to attend the DroidCon Android conference in London, impressed by what I saw, I presented my case to return again for the second year, to scout out information on Android developments.

As usual, the format of the event is a 2 day barcamp, where various representatives from all areas of the industry present a topic which they feel strongly about, ranging from anything about UI design, design patterns, right through to commercials such as marketing and business considerations when releasing an application.

The first day consisted of informal discussions on various topics, I attended those mostly aimed at the developer (wasn’t too interested in gaming or the “boring” business talks).

I could drone on about each talk and what it covered, however it’s probably best that I just highlight some of the key talks and topics I found of interest:

Implementing analytics with AspectJ

Obviously one of the main drivers of putting an application to market is generate downloads, which, if priced correctly, will create revenue. However, being able to understand what users actually do with your application could enable you to target specific features even more, and produce even more downloads, revenue, and general happiness in the development team knowing their applications are doing well.

Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to track what users are doing in your applications? Being able to see which screens, features, or even which buttons are being used most in your application? The ability to know this information would allow you to back up business decisions, and enable product managers to decide and target upon new features.

Fortunately, the Google analytics framework is able to assist us with such issues, it can be integrated into applications and you can track events where you feel necessary. Additionally, the analytics API is also cross-platform compatible, so if you have iPhone and blackberry versions of your application, you can also track statistics there too.

To read more about this, you can access the slides from the presentation here.

Innovative UI with GreenDroid

I’ve developed a few android applications in my own time, both for hobbyist curiosity, and for Smart421s’ marketing curiosity (this one is yet to be published, watch this space!), and one of the things that takes a considerable chunk of development time, is designing and implementing the UI. Quite often, the application code is incredibly simple, sometimes even less than 50 lines, but arranging the UI into something remotely usable can often take double, if not more time than the original business logic for the application did.

Fortunately for us android developers, a pioneer named Cyril Mottier has forged an API from the depths of developer frustration to help, named GreenDroid. When developing UIs, its important to make the interface responsive, smooth, fast and polished, which can be somewhat an involving task if developing manually.

GreenDroid is a library, that can be included into your applications, which you can then depend on to create clean, attractive and accessible UIs easily, without having to manually design them in XML yourself. You can read more and see examples here : https://github.com/cyrilmottier/GreenDroid#readme

I can see a great many applications, and developers benefitting from this venture, particularly smaller scaled applications that are primarily interested in delivering functionality, without imposing corporate branding and color schemes across their application, however I wouldn’t be surprised if Cyril hasn’t already taken that into account and exposed some options for modifying color schemes and anything else to “brand” the UI.

I did try this on one of my applications that’s in development at the moment, it was incredibly easy to set up and use, if you’d like to see what this library can offer, checkout an application on the market called GDCatalog, Cyril released this as a showcase for the GreenDroid API.

Test Driving android with Robolectric

TDD is a development principle that most developers should consider, or at least be aware of. This is a practice that Smart421 actively pursue, so I was keen to see how this can be applied in the Android world.

Android applications are written in Java, however they don’t run on the standard JVM, but a mobile specific Dalvik VM, which can make standard unit testing somewhat frustrating, as the application code has to be built, the emulator started, application deployed and then started, that’s all before you can run a measly JUnit test. Fortunately for us developers, Robolectric saves the day.

Robolectric allows us to write simple JUnit test cases, against android components, which can be executed on the JVM, enabling a much faster TDD cycle. Robolectric works by intercepting android framework calls, and re-writing the method bodies, essentially allowing us to run a mocked android platform on the JVM for testing purposes.

Ultimately, Robolectric enables us to black box test, fastly, without need for mocking frameworks. I’m using Robolectric in two of my android applications and it has proven to be an easy to use API, and has helped me catch several potential issues, thus serving its intended purpose.

Other keynotes

I attended around 10 discussions over the 2 day period, here are some other talks that I found of interest.

Code reuse

Often, development teams want to release a trial, and a full (and often paid for) version of their application. Ultimately they would want to use the same code base for both versions of the application (you’d be crazy not to). There was a talk from the company TouchType on how they have implemented a build framework to disable or remove certain features from a build.

Mark Murphy’s predictions sure to go wrong

Whilst no one can predict the future precisely, Mark Murphy is quite the celebrity in the android world, so he’d be a reliable source to give us a steer in what may pan out in the future for the little green robot. Marks’ talk covered some of the things we may encounter, such as e-readers merging with tablets (which we’re already starting to see now, with the Kindle Fire), Amazon to be the #2 tablet maker (which we may also see now the budget Kindle Fire is on the way) and the inevitable introduction of ever more cross-platform technologies, hoping to obtain 100% cross-platform compatible apps, such as PhoneGap from Adobe, and pure HTML5. There will always be subtle differences in platforms and hardware, so these may prove slightly less forthcoming than hoped.

Hacking the android market for private betas

Currently, the android market doesn’t support betas, or private listings. However the devs over at LightBox have devised a way of “bending” the rules to cater for this.

Before they released their LightBox camera application, they ran a private beta on the android market, by publishing the app under an undisclosed name, locking all features, and requiring an authentication key to unlock the application. This enabled a select number of users to easily access the application, trial it, and provide feedback, without releasing the application to the wider market, for often preempted flaming from the general android community because it doesn’t play Super Mario, or because it’s not free.

I don’t know how legally correct, or even ethically correct this usage of the market is, but I found it an interesting topic of discussion.

Geeksphone

A startup from a young Spanish entrepreneur, to develop and market an android device, created by developers, for developers. The Geeksphone project is also intended to be community driven, whereby the users have a voice and direction in the development of future productions. Geeksphone do provide one unique feature, that I found rather appealing, that users are free to develop and create their own Android ROMs, submit these to Geeksphone where they will run their own in-house tests on it, and give it a seal of approval. Users can then use the ROM without voiding their warranty, and it is fully supported by Geeksphone from then on, quite an appealing promotion to users who intend to do slightly more than checking emails, and using Facebook on their devices.

To summarise, the conference was very informative and provided a wealth of information on all things happening in the android world. I’d certainly like to attend again next year, it would also be fantastic if we could muster up some Smart421 presence on site too….

All DroidCon seminars were recorded on video, and should be freely available here : http://skillsmatter.com/event/os-mobile-server/droidcon-2011

 

Elastic Load Balancing on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

We’ve wanted to be able to use ELBs inside VPC deployments for a long time – via our AWS partnership relationship we put this on our “AWS Christmas wish list” quite a while ago, and Santa has delivered early

All the extra AWS goodies are gradually making their way into VPC, and the direction of travel /trajectory is great, and more importantly for giving our customers confidence it is consistent over time – which confirms our view (as mentioned before) that VPC will become the default model for most/all deployments over time.