This is the third set of certifications Amazon has recently announced coming on top of VPC ISO 27001 certification and SAS 70 Type II certification.

The accreditation covers EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service), VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), and includes Amazon’s underlying infrastructure.

AWS’ accreditation covers FISMA’s low and moderate levels. This level of accreditation requires a set of security configurations and controls that includes documenting the management, operational and technical processes used in securing physical and virtual infrastructure, and a requirement for third-party audits.

Other vendors who recently announced FISMA certification recently where Google with Google Apps for Government and Microsoft with the Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite among cloud services (although there was a spat between Microsoft and Google regarding these claims).

Expect to see further certifications as these are a pre-requisite of expansion into lucrative government and private sector contracts as vendors feels more comfortable choosing Cloud resources as commoditisation marches on.

To get started, open the Amazon S3 Management Console, and follow these steps:

1) Right-click on your Amazon S3 bucket and open the Properties pane

2) Configure your root and error documents in the Website tab

3) Click Save

Amazon provide more information on hosting a static website on Amazon S3 here.

This is part of a trend that Amazon obviously want to encourage. They recently started an add placement from JumpBox on their free Web Services developers page to offer one click WordPress deployments, amongst other JumpBox offerings.

This is further exacerbated in the cloud storage space as their is no ubiquitous API (see our prior post on Amazon S3 becoming a de facto standard interface).

To this end we are starting to see services an applications that themselves are offering interesting aggregations of access to data clouds. We look at a few of these below:

GoodReader, Office2 HD , QuickOffice , Documents to Go, iSMEStorage, iWork:

The iPad,  iPhone, Android have some interesting applications which function on top of existing data clouds. All the aforementioned application work in this way, either letting you view the files (in the case of GoodReader) or letting you view and edit the files (in the case of Office2, QuickOffice, Documents to Go, iWork, and iSMEStorage). The premise is that if you have data stored in an existing cloud then you can load and view or edit it in this tools and store it locally.

Tools such as iWork (which encompasses iPages, iNumbers, and iKeynote) only work with MobileMe or the WebDav standard, although the iSMEStorage App gets around this by enabling you to use iWork as an editor for files accessed through it’s cloud gateway , that can be stored on any number of clouds, using WebDav, even if the underlying cloud does not support WebDav.

In fact some companies are making data access a feature in pricing, for example,  charging extra for increased connectivity.

Gladinet.com and SMEStorage.com :

Both Gladinet and SMEStorage are unique amongst the current Cloud vendors in that they enable aggregated access to multiple file clouds. They essentially enable you to access cloud files from multiple different providers from a single file system.

Gladinet is inherently a windows only solution with many different offerings whereas SMEStorage also has windows software but also has cloud drives for Linux, Mac and also mobile clients for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Gladinet is  a client side service whereas SMEStorage is a server-based service using it’s Cloud Gateway Appliance ,which is also available as a virtual appliance for VMWAre, XEN etc.

Both offering support a dizzying array of Cloud, such as, Amazon S3, Windows Azure Blob Storage, Google Storage, Google Docs, RackSpace Cloud Files etc, plus many more.

Such solutions don’t just aggregate cloud services but bring the cloud into the desktop and onto the Mobile / Tablet, making the use of cloud data much more transparent.

As data become more outsourced (to the cloud) for all types of different applications and services I expect we will see more such innovative solutions, and applications that give access to aggregated cloud data, and extend the services and tools that are provided by the native data provider.

As befits a dominant player the interface that Amazon exposes for Amazon S3 is becoming so widely used that it almost becoming a standard with regards to how to connect into Cloud Storage. Many new or existing players in this space already support the interface as an entry point into their Storage infrastructure. For example Google Storage supports the S3 interface, as does the private cloud vendor Eucalyptus with its Walrus offering. Also the on-premise cloud appliance vendor Mezeo recently announced support for accessing their cloud using Amazon S3, as did TierraCloud. There are other Open Source implementations as well such as ParkPlace which is an Amazon S3 clone and bittorrent service that is written in ruby.

Additional to this, the multi-cloud vendor, SMEStorage has implemented an S3 entry point into it’s gateway so that you can use it with normal clouds even where they do not natively support Amazon S3, such as RackSpace, Google Docs, DropBox etc.

So as far as S3 goes it seems you can pretty much access a multitude of  storage back-end’s using this API, which is not surprising as vendors want to make it easy for you to move from S3 to their proposition or they want their proposition to work with existing toolsets and program code. So is it good for cloud in general ? I guess the answer to that is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

‘Yes’ from the point of view that standardisation can be a good thing for customers as it gives stability and promotes interoperability. ‘No’ from the point of view that standardisation can easily stifle innovation. I’m happy to say that this is not what is occurring in the cloud storage space as the work around OpenStack and Swift demonstrates.

I think right now, S3 is as close as you will get to a de facto standard for cloud storage API interactions. It probably suits Amazon that this is the case, and it certainly suits consumers / developers. Time will tell how quickly this situations lasts.

“As a social gaming online casino, we knew from the beginning that scalability was critical to our success,” says Hussein Chahine, Yazino’s Founder and CEO. “With XAP, we have the flexibility to meet constantly changing business volumes, with linear, real-time dynamic scalability using a cloud-data center hybrid model.”

Yazino fuses social interaction and multiplayer functionality, building a bridge between traditional online gambling and social gaming sites. Yazino has already registered more than 500,000 players, with more than 10,000 new players joining daily.

XAP provides a unique enterprise-grade, end-to-end application scalability platform, which can handle extremely large volumes, be scaled out (or in) in real-time, and is governed by preset business SLAs, and which is ultra-fast due to the whole platform running in memory. A strategic solution enhancing IT efficiency and agility, it guarantees performance under peak demand while improving hardware utilization by up to 500%. It allows developers to build, deploy, and operate their infrastructures in any environment without a single code change.

“Yazino benefits from our long experience with cloud development,” says Adi Paz, GigaSpaces Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. “With XAP as the underlying infrastructure, our clients like Yazino can focus on the business logic and speed time to market without concern for where the application will actually run.”

By using XAP, Yazino now has a massively multiplayer/multi-game online casino platform optimized for extremely high throughput, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent, interactive players, while giving each player excellent response time.

“GigaSpaces technology helped us build a hybrid infrastructure, where we can leverage the best of the cloud’s economies of scale while ensuring our data center can manage all of the regulatory-related processing,” continued Hussein. “This provides Yazino a valuable competitive edge as we use more costly hosting only for what is required by regulation, while other services sit entirely on the cloud.”

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a new generation of virtualized application platforms. Our flagship product, eXtreme Application Platform (XAP), delivers end-to-end scalability across the entire stack, from the data all the way to the application. XAP is the only product that provides a complete in-memory solution on a single platform, enabling high-speed processing of extreme transactional loads, while scaling to meet any requirement – dynamically and linearly. XAP was designed from the ground up to support any cloud environment – private, public, or hybrid – and offers a pain-free, evolutionary path from today’s data center to the technologies of tomorrow.

More than 350 organizations worldwide are leveraging XAP to enhance IT efficiency and performance. Among our customers are Fortune Global 500 companies, including top financial services enterprises, telecom carriers, online gaming providers, and e-commerce companies, such as Dow Jones, NYSE, Société Générale, Virgin Mobile, and Sears.

About Yazino
Yazino, the world’s first social casino (www.yazino.com) was conceived by three friends who wanted to reinvent the social gaming and online casino worlds by connecting the two together. Yazino has built a bridge between traditional online gambling and social gaming sites, creating a whole new hybrid category. The entire brand and in-game experience is entertaining and social to its core. Yazino offers a uniquely fun and competitive environment to connect the world around casino games, such as Blackjack, Roulette, Texas Hold’em and Slots.  Constantly refreshed multiplayer content, tournaments and the engaging challenge of levels and achievements allow Yazino to define the next generation of online gambling.

Yazino, a wholly owned subsidiary of Yazino Group AG (Switzerland), was founded by Hussein Chahine, Bijan Khezri and Gojko Adzic in 2008.

As stated on WikiPedia:

SO/IEC 27001 requires that management:

Systematically examine the organization’s information security risks, taking account of the threats, vulnerabilities and impacts;

Design and implement a coherent and comprehensive suite of information security controls and/or other forms of risk treatment (such as risk avoidance or risk transfer) to address those risks that are deemed unacceptable; and

Adopt an overarching management process to ensure that the information security controls continue to meet the organization’s information security needs on an ongoing basis.

“Amazon Web Services is continuing its commitment to provide further assurance of AWS security controls and practices through third-party audits and certifications such as SAS 70 Type II and ISO 27001,” said Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services.

“Via ISO 27001 and other certifications, we continue to provide our customers with confidence that our security controls and practices follow internationally-recognized security standards.”

You can learn more about Amazon and it’s compliance and security provisions here.

Amazon have introduced a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3.

It provides a cost-effective solution for distributing or sharing content that is durably stored elsewhere, or for storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced. The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage does, and thus is even more cost effective.

Both storage options are designed to be highly available, and both are backed by Amazon S3′s Service Level Agreement.

Once customer data is stored using either Amazon S3′s standard or reduced redundancy storage options, Amazon S3 maintains durability by quickly detecting failed, corrupted, or unresponsive devices and restoring redundancy by re-replicating the data. Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, while RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.

Pricing for Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage starts at only $0.10 per gigabyte per month and decreases as you store more data.

From a programming viewpoint to enable your storage to take advantage of RRS  you need to set the storage class of an object you upload to RRS. To enable this you set x-amz-storage-class to REDUCED_REDUNDANCY in a PUT request.

The new Singapore Region launches with multiple availability zones and currently supports 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 Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon CloudFront. Singapore Region pricing is available on the detail page of each service, at aws.amazon.com/products.

There are two main additions in this release. The First is is integration with Apache Hadoop in which Hadoop jobs can now be submitted to Grid Engine, as if they were any other computation job. The Grid Engine also understand Hadoop’s global file systems which means that the Grid Engine is able to send work to the correct part of the cluster (data affinity).

The second is dynamic resource reallocation which also includes the ability to use on-demand resources from Amazon EC2. Grid Engine also is now able to manage resources across logical clusters which can be either in Cloud or off Cloud. This means that Grid engine can now be configured to “cloud burst” dependent on load which is a great feature. Integration is specifically set up with EC2 and enables scale down as well as scale up.

This release of Grid Engine also implements a usage accounting and billing feature called ARCo, making it truly SaaS ready as it is able to cost and bill jobs.

Impressive and useful stuff, and if you are interested in finding out more you can do so here.

GigaSpaces have a number of hybrid deployments in which their application stack is hosted in the cloud and the data or services are hosted on premise which have had some notable successes.

The GigaSpaces product provides a strong Cloud middleware stack which encompasses Logic, data, services and messages in memory underpinned by a real-time Service Level Agreement enforcement which functions at the application level enabling the stack to scale up and out in real time based on SLA’s set by the business. As everything is held in memory, it is faster than alternative ways of trying to build enterprise scale applications in the cloud, and it has sophisticated sync’ services that enable async (or sync) of data to a DB or persistent store.