Chris Fleck (Citrix VP of Solutions Development) recently published a short guide showing how to build XenApp Servers in Amazon's EC2 cloud using a Community AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that allows anyone to be up and running with their own XenApp server in minutes. In releasing XenApp to the cloud Chris has given every IT professional in the world access to their own personal XenApp lab and by extension has given every potential XenApp customer or Citrix Ready Partner a very low cost, risk free means of assessing how their applications could be delivered by XenApp (not a bad day's work Chris).
Of course, this opportunity isn’t limited to Citrix, I would expect Ericom and all the other Remote Desktop Services vendors to follow Citrix’s lead and provide access to their products this way. If nothing else this will enable potential customers to perform side-by-side comparisons between competing technologies far more readily than is possible today.
I wonder how long it will be before companies like Alpiron (see my previous posts on data center power management for more detail on Alpiron) release their own Community AMI to allow potential customers to evaluate Alpiron’s server power management system running in EC2. Granted there's nothing to stop Alpiron from doing this today with their own servers but it makes a lot of sense for a company selling power management solutions to be able to bolster their Green credentials by placing their demo environment in one of the most power efficient data centers in the world.
Extending this line of thought a little further, what else looks like a good candidate for the cloud. At this point, I’m willing to suggest that almost anything without an SLA could be placed in the cloud. I still hesitate to suggest considering production environments. Cloud technologies are still immature and as such subject to greater threat from unidentified risk than more mature technologies would be; this alone is enough for me to want to steer clear of suggesting that production systems are good candidates for the cloud.
One of the more interesting possibilities that application delivery from the cloud brings is in the realm of business continuity services. About 10 years ago I spent a year or so working for a systems integrator that worked primarily with small businesses. Most of these companies’ disaster recovery plans were limited to off-site storage of their backup tapes and an understanding that they might need to purchase replacement servers in the event anything untoward happened and hope that the backup tapes had worked. Skip forwards to the day after tomorrow, and that same company could have a cloud based DR plan that required them to mirror their data to the cloud every night, and in the event that disaster were to strike their recovery action would be to launch however many private AMIs (copies of their physical IT infrastructure) and they could have their entire IT infrastructure back up and running in the cloud in a couple of minutes. This kind of warm standby service has always been beyond the reach of all but the largest IT shops, but with the advent of cloud services just as eveyone can afford their own lab environment, now every business can afford warm standby.
Which got me to thinking; Amazon has always been about the Long Tail, making most of their money by selling the products that bricks and mortar stores can’t afford the shelf space to stock. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that with EC2 Amazon is growing a second tail, providing a low cost framework for DR and Business Continuity services at a price that traditional DR service providers can’t afford to match.
