Amazon Flash Drives Put Cloud Into Overdrive

Amazon just flashed its cloud service. Image: mnsc/Flickr

You’ll find it inside the top-secret data centers that run Google. It provides extra speed at Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, and countless other operations across the web. And now, Amazon is offering it up to the rest of the world via its massively popular cloud service, letting you slip it under your own online applications — without actually installing it in your own data center.

What is it? It’s flash — the super-fast storage hardware that’s gradually replacing traditional hard disks across the web and beyond. Flash is by no means a new technology, but it’s just now getting to the point where it’s cheap enough for use across the world’s biggest data centers. And Amazon is in the business of sharing its data-center infrastructure with developers and businesses across the globe.

Amazon’s EC2 service provides instant access to virtual servers where you can run just about whatever software you want, and on Wednesday, with a blog post, the company announced that EC2 now offers virtual machines backed by flash drives, also known as solid-state drives, or SSDs. These virtual machines are intended for use with massive databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB and other software requiring that extra bit of speed.

That’s what the big boys use flash for. Facebook uses flash hardware from a company called Fusion I/O to help drive the databases underpinning its social network, and Urs Hölzle, the man who oversees Google’s data center empire, recently told us that the search giant uses flash drives in much the same way. “We don’t use it exclusively, because it’s still not competitive on a price per gigabyte basis, but it’s good for some things,” he said. “I don’t think the way we use it is that different from the rest of the world.”

But Amazon has taken things a step further by offering SSD-backed virtual servers over EC2. Previously, if you used Amazon EC2 in lieu of your own hardware, you couldn’t benefit from SSDs in the same way. Now you can.

In a blog post of this own, Adrian Cockroft — the director of cloud architecture at Netflix, whose movie streaming services runs in part on Amazon — paints Amazon’s SSD instances as important milestone for the proverbial cloud.

“That extremely I/O intensive applications can be deployed, a commonly cited obstacle to running in the cloud has been removed,” he says, referring to applications that involve the constant input and output of data.

Amazon calls these virtual servers “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large.” That’s not to confused with Double Secret Probation. What it means is that you get a virtual machine backed by eight virtual processors core, 60.5 GB of RAM, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection to the network, and 2 terabytes of SSD storage.

Flash is the same stuff that stores software and data on your iPhone, and that’s the biggest reason that the price has come down in recent years, according to Jonathan Goldick, chief technology officer of software at Violin Memory, a Silicon Valley outfit that sells large flash storage devices to businesses for use with databases and other software with the need for extra speed.

As prices have dropped, the technology has not only juiced performance inside Google and Facebook, it has slowly moved into cloud services as well. Amazon was already using flash drives underneath its new DynamoDB service, which provides online access to databases built by Amazon, and Microsoft is using flash drives with its new Windows Azure Storage service, a means of storing massive amounts of files.

But Amazon’s latest offering is a little different. In providing virtual machines backed by flash, you can use flash with more than just DynamoDB or file storage. You can use it for, well, almost anything.

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