ReadWriteWeb

HP began its OpenStack-based Cloud Services this month, and there is a lot of promise but not much in the way of actual implementation yet. HP intends its cloud to cover both public and hybrid uses. Initially, the beta is free of charge although you will need to provide a credit card number for authentication (you won't be charged anything while the beta is underway).

The XML-based language that the Web uses for sending small transactional messages and chunks of data between hosts is Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Essentially, it's a system for Web services to communicate almost anything between one another, first by defining the format of what it is they're communicating - a kind of manifest - and then by enclosing instances of the items defined inside XML tags.

What makes WSDL perfect for cloud services is that the message transport protocol is simple HTTP (thus the "W" for "Web" in its name). So hosts don't have to be joined together in the same network loop; it's the Internet that connects them. Cloud-based Web services geared to receive WSDL messages use their own message queues, often using the same MQ systems devised for middleware. For Amazon Web Services, the MQ is Simple Queue Service (SQS). Believe it or not, up until a few days ago, AWS customers could not access their SQS queues through the AWS Management Console.

If you are looking for an alternative to mail your hard drive to Amazon, as we wrote about earlier this summer, then you might want to consider Aspera's On-Demand for AWS, which was announced earlier this month. The software speeds up transfer of really large data sets (say more than 50 GB) into Amazon's cloud services.

Just a month ago, Amazon introduced Direct Connect for establishing a direct connection from a customer site to Amazon Web Services. Initially, Direct Connect was rolled out just in the US-East region. Today the company announced that it was turning on the lights out West.

AWS is now offering Direct Connect via Equinix's San Jose Facility for the US-West region.

It appears that Amazon Web Services has suffered another outage tonight. The AWS Service Health Dashboard confirms that there were Internet connectivity issues at the EC2 location in the US-EAST-1, as well as issues with the Amazon Relational Database Service in Virginia. Amazon lists both issues as resolved but some sites, with the total downtime amounting to less than half an hour. It's not clear how many Availability Zones were affected, or if this affected the entire US-EAST-1 region.

TechCrunch reported that several sites, including Foursquare, Instagram, Quora and Reddit went down. Each of these appear to be back up. However Netflix remains offline as of this writing. Update: As of 8:41 PT Netflix appears to be back up.

No word yet whether this has anything to do with the outage at AWS Dublin yesterday.

Amazon continues to roll out new AWS features at breakneck speed. The latest in a slew of announcements is Amazon's bringing its Virtual Private Cloud out of beta. Amazon Direct Connect lets customers establish a dedicated network connection from the customer site to AWS. Amazon has also added a new feature to AWS Identity and Access Management that gives the ability to perform "identity federation" to grant access to AWS to corporate users without having to create new identities. Companies can now wire up directly to AWS without passing data over the public Internet, and avoid saturating their Internet connection with application data.

If you're working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), you should take note of the BitNami Cloud Tools site launched this week by BitNami. The Cloud Tools Installer packages a bundle of AWS support programs in one virtual machine for admins of AWS instances, and the soon-to-be launched Cloud Agent will let admins monitor servers and applications via AWS CloudWatch.

CumuLogic, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software provider, today announces the public beta version of their new PaaS solution which will enable enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs to build and manage Java PaaS in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The product is based on a cloud application management platform, and includes cloud services automation, autoscaling, monitoring, policy-base workload deployment resource management and user management. The idea is to mix and match different cloud-based applications, no matter where they reside.

Last week Infinite Apple posted screenshots of what writer Paul Paliath believes are evidence that Apple iCloud is using Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services to store content. GigaOM ran an article after consulting three networking and cloud computing experts who concluded that the data Paliath posted wasn't sufficient to prove that iCloud was using AWS or Azure.

This week, Paliath posted a raw dump (with some redactions) of some tests conducted with beta versions of iOS5, and conclude that Apple is at least using Azure as a content-delivery network (CDN).

The folks at LearnBoost, a free classroom management suite of online tools, have blogged last month about how they use MongoDB among other things to help them replicate in the cloud to prevent exactly the same sorts of outages that hit Quora and others when Amazon's Web Services went offline.

Guillermo Rauch writes that LearnBoost didn't suffer any downtime, largely because they took some care to build in redundancy to their apps and cleverly replicated their data across different Amazon regions and data centers.