The cloud services leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been challenged by the big daddy Google by announcing new storage partnerships with a number of companies for data backup (Veritas Technologies Corp./Symantec Corp.), on-premises appliances for data de-duplication (NetApp), encryption and compression (Iron Mountain Inc.), and offline disk storage and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions (Geminare Inc.). Google offers an Online Cloud Import service that can be used to migrate petabyte-scale data from other online storage services to Google Cloud Storage, the company said in a white paper about Nearline Storage.Nearline will enable users to easily back up and store limitless amounts of data at a very low cost and access it at any time in a matter of seconds, which has been positioned against the Amazon Glacier storage service.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/03/16/google-nearline-storage-challenges-aws.aspx

Big data, the huge amount of structured and unstructured information will slow down most traditional approaches to data management. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services are contributing powerful, profitable approaches to analyze big data. Analytics can make organizations "self-healing" or "self-optimizing."The AWS services directory has a mixture of SQL and NoSQL database technology. Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service has a single-digit millisecond latency that makes it a fine fit for big data project where fast line with the data is a must.  The first difficulty need to think in big data analytics is data amalgamation. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a relational database that can sort in the AWS cloud. Amazon Redshift  (Oracle), which is a petabyte-scale database intended for big data analytics and data warehousing. Finally, Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a Hadoop file system structure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud decrease queries. Read more at: 

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/tip/Whats-what-in-AWS-big-data-analytics?asrc=EM_ERU_30984098&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=ERU&utm_campaign=20140630_ERU%20Transmission%20for%2006/30/2014%20(UserUniverse:%20932694)_myka-reports@techtarget.com&src=5265609

Is our privacy at risk?- This is the most discussed question in today's world of big data where companies like Google is able to capture data from homes and offices as well as video footage for storage anywhere in cloud, provided by Amazon Web Services. According to Danielle Hughes of Divine Capital, computers are learning to interact with one another and this is raising concerns. Though, it is true that people are living in the post-privacy world today as younger ones have no issues in sharing their personal information in social media. But, Hughes thinks, this is the beginning and in the future machines will start to teach other machines and tell back the information analytically to big companies. She also concludes that it will not lack investments in future, as for example IBM is already projecting $20 billion in revenue from big data in 2015. Read more at:http://analytics.theiegroup.com/article/53ac20613723a8031500002b/Our-Connected-World-Big-Data-Big-Profits-And-No-Privacy

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There exists price war among major cloud providers. Amazon Web Services announced to lower the prices of a number of its cloud services, soon after Google cut down its prices. According to the vice president of Amazon Web Services, cost slashing is aggressive in nature. Slashing prices is a regular process. Whenever it is possible to reduce costs, they lower the prices for the customers.As soon as Google announced to reduce its  Google Compute Engine (GCE) by 32 percent, Google Storage  by 68 percent Amazon Web Services decided to cut its price of AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3) by 51 percent, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) by 30 percent to 40 percent, AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS) by 28 percent, ElastiCache service  by 34 percent on average.The repeated cloud price cuts make it hard  to run in-house operations, which would create both hardware costs and preservation costs costly. Read more at:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247216/Price_war_Amazon_cuts_cloud_costs_to_counter_Google

Recently Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the news for reducing its cloud services prices by up to forty percent and turning into a strong competitor overnight against Google and Microsoft offering similar services. The cost reduction has resulted in an intensive price war where the price has touched a rock bottom level.

The price reduction is in line with reducing waste at every opportunity as mastered by Andy Jassy, senior VP of AWS. The price reduction policy has made public cloud space very much competitive, but the other side of the coin is that the place has become jam packed too.

So, how can AWS afford to cut its prices and offer a stiff competition? Brett Winterford and Steven Kiernan from CRN write about them here: http://www.crn.com.au/News/382683,four-secrets-of-awss-low-prices.aspx .

Economic uncertainty makes dynamic resource model of the cloud a tempting option for start-ups. With the elasticity of cloud computing, no capital goes unused and organizations don't have to guess how much capacity they require. AWS is attractive to small businesses because it is inexpensive to deploy and allows companies to pay only for the resources they use. Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels said that “Cost of failure in the cloud world is close to zero". Application and deployment speed, in addition to ease of use, are key benefits of the cloud for enterprises. For large organizations, hardware savings also can be significant.Redistributing capacity to use capital in the most efficient way is another main reason to implement AWS.

To read more, visit

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2240182220/Startups-omit-in-house-IT-with-Amazon-Web-Services

The industry-wide cloud services pricing curve have inclined downwards with respect to time. Courtesy to the big players like Amazon, Google & Microsoft, price cut is a routine phenomenon in this industry. Amazon Web Services is well known for its belief in the phrase “change is the only constant”. AWS has made frequent changes to its cloud service in recent years, from price cuts to tighter integration with private data centres, to accommodate the enterprise market and branch out beyond its original clientele of developers and start-ups. They had reduced their price 42 times over the past 8 years! At the same time, with huge amount of data available today, a lot of hidden, unearthed insights can be found for each and every industry. AWS Kinesis is an amazing platform to perform various operations on big data. There are also other third party tools to help you explore your data. Matt Wood, General Manager for data science, Amazon Web Services, said “One of the biggest trends is the augmentation -- not the replacement, but the augmentation -- of traditional business intelligence reporting with more real-time services. … Being able to use the two together is very empowering”.

In a recent conversation, Matt Wood, General Manager, AWS, spoke about cloud pricing, big data trends etc. To read, visit the following link:

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2240217081/AWS-chief-data-scientist-talks-cloud-pricing-big-data-trends

AWS has been authorized to operate under FedRAMP(U.S. government-wide general security standard) since May of 2013. Under FedRAMP, AWS has already made contracts with U.S. Military, Air-force & Navy. With the recent authorization from United States Defence Department’s cloud security standards, AWS can work with all agencies within the U.S Defence Department from now on. It’s like a new feather added to the AWS hat! Teresa Carlson, AWS’s vice president for the public sector, said the new certification could mean more than just new Defence Department business. This would let AWS work with more defence agencies to host several sensitive projects.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/amazon-web-services-gets-defense-security-authorization/2014/03/28/7959ad8a-b500-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html

For many enterprises, the most recognizable model of cloud computing is the public cloud model, which provides ultimate scalability, flexibility, location independent access and is of course cost effective. But workload evaluation is important before an organization moves to the public cloud. There can be situations wherepublic cloud such as AWS costs may far exceed on-premise infrastructure costs. According to research firm Gartner, the evaluation every organization must undergo before moving into a public cloud consists of taking into account few major things. These are: number of machines an organization will run, number of hours per day or per week they'll run and the amount of storage these machines will generate. The evaluation should also include the licenses that need to be paid for on a recurring basis; how many times and how often snapshots occur; the rate of change in the data; and how much new data they are going to generate. Mike Ryan, consultant, Epitech, said that “You're paying for the elasticity of Amazon, and if you're not using that, it makes sense to bring things into your own data centre”. The scaling flexibility of public cloud is great during the growth phase, but which solution is the best from an enterprise long term perspective?

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer, SearchAWS, wrote about this aspect on her recent article. To know more, visit the following link:

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2240219066/Enterprises-hit-tipping-point-in-AWS-cloud-vs-private-cloud-costs

Kinesis is a service related to real-time processing of streaming data. It buffers data into a storage system with checkpoints to absorb the data into the Redshift cloud data warehouse. Users can store and process large datasets each hour from various sources like financial transactions, social media feeds, location-tracked events etc. With Kinesis, business customers can write applications, generate alerts, and make other decisions virtually apart from retrieving the stored data back instantly. According to Amazon, Kinesis can support applications and data streams of any size while replicating across multiple availability zones. Kinesis has been positioned as an answer to big data, with a “pay-as-you-go” pricing.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/kinesis-amazon-web-servicess-answer-to-big-data-7000023223/

During 2013 December, Amazon launched Kinesis. It is a service for real-time processing of streaming data. Kinesis is designed to capture small records, which in turn forms huge amount of backend data. Amazon wanted to be able to capture all of that data, aggregate it, and put it into its AWS cloud storage service (S3), so that they could look at it at a later stage. Waite, General Manager of Data Services, AWS, said “This enables us to scale the metering service to new limits and give alerts in real time”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/why-amazon-created-aws-kinesis-its-live-data-processing-service/

According to a recent research report “Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet” by Greenpeace, most of the enterprise cloud service providers are powering their services with renewable energy sources. However, the cloud giant AWS received lowest grades on energy transparency, renewable energy commitments, energy efficiency initiatives, deployment and advocacy in the report. AWS, which has more than 50 % of market share over the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in North America and Europe, seems to be lagging behind other major cloud providers in terms of its use of green energy sources to power its data centres. According to the report, AWS “remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder.”

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2014/04/14/aws-increasingly-isolated-as-least-green-cloud/

A recent report by Rightscale revealed details about pricing changes by IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) vendors.Cloud Service Providers AWS, Rackspace, Google and Microsoft's Azure cut prices for computing services, storage solutions and networking 25 times in 2013, up from 22 times in 2012. According to Rightscale, cloud infrastructure prices continue to fall, especially for computing services and storage solutions. AWS leads the pack in price cuts and Microsoft's Azure is reacting most to these price cuts made by AWS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/infrastructure-as-a-service-price-cuts-accelerate-7000027581/

During 2006, Amazon Web Services started operations with 24 separate divisions. Today it has 654 operating units! Such breakthrough growth comes with bigger issues to deal, bigger problems to face. But Amazon had all the answers to grow beyond imagination. Today, Amazon is looking beyond running processor intensive applications in the cloud. The focus is now on the desktop.  In March it unveiled “AmazonWorkSpace”, a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud. It had been running “WorkSpace” as a Beta version with some customers since November last year. It can run in such a way that an employee or a customer can log in and out of a system and use it exactly as if it was one of the company's own systems without realizing that it is running in the Amazon cloud. From an organization’s point of view, outsourcing of their day-to-day system uptime issues to a third party is going to be a big advantage.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-eyes-the-desktop-next-7000027692/

Amazon Simple Email Service is a cost effective outbound email sending service built on the reliable and scalable infrastructure that Amazon.com has developed to serve its own customer base. With Amazon SES, it is possible to send transactional emails, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content. Amazon offers “pay as you go” plan flexibility. Along with high deliverability, Amazon SES provides easy, real-time access to statistics and built-in notifications for bounces and complaints to help fine-tuning email-sending strategy. Each AWS account is independent in its sending procedure and can be treated as a separate entity. SES is structured around this idea. But there can be situations compelling to send contents from multiple AWS accounts.

Sam Minter, Expert, AWS, speaks about how to send contents successfully with SES through multiple AWS accounts. To read more, visit:

https://sesblog.amazon.com/post/Tx1KQ7HH36OTFW7/Can-I-use-multiple-AWS-Accounts-with-SES

It is evident that Amazon Web Services trades at a discount relative to other cloud companies despite higher sales growth.Should infrastructure as a service (IaaS) players like AWS always opt for discounting option as like application-based peers?That argument was floated by Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein, who raised his price target for Amazon shares based on a few moving parts.

To read more, visit Larry Dignan‘s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-whats-it-worth-7000027433/

Amazon web services is designing tools to help users track cloud usage & spending pattern in a much easier way. Cloud tracking ability is the new front in the feature competition among cloud services. In addition to the just-launched Cost Explorer by Amazon Web Services, for example, Google unveiled a beta version of Cloud Pricing Calculator in February to estimate costs and needs for computing power, storage, memory or other resources. According to Parmita Mehta, technical program manager at AWS, there were several things the first release focused on. One is simplicity, so that sign-up can be accomplished with a single click, and the tool runs in the browser. She said, “Cost Explorer shows you your current month's spend and automatically pre-populates your last 4 months of AWS spend so you can visualize your AWS costs, and start analyzing trends and spending patterns”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023002KGT582