"We have been listening very closely to the real requirements that our customers have and have worked closely with many...CIOs and their teams to understand what solution would allow them to treat the cloud as a seamless extension of their datacenter," wrote Amazon's VP & CTO, Werner Vogels, in a blog posting yesterday on the 3rd anniversary of the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - the date chosen by Amazon also to launch its new Virtual Private Cloud, or Amazon VPC.


Dr Vogels keynoted SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Expo

Vogels writes about the many conversations he has had with CIOs around the globe:

"They have bought into the cloud as a target for a significant portion of their services, as the benefits are too obvious to ignore, and most expect that their transition will be a continuous process. They would accelerate the adoption of cloud services if they could access a form of cloud that would give them the best of both worlds: the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of accessing a virtually infinite pool of resources without owning it, while being able to integrate those resources into their existing datacenter environments such that they could continue to leverage existing investments in their management and control infrastructure."

The problem, says Vogels, is that these CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed "private cloud" does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. He continues:

"Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher."

Realizing that what these CIOs needed was a solution where they get all the benefits of cloud as mentioned above while treating it as a part of their datacenter, Amazon developed its latest offering, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. "Amazon VPC offers customers the best of both the cloud and the enterprise managed data center," notes Vogels.

For more details on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, visit the Amazon VPC detail page.