Amazon Extends Cloud Reach With Hardware

With just a couple of years Internet of Things has found a solid footing in the technology industry due to eager adoption by the consumers. Internet of Things was essentially an experimental initiative by the industry to get people interested in smart products apart from the Smartphone and computing devices. Amazon Web Services is an Amazon core cloud based wing which caters to the needs of the industry is storing and accessing data from anywhere at given point of time.

With the popularity and significant reach covered by the Internet of things devices in the recent past Amazon very well understand that in future the consumer’s computing will not be happening just in its data centers. We have more hundreds of millions of Internet of Things devices up and running around the world which collects user’s data and analyze on every given second.

Given this though Amazon has brought a suitable answer in the form a hardware named Snowball Edge which is portable and it will allow users not just store their data locally but also computes it run some tasks as per their need. A year Amazon brought Snowball which simply a storage only hardware but Edge happens to be an offshoot of the Snowball with enhanced capability.

What Snowball Edge brings to the table? 

The difference between the earlier hardware Snowball and current offering Softball Edge is very simple. Snowball was designed to help users to store data and send it over to the AWS data center for further uploading and analyzing while Edge will remain at the consumer’s establishment and it will like a local computing device as well as storage node.

Secondly Amazon has revealed a new hardware which has been made in close collaboration with Intel. This device is named AWS Greengrass powered by Intel chips and it runs on a unique software programming using Amazon’s Lambda tool.

More storage hardware will usher AWS growth & revenue

With the launch of this hardware it has been well noted that Amazon is looking forward to increase the flow of data as well as capability of the standalone device to the next level. In order to get more data and increase the flow of work it is necessary to get the data to the AWS data centers for valuable business insights which can help companies in improving their products and services. To this effect Amazon has brought a number of data migration tool which consists of reinvent—a big-rig truck for bringing data back to the AWS data center and a Sonwmobile—a highly shipping container which possess the ability to deliver 100 petabytes of data to the data centers.

It might appear absurd to use such devices and vehicles to deliver data from the source to the data center but it should be understood that moving such amount of data over any kind of network will require a lot of time (calculated in months).

Is iCloud going to use Windows Azure!?

In recent weeks, Mary-Jo Foley, a journalist specializing in Windows for ZDNet, has received several indications that Apple would use Windows Azure, the platform-as-service Microsoft. She was dismissed out of hand these rumors, but the assumption seems to be confirmed now iCloud was presented.

Sending an image IMessage causes authentication to servers Windows Azure. The study of communications network connected to IOS devices icloud indeed shows contacts with Windows Azure servers and Amazon AWS in addition to Apple's servers, as shown, for example Apple Infinite. GigaOM has sought advice from three experts from the cloud: if two do not think that such communications be sufficient evidence, the third draws an explanation of interest.

Apple already has data centers, used especially for MobileMe and updates of software. They are however not sufficient to properly distribute the content around the world: Apple relies on a distribution network (CDN), provided in particular by Akamai and Limelight. The contents are duplicated on thousands of servers around the globe to accelerate downloads. So according to this third expert, Apple would use a similar strategy to icloud: the data center of Maiden would host the master files, but copies are placed on servers Windows Azure (and Amazon AWS) as a cache.

In light of new observations of network traffic on an iPhone with iOS 5, Infinite Apple has another theory: Apple's servers would not be used to store files, but to manage the links between different files, scattered servers, Windows Azure and Amazon AWS, as close to their users.

In any case in detail, the use of external services for icloud is not surprising. While the data center of Maiden is the ninth largest in the world, but Microsoft up three data centers in the top 10: the Redmond Company has one of the largest accommodation capacity in the world, with a system, Windows Azure that has nothing to prove. Apple is pragmatic on the matter: she knows the world of data center is not his strength, and does in fact not a single Mac in the Maiden. Windows Azure is also a product that Steve Jobs knows well: his other company, Pixar, had worked in the cloud version of its rendering engine, system demonstration in the Microsoft cloud.