Amazon Cloud Server in Sydney

Amazon have announced a centre in Sydney, Australia for their Amazon Web Services "cloud" server. This answers the concerns I had about Australian organisations having to move their data to other countries for processing.

By specifying the Australian server, the data can remain in Australia, under Australia law. This is particularly useful for organisations handling personal data which is subject to the Privacy Act. Moving data offshore to a jurisdiction which does not have the same privacy protections as Australia is unlawful. Organisations such as government departments and agencies, banks, telecommunications companies and universities risk prosecution if they place client data in "the cloud" outside Australia.

Australian provider Ninefold seem happy with the Amazon announcement as it legitimises them as an alternative.

Internet for the Rest of the World: The Mobile Phone

Greetings from the first Mobile Monday Sydney for 2012. I gave the first talk on "New Ways of Learning to Work: With E-books and E-Learning", this was followed by "VoIP via Mobile Phone: by Dan from VTalk. The last talk now underway is by Mark from Binu on "How to Make a Feature Phone Smarter using the Cloud". Binu uses the Amazon compute cloud to provide a virtual smart-phone server. They host "apps" in the cloud, to overcome the limited processing and storage capacity of non-smart phones. The interesting part of this is that Binu argue they have found a profitable business in providing a service to African customers. What I find interesting is that this same service could be used to provide education, via mobile phones.

Dan argues that these low cost phones, which are popular in developing nations are capable of providing the type of services currently though of as requiring a smart phone. This makes sense as most low cost phones thought of as "dumb" actually have a web browser built in, this is a WAP browser, which was intended to provide simple information services, but was overtaken by smart phones.

Binu's approach is similar to that used by Amazon for their Kindle Fire Tablet Computer. Knidle carry out processing of web content on their cloud computer server and then use the tablet computer essentially as a graphics terminal. This allows a lower cost lower power device to be sued and also reduces the amount of data being communicated (if the application is well designed). It happens I wrote a multi-part article about this for the Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch newsletter in 1991, which then lead to a Defense Department sponsored project. With the passage of time some of this has become easier, but other parts have become harder.

At question time the issue of security came up. As with Amazon's service, Binu's by its nature has access to more information that where a conventional web browser is used. Because the apps run on the server, the company could, if they wished to, have access to the internal information. Obviously, like any company, Binu is required to provide information demanded by national security authorities, under national laws.

Deltacloud standard cloud service interface

Deltacloud is proposed as a standard way to interface to cloud service providers, such as Amazon EC2. The idea is that you can then move to other providers easily. However, the details of support for networking, authentication and accounting are still to be finalised. Delatacloud was developed by Red Hat and is proposed as an Apache open source project (which has disadvantages as well as advantages). There is a Deltacloud Website, Deltacloud git repository and Deltacloud mailing list.

Cloud Computing to Reduce Greenhouse Emissions

Cloud Computing could be used to reduce energy use and allow for more use of renewable energy, by shifting processing off desktop PCs and onto shared data centres.

At a new year's party I was asked how to reduce greenhouse emissions at home. This was by an engineer who works part time from their home office. One thing I suggested was a lower power computer. However, they explained that they need to perform complex engineering calculations which take several days on a desktop computer. A slow low power computer would result in the calculations taking weeks.

Instead I suggested using cloud computing, with the computations run not on the home computer but on one rented for the purpose, as required. An example of this is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Amazon.com offer configurations (call "instances") of the services they provide optimised for data base ("High-Memory") or computations ("High-CPU"). Amazon offer a choice of Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems, with Windows costing about 20% more. The number of the processors can also be selected. However, the engineering application is limited to running on Microsoft Windows and has not been optimised for multiprocessor machines.

The user can specify the number of "virtual cores" provided and the number of "EC2 Compute Units" for each. The compute units are measured relative to a 2007s era 1.0-1.2 GHz Intel Opteron processor. Offered are 1, 2, and 3.25 EC2 Compute Units. These appear to relate to the speed of the actual processors Amazon.com is using, rather than an arbitrary allocation by a virtual operating system.

One anomaly is that the High-CPU Instances have smaller EC2 Compute Units than the High-Memory Instances. The High-CPU Instances are much lower price than the High-Memory Instances.

Assuming that a computation takes two days on Amazon's standard instance (US$0.12 per hour), this would cost US$5.76. One such calculation per week, would cost about US$300 per year, a cost comparable to a desktop computer. Amazon.com also offers Spot Instances, where unused capacity is auctioned. This would suit engineering calculations which are not time critical.

Working out if using Amazon.com's service would actually reduce energy use would be a complex process. This would depend firstly on how the desktop alternative was used. If a computer was dedicated to computations and turned off when not needed, then the power use would be low (not including the embedded energy in making the computer). More likely the computer would be used for normal office applications. In hat instance the processor may lower its energy use for the less demanding application.

The energy management of Amazon.com's system is not well known publicly. Perhaps Amazon.com need to offer greenhouse gas emissions as one of the parameters for their system. The use could then select a processing site which might use renewable energy, for example, to power the processors.

Assuming that Amazon.com's processors are fully occupied, then they should use less energy and cause less greenhouse gas emissions than a desktop computer which is idle much of the time. Also assuming that Amazon.com's computers are in a well designed data centre building then the air conditioning cost of cooling the system should be lower than for an office building (if the desktop computer is at home then hopefully it is naturally cooled with no air-conditioning).

Perhaps this is something I need to set as an exercise for my Green Information Technology students.