“Disaster Recovery in the cloud” at Amazon Web Services Enterprise event

On Tuesday I presented on the topic of “Disaster Recovery in the cloud” at this year’s big Amazon Web Services (AWS) Enterprise event near Westminster in London – I had the privilege of sharing the speaking platform with a number of AWS speakers including Amazon.com CTO Dr Werner Vogels who delivered the opening keynote. Smart421 were sponsors of the event and so we had a stand in the Partner Expo and some colleagues in attendance.

In front of a full house I went through one of our AWS case studies relating to the design and implementation of a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for Haven Power and walked though a generic DR architecture on AWS, using it to bring out various architectural considerations such as resilience, cost and complexity design tradeoffs, security features and patterns, support for heterogeneous platforms, support for emergency virtual desktops for remote users, monitoring and control considerations etc.

I also covered some material on the various data replication strategies that can be employed to meet different recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) for different classes of data and applications. Get in touch if you’d like a copy of the presentation.

I took what felt like a bit of a risk by throwing in some images into the presentation to keep it a bit light hearted, and seemed to get away with it . There was a definite sheep theme to the slides which was not intentional – just the way it worked out. A key takeaway for my audience was that Dolly the sheep was stuffed and is now in the National Museum of Scotland…

Overall it was a great event, very well organised (including the AV team) and well attended, with around 300+ attendees or so from enterprise customers. AWS events get bigger every year – last year there was one big event in London, whereas this year it was split across two days, with a developer/startups focus on day one and enterprise focus on day two. I had some excellent conversations with various customers and innovative startups, and it was also great to catch up with my AWS colleagues – I must confess to having enjoyed the benefits of using the speaker’s room. Highlight of the day for me was when I tenuously weaved a picture of Clive Sinclair with a ZX81 into my slide deck and used it as a “grey hair test” of my audience to see who knew who it was – and the fact that one person (admittedly not an IT person) thought it might be Babbage…

 

New AWS Functionality released today – VPC & IAM & Direct Connect

Those boys in Seattle have been busy – we’ve known about these new releases for some time now via our AWS partnership but have had to keep schtum, so it’s nice now that they are out in the public domain to talk about a bit more. Each of these items in the AWS news release would be good enough for a news release on their own for most organisations…

For us, the most immediately exciting part is that their virtual private cloud (VPC) offering is now available in multiple AZs in a region, a single VPC can span multiple AZs, and a single AWS account can have more than one VPC. In our view, these remove the last major barriers to serious production use by enterprises – as we typically want to engineer a virtual private cloud that spans AZs in the same region for resilience reasons.

The other really exciting thing about the VPC news is that Smart421 are mentioned in the press release . We use VPC for pretty much everything we do for customers now – there’s no good reason why not, the financial model is not really affected and you get much more control. One of those customers is Haven Power, where VPC is one of the building blocks of the solution to deliver a really innovative business continuity planning (BCP) solution.

The Identity and Access Management functional enhancements are very welcome also – this is an area that has matured quite fast but from a relatively low base. Managing multiple customer and internal deployments and the accounts and permissions that go with them is challenging, and integration with Active Directory etc looks like it will be very useful.

Finally, Direct Connect is something we’ve been discussing with AWS in the UK for a while – again, coming back to my theme about making IaaS a credible solution for enterprise customers (the market Smart421 principally serve) – enterprise customers expect to have more private, more controlled networks between their data centres and the use of VPNs usually concerns the internal security guys, so this is a necessary piece of the enterprise deployment architecture jigsaw. It’s only available in US East as the moment but there’s a commitment to a London deployment, so this is something I’d expect our customers to want to exploit – especially at the price point which seems a bargain to me, e.g. a 1Gbps port used full time for a month is about $216. Peanuts – so it’d be rude not to use it.

Read the AWS blog entry for more details, and the related Smart421 news item is here.