Amazon Web Services releases two pretty cool things.

Amazon Web Services releases two pretty cool things.

Cirrhus9 has been using and promoting Amazon Web Services for well over 2 years now. We're strategic partners with them and, when the business solution warrants it, we promote them as our environment of choice due to the excellent ability to scale out quickly and the virtually unlimited resources available to us.

Just about one year ago, AWS opened their European region, EU-WEST-1. This allowed Cirrhus9 to be able to work in the European arena, keeping customers servers and data in the EU. Something that a lot of customers outside of the U.S. find very appealing. Well, yesterday Amazon announced the availability of a new Cloud region on the west coast. US-WEST-1.

I'm really excited about this because we can now offer Replication and DR solutions in AWS regions that are very separate from each other. Not to mention the fact that now, customers on the west coast can have their VPC's and VPS's running in territory much closer to them. (It makes people feel warm and fuzzy knowing that any perceived latency issues will no longer be a concern.)

The reasoning behind creating an in-house DC or even setting up a new colo DC just goes out the window entirely now. How can any company falling into the SMB / SME sector justify spending the time, effort and expense any longer? Cirrhus9 can set them up and integrate any legacy IT for a fraction of the cost. I'm really loving this!

The second announcement from AWS yesterday is the ability to boot instances from EBS volumes now. OK, this is really cool on so many levels!

I'm not going to get into the details here, because I want to keep your attention for the remainder of this blog post but, the first thing that comes to my mind is now Cirrhus9 has even greater control over our QMI's™ (Qualified Machine Images) and the change control process. The QMI's can now be setup on an EBS root volume and client servers can be launched as many times as needed without having to touch the configuration.

The second thing that strikes me here is that now DEV or TEST servers can be stopped and started as needed, all the while retaining the work done on / to them since the last time it was running. Even furthering the meaning of On-Demand utility computing, this really adds greater cost controls to the environment. We can shut these instances down overnight or over the weekend for our clients and bring them back up very quickly when they're ready to start working again.

The possibilities of these two new features is really amazing and you can bet that Cirrhus9 will be including this new functionality into all of our SMB / SME business solutions. If you're interested in learning more about these, and Cirrhus9's other products and offerings, please reach out to us. We are always happy to answer any questions you may have.

Mike