Amazon has extended its Elastic Cloud Computing service (EC2)
to enable IT departments to link their own datacentres with virtual
servers running in the cloud.
The Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service lets users create their
own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 virtual machine instances
which can connect to the corporate network using an IPsec virtual
private network (VPN) connection.
"This new offering lets you take advantage of the low cost and
flexibility of AWS while leveraging the investment you have already
made in your IT infrastructure,"
Amazon said on its EC2 blog site.
Amazon said its VPC service enables virtual machines to be
accessible from a business' corporate network, which means they can
access or be accessed by other systems on the network as if they
were local.
One commentator on the Amazon blog noted that the service could
blur lines of responsibility between internal IT, internet service
providers and Amazon.
"There's a nasty problem with this kind of configuration: when
the internet route between the cloud and the in-house network is
disrupted, nobody is responsible. Neither Amazon nor one's ISP will
typically be willing (or able) to do anything to help. For this
reason, we found that in practice it's necessary to keep the
interface between cloud and in-house network to a minimum and
ensure that temporary disruption in communication between the two
doesn't cause a loss of service to our customers. This
unfortunately makes the configuration pictured here of limited use
in practice, unless this new offering somehow gets around the
problem."