By Nicole Henderson, March 10, 2011
A screenshot of Amazon's EC2
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) announced this week that online gloabl travel network Swiftrank (www.swiftrank.com) and video delivery company Netflix (www.netflix.com) use its cloud platform and related cloud services.
On Wednesday Amazon announced that Swiftrank will use its cloud platform for its network of travel websites. Netflix announced at the opening of Cloud Connect 2011 that it moved all of its production systems into Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud last year, according to a report by Information Week.
Based in Singapore, Swiftrank says that unlike other online travel sites, its sites provide partner hotels with direct links to their own hotel websites, driving "highly profitable direct bookings."Swiftrank says that since migrating to AWS, it has seen improvements in site load speed worldwide.
“The flexibility of Amazon Web Services enables us to scale the infrastructure capacity both up and down in minutes, which has helped us accommodate our growing traffic and business. Perhaps most importantly, there is no risk in any single point of failure, and our hotel partners can be assured that they’ll never lose a sales opportunity,” Bryan Harwood, Swiftrank’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation said in a statement. “In addition, Amazon Web Services provides us with superior customer service and a secure transactional environment, which ensures a safe booking experience for our customers.”
According to the press release, Swiftrank has levergaed the cloud-based suite of products from Amazon Web Services, including Amazon Simple Storage Services, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Relational Database Service, Elastic IP and Elastic load balancing. Swiftrank says these products work in conjunction with its DNS servers.
By switching to the cloud, Swiftrank has seen increased speed, scalability, and has realized 25 percent cost savings as compared to its previous server setup.
Netflix says it decided to use Amazon Web Services EC2 because of its rapid growth accelaration that made it a challenge to build data centers to keep up, according to a report by Information Week.
Part of the growth of its Website traffic is due to a free iPhone Netflix app and the ability to download media to game consoles like Xbox 360 and Wii.
The report said that Netflix moved most of its production systems, except the initial capture of customer credit card data, into Amazon's EC2.
"We are just about 100% in the cloud," Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix said at a wordshop on Monday. "We want to use clouds. We don't have time to build them."
According to Information Week, Cockcroft says Netflix chose Amazon over other cloud providers because of its size, scalability and cloud features.
Cockcroft expressed some challenges with Amazon's EC2's Elastic Load Balancer, which he said had too many limits for the scale Netflix needs to operate. He added that Netflix needs to handle terabytes at a time, while SimpleDB is suitable for dozens or hundreds of gigabytes of data.
The report points out that Netflix is a "unique cloud customer" as its on demand need for capacity gives it "a unique set of requirements that few are ever going to match." While there are challenges, the report adds that the fact Netflix has found Amazon EC2 as a suitable replacement for its own data centers shows the cloud "will be able take on some of the most strenuous enterprise tasks in the future."
On Wednesday Amazon partnered with SecludIT to release Elastic Detector for Amazon EC2, a fully automated event detection tool for Amazon EC2.
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