A New Approach to Amazon EC2 Networking

[thematt]

At the rate they're innovating and growing, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Amazon Web Services operation grow to be larger than the rest of Amazon's business.

[asnyder]

Jeff Bezos spoke about this in some depth at startup school in 2008. He even highlighted a journalist's quote suggesting that Amazon was sneaking web services through the back door and it would soon be larger than Amazon itself. I don't know the numbers offhand, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've already surpassed the storefront side of their business.

[tzs]

Has anyone done credit card handling (input, submission to payment gateway, and storing for subscription billing and on-file orders) on EC2?

A while back I recall Amazon saying that this was possible. We're looking into the possibility of moving to the cloud, and on first look our PCI guy saw some problems. We've just started experimenting so could easily have overlooked something, but these were the stumbling blocks we saw. It looks like these new features address 2 of these 3:

• PCI requires limitations be based on outbound traffic from the cardholder environment. Amazon only allowed inbound filtering. Now they have outbound filtering, so this may be no longer problematic.

• PCI requires internal machines to be placed on internal private networks using NAT. Amazon did not support NAT. Now they do, so this block may be gone.

• PCI requires that all traffic be monitored with an IDS in the cardholder data environment. It doesn't appear possible to do a central monitoring machine with IDS in EC2.

[tybris]

http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-fa...

[jeffbarr]

tzs, feel free to get in touch with me if you need more information on this.

[jordw]

I work at Amazon (not on AWS). I must say, the frequency that new features are rolled out impresses even me.

Congrats on shipping, guys.

[staunch]

Completely agree. The AWS team is one of the very few examples of rapid iteration and improvement from a big company.

I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?

[d_r]

Seconded.

I first tried Rackspace Cloud, who would send me frequent marketing-style e-mails with stock photos of intelligent-looking office employees, ask me to participate in raffles, and other nonsense that I would quickly filter.

I much prefer seeing new feature announcements from AWS in my inbox! (And on HN.)

[kbatten]

I use AWS both for work and for personal (love the free tier micro to play around with on my own time) and I am always impressed with how polished new features feel.

[mleonhard]

I was hoping that this would finally be a way to have an ELB inside a firewall, but alas VPC doesn't support ELBs yet.

  AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon
  Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Relational Database Service
  (Amazon RDS) are not available for use in a VPC at
  this time.

http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/#legal

[SriniK]

Good point. They seem to target the last leg(enterprise) of cloud shift with this. Pretty awesome to see how they are churning features.

[cemetric]

I just came to tell I love Amazon EC2, it's a treat to use.

[dcreemer]

any clues if broadcast / multicast will be allowed on my private subnets? The article makes no claims one way or another...

[spahl]

It's not supported: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#R4

[wmf]

That means it doesn't work.

[rmoriz]

What about IPv6?

[lecha]

Any word on performance properties of various network topologies. What topology would provide absolute maximum network performance between instances?