AWS Rolls Out Virtual Private Cloud for Enterprises

Pushing its way into the enterprise market, cloud infrastructure giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the process of enabling its virtual private cloud (VPC) instance for new and existing AWS EC2 customers.

AWS is in the midst of enabling this feature one region at a time, starting with the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and South America (São Paulo) regions. The rollouts will take place over the next several weeks, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a recent blog post.

Instances will automatically launch into what AWS calls the “EC2-VPC” platform. AWS is adding new features to VPC, including DNS hostnames, DNS name resolution and RDS IP addresses.

According to AWS, a customer would launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases or ElastiCache clusters like they would in EC2-Classic and a VPC is created with no extra charge. Each VPC will have its own private IP range (172.31.0.0/16, to be exact), and each subnet will be a “/20” (4096 IP addresses, minus a few that are reserved for the VPC), Barr said.

Existing AWS EC2 customers interested in the new service have two options: they can create a new AWS account or pick a region they haven’t used (as mentioned above). The set of available platforms can be viewed in the AWS Management Console, but customers need to check the supported platforms and default VPC values for their account to see how it is configured in a specific region.

Amazon continues to lead the cloud infrastructure services market, according to new data from Synergy Research Group. The company dominates the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment, accounting for 36 percent of revenue.

In addition, total cloud infrastructure service revenues grew 15 percent between Q4 2011 and Q4 2012 to reach $12.5 billion, based on Synergy Research findings, MSP Today reported.

Service provider revenue from IaaS and PaaS topped $2.75 billion in the first half of the year, having grown by 65 percent from the same period in 2011. While Amazon clearly dominates the IaaS segment, it is also quickly approaching Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) leader Salesforce’s 19 percent market share.