Sony turns away from AWS, gets into bed with OpenStack

Sony has dropped Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider in favour of Rackspace’s OpenStack platform for its workload.

The deal covers Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) and covers hosting for games such as “Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare”. The transfer comes after a raft of performance issues that affected the service.

Among the problems were cyber attacks that led to SCEA temporarily shutting down its PlayStation Network, which allows gamers to play with each other online and Qriocity services, which allows users to download and watch films, TV programmes and music. The email addresses, usernames and passwords of 77 million users of the service were also compromised.

A story from Bloomberg linked Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the outage with an anonymous source claiming that hackers created fake AWS accounts and used AWS infrastructure to launch attacks on Sony’s network.

According to an email from Rackspace sent to US publication Network World, the migration to OpenStack for SCEA was relatively quick and took six days to complete. However, Rackspace refused to go on record with Cloud Pro to confirm this. A quick check at Hosted-at.com reveals that scea.com (Sony’s American website) is being hosted by RackSpace and not AWS (see link – hoste-at.com/www.scea.com).

It remains to be seen if Sony will be moving any other services it currently hosts with AWS, but has in recent months been making overtures towards OpenStack since last year’s PlayStation outage.