March 7, 2008 Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise?litwin/cours98/Doc-cours-clouds... ·...

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

March 7, 2008

Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise?by James Statenfor Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

www.forrester.com

© 2008, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester, Forrester Wave, RoleView, Technographics, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Forrester clients may make one attributed copy or slide of each figure contained herein. Additional reproduction is strictly prohibited. For additional reproduction rights and usage information, go to www.forrester.com. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected].

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYCloud computing is a new IT outsourcing model that doesn’t yet meet the criteria of enterprise IT and isn’t supported by most of the key corporate vendors. It’s wildly popular with startups, exactly fits the way small businesses like to buy things, and has the potential to completely upend IT as we know it. And there’s a high likelihood developers inside your company are experimenting with it right now. Forrester spoke with more than 30 companies in this market to determine its worthiness for enterprise consideration and found that it provides a very low-cost, no-commitment way for enterprises to quickly get new services and capabilities to market that entirely circumvents the IT department. Infrastructure and operations professionals can try to ignore it as it is just in its infancy, but doing so may be a mistake as cloud computing is looking like a classic disruptive technology.

TABLE OF CONTENTSIT Can’t Keep Up With The Demands Of The Business

The Very Best At Data Center Management May Hold The Solution

Enter Cloud Computing

Who Are The Cloud Providers?

But Cloud Computing Doesn’t Meet Enterprise Requirements Yet

Key Issues To Overcome For Enterprise Readiness

What Enterprises Are Doing In The Cloud

RECOMMENDATIONS

Add Clouds To Your List Of Outsourcing Options

WHAT IT MEANS

The Data Center Of The Future May Be In The Cloud

Supplemental Material

NOTES & RESOURCESForrester interviewed more than 20 vendor and user companies, including 3TERA, Akamai Technologies, Amazon.com, Box.net, Dell Computer, Enki, Google, IBM, Layered Technologies, Mindcrest, RightScale, Salesforce.com, Sun Microsystems, Jam Warehouse, XCalibre Communications, and 10 cloud customers who asked that their comments be kept confidential.

Related Research“What Can Enterprise IT Learn From The Web Giants?”August 15, 2007

March 7, 2008

Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise?Not Yet, But This Disruptive Innovation Is Maturing Fastby James Statenwith Simon Yates, Frank Gillett, Walid Saleh, and Rachel A. Dines

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http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=42755&src=44229pdf


© 2008, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction ProhibitedMarch 7, 2008

Is Cloud Computing Ready For The Enterprise? For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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IT CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THE DEMANDS OF THE BUSINESS

How quickly can you get a new application or service deployed for your business? Four weeks? Eight weeks? For many enterprises, the answer is even longer. Today your business needs to respond in Internet time with new services, capabilities, and offerings to stay ahead of its competitors. Yet, most corporate IT shops aren’t well equipped to respond with speed. They still have a “procure and provision” approach to the infrastructure that supports their services. Even if equipment is available, it must be assigned and prepped. This can be a lengthy process of approvals and actions involving everyone from storage, networking, security, and sometimes facilities. Why is this so difficult for enterprise IT? Infrastructure and operations professionals tell us that among the reasons are that:

· Capacity planning is too difficult. Determining whether the data center can accommodate another service, where it should go, and what moves and provisioning need to take place to make room for a new service is time consuming, and there’s a lack of good tools in this area. This is the main culprit for long deployment queues in most shops.

· Balancing time to market against asset utilization is too challenging. IT is stuck in a Catch-22 between controlling IT spend and being responsive to the business. The old answer of “just give them a server” doesn’t fly anymore.

· The business wants a quick and dirty way to prototype. The business often comes to IT with requests that don’t have budget approval or lack a fully baked business case, hoping IT can

“squeeze them in.” And IT can’t afford to set up and manage an outside-facing play area — especially with today’s security imperatives.

The Very Best At Data Center Management May Hold The Solution

The leading Web services companies have built their businesses around innovative new approaches to IT infrastructure that maximize data center management and efficiency — investments that have given them a distinct advantage over competitors that came to Web services from a traditional IT foundation. This success led Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to conclude in his keynote address at the 2007 Next Generation Data Center Conference that if managing a massive data center isn’t a core competency of your business, maybe you should get out of this business and pass the responsibility to someone who has:1

· Vastly superior economics. The leading providers of Internet applications and services — whether their own or as a hosting provider — buy so much server, storage, and other data center equipment that they have an enormous amount of negotiating power when it comes to hardware pricing, software licensing, and support contracts. Imagine the discounts and white glove treatment you would get if you could place server orders in lots of 10,000.

· Better practices for handling dynamic workloads. The leading Internet services companies have invested not only in better processes, but have also built management and administration tools that let them spread applications across thousands of servers and scale them quickly.2

© 2008, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited March 7, 2008


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They have optimized their infrastructures to accommodate new services quickly and without disruption, letting them introduce new capabilities every week.

· Expertise in dynamic capacity management. For these companies, the productivity of their assets is paramount, as the cost of their services is directly proportional to the ongoing costs of the data center. The more productivity they can wring from each square foot of space, the higher the profitability of the service. Thus, they closely monitor the infrastructure consumption of each application.

· Consumption-based cost tracking. It is the tight mapping of IT resource consumption by application that determines the margins on the services they provide. For most of these companies, this reporting is internal, but for an innovative few, this tracking is starting to be exposed as a new kind of offering.

ENTER CLOUD COMPUTING

Due to their singular focus on maximizing the efficiency of their Internet services hosting practices, a select few Web services and hosting companies have realized they can deliver the benefits of their unique infrastructure practices to their customers as a new type of hosting service. Among the first of these services was the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the flagship example of a new IT outsourcing model called cloud computing. Forrester interviewed more than 30 companies in the cloud space, including providers, customers, and infrastructure suppliers, and through this work, reached the following definition for cloud computing:

A pool of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption.

What makes cloud computing different than a traditional hosting or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model? While built on the same basic foundation, cloud computing infrastructure is also:

· A prescripted and abstracted infrastructure. Fundamental to the cloud computing model is standardization of the infrastructure and abstraction layers that allow the fluid placement and movement of services (see Figure 1). It starts with a flat implementation of scale-out server hardware that, for some clouds, serves as both compute and storage infrastructure (others are leveraging SAN storage). Their infrastructure enables the cloud and is decided upon solely by the cloud vendor; customers don’t get to specify the infrastructure they want — a major shift from traditional hosting.

· Fully virtualized. Nearly every cloud computing vendor abstracts the hardware with some sort of server virtualization. The majority employ a Xen-based hypervisor to keep costs low. Some have solutions that span virtual and physical servers via another middleware element, such as a grid engine.



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· Equipped with dynamic infrastructure software. Most clouds employ infrastructure software (3Tera being the most popular) that can easily add, move, or change an application with very little, if any, intervention by cloud provider personnel. Amazon Web Services declined to detail its technology. An executive at a large telecommunications company that built its own cloud said, “Before the cloud, high availability (HA) was very difficult. Now in the cloud model HA is very simple and affordable. Disaster recovery and resiliency are dramatically cheaper.”

· Pay by consumption. Most clouds charge by actual use of the resources in CPU hours, gigabits (Gbs) consumed, and gigabits per second (Gbps) transferred, rather than by the server or via a monthly fee. And the pricing is compelling. According to Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, a company that helps customers get their applications up on Amazon EC2, “Amazon is $70 to $150 per month fully burdened for a server versus [an average of] $400 per month for an enterprise.”

· Free of long-term contracts. Most cloud vendors let you come and go as you please. The minimum order through XCalibre’s FlexiScale cloud, for example, is one hour, with no sign-up fee. Amazon EC2’s policy is equally as lenient. This makes clouds an ideal place to prototype a new service, conduct test and development, or run a limited-time campaign without IT resource commitments.

· Application and OS independent. In most cases, the architectures of the clouds support nearly any type of application the customer may want to host as long as it does not need direct access to the hardware or specialized hardware elements. The cloud vendors told us there’s nothing about their infrastructures that would prevent them from supporting any x86-compatible operating system, but most only support Linux today.3

· Free of software or hardware installation. You tap into a cloud just as you would any remote server. All you need is a log-in. There’s no software or hardware requirement at the customer end or specialized tools needed to deploy your application.4

Who Are The Cloud Providers?

Amazon Web Services has since grown into a new business that encompasses compute and storage infrastructure services and new middleware services that Amazon EC2 customers can leverage, such as the Amazon Simple Queue Service. But it isn’t alone. There are host of emerging cloud computing vendors to choose from, some of which are more enterprise-friendly. The early entrants to cloud computing come from two camps:

· Internet services companies. The first camp — led by Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, and Akamai — is turning its infrastructure management services into profit centers serving internal and external customers.



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Figure 1 What Is The Infrastructure Behind Cloud Computing?

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.44229

Cloud computing architectural fundamentals1-1

Workload distribution and management1-2

Commodity hardware infrastructure

Virtual server containers

ERP CRM BI

Workload distribution system (grid engine)

Virtual server containers

Commodity hardware infrastructure

Workload distribution system (grid engine)Workloadmanagement, reporting and billing:

$/CPU/hr$/GB$/Gbps



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· Hosting providers. The second camp is the forward-thinking hosting providers that see clouds as the next step in the evolution of their business models (see Figure 2). This group is comprised of large multinationals like Terremark and smaller players, such as Layered Technologies and XCalibre that see clouds as new offerings that can differentiate their businesses. Startups like Enki, from NetSuite’s data center pioneer Dave Durkee, are basing their business on this new model (see Figure 3).

Many hosting providers — and several enterprises — are building clouds using 3Tera AppLogic, a grid engine that has evolved into full-blown cloud computing infrastructure software. This technology works across physical and virtualized servers (sitting below the OS) and has built-in high availability, virtualized storage, and per-use reporting. Unlike most other grid offerings, AppLogic works with most any type of application without redesign or programming to a grid API. Preparing your application for AppLogic is simply a staging process that customers told us takes less than a few days. AppLogic supports Linux today; Solaris support will be added this quarter followed by Windows in the summer.

Figure 2 The Cloud Providers


Company

Akamai

Amazon

Areti Internet

Enki

Fortress ITX

Joyent

Layered Technologies

Rackspace

Salesforce.com

Terremark

XCalibre

Offering

ApplicationPerformance

Services

Amazon Web Services

Virtual Hosting

Computing Utility

DynamicGrid

Acclerator forApplications

GridLayer

Mosso

Force.com

Infinistructure

FlexiScale

Content delivery network solution that improves the edgeperformance application experience by moving cloud applicationscloser to target users

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtualized cloud infrastructure;Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage; various cloudimplemented application services

3Tera AppLogic-based cloud hosting for small businesses

3Tera AppLogic-based cloud hosting and cloud-enabling services

3Tera AppLogic-based cloud utility computing platform

Cloud computing platform built on OpenSolaris and JoyentAccelerators (virtual servers)

3Tera AppLogic-based cloud utility computing platform

Cloud offering focused on hosting dynamic Web sites

Extendable cloud platform for Web-based applications

Cloud offering housed within Terremark co-location facilities

Virtual Iron-based cloud infrastructure with embedded clusterload balancing and HA services

Description



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Figure 3 Cloud Computing: The Latest Evolution Of Hosting


ISP 1.0Provided accessto the Internet(dial-up, ISDN,

T1, T3)

ISP 2.0Access to servers

at the Internetaccess point

Colo (ISP 3.0)Racks for your

equipment at theInternet access point

ASP (ISP 4.0)Hosted (traditionally

designed) applicationson servers at the

Internet access point

SaaSInternet-based

applications andservices

Cloud (ISP 5.0)Dynamic, Internet-

optimized infrastructure for hosting your applications

BUT CLOUD COMPUTING DOESN’T MEET ENTERPRISE REQUIREMENTS YET

Forrester feels that for a service to be ready for enterprise to consume, it must pass from the early-adopter phase (few enterprises using it with most deployments being experimentation and non-business critical projects) to early majority. Evidence of being at this stage comes from a sufficient volume of direct enterprise customer references using the service for business-critical purposes to indicate that the service has matured to the point of consideration for IT approval. We were not able to verify enough customer references (even off the record) to conclude that cloud computing has crossed over from early adopter to early majority. However, the platforms are maturing and will start to better meet enterprise needs during the next two to three years.

The main consumers of cloud computing are small companies and startups that don’t have a legacy of IT investments to manage. The concept of cloud computing is new and hard for traditional IT professionals to grasp and trust. The majority of enterprise use of clouds today is by innovative developers in business units and within IT who are just dipping their toes into these waters. For companies like The New York Times, these experiments have proved fruitful. They’ve leveraged Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to help get its archives online.5



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“Honestly, I had a couple of moments of panic. I was using some very new and not totally proven pieces of technology, on a project that was very high profile and on an inflexible deadline. But clearly it worked out . . . I can’t imagine how we might have done it without Amazon S3/EC2. We have already completed the S3/EC2 portion of another project and I have ideas for countless more.” (Derek Gottfrid, IT developer, The New York Times)

Some enterprises are experimenting with building their own clouds, something 3Tera, Dell, IBM, and HP see as new business opportunities worth exploring. One such company is a large telecommunications provider that sees the value of clouds mainly for its own internal users but possibly as a new service for its customers.

“We have about 25,000 virtualized servers in a cloud pool today. We have already deployed wikis and intranet sites on it. We are now testing some serious mission critical applications that will roll into production on the cloud in the next six months.” (A large multinational telecommunications provider)

Key Issues To Overcome For Enterprise Readiness

As appealing as the cloud concept sounds, it isn’t even on the radar of most enterprise IT shops. An informal survey of the Forrester Leadership Board of Infrastructure & Operations professionals regarding interest in, or use of, clouds yielded a resounding silence. The reasons are many:

· Concerns about stability. Most cloud vendors today do not provide availability assurances. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are mostly nonexistent.6 This will hold back many enterprises but it doesn’t scare startups like KnowledgeTree. Daniel Chalef, COO of this content management service hosted on Amazon EC2 said, “We’re comfortable that they are providing us with a relatively stable environment.” Yet he acknowledged that an hour or two of unscheduled downtime is acceptable to its customers.

· Few big-name players offering clouds. The presence of Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, and Akamai certainly helps, and rumors persist that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! — which all have massive data center infrastructures optimized for hosting dynamic Web services — will enter this space. But until more of the big players enter, enterprise IT is likely to stay away.

· Few enterprise reference accounts. Despite repeated requests to the vendors in this space and efforts by Forrester outside of these players, few enterprises could be found or were willing to identify themselves as cloud users. Lack of references will hold back adoption.

· Concerns around security. Many enterprises said they weren’t using clouds because these services are less secure. But the reality may be the opposite. The hosting companies expanding into clouds told us that security is one of their core competencies, where it is more a necessary evil for most enterprises. As Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s CTO, put it, “Over time, people will start



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to view an external service provider as more compliant than internal. They are a disinterested third party. Their job is to hold your data but it involves you and me to collude. As a third party provider I would have no motive to muck with your data.”

· Lack of commercial ISV support. Given that most clouds are unique infrastructures (and in the case of Amazon, one it won’t tell you a lot about), most commercial operating systems and applications are not certified on these platforms. Only XCalibre FlexiScale supports Windows, for example. Given that the infrastructures are virtualized, licensing is another issue.

· Little geographic locality. With the exception of Akamai and Layered Technologies, no cloud vendors we interviewed will place your application in a specific geography. In fact, most don’t have geographic coverage. Amazon EC2 does, but won’t tell you where your application is located geographically, nor can you request a specific geography today.7 Some government-specific regulations, especially in Europe, require services and/or customer data be retained within a country’s borders, and noncompliance isn’t an option.

· Not for the faint-of-tech. While leveraging most clouds is relatively easy, some developer or IT administration savvy is required. Amazon EC2, for example, provides a place to scale but no services that automatically scale your application or ensure application availability (it does provide infrastructure availability). Thus, new businesses are forming, like RightScale and Enki, to help the technically challenged leverage clouds. According to RightScale’s Crandell,

“[On EC2], when the virtual server terminates, it’s gone. So you really need to architect it so it’s backed up to S3 and will persist in the case of failovers.”

· Not very enterprise friendly. Most cloud offerings aren’t easy for enterprises to consume. Most don’t allow you to embed your security and management agents and monitors. Amazon EC2 is not Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards-compliant, so you cannot take credit card payments if you host a service on Amazon EC2. And few vendors provide security or process compliance audits.

What Enterprises Are Doing In The Cloud

Despite all these issues, some enterprises are experimenting with clouds with or without the approval of IT management. The large telecommunications company, referenced above, said that in using the cloud, it has been able to reduce capital expenditures for the affected applications by 30% and achieve significant headcount reduction for systems administration. It said it has been able to mix and match and repurpose the cloud infrastructure far more than any previous infrastructure deployment. Most enterprises would not talk on the record, and some of the information that follows was relayed to us secondhand, by the cloud vendors themselves. Here are the types of efforts reportedly underway by enterprises today:



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· R&D projects. Many enterprise shops are using clouds to test new services, applications, and design models. One oil and gas company, wrestling with four-month delays to requisition resources for a new Web site, bypassed IT and put up the sites via a cloud to see what interest it would bring. Another company reported testing out a new service offering, under a stealth Web address, and without company branding.

· Low-priority business applications. Services such as Web-based collaboration, business intelligence against very large databases, partner-facing project sites, and other low-priority services have been hosted on clouds. Services that have low availability requirements and short lifespans are common. XCalibre said that a French investment bank is using FlexiScale to run financial models. Another use is by enterprise marketing departments looking for quick delivery of a promotion that can just as quickly be switched off.

· Web-based collaboration services. The bulk of the enterprise use of Force.com, and a common deployment on other clouds, is collaboration, whether internal or external. Departmental developers typically build these types of services, which often have a short lifespan and are too much of a hassle to deploy via traditional IT procurement processes.

R E C O M M E N D A T I O N S

ADD CLOUDS TO YOUR LIST OF OUTSOURCING OPTIONS

Many enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals see clouds as an inferior outsourcing option. Most don’t meet enterprise standards and can’t be monitored and controlled by IT. However, for business units frustrated by the speed of corporate IT that get a taste of cloud computing, it’s becoming a viable option. Cloud computing has all the earmarks of being a potential disruptive innovation that all infrastructure and operations professionals should heed. As one early adopter put it, “The resistance to cloud computing is much more political and bureaucratic than technical. When you go to a cloud you lose track of who controls what and who is currently on what resources. We’re still working through the political issues. We’ve only succeeded with a small group of divisions, but it is demonstrating the value.” Rather than ignore it and hope it goes away, consider the following:

· Start experimenting with the cloud. This new dynamic platform will start to better meet enterprise needs later this year, and enterprise-class names will enter the space. Determine which applications could be candidates for cloud experimentation based on business criticality. Some clouds can also be used as overflow capacity — burst computing.

· Be prepared for your business to experiment with it. Even if IT can’t justify leveraging clouds, your business units will. Cloud is a compelling business proposition — infrastructure they can provision with a credit card with low barriers to entry and low barriers to exit. Rather than block their efforts, learn from them. As Papadopoulos said, “I would seriously look at what your developers are doing and where they are doing it. Look at where their attention is.”



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· Let them know what you want. The cloud vendors want your business and are looking for your guidance on what it takes to win it. Once you have some experience with these offerings, let them know what they need to provide to better meet your needs. And shop around, as we are already seeing differences in the cloud offerings. “Expect to see lots of different clouds that compete,” said Harald Prokop, SVP of engineering at Akamai. “If you have massive needs for CPU, storage, or geographic dispersion, there will be a cloud model for that.”

· Leverage cloud infrastructure internally. Learn from what the cloud vendors are doing to improve the utilization and reusability of your internal infrastructure. Hardware and server workload abstraction is key and can be achieved with virtualization software. Blade servers from HP and IBM enable dynamic workload movement via new virtual I/O capabilities, and several vendors, including 3Tera, Cassatt, and DataSynapse, offer middleware that can provide this capability across blade and traditional infrastructure — virtual or physical.

· Build your own cloud. If you have vast data center resources, and application deployment is a core competency of your business, leveraging cloud architectures can help make your IT shop more responsive to business needs. IBM recently announced an initiative called Project Blue Cloud, and 3Tera, Dell, Sun, and other vendors are eager to assist you in this development. If you are in the business of providing infrastructure services to external customers, run, don’t walk, to try this out.

W H A T I T M E A N S

THE DATA CENTER OF THE FUTURE MAY BE IN THE CLOUD

Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors’ visions of the data center of the future; it’s an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. It also has all the earmarks of a disruptive innovation: It is enterprise technology packaged to best fit the needs of small businesses and startups — not the enterprise. Deployment is dramatically simpler, it’s far cheaper to use, and doesn’t meet enterprise quality, availability, or transparency requirements. With cloud computing, two guys in a garage can build a service, grow it to $100 million in revenues, and never buy a single server along the way. Papadopoulos said, “Most every software startup I know that is in the SaaS game is seriously considering EC2 or using it today.”

The Web giants are investing heavily in mega-sized data centers, cloud-like middleware, and optimized management software and practices that make them likely candidates to offer cloud computing. To date, they have been using these infrastructures to power their own services but could just as easily follow Amazon EC2’s lead.

In these efforts, they are changing the dynamics of IT management and reaching new levels of cost efficiency that few enterprises will be able to match. “We’ve spent many years and tons of money building out our data center infrastructure in a unique way that we get uniquely large



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economies of scale,” said Rajen Sheth, senior product manager of Google Apps. “Our speed of patching, failover, use of grid and PC infrastructure, and creation of a fully flat infrastructure is a unique value that can’t be matched.”

As the gap widens between enterprise and Web giant economics, it may get to the point that it no longer makes financial sense for many businesses to run their own servers. When this happens, will you be a cloud or a cloud customer? “We’re probably one to two years away from cloud computing being more efficient than the best enterprise IT shops,” said Philipp Huber, COO of XCalibre Communications.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Companies Interviewed For This Document:

3TERA

Akamai Technologies

Amazon Web Services

Box.net

Dell

Enki

Google

IBM

Layered Technologies

Mindcrest

Rackspace US

Red Hat

RightScale

Salesforce.com

Sun Microsystems

Terremark Worldwide

Jam Warehouse

XCalibre Communications

Ten cloud customers who asked to be kept anonymous

ENDNOTES1 You can read more of Vogels’ views on the Amazon architecture and the changes it can reap on his blog, “All

Things Distributed,” at http://www.allthingsdistributed.com.

2 The largest Internet services, including Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, are going to extremes to squeeze inefficiency and complexity out of services that consume hundreds of thousands of servers and double every 12 months. Some of their moves are unique, but many can be adapted to enterprise data centers to yield similar benefits. See the August 15, 2007, “What Can Enterprise IT Learn From The Web Giants” report.

3 Just about any Linux variant can be used in a cloud, but so far only Red Hat has certified its OS for cloud deployment and is willing to provide commercial support in this type of environment.





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4 Salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud offering has an online SDK for integrating your application onto its cloud and is thus more restrictive. Akamai hosts applications on its content delivery network as well, and some prep of the application is required for use. The application type is more restrictive on this offering as well.

5 You can read more about The New York Times’ experience with EC2 at http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun/.

6 Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an SLA against its S3 service, one of the few SLAs in the business. However, Amazon EC2 and its other services do not have SLAs, and the Terms of Service reserve the right for AWS to terminate all services with just 60 days notice. The full terms can be found on the AWS Customer Agreement page: http://www.amazon.com/AWS-License-home-page-Money/b?ie=UTF8&node=3440661#3.

7 AWS said its S3 service stores customer data in multiple locations to ensure redundancy and lets customers choose Europe or US storage locations (different pricing for each). The company said other cloud services will expand geographically over time and that it currently leverages data centers on the East and West Coasts of the US and in Europe.

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