Amazon Gets Into App Management with OpsWorks

In aim to make it easier for developers to automate the process of modeling, deploying and scaling their apps, Amazon Web Services this week launched an application management service called AWS OpsWorks.

AWS OpsWorks, takes management templates developed from Opscode called Chef Recipes, designed to provide flexible capacity provisioning, configuration management and deployment, while allowing administrators to manage access control and to monitor the app, the company said Tuesday. Administrators can use AWS OpsWorks from the AWS Management Console.

"AWS OpsWorks was designed to simplify the process of managing the application lifecycle without imposing arbitrary limits or forcing you to work within an overly constrained model," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "You have the freedom to design your application stack as you see fit."

AWS OpsWorks is the latest service aimed at allowing more sophisticated management of the company's cloud services. It follows the release two years of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, aimed at rapid deployment and management of apps running among Amazon's portfolio of cloud services. Amazon more recently added CloudFormation, aimed at bringing together and managing various AWS resources.

The launch of AWS OpsWorks comes just days after Amazon made available its data warehousing service called Redshift. Amazon announced its plans to offer Redshift back in November at its first ever re: Invent partner and customer conference.

Amazon is hoping it can do to the data warehousing business with Redshift what it has done to computing and storage with EC2 and S3, respectively. "We designed Amazon Redshift to deliver 10 times the performance at 1/10th the cost of the on-premises data warehouses that are commonly used today," Barr wrote in an earlier blog post last week. We used a number of techniques to do this including columnar data storage, advanced compression, and high-performance disk and network I/O."

Amazon will be taking on some pretty large and established rivals in the data warehousing market, including Oracle, IBM, Teradata SAP and Microsoft. Not that taking on entrenched players has ever stopped Amazon before. And many of them are also already partnering with Amazon.

What's your take on Amazon's latest new offerings? Do you think the company will commoditize app management and data warehousing? Drop me a line at [email protected] or leave a comment below.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 20, 2013