Amazon, Ninefold way out in front on availability tools

Cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services offers software developers the best tools for managing the availability of their applications in the public cloud, according to independent research commissioned by iTnews.

Yesterday, iTnews released a research report entitled ‘Designing for availability in the cloud’, penned by Justin Warren, an experienced IT architect and managing director of business consultancy PivotNine.

Report author Justin Warren

The report offers readers advice on how to design their applications for deployment across multiple virtual machines, availability zones or cloud providers to ensure high availability.

Further, it scrunitises global providers Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure and local providers Telstra, Ninefold and OrionVM on what availability tools they offer as part of their service.

The providers were judged on whether they could offer server and data snapshots, VM image import and export, multiple availability zones, a scalable database service, automated failover, APIs for failover and capacity scaling, load balancing, DNS resolution and elastic capacity.

Amazon Web Services ticked the box for 11 out of the 12 criteria, while its global competitors Microsoft and Rackspace offered seven.

Ninefold was the pick of the local providers, offering nine of the 12 services – in effect providing a more superior service than many of its global competitors.

‘Designing for Availability in the cloud’ is available as a free download for subscribers of iTnews.