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Amazon Vets Launch Nimbula, Aim To Deliver Amazon EC2-like Services Behind Firewalls

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At the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, former Amazon executives who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service, announced that they are launching Nimbula. Nimbula’s business and technology focus is on blending EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control.

Nimbula has been operating in stealth mode since early 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware.

Today Nimbula also unveiled details of the technology that provides the foundation for its first product, Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that efficiently manages on- and off-premises IT resources on customer-controlled infrastructure.

Nimbula Director delivers utility grade computing and empowers IT innovation behind the firewall. Unlike other enterprise cloud solutions, Nimbula provides for linear scaling to thousands of nodes and automated hands-off installation and data center management. Fine-grained policy-based authorization and network security combined with metered bursting into public clouds such as Amazon Web Services offer unmatched control and visibility.

Prior to founding Nimbula, Pinkham was Vice President of Engineering at Amazon and leader of the group that planned and developed Amazon EC2. Prior to joining Amazon, Pinkham founded the first ISP in Africa, which was acquired by UUNET.

Co-founder and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon led the Amazon EC2 development effort. Prior to joining Amazon, van Biljon was a co-founder of Mosaic Software, which was acquired by S1 Corp.

Pinkham, van Biljon and Sequoia’s Botha have served as Board members since 2009. Today, Nimbula announced that VMware former CEO and co-founder, Diane Greene, also has joined the Board.

Other members of the Nimbula management team are Martin Buhr, Nimbula Vice President of Sales and Business Development, and Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula Vice President of Marketing. Most recently, Buhr spent four and a half years with Amazon Web Services where he led business development and sales for Amazon EC2, and served as Business Director for EMEA. Malekzadeh spent more than eight years at VMware in its Palo Alto headquarters and in EMEA. He was previously VP of International at Akimbi, which was acquired by VMware.

Nimbula is currently in beta with half a dozen large international customers in the financial services, technology and healthcare industries. The company plans a formal product launch and ramp to sales in the second half of 2010.

VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

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VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.

CohesiveFT Releases VPN-Cubed for EC2

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CohesiveFT today announced the release of VPN-Cubed for EC2, a specially packaged version of the company’s customer-controlled cloud security offering for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 users now have immediate access to this specific VPN-Cubed use-case allowing them to create and configure their own VPN-Cubed overlay network inside of and across EC2’s geographically distinct regions. The VPN-Cubed overlay network provides four key capabilities EC2 users currently cannot control: static addressing for the user’s EC2 devices; topology control by using VPN-Cubed managers as virtual switches, virtual bridges or virtual routers; use of popular enterprise protocols like UDP Multicast for service discovery; and lastly encrypted communications between all devices on the overlay network.

VPN-Cubed for EC2 is available as a Free Edition which provides a high availability version for use in one EC2 region or in one EC2 VLAN, and a paid version which allows creation of a reliable, cross-region, cross-VLAN overlay network. Both are available through Amazon DevPay as “Paid AMIs”. EC2 users can now get their own highly available and secure VPN-Cubed overlay network up and running quickly and easily.

VPN-Cubed is the first commercial solution that enables customer control in a cloud, across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds. VPN-Cubed provides an overlay network that allows the customer control over addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for their devices deployed to virtual infrastructure or cloud computing centers. VPN-Cubed gives customers the confidence and flexibility to utilize cloud computing by offering a layer of security that the customer controls inside of 3rd party environments.

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

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Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.

rPath Takes rBuilder Technology to Amazon EC2

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rPath today announced the beta launch of its rBuilder Appliance Creator and rBuilder Catalog features for the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2). When coupled with rPath’s industry leading technology for release management, lifecycle management, and its comprehensive support capability for Linux technology, these new features offer one of the most comprehensive solutions for managing cloud application deployments in the industry.  This solution is being offered to developers for Amazon EC2 deployments at no cost via rBuilder Online. 

The rBuilder Appliance Creator takes developers through the steps to package a Linux-based application as an Amazon Machine Image.  With rBuilder, the on-going maintenance and release management of the application image becomes efficient and elegant.  The rBuilder Catalog for Amazon EC2 provides a simple management interface for launching, managing, and retiring application images for Amazon EC2.  The dynamic search and catalog capabilities will be familiar to anyone that uses Apple’s iTunes, and this “dynamic playlist” metaphor provides a basis for future management activities directed at large scale catalogs of machine images.

CohesiveFT Adds Elastic Server Support for Amazon EC2

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Tomorrow, CohesiveFT, makers of the Elastic Server platform, will announce support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) large, extra-large and high-CPU instances.

This is an expansion beyond the company’s existing support for standard instances on Amazon EC2’s 32-bit platform. Developers interested in defining software components for real-time deployment to Amazon EC2 can use the Elastic Server platform to build, test and deploy their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats.

The Elastic Server platform lets users choose their components from a library of popular software stacks. The platform also allows any individual, team or company to import their software offerings, a crowd-sourced practice that ensures the library continually reflects evolving market preferences. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. Support for the full spectrum of Amazon EC2 formats follows the company’s recent support for the Flexiscale cloud environment, the Skytap Virtual Lab, as well as its ongoing support for the VMware, Parallels, and Xen formats.

The Elastic Server platform features a dashboard that highlights the most popular user-selected components as well as an overall view of community activity. Users can also distribute their finished servers through the Elastic Server platform. There are currently more than a thousand community users contributing nearly three thousand Elastic Servers to the market.

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