Teknovis

Wow – I heard this mentioned today:

By July 2010, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and six months later, Kindle books overtook paperback books to become the most popular format on Amazon.com. Today, less than four years after introducing Kindle books, Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books – hardcover and paperback – combined.

The full press is release is Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books.

It is interesting timing, because in the last month I have been talking to two people who were giving away their Kindles because they use their iPads instead. Maybe it is in evolutionary process :)

Tags: Amazon

OK – I admit that the title of this blog post is a bit dramatic! I am of course referring to the fact that Amazon‘s cloud infrastructure was out for several hours yesterday. See Amazon fault takes down websites or Amazon cloud sinks, smothers Web 2.0 darlings.

It is a pity really, because this is the sort of incident that moving into the cloud is supposed to prevent! As somebody I know who deals with Amazon said:

Amazon keep promising us 100% reliability, because “Telcos’ five 9s are so yesterday”!

Yes – this has effected his companies cloud strategy!

Tags: Amazon

I read an interesting news release last week from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but for some reason I forgot to add it here :o

Anyway, the article announced that Amazon will soon allow customers to run their machine instances on dedicated hardware within the cloud. For more information see Amazon VPC Adds Dedicated Instances and Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances.

This is an interesting development, because it moves the machine instances slightly away from the original spirit of the cloud. However, it does enable Amazon to compete with other existing cloud providers who were offering dedicated hardware (unfortunately, I cannot remember their names).

Tags: Amazon

Amazon, Microsoft, and many more see Dublin as an ideal location for their data centres according to Dublin Emerges as Cloud Computing Hub.

Some of the linked articles are also very interesting, such as Colocation Dublin that lists all of the data centres in the Dublin area.

Tags: Amazon, Ireland, Microsoft

I hate censorship – of all types. So I was delighted to read that Amazon has refused to censor the rather controversially titled book The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure. For more information see Amazon row over paedophile book.

Well done Amazon!

Tags: Amazon, Censorship

I am just after reading Battle of the apps fuels smartphone war, and I am amazed by the following statement:

Global online trader Amazon.com is reportedly looking at creating its own online store for Android. This would bring the unity, stamp of quality and prestige that Android apps needed from the beginning.

This certainly would be an interesting development by Amazon. Perhaps it would be a good fit, given that Amazon certainly is an innovator, and it is also very well established with consumers.

I really wonder if the iPad, or indeed the entire emerging tablet market, is damaging Kindle sales.

Tags: Amazon

Somebody told me during the week that Verizon was entering the Cloud Computing market place. I think that this is a very interesting development.

Computers can be thought of abstractly being composed of only three capabilities:

• Processing capabilities
• Storage capabilities
• Networking capabilities

The existing Cloud Computing providers (such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)) have already successfully brought the first of those two capabilities into the Cloud Computing environment.

However, nobody has successfully brought network capabilities into the Cloud Computing environment (or alternatively, nobody has brought the cloud outside of the data centre).

I suspect the reason for this is two-fold:

• The existing Cloud Computing providers do not own the infrastructure outside of the data centre.
• The telecos, who own the infrastructure, do not really have the enabling technology.

Therefore, it will be very interesting to see if Verizon’s move into the Cloud Computing environment will be the start of true Cloud Computing!

For more details about this read Verizon Introduces New Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Computing for Small, Medium Business Markets.

Tags: Amazon, Verizon

I saw today that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released new, low-cost, entry level instances! Very cool! I am extremely happy with the service from Blacknight, but if circumstances changed then I would definitely consider moving some of my sites!

For more information about this see New Amazon EC2 Micro Instances – New, Low Cost Option for Low Throughput Applications.

Tags: Amazon, Blacknight

A while ago a friend told me about a company called SimpleGeo that develops a geodata infrastructure. It is a bit difficult to understand exactly what it does, but the blog is interesting, and the founders’ biographies are also worth a look.

The infrastructure itself appears to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Tags: Amazon, SimpleGeo

I recently read Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud by George Reese.

"Cloud Application Architectures" by George Reese

It was a very enjoyable read, and it was quite an easy read. I think that it is a great place to start reading about Cloud Computing.

The book focuses almost exclusively on Cloud Computing in the context of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This suited me, but it may not be to everybody’s liking.

My only criticism of the book was that it did not go into enough detail. In particular, there is a lot of focus on EC2 and almost nothing about the other services. That is a pity, because I would have liked to have read the same type of material about S3, SimpleDB, and SQS.

Also, despite the focus on EC2, I felt that some fundamental aspects were not described even though the author referred to them extensively. For example, many pages were dedicated to describing the AMIs, yet it is not described anywhere how to create them!

In summary, I think that this book is a great introduction to Cloud Computing. It describes what it is, and when it can be used advantageously. Finally, it really put me in the mood for starting to play with AWS :)

Tags: Amazon