Cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services has announced a new service that allows organisations to integrate cloud-based resources with their own network more easily.
The so-called virtual private cloud (VPC) service works by establishing a virtual private network between the proprietary infrastructure and ‘logically isolated’ server instances on AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). As with AWS’ other services, VPC is charged for on a pay-as-you-go basis.
According to a post on the company’s official AWS blog, the fact that VPC acts as through it is part of the network will reduce the management overhead associated with deploying cloud services, allowing for greater flexibility in corporate infrastructure and easing enterprise adoption.
“You can expand your corporate network on a permanent or temporary basis,” it says. “You can get resources for short-term experiments and then leave the instances running if the experiment succeeds. You can establish instances for use as part of a disaster recovery effort. You can even test new applications, systems, and middleware components without disturbing your existing versions.”
In a press release from the vendor, phamraceutical company and flagship AWS user Eli Lilly said it saw value in VPC. “We can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with computing resources we’ve deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome configuration or management hassles," said Dave Powers, associate information consultant at Eli Lilly.
Industry activity around cloud computing is beginning to heat up. This week, for example infrastructure vendor Tibco acquired DataSynapse, whose technology helps manage application across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure, for $28 million. The technology will boost the company’s cloud management offering, Tibco Silver.
And earlier this month, virtualisation pioneer VMware acquired SpringSource, the company behind an open source Java development framework called Spring. VMware says it will use SpringSource technology to build a ‘platform-as-a-service’ offering that will allow enterprises and service providers to build applications on internal or public clouds.
