New AWS enable "Real" Elastic Clouds

Yesterday Amazon announced a new set of services for their EC2 "elastic compute cloud" and these perhaps represent the real "holy grail" for cloud computing. While not new concepts, they illustrate how "real" cloud computing elasticity works, and challenge a few other virtualization & automation providers to do the same.

• Amazon CloudWatch: A for-fee ($0.015 per AWS instance monitored) service that:
  provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources... It provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic...

• Amazon Auto Scaling: a free service that:
  automatically scales your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch...
  
  
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing: A for-fee ($0.025/hour/balancer + $0.008/GB transferred) which
  automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored...
  

To-date, users of Amazon EC2 have had to do these sorts of things manually, if at all. Now Amazon is building these services into AWS (as well as into Amazon's pricing and business model).

Not entirely new concept:
Note that what Amazon is doing is not entirely new. For example, if you're considering building these sorts of capabilities into your own "internal cloud" infrastructure, there are a few products that provide similar solutions. e.g. in 2008, Cassatt (RIP?) announced its own capacity-on-demand technology, which created/retired entirely new instances of a service based on user-definable demand/performance criteria. (I should add that Auto Scaling & CloudWatch operate similarly -- you can define a number of performance and SLA parameters to trigger grow/shrink scaling commands).

Similarly, Egenera's PAN Manager approach dynamically load-balances networking traffic between newly-created instances of an App. And, products such as 3Tera also enable users to define components (such as load balancers) in software. All of this adds-up to truly "adaptive infrastructure" that responds to loads, failures, SLAs etc. automatically.

The challenge to others:
So, if Amazon can instantiate these services in the "public" cloud, then I would expect others -- notably providers such as VMware, Citrix, MSFT etc. -- to provide similar technologies for folks building their own infrastructure.

For example, in VMware's "vCloud" I would expect to see services (some day) that provide similar monitoring, auto-scaling, and load balancing features. If virtualization providers are to take "internal cloud comuting" seriously, these are automation-related services they'll be required to provide.

Kudos to Amazon:
And finally, Amazon has done two saavy things in one move - (a) they've once again shown the world what a true "cloud" computing infrastructure ought to do, and (b) provided another nice value (and revenue stream!) to complement their per-instace EC2 fees. Remember: The easier they make it to scale your EC2 instances, the more $ they make...

Looking forward to how the industry will respond....