Amazon Web Services is pushing out one update/innovation/product after another, last year more than 100 announcements were made. That is two a week! Some announcements are pretty small, while others are short of groundbreaking.
In the last few weeks, two announcements were made that caught my eye and showed (in my opinion) that these guys are still on another planet. While the competition is struggling to provide the basic infrastructure services, AWS is providing some very advanced stuff.
First of all: OpsWorks is really cool. If you've read some of my previous blogs, then you'll know that I am skeptical about the benefits of 3rd party cloud management tools. Not because I feel we don't need such tools, but because the standard tools (of in this case AWS) are very powerful by themselves.
With the launch of OpsWorks, basically the powerful Chef framework embedded in the AWS Console, this has become even more true. Until recently, the AWS console has focused on managing the infrastructure, with OpsWorks they make a move into managing the server configuration as well.
Sure, Opsworks is still limited and does not support too many dfferent platforms. But it clearly shows the direction AWS is taking and this is light years ahead of the competition. Impressive.
The other thing that I found noticeable is smaller but still as significant The introduction of the CloudHSM. A HSM (hardware security module) is not a commodity in a typical application architecture, but in security sensitive solutions this is where the confidential stuff happens/resides. The HSM protects this by means of software but also hardware. For instance, it typically comes with tamper resistant housing, that deletes all sensitive stuff the minute someone starts fiddling with the housing.
What is the number one reason cited for NOT moving to the cloud? Indeed, that's security. And by providing a managed HSM service the options in this regard are much improved.
Interesting times indeed.
