Amazon announces the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

One of the questions people ask when being offered a Peoplesoft in the Cloud service is: How will you make sure this is safe and will follow corporate security policies?

One of the main reasons most enterprises would not want to put their sensitive HR/Financials data out there in the great fuzzy thing-a-ma-jiggy called "The Cloud" is because of the perception (right or wrong) that somehow this wouldn't follow the architectural guidelines established by a given IT organization (and the business sponsors thereof.)

This is also because most Peoplesoft Customers would only go so far as to consider putting a "trial/vanilla" instance in the cloud fearing that putting copies of actual data may expose the organization to risk.

And these concerns are not limited just to ERP Peoplesoft customers, they extend to most other large corporate entities. Keeping this in mind, it was only a matter of time before Amazon, being the industry leaders that they are in this space, came out with the next offering in their cloud portfolio.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec 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.

More at the AWS Blog: Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Implementing Peoplesoft in the Amazon AWS Cloud

A blog entry wondering about whether something like that is possible prompted me to post this.

I believe we are the very first outfit to actually have implemented a proof of concept vanilla install of a Peoplesoft HCM instance in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

The proof of concept was to be offered as a joint venture "productized" consulting service coinciding with the launch of PT8.50 and HCM9.1 this fall. The "Cloud Broker" piece is still missing which basically means we can't have clients sign up and once built, provision their instances "on Demand"... although that is where I envision going once we get more funding and some time to build that piece into the infrastructure.

The basic architecture has been:

1. Windows2003/SQLServer 2005 Standard "Small Instance (Default)": 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
   
2. Peoplesoft Vanilla Install for evaluation purposes.
   
3. EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes to house the database, as the i/o throughput is much better than the standard instance.
   

There is some magic that goes into getting this up and running, but it is by no means impossible!

I foresee Peoplesoft installations running happily in Internal IT Clouds in not too distant a future.

Imagine a DMO environment, for every developer if needed!

Imagine a DMO environment for every major bug your team is following up on.

Imagine separate environments provisioned on an hour's notice for multiple testing streams!

The possibilities are endless!