Today in an email to existing AWS customers, Amazon introduced a service known as AWS Storage Gateway which is an on-premise software appliance allowing customers to easily transfer data from on-premise storage to S3. This service could be used for offsite backup and capacity augmentation among other use cases.

From the email:

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

Here is a video that describes Storage Gateway in more detail.

In an email to customers today, Amazon announced new feature additions to its Simple Queue Service (SQS).

From the email:

We are excited to announce three new Amazon SQS features today: delay queues, message timers, and the ability to send or delete multiple messages in a single API call (batch operations). Delay queues can be used to apply a uniform delay to all messages. Alternatively message timers can be used to apply delay to specific messages that can be sent individually, or in a batch.

New support for batch send and delete operations complements the existing batch receive functionality. With batch operations many workloads will benefit from improved single thread message throughput, reduced connection overhead and lower API call latencies.

As distributed applications become larger and more complex, greater scalability and control of message-based systems becomes increasingly important. With support for both queue delays and message timers, a wider array of real world distributed application scenarios can be addressed. With batch APIs, developing Internet-scale distributed applications is easier and more cost effective than ever.

Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

via Biztech2.com India – Top 10 Strategic Technologies For 2012 – News on Enterprise Solutions.

Enterprises should consider public cloud services first and turn to private clouds only if the public cloud fails to meet their needs.

That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner’s IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.

via Gartner: Private clouds are a last resort.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides one of the most popular infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud platforms around. Since 2006, AWS has provided companies of all sizes with an infrastructure Web services platform in the cloud. With AWS, users can requisition compute power, storage and other services, and gain access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as their needs increase or decrease. In addition, AWS gives developers the flexibility to choose whichever development platform or programming model makes the most sense for the problems they’re trying to solve. Users pay only for what they use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, which makes AWS a cost-effective way to deliver applications to customers and clients. AWS also allows users to take advantage of Amazon.com’s global computing infrastructure that is the backbone of Amazon.com’s multibillion-dollar retail business and transactional enterprise—the scalable, reliable and secure distributed computing infrastructure that has been honed for more than a decade. Although AWS does not have a specific developer program, the company continues to offer new services and offerings that benefit developers. These include Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Amazon EC2 celebrated its fifth birthday on Aug. 25. Here, eWEEK looks at the ways AWS makes it easier for developers as they move to the cloud.

via Amazon Web Services: 15 Ways It Makes Cloud App Development Easier – Cloud Computing – News & Reviews – eWeek.com.