Amazon Session at Cloud Expo

Cloud Computing Expo - Amazon Web Services (AWS) sent its enterprise-directed Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) widgetry into full public beta Monday. The thing’s been in limited public beta since the summer and before that it was in private beta.

VPC is Amazon’s way of creating hybrid clouds by letting an enterprise connect its existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a virtual private network (VPN) – a bog standard encrypted IPsec tunnel – and use its own existing security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems for the EC2 instances and traffic. Ditto whatever third-party management software it’s using.

Amazon imagines VPC being used for added capacity, disaster recovery and corporate applications such as e-mail systems, financial systems, trouble ticketing systems and CRM apps to save on TCO. It’s expected to be quite popular.

VPC supports both Windows and Linux/Unix instances but Amazon warns of potential latency in bundling Linux instances within VPC.

Since this is a beta Amazon has restricted use to one VPC per AWS account, 20 EC2 instances and 20 subnets per VPC, one VPN gateway, one VPN connection to that gateway and one customer gateway per AWS account. If you want more you have to dicker with them.

And since this is a beta Amazon’s EC2 Security Groups don’t work yet, neither do DevPay AMIs, or AMIs backed by Amazon Elastic Bock Store (EBS) like the new Windows 2008 AMIs, or Elastic Load Balancing, or Auto-Scaling, or Elastic MapReduce, or EC2 High-Memory Instances.

The beta supports Reserved Instances but Amazon’s not guaranteeing availability.

And there are no SLAs for the thing.

The beta is only running on Amazon’s Eastern US data center. Multiple Availability Zones will be available later on.

On top of Amazon’s usual EC2 charges, the widgetry is priced per available VPN Connection-hour and for the data transferred in and out.

A VPN Connection-hour costs a nickel. Data transfers going in will be free until June 30. They will thereafter cost 10 cents a gigabyte. Data being transferred out starts at 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10TB a month, the next 40TB costs 13 cents a gigabyte, the next 100TB 11 cents a gigabyte and over 150TB a month is 10 cents a gigabyte. There’s no charge for data exchanged between a VPC’s subnets.

Amazon said its bills would separate out VPC charges from EC2 use.