There has been a free tier of the AWS service for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Amazon Linux or other “unpaid” versions of Linux for some time, but SUSE and Red Hat did not fall into that category. Now Red Hat Linux, which has become the Linux standard for most corporations, is part of the free tier. Users can get 750 hours of free Red Hat usage, but here’s some fine print: 

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer or if the new account is included in Consolidated Billing. You will be charged standard rates for use of AWS services if we determine that you are not eligible for the Offer.

It will be interesting to see if this move shifts the composition of operating system share on EC2. According to the Cloud Market, Ubuntu makes up over half of all AMIs running in AWS. “Other” Linux,which is presumably Amazon or other unpaid Linux, is at 23.2 percent; Windows at 8.4 percent and then there’s Red Hat at 5 percent (see chart).

This just the latest example of cloud coopetition. Red Hat is working on its own flavor of an OpenStack cloud, still in preview but likely to become generally available this week at the Red Hat Summit. It is tailored for enterprise users and would challenge AWS for those the enterprise workloads that Amazon so clearly wants.

There may be a micro battle raging between the various flavors of Linux but the war lies ahead  as companies from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, HP and Red Hat fight to make their respective clouds the destination for corporate workloads.

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At Scalr, we’ve been happy customers of Amazon’s infrastructure service, EC2, since 2007. In fact, we’ve built our tools for EC2 because we saw an opportunity to leverage its flexibility to help AWS customers easily design and manage resilient services. But as competitors spring up, we always test them to see how they compare, especially in regards to io performance.

On a warm June day in San Francisco, the Scalr team attended Google I/O 2012. Google was rumored to be launching a EC2 competitor, which we were interested in for our multi-cloud management software. It launched. And boy did it sound good. You see, EC2 and GCE offer pretty much the same core service, but Amazon has been plagued by poor network and disk performance, so Google’s promise to offer both higher and more consistent performance struck a real chord.

Not ones to be fooled by marketing-driven, hyped-up software, we applied for early access and were let in so we could start testing it ourselves. Once we got in, we felt like kids in a candy store. Google Compute Engine is not just fast. It’s Google fast. In fact, it’s a class of fast that enables new service architectures entirely. Here are the results from our tests, along with explanations of how GCE and EC2 differ, as well as comments and use cases.

A note about our data: The benchmarks run to collect the data presented here were taken twice a day, over four days, then averaged. When a high variance was observed, we took note of it and present it here as intervals for which 80 percent of observed data points fall into.

API

First off, GCE’s API is beautifully simple, explicit and easy to work with. Just take a look at it. Their firewalls are called “firewalls,” vlans are “networks,” and kernels are “kernels” (AKIs, anyone?). Anyone familiar with Unix will feel right at home.

Fast boot

Second, VMs are deployed and started with impressive speed (and we’ve extensively used 10 clouds). It routinely takes less than 30 seconds to login as root after making the insert call to launch a VM. As a reference point, this is the amount of time it takes AWS to get to the running state, after which you still need to wait for the OS to boot, for a total of 120 seconds on a good day, and 300 on a bad one (data points taken from us-east-1).

Boot times are measured in seconds.

We don’t know what sort of sorcery Google does here, but they clearly demonstrate engineering prowess. That’s 4-10x faster.

Volumes

Those of you familiar with Amazon’s EBS volumes know that you can attach and detach volumes to any instance, anytime. On GCE, you can’t (at least not yet). This precludes you from switching drives to minimize downtime: attaching a volume on a running server allows you to skip the boot and configure stages of bringing a new node up, which is useful when promoting an existing mysql slave to master and you just need to swap out storage devices.

While GCE’s “disks” (as they call them) have that one disadvantage, they offer some unique advantages over Amazon volumes. For example, disks can be mounted read-only on multiple instances, which makes for more convenient fileserving than object stores, especially for software such as WordPress (see disclosure) or Drupal that expect a local filesystem. Disks are really fast too, and don’t seem to have the variable performance that plagued EBS before the introduction of Provisioned IOPS. See for yourself in the following benchmarks.

As you can see, GCE and EC2 are equivalent on reads, but GCE is 2-4x faster on writes.

Read/write speeds are measured in MB/s. Higher numbers mean faster throughput.

Network

A short note about multi-cloud. I’m talking here about services that span multiple clouds, such as replicating a database from us-east-1 to us-west-1, for disaster recovery or latency-lowering purposes, not the multi-cloud management capabilities widely used in the enterprise. I believe that first kind of multi-cloud is a myth driven by the industry’s less tech-savvy folks. I’ve seen too many people attempt it unsuccessfully to recommend it: what usually happens is the slave database falls behind on the master, with an ever-increasing inconsistency window, because the load on the master exceeds the meager bandwidth available between master and slave. Our friends at Continuent are doing great work with Tungsten to accelerate that, but still.

Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster.

Higher bandwidth is better and means faster up and downlinks.

After being so very much impressed, we made a latency benchmark between the same regions. We got an average of 20ms for GCE and 86ms for AWS. GCE came out 4x faster.

Lower latency is better and means shorter wait times.

This might allow new architectures, and high-load replicated databases might just become possible. Put a slave in different regions of the US (and if/when GCE goes international, why not different regions of the world?) to dramatically speed up SaaS applications for read performance.

Of course, unless Amazon and Google work together to enable Direct Connect, bandwidth from GCE to EC2 will still be slow. I also hear that Amazon is working on creating a private backbone between regions to enable the same use cases, which would be an expected smart move from them.

Multi-region images

We’re not quite sure why AWS doesn’t support this, but images on GCE are multi-region (“multi-zone” in their terms), that is to say when you snapshot an instance into an image, you can immediately launch new instances from that image in any region. This makes disaster recovery that much easier and makes their scheduled region maintenance (which occurs a couple of times a year) less of a problem. On that note, I’d also like to add that it forces people to plan their infrastructure to be multi-region, similar to what AWS did for instance failure by making local disk storage ephemeral.

So should you switch?

AWS offers an extremely comprehensive cloud service, with everything from DNS to database. Google does not. This makes building applications on AWS easier, since you have bigger building blocks. So if you don’t mind locking yourself into a vendor, you’ll be more productive on AWS.

But that said, with Google Compute Engine, AWS has a formidable new competitor in the public cloud space, and we’ll likely be moving some of Scalr’s production workloads from our hybrid aws-rackspace-softlayer setup to it when it leaves beta. There’s a strong technical case for migrating heavy workloads to GCE, and I’ll be grabbing popcorn to eagerly watch as the battle unfolds between the giants.

Sebastian Stadil is the founder of Scalr, a simple, powerful cloud management suite, and SVCCG, the world’s largest cloud computing user group. When not working on cloud, Sebastian enjoys making sushi and playing rugby.

Note: Data scientists from LinkedIn, Continuuity, Quantcast and NASA will talk about their hardware and software stacks at our “guru panel” at Structure:Data next week, March 20-21, in New York City.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

Update: This story was updated at 7:34 a.m. PDT on May 15, 2013 to note that Scalr is working on a new set of benchmarks and will publish those results soon.

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As it set out in a blog post, the company also released an open-source Python library so users can integrate its automation into their own applications and processes.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year in Amsterdam (this year’s event will be in London in September). The company automates not only the ongoing configuration of what goes on within virtual machines (VMs) – whether they’re hosted on public (Amazon EC2, Rackspace) or private clouds (OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, VMware) or even on physical servers – but also the provisioning of those VMs. ComodIT lets users migrate machines between, for example, EC2 and a Xen hypervisor by changing a single parameter.

And its latest features may come in handy for those who want to run their application on a private cloud while bursting to a public cloud when needed.

“If you want to have autoscaling for your infrastructure, your web application or database, if you want to have it on hybrid clouds you have to manage the fact that, if the load is becoming too high, you need to automatically scale your infrastructure,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz explained to me. “To do this, usually you are talking about orchestration, but most of the time the tools are scaling only the virtual machine entity itself – if the load is too high, you just pop up a new VM.

“We are able to do that if you need, but also to reconfigure automatically what is in another machine to keep the complete infrastructure coherent and be able to adapt to hybrid clouds.”

The new Python library bears a permissive MIT license and, according to Bartz, is largely targeted at startups that are developing new infrastructure and new applications.

‘Enabling the cloud broker market’

ComodIT is still in beta mode and, before it can hit general availability, it needs to integrate one more piece: its billing system. The firm’s subscription model is a per-node-per-month one, but right now payments need to be organized by email.

And once that billing system is in place, along with connections to providers’ systems, ComodIT will try to become what Bartz calls an “enabler” for the booming cloud broker market“.

“There are two challenges for the cloud broker market,” Bartz said. “The first is technical, and we are close to a solution there – to make the deployment and management of your infrastructure independent of the underlying technology. People can use ComodIT to do that today.

“But the other part is billing relationship management with the different cloud providers. There we are nowhere. To do that, the cloud brokers need to have the underlying technology.”

Intriguing talk, but Bartz wouldn’t say any more for now. Further details will come in the summer, he promised.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Update: Until now, Amazon charged standard internet rates for moving data between its regions but as if Friday it’s offering a reduced rate. The new data transfer pricing –which ranges from 26 percent to 83 percent off those old rates — applies to data residing in S3 storage, EC2 compute instances and Glacier archives.  This may come as good news to companies wanting to spread their cloud loads beyond Amazon’s US-East data center, which is the focal point of virtually all of the AWS outages over the past year.

The discounts also apply to Amazon’s Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN). The cost of using CloudFront with static data stored in S3 or dynamic data coming from EC2 will also fall, according to the AWS blog post announcing the news.

In other AWS news, Amazon also made use of its M3 extra-large high-CPU performance instances available in data centers beyond US-East. These 64-bit instances — which target batch processing and web serving applications — can now be sourced from both US-West regions, AWS GovCloud, Europe and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney). M3 will come to the South America region soon.

Amazon typically launches new features and functions in US-East because it is the largest and oldest of its data center facilities; it then broadens availability over time. One thing to keep in mind: pricing can be lower in US-East than the other regions — it was unclear if there was a price differential here, however.

Finally, AWS also cut prices of some of its Linux On-Demand EC2 instances worldwide by 10 to 20 percent as of Friday.

Robert Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, an IT consultancy that does a lot of AWS work, said that as of now, “multi-region solutions are not as common in the wild as they are on paper. The [data transfer] cost reduction will give us more freedom in the ways we architect cross-region solutions,”  he said via email.

Most of his customers will see  more immediate benefit in the reduction of on-demand instance pricing.

Amazon makes a habit of rolling out new features fast and furiously and then slicing prices; it looks like that trend will continue. What’s different this year is that more companies are offering cloud infrastructure that will compete with AWS for business workloads, although none of the rivals — with the possible exception of Google Compute Engine – are expected to come close to Amazon’s overall scale and capacity any time soon.

This story was updated at 7:36 a.m. PDT with user comment and again at 11:19 a.m. PDT with clarification of the new data transfer charges.

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The post, published Tuesday, details the evolution of the fundraising platform from a hosted service provided by Blue State Digital to a redundant, dual-platform API that had the lowest latency possible. Rush, who was the deputy director of front end web development at Obama for America, lays out how the six engineers working on the fundraising side created a web-based API for accepting donations for the Obama campaign in early 2012. The goals of the team were to make sure the API was always available (when a platform can take in $3 million in donations in a single hour, downtime is pricey), that it scaled and that it was fast, since millisecond delays make people second-guess their decision to spend/give money.

Rush detailed how the team used Amazon EC2, Akamai and its own hosted platform with a REST-based API on top of that. Anyone who wanted to access the API had redundant options and Akamai chose the fastest route as well as lowered latency. From Rush’s post:

To ensure that the platform was as stable as possible we worked with backend engineers on the campaign’s Tech team to make the Blue State API redundant. The Tech engineers built out a duplicate payment processor/API and hosted it on Amazon EC2 (itself redundant across data centers). At this point we had two APIs that we could switch between if one went down, but our Devops team had a great solution to make this automatic. They sprinkled a little Akamai magic and we had an Akamai health check which would automatically divert traffic to one API or the other based on the health check. By the time this was fully functional there was not a single moment in time that our new platform was not able to accept donations.

For more on the campaigns use of tech read Rush’s post, or check out the post by my colleague Derrick Harris on how the Obama team used tech as a “force multiplier,” to help win the election. It’s a good reminder that politics has transitioned from TV soundbites to scaled out web infrastructure and the cloud.

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Launched on Tuesday, the service’s virtual servers are optimized for mobile, enterprise and M2M applications. The infrastructure-as-a-service offering is the first product that Telefónica is selling to companies over the internet on a global basis, although the firm is already pushing its TU Me comms app directly to consumers.

“With the launch of Instant Servers Telefónica Digital seeks to meet the needs of thousands of businesses that require a cloud services platform that is easily scalable, with low latency and totally trustworthy, enabling them not only to rapidly respond to their own needs, but also to the expectations of their customers,” Telefónica Digital cloud and M2M chief Carlos Morales said in a statement.

Both of the Instant Servers datacenters at launch are in the European Union – one in Madrid, the other in London. They are, of course, plugged into Telefónica’s own global fiber network, as will the other datacenters be when they go online elsewhere in Europe and Latin America.

So what’s the advantage over Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud?

It’s supposedly more reliable, for one thing. According to Telefónica, Instant Servers comes with a service-level agreement (SLA) promising 99.996 percent availability, compared to EC2′s 99.95 percent.

The telco claims that its virtual servers will be able to scale instantly by 400 percent if needed. Instant Servers also uses the ZFS file system and volume manager, which is supposed to guarantee 100 percent data resiliency.

Then there’s the optimization angle. Although there’s a bit of rebadging going on here – Instant Servers is based on Joyent‘s infrastructure – it makes complete sense for a telco to be offering virtual servers that are primed for mobile and M2M services. Particularly services that are hooked up to Telefónica’s network.

Also, as with other big carriers such as Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica is trying to find revenue streams beyond its declining voice offerings – a lot of that involves cosying up to promising app providers, and Instant Servers may provide an extra hook there.

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As described in a post to the the AWS blog late Wednesday, each “hi1.4xlarge” instance can access two 1 TB volumes of fast solid state disk (SSD) storage to enable that speed.

According to the blog:

The SSD storage is local to the instance. Using PVM virtualization, you can expect 120,000 random read IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and between 10,000 and 85,000 random write IOPS, both with 4K blocks. For HVM and Windows AMIs, you can expect 90,000 random read IOPS and 9,000 to 75,000 random write IOPS. By way of comparison, a high-performance disk drive spinning at 15,000 RPM will deliver 175 to 210 IOPS.

Netflix, a huge Amazon customer, has already benchmarked the new SSD-enabled instances running a Cassandra test suite. Adrian Cockcroft posted a blog outlining the benchmark is here, but the short version is that Netflix validated Amazon’s raw performance claims for this Cassandra workload. Cockroft is director of architecture for Netflix.

The availability of solid state storage, which is faster and more expensive than more traditional spinning disks, has become a battleground with more companies adding the option as the price for SSDs falls.

Update: One Amazon user, Robert Shears, president of Greystone Solutions, a Boston developer of e-commerce sites, is generally impressed with the speed at which Amazon makes new features available. This news is more exciting than usual, he said, even though only a few of his customers really need this capability. “For those who do need it, it will be a real lifesaver,” he wrote.

“Our expected use cases are first: SQL Servers that need to scale up in a big hurry due to volume demands and second: clients who are stuck with legacy DBMS systems (relational or pre-relational) who have important line-of-business apps that are running out of steam at the same time DBMS vendors are also running out of steam.”

The specs for the new instances, which initially will be available from Amazon’s US East in Northern Virginia and EU West regions, are:

• 8 virtual cores, clocking in at a total of 35 ECU (EC2 Compute Units)
• HVM and PVM virtualization
• 60.5 GB of RAM
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with support for cluster placement groups
• 2 TB of local SSD-backed storage, visible to you as a pair of 1 TB volumes

Early comments to the post were positive. Wrote one commenter:

Excellent! But please consider adding a wider range of instance types with SSD storage. Not every server needs 60GB ram and 1TB ssd. Ideally every current instance type should be available with the choice of SSD storage instead(or at least a selection of the most popular ones).

Oh and it would be very nice being able to spin up some Amazon RDS MySQL instances backed by SSDs.

Amazon continues to add new features and functionality to EC2 at a fast clip. It will probably have to keep doing so as Microsoft and Google and other well-funded players appear intent on challenging its dominance in massive cloud infrastructure.

For more on the new high I/O instances, check out the video.

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