Amazon Cloud on Ulitzer

In the early 19^th century, the famous advice “Go West, Young Man” was given to U.S. Easterners eager to explore the riches and opportunities of an expanding still-wild West in America. Now, it seems “Go East, All Who Follow the Cloud” should be the guiding advice.

I saw a recent news story that said Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform, will expand into the Asia Pacific region during the first half of 2010 – beginning with a zone in Singapore, to be followed by others around the region in the second half of the year. Software developers and businesses storing data and using cloud-based apps will be able to access Amazon’s infrastructure services from those zones.

Asia Pacific customers will be able to access the following Amazon Services:

-Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

- Amazon SimpleDB

-Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

-Amazon Elastic MapReduce

- Amazon CloudFront

In the story, I also noticed that Amazon also put out a new software development kit for .NET and support for private content in Amazon CloudFront – the company’s content delivery service. This is the kind of support that enables, say, a website that sells digital products, to restrict downloadable merchandise to paying customers.

I like to hear about the development of support services that make companies feel more secure about doing business on the cloud. We have enough examples of security breaches, outages and other cloud snags that make consumers and businesses jittery. And, of course, I think supplemental services for website owners, such as website transaction monitoring and incidence notifications, go a long way to increasing a sense of security.