Google, AWS Clouds Embrace Flash For Storage
The transition to flash storage in the cloud is gaining steam as rivals Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) each introduced solid state drive upgrades to their cloud platforms.
The deployments underscore how SSD technology is entering the mainstream as a commodity, default offering.
Along with an SSD-based persistent disk offering, Google also said it was rolling out an HTTP load balancing feature designed to support in excess of 1 million requests per second without first warming up.
Separately, Amazon announced an SSD-backed volume type for its Elastic Block Store (EBS) designed to power varying workloads.
In a blog post, Google said the SSD version of its persistent disk aims to meet customer demand for a solution in high I/O use cases. Google's Compute Engine will offer persistent disk resources as primary storage for virtual machines.
Google said SSD persistent disk supports up to 30 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per gigabyte at a flat rate price of $0.325 a month per gigabyte. The service is currently in limited preview.
Google's HTTP load balancing feature is designed to support content-based routing and ties in with the Google's cloud infrastructure. (A content-aware load balancing architecture allows users to serve traffic from different sets of instances optimized for the content type being served.)
The feature is also said to allow a regional capability so that network traffic can be balanced within computing resources at different datacenters around the world. That feature would reduce network latency, Google claimed.
The HTTP load balancing scheme operates through a single external IP address as a way to simplify network operations.
The load-balancing feature is part of larger server-side load-balancing capability in Google's Compute Engine public cloud that permits either network or HTTP load balancing. Among its uses is routing traffic to the nearest virtual machine.
Google said its HTTP load balancing offering is also in limited preview.
Meanwhile, rival AWS is countering with its general purpose SSD product that aims to provide burst volumes up to 3,000 IOPS per volume. Amazon said performance is independent of volume size, and the feature would consistently deliver 3 IOPS per gigabyte while meeting the performance requirements of most cloud-based applications. (That is a factor of ten lower than what Google is offering.)
The new general purpose SSD volume type joins existing Amazon EBS volume types: provisioned IOPS and Magnetic, formerly known as standard volumes. General purpose SSD will become the new default Amazon EBS volume, the cloud giant said.
The growing adoption of SSD technology for handling cloud applications and databases is gradually making it a more affordable commodity feature. "SSD technology can now be applied to a much broader range of use cases at a lower cost while delivering high IOPS, low latency and high bandwidth," AWS noted in a statement announcing the new service.
Meanwhile, the search giant's SSD announcement was timed to coincide with the annual Google I/O conference June 25 through 26 in San Francisco. Among the scheduled sessions are "Predicting the Future of the Cloud."
