Blog posts from Amazon AWS blog |
2057 blog posts:
Oct 16, 2018
makes it easy for you to get started with AWS. You choose the operating system (and optional application) that you want to run, pick an instance plan, and create an instance, all in a matter of minutes. offers low, predictable pricing, with instance plans that include compute power, storage, and data transfer: Managed Databases Today […]
Oct 02, 2018
As I write this, there are just 55 calendar days until 2018. My colleagues and I are working flat-out to bring you the best possible learning experience and I want to give you a quick update on a couple of things… Transportation – Customer Obsession is the first Amazon Leadership Principle and we take your […]
Oct 01, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks are live, online presentations that cover a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. We’ll have experts online to help answer any questions you may have. Featured this month, check out the webinars under AR/VR, End-User Computing, Industry Solutions. Also, […]
Sep 28, 2018
Today is Save the Koala Day and a perfect time to tell you about some noteworthy and ground-breaking research that was made possible by AWS Research Credits and the AWS Cloud. Five years ago, a research team led by Dr. Rebecca Johnson (Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute) set out to learn more about […]
Sep 27, 2018
The Altair 8800 computer that I built in 1977 had just 4 kilobytes of memory. Today I was able to use an EC2 instance with 12 terabytes (12 tebibytes to be exact) of memory, almost 4 billion times as much! The new Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances let you take advantage of other AWS services […]
Sep 21, 2018
AWS Heroes are passionate AWS enthusiasts who use their extensive knowledge to teach others about all things AWS across a range of mediums. Many Heroes eagerly share knowledge online via forums, social media, or blogs; while others lead AWS User Groups or organize AWS Community Day events. Their extensive efforts to spread AWS knowledge have […]
Sep 20, 2018
is a relational database that was designed to take full advantage of the abundance of networking, processing, and storage resources available in the cloud. While maintaining compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL on the user-visible side, Aurora makes use of a modern, purpose-built distributed storage system under the covers. Your data is striped across hundreds of […]
Sep 19, 2018
I’ve got good news for AWS customers who make use of our and Regions. Effective September 1, 2018 we are reducing prices for data transfer from , , and by up to 34% in Japan and 28% in Australia. EC2 and S3 Data Transfer Here are the new prices for data transfer from EC2 and S3 […]
Sep 18, 2018
connects your on-premises applications to AWS storage services such as , , and . It runs in your existing virtualized environment and is visible to your applications and your client operating systems as a file share, a local block volume, or a virtual tape library. The resulting hybrid storage model gives our customers the ability […]
Sep 11, 2018
It is a very interesting time to be a corporate IT administrator. On the one hand, developers are talking about (and implementing) an idyllic future where infrastructure as code, and treating servers and other resources as cattle. On the other hand, legacy systems still must be treated as pets, set up and maintained by hand […]
Sep 11, 2018
As I have shared in the past (AWS – Ready to Weather the Storm) we take extensive precautions to help ensure that AWS will remain operational in the face of hurricanes, storms, and other natural disasters. With Hurricane Florence heading for the east coast of the United States, I thought it would be a good […]
Sep 10, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks are live, online presentations that cover a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. We’ll have experts online to help answer any questions you may have. Featured this month is our first ever fireside chat discussion. Join Debanjan Saha, General […]
Sep 10, 2018
Amazon AppStream 2.0 gives you access to Windows desktop applications through a web browser. Thousands of AWS customers, including SOLIDWORKS, Siemens, and MathWorks are already using AppStream 2.0 to deliver applications to their customers. Today I would like to bring you up to date on some recent additions to AppStream 2.0, wrapping up with a […]
Sep 06, 2018
Today, we're adding two new features to AWS X-Ray: support for Amazon API Gateway, making it easier to trace and analyze requests as they travel through your APIs to the underlying services, and support for centralized sampling rules in the AWS X-Ray console, SDKs, and API.
Sep 06, 2018
Today I'm really excited to show you a powerful new feature of AWS CloudFormation, we're calling Macros. Macros allow developers to extend the native syntax of CloudFormation templates by allowing AWS Lambda powered transformations on templates.
Sep 04, 2018
The Alexa Prize is an annual competition designed to spur academic research and development in the field of conversational artificial intelligence. This year, students are working to build socialbots that can engage in a fun, high-quality conversation on popular societal topics for up to 20 minutes. In order to succeed at this task, the teams […]
Aug 29, 2018
Database administrators spend a lot of time provisioning hardware, installing and patching operating systems and databases, and managing backups. All of this undifferentiated heavy lifting keeps the lights on but often takes time away from higher-level efforts that have a higher return on investment. For many years, has taken care of this heavy lifting, and […]
Aug 28, 2018
is an operating system for the microcontrollers that power connected devices such as appliances, fitness trackers, industrial sensors, smart utility meters, security systems, and the like. Designed for use in small, low-powered devices, Amazon FreeRTOS extends the FreeRTOS kernel with libraries for communication with cloud services such as AWS IoT Core and with more powerful […]
Aug 27, 2018
I first told you about in early 2012, and said: We want you to think big, to dream big dreams, and to envision (and then build) data-intensive applications that can scale from zero users up to tens or hundreds of millions of users before you know it. We want you to succeed, and we don’t […]
Aug 23, 2018
Amazon Lightsail gives you access to the power of AWS, with the simplicity of a VPS (Virtual Private Server). You choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine (an instance) preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address. You can use Linux or Windows, and can even choose between […]
Aug 21, 2018
We launched the t1.micro instance type in 2010, and followed up with the first of the T2 instances (micro, small, and medium) in 2014, more sizes in 2015 (nano) and 2016 (xlarge and 2xlarge), and unlimited bursting last year. Today we are launching T3 instances in twelve regions. These general-purpose instances are even more cost-effective […]
Aug 21, 2018
We launched a new feature for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS) called Enhanced Fan-out, which enables developers to take advantage of a new low latency HTTP/2 data retrieval API. This new API allows customers to attach more applications to a single data stream while maintaining read performance across all of the applications consuming the stream. The HTTP/2 interface reduces the latency between ingestion of data and consumption of data by a consumer application by about 75%, down to less than 50 milliseconds.
Aug 10, 2018
You may have heard of Amazon Aurora, a custom built MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible database born and built in the cloud. You may have also heard of serverless, which allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about instances. These are two pieces of the growing AWS technology story that we’re really excited to be working on. Last year, at AWS re:Invent we announced a preview of a new capability for Aurora called Aurora Serverless. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Aurora Serverless for Aurora MySQL is generally available. Aurora Serverless is on-demand, auto-scaling, serverless Aurora. You don’t have to think about instances or scaling and you pay only for what you use.
Aug 06, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks are live, online presentations that cover a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. We’ll have experts online to help answer any questions you may have. We’ve also launched our first-ever office hours style tech talk, where you have the […]
Aug 02, 2018
I was cleaning up my home office over the weekend and happened upon a network map that I created in 1997. Back then my fully wired network connected 5 PCs and two printers. Today, with all of my children grown up and out of the house, we are down to 2 PCs. However, our home […]
Aug 02, 2018
lets you create petabyte-scale file systems that can be accessed in massively parallel fashion from hundreds or thousands of servers and on-premises resources, scaling on demand without disrupting applications. Behind the scenes, storage is distributed across multiple Availability Zones and redundant storage servers in order to provide you with file systems that are scalable, durable, […]
Jul 27, 2018
This blog shares some brief thoughts on machine learning accuracy and bias. Let’s start with some comments about a recent ACLU blog in which they ran a facial recognition trial. Using Rekognition, the ACLU built a face database using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and then performed facial similarity searches on that database using public […]
Jul 25, 2018
Just last week I told you about our plans to launch EC2 Instances with Faster Processors and More Memory. Today I am happy to report that the R5, R5d, and z1d instances are available now and you can start using them today. Let’s take a look at each one! R5 Instances The memory-optimized R5 instances […]
Jul 20, 2018
At the New York Summit a few days ago we launched two new features: a new batch inference feature called Batch Transform that allows customers to make predictions in non-real time scenarios across petabytes of data and Pipe Input Mode support for TensorFlow containers. SageMaker remains one of my favorite services and we’ve covered it […]
Jul 17, 2018
I hope that you are enjoying the Polly-powered audio that is available for the newest posts on this blog, including the DeepLens Challenge and the Storage Gateway Recap. As part of my blogging process, I now listen to the synthesized speech for my draft blog posts in order to get a better sense for how […]
Jul 17, 2018
Last month I told you about the Nitro system and explained how it will allow us to broaden the selection of EC2 instances and to pick up the pace as we do so, with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options. This will allow us to give you access to the latest […]
Jul 17, 2018
I love factories and never miss an opportunity to take a tour. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to watch as raw materials and sub-assemblies are turned into cars, locomotives, memory chips, articulated buses, and more. I’m always impressed by the speed, precision, repeat-ability, and the desire to automate every possible step. On […]
Jul 17, 2018
Today I’m excited to announce that has added support for Japanese, Russian, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Czech! Amazon Translate is a translation API that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Translate was originally released in preview at in 2017 and my colleague, Tara, wrote about the service in depth. Since the initial preview, we’ve […]
Jul 13, 2018
Today I’m excited to announce and demonstrate the new HTTP Live Streams (HLS) output feature for (KVS). If you’re not already familiar with KVS, Jeff covered the release for in 2017. In short, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is a service for securely capturing, processing, and storing video for analytics and machine learning – from one […]
Jul 13, 2018
It is always interesting to zoom in on the history of a single AWS service or feature and watch how it has evolved over time in response to customer feedback. For example, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) launched a decade ago and has been gaining more features and functionality every since. Here are a few […]
Jul 12, 2018
To borrow my own words, the is a service that includes a multi-protocol storage appliance that fits in between your existing application and the . Your applications see the gateway as a file system, a local disk volume, or a Virtual Tape Library, depending on how it was configured. Today I would like to share […]
Jul 10, 2018
As I write this, there are just 138 days until re:Invent 2018. My colleagues on the events team are going all-out to make sure that you, our customer, will have the best possible experience in Las Vegas. After meeting with them, I decided to write this post so that you can have a better understanding […]
Jul 10, 2018
Are you ready to develop and show off your machine learning skills in a way that has a positive impact on the world? If so, get your hands on an video camera and join the AWS DeepLens Challenge! About the Challenge Working together with our friends at Intel, we are launching the first in a […]
Jul 05, 2018
As you may know, in 2014 we launched the AWS Community Heroes program to recognize a vibrant group of AWS experts. These standout individuals use their extensive knowledge to teach customers and fellow-techies about AWS products and services across a range of mediums. As AWS grows, new groups of Heroes emerge. Today, we’re excited to […]
Jul 02, 2018
Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions featuring topics on Amazon EMR, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon EC2 Fleet and more! We also have our third episode of the “How to re:Invent” where we’ll dive deep with the AWS Training and Certification team on Bootcamps, Hands-on Labs, […]
Jun 28, 2018
We can now use to trigger functions! This is a stellar update with some key functionality that I’ve personally been looking forward to for more than 4 years. I know our customers are excited to take it for a spin so feel free to skip to the walk through section below if you don’t want […]
Jun 27, 2018
My colleague Jeff Barr last wrote about , a service for discovering insights and relationships in text, when it launched at in 2017. Today, after iterating on customer feedback, we’re releasing a new asynchronous batch inferencing feature for Comprehend. Asynchronous batch operations work on documents stored in buckets and can perform all of the normal […]
Jun 26, 2018
Over two years ago I explained why I Love my Amazon WorkSpace. Today, with well over three years of experience under my belt, I have no reason to return to a local, non-managed desktop. I never have to worry about losing or breaking my laptop, keeping multiple working environments in sync, or planning for disruptive […]
Jun 21, 2018
I’ve got some important news for users. As a result of our partnership with Hancom, you can now edit Microsoft Office documents in your browser without having to install any applications or connect with another web service. You can quickly create a document, share it with team members, and let them make changes and contribute […]
Jun 19, 2018
I have a backlog of EC2 updates to share with you. We’ve been releasing new features and instance types at a rapid clip and it is time to catch up. Here’s a quick peek at where we are and where we are going… Additional Instance Types Here’s a quick recap of the most recent EC2 […]
Jun 19, 2018
Earlier this year I showed you how to Give Your WordPress Blog a Voice with Amazon Polly and walked you through the steps involved in installing, configuring, and using the Amazon Polly for WordPress plugin. Today we are making this plugin even more powerful, adding the ability to translate your content into one or more […]
Jun 15, 2018
makes it easy for you to set up a fully managed in-memory data store and cache with Redis or Memcached. Today we’re pleased to launch compatibility with Redis 4.0 in ElastiCache. You can now launch Redis 4.0 compatible ElastiCache nodes or clusters, in all commercial AWS regions. ElastiCache Redis clusters can scale to terabytes of […]
Jun 14, 2018
is a video camera that runs deep learning models directly on the device, out in the field. I wrote about the hardware and system software in depth last year; here’s a quick recap: Hardware – 4 megapixel camera (1080P video), 2D microphone array, Intel Atom® Processor, dual-band Wi-Fi, USB and micro HDMI ports, 8 GB […]
Jun 08, 2018
Today I’m excited to announce the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning. Automatic Model Tuning eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting required to search the hyperparameter space for more accurate models. This feature allows developers and data scientists to save significant time and effort in training and tuning their machine learning models. A Hyperparameter […]
Jun 05, 2018
We announced and invited customers to take a look at a preview during re:Invent 2017. Today I am pleased to be able to let you know that is available for use in production form. It has been certified as Kubernetes conformant, and is ready to run your existing Kubernetes workloads. Based on the most recent […]
Jun 05, 2018
While many of my AWS colleagues are preparing for SAPPHIRE NOW, I thought this would be a good time to bring you up to date on what we have already done to make AWS a great home for SAP’s products and to share our plans to make it even better. The Story So Far Our […]
Jun 04, 2018
Earlier this month we launched the C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage and I told you that we would be doing the same for additional instance types in the near future! Today we are introducing M5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit […]
Jun 04, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2018 Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. New this month, we have a fireside chat with the GM of Amazon WorkSpaces and our 2nd episode of the “How to re:Invent” series. We’ll also cover best practices, deep dives, use cases and more! Join us […]
Jun 01, 2018
We have seen a lot of discussion this past week about the role of Amazon Rekognition in facial recognition, surveillance, and civil liberties, and we wanted to share some thoughts. Amazon Rekognition is a service we announced in 2016. It makes use of new technologies – such as deep learning – and puts them in […]
Jun 01, 2018
Today, at the AWS Summit in Tokyo we announced a number of updates and new features for . Starting today, SageMaker is available in ! SageMaker also now supports CloudFormation. A new machine learning framework, Chainer, is now available in the SageMaker Python SDK, in addition to MXNet and Tensorflow. Finally, support for running Chainer […]
May 31, 2018
is a fully managed cloud business intelligence system that gives you Fast & Easy to Use Business Analytics for Big Data. makes business analytics available to organizations of all shapes and sizes, with the ability to access data that is stored in your data warehouse, your relational databases, flat files in S3, and (via connectors) […]
May 30, 2018
Amazon Neptune is now Generally Available in , , , and . is a fast, reliable, fully-managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. At the core of Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying […]
May 30, 2018
Today I’m excited to announce built-in authentication support in Application Load Balancers (ALB). ALB can now securely authenticate users as they access applications, letting developers eliminate the code they have to write to support authentication and offload the responsibility of authentication from the backend. The team built a great live example where you can try […]
May 18, 2018
As you can see from my EC2 Instance History post, we add new instance types on a regular and frequent basis. Driven by increasingly powerful processors and designed to address an ever-widening set of use cases, the size and diversity of this list reflects the equally diverse group of EC2 customers! Near the bottom of […]
May 16, 2018
We announced a preview of at 2017 and have been refining it ever since, focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Designed to make IoT available and accessible to a broad audience, is now generally available, along with new IoT buttons from AWS and AT&T. I sat down with the dev team a month […]
May 15, 2018
We announced at 2017. As you can see from Tara‘s blog post (Presenting Amazon Sumerian: An Easy Way to Create VR, AR, and 3D Experiences), Sumerian does not require any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. You can build VR, AR, and 3D experiences for a wide variety of popular hardware platforms including mobile devices, […]
May 10, 2018
We’ve all been there! You need to make a quick, seemingly simple fix to an important production database. You compose the query, give it a once-over, and let it run. Seconds later you realize that you forgot the WHERE clause, dropped the wrong table, or made another serious mistake, and interrupt the query, but the […]
May 10, 2018
Today I’m excited to announce a new Machine Learning Competency for Consulting Partners in the Amazon Partner Network (APN). This AWS Competency program allows APN Consulting Partners to demonstrate a deep expertise in machine learning on AWS by providing solutions that enable machine learning and data science workflows for their customers. This new AWS Competency […]
May 10, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks – May and Early June 2018 Join us this month to learn about some of the exciting new services and solution best practices at AWS. We also have our first re:Invent 2018 webinar series, “How to re:Invent”. Sign up now to learn more, we look forward to seeing you. Note […]
May 09, 2018
Many of my colleagues are fortunate to be able to spend a good part of their day sitting down with and listening to our customers, doing their best to understand ways that we can better meet their business and technology needs. This information is treated with extreme care and is used to drive the roadmap […]
May 08, 2018
Enterprises want to provide their employees with apps and tools that will allow them to do a better and more efficient job, while still providing oversight and governance. helps enterprise IT to meet all of these needs, with a focus on cloud-based solutions. Administrators assemble portfolios of products, add rules to control and manage user […]
May 04, 2018
EC2’s H1 instances offer 2 to 16 terabytes of fast, dense storage for big data applications, optimized to deliver high throughput for sequential I/O. Enhanced Networking, 32 to 256 gigabytes of RAM, and Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors running at a base frequency of 2.3 GHz round out the feature set. I am happy to […]
May 03, 2018
EC2 Spot Fleets are really cool. You can launch a fleet of Spot Instances that spans EC2 instance types and Availability Zones without having to write custom code to discover capacity or monitor prices. You can set the target capacity (the size of the fleet) in units that are meaningful to your application and have […]
May 01, 2018
Today, I’m pleased to announce that, as of April 24th 2018, the AWS IoT Analytics service is generally available. Customers can use IoT Analytics to clean, process, encrich, store, and analyze their connected device data at scale. AWS IoT Analytics is now available in , , , and . In November of last year, my […]
Apr 24, 2018
Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of .BOT, a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) from Amazon. Customers can use .BOT domains to provide an identity and portal for their bots. Fitness bots, slack bots, e-commerce bots, and more can all benefit from an easy-to-access .BOT domain. The phrase “bot” was the 4th most registered […]
Apr 20, 2018
We launched AWS Support a full decade ago, with Gold and Silver plans focused on Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS. Starting from that initial offering, backed by a small team in Seattle, AWS Support now encompasses thousands of people working from more than 60 locations. A Quick Look Back Over the years, that […]
Apr 19, 2018
Many of today’s discussions around blockchain technology remind me of the classic Shimmer Floor Wax skit. According to Dan Aykroyd, Shimmer is a dessert topping. Gilda Radner claims that it is a floor wax, and Chevy Chase settles the debate and reveals that it actually is both! Some of the people that I talk to […]
Apr 18, 2018
Almost a decade ago, my colleague Deepak Singh introduced the AWS Public Datasets in his post Paging Researchers, Analysts, and Developers. I’m happy to report that Deepak is still an important part of the AWS team and that the Public Datasets program is still going strong! Today we are announcing a new take on open […]
Apr 13, 2018
If you build (or want to build) data-driven web and mobile apps and need real-time updates and the ability to work offline, you should take a look at . Announced in preview form at 2017 and described in depth here, AWS AppSync is designed for use in iOS, Android, JavaScript, and React Native apps. AWS […]
Apr 11, 2018
We have several upcoming tech talks in the month of April and early May. Come join us to learn about AWS services and solution offerings. We’ll have AWS experts online to help answer questions in real-time. Sign up now to learn more, we look forward to seeing you. Note – All sessions are free and […]
Apr 04, 2018
What happens when you combine the Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Edge Computing? Before I tell you, let’s review each one and discuss what AWS has to offer. Internet of Things (IoT) – Devices that connect the physical world and the digital one. The devices, often equipped with one or more types of sensors, […]
Apr 04, 2018
was designed to be the file system of choice for cloud-native applications that require shared access to file-based storage. We launched EFS in mid-2016 and have added several important features since then including on-premises access via Direct Connect and encryption of data at rest. We have also made EFS available in additional AWS Regions, most […]
Apr 04, 2018
Today we’re launching a new feature for (ACM), Private Certificate Authority (CA). This new service allows ACM to act as a private subordinate CA. Previously, if a customer wanted to use private certificates, they needed specialized infrastructure and security expertise that could be expensive to maintain and operate. ACM Private CA builds on ACM’s existing […]
Apr 04, 2018
There’s often tension between distributed and centralized control, especially in larger organizations. While a distributed control model allows teams to move fast and to respond to specialized local needs, a central model can provide the right level of oversight for global initiatives and challenges that span all teams. We’ve seen this challenge arise first-hand when […]
Apr 04, 2018
As I have discussed in the past, sophisticated AWS customers invariably control multiple AWS accounts. Some of these are the results of acquisitions or a holdover from bottom-up, departmental adoption of cloud computing. Others create multiple accounts in order to isolate developers, projects, or departments from each other. We strongly endorse this as a best […]
Apr 04, 2018
Today we’re launching AWS Secrets Manager which makes it easy to store and retrieve your secrets via API or the and rotate your credentials with built-in or custom functions. Managing application secrets like database credentials, passwords, or API Keys is easy when you’re working locally with one machine and one application. As you grow and […]
Apr 04, 2018
I’ve got two big pieces of news for anyone who stores and retrieves data in : New S3 One Zone-IA Storage Class – This new storage class is 20% less expensive than the existing Standard-IA storage class. It is designed to be used to store data that does not need the extra level of protection […]
Apr 04, 2018
At 2017 we launched Amazon Transcribe in private preview. Today we’re excited to make Amazon Transcribe generally available for all developers. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service (ASR) that makes it easy for developers to add speech to text capabilities to their applications. We’ve iterated on customer feedback in the preview to make […]
Apr 04, 2018
Today we’re excited to make Amazon Translate generally available. Late last year at my colleague Tara Walker wrote about a preview of a new AI service, . Starting today you can access Amazon Translate in , , , and with a 2 million character monthly free tier for the first 12 months and $15 per […]
Apr 04, 2018
Amazon SageMaker continues to iterate quickly and release new features on behalf of customers. Starting today, SageMaker adds support for many new instance types, local testing with the SDK, and Apache MXNet 1.1.0 and Tensorflow 1.6.0. Let’s take a quick look at each of these updates. New Instance Types Amazon SageMaker customers now have additional […]
Mar 28, 2018
now includes integrated service discovery. This makes it possible for an ECS service to automatically register itself with a predictable and friendly DNS name in . As your services scale up or down in response to load or container health, the Route 53 hosted zone is kept up to date, allowing other services to lookup […]
Mar 27, 2018
The team is back with another useful feature hot on the heels of encryption at rest. At 2017 we launched global tables and on-demand backup and restore of your DynamoDB tables and today we’re launching continuous backups with point-in-time recovery (PITR). You can enable continuous backups with a single click in the , a simple […]
Mar 26, 2018
Mid-march in the USA means millions of people watching, and betting on, college basketball (I live here but I didn’t make the rules). As the NCAA college championship continues I wanted to briefly highlight the work of Wesley Pasfield one of our Professional Services Machine Learning Specialists. Wesley was able to take data from kenpom.com […]
Mar 22, 2018
We launched EFS File Sync a few days before 2017 and I finally have time to tell you about it! If you need to move a large collection of files from an on-premises or in-cloud file system to , this tool is for you. Simple, single-threaded command line tools such as cp and rsync predate […]
Mar 22, 2018
Starting on March 8th you might have seen AWS Quest popping up in different places. Now that we are a bit over halfway through the game, we thought it would be a great time give everyone a peek behind the curtain. The whole idea started about a year ago during an casual conversation with Jeff […]
Mar 20, 2018
Today we’re releasing a new machine learning feature in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for detecting “hotspots” in your streaming data. We launched Kinesis Data Analytics in August of 2016 and we’ve continued to add features since. As you may already know, Kinesis Data Analytics is a fully managed real-time processing engine for streaming data that […]
Mar 19, 2018
As a follow-up to our earlier work to provide longer IDs for a small set of essential EC2 resources, we are now doing the same for the remaining EC2 resources, with a migration deadline of July 2018. You can opt-in on a per-user, per-region, per-type basis and verify that your code, regular expressions, database schemas, […]
Mar 18, 2018
Whew! March has been one crazy month for me and it is only half over. After a week with my wife in the Caribbean, we hopped on a non-stop Seattle to Tokyo flight so that I could speak at JAWS Days, Startup Day, and some internal events. We arrived home last Wednesday and I am […]
Mar 16, 2018
The AWS Community Heroes program helps shine a spotlight on some of the innovative work being done by rockstar AWS developers around the globe. Marrying cloud expertise with a passion for community building and education, these Heroes share their time and knowledge across social media and in-person events. Heroes also actively help drive content at Meetups, workshops, and conferences. […]
Mar 13, 2018
Earlier this year we made the AWS SDK developer guides available as GitHub repos (all found within the awsdocs organization) and invited interested parties to contribute changes and improvements in the form of pull requests. Today we are adding over 138 additional developer and user guides to the organization, and we are looking forward to […]
Mar 12, 2018
I am a regular and frequent user of , as are most of my colleagues. In addition to dozens of ongoing point-to-point sessions with individual colleagues, I participate in one chat room for the AWS Blog team and another for the AWS Evangelists. I attend several meetings per day, and use Amazon Chime’s conferencing feature […]
Mar 11, 2018
I’m writing this post from my hotel room in Tokyo while doing my best to fight jet lag! I’m here to speak at JAWS Days and Startup Day, and to meet with some local customers. I do want to remind you that the AWS Global Summit series is just about to start! With events planned […]
Mar 09, 2018
If you have been watching my weekly videos, you may have noticed an orange robot in the background from time to time. That’s Ozz, my robot friend and helper. Built from the ground up in my home laboratory, Ozz is an invaluable part of the AWS blogging process! Sadly, when we announced we are adding […]
Mar 07, 2018
Can you believe it’s already the month of March? With some great new Tech Talks available this month, there’s no better time to grow your knowledge about AWS services and solutions. AWS Online Tech Talks March 2018– Schedule Below is the full schedule for the live, online technical sessions being held during the month of […]
Mar 02, 2018
Kumar Venkateswar, Product Manager on the AWS ML Platforms Team, shares details on the announcement of Auto Scaling with Amazon SageMaker. With Amazon SageMaker, thousands of customers have been able to easily build, train and deploy their machine learning (ML) models. Today, we’re making it even easier to manage production ML models, with Auto Scaling […]
Feb 27, 2018
Are you planning to attend Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona (one of my favorite cities)? If so, please be sure to check out the connected car demo in Hall 5 Booth 5E41. The team has been working on a proof of concept with our friends at Vodafone and Saguna to show you how connected […]
Feb 22, 2018
is a scalable, cloud-based runtime environment for session-based multiplayer games. You simply upload a build of your game, tell which type of EC2 instances you’d like to host it on, and sit back while takes care of setting up sessions and maintaining a suitably-sized fleet of EC2 instances. This automatic scaling allows you to accommodate […]
Feb 21, 2018
Last year I suggested that you Get Ready for the AWS Serverless Application Repository and gave you a sneak peek. The Repository is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to discover, configure, and deploy applications and components on AWS. It is also an ideal venue for AWS partners, enterprise customers, and […]
Feb 12, 2018
The Amazon RDS team launched nearly 80 features in 2017. Some of them were covered in this blog, others on the , and the rest in What’s New or Forum posts. To wrap up my week, I thought it would be worthwhile to give you an organized recap. So here we go! Certification & Security […]
Feb 12, 2018
Note to readers! Starting next month, we will be publishing our monthly Hot Startups blog post on the AWS Startup Blog. Please come check us out. As visual communication—whether through social media channels like Instagram or white space-heavy product pages—becomes a central part of everyone’s life, accessible design platforms and tools become more and more […]
Feb 08, 2018
At 2017, Werner encouraged his audience to “Dance like nobody is watching, and to encrypt like everyone is:” The AWS team is always eager to add features that make it easier for you to protect your sensitive data and to help you to achieve your compliance objectives. For example, in 2017 we launched encryption at […]
Feb 08, 2018
I first told you about in late 2016 in my post Amazon Polly – Text to Speech in 47 Voices and 24 Languages. After that launch, we added support for Korean, five new voices, and made Polly available in all Regions in the aws partition. We also added whispering, speech marks, a timbre effect, and […]
Feb 05, 2018
I recently heard my manager (Ariel Kelman, VP of Marketing for AWS) talk about the important role that education plays in our work. In fact, he assigned it a significantly higher priority than traditional marketing activities that focus on leads or conversions. I’ve also heard our other leaders talk about their work to create highly […]
Jan 27, 2018
I hope that you have configured your AMIs and your current-generation EC2 instances to use the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) that I told you about back in mid-2016. The ENA gives you high throughput and low latency, while minimizing the load on the host processor. It is designed to work well in the presence of […]
Jan 22, 2018
I’m still catching up with the last couple of launches! Today I would like to tell you about inter-region VPC peering. You have been able to create peering connections between Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in the same AWS Region since early 2014 (read New VPC Peering for the Amazon Virtual Cloud to learn more). Once […]
Jan 19, 2018
We launched some important new EC2 instance types and features at . I’ve already told you about the M5, H1, T2 Unlimited and Bare Metal instances, and about Spot features such as Hibernation and the New Pricing Model. Randall told you about the Amazon Time Sync Service. Today I would like to tell you about […]
Jan 17, 2018
I’ve been talking about scalability for servers and other cloud resources for a very long time! Back in 2006, I wrote “This is the new world of scalable, on-demand web services. Pay for what you need and use, and not a byte more.” Shortly after we launched , we made it easy for you to […]
Jan 16, 2018
We expand AWS by picking a geographic area (which we call a Region) and then building multiple, isolated Availability Zones in that area. Each Availability Zone (AZ) has multiple Internet connections and power connections to multiple grids. Today I am happy to announce that we are opening our 50th AWS Availability Zone, with the addition […]
Jan 10, 2018
Last week I attended a talk given by Bryan Mistele, president of Seattle-based INRIX. Bryan’s talk provided a glimpse into the future of transportation, centering around four principle attributes, often abbreviated as ACES: Autonomous – Cars and trucks are gaining the ability to scan and to make sense of their environments and to navigate without […]
Jan 08, 2018
Happy New Year! Kick of 2018 right by expanding your AWS knowledge with a great batch of new Tech Talks. We’re covering some of the biggest launches from re:Invent including Amazon Neptune, Amazon Rekognition Video, AWS Fargate, AWS Cloud9, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, AWS PrivateLink, AWS Single-Sign On and more! January 2018– Schedule Noted below […]
Jan 02, 2018
Happy 2018! I am looking forward to getting back to my usual routine, working with our teams to learn about their upcoming launches and then writing blog posts to bring the news to you. Right now I am still catching up on a few launches and announcements from late 2017. First on the list for […]
Dec 21, 2017
We recently made some updates to AWS Training and Certification to make it easier for you to build your cloud skills and to learn about many of the new services that we launched at . Free AWS Digital Training You can now find over 100 new digital training classes at aws.training, all with unlimited access […]
Dec 19, 2017
I’m getting ready to wrap up my work for the year, cleaning up my inbox and catching up on a few recent AWS launches that happened at and shortly after . Last week we launched . This is modern version of Linux, designed to meet the security, stability, and productivity needs of enterprise environments while […]
Dec 19, 2017
Today we are launching our 18th AWS Region, our fourth in Europe. Located in the Paris area, AWS customers can use this Region to better serve customers in and around France. The Details The new Region provides a broad suite of AWS services including , , , , , , , , , , , […]
Dec 14, 2017
In the past I’ve talked about several agents, deaemons, and scripts that you could use to collect system metrics and log files for your Windows and Linux instances and on-premise services and publish them to . The data collected by this somewhat disparate collection of tools gave you visibility into the status and behavior of […]
Dec 14, 2017
Whew – I am just getting back in to blogging after a quick recovery from ! I’m happy to start things off with yet another AWS price reduction, this one for four instance families in the Region. Effective December 1, 2017 we are reducing prices for On-Demand and Reserved Instances as follows: M4 – Up […]
Dec 12, 2017
Today we launched our 17th Region globally, and the second in China. The AWS Region, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD), is generally available now and provides customers another option to run applications and store data on AWS in China. The Details At launch, the new China (Ningxia) Region, operated by […]
Dec 07, 2017
My colleague Sandy Carter delivered the Enterprise Innovation State of the Union last week at . She wrote the guest post below to recap the announcements that she made from the stage. “I want my company to innovate, but I am not convinced we can execute successfully.” Far too many times I have heard this […]
Nov 09, 2017
The AWS Community Heroes program helps shine a spotlight on some of the innovative work being done by rockstar AWS developers around the globe. Marrying cloud expertise with a passion for community building and education, these heroes share their time and knowledge across social media and through in-person events. Heroes also actively help drive community-led tracks at conferences. […]
Nov 09, 2017
Amazon Elasticache makes it easy to for you to set up a fast, in-memory data store and cache. With support for the two most popular open source offerings (Redis and Memcached), ElastiCache supports the demanding needs of game leaderboards, in-memory analytics, and large-scale messaging.
Nov 08, 2017
This guest post is by Colm MacCárthaigh, Senior Engineer for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Since VPC Endpoints launched in 2015, creating Endpoints has been a popular way to securely access S3 and DynamoDB from an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without the need for an Internet gateway, a NAT gateway, or firewall proxies. With VPC […]
Nov 07, 2017
Back in 2006, when I announced S3, I wrote ” Further, each block is protected by an ACL (Access Control List) allowing the developer to keep the data private, share it for reading, or share it for reading and writing, as desired.” Starting from that initial model, with private buckets and ACLs to grant access, […]
Nov 07, 2017
We launched Convertible Reserved Instances for EC2 just about a year ago. The Convertible RIs give you a significant discount (typically 54% when compared to On-Demand) and allow you to change the instance family and other parameters associated with the RI if your needs change. Today we are introducing Convertible RIs with a 1-year term, […]
Nov 07, 2017
The original AWS Price List API, as described in New – AWS Price List API, gave you access to prices in JSON and CSV form by way of structured URLs. While this worked well for some types of cost management tools, the size and complexity of the files made them difficult to download and tedious […]
Nov 06, 2017
I’m thrilled to announce that the new compute-intensive C5 instances are available today in six sizes for launch in three AWS regions! These instances are designed for compute-heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. The new instances offer a 25% price/performance improvement over […]
Nov 04, 2017
So many launches and cloud innovations, that you simply may not believe. In order to catch up on some service launches and features, this post will be a round-up of some cool releases that happened this summer and through the end of September. The launches and features I want to share with you today are: […]
Nov 01, 2017
As I was preparing to write this post, I took a nostalgic look at the blog post I wrote when we launched back in 2012. We created Direct Connect after our enterprise customers asked us to allow them to establish dedicated connections to an AWS Region in pursuit of enhanced privacy, additional data transfer bandwidth, […]
Nov 01, 2017
Nine years ago I showed you how you could Distribute Your Content with Amazon CloudFront. We launched CloudFront in 2008 with 14 Points of Presence and have been expanding rapidly ever since. Today I am pleased to announce the opening of our 100th Point of Presence, the fifth one in Tokyo and the sixth in […]
Oct 31, 2017
In 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that healthcare spending made up 17.8% of the U.S. GDP – that’s almost $3.2 trillion or $9,990 per person. By 2025, the CMS estimates this number will increase to nearly 20%. As cloud technology evolves in the healthcare and life science industries, we are […]
Oct 31, 2017
Our Health Customer Stories page lists just a few of the many customers that are building and running healthcare and life sciences applications that run on AWS. Customers like Verge Health, Care Cloud, and Orion Health trust AWS with Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifying Information (PII) as part of their efforts to comply […]
Oct 30, 2017
Leaves are crunching under my boots, Halloween is tomorrow, and pumpkin is having its annual moment in the sun – it’s fall everybody! And just in time to celebrate, we have whipped up a fresh batch of pumpkin spice Tech Talks. Grab your planner (Outlook calendar) and pencil these puppies in. This month we are […]
Oct 26, 2017
Driven by customer demand and made possible by on-going advances in the state-of-the-art, we’ve come a long way since the original m1.small instance that we launched in 2006, with instances that are emphasize compute power, burstable performance, memory size, local storage, and accelerated computing. The New P3 Today we are making the next generation of […]
Oct 25, 2017
Late last year I told you about our plans to add PostgreSQL compatibility to . We launched the private beta shortly after that announcement, and followed it up earlier this year with an open preview. We’ve received lots of great feedback during the beta and the preview and have done our best to make sure […]
Oct 19, 2017
You have long had the ability to tag your AWS resources and to see cost breakouts on a per-tag basis. Cost allocation was launched in 2012 (see AWS Cost Allocation for Customer Bills) and we have steadily added support for additional services, most recently DynamoDB (Introducing Cost Allocation Tags for Amazon DynamoDB), Lambda (AWS Lambda […]
Oct 19, 2017
With just 40 days remaining before begins, my colleagues and I want to share some tips that will help you to make the most of your time in Las Vegas. As always, our focus is on training and education, mixed in with some after-hours fun and recreation for balance. Locations, Locations, Locations The re:Invent Campus […]
Oct 17, 2017
Starting today, you can connect to your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains from within an Amazon VPC without the need for NAT instances or Internet gateways. VPC support for Amazon ES is easy to configure, reliable, and offers an extra layer of security. With VPC support, traffic between other services and Amazon ES stays entirely within […]
Oct 16, 2017
I first told you about last year in my blog post, Amazon Lightsail – the Power of AWS, the Simplicity of a VPS. Since last year’s launch, thousands of customers have used Lightsail to get started with AWS, launching Linux-based Virtual Private Servers. Today we are adding support for Windows-based Virtual Private Servers. You can […]
Oct 12, 2017
Post by Dr. Matt Wood Today, AWS and Microsoft announced Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface which allows developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models, without compromising performance. Gluon provides a clear, concise API for defining machine learning models using a collection of pre-built, optimized neural network components. Developers who […]
Oct 10, 2017
Today we’re launching support for multiple TLS/SSL certificates on Application Load Balancers (ALB) using Server Name Indication (SNI). You can now host multiple TLS secured applications, each with its own TLS certificate, behind a single load balancer. In order to use SNI, all you need to do is bind multiple certificates to the same secure […]
Oct 06, 2017
Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (launched just a few days ago) includes lots of powerful new features including support for graph databases, automatic database tuning, and the ability to create clusterless Always On Availability Groups. It can also be run on Linux and in Docker containers. Run on EC2 I’m happy to announce that you can […]
Oct 05, 2017
I often give presentations on Amazon’s culture of innovation, and start out with a slide that features a revealing quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: I love to sit down with our customers and to learn how we have empowered their creativity and to pursue their dreams. Earlier this year I chatted with Patrick Brandt […]
Oct 03, 2017
I’m happy to announce that the latest version of the Amazon Linux AMI (2017.09) is now available in all AWS Regions for all current-generation EC2 instances. The AMI contains a supported and maintained Linux image that is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance environment for applications running on EC2. Easy Upgrade You can […]
Sep 29, 2017
As consumers continue to demand faster, simpler, and more on-the-go services, FinTech companies are responding with ever more innovative solutions to fit everyone’s needs and to improve customer experience. This month, we are excited to feature the following startups—all of whom are disrupting traditional financial services in unique ways: Acorns – allowing customers to invest […]
Sep 28, 2017
My colleague Sanjay Padhi shared the guest post below in order to recognize an important milestone in the use of EC2 Spot Instances. A group of researchers from Clemson University achieved a remarkable milestone while studying topic modeling, an important component of machine learning associated with natural language processing, breaking the record for creating the […]
Sep 26, 2017
Last week launched AWS Global SMS two-way text messaging and we didn’t get an opportunity to cover the launch. AWS Pinpoint users can now programmaticaly respond to their end-users’ text messages. Users can provision both short codes and long codes (10-digit phone numbers) which send inbound messages to an SNS topic. Let’s take a look. […]
Sep 25, 2017
Last year we launched new AWS Regions in Canada, India, Korea, the UK, and the United States, and announced that new regions are coming to China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the US throughout 2017 and 2018. Middle East Region by Early 2019 Today, I am happy to announce that […]
Sep 20, 2017
As I have noted in the past, the AWS Blog Team is working hard to make sure that you know about as many AWS launches and publications as possible, without totally burying you in content! As part of our balancing act, we will occasionally publish catch-up posts to clear our queues and to bring more […]
Sep 19, 2017
EC2 Spot Instances give you access to spare EC2 compute capacity at up to 90% off of the On-Demand rates. Starting with the ability to request a specific number of instances of a particular size, we made Spot Instances even more useful and flexible with support for Spot Fleets and Auto Scaling Spot Fleets, allowing […]
Sep 18, 2017
Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power. When we launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news. The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about […]
Sep 14, 2017
The wait is over. September and October’s Partner Webinars have officially arrived! In case you missed the intro last month, the AWS Partner Webinar Series is a selection of live and recorded presentations covering a broad range of topics at varying technical levels and scale. A little different from our AWS Online TechTalks, each AWS Partner […]
Sep 14, 2017
The third annual Prime Day set another round of records for global orders, topping Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day in Amazon retail history. Over the course of the 30 hour event, tens of millions of Prime members purchased things like Echo Dots, Fire tablets, programmable pressure cookers, espresso machines, rechargeable […]
Sep 13, 2017
Earlier this year I told you about our plan to launch EC2 instances with up to 16 TB of memory. Today I am happy to announce that the new x1e.32xlarge instances with 4 TB of DDR4 memory are available in four AWS Regions. As I wrote in my earlier post, these instances are designed to […]
Sep 07, 2017
(ELB) has been an important part of AWS since 2009, when it was launched as part of a three-pack that also included and . Since that time we have added many features, and also introduced the Application Load Balancer. Designed to support application-level, content-based routing to applications that run in containers, Application Load Balancers pair […]
Sep 06, 2017
As a school supply aficionado, the month of September has always held a special place in my heart. Nothing sets the tone for success like getting a killer deal on pens and a crisp college ruled notebook. Even if back to school shopping trips have secured a seat in your distant memory, this is still […]
Aug 31, 2017
I told you about the new AWS Application Load Balancer last year and showed you how to use it to do implement Layer 7 (application) routing to EC2 instances and to microservices running in containers. Some of our customers are building hybrid applications as part of a longer-term move to AWS. These customers have told […]
Aug 31, 2017
There’s no doubt about it – Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and how it operates. Across industries, organizations from startups to Fortune 500s are embracing AI to develop new products, services, and opportunities that are more efficient and accessible for their consumers. From driverless cars to better preventative healthcare to smart home devices, AI […]
Aug 31, 2017
I’m often impressed when I look back to the early days of EC2 and see just how many features from the launch have survived until today. AMIs, Availability Zones, KeyPairs, Security Groups, and Security Group Rules were all present at the beginning, as was pay-as-you-go usage. Even though we have made innumerable additions to the […]
Aug 30, 2017
Graphical rendering is a compute-intensive task that is, as they say, embarrassingly parallel. Looked at another way, this means that there’s a more or less linear relationship between the number of processors that are working on the problem and the overall wall-clock time that it takes to complete the task. In a creative endeavor such […]
Aug 30, 2017
Today, I want to quickly show off a feature of that I find incredibly useful: Fast Database Cloning. By taking advantage of Aurora’s underlying distributed storage engine you’re able to quickly and cheaply create a copy-on-write clone of your database. In my career I’ve frequently spent time waiting on some representative sample of data to […]
Aug 30, 2017
Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs for Windows. An Elastic GPU is a GPU resource that you can attach to your instance to accelerate the graphics performance of your applications. Elastic GPUs come in medium (1GB), large (2GB), xlarge (4GB), and 2xlarge (8GB) sizes and are lower cost […]
Aug 28, 2017
Last year I told you about the work that we are doing with our friends at VMware to build the VMware Cloud on AWS. As I shared at the time, this is a native, fully-managed offering that runs the VMware SDDC stack directly on bare-metal AWS infrastructure that maintains the elasticity and security customers have […]
Aug 25, 2017
Recently I was reading articles on Forbes.com, as well as, some other tech-focused websites around mobile user experience, engagement, and development. Almost every article, it mentions that the success of a mobile app development project is dependent upon the delivery of a well-designed user onboarding experience and an engaging mobile interface. An Inc.com article states […]
Aug 23, 2017
We (the AWS Blog Team) work to maintain a delicate balance between coverage and volume! On the one hand, we want to make sure that you are aware of as many features as possible. On the other, we don’t want to bury you in blog posts. As a happy medium between these two extremes we […]
Aug 21, 2017
Our customers use Cost Explorer to better understand and manage their AWS spending, making heavy use of the reporting, analytics, and visualization tools that it provides. We launched Cost Explorer in 2014 with a focus on simplicity – single click signup, preconfigured default views, and a clean user interface (take a look back at The […]
Aug 21, 2017
I’ve been earning a living in the technology industry since 1977, when I worked in one of the first computer stores in the country as a teenager. Looking back over the past 40 years, and realizing that the Altair, IMSAI, Sol-20, and North Star Horizon machines that I learned about, built, debugged, programmed, sold, and […]
Aug 18, 2017
A couple of months ago on the blog, I announced the AWS Chatbot Challenge in conjunction with Slack. The AWS Chatbot Challenge was an opportunity to build a unique chatbot that helped to solve a problem or that would add value for its prospective users. The mission was to build a conversational, natural language chatbot […]
Aug 18, 2017
Today we released Dedicated IP Pools for . With dedicated IP pools, you can specify which dedicated IP addresses to use for sending different types of email. Dedicated IP pools let you use your SES for different tasks. For instance, you can send transactional emails from one set of IPs and you can send marketing […]
Aug 16, 2017
Welcome to mid-August, everyone–the season of beach days, family road trips, and an inbox full of “out of office” emails from your coworkers. Just in case spending time indoors has you feeling a bit blue, we’ve got a piping hot batch of AWS Online Tech Talks for you to check out. Kick up your feet, grab a […]
Aug 16, 2017
Starting today (VPC) Endpoints for are available in all public AWS regions. You can provision an endpoint right away using the or the . There are no additional costs for a VPC Endpoint for DynamoDB. Many AWS customers run their applications within a (VPC) for security or isolation reasons. Previously, if you wanted your EC2 […]
Aug 15, 2017
We love bringing our customers helpful information and we have another cool series we are excited to tell you about. The AWS Partner Webinar Series is a selection of live and recorded presentations covering a broad range of topics at varying technical levels and scale. A little different from our AWS Online TechTalks, each AWS […]
Aug 14, 2017
Whew – what a week! Tara, Randall, Ana, and I have been working around the clock to create blog posts for the announcements that we made at the AWS Summit in New York. Here’s a summary to help you to get started: Amazon Macie – This new service helps you to discover, classify, and secure […]
Aug 14, 2017
When Jeff and I heard about this service, we both were curious on the meaning of the name Macie. Of course, Jeff being a great researcher looked up the name Macie and found that the name Macie has two meanings. It has both French and English (UK) based origin, it is typically a girl name, […]
Aug 14, 2017
We launched in production form a little over a year ago (see Amazon Elastic File System – Production Ready in Three Regions for more information). Later in the year we added On-Premises access via Direct Connect and made EFS available in the Region, following up this year with availability in the and Regions. Encryption at […]
Aug 14, 2017
Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of . is a fully managed, serverless, and cloud-optimized extract, transform and load (ETL) service. is different from other ETL services and platforms in a few very important ways. First, is “serverless” – you don’t need to provision or manage any resources and you only pay for […]
Aug 14, 2017
Our customers run an incredible variety of mission-critical workloads on AWS, many of which process and store sensitive data. As detailed in our Overview of Security Processes document, AWS customers have access to an ever-growing set of options for encrypting and protecting this data. For example, supports encryption of data at rest and in transit, […]
Aug 14, 2017
I have exciting news for all Amazon Web Services customers! I have been waiting patiently to share this great news with all of you and finally, the wait is over. is now enabled by default for ALL CUSTOMERS and will provide visibility into the past seven days of account activity without the need for you […]
Aug 14, 2017
captures the state of your AWS resources and the relationships between them. Among other features, it allows you to select a resource and then view a timeline of configuration changes that affect the resource (read Track AWS Resource Relationships With AWS Config to learn more). AWS Config rules extends Config with a powerful rule system, […]
Aug 14, 2017
About once a week, I speak to current and potential AWS customers in our Seattle Executive Briefing Center. While I generally focus on our innovation process, we sometimes discuss other topics, including application migration. When enterprises decide to migrate their application portfolios they want to do it in a structured, orderly fashion. These portfolios typically […]
Aug 08, 2017
With just 110 days left until November 27, 2017, my colleagues and I are working hard to get ready for re:Invent 2017. I have not yet started on my blog posts or on any new LEGO creations, but I have taken a look at a very preliminary list of launches and am already gearing up […]
Aug 03, 2017
I’m really excited to share some recent enhancements to two of my favorite services: Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex. is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost. is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. By integrating these […]
Aug 01, 2017
Imagine if you will, you have obtained a new position at Unicorn.Rentals, a company that specializes in LARM, Legendary Animal Rental Market. Given the chance, what child wouldn’t happily exchange anything for the temporary use of a unicorn? What parent could refuse the opportunity to make their children happy? Let’s estimate the year to be […]
Jul 27, 2017
Welcome back to another month of Hot Startups! Every day, startups are creating innovative and exciting businesses, applications, and products around the world. Each month we feature a handful of startups doing cool things using AWS. July is all about learning! These companies are focused on providing access to tools and resources to expand knowledge […]
Jul 26, 2017
has been an important part of AWS since early 2009! Launched as part of a three-pack that also included and , CloudWatch has evolved into a very powerful monitoring service for AWS resources and the applications that you run on the . CloudWatch custom metrics (launched way back in 2011) allow you to store business […]
Jul 26, 2017
AWS Training allows you to learn from the experts so you can advance your knowledge with practical skills and get more out of the . Today I am happy to announce that three of our most popular training bootcamps (a staple at and ) are becoming part of our permanent instructor-led training portfolio: Building a […]
Jul 25, 2017
We launched Amazon AppStream 2.0 at re:Invent 2016. This application streaming service allows you to deliver Windows applications to a desktop browser. AppStream 2.0 is fully managed and provides consistent, scalable performance by running applications on general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized streaming instances, with delivery via NICE DCV – a secure, high-fidelity streaming […]
Jul 25, 2017
helps AWS customers implement an Infrastructure as Code model. Instead of setting up their environments and applications by hand, they build a template and use it to create all of the necessary resources, collectively known as a CloudFormation stack. This model removes opportunities for manual error, increases efficiency, and ensures consistent configurations over time. Today […]
Jul 20, 2017
It is now essential, with the fast paced lives we all seem to lead, to find tools to make it easier to manage our time, our home, and our work. With the pace of technology, the need for technologists to find management tools to easily manage their systems is just as important. With the introduction […]
Jul 19, 2017
Hightail – formerly YouSendIt – streamlines how creative work is reviewed, improved, and approved by helping more than 50 million professionals around the world get great content in front of their audiences faster. Since its debut in 2004 as a file sharing company, Hightail shifted its strategic direction to focus on delivering value-added creative collaboration […]
Jul 18, 2017
In this age of smart homes, big data, IoT devices, mobile phones, social networks, chatbots, and game consoles, streaming data scenarios are everywhere. Amazon Kinesis Streams enables you to build custom applications that can capture, process, analyze, and store terabytes of data per hour from thousands of streaming data sources. Since Amazon Kinesis Streams allows […]
Jul 18, 2017
It is time for an update on our on-going effort to make AWS a great host for healthcare and life sciences applications. As you can see from our Health Customer Stories page, Philips, VergeHealth, and Cambia (to choose a few) trust AWS with Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifying Information (PII) as part of […]
Jul 17, 2017
Late last year I announced a preview of and talked about how you could use it to intelligently process HTTP requests at locations that are close (latency-wise) to your customers. Developers who applied and gained access to the preview have been making good use of it, and have provided us with plenty of very helpful […]
Jul 14, 2017
I first wrote about the benefits of GPU-powered computing in 2013 when we launched the G2 instance type. Since that launch, AWS customers have used the G2 instances to deliver high performance graphics to mobile devices, TV sets, and desktops. Today we are taking a step forward and launching the G3 instance type. Powered by […]
Jul 13, 2017
This month we are hosting two joint AWS-Partner webinars about how executing DevOps practices on AWS can automate configuration management and leave time for innovation. Many organizations adopt DevOps practices to manage their cloud and on-premises environments for greater scalability, speed, and reliability and these webinars give you a chance to hear directly from the […]
Jul 12, 2017
I recently told you about DynamoDB Auto Scaling and showed you how it uses multiple CloudWatch Alarms to automate capacity management for DynamoDB tables. Behind the scenes, this feature makes use of a more general Application Auto Scaling model that we plan to put to use across several different AWS services over time. The new […]
Jul 11, 2017
If you are anything like me, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning are completely fascinating and exciting topics. As AI, ML, and Deep Learning become more widely used, for me it means that the science fiction written by Dr. Issac Asimov, the robotics and medical advancements in Star Wars, and the technologies […]
Jul 11, 2017
A few months ago, I introduced the AWS CodeStar service, which allows you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS. AWS CodeStar helps development teams to increase the pace of releasing applications and solutions while reducing some of the challenges of building great software. When the CodeStar service launched in April, it was […]
Jul 10, 2017
I realized at a young age that I really liked writing those special statements that would control the computer and make it work in the manner in which I desired. This technique of controlling the computer and building things on the machine, I learned from my teachers was called writing code, and it fascinated me. […]
Jul 07, 2017
It’s unbelievable that 2017 has flown by so quickly, yet here we are already in the month of July. A little-known fact about the 7th month of the year is that its name, July, is in honor of the Roman general, Julius Cæsar. The Roman State named the month on his behalf since it the […]
Jul 07, 2017
Hot on the heels of some other great updates is another vital enhancement: the ability to use Patch Manager on Linux instances! We launched Patch Manager with SSM at re:Invent in 2016 and Linux support was a commonly requested feature. Starting today we can support patch manager in: Amazon Linux 2014.03 and later (2015.03 and […]
Jul 06, 2017
Are you aware of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and the work that they do to improve the security of web applications? Among many other things, they publish a list of the 10 most critical application security flaws, known as the OWASP Top 10. The release candidate for the 2017 version contains a […]
Jul 05, 2017
We launched CloudWatch Dashboards a couple of years ago. In the post that I wrote for the launch, I showed you how to interactively create a dashboard that displayed chosen CloudWatch metrics in graphical form. After the launch, we added additional features including a full screen mode, a dark theme, control over the range of […]
Jul 05, 2017
I’m happy to be able to announce the 62nd AWS price reduction, this one for Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition on EC2. Many enterprise workloads run on Microsoft Windows, primarily on-premises or in corporate data centers. We believe that AWS is the best place to build, deploy, scale, and manage Windows applications due to the […]
Jun 30, 2017
CloudWatch Events allow you to track and respond to changes in your AWS resources. You get a near real-time stream of events that you can route to one or more targets ( functions, streams, Amazon SNS topics, and more) using rules. The events that are generated depend on the particular AWS service. For example, here […]
Jun 30, 2017
Even though we have published 123 posts so far this year, we simply don’t have the time to cover every significant AWS launch. Also, the newer services are often richer and take more space to describe, adding to our workload. This post (and others to follow each quarter) will outline some of the launches that […]
Jun 29, 2017
The AWS Community Heroes program seeks to recognize and honor the most engaged Amazon Web Services developers who have had a positive impact in the global community. If you are interested in learning more about the AWS Community Heroes program or curious about ways to get involved with your local AWS community, please click the […]
Jun 29, 2017
Thanks for stopping by for another round of AWS Hot Startups! This month we are featuring: CloudRanger – helping companies understand the cloud with visual representation. quintly – providing social media analytics for brands on a single dashboard. Tango Card – reinventing rewards programs for businesses and their customers worldwide. Don’t forget to check out […]
Jun 29, 2017
Are you tired of hearing me talk about yet? I hope not, because we have a lot of customer-driven additions on the roadmap! Our customers in the developer and analyst community have been asking for a workstation-class machine that will allow them to take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of . Developers want […]
Jun 28, 2017
The AWS Developer Tools Team has been hard at work on the AWS SDK for Java and is launching a Developer Preview of version 2.0 today. This version is a major rewrite of the older, 1.11.x codebase. Built on top of Java 8 with a focus on consistency, immutability and ease of use, the new […]
Jun 26, 2017
I’ve already told you about and described how it uses deep neural network models to analyze images by detecting objects, scenes, and faces. Today I am happy to tell you that is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. To learn more, read the Amazon Rekognition FAQ, and the Amazon Rekognition Product Details, review […]
Jun 22, 2017
The bill that you receive for your use of AWS in July will include a change in the way that charges are presented. The CloudWatch team made this change in order to make your bill simpler and easier to understand. Consolidating Charges In the past, charges for your usage of CloudWatch were split between two […]
Jun 21, 2017
Earlier this year I told you about Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), a fully-managed caching service that sits in front of (logically speaking) your tables. DAX returns cached responses in microseconds, making it a great fit for eventually-consistent read-intensive workloads. DAX supports the DynamoDB API, and is seamless and easy to use. As a managed service, […]
Jun 21, 2017
AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps to protect your application from many different types of application-layer attacks that involve requests that are malicious or malformed. As I showed you when I first wrote about this service (New – AWS WAF), you can define rules that match cross-site scripting, IP address, SQL injection, size, or content […]
Jun 21, 2017
Last year we launched new AWS Regions in Canada, India, Korea, the UK (London), and the United States (Ohio), and announced that new regions are coming to France (Paris), China (Ningxia), and Sweden (Stockholm). Coming to Hong Kong in 2018 Today, I am happy to be able to tell you that we are planning to […]
Jun 20, 2017
lets AWS customers find and use products and services offered by members of the . Some marketplace offerings are billed on an hourly basis, many with a cost-saving annual option designed to line up with the procurement cycles of our enterprise customers. Other offerings are available in SaaS (Software as a Service) form and are […]
Jun 19, 2017
allows you to access a virtual desktop in the cloud from the web and from a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices. This flexibility makes WorkSpaces ideal for environments where users have the ability to use their existing devices (often known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device). In these environments, organizations sometimes need […]
Jun 16, 2017
Every product planning session at AWS revolves around customers. We do our best to listen and to learn, and to use what we hear to build the roadmaps for future development. Approximately 90% of the items on the roadmap originate with customer requests and are designed to meet specific needs and requirements that they share […]
Jun 14, 2017
Box is a cloud-based file sharing and content management system, with an API that recently became available in AWS Marketplace (Box Platform – Cloud Content Management APIs). With an array of features for collaboration and an emphasis on security, Box has found a home in many enterprises (see their success stories page for a list). […]
Jun 14, 2017
has more than one hundred thousand customers, spanning a wide range of industries and use cases. These customers depend on DynamoDB’s consistent performance at any scale and presence in 16 geographic regions around the world. A recent trend we’ve been observing is customers using DynamoDB to power their serverless applications. This is a good match: […]
Jun 14, 2017
We’re continuing to iterate on the service based on customer feedback and today we’re excited to release a set of tools to help you quickly dive deep on latencies in your applications. Visual Node and Edge latency distribution graphs are shown in a handy new “Service Details” side bar in your X-Ray Service Map. The […]
Jun 14, 2017
The guest post below, written by Ananth Vaidyanathan (Senior Product Manager for EC2 Systems Manager) and Rich Urmston (Senior Director of Cloud Architecture at Pegasystems) shows you how to use EC2 Run Command to manage a large collection of EC2 instances without having to resort to SSH. Enterprises often have several managed environments and thousands […]
Jun 13, 2017
gives AWS customers a place to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the AWS Cloud. The first AWS GovCloud (US) Region was launched in 2011 and is located on the west coast of the US. I’m happy to announce that we are working on a second Region that we expect to open in 2018. […]
Jun 08, 2017
We launched at re:Invent (Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning) and added Image Moderation earlier this year. Today we are adding celebrity recognition! Rekognition has been trained to identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media. […]
Jun 07, 2017
I first told you about in the post that I published during re:Invent (AWS Greengrass – Ubiquitous Real-World Computing). We launched a limited preview of at that time and invited you to sign up if you were interested. As I noted at the time, many AWS customers want to collect and process data out in […]
Jun 06, 2017
Surely, some of you have contemplated how you would survive the possible Zombie apocalypse or how you would build your exciting new startup to disrupt the transportation industry when Unicorn haven is uncovered. Well, there is no need to worry; I know just the thing to get you prepared to handle both of those scenarios: […]
Jun 02, 2017
AWS customers can use to establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. This gives them a more consistent network experience than a shared, Internet-based connection along with increased throughput and the potential to reduce network costs. We have added several new Direct Connect locations already this year, and are adding even more […]
Jun 02, 2017
I am a big believer in hands-on experience. Except under very rare circumstances, the posts in my blog are written only after I have used the service in question. If you happened to read I Love My Amazon WorkSpace, you know that is one of my most important productivity tools. I would like to tell […]
May 31, 2017
Earlier this year I told you about Cloud Directory, our cloud-native directory for hierarchical data and told you how it was designed to store large amounts of strongly typed hierarchical data. Because Cloud Directory can scale to store hundreds of millions of objects, it is a great fit for many kinds of cloud and mobile […]
May 31, 2017
lets you launch Virtual Private Servers on AWS with just a few clicks. With prices starting at $5 per month, takes care of the heavy lifting and gives you a simple way to build and host applications. As I showed you in my re:Invent post (Amazon Lightsail – The Power of AWS, the Simplicity of […]
May 30, 2017
We are making two important updates to the AWS Certification program today. We are introducing two new AWS Certification Specialty Exams and our new AWS Certification Benefits Program, giving you another way to validate your skills and to showcase your expertise. New AWS Certification Specialty Exams Our new AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty and […]
May 30, 2017
As the sixth month of the year, June is significant in that it is not only my birth month (very special), but it contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours. In the […]
May 30, 2017
April showers bring May startups! This month we have three hot startups for you to check out. Keep reading to find out what they’re up to, and how they’re using AWS to do it. Today’s post features the following startups: Lobster – an AI-powered platform connecting creative social media users to professionals. Visii – helping […]
May 23, 2017
Today seems like a good time to recap some of the features that we have added to over the last year or so, and to share some customer success stories and code with you! The service makes it easy for you to run any number of Docker containers across a managed cluster of EC2 instances, […]
May 23, 2017
allows you to create persistent block storage volumes for your Amazon EC2 instances. The volumes offer consistent, low-latency performance and a choice of volume types. You can take snapshot backups of your EBS volumes, keep them for as long as you would like, and then restore them to a fresh volume. AWS Billing and Cost […]
May 22, 2017
AWS Training and Certification can help you get more out of the . The new AWS Training and Certification Portal allows you to access and manage your training and certification activities, progress, and benefits – all in one place: Previously, you had to rely on multiple websites to find and manage training and certification offerings. […]
May 22, 2017
Do you know about the AWS Support Knowledge Center? It contains answers to some of the most frequently asked questions and other requests asked of our support team. Many of the answers even include a short video that serves to illustrate the process or to provide additional info on the topic. For example, I recently […]
May 18, 2017
We launched the AWS Region in Frankfurt in the fall of 2014 and opened the AWS Marketplace for the Region the next year. Our customers in Germany come in all shapes and sizes: startups, mid-market, enterprise, and public sector. These customers have made great use of the new Region, building and running applications and businesses […]
May 16, 2017
Today we’re announcing general availability of support for . As you may already know from Jeff’s GA POST, X-Ray is an AWS service for analyzing the execution and performance behavior of distributed applications. Traditional debugging methods don’t work so well for microservice based applications, in which there are multiple, independent components running on different services. […]
May 15, 2017
Several times each month, I speak to AWS customers at our Executive Briefing Center in Seattle. I describe our innovation process and talk about how the roadmap for each AWS offering is driven by customer requests and feedback. A good example of this is our work to make AWS a great home for SAP’s portfolio […]
May 11, 2017
Twitch is one of the leading community streaming video platforms today for developers, gamers, and the artists. Each day, millions visit Twitch to watch and discuss their passions by joining live sessions with other passionate online streamers. Amazon Web Services has joined the fun by adding the AWS Twitch Channel this past November to bring […]
May 10, 2017
Spring has officially sprung. As you enjoy the blossoming of May flowers, it may be worthy to also note some of the great tech talks blossoming online during the month of May. This month’s AWS Online Tech Talks features sessions on topics like AI, DevOps, Data, and Serverless just to name a few. May 2017 […]
May 09, 2017
My colleague Jed Sundwall runs the AWS Public Datasets program. He wrote the guest post below to tell you about an important new dataset that is available as an Amazon RDS Snapshot. In the post, Jed introduces the dataset and shows you how to create an Amazon RDS DB Instance from the snapshot. I am […]
May 05, 2017
Spring is in the air, new technologies are budding, and the community is buzzing. Which means it’s also springtime in the city by the bay and AWS is thrilled to announce an exciting event, AWS Community Day. AWS Community Day is a community-led event in San Francisco where AWS Community Heroes, user group leaders, and […]
May 05, 2017
I first told you about this past February (Amazon Chime – Unified Communications Service) and told you how I connect and collaborate with people all over the world. Since the launch, Amazon Chime has quickly become the communication tool of choice within the AWS team. I participate in multiple person-to-person and group chats throughout the […]
May 03, 2017
As AWS grows, we continue to find ways to make it an even better value. We work with our suppliers to drive down costs while also finding ways to build hardware and software that is increasingly more efficient and cost-effective. In addition to reducing our prices on a regular and frequent basis, we also give […]
May 01, 2017
At we have had a number of HIPAA eligible service announcements. Patrick Combes, the Healthcare and Life Sciences Global Technical Leader at AWS, and Aaron Friedman, a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, have written this post to tell you all about it. -Ana We are pleased to announce that the following […]
Apr 28, 2017
Spring is here, the flowers are blooming and Tina Barr is back with more great startups for you to check out! -Ana Welcome back to another month of hot AWS-powered startups! Today we have three exciting startups: Beekeeper – simplifying employee communication in the workplace. Betterment – making investing easier for everyone. ClearSlide – a […]
Apr 28, 2017
As one of the most venerable members of the AWS family of services, is an essential part of many applications. Presentations such as Amazon SQS for Better Architecture and Massive Message Processing with Amazon SQS and Amazon DynamoDB explain how SQS can be used to build applications that are resilient and highly scalable. Today we […]
Apr 28, 2017
It is really interesting to watch as technology evolves and improves. For example, today’s mobile phones offer screens with resolution that rivals a high-end desktop, along with multiple connectivity options and portability. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to get some hands-on experience with the brand-new Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone and a unique new […]
Apr 27, 2017
I should probably have a blog category for “catching up from !” Last November we made a really important addition to the that I was too busy to research and write about at the time. As a reminder, the is a multi-protocol storage appliance that fits in between your existing applications and the . Your […]
Apr 26, 2017
My colleague Mia Champion is a scientist (check out her publications), an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and an AWS Certified Developer. The time that she spent doing research on large-data datasets gave her an appreciation for the value of cloud computing in the bioinformatics space, which she summarizes and explains in the guest post below! […]
Apr 25, 2017
is our automated security assessment service. It analyzes the behavior of the applications that you run in AWS and helps you to identify potential security issues. In late 2015 I introduced you to Inspector and showed you how to use it (Amazon Inspector – Automated Security Assessment Service). You start by using tags to define […]
Apr 21, 2017
If you have been checking out the launches and announcements from the AWS 2017 San Francisco Summit, you may be aware that the Amazon Lex service is now Generally Available, and you can use the service today. Amazon Lex is a fully managed AI service that enables developers to build conversational interfaces into any application […]
Apr 20, 2017
I’m a life-long learner! I try to set aside some time every day to read about or to try something new. I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, back before the Internet existed. As a teenager, access to technical information of any sort was difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. It often involved begging my parents […]
Apr 20, 2017
We launched the AWS Price List API in late 2015 (read New – AWS Price List API to learn more). Designed to power budgeting, forecasting, and cost analysis tools, this API provides prices for AWS services in JSON and CSV form, with one price list per service. You can download and process the price lists […]
Apr 20, 2017
Allison Johnson from the AWS Marketplace wrote the guest post below to share some important APN news. -Ana At last November’s re:Invent, we announced the AWS Service Delivery Program to help AWS customers find partners in the AWS Partner Network (APN) with expertise in specific AWS services and skills. Today we are adding Management Tools […]
Apr 19, 2017
Many of my colleagues are in San Francisco for today’s AWS Summit. Here’s a summary of what we announced from the main stage and in the breakout sessions: New Services Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) – In-Memory Caching for Read-Intensive Workloads. Amazon Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data. AWS CodeStar – Quickly Develop, […]
Apr 19, 2017
During I showed you how you could use Amazon Lex to build conversational voice & text interfaces. At that time we launched in preview form and invited developers to sign up for access. Powered by the same deep learning technologies that drive Amazon Alexa, Amazon Lex allows you to build web & mobile applications that […]
Apr 19, 2017
Like me, you may have loved going to the library or bookstore to have your favorite book narrated to you. As a child, I loved listening to books narrated by good storytellers who gave life to their stories by changing the inflection of their voice as needed. The book narration coupled with the visual aids […]
Apr 19, 2017
We launched late last year and I told you about it in my post Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning. As I explained at the time, this service was built by our Computer Vision team over the course of many years and analyzes billions of images daily. Today we are […]
Apr 19, 2017
Last year we announced that we would be bringing PostgreSQL compatibility to Amazon Aurora. At that time I invited you to sign up for our private preview so that you could take a closer look. The response to that request was strong! Our customers already understood that Amazon Aurora would provide them with high availability […]
Apr 19, 2017
Now that we can launch cloud-based compute and storage resources with a couple of clicks, the challenge is to use these resources to go from raw data to actionable results as quickly and efficiently as possible. allows AWS customers to build petabyte-scale data warehouses that unify data from a variety of internal and external sources. […]
Apr 19, 2017
I’m fairly sure that you already know about . As you probably know, it is a managed NoSQL database that scales to accommodate as much table space, read capacity, and write capacity as you need. With response times measured in single-digit milliseconds, our customers are using for many types of applications including adtech, IoT, gaming, […]
Apr 19, 2017
I first told you about at in my post, AWS X-Ray – See Inside Your Distributed Application. allows you to trace requests made to your application as execution traverses Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon ECS containers, microservices, AWS database services, and AWS messaging services. It is designed for development and production use, and can handle simple […]
Apr 19, 2017
We launched the Developer Preview of the FPGA-equipped F1 instances at . The response to the announcement was quick and overwhelming! We received over 2000 requests for entry, and were able to provide over 200 developers with access to the Hardware Development Kit (HDK) and the actual F1 instances. In the post that I wrote […]
Apr 19, 2017
It wasn’t too long ago that I was on a development team working toward completing a software project by a release deadline and facing the challenges most software teams face today in developing applications. Challenges such as new project environment setup, team member collaboration, and the day-to-day task of keeping track of the moving pieces […]
Apr 14, 2017
In November of last year, we brought a service to the market that we hoped would be a major step toward helping those who have the need to securely access and examine massive amounts of data on a daily basis. This service is none other than Amazon Athena which I think of as a managed […]
Apr 13, 2017
The AWS Blog collection has grown over the past couple of years. As you can see from the list on the right, we now have blogs that cover a wide variety of topics and development tools. We also have blogs that are designed for those of you who read languages other than English! The is […]
Apr 12, 2017
April is Autism Awareness month and about 1 in 68 children in the U.S. have been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (CDC 2014). In this post from Troy Larson, a Sr. Devops Cloud Architect here at AWS, you get an introduction to a project he has been working on to help his son Calvin. […]
Apr 06, 2017
Maor Kleider, Senior Product Manager with Amazon Redshift, wrote today’s guest post. -Ana Amazon Redshift, is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehousing service that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all of your data. Many of our customers, including Scholastic, King.com, Electronic Arts, TripAdvisor and Yelp, migrated to Amazon Redshift and achieved agility […]
Apr 05, 2017
Last year I told you about the new AWS Application Load Balancer (an important part of Elastic Load Balancing) and showed you how to set it up to route incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic based on the path element of the URL in the request. This path-based routing allows you to route requests to, for […]
Apr 04, 2017
Last year we launched new AWS Regions in Canada, India, Korea, the UK (London), and the United States (Ohio), and announced that new regions are coming to France (Paris) and China (Ningxia). Today, I am happy to be able to tell you that we are planning to open up an AWS Region in Stockholm, Sweden […]
Mar 31, 2017
We would like to extend a very warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes: Mark Nunnikhoven SangUk Park James Hall Drew Firment AWS Community Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS in a plethora of ways. They go above and beyond to share AWS insights via social media, blog posts, open […]
Mar 31, 2017
As the madness of March rounds up, take a break from all the basketball and check out the cool startups Tina Barr brings you for this month! -Ana The arrival of spring brings five new startups this month: Amino Apps – providing social networks for hundreds of thousands of communities. Appboy – empowering brands to […]
Mar 31, 2017
AWS customers frequently use tags to organize their Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon S3 buckets, and other resources. Over the past couple of years we have been working to make tagging more useful and more powerful. For example, we have added support for tagging during Auto Scaling, the ability to use up to […]
Mar 30, 2017
Amazon CloudWatch is a service that gives customers the ability to monitor their applications, systems, and solutions running on Amazon Web Services by providing and collecting metrics, logs, and events about AWS resources in real time. CloudWatch automatically provides key resource measurements such as; latency, error rates, and CPU usage, while also enabling monitoring of […]
Mar 29, 2017
In the guest post below, my colleague Tim Bray explains how he built IsItOnAWS.com . Powered by the list of AWS IP address ranges and using a pair of functions that Tim wrote, the site aims to tell you if your favorite website is running on AWS. Is it on AWS? I did some recreational […]
Mar 29, 2017
One of the first things I got to do when I joined the Blog team was to attend the summit in New York City last August. Meeting all of our customers, checking out Game Day, and getting to see the enthusiasm of the AWS community made me even more excited to be starting my adventure […]
Mar 28, 2017
Way back in 2010, we launched Resource Tagging for EC2 instances and other EC2 resources. Since that launch, we have raised the allowable number of tags per resource from 10 to 50, and we have made tags more useful with the introduction of resource groups and a tag editor. Our customers use tags to track […]
Mar 28, 2017
I’m in catch-up mode again, and would like to tell you about some recent improvements that we have made to . As a reminder, Aurora is our high-performance MySQL-compatible (and soon PostgreSQL-compatible) enterprise-class database (read Now Available – Amazon Aurora and Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS for an introduction). […]
Mar 28, 2017
Customer service is essential to the success of any business. In order to provide voice-based customer service at scale, many organizations operate call centers. At the low end, call centers simply route incoming calls to any available agent. More sophisticated systems support more sophisticated routing and interaction, including the ability to create customized call trees […]
Mar 27, 2017
Last year I announced that AWS had signed an agreement to acquire NICE, and that we planned to work together to create even better tools and services for high performance and scientific computing. Today I am happy to be able to tell you about the launch of NICE EnginFrame 2017. This product is designed to […]
Mar 23, 2017
My colleague Gene Farrell introduced you to Amazon AppStream 2.0 late last year. In his guest post, Gene explained how AppStream 2.0 lets you run desktop applications securely on any device, from within the comfort of an HTML5 web browser (read the entire post to learn more). For example, I used the AppStream 2.0 Try […]
Mar 21, 2017
Ok, time for another peanut butter and chocolate post! Let’s combine EC2 Run Command (New EC2 Run Command – Remote Instance Management at Scale) and CloudWatch Events (New CloudWatch Events – Track and Respond to Changes to Your AWS Resources) and see what we get. EC2 Run Command is part of EC2 Systems Manager. It […]
Mar 21, 2017
Today we’re excited to introduce a new feature for clusters called instance fleets. Instance fleets gives you a wider variety of options and intelligence around instance provisioning. You can now provide a list of up to 5 instance types with corresponding weighted capacities and spot bid prices (including spot blocks)! EMR will automatically provision On-Demand […]
Mar 21, 2017
Most of us equate in-memory caching with improved performance and lower cost at scale when designing applications or building solutions. Now if there was only a service that would continually make it simpler to deploy and utilize in-memory cache in the cloud while increasing the ability to scale. Okay no more joking around, the cloud […]
Mar 20, 2017
Today I would like to tell you about four S3 features that will give you detailed insights into your storage and your access patterns. You can see what and how much you are storing, how it is being used, and you can make informed decisions about the use of S3 storage classes as a result. […]
Mar 18, 2017
Calling all Game Developers! GDC 2017 was a blast in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, so there is no better time to be inspired and passionate about learning and building cool games. Therefore, I am excited to share that Amazon GameLift is now available for all C++ and C# game engines, including Amazon […]
Mar 16, 2017
As I have told you in the past, we like to drink our own Champagne at Amazon. Practically speaking, this means that we make use of our own services, tools, and applications as part of our jobs, and that we supply the development teams with feedback if we have an idea for an improvement or […]
Mar 16, 2017
The Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that provides easier deployment, operation, and scale for the Elasticsearch open-source search and analytics engine. We are excited to announce that Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Elasticsearch 5.1 and Kibana 5.1. Elasticsearch 5 comes with a ton of new features and enhancements that customers can now […]
Mar 15, 2017
Here to tell you about using Automation for streamline AMI maintenance and patching is Taylor Anderson, a Senior Product Manager with EC2. -Ana Last December at re:Invent, we launched Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, which helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These […]
Mar 14, 2017
Reserved Instances allow AWS customers to receive a significant discount on their EC2 usage (up to 75% when compared to On-Demand pricing), along with capacity reservation when the RIs are purchased for use in a specific Availability Zone (AZ). Late last year we made Reserved Instances more flexible with the launch of Regional RIs that […]
Mar 13, 2017
Unbelievably it is March already, as you enter into the madness of March don’t forget to take some time and learning more about the latest service innovations from AWS. Each month, we have a series of webinars targeting best practices and new service features in the AWS Cloud. I have shared below the schedule for […]
Mar 13, 2017
This edition includes all of our announcements, content from all of our blogs, and as much community-generated AWS content as I had time for! Monday March 6 We announced the AWS Health Tools Repository. We announced that you can now Send High-Volume SMS Messages from Dedicated Short Codes. We announced that Amazon Elastic File System […]
Mar 09, 2017
Jordin Green is our guest writer today, with an inside view from the floor of HIMSS17. -Ana Empathy. It’s not always a word you hear associated with technology but one might argue it should be a central tenet for the application of technology in healthcare, and I was reminded of that fact as I wandered […]
Mar 07, 2017
I first wrote about AWS Database Migration Service just about a year ago in my AWS Database Migration Service post. At that time I noted that over 1,000 AWS customers had already made use of the service as part of their move to AWS. As a quick recap, and Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) help our […]
Mar 07, 2017
This edition includes all of our announcements, content from all of our blogs, and as much community-generated AWS content as I had time for. Going forward I hope to bring back the other sections, as soon as I get my tooling and automation into better shape. Monday February 27 We announced general availability for AWS […]
Mar 06, 2017
Tipu Qureshi and Ram Atur join us today with really cool news about a Git repository for AWS Health / Personal Health Dashboard. -Ana Today, we’re happy to release the AWS Health Tools repository, a community-based source of tools to automate remediation actions and customize Health alerts. The AWS Health service provides personalized information about […]
Mar 06, 2017
Even though we published 294 posts on this blog last year, I left out quite a number of worthwhile launches! Today I would like to focus on and recap all of the progress that the teams behind this family of services made in 2016. The team focused on four major areas last year: High Availability […]
Mar 06, 2017
My bank, my credit card company, my mobile provider, and other businesses that I patronize often send me password reminders, service updates, and other important customer service information via SMS (Short Message Service) messages. AWS customers have been able to use to send SMS messages for many years (see Amazon Simple Notification Service Now Supports […]
Mar 03, 2017
AWS Quick Starts help you to deploy popular solutions on AWS. Each Quick Start is designed by AWS solutions architects or partners, and makes use of AWS best practices for security and high availability. You can use them to spin up test or production environments that you can use right away. The Quick Starts include […]
Feb 28, 2017
As we finish up the month of February, Tina Barr is back with some awesome startups. -Ana This month we are bringing you five innovative hot startups: GumGum – Creating and popularizing the field of in-image advertising. Jiobit – Smart tags to help parents keep track of kids. Parsec – Offers flexibility in hardware and […]
Feb 28, 2017
By popular demand, I am producing this “micro” version of the AWS Week in Review. I have included all of our announcements, content from all of our blogs, and as much community-generated AWS content as I had time for. Going forward I hope to bring back the other sections, as soon as I get my […]
Feb 28, 2017
Over the years I have found that many of our customers are managing multiple AWS accounts. This situation can arise for several reasons. Sometimes they adopt AWS incrementally and organically, with individual teams and divisions making the move to cloud computing on a decentralized basis. Other companies grow through mergers and acquisitions and take on […]
Feb 27, 2017
AWS customers are making great use of . They love the speed and flexibility and build Ad Tech (reference architecture), Gaming (reference architecture), IoT (reference architecture), and other applications that take advantage of the consistent, single-digit millisecond latency. They also love the fact that DynamoDB is a managed, serverless database that scales to handle millions […]
Feb 23, 2017
On the first day of I published an EC2 Instance Update and promised to share additional information with you as soon as I had it. Today I am happy to be able to let you know that we are making six sizes of our new I3 instances available in fifteen AWS regions! Designed for I/O […]
Feb 23, 2017
There is excitement in the air! I am thrilled to announce that customers can now create custom platforms in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. With this latest release of the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service, developers and systems admins can now create and manage their own custom Elastic Beanstalk platform images allowing complete control over the instance configuration. […]
Feb 16, 2017
Wilson To and Luis Daniel Soto are our guest bloggers today, telling you about a new industry vertical category that is being added to the AWS Marketplace.Check it out! -Ana AWS Marketplace is a managed and curated software catalog that helps customers innovate faster and reduce costs, by making it easy to discover, evaluate, procure, immediately deploy […]
Feb 15, 2017
This guest post is brought to you by Andrew Benjamin and Tim Sandage. -Ana It’s increasingly difficult for organizations within regulated industries (such as government, financial, and healthcare) to demonstrate compliance with security requirements. The burden to comply is compounded by the use of legacy security frameworks and a lack of understanding of which services […]
Feb 14, 2017
If your working day is anything like mine, you probably spend a lot of time communicating with your colleagues. Every day, I connect with and collaborate with people all over the world. Some of them are sitting in their office in front of their PCs; others are on the go and using their phones to […]
Feb 14, 2017
It is always interesting to speak with our customers and to learn how the dynamic nature of their business and their applications drives their block storage requirements. These needs change over time, creating the need to modify existing volumes to add capacity or to change performance characteristics. Today’s 24×7 operating models leaves no room for […]
Feb 13, 2017
helps our large-scale customers to create private, dedicated network connections to their office, data center, or colocation facility. Our customers create 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections in order to reduce their network costs, increase data transfer throughput, and to get a more consistent network experience than is possible with an Internet-based connection. Today I […]
Feb 10, 2017
is one of our artificial intelligence services. In addition to detecting objects, scenes, and faces in images, Rekognition can also search and compare faces. Behind the scenes, Rekognition uses deep neural network models to analyze billions of images daily (read Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning to learn more). returns […]
Feb 09, 2017
We’re kicking off the New Year with some great news on the AWS sustainability front – three additional wind and solar projects went live at the end of 2016 and are now delivering energy onto the electric grid that powers AWS data centers! As a quick recap, at re:Invent 2016, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer […]
Feb 04, 2017
The New Year is underway, so there is no better time to dive into learning more about the latest AWS services. Each month, we have a series of webinars targeting best practices and new service features in AWS Cloud. February Online Tech Talks (formerly known as Monthly Webinar Series) I am excited to share […]
Jan 31, 2017
If you are a long-time reader, you know that I am a full-time user and huge fan of (read I Love my Amazon WorkSpace to learn more). Having a single environment that I can access from a wide variety of devices and web browsers allows me to stay focused on my work and eliminates a […]
Jan 30, 2017
Post by Dr. Matt Wood From Alexa to Amazon Go, we use deep learning extensively across all areas of Amazon, and we’ve tried a lot of deep learning engines along the way. One has emerged as the most scalable, efficient way to perform deep learning, and for these reasons, we have selected MXNet as our […]
Jan 27, 2017
With so much going on at AWS, we often hear from readers asking for ways to help them make more informed decisions, or put together examples for their planning processes. Joining us today is Jim Carroll, a Sr. Category Leader with Amazon Marketplace to talk about AWS Networking services and solutions in the AWS Marketplace. […]
Jan 27, 2017
Our customers have traditionally used directories (typically Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service or LDAP-based) to manage hierarchically organized data. Device registries, course catalogs, network configurations, and user directories are often represented as hierarchies, sometimes with multiple types of relationships between objects in the same collection. For example, a user directory could have one hierarchy based […]
Jan 26, 2017
It is the start of a new year and Tina Barr is back with many more great new startups to check out. -Ana Welcome back to another year of hot AWS-powered startups! We have three exciting new startups today: ClassDojo – Connecting teachers, students, and parents to the classroom. Nubank – A financial services startup […]
Jan 26, 2017
We’ve been working to add IPv6 support to many different parts of AWS over the last couple of years, starting with , , , , , and S3 Transfer Acceleration, all building up to last month’s announcement of IPv6 support for EC2 instances in Virtual Private Clouds (initially available for use in the Region). Today […]
Jan 25, 2017
I’m still catching up on a couple of launches that we made late last year! Today’s post covers two services that I’ve written about in the past — AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Application Load Balancer: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) – Helps to protect your web applications from common application-layer exploits that […]
Jan 19, 2017
The AWS IoT Button first made its appearance on the IoT scene in October of 2015 at AWS re:Invent with the introduction of the AWS IoT service. That year all re:Invent attendees received the AWS IoT Button providing them the opportunity to get hands-on with AWS IoT. Since that time AWS IoT button has been […]
Jan 18, 2017
Migrating from one database engine to another can be tricky when the database is supporting an application or a web site that is running 24×7. Without the option to take the database offline, an approach that is based on replication is generally the best solution. Today we are launching a new feature that allows you […]
Jan 17, 2017
Matthew Freeman and Luis Daniel Soto are back talking about the use of Linux through the AWS Marketplace. – Ana Linux is widely used in corporations now as the basis for everything from file servers to web servers to network security servers. The no-cost as well as commercial availability of distributions makes it an obvious […]
Jan 16, 2017
There are lot’s of exciting things going on in the AWS Marketplace. Here to tell you more about open source software in the marketplace are Matthew Freeman and Luis Daniel Soto. – Ana According to industry research, enterprise use of open source software (OSS) is on the rise. More and more corporate-based developers are asking to […]
Jan 14, 2017
2016 was an exciting year for AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway and serverless compute technology, to say the least. But just in case you have been hiding away and haven’t heard of serverless computing with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, let me introduce these great services to you. AWS Lambda lets you run code […]
Jan 12, 2017
As a follow-on to the recent launch of the AWS Region in London, I am happy to be able to tell you about a new UK-centric training and job placement program that we call AWS re:Start. This program is designed to educate young adults, military veterans, members of the military reserve, those leaving the Armed […]
Dec 30, 2016
In late October of 2016 a large-scale cyber attack consisting of multiple denial of service attacks targeted a well-known DNS provider. The attack, consisting of a flood of DNS lookups from tens of millions of IP addresses, made many Internet sites and services unavailable to users in North America and Europe. This Distributed Denial of […]
Dec 30, 2016
helps you to configure and run applications using Chef. You use a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to write cookbooks that define your application’s architecture and the configuration of each component. The Chef server is an essential part of the configuration process. It stores all of the cookbooks and tracks state information for each of the […]
Dec 29, 2016
Last year, AWS customers and partners were asking for a systematic way to retrieve prices for AWS services. We answered the need by launching the AWS Price List API last December with pricing for thirteen (13) AWS services. The API provides pricing data in JSON and CSV format for download and enables customers to query for […]
Dec 23, 2016
If you are counting down the seconds before 2016 is history, be sure to add one at the very end! The next leap second (the 27th so far) will be inserted on December 31, 2016 at 23:59:60 UTC. This will keep Earth time (Coordinated Universal Time) close to mean solar time and means that the […]
Dec 23, 2016
Last year I introduced you to the EC2 Run Command and showed you how to use it to do remote instance management at scale, first for EC2 instances and then in hybrid and cross-cloud environments. Along the way we added support for Linux instances, making EC2 Run Command a widely applicable and incredibly useful administration […]
Dec 21, 2016
Cost Explorer is a tool that helps you to manage your AWS spending using reporting and analytics tools (read The New Cost Explorer for AWS to learn more). You can sign up with a single click and then visualize your AWS costs, analyze trends, and look at spending patterns. You can look at your spending […]
Dec 21, 2016
I sincerely hope that you are familiar with container-based computing and that you have at least a basic understanding of the value of containerization. As I noted back in 2014, packaging your cloud-based application as a collection of containers, each specified declaratively, gives you a laundry list of benefits including consistency between your development and […]
Dec 20, 2016
I introduced you to last year (Amazon Elastic File System – Shared File Storage for Amazon EC2) and announced production readiness earlier this year (Amazon Elastic File System – Production-Ready in Three Regions). Since the launch earlier this year, thousands of AWS customers have used it to set up, scale, and operate shared file storage […]
Dec 20, 2016
One of the challenges in building applications has been around user authentication and management. Let’s face it, not many developers want to build yet another user identification and authentication system for their application nor would they want to cause a user to create yet another account unless needed. Amazon Cognito makes it simpler for developers […]
Dec 19, 2016
helps you to plan your migration to the cloud. As a central component of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, it simplifies the process of automating the process of discovering and collecting important information about your system (read New – AWS Application Discovery Service – Plan Your Cloud Migration to learn more). There are two different […]
Dec 19, 2016
AWS Community Heroes are members of the AWS Community that share their knowledge and demonstrate outstanding enthusiasm for AWS. They do this in a variety of ways including user groups, social media, meetups and workshops. Today we extend a Happy Holiday welcome to the last of the 2016 cohort of AWS Heroes: Ayumi Tada Shimon […]
Dec 19, 2016
Have you had time to digest all of the announcements that we made at ? Are you ready to debug with , analyze with , or build conversational interfaces using ? Do you want to learn more about , set up CI/CD with , or use to give your applications a voice? January Webinars In […]
Dec 19, 2016
I wrote my first post for this blog back in 2004, and have published over 2,700 more since then, including 52 last month! Given the ever-increasing pace of AWS innovation, and the amount of cool stuff that we have to share with you, we are expanding our blogging team. Please give a warm welcome to […]
Dec 16, 2016
It is the end of 2016! Tina Barr has a great roundup of all the startups we featured this year. Check it out and see if you managed to read about them all, then come back in January for when we start up all over again. Also- I wanted to thank Elsa Mayer for her […]
Dec 16, 2016
When I first wrote about in 2015 (Amazon QuickSight – Fast & Easy to Use Business Intelligence for Big Data at 1/10th the Cost of Traditional Solutions), I mentioned that we would make the service available in Standard and Enterprise Editions. Enterprise Edition We launched the Standard Edition of Amazon QuickSight last month. Today we […]
Dec 14, 2016
Despite stiff competition from many other AWS services, is still the fastest-growing service in AWS history! Our customers love the speed, performance, and availability. They are making great use of the MySQL compatible side of Aurora today, and are looking forward to using the PostgreSQL compatible side in the future (read Amazon Aurora Update – […]
Dec 14, 2016
Last week we launched our 15th AWS Region and today we are launching our 16th. We have expanded the AWS footprint into the United Kingdom with a new Region in London, our third in Europe. AWS customers can use the new London Region to better serve end-users in the United Kingdom and can also use […]
Dec 13, 2016
Ray Zhu from the Amazon Kinesis team wrote this great post about how to set up a streaming data pipeline. He carefully shows you step by step how he set it all up and how you can do it too. -Ana Consumer demand for better experiences is ever increasing today. Companies across different industry […]
Dec 13, 2016
The AWS office in Dubai, UAE will open on January 1, 2017. We’ve been working with the Dubai Investment Development Agency (Dubai FDI) to launch the office, and plan to support startups, government institutions, and some of the Middle East’s historic and most established enterprises as they make the transition to the . Resources in […]
Dec 12, 2016
Large-scale, enterprise data centers are generally run “by the book.” Policies, best practices, and operational procedures are developed, refined, captured, and codified, as part of responsible IT management, often with an eye toward the ITIL model. Ideally, all infrastructure improvements, configuration changes, and provisioning requests are handled in a process-oriented fashion that serves to impose […]
Dec 08, 2016
We are growing the AWS footprint once again. Our new Region is now available and you can start using it today. AWS customers in Canada and the northern parts of the United States have fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services. The Details The new Region supports and related services including , […]
Dec 02, 2016
My colleague Gene Farrell wrote the guest post below to tell you how the original vision for Amazon AppStream evolved in the face of customer feedback. At AWS, helping our customers solve problems and serve their customers with technology is our mission. It drives our thinking, and it’s at the center of how we innovate. […]
Dec 01, 2016
The continued growth of the Internet, particularly in the areas of mobile applications, connected devices, and IoT, has spurred an industry-wide move to IPv6. In accord with a mandate that dates back to 2010, United States government agencies have been working to move their public-facing servers and services to IPv6 as quickly as possible. With […]
Dec 01, 2016
We want to make it even easier for you to build complex, distributed applications by connecting multiple web and microservices. Whether you are implementing a complex business process or setting up a processing pipeline for photo uploads, we want you to focus on the code instead of on the coordination. We want you to be […]
Dec 01, 2016
Just last week, a comment that I made on Hacker News resulted in an interesting email from an AWS customer! He told me that he runs a single page app that is hosted on S3 (read about this in Host Your Static Website on Amazon S3) and served up at low latency through . The […]
Dec 01, 2016
Back in 2014 I talked about and showed you how it helps you to build, run, and scale Docker-based applications. I talked about the three scheduling options (automated, manual, and custom) and described how a scheduler works to assign tasks to instances. At the time that I wrote that post, your custom scheduler had to […]
Dec 01, 2016
We launched the AWS Service Health Dashboard way back in 2008! Back then, the AWS Cloud was relatively new, and the Service Health Dashboard was a good way for our customers to check on the status of each service (compare the simple screen shot in that blog post to today’s Service Health Dashboard to see […]
Dec 01, 2016
I entered college in the fall of 1978. The Computer Science department at Montgomery College was built around a powerful (for its time) IBM 370/168 mainframe. I quickly learned how to use the keypunch machine to prepare my card decks, prefacing the actual code with some cryptic Job Control Language (JCL) statements that set the […]
Dec 01, 2016
My colleague Georgie Mathews wrote the guest post below to introduce you to Amazon Pinpoint, a new service that helps you to measure and improve user engagement for your mobile apps. Our mobile customers have told us how expensive it can get to acquire new users for their apps. Then there is the challenge of […]
Dec 01, 2016
The online world can be an unfriendly place! As soon as you put a web site online, it can become the target of many different types of attacks, all aimed at causing trouble and taking the site offline. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are one very common trouble spot. They draw on compromised resources […]
Dec 01, 2016
Developers typically have to set up and operate a shared build server to run continuous integration builds and tests on their source code changes. Because of the maintenance overhead, many developers avoid that and just run builds on their local machines, often leading to situations where code that works for one developer does not work […]
Nov 30, 2016
Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new […]
Nov 30, 2016
A I was preparing to write this blog post I went back and read the post I wrote when we launched last year (AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances) and then cataloged all of the updates that we have made since then. To recap, Snowball started out as […]
Nov 30, 2016
Computing and data processing within the confines of a data center or office is easy. You can generally count on good connectivity and a steady supply of electricity, and you have access to as much on-premises or cloud-based storage and compute power as you need. The situation is much different out in the real world. […]
Nov 30, 2016
Just two years ago (it seems like yesterday), I introduced you to in my post Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. In that post I told you how the RDS team took a fresh, unconstrained look at the relational database model and explained how they built a relational database for […]
Nov 30, 2016
As I was getting ready to write this post, I thought back to my childhood (largely spent watching TV) and some of the popular computer and robot voices of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In just a few minutes, pleasant memories of HAL-9000, B9 (Lost in Space), the original Star Trek Computer, and Rosie (from The […]
Nov 30, 2016
What do you see when you look at this picture? You might simply see an animal. Maybe you see a pet, a dog, or a Golden Retriever. The association between the image and these labels is not hard-wired in to your brain. Instead, you learned the labels after seeing hundreds or thousands of examples. Operating […]
Nov 30, 2016
While computers that talk are great, computers that listen and respond are even better! If you have used an Amazon Echo, you know how simple, useful, and powerful the Alexa-powered interaction model can be. Today we are making the same deep learning technologies (ASR – Automatic Speech Recognition NLU – Natural Language Understanding) that power […]
Nov 30, 2016
The amount of data that we all have to deal with grows every day (I still keep a floppy disk or two around in order to remind myself that 1.44 MB once seemed like a lot of storage). These days, many people routinely process and query data in structured or semi-structured files at petabyte scale. […]
Nov 30, 2016
Have you ever had to decide between a general purpose tool and one built for a very specific purpose? The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one. Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that […]
Nov 30, 2016
I have written about the benefits of GPU-based computing in the past, most recently as part of the launch of the P2 instances with up to 16 GPUs. As I have noted in the past, GPUs offer incredible power and scale, along with the potential to simultaneously decrease your time-to-results and your overall compute costs. […]
Nov 23, 2016
already allows you to make your choice of five DB instance classes ranging from the db.r3.large (2 vCPUs and 15 GiB of RAM) up to the db.r3.8xlarge (32 vCPUs and 244 GiB of RAM). These instances support a very wide range of production-scale applications and use cases. Today we giving you a sixth choice, the […]
Nov 23, 2016
My colleague Philip “Fitz” Fitzsimons wrote the guest post below to bring you up to date on the popular Well-Architected Framework. Working backward is a fundamental part of our innovation process. We start with the customer and what they want, and let that define and guide our efforts. Having released the Well-Architected Framework in 2015 […]
Nov 23, 2016
allows you to build, test, and monitor mobile applications that make use of one or more AWS services. You can use its single, integrated console to add user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push notifications, content delivery, and analytics features to your apps, with plenty of opportunities for customization. We are seeing an increasing number […]
Nov 23, 2016
In today’s guest post, my colleague Colm MacCárthaigh discusses the new CloudWatch Percentile Statistics and the implications and benefits load balancing. He also introduces a new request tracing feature that will make it easier for you to track the progress of individual requests as they arrive at a load balancer and make their way to […]
Nov 22, 2016
Back in 2006, we launched S3 with a revolutionary pay-as-you-go pricing model, with an initial price of 15 cents per GB per month. Over the intervening decade, we reduced the price per GB by 80%, launched S3 in every AWS Region, and enhanced the original one-size-fits-all model with user-driven features such as web site hosting, […]
Nov 21, 2016
I would like to show you how several different AWS services can be used together to address a challenge faced by many of our customers. Along the way I will introduce you to a new feature that launches today and show you how you can use it in conjunction with CloudWatch Events. The Challenge Our […]
Nov 21, 2016
Back in 2011 I introduced you to Custom Metrics for CloudWatch and showed you how to publish them from your applications and scripts. At that time, the first ten custom metrics were free of charge and additional metrics were $0.50 per metric per month, regardless of the number of metrics that you published. Today, I […]
Nov 19, 2016
We launched WorkSpaces in late 2013 (Amazon WorkSpaces – Desktop Computing in the Cloud) and have been adding new features at a rapid clip. Here are some highlights from 2016: November 2016 – WorkSpaces adds GPU-Powered Graphics Bundles. October 2016 – WorkSpaces becomes available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. August 2016 – WorkSpaces offers hourly […]
Nov 18, 2016
I am thrilled by all of the excitement that I see around and serverless application development. I have shared many serverless success stories, tools, and open source projects in the AWS Week in Review over the last year or two. Today I would like to tell you about two important additions to Lambda: environment variables […]
Nov 18, 2016
The team is cranking out new features at an impressive pace (guess they have lots of worker nodes)! So far this quarter they have added all of these features: September – Data Encryption for Apache Spark, Tez, and Hadoop MapReduce. September – Open-sourced EMR-DynamoDB Connector for Apache Hive. November – Stream Processing at Scale with […]
Nov 18, 2016
Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) is at the forefront of genomics research and wants to build the world’s largest database of human genomes along with related phenotype and clinical data, all in support of preventive healthcare. In today’s guest post, Yaron Turpaz, Bryan Coon, and Ashley Van Zeeland talk about how they are using AWS to […]
Nov 17, 2016
I am a heavy-duty user and a big fan of . With just days away, I have nearly two dozen draft blog posts underway. I use WorkDocs to make sure that all of the interested parties are reviewing and commenting on the most recent version of each draft. Today I am happy announce that we […]
Nov 17, 2016
There sure is a lot going on with these days! Earlier this month I showed you how to Jump From Metrics to Associated Logs and told you about Extended Metrics Retention and the User Interface Update. Today we are improving CloudWatch yet again, adding percentile statistics and two new dashboard widgets. Time is super tight […]
Nov 17, 2016
As the very first member of the family of services, has certainly withstood the test of time! Back in 2004, we described it as a “reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components.” Over the years, we have added many features including a dead letter queue, 256 KB payloads, SNS integration, […]
Nov 16, 2016
Tina is back with another impressive set of startups! This month we are featuring four hot AWS-powered startups: AwareLabs – Helping small businesses build smart websites Doctor On Demand – Delivering fast, easy, and cost-effective access to top healthcare providers. Starling Bank – Mobile banking for the next generation. VigLink – Powering content-driven commerce. Make […]
Nov 16, 2016
You can now find, buy, and use a nice variety of SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions from AWS Marketplace Vendors. The new SaaS solutions run on AWS infrastructure and you will pay only for the service that you consume, with no monthly fees or subscription costs. For example, you can buy security services on […]
Nov 15, 2016
After a preview period that included participants from over 1,500 AWS customers ranging from startups to global enterprises, I am happy to be able to announce that is now generally available! When I invited you to join the preview last year, I wrote: In the past, Business Intelligence required an incredible amount of undifferentiated heavy […]
Nov 15, 2016
As you can probably tell from my I Love My Amazon WorkSpace post I am kind of a fan-boy! Since writing that post I have found out that I am not alone, and that there are many other WorkSpaces fan-boys and fan-girls out there. Many AWS customers are enjoying their fully managed, secure desktop computing […]
Nov 14, 2016
Cloud computing can improve upon traditional IT operations by giving you the power to automate complex high-level operations that were formerly kept in a runbook or passed along as tribal knowledge. Far too many of these operations involve backup and recovery operations, especially in smaller and less mature organizations. Many AWS customers make great use […]
Nov 14, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week. Thanks are due to the 17 internal and external contributors who submitted pull requests! Monday November 7 We announced a CloudWatch Update – Jump From Metrics to Associated Logs. We published a Quick Start Reference Deployment for CI/CD for Microsoft Windows on AWS. […]
Nov 14, 2016
I am happy to be able to announce that an EC2 price reduction will go in to effect on December 1, 2016, just in time to make your holiday season just a little bit more cheerful! Our engineering investments, coupled with our scale and our time-tested ability to manage our capacity, allow us to identify […]
Nov 11, 2016
Many of the tools and technologies now in use at your local doctor, dentist, hospital, or other healthcare provider generate massive amounts of sensitive digital data. Other prolific data generators include genomic sequencers and any number of activity and fitness trackers. We all want to benefit from the insights that can be produced by this […]
Nov 10, 2016
Many AWS customers are getting great results with the General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes that we launched in mid-2014 (see New SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage for more information). If you’re unsure of which volume type to use for your workload, gp2 volumes are the best default choice because they offer balanced price/performance for a […]
Nov 10, 2016
Our friends at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia sent along the guest post below to tell us about how AWS powers an important new genome editing technique. — Jeff Recent developments in molecular engineering technology now enables the accurate editing of genomes. The new technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, can be […]
Nov 07, 2016
A few years ago I showed you how to Store and Monitor OS & Application Log Files with Amazon CloudWatch. Many AWS customers now create filters for their logs, publish the results as CloudWatch metrics, and then raise alarms when something is amiss. For example, they watch their web server logs for 404 errors that […]
Nov 07, 2016
Over 25 internal and external contributors helped out with pull requests and fresh content this week! Thank you all for your help and your support. Monday October 31 We shared the AWS Hot Startups for October 2016 – Optimizely, Touch Surgery, and WittyFeed. We announced that Amazon Redshift now available in South America (São Paulo) […]
Nov 04, 2016
One of my colleagues has been rooting for the Red Sox since she was in her teens. She recently had the opportunity to work with Red Sox legend and Hank Aaron award winner David Ortiz (aka “Big Papi”), Hall of Famer Joe Torre, and announcer Dave O’Brien (ESPN and NESN) to produce a fun video […]
Nov 03, 2016
When I begin to write about a new way for you to become more productive by using two AWS services together, I think about a 1980’s TV commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups! The intersection of two useful services or two delicious flavors creates a new one that is even better. Today’s chocolate / peanut […]
Nov 02, 2016
focuses on deliverability – getting email through to the intended recipients. In my launch blog post (Introducing the Amazon Simple Email Service), I noted that several factors influence delivery, including the level of trust that you have earned with multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the number of complaints and bounces that you generate. Today […]
Nov 01, 2016
The Amazon Linux AMI is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance execution environment for applications running on EC2. With limited remote access (no root login and mandatory SSH key pairs) and a very small number of non-critical packages installed, the AMI has a very respectable security profile. Many of our customers have asked […]
Nov 01, 2016
There are now over 2,700 software products listed in . Tens of thousands of AWS customers routinely find, buy, and start using offerings from more than 925 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Today we are giving you, as a consumer of software through , the ability to selectively share your contact information (name, title, phone number, […]
Nov 01, 2016
is a monitoring service for your AWS resources and for the applications that you run on AWS. It collects and tracks metrics, monitors log files, and allows you to set alarms and respond to changes in your AWS resources. Today we are launching several important enhancements to CloudWatch: Extended Metrics Retention – CloudWatch now stores […]
Oct 31, 2016
Another busy week in AWS-land! Today’s post included submissions from 21 internal and external contributors, along with material from my RSS feeds, my inbox, and other things that come my way. To join in the fun, create (or find) some awesome AWS-related content and submit a pull request! Monday October 24 We launched the AWS […]
Oct 31, 2016
I’m pleased to share yet another month of hot startups, courtesy of Tina Barr! Check out this month’s AWS-powered startups: Optimizely – Providing web and mobile A/B testing for the world’s leading brands. Touch Surgery – Building technologies for the global surgical community. WittyFeed – Creating viral content. Optimizely (San Francisco) Optimizely is one of […]
Oct 26, 2016
Early this year I announced that Longer EC2 Resource IDs are Now Available, and kicked off the start of a transition period that will last until early December 2016. During the transition period, you can opt in to the new resource format on a region-by-region, user-by-user basis. At the conclusion of the transition period, all […]
Oct 24, 2016
I love to use the historical photo at right to emphasize a situation that many of our customers face. They need to move their existing IT infrastructure to the without scheduling prolonged maintenance periods for data migration. Because many of these applications are mission-critical and are heavily data-driven, taking systems offline in order to move […]
Oct 24, 2016
My colleague Joe Baron wrote the guest post below to introduce you to a book that he and his colleagues have put together! Are you studying for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam? The new AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam has just been published by John Wiley & Sons, […]
Oct 24, 2016
Wow, a lot is happening in AWS-land these days! Today’s post included submissions from several dozen internal and external contributors, along with material from my RSS feeds, my inbox, and other things that come my way. To join in the fun, create (or find) some awesome AWS-related content and submit a pull request! Monday October […]
Oct 21, 2016
I announced the AWS Serverless Chatbot Competion in August and invited you to build a chatbot for Slack using and . Last week I sat down with fellow judges Tim Wagner (General Manager of AWS Lambda) and Cecilia Deng (a Software Development Engineer on Tim’s team) to watch the videos and to evaluate all 62 […]
Oct 21, 2016
As Spider-Man and others before him have said, “with great power comes great responsibility.” In the on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud world, this means that you need to be an informed, responsible consumer. In a corporate environment, this means that you need to pay attention to budgets and to spending, and to make sure that your actual […]
Oct 20, 2016
The AWS Developer Tools help you to put modern DevOps practices to work! Here’s a quick overview (read New AWS Tools for Code Management and Deployment for an in-depth look): is a fully-managed source code control service. You can use it to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories while continuing to use your […]
Oct 20, 2016
You can now run Windows Server 2016 on . This version of Windows Server is packed with new features including support for Docker and Windows containers. We are making it available in all AWS regions today, in four distinct forms: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter with Desktop Experience – The mainstream version of Windows Server, designed […]
Oct 18, 2016
Many AWS services work just fine by themselves, but even better together! This important aspect of our model allows you to select a single service, learn about it, get some experience with it, and then extend your span to other related services over time. On the other hand, opportunities to make the services work together […]
Oct 18, 2016
Twenty four (24) external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. I am also about to open up some discussion on a simplified and streamlined submission process. Monday October 10 […]
Oct 17, 2016
As part of our ongoing plan to expand the AWS footprint, I am happy to announce that our new Region is now available. In conjunction with the existing Region, AWS customers in the Eastern part of the United States have fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services. The Details The new Ohio […]
Oct 13, 2016
The long-standing trend toward on-premises virtualization has helped many enterprises to increase operational efficiency and to wring out as much value from their data center as possible. Along the way, they have built up a substantial repertoire of architectural skills and operational experience, but now find that they are struggling to match public cloud economics […]
Oct 12, 2016
Many AWS customers use to implement a fast, in-memory data store for their applications. We launched Amazon ElastiCache for Redis in 2013 and have added snapshot exports to S3, a refreshed engine, scale-up capabilities, tagging, and support for Multi-AZ operation with automatic failover over the past year or so. Today we are adding a healthy […]
Oct 12, 2016
The AWS Quick Starts help you to rapidly deploy reference implementations of software solutions on the . You can use the Quick Starts to easily test drive and consume software while taking advantage of best practices promoted by AWS and the software partner. Today I would like to tell you about a pair of Quick […]
Oct 11, 2016
Are you keeping up with the latest developments in AWS-land? Do you have a good understanding of , , and ? Do you know what IoT is all about, and do you have firm grasp of the best security practices for your cloud workloads? Do you understand the EC2 Spot Market, and do you know […]
Oct 11, 2016
Earlier this year we made the x1.32xlarge instance available. With nearly 2 TiB of memory, this instance type is a great fit for memory-intensive big data, caching, and analytics workloads. Our customers are running the SAP HANA in-memory database, large-scale Apache Spark and Hadoop jobs, and many types of high performance computing (HPC) workloads. Today […]
Oct 10, 2016
In order to make sure that the AWS Blog is meeting your information and entertainment needs, we are planning to conduct some usability panels later this month. We are looking for a mix or local (Seattle) and remote participants with any level of experience reading the blog and/or using AWS. If you participate in a […]
Oct 10, 2016
Twenty external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party (with the possibility of a free lunch at re:Invent), please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Monday October 3 Mistwire.com kicked off a series of articles on studying […]
Oct 07, 2016
If you are running MapReduce jobs on premises and storing data in HDFS (the Hadoop Distributed File System), you can now copy that data directly from HDFS to an without using an intermediary staging file. Because HDFS is often used for Big Data workloads, this can greatly simplify the process of importing large amounts of […]
Oct 06, 2016
As a follow-up to our recent announcement of IPv6 support for Amazon S3, I am happy to be able to tell you that IPv6 support is now available for , Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, and and that all 60+ CloudFront edge locations now support IPv6. We are enabling IPv6 in a phased rollout that starts […]
Oct 06, 2016
You have had the power to store your own business, application, and system metrics in for quite some time (see New – Custom Metrics for Amazon CloudWatch to learn more). As I wrote way back in 2011 when I introduced this feature, “You can view graphs, set alarms, and initiate automated actions based on these […]
Oct 04, 2016
Express is a web framework for Node.js . It simplifies the development of “serverless” web sites, web applications, and APIs. In a serverless environment, most or all of the backend logic is run on-demand in a stateless fashion (see Mike Roberts’ article on Serverless Architectures for a more detailed introduction). , when used in conjunction […]
Oct 03, 2016
Fourteen (14) external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party (with the possibility of a free lunch at re:Invent), please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Monday September 26 The released an episode interviewing Abby Fuller from […]
Sep 30, 2016
We are 60 days away from 2016! I’m already working on a big pile of blog posts and my colleagues are working night and day to make sure that you have plenty of opportunities to learn about our services. With two new venues, hands-on labs, certification exams, a full day of additional content, and the […]
Sep 30, 2016
I like to watch long-term technology and business trends and watch as they shape the products and services that I get to use and to write about. As I was preparing to write today’s post, three such trends came to mind: Moore’s Law – Coined in 1965, Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors […]
Sep 29, 2016
We launched EC2 Reserved Instances almost eight years ago. The model that we originated in 2009 provides you with two separate benefits: capacity reservations and a significant discount on the use of specific instances in an Availability Zone. Over time, based on customer feedback, we have refined the model and made additional options available including […]
Sep 29, 2016
I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the newest : Cyrus Wong Paul Duvall Vit Niennattrakul Habeeb Rahman Francisco Edilton Jeevan Dongre The Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blog posts, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more. […]
Sep 29, 2016
Every evening we ask Alexa for the time of sunset, subtract 10 minutes to account for the Olympic Mountains on the horizon, and plan our walk accordingly! My family and my friends love the Amazon Echo in our kitchen! In the past week we have asked for jokes, inquired about the time of the impending […]
Sep 29, 2016
As cloud computing becomes the new normal for organizations all over the world and as our customer base becomes larger and more diverse, we will continue to build and launch additional AWS Regions. Bonjour la France I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in Paris, France in 2017. The […]
Sep 28, 2016
After an organization decides to move to the and to start taking advantage of the benefits that it offers, one of the next steps is to figure out how to properly architect their applications. Having talked to many of them, I know that they are looking for best practices and prescriptive design patterns, along with […]
Sep 28, 2016
Eighteen (18) external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party (with the possibility of a free lunch at re:Invent), please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Monday September 19 We announced that Lumberyard Beta 1.5 is Now […]
Sep 27, 2016
EC2’s M4 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources and are a good choice for many different types of applications. We launched the M4 instances last year (read The New M4 Instance Type to learn more) and gave you a choice of five sizes, from large up to 10xlarge. Today we are […]
Sep 27, 2016
Tina Barr is back with this month’s hot startups on AWS! It’s officially fall so warm up that hot cider and check out this month’s great AWS-powered startups: Funding Circle – The leading online marketplace for business loans. Karhoo – A ride comparison app. nearbuy – Connecting customers and local merchants across India. Funding Circle […]
Sep 27, 2016
My colleague Sean Kelly is part of the team that produces the Amazon Linux AMI. He shared the guest post below in order to introduce you to the newest version! The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image for use on Amazon EC2. We offer new major versions of the Amazon Linux […]
Sep 27, 2016
I’m happy to be able to announce that an AWS Pop-up Loft is opening in Munich on October 26th, with a full calendar of events and a brand-new AWS Innovation Lab, all created with the help of our friends at Intel and Nordcloud. Developers, entrepreneurs, students come to AWS Lofts around the world to learn, […]
Sep 22, 2016
I often speak to new and potential AWS customers in our EBC (Executive Briefing Center) in Seattle. The vast majority of them have already bought in to the promise of the cloud and are already making plans that involve a combination of “lifting and shifting” existing applications and building new, cloud-native ones. Because their move […]
Sep 21, 2016
Our customers use (including Apache Hadoop and the full range of tools that make up the Apache Spark ecosystem) to handle many types of mission-critical big data use cases. For example: Yelp processes over a terabyte of log files and photos every day. Expedia processes streams of clickstream, user interaction, and supply data. FINRA analyzes […]
Sep 20, 2016
allows you to quickly and easily build and run application backends that are robust and scalable. With the recent addition of usage plans, you can create an ecosystem of partner developers around your APIs. Let’s review some terminology to start things off: Endpoint – A URL (provided by ) that responds to HTTP requests. These […]
Sep 19, 2016
Wow! Twenty five (25) external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party (with the possibility of a free lunch at re:Invent), please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Monday September 12 We announced a Second Edge Location […]
Sep 19, 2016
gives you the ability to express entire stacks (collections of related AWS resources) declaratively, by constructing templates. You can define a stack, specify and configure the desired resources and their relationship to each other, and then launch as many copies of the stack as desired. CloudFormation will create and set up the resources for you, […]
Sep 19, 2016
AWS Cost Explorer is a powerful tool that helps you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS spending (read The New Cost Explorer for AWS to learn more). You can view your spend by service or by linked account, with your choice of daily or monthly granularity. You can also create custom filters based on […]
Sep 16, 2016
My colleague Joe Flasher is part of our Open Data team. He wrote the guest post below in order to let you know about our new Earth on AWS project. In March 2015, we launched Landsat on AWS, a Public Dataset made up of imagery from the Landsat 8 satellite. Within the first year […]
Sep 14, 2016
At the beginning of the month I blogged about the value of continuing education and shared an infographic that ilustrated the link between continued education and increased pay, higher effectiveness, and decreased proclivity to seek other employment. The pace of AWS innovation means that there’s always something new to learn. One way to do this […]
Sep 14, 2016
simplifies the process of setting up, operating, and scaling a relational database in the cloud. With support for six database engines (, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB) RDS has become a foundation component for many cloud-based applications. We launched support for PostgreSQL in late 2013 and followed up that launch with support […]
Sep 12, 2016
This is the third community-driven edition of the AWS Week in Review. Special thanks are due to the 15 internal and external contributors who helped to make this happen. If you would like to contribute, please take a look at the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Monday September 5 John McKim wrote about GraphQL […]
Sep 09, 2016
Please check back on September 12th…
Sep 08, 2016
Featuure-by-feature, has become more powerful and easier to use. Over the past months we have given you the ability to create a cluster from a MySQL backup, create cross-region read replicas, share snapshots across accounts, exercise additional control over failover, and migrate from other in-cloud or on-premises databases to Aurora. Today, as an extension of […]
Sep 07, 2016
When I interview a candidate for a technical position, I often ask them to explain what happens when they see a interesting link and decide to click on it. I encourage them to go in to as much detail as they would like. The answers let me know how well they understand and can explain […]
Sep 06, 2016
After almost a year of developer feedback and contributions, version 1.0 of the AWS SDK for C++ is now available and recommended for production use. The SDK follows semantic versioning, so starting at version 1.0, you can depend on any of the C++ SDKs at version 1.x, and upgrades will not break your build. Based […]
Sep 06, 2016
This is the second community-driven edition of the AWS Week in Review. Special thanks are due to the 13 external contributors who helped to make this happen. If you would like to contribute, please take a look at the AWS Week in Review on GitHub. Adding relevant content is fast and easy and can be […]
Sep 06, 2016
AWS Community Hero Onur Salk wrote the guest post below in order to tell you how he helped his employer to move to a serverless architecture. I’m Onur Salk, AWS Community Hero, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, and organizer of the AWS user group in Turkey. As a Hero, I like to share my […]
Sep 02, 2016
is currently the fastest-growing AWS service! As a relational database designed for the cloud (read Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS to learn more), Aurora offers great performance, effortless storage scaling all the way up to 64 TB, durability, and high availability. Because Aurora was designed to be compatible with […]
Sep 01, 2016
The EC2 Spot Fleet model (see Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet API – Manage Thousands of Spot Instances with one Request for more information) allows you to create a fleet of EC2 instances with a single request. You simply specify the fleet’s target capacity, enter a bid price per hour, and choose the instance types that […]
Sep 01, 2016
As we see more customers transition their business to the cloud, we are also seeing increased demand in the market for skilled IT professionals who are capable of designing, deploying, and operating applications and infrastructure on AWS. IT certifications are considered a gold standard for validating technical proficiency and one’s ability to perform on the […]
Aug 31, 2016
My colleague Steven Jones wrote the guest post below in order to tell you about an impressive new way to use SAP HANA for large-scale workloads. Back in May we announced the availability of our new X1 instance type x1.32xlarge, our latest addition to the Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instance family with 2 TB of RAM, […]
Aug 30, 2016
Back with her second guest post, Tina Barr talks about four more hot startups! This month we are featuring four hot AWS-powered startups: Craftsvilla – Offering a platform to purchase ethnic goods. SendBird – Helping developers build 1-on-1 messaging and group chat quickly. Teletext.io – A solution for content management, without the system. Wavefront – […]
Aug 29, 2016
Here’s the first community-driven edition of the AWS Week in Review. In response to last week’s blog post (AWS Week in Review – Coming Back With Your Help!), 9 other contributors helped to make this post a reality. That’s a great start; let’s see if we can go for 20 this week. Monday August 22 […]
Aug 29, 2016
helps you to see, diagnose, react to, and resolve issues that arise in your AWS infrastructure and in the applications that you run on AWS. Today, I would like to talk about several usability and functionality improvements to CloudWatch Logs (Store and Monitor OS & Application Log Files with Amazon CloudWatch) and to CloudWatch Dashboards […]
Aug 29, 2016
Many AWS customers have been asking us for a way to programmatically analyze their Cost and Usage Reports (read New – AWS Cost and Usage Reports for Comprehensive and Customizable Reporting for more info). These customers are often using AWS to run multiple lines of business, making use of a wide variety of services, often […]
Aug 23, 2016
Back in 2012 I realized that something interesting happened in AWS-land just about every day. In contrast to the periodic bursts of activity that were the norm back in the days of shrink-wrapped software, the cloud became a place where steady, continuous development took place. In order to share all of this activity with my […]
Aug 19, 2016
In my recent post, I Love My Amazon WorkSpace, I shared the story of how I became a full-time user and big fan of . Since writing the post I have heard similar sentiments from several other AWS customers. Today I would like to tell you about some new and recent developments that will make […]
Aug 11, 2016
Everyone on the AWS team understands the value of educating our customers on the best ways to use our services. We work hard to create documentation, training materials, and blog posts for you! We run live events such as our Global AWS Summits and where the focus is on education. Last but not least, we […]
Aug 11, 2016
Today I would like to tell you about a new AWS Solution. This one is cool because of what it does and how it works! Like the AWS Quick Starts, this one was built by AWS Solutions Architects and incorporates best practices for security and high availability. The new Transit VPC Solution shows you how […]
Aug 11, 2016
We introduced last fall from the re:Invent stage. The Snowball appliance is designed for customers who need to transfer large amounts of data into or out of AWS on a one-time or recurring basis (read AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances to learn more). Today we are launching […]
Aug 11, 2016
provides you with seamless, centralized control over your encryption keys. Our customers have told us that they love this fully managed service because it automatically handles all of the availability, scalability, physical security, and hardware maintenance for the underlying Key Management Infrastructure (KMI). It also centralizes key management, with one dashboard that offers creation, rotation, […]
Aug 11, 2016
As you probably know, every server and device that is connected to the Internet must have a unique IP address. Way back in 1981, RFC 791 (“Internet Protocol”) defined an IP address as a 32-bit entity, with three distinct network and subnet sizes (Classes A, B, and C – essentially large, medium, and small) designed […]
Aug 11, 2016
We introduced the last year in order to allow developers to build backend web services for mobile, web, enterprise, and IoT applications (read Amazon API Gateway – Build and Run Scalable Application Backend to learn more). Since that time, AWS customers have built API implementations that run on , , and on servers running outside […]
Aug 11, 2016
As you may know, greatly simplifies the process of working with real-time streaming data in the . Instead of setting up and running your own processing and short-term storage infrastructure, you simply create a Kinesis Stream or Kinesis Firehose, arrange to pump data in to it, and then build an application to process or analyze […]
Aug 11, 2016
Containers are great but they come with their own management challenges. Our customers have been using containers on AWS for quite some time to run workloads ranging from microservices to batch jobs. They told us that managing a cluster, including the state of the EC2 instances and containers, can be tricky, especially as the environment […]
Aug 11, 2016
We launched Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for AWS in the spring of 2009 (see New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch to see just how far AWS has come since then). Elastic Load Balancing has become a key architectural component for many AWS-powered applications. In conjunction with , Elastic […]
Aug 11, 2016
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) makes it easy for you to create persistent block level storage volumes and attach them to your EC2 instances. Among many other features, EBS allows you to provision SSD-backed volumes with the desired level of performance (Provisioned IOPS or PIOPS) and to create snapshot backups either manually or programmatically. Today […]
Aug 10, 2016
Earlier this month I was asked to be a judge for the AWS Serverless Chatbot Competition and I was happy to accept! Build a Chatbot We want you to build a chatbot for Slack using and . You can also use other APIs (the Slack Events API will be helpful), additional services (AWS or otherwise), […]
Aug 08, 2016
With a long feature list (powered in large part by customer requests) Amazon CloudFront is well-suited to delivering your static, dynamic, and interactive content to users all over the world at high speed and with low latency. As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can handle up to 2 million HTTP and HTTPS requests […]
Aug 03, 2016
We launched at re:Invent (read AWS IoT – Cloud Services for Connected Devices for an introduction) and made it generally available last December. Earlier this year my colleague Olawale Oladehin showed you how to Use Your Own Certificate with AWS IoT. Before that, John Renshaw talked about Predictive Maintenance with AWS IoT and Amazon Machine […]
Aug 02, 2016
The team has been cranking out new releases at a fast and furious pace! Here’s a quick recap of this year’s launches: EMR 4.7.0 – Updates to Apache Tez, Apache Phoenix, Presto, HBase, and Mahout (June). EMR 4.6.0 – HBase for realtime access to massive datasets (April). EMR 4.5.0 – Updates to Hadoop, Presto; addition […]
Jul 28, 2016
A few months ago I wrote about the new Your User Pools feature for . As I wrote at the time, you can use this feature to easily add user sign-up and sign-in to your mobile and web apps. The fully managed user directories can scale to hundreds of millions of users and you can […]
Jul 28, 2016
As I wrote earlier this year, is designed to help you to dig in to your existing environment, identify what’s going on, and provide you with the information and visibility that you need to have in order to successfully migrate your systems and applications to the cloud (see my post, New – AWS Application Discovery […]
Jul 27, 2016
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of . As a managed database service, it takes care of the more routine aspects of setting up, running, and scaling a relational database. We first launched support for SQL Server in 2012. Continuing our effort to add features that have included […]
Jul 27, 2016
Today I would like to introduce a very special guest blogger! My daughter Tina is a Recruiting Coordinator for the AWS team and is making her professional blogging debut with today’s post. It’s officially summer and it’s hot! Check out this month’s hot AWS-powered startups: Depop – a social mobile marketplace for artists and friends […]
Jul 25, 2016
The second annual Prime Day was another record-breaking success for Amazon, surpassing global orders compared to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Prime Day 2015. According to a report published by Slice Intelligence, Amazon accounted for 74% of all US consumer e-commerce on Prime Day 2016. This one-day only global shopping event, exclusively for Amazon Prime […]
Jul 22, 2016
We have some awesome webinars lined up for next week! As always, they are free but do often fill up, so go and and register. Here’s the lineup (all times are PT and each webinar runs for one hour): July 26 9:00 AM – Getting Started with AWS. Noon – SQL to NoSQL: Best Practices […]
Jul 21, 2016
We launched EC2 Run Command late last year and have enjoyed seeing our customers put it to use in their cloud and on-premises environments. After the launch, we quickly added Support for Linux Instances, the power to Manage & Share Commands, and the ability to do Hybrid & Cross-Cloud Management. Earlier today we made EC2 […]
Jul 21, 2016
GameStop sells new and pre-owned video game hardware, software, and accessories, consumer electronics, and wireless services. With over 7,000 retail locations spread across 14 countries, the company sells to and interacts with millions of customers every day. In addition to their retail locations, they follow an omni-channel strategy and run a loyalty program with over […]
Jul 21, 2016
After potential AWS customers see the benefits of moving to the cloud, they often ask about the best way to migrate their applications and their data, including large amounts of structured information stored in relational databases. Today we are launching an important new feature for . If you are already making use of MySQL, either […]
Jul 20, 2016
My colleague Janna Pellegrino shared the guest post below to introduce you to a new set of AWS training bootcamps! We’ve made four of our most popular Technical Bootcamps from AWS re:Invent and Summits part of our broader AWS Training portfolio so you can now attend a class convenient to you. Taking AWS Operations to […]
Jul 13, 2016
My colleague Eric Fitzgerald wrote the guest post below in order to show you how to use an AWS Lambda function to forward Amazon Inspector findings to your ticketing and workflow systems. At AWS Re:Invent 2015 we announced Amazon Inspector, our security vulnerability assessment service that helps customers test for security vulnerabilities early and often. […]
Jul 06, 2016
allows AWS customers to find, buy, and immediately start using cloud-based applications developed by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). AWS customers collectively rack up 205 million hours per month of AWS Marketplace usage as they make use of over 2,700 offerings from over 925 ISVs. Support for EU-Based ISVs ISVs based in the European Union can […]
Jul 06, 2016
Continuing with our focus on hot AWS-powered startups (March and April), I would like to tell you about three more this month: Shaadi.com – Helping South Asians to find a companion for life. Capillary – Boosting customer engagement for e-commerce. Mondo – A mobile-first bank. Shaadi.com Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com, was exasperated by the […]
Jul 05, 2016
My colleague Sanjay Padhi wrote the guest post below in order to tell the story of how AWS powered an important scientific discovery. Ghostlike particles called neutrinos are everywhere, cosmic rays bombard us with them, the sun bathes us in them. Though incredibly difficult to detect, they may hold the key to why there is […]
Jul 01, 2016
We launched EC2 Run Command late last year (read my post, New EC2 Run Command – Remote Instance Management at Scale to learn more). This feature was designed to allow developers, system administrators, and other IT professionals to easily and efficiently manage multiple EC2 instances running Windows or Linux. As I explained in my original […]
Jun 30, 2016
My colleague Janna Pellegrino shared the guest post below to introduce you to the newest version of our AWS Security Fundamentals Course. Information security is deeply important to our customers. AWS Security Fundamentals is a free, online course that introduces you to fundamental cloud computing and AWS security concepts, including AWS access control and management, […]
Jun 30, 2016
In the last couple of months I have spoken with several Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) about their offerings. I’ve heard some impressive success stories and am working to share as many of them as possible. Last week I spoke with the founders of Ionic Security to learn more about their product and new AWS Marketplace […]
Jun 29, 2016
Many applications use the Amazon SNS to deliver SMS messages to individuals or to groups. Because SNS is simple and easy to use, you can add push notifications to your application with a modest amount of code. Today we are making SNS even more useful by adding support for worldwide delivery of SMS messages. You […]
Jun 29, 2016
The portfolio of AWS storage products has grown increasingly rich and diverse over time. Amazon S3 started out with a single storage class and has grown to include storage classes for regular, infrequently accessed, and archived objects. Similarly, began with a single volume type and now offers a choice of four types of SAN-style block […]
Jun 28, 2016
Many AWS customers create high-performance systems that run across multiple EC2 instances and make good use of all available network bandwidth. Over the years, we have been working to make EC2 an ever-better host for this use case. For example, the CC1 instances were the first to feature 10 Gbps networking. Later, the Enhanced Networking […]
Jun 28, 2016
We are expanding the AWS footprint again, this time with a new region in Mumbai, India. AWS customers in the area can use the new Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to better serve end users in India. New Region The new Mumbai region has two Availability Zones, raising the global total to 35. It supports (C4, […]
Jun 21, 2016
AWS already supports the use of encrypted volumes and snapshots, with keys stored in and managed by . It also supports copying of EBS snapshots with other AWS accounts so that they can be used to create new volumes. Today we are joining these features to give you the ability to copy encrypted EBS snapshots […]
Jun 20, 2016
Long-time AWS customer Zynga is making great use of and other AWS database services. In today’s guest post you can learn about how they use Amazon Aurora to accommodate spikes in their workload. This post was written by Chris Broglie of Zynga. Zynga has long operated various database technologies, ranging from simple in-memory caches like […]
Jun 20, 2016
AWS built and now runs a private cloud for the United States Intelligence Community. In order to better meet the needs of this unique community, we have set up an AWS Marketplace designed specifically for them. Much like the existing , this new marketplace makes it easy to discover, buy, and deploy software packages and […]
Jun 08, 2016
More and more, I hear from customers who want to migrate large-scale workloads to AWS, and seek advice regarding their cloud migration strategy. We provide customers with a number of cloud migration tools and services, including the AWS Database Migration Service, and resources, such as the AWS Professional Services Cloud Adoption Framework. Further, we have […]
Jun 08, 2016
Will White of Mapbox shared the following guest post with me. In the post, Will describes how they use EC2 Spot Instances to economically process the billions of data points that they collect each day. I do have one note to add to Will’s excellent post. We know that many AWS customers would like to […]
Jun 02, 2016
allows you to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Since the 2009 launch, we have added many new features and support for an ever-increasing roster of applications from the Hadoop ecosystem. Here are a few of the additions that we have made this year: April – Support for Apache HBase 1.2 (EMR 4.6). […]
Jun 02, 2016
As our customers continue to look to use their data to help drive their missions forward, finding a way to simply and cost-effectively make use of analytics is becoming increasingly important. That is why I am happy to announce the upcoming availability of Data Warehousing on AWS, a new course that helps customers leverage the […]
Jun 01, 2016
You already have the power to scale the read capacity of your instances by adding additional read replicas to an existing cluster. Today we are giving you the power to create a read replica in another region. This new feature will allow you to support cross-region disaster recovery and to scale out reads. You can […]
Jun 01, 2016
In the past couple of years, academic and corporate researchers have begun to see the value of the cloud. Faced with a need to run demanding jobs and to deliver meaningful results as quickly as possible while keeping costs under control, they are now using AWS to run a wide variety of compute-intensive, highly parallel […]
May 26, 2016
supports the popular Memcached and Redis in-memory caching engines. While Memcached is generally used to cache results from a slower, disk-based database, Redis is used as a fast, persistent key-value store. It uses replicas and failover to support high availability, and natively supports the use of structured values. Today I am going to focus on […]
May 24, 2016
Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts media files (audio and video) from one format to another. The service is robust, scalable, cost-effective, and easy to use. You simply create a processing pipeline (pointing to a pair of S3 buckets for input and output in the process), and then create transcoding jobs. Each job reads a specific file […]
May 24, 2016
My colleague Maor Kleider wrote today’s guest post! , AWS’s fully managed data warehouse service, makes petabyte-scale data analysis fast, cheap, and simple. Since launch, it has been one of AWS’s fastest growing services, with many thousands of customers across many industries. Enterprises such as NTT DOCOMO, NASDAQ, FINRA, Johnson & Johnson, Hearst, Amgen, and […]
May 24, 2016
When our users move existing machine images to the cloud for use on Amazon EC2, they occasionally encounter issues with drivers, boot parameters, system configuration settings, and in-progress software updates. These issues can cause the instance to become unreachable via RDP (for Windows) or SSH (for Linux) and can be difficult to diagnose. On a […]
May 23, 2016
If you build an application that processes credit card data, you need to conform to PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). Adherence to the standard means that you need to meet control objectives for your network, protect cardholder data, implement strong access controls, and more. In order to help AWS customers to build […]
May 20, 2016
Last night I spoke with Luca Cipriani from Arduino to learn more about the new AWS-powered Arduino Web Editor and Arduino Cloud Platform offerings. Luca was en-route to the Bay Area Maker Faire and we had just a few minutes to speak, but that was enough time for me to learn a bit about what […]
May 20, 2016
If you are running Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop and/or NetScaler on-premises and are interested in moving to the AWS Cloud, I have a really interesting offer for you! In cooperation with our friends at Citrix (an Advanced APN Technology Partner), we have assembled an AWS Accelerator to help you to plan and execute a successful trial […]
May 18, 2016
is a high-performance, MySQL-compatible database engine. Aurora combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effective of open source databases (see my post, Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS, to learn more). Aurora shares some important attributes with the other database engines that are available […]
May 18, 2016
Many AWS customers are running memory-intensive big data, caching, and analytics workloads and have been asking us for EC2 instances with ever-increasing amounts of memory. Last fall, I first told you about our plans for the new X1 instance type. Today, we are announcing availability of this instance type with the launch of the x1.32xlarge […]
May 18, 2016
Early last year my colleague Steve Mueller stopped by my office to tell me about an internal pilot program that he thought would be of interest to me. He explained that they were getting ready to run Amazon WorkSpaces on the Amazon network and offered to get me on the waiting list. Of course, being […]
May 17, 2016
I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes: Ryan Kroonenburg Aleksandar Nenov Markus Ostertag Cliff Lu The Heroes share their knowledge and demonstrate their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blog posts, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more. Ryan Kroonenburg Ryan […]
May 12, 2016
The EC2 Run Command allows you to manage your EC2 instances in a convenient, scalable fashion (see my blog post, New EC2 Run Command – Remote Instance Management at Scale, for more information). Today we are making several enhancements to this feature: Document Management and Sharing -You can now create custom command documents and share […]
May 12, 2016
Back in the mid-1980’s, I was working on a system that was deployed on Wall Street. Due to a multitude of project constraints, I had to do most of my debugging on-site, spending countless hours in a data center high above Manhattan. The data center occupied an entire floor of the high-rise. Close to the […]
May 05, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday April 25 We announced updated AWS CloudFormation Support for EC2, ECS, Lambda, and GameLift. We announced that AWS IoT is Now Available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. We announced that AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps is Now Available in the EU […]
May 02, 2016
GE Oil & Gas is a relatively young division of General Electric, the product of a series of acquisitions made by parent company General Electric starting in the late 1980s. Today GE Oil &Gas is pioneering the digital transformation of the company. In the guest post below, Ben Cabanas, the CTO of GE Transportation and […]
May 02, 2016
I am a firm believer in the value of continuing education. These days, the half-life on knowledge of any particular technical topic seems to be less than a year. Put another way, once you stop learning your knowledge base will be just about obsolete within 2 or 3 years! In order to make sure that […]
May 02, 2016
Continuing with our focus on hot AWS-powered startups (see Hot Startups on AWS – March 2016 for more info), this month I would like to tell you about: Robinhood – Free stock trading to democratize access to financial markets. Dubsmash – Bringing joy to communication through video. Sharethrough – An all-in-one native advertising platform. Robinhood […]
Apr 28, 2016
Last November I let you know that were were planning to increase the length of the resource IDs for EC2 instances, reservations, EBS volumes, and snapshots in 2016. Early this year I showed you how to opt in to the new format for EC2 instances and EC2 reservations. Effective today you can now opt in […]
Apr 28, 2016
In today’s guest post, Leon Mergen, CTO of Autheos, reviews their company history and their move to AWS. Adding video to a product page on an e-commerce site is perhaps the single most effective way to drive increased sales — studies have shown sales conversion rates can go up by more than two thirds. In […]
Apr 26, 2016
In today’s guest post, Alex Casalboni and Giacomo Marinangeli of Cloud Academy discuss the design and development of their new Inspire system. Our Challenge Mixing technology and content has been our mission at Cloud Academy since the very early days. We are builders and we love technology, but we also know content is king. Serving […]
Apr 25, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday April 18 We announced that AWS CodePipeline Now Integrates with AWS CodeCommit. We announced that AWS CloudFormation Now Supports Amazon API Gateway, and Includes Improved Support for CloudWatch Events and AWS WAF. The talked about Serverless Service Discovery (Part 1 – Getting […]
Apr 22, 2016
Our 2016 series of webinars continues with a strong set of 200-level topics in April. The webinars are free, but space is limited and you should sign up ahead of time if you would like to attend. Here’s what we have on the calendar for the last week of April (all times are Pacific): Tuesday, […]
Apr 21, 2016
Apache HBase is a distributed, scalable big data store designed to support tables with billions of rows and millions of columns. HBase runs on top of Hadoop and HDFS and can also be queried using MapReduce, Hive, and Pig jobs. AWS customers use HBase for their ad tech, web analytics, and financial services workloads. They […]
Apr 20, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday April 11 We announced that the AWS Database Migration Service Now Supports Advanced Table and Schema Mapping. We announced that you can Easily Create New Amazon Redshift Datasources in Amazon ML by Copying Existing Datasource Settings. We updated the Amazon Kinesis Agent […]
Apr 19, 2016
Last year I wrote about and told you how you can use it to Test Mobile Apps on Real Devices. As I described at the time, AWS Device Farm allows you to create a project, identify an application, configure a test, and then run the test against a variety of iOS and Android devices. Remote […]
Apr 19, 2016
makes it easy for mobile and web apps to easily add authentication, user management, and data synchronization without having to write backend code or manage any infrastructure. In the last year we have added some powerful new features to Cognito including AWS CloudTrail support, the use of Twitter and Digits as login providers, the ability […]
Apr 19, 2016
Several AWS teams are focused on simplifying and accelerating the process of moving on-premises data to the cloud. We started out with the very basic PUT operation and multipart upload in the early days. Along the way we gave you the ability to send us a disk, and made that process even easier by launching […]
Apr 19, 2016
Amazon Kinesis makes streaming data easy in the cloud.The Amazon Kinesis platform is comprised of three distinct services: Kinesis Streams allows developers to build their own stream processing applications; Kinesis Firehose simplifies the process of loading streaming data into AWS for storage and analytics; Kinesis Analytics supports the analysis of streaming data using standard SQL […]
Apr 19, 2016
simplifies the process of deploying and running web applications and web services. You simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk will take care of the details. This includes provisioning capacity, setting up load balancing and auto scaling, and arranging for application health monitoring. You can build Elastic Beanstalk applications using a variety of platforms and […]
Apr 19, 2016
The AWS team spends a lot of time looking in to ways to deliver innovation based around improvements in price/performance. Quite often, this means wrestling with interesting economic and technical dilemmas. For example, it turns out that there are some really interesting trade-offs between HDD and SSD storage. On the one hand, today’s SSD devices […]
Apr 12, 2016
Our friends over at Box provide secure content management, collaboration, and file sharing for over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. Box has succeeded by paying attention to the needs of enterprise customers. For example, last year I wrote about Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM), a flexible, no-compromises encryption system that gives […]
Apr 11, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday April 4 We announced Two New Predefined Commands and an Open Source Agent for the EC2 Run Command. We announced Release 4.5.0 of Amazon EMR, with Spark 1.6.1, Updated Hadoop and Presto, and Support for S3 SSE-KMS. The talked about Building a […]
Apr 11, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday March 28 The showed you How to Easily Identify Your Federated Users by Using AWS CloudTrail. BotMetric continued their series of posts on AWS Security Best Practices with two new posts: Data Security and Detective Services. Evident discussed Programmatic Security Automation for […]
Apr 11, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday March 21 We announced New CloudWatch Metrics for Spot Fleets. We announced Retry Throttling for the AWS SDK for Java. We announced that it is Now Easier to Connect Amazon Machine Learning to Amazon Redshift via the AWS Management Console. We announced […]
Apr 11, 2016
My colleague Ray Zhu wrote the guest post below to introduce you to some new data preprocessing features for the Amazon Kinesis Agent. Amazon Kinesis Agent is a stand-alone Java software application that provides an easy and reliable way to send data to Amazon Kinesis Streams and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. The agent monitors a set […]
Apr 07, 2016
We continuously enhance our technical courses to stay current with the pace of AWS platform updates and incorporate student feedback. We have made substantial updates to our two most popular foundational training courses, AWS Technical Essentials and Architecting on AWS, to better provide students with actionable knowledge to get started creating solutions with AWS and […]
Apr 06, 2016
LiveOps Cloud is ready to break open a huge untapped market. The company is a long-time solutions provider for the contact center industry, and just recently launched CxEngage, a new contact center-as-a-service platform built and run entirely on AWS. I asked Jeff Thompson, LiveOps Cloud’s CTO and SVP for engineering, to tell us a bit […]
Apr 05, 2016
My colleagues Jessica Beegle and Christopher Crosbie shared the inspiring story below! The science of cancer research is continually evolving to include new fields of study. Examples include development of chemotherapies, radiology amplified treatments, and epidemiology for identifying carcinogens. Pathology continues to help deepen the understanding of the disease’s manifestations. The discipline of computer science […]
Mar 30, 2016
My colleague Sanjay Padhi is part of the AWS Scientific Computing team. He wrote the guest post below to share the story of how AWS provided computational resources that aided in an important scientific discovery. The Higgs boson (sometimes referred to as the God Particle), responsible for providing insight into the origin of mass, was […]
Mar 29, 2016
lets you create, manage, and update a collection of AWS resources (a “stack”) in a controlled, predictable manner. Every day, customers use CloudFormation to perform hundreds of thousands of updates to the stacks that support their production workloads. They define an initial template and then revise it as their requirements change. This model, commonly known […]
Mar 25, 2016
makes it easy for you to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory database in the cloud. As you may already know, ElastiCache supports the Memcached and Redis engines. More Power for Redis Today we are launching an ElastiCache update that provides you with additional control over your Redis-based ElastiCache clusters. You can now scale up […]
Mar 23, 2016
Airbnb is a classic story of how a few people with a great idea can disrupt an entire industry. Launched in 2008, over 80 million guests have stayed on Airbnb in over 2 million homes in over 190 countries. They recently opened 4,000 homes in Cuba to travelers around the globe. The company was also […]
Mar 23, 2016
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of . As a managed database service, it takes care of the more routine aspects of setting up, running, and scaling a relational database. We first launched support for SQL Server in 2012. Since that time we have added many features including […]
Mar 23, 2016
Forward-looking ISVs (Indepdendent Software Vendors) are making great use of . Users can find, buy, and start using products in minutes, without having to procure hardware or install any software. This streamlined delivery method can help ISVs to discover new customers while also decreasing the length of the sales cycle. The user pays for the […]
Mar 22, 2016
You can launch an EC2 Spot fleet with a couple of clicks. Once launched, the fleet allows you to draw resources from multiple pools of capacity, giving you access to cost-effective compute power regardless of the fleet size (from one instance to many thousands). For more information about this important EC2 feature, read my posts: […]
Mar 21, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday March 14 We announced that the Developer Preview of AWS SDK for C++ is Now Available. We celebrated Ten Years in the AWS Cloud. We launched Amazon EMR 4.4.0 with Sqoop, HCatalog, Java 8, and More. The announced the Launch of AWS […]
Mar 17, 2016
It is still a bit of a shock to me to realize that Amazon S3 is now ten years old! The intervening decade has simply flown by. For several years, you have been able to use S3’s Lifecycle Management feature to control the storage class and the lifetime of your objects. As you may know, […]
Mar 16, 2016
is a fully-managed, MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source database (read my post, Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS, to learn more). Aurora allows you create up to 15 read replicas to increase read […]
Mar 15, 2016
Do you currently store relational data in an on-premises Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL database? Would you like to move it to the AWS cloud with virtually no downtime so that you can take advantage of the scale, operational efficiency, and the multitude of data storage options that are available to you? If […]
Mar 15, 2016
The helps our partners to build successful businesses around AWS. Members of APN provide consulting services (APN Consulting Partners) or software solutions (APN Technology Partners) that are integrated with the AWS platform. I am happy to be able announce that AWS Advanced Technology Partner Splunk (read their APN entry) has named Amazon Web Services to […]
Mar 14, 2016
Rob Leidle, Development Manager for , wrote the guest post below to introduce you to the latest and greatest version! Today we are announcing Amazon EMR release 4.4.0, which adds support for Apache Sqoop (1.4.6) and Apache HCatalog 1.0.0, an upgraded release of Apache Mahout (0.11.1), and upgraded sandbox releases for Presto (0.136) and Apache […]
Mar 14, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday March 7 We launched Notifications for AWS CodeCommit. We announced that New AWS Accounts Now Default to Long EC2 Resource IDs. The showed you How to Automate Restricting Access to a VPC by Using AWS IAM and AWS CloudFormation. Botmetric talked about […]
Mar 14, 2016
My colleague Jonathan Henson has great news for C++ developers who would like to use AWS. I am happy to announce that the AWS SDK for C++ is now available as a developer preview. Last fall, we released the SDK in an experimental state to gather feedback and improve the APIs. Since then, we have […]
Mar 14, 2016
Ten years ago today I announced the launch of Amazon S3 with a simple blog post! It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since then, or that I have written well over 2000 posts during that time. Future Shock When I was in high school, I read and reported on a relatively […]
Mar 11, 2016
We love startups! When energy, enthusiasm, creativity, and passion for changing the world come together to build new and exciting businesses and applications, everyone benefits. Today I am kicking off a new series of posts. Every month I am going to feature a handful of hot, AWS-powered startups and tell you a little bit about […]
Mar 09, 2016
Today’s guest post comes from K Young, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Datadog! AWS recently announced enhanced monitoring for Amazon RDS instances running MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora. Enhanced monitoring includes over 50 new CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O metrics which can be collected on a per-instance basis as frequently as once per second. […]
Mar 09, 2016
Flatiron Health is a hot startup with a great idea – providing cancer patients, physicians, researchers, and drug firms with a solution that organizes global oncology information. Currently more than 230 cancer clinics and about 2,200 clinicians across the United States use their products and services, which support the treatment of approximately one in five […]
Mar 08, 2016
is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for you to host a secure and highly scalable private Git repository.Today we are making CodeCommit even more useful by adding support for repository triggers. You can use these triggers to integrate your existing unit tests and deployment tools into your source code management workflow. […]
Mar 07, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday February 29 We announced that AWS Import/Export Snowball Now Supports Export. We announced that Amazon CloudWatch Events are Now Available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. We announced VPC ClassicLink and ClassicLink Support in the South America (Sao Paulo) Region. We announced that […]
Mar 01, 2016
We launched last year at (see my blog post, AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances, to learn more). At launch time, you had the ability to use this appliance-based model to move large amounts of data (generally 10 terabytes or more) to AWS. This aspect of Snowball is […]
Feb 29, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday February 22 We announced an Amazon RDS Update, with Support for MySQL 5.7. We announced that the AWS Mobile SDK for Android Now Supports AWS IoT. We announced the AWS Pop-Up Loft in Tel Aviv. CloudCheckr listed 5 Common AWS Cost Issues: […]
Feb 25, 2016
Continuing what is quickly turning in to series of customer stories, I would like to turn the keyboard over to our friends at Vodafone! You may have seen an interesting application called DreamLab circulating on the internet and social media in the past couple of weeks, and we thought we’d give you some insight into […]
Feb 25, 2016
I am a flâneur! I enjoy wandering around a new city, exploring the nooks and crannies, and figuring out what makes it unique and special. On one of my trips to Tokyo I was walking through Shibuya and found and amazing hobby store. The 8-floor building contained tools, supplies, and kits for almost every imaginable […]
Feb 25, 2016
My colleagues Jessica Beegle and Angel Pizarro wrote the guest post below to introduce you to an exciting new approach to healthcare! Precision Medicine is an emerging approach for disease prevention and treatment that takes into account a person’s individual variation in genes, lifestyle, and environment. At AWS, we are proud to support the White […]
Feb 24, 2016
makes it simple for you to discover, buy, and deploy many different types of software packages and applications including Network Infrastructure, Security, Web Apps, Business Intelligence, Big Data, DevOps, Media, and Storage / Backup. Access to SharePoint Enterprise I am happy to be able to announce that SharePoint Enterprise is now available to purchase and […]
Feb 23, 2016
Many of my colleagues will be heading to San Francisco next week for the RSA conference. In order to make your time in San Francisco even more worthwhile, you may want to consider attending some security sessions at the AWS Pop-up Loft on Market Street (a short walk from Moscone Center). The talks (from our […]
Feb 22, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday February 15 The talked about What’s Next for Lumberyard. The published a Practical Guide to Cloud Migration. The showed our partners how to Securely Access Customer AWS Accounts Using Cross-Account IAM Roles. The showed you How to Automate HIPAA Compliance (Part 1 […]
Feb 22, 2016
You can now launch Amazon RDS database instances that run MySQL 5.7 . This release of MySQL offers a number of performance, scalability, and security enhancements. Here are some of the most important and relevant ones: Native support for JSON data and a set of built-in JSON functions (JSON_ARRAY, JSON_OBJECT, JSON_QUOTE, JSON_CONTAINS, JSON_CONTAINS_PATH, JSON_EXTRACT, JSON_KEYS, […]
Feb 22, 2016
The AWS Pop-up Lofts in San Francisco and New York have become hubs and working spaces for developers, entrepreneurs, students, and others who are interested in working with and learning more about AWS. They come to learn, code, meet, collaborate, ask questions, and to hang out with other like-minded folks. I am happy to announce […]
Feb 18, 2016
is a service that helps you to deploy your code to a fleet of EC2 or on-premises instances while taking care to leave as much of the fleet online as possible. [codedeploy_u] was designed to work with fleets that range in size from a single instance all the way up to thousands of instances (see […]
Feb 17, 2016
Service members returning from active duty can face many challenges—including finding a new job or even a new career. To help veterans succeed, we’ve worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to make AWS Certification exams eligible for VA reimbursement under the GI Bill’s education provision. About AWS Certifications AWS Certifications recognize IT professionals with […]
Feb 17, 2016
Today I have a new guest post, this one written by AWS customer Safe Software. They were an early adopter of and have a great story to tell. Being in the business of moving data, Safe Software is always working to support leading edge database technology. This focus naturally led us to us being aware […]
Feb 16, 2016
My colleague Abhishek Sinha wrote the guest post below to tell you about the latest additions to . Amazon EMR is a service that allows you to use distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark and Presto to process data on a managed cluster of EC2 instances. Newer versions of EMR (3.10 […]
Feb 16, 2016
Last month I challenged you to learn something new in 2016 and offered up our January webinar series as a starting point. We’ve put together another strong lineup for February and I’d like to share it with you now. As always, the webinars are free but space is limited and you should sign up ahead […]
Feb 15, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday February 8 We announced that Amazon Redshift Now Supports Appending Rows to Tables and Exporting Query Results to BZIP2-compressed Files. The advised you to Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy with Partners. Spotinst announced that Spotinst Elastigroup Now Integrates with AWS CodeDeploy. Cloud Academy […]
Feb 12, 2016
In light of the recent announcement that Parse will be winding down, the AWS team has been working to provide developers with some migration paths and some alternative services, as have members of the AWS community. Here’s what I know about: A new post on the shows you how to Migrate From Parse Push to […]
Feb 12, 2016
I would like to extend a warm welcome to our new colleagues at NICE. We have signed an agreement to acquire this leading provider of software and services for high performance and technical computing. Products for HPC From their headquarters in Asti, Italy, NICE delivers products and solutions to customers all over the world. These […]
Feb 12, 2016
A few months ago I announced that you would soon be able to access resources in a VPC from your functions. I am happy to announce that this much-wanted feature is now available and that you can start using it today! Your Lambda functions can now access data warehouses, clusters, instances, and service endpoints that […]
Feb 12, 2016
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to secure your AWS environment. Some of our more recent announcements in this area include encrypted EBS boot volumes, encryption at rest for Amazon Aurora, and support for across several different services. Today we are giving you some additional options for data stored in […]
Feb 11, 2016
Earlier this year I told you about the AWS IoT Mega Contest. The contest closed at the end of January, the judges retired to our secret lair deep in the heart of Seattle, and we have chosen the winners. There were an impressive number of equally impressive projects and it was not easy to evaluate […]
Feb 09, 2016
Building world-class games is a very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive process. The audience is incredibly demanding. They want engaging, social play that spans a wide variety of desktop, console, and mobile platforms. Due to the long lead time inherent in the game development and distribution process, the success or failure of the game can often […]
Feb 08, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday February 1 We launched the AWS Answers site. The showed you how to Test Your App’s Compatibility with Android 6.0 Using Amazon’s App Testing Service (ATS). The explored how to Continue Rolling Back an Update for AWS CloudFormation Stacks in the UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED […]
Feb 08, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday January 25 We announced AWS Marketplace Support for the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. We announced that AWS CloudFormation Now Includes an Override for Failed Update Rollbacks. The listed 4 Dos and Don’ts when Using the Cloud to Experiment. The explained how Cloud […]
Jan 29, 2016
My colleague Mike Stroh is part of our sales training team. He wrote the guest post below to introduce you to our newest AWS training courses. We routinely tweak our 3-day AWS technical training courses to keep pace with AWS platform updates, incorporate learner feedback, and the latest best practices. Today I want to tell […]
Jan 29, 2016
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of . In fact, after checking my calendar, I verified that every blog post I have written in the last 10 months has been done from within my WorkSpace. Regardless of my location—office, home, or hotel room—performance, availability, and functionality have all […]
Jan 28, 2016
In the early days of AWS, customers were happy to simply learn about the cloud and its benefits. As they started to learn more, the conversation shifted. It went from “what is the cloud” to “what kinds of security does the cloud offer” to “”how can I use the cloud” over the course of just […]
Jan 28, 2016
For Episode 134 of the AWS podcast, I spoke with Bob Rogers, PhD, Chief Data Scientist for Big Data Solutions at Intel Corporation. We talked about how Bob entered the field of data science, how to get value from data science projects, and some misconceptions around big data. You can listen to the podcast to […]
Jan 27, 2016
My colleague Jon Fritz wrote the blog post below to introduce you to some new features of . — Jeff; Today we are announcing Amazon EMR release 4.3.0, which adds support for Apache Hadoop 2.7.1, Apache Spark 1.6.0, Ganglia 3.7.2, and a new sandbox release for Presto (0.130). We have also enhanced our maximizeResourceAllocation setting […]
Jan 26, 2016
Early in my career I worked for several companies that developed and shipped (on actual tapes) packaged software. Back in those pre-Internet days, marketing, sales, and distribution were all done on a country-by-country basis. This often involved setting up a field office and hiring local staff, both of which were expensive, time-consuming, and somewhat speculative. […]
Jan 25, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday January 18 We announced that Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge is Now Live. We announced a GxP Compliance Resource for AWS. The showed you how to Speed Template Sharing with an AWS CloudFormation Designer URL. Botmetric showed how New AWS Scheduled Reserved […]
Jan 21, 2016
As people across the Northeastern United States are stocking up their pantries and preparing their disaster supplies kits, AWS is also preparing for winter snow storms and the subsequent hurricane season. After fielding several customer requests for information about our preparation regime, my colleagues Brian Beach and Ilya Epshteyn wrote the following guest post in […]
Jan 21, 2016
I am fascinated by things that are simple on the surface and complex underneath! For example, consider the popular padlock icon that is used to signify that traffic to and from a web site is encrypted: How does the browser know that it should display the green padlock? Well, that’s quite the story! It all […]
Jan 20, 2016
It is big. It is cold. It is secure. And now it is empty, because you have gone all-in to the AWS Cloud. So, what do you do with your data center? Once the pride and joy of your IT staff, it is now a stark, expensive reminder that the world has changed. Many AWS […]
Jan 19, 2016
Ever since we launched AWS, customers have been curious about how they can use it to build and run applications that must meet many different types of regulatory requirements. For example, potential AWS users in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries are subject to a set of guidelines and practices that are commonly known […]
Jan 19, 2016
Did you resolve to learn something new in 2016? If so, you should attend an AWS webinar! Each month, we run a series of webinars that are designed to bring you up to speed on the latest AWS services & features, and to make sure that you are aware of the best ways to put […]
Jan 18, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday January 11 We announced ClassicLink DNS Support. We announced that Elastic Beanstalk Now Supports t2.nano Instances and Deployment From the EC2 Container Registry. We updated the AWS SDK for Unity. The talked about Landsat on AWS: Half a Year, Half a Billion […]
Jan 18, 2016
Back in November 2014 AWS made a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint, and we continue to make progress towards this goal. Today’s news on this topic is particularly exciting for us – our Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, located in Benton County, Indiana, is now live and […]
Jan 15, 2016
Getting Ready to present (photo by Danilo Poccia) Late last year I traveled to Barcelona and delivered the keynote address at one of the final AWS Summit events of 2015. My re:Invent recap was well received; the AWS users and partners in the area were excited by our newest services and left the session eager […]
Jan 14, 2016
When you pull the curtain back on an AWS-powered application, you’ll find that a lot is happening behind the scenes. EC2 instances are launched and terminated by Auto Scaling policies in response to changes in system load, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon SNS topics and Amazon SQS queues are created and deleted, and attributes of existing […]
Jan 14, 2016
Last November I gave you a heads-up that we planned to increase the length of the resource IDs for EC2 instances, reservations, volumes, and snapshots in early 2016. We are now entering a transition period that will last until early December (2016). During this period, you can opt in to the new format (a resource […]
Jan 14, 2016
can be used to deliver static and dynamic content using a global network of edge locations. You can set it up in minutes and give your customers the benefit of fast, low-latency access to your web site, movies, music, and so forth. Each CloudFront distribution references one or more origins (web servers or S3 buckets). […]
Jan 13, 2016
Many AWS customers run some of their mission-critical applications on a periodic (daily, weekly, or monthly), part-time basis. Here are some of the kinds of things that they like to do: A bank or mutual fund performs Value at Risk calculations every weekday afternoon. A phone company does a multi-day bill calculation run at the […]
Jan 13, 2016
Does your operations team practice ChatOps? This brand-new term refers to the practice of conversation-driven operations using one or more “bots” that have the ability to insert notifications & status reports into the conversation and to respond to commands. The chat environment provides real-time communication, a coherent shared view, multi-user access from web and mobile […]
Jan 13, 2016
We continue to announce, build, and launch additional AWS regions as our customer base becomes larger, more diverse, and accustomed to running many different types of workloads in the cloud. Hello, Canada I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS region in Montreal, Québec, Canada in the coming year. This region […]
Jan 12, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday January 4 We announced that Amazon WorkMail is Now Generally Available. The talked about Creating a Culture of Experimentation Enabled by the Cloud. CloudCheckr shared some Cloud Predictions for 2016. Cloud Academy explored Six Cloud Computing Myths. Cloud Zone talked about Provisioning […]
Jan 12, 2016
The AWS IoT Mega Contest (brought to you by AWS and the great team at Hackster) has been extended until January 31, 2016. We already have over 850 participants, nearly 300 project ideas, and 45 projects, but there’s still time (and room) for more. As the name suggests, we’re looking for Internet of Things projects […]
Jan 07, 2016
We are expanding the footprint once again, this time with a new region in Seoul, South Korea. AWS customers in the area can use the new Asia Pacific (Seoul) region for fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services. New Region The new Seoul region has two Availability Zones (raising the global total […]
Jan 05, 2016
The AWS Cost Explorer (read The New Cost Explorer for AWS to learn more) is a set of a tools that help you to track and manage your AWS costs. Last year we added saved reports, budgets & forecasts, and additional filtering & grouping dimensions. Today we are adding EC2 usage data to Cost Explorer, […]
Jan 05, 2016
I am happy to be able to announce that we are making yet another EC2 price reduction! We are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for C4 and M4 instances running Linux by 5% in the , , , , , , , and regions. We are also reducing the On-Demand, […]
Jan 05, 2016
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday December 28 I published podcasts from Aerobatic, Aire, Prairie Cloud, and Osper. We announced that D2 Instances are Available in AWS GovCloud (US). We announced that AWS CloudFormation Now Supports AWS WAF, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, DynamoDB Global Secondary […]
Jan 04, 2016
I first wrote about last year when we made it available in preview form. At the time, I noted that is a managed calendaring and email solution that runs in the and works with your existing desktop and mobile clients. In my initial post (Amazon WorkMail – Managed Email and Calendaring in the AWS Cloud) […]
Dec 31, 2015
For my final batch of 2015 podcasts, I spoke with representatives of Banter, Predicsis, Peak, Urban Massage, Contentful, Babbel, and Intel IoT. As always, the “Episode” links go directly to the audio files. You can also find several subscription options on the page. Episode 127 For Episode 127, I interviewed Diego Villareal (CEO and Co-founder) […]
Dec 28, 2015
After some experimentation, I am now somewhat proficient at recording podcasts remotely! In fact, three of the four podcasts below were recorded over Skype with the aid of Zencastr. This time around, I spoke with representatives of Aerobatic, Aire, Prairie Cloud, and Osper. As usual, the “Episode” links go directly to the audio files. Episode […]
Dec 28, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday December 21 We announced that the EC2 Container Registry is Now Generally Available. The showed how Students Use AWS to Predict Ebola Outbreaks. The noted that AWS ISO 27001 Certification Increases Total In-Scope Services to 33. We updated the AWS SDK for […]
Dec 22, 2015
My colleague Jon Fritz wrote the guest post below to introduce you to an important new feature for . — Jeff; Today we are announcing that Amazon EMR now supports launching clusters in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) private subnets, allowing you to quickly, cost-effectively, and securely create fully configured clusters with Hadoop ecosystem applications, […]
Dec 22, 2015
Here’s the final batch of interviews that I recorded on Tuesday, September 1 at the AWS Loft in San Francisco as part of the Intel Startup Spotlight for the . Episode 122 was recorded remotely (a first for me). I spoke with representatives from JAWS, Muterra, Betabrand, and DubSmash. As usual, the “Episode” links go […]
Dec 21, 2015
My colleague Andrew Thomas wrote the guest post below to introduce you to the new EC2 Container Registry! — Jeff; I am happy to announce that Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is now generally available! Amazon ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker […]
Dec 21, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday December 14 We announced Encrypted EBS Boot Volumes. We updated the DynamoDB Backend for Titan to Version 1.0. We announced that Amazon RDS Now Supports Oracle Database Standard Edition Two (BYOL) and October 2015 PSU. The showed you how to Set up […]
Dec 21, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday December 7 We announced Instance Protection for Auto Scaling. We announced Encryption at Rest for Amazon Aurora. I published AWS Podcasts with Convox, FundersClub, Pachyderm, and Runscope. The announced the AWS SDK for .NET Refresh for ASP.NET 5. Botmetric shared 6 Important […]
Dec 18, 2015
makes it easy for you to set up, run, scale, and maintain a relational database. As is often the case with the high-level AWS model, we take care of all of the details in order to give you the time to focus on your application and your business. Enhanced Monitoring Advanced RDS users have asked […]
Dec 18, 2015
We announced AWS Config Rules (Dynamic Compliance Checking for Cloud Resources) at and made a preview available to interested customers. As I noted at the time, you can use these rules to verify that existing and newly launched AWS resources conform to your organization’s security guidelines and best practices without having to spend time manually […]
Dec 18, 2015
A few months ago, I wrote about (see AWS IoT – Cloud Services for Connected Devices) and talked about how we are working to make sure that AWS is well-equipped to support many different types of IoT devices and applications. At that time we launched in beta form and invited interested developers to sign up […]
Dec 17, 2015
Many of our customers have been asking us for data and tools to allow them to better understand and manage their AWS costs. New Reports Today we are introducing a set of new AWS Cost and Usage Reports that provide you with comprehensive data about products, pricing, and usage. The reports allow you to understand […]
Dec 17, 2015
My colleague Sivakanth Mundru wrote the guest post below in order to share news of some important new features for . As many of you know AWS CloudTrail provides visibility into API activity in your AWS account and enables you to answer important questions such as which user made an API call or which resources […]
Dec 17, 2015
helps you to get your content to your users at high speed with low latency. Today we are making even better with the addition of support for Gzip compression. After you enable it for a particular CloudFront distribution, text and binary content will be compressed at the edge and returned in response to requests that […]
Dec 17, 2015
is an online store that helps you to find, buy, and immediately start using a very wide variety of applications on AWS (some of the more popular categories are Network Infrastructure, Security, and Big Data). Up until now, running an application from was essentially equivalent to launching a single, self-contained Amazon EC2 instance. This was […]
Dec 17, 2015
You can use to create a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. Within the VPC, you can define your desired IP address range, create subnets, configure route tables, and so forth. You can also use a virtual private gateway to connect the VPC to your existing on-premises network using a hardware Virtual Private Network […]
Dec 16, 2015
Back when I was young, InfoWorld was a tabloid-sized journal that chronicled the growth of the PC industry. Every week I would await the newest issue and read it cover to cover, eager to learn all about the latest and greatest hardware and software. I always enjoyed and appreciated the reviews — they were unfailingly […]
Dec 16, 2015
The helps you to provision and configure your AWS resources so as to improve system performance and reliability, increase security, and optimize for cost. We have added some new checks and improved an existing one in order to make even more useful to you. Here is a summary of the changes: The Service Limits check […]
Dec 16, 2015
When we launched EC2 Run Command seven weeks ago (see my post, New EC2 Run Command – Remote Instance Management at Scale to learn more), I promised similar functionality for instances that run Linux. I am happy to be able to report that this functionality is available now and that you can start using it […]
Dec 16, 2015
We announced the t2.nano instances earlier this year. Like their larger siblings (t2.micro, t2.small, t2.medium, and t2.large), these instances provide a baseline level of processing power, along with the ability to save up unused cycles and use them when the need arises. As I noted in my earlier post (New T2.Large Instances), this model has […]
Dec 15, 2015
Here are the next batch of podcasts that I recorded on Tuesday, September 1 at the AWS Loft in San Francisco as part of the Intel Startup Spotlight for the . I spoke with startups Compgun, Primadesk, SkinnyPrice. I also spoke with Cameron Peron, a startup advisor. Here are the episodes and the show notes […]
Dec 15, 2015
Encryption is an important part of any data protection strategy. Over the past year or two, we have introduced many features that are designed to simplify the task of storing your cloud-based information in encrypted form. Many of these features make use of the AWS Key Management Service (KMS); here are some of the more […]
Dec 14, 2015
I was super-double-extra busy last week and did not have time to assemble the Week in Review as usual. I’m playing catch-up now! Monday November 30 We announced an AWS Certification Update – ISO 27017. The announced that Big Data AWS Training Course Gets Big Update. Cloudyn shared Top 7 Cloud Influencers You Need to […]
Dec 11, 2015
I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes: Jarrod Levitan Keith Yau Boyan Dimitrov Austen Collins Teri Radichel The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more. Jarrod Levitan Jarrod is the […]
Dec 11, 2015
I registered my first domain name almost 20 years ago! Back then, the mapping from a domain name to a server was simple and straightforward. Load balancers, geographic redundancy, website monitoring, cloud computing, and the like had not yet entered the scene. The mapping was always from a domain name to a single, unchanging IP […]
Dec 10, 2015
Many AWS customers and partners have been asking for a programmatic way to access prices for AWS services. This information can be used in several ways. Some potential customers are evaluating the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of moving their on-premises workloads to the cloud and want to “do the math.” Current customers and partners would like […]
Dec 09, 2015
When I discuss AWS with enterprise customers, they often ask me how they can take advantage of their existing investments in on-premises virtualization. They want to take advantage of their existing “golden” images and the development, deployment, and certification processes that go along with them. Fortunately, I am able to tell them about two separate […]
Dec 09, 2015
makes it easy for you to create a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. This private connectivity can reduce your network costs, increase data transfer throughput, and provide a more consistent experience than a shared Internet-based connection. I am pleased to be able to announce that we have opened up 5 more Direct […]
Dec 09, 2015
The AWS Directory Service allows you to use your existing corporate identities to access AWS services and to simplify cloud-based deployment of Microsoft Windows and Linux applications that are dependent on the availability of a directory. We launched the service last year with support for two types of directories (AD Connector and Simple AD); see […]
Dec 07, 2015
You can use to scale a collection of EC2 instances up and down based on a set of conditions that you define. Scaling out helps you to maintain the desired level of performance as demand for processing power increases; scaling in reduces costs during quiet periods. Today we are giving you additional control over the […]
Dec 07, 2015
We launched a little over a year ago (see my post, Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS, to learn more). Customer adoption of Amazon Aurora has been strong and it is now the fastest-growing AWS service! We recently made Amazon Aurora available in the region for our customers in Japan […]
Dec 07, 2015
Early in the fall I spent two days talking to startups and recording their stories in the basement of the AWS Loft in San Francisco as part of the Intel Startup Spotlight focus for the . I published the first four interviews a couple of months ago. Life got kind of busy (this little thing […]
Dec 01, 2015
Every month, we set up a series of webinars that are designed to bring you up to speed on the latest AWS services & features, and to make sure that you are aware of the best ways to put them to use. The webinars are conducted by senior AWS Product Managers and Solution Architects and […]
Nov 30, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday November 23 We announced that EC2 Dedicated Hosts Are Now Available. The talked about Building IoT Solutions with AWS and Intel. The CloudCheckr Blog talked about Unused and Idle Resources in AWS. The N2WS Blog showed you How to Verify That Your […]
Nov 30, 2015
I am happy to announce that AWS has achieved ISO 27017 certification. This new criteria builds upon the ISO 27002 standard, with additional controls specifically applicable to cloud service providers. AWS is the first cloud provider to obtain this certification, which is available now for download on our compliance site. Additionally, we’ve posted a Frequently […]
Nov 24, 2015
Sitecore is a popular enterprise content management system that also includes a multi-channel marketing automation component with an architecture that is a great fit for the AWS cloud! It allows marketers to deliver a personalized experience that takes into account the customers’ prior interaction with the site and the brand (they call this feature Context […]
Nov 23, 2015
Last month, I announced that we would soon be making EC2 Dedicated Hosts available. As I wrote at the time, this model allows you to control the mapping of EC2 instances to the underlying physical servers. Dedicated Hosts allow you to: Bring Your Own Licenses – You can bring your existing server-based licenses for Windows Server, […]
Nov 23, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday November 16 The announced that the AWS Security Token Service (STS) Is Now Active by Default in All AWS Regions. Eric Hammond talked about Using AWS CodeCommit with Git Repositories in Multiple AWS Accounts. The Cloudyn Blog analyzed EC2 Price Drops over […]
Nov 20, 2015
The AWS Cost Explorer allows you to explore and forecast your AWS costs (read The New Cost Explorer for AWS to learn more). You can use Cost Explorer’s built-in filtering and grouping facilities to analyze your expenditures by Account, Service, Tag, Availability Zone, Purchase Option, and API Operation. For example, here’s a quick look at […]
Nov 20, 2015
My colleague Jon Fritz wrote the guest post below to introduce you to the newest version of . — Jeff; Today we are announcing Amazon EMR release 4.2.0, which adds support for Apache Spark 1.5.2, Ganglia 3.6 for Apache Hadoop and Spark monitoring, and new sandbox releases for Presto (0.125), Apache Zeppelin (0.5.5), and Apache […]
Nov 19, 2015
Earlier this year, my colleague Peter Moon shared our plans to launch an AWS SDK for Go. As you will read in Peter’s guest post below, the SDK is now generally available! — Jeff; At AWS, we work hard to promote and serve the developer community around our products. This is one of the reasons […]
Nov 19, 2015
If you build mobile apps, you know that you have two implementation choices. You can build native or hybrid applications that compile to an executable file. You can also build applications that run within the device’s web browser. We launched the in July with support for testing native and hybrid applications on iOS and Android […]
Nov 18, 2015
My colleagues Angel Pizarro and Ariel Gold wrote the incredibly interesting guest post below. — Jeff; Today we are pleased to announce that qualified researchers can now access two of the world’s largest collections of cancer genome data at no cost on AWS as part of the AWS Public Data Sets program. Providing access to […]
Nov 17, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday November 9 We announced the AWS Webinars for November 2015 – Learn About New Services and Best Practices. We announced that AWS Device Farm Now Supports Testing Your Apps Written in Swift. The discussing Using Amazon Kinesis Firehose. The showed you how […]
Nov 16, 2015
I have been traveling and got behind on my Week in Review posts. Here’s the day-by-day for late October’ I’ll catch up on everything else (code, presentations, videos, events, and so forth) in the post for the week of November 9th. Monday November 2 The noted that Great Leaders Make New Rules. We updated the […]
Nov 16, 2015
I have been traveling and got behind on my Week in Review posts. Here’s the day-by-day for late October; I’ll catch up on everything else (code, presentations, videos, events, and so forth) in the post for the week of November 9th. Monday October 26 We announced the New EC2 Run Command for Remote Instance Management […]
Nov 12, 2015
Today we have a very special guest post. My colleague Shannon Kellogg is a senior member of our Public Policy team. He has an interesting perspective on the role of public policies for renewable energy, with a focus on how they affect investment and economic growth. — Jeff; In late September, I traveled to Virginia’s […]
Nov 10, 2015
The Challenge Our City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge was designed to encourage local governments to use AWS to create innovative solutions to problems faced by local governments in the United States and other countries. Each year, we recognize winners in three categories: Best Practices, Dream Big, and Partners in Innovation. Over the years that […]
Nov 09, 2015
As we did last month, we are running a series of webinars designed to bring you up to speed on the latest AWS services & features, and to make sure that you are aware of the best ways to put them to use. The webinars are free but “seating” is limited and you should definitely […]
Nov 04, 2015
The region-based AWS model has proven to be a good match for the needs of our global customer base. We have always believed that you need to be able to exercise complete control over where your data is stored and where it is processed. Next Stop, Korea I am happy to announce that we will […]
Nov 04, 2015
My colleague Angela Chapman wrote the guest post below to make you aware of longer instance, reservation, volume, and snapshot IDs that we will be rolling out in 2016. – Jeff; EC2 and EBS are planning to increase the length of some of their resource IDs over the coming year. In 2016, we will be […]
Nov 03, 2015
Are you planning to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam? If so, we have a new full-day workshop to help you prepare. The new AWS Certification Exam Readiness Workshop provides an overview of the concepts and knowledge areas covered on the Solutions Architect—Professional exam, and walks you through the exam structure and question […]
Oct 29, 2015
Today I would like to tell you about a new cross-account snapshot sharing feature for . You can share the snapshots with specific AWS accounts or you can make them public. Cross-Account Snapshot Sharing I often create snapshot backups as part of my RDS demos: The snapshots are easy to create and can be restored […]
Oct 28, 2015
You can use to create a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. Within the VPC, you can define your desired IP address range, create subnets, configure route tables, and so forth. You can also use a network gateway to connect the VPC to your existing on-premises network using a hardware Virtual Private Network (VPN) […]
Oct 27, 2015
My colleague Ariel Gold wrote the guest post below to introduce the newest AWS Public Data Set. — Jeff; You can now access real-time and archival NEXRAD weather radar data as an AWS Public Data Set. The Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) is a network of 160 high-resolution Doppler radar sites that detects precipitation […]
Oct 26, 2015
When you move from a relatively static and homogeneous computing environment where you have a small number of persistent, well-known servers (or instances, using terminology) to a larger and more dynamic and heterogeneous environment, you may need to think about managing and controlling those instances in a new way. New EC2 Run Command Today we […]
Oct 26, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday October 19 Eric Hammond showed you how to Protect Critical SNS Topics from Deletion. ElasticBox shared some IT Insights from AWS re:Invent 2015. We announced that Amazon CodeDeploy is Now Available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. We announced that Amazon is Now […]
Oct 19, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday October 12 The published a Amazon EC2 Container Service at AWS re:Invent Wrap-up. I invited you to Learn About the Newest AWS Services and Attend our October Webinars. The Platform reported on The Custom Gear Inside Amazon’s Cloud. We updated the AWS […]
Oct 12, 2015
If you attended , you were among the first to know about Amazon QuickSight, AWS IoT, Kinesis Firehose, and our other new offerings. Perhaps you had time to attend a session to learn more about the new service or services that were of interest to you. If you didn’t attend re:Invent or missed a session […]
Oct 12, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday October 5 We announced CodeCommit Repo Browsing in the Console. The announced the Internet of Beer: Introducing Simple Beer Service. The Cloudlytics Blog talked about Amazon EC2 Monitoring & Management to Increase Efficiency & Optimize Usage. Tuesday October 6 We announced EC2 […]
Oct 08, 2015
The new AWS Mobile Hub (Beta) simplifies the process of building, testing, and monitoring mobile applications that make use of one or more AWS services. It helps you skip the heavy lifting of integrating and configuring services by letting you add and configure features to your apps, including user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push […]
Oct 08, 2015
Have you heard about the Internet of Things (IoT)? Although critics sometimes dismiss it as nothing more than “put a chip in it,” I believe that the concept builds upon some long-term technology trends and that there’s something really interesting and valuable going on. To me, the most relevant trends are the decreasing cost of […]
Oct 08, 2015
We launched at re:Invent 2014 and the reception has been incredible. Developers and system architects quickly figured out that they can quickly and easily build serverless systems that need no administration and can scale to handle a very large number of requests. As a recap, Lambda functions can run in response to the following events: […]
Oct 08, 2015
monitors your AWS cloud resources and your cloud-powered applications. It tracks the metrics so that you can visualize and review them. You can also set alarms that will fire when a metrics goes beyond a limit that you specified. CloudWatch gives you visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. New CloudWatch Dashboards Today […]
Oct 08, 2015
I’m really excited by the -driven, container-based deployment model that is quickly becoming the preferred way to build, run, scale, and quickly update new applications. Since we launched last year, we have seen customers use it to host and run their microservices, web applications, and batch jobs. Many developers have told me that containers have […]
Oct 08, 2015
AWS customers love to share their plans and their infrastructure needs with us. We, in turn, love to listen and to do our best to meet those needs. A look at the EC2 instance history should tell you a lot about our ability to listen to our customers and to respond with an increasingly broad […]
Oct 07, 2015
As systems, configurations, and applications become more and more complex, detecting potential security and compliance issues can be challenging. Agile development methodologies can shorten the time between “code complete” and “code tested and deployed,” but can occasionally allow vulnerabilities to be introduced by accident and overlooked during testing. Also, many organizations do not have enough […]
Oct 07, 2015
The flexible, dynamic nature of the AWS cloud gives developers and admins the flexibility to launch, configure, use, and terminate processing, storage, networking, and other resources as needed. In any fast-paced agile environment, security guidelines and policies can be overlooked in the race to get a new product to market before the competition. Imagine that […]
Oct 07, 2015
We launched the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) almost six years ago, in October of 2009. The initial launch gave you the power to launch a MySQL database instance from the command line. From that starting point we have added a multitude of features, along with support for the SQL Server, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, and […]
Oct 07, 2015
Even though high speed Internet connections (T3 or better) are available in many parts of the world, transferring terabytes or petabytes of data from an existing data center to the cloud remains challenging. Many of our customers find that the data migration aspect of an all-in move to the cloud presents some surprising issues. In […]
Oct 07, 2015
Two years ago we introduced , which we now call Amazon Kinesis Streams, to allow you to build applications that collect, process, and analyze streaming data with very high throughput. We don’t want you to have to think about building and running a fleet of ingestion servers or worrying about monitoring, scaling, or reliable delivery. […]
Oct 07, 2015
Over the last couple of years, the process of collecting, uploading, storing, and processing data on AWS has become faster, simpler, and increasingly comprehensive. We have delivered a broad set of data-centric services that tackle many of the issues faced by our customers. For example: Managing Databases is Painful and Difficult – addresses many of […]
Oct 06, 2015
The AWS Global Partner Summit just wrapped up! This annual event is held the day before the main keynotes, breakout sessions, and other events. During the event, members of the had the opportunity to hear from senior AWS leaders. Traditionally, the talks have provided insights into the future direction of AWS and of the APN […]
Oct 06, 2015
I do believe that there’s a strong evolutionary aspect to the continued development of AWS. Services start out simple and gain new features over time. Our customers start to use those features, provide us with ample feedback, and we respond by enhancing existing features and building new ones. As an example, consider the history of […]
Oct 06, 2015
Sometimes business enables technology, and sometimes technology enables business! If you are migrating from an existing environment to AWS, you may have purchased volume licenses for software that is licensed for use on a server with a certain number of sockets or physical cores. Or, you may be required to run it on a specific […]
Oct 06, 2015
Have you ever taken the time to watch the access and error logs from your web server scroll past? In addition to legitimate well-formed requests from users and spiders, you will probably see all sorts of unseemly and downright scary requests far too often. For example, I checked the logs for one of my servers […]
Oct 02, 2015
There’s a lot of buzz about Spot instances these days. Customers are really starting to understand the power that comes with the ability to name their own price for compute power! After launching the Spot fleet API in May to allow you to manage thousands of Spot instances with a single request, we followed up […]
Oct 02, 2015
Seattle-born musical legend Jimi Hendrix started out his career with a landmark album titled Are You Experienced? I’ve got a similar question for you: Are You Well-Architected? In other words, have you chosen a cloud architecture that is in alignment with the best practices for the use of AWS? We want to make sure that […]
Oct 02, 2015
As I have noted in the past, I am a huge fan and devoted user of . In fact, every blog post that I have written and illustrated over the last 6 or 7 months has been written on my WorkSpace. The most recent set of AWS podcasts were edited on the same WorkSpace. Several […]
Oct 01, 2015
My colleague Sivakanth Mundru sent the guest post below to introduce a pair of features for . — Jeff; As you know, AWS CloudTrail records API calls made on your account and delivers log files containing API activity to an S3 bucket you specify. Today, we are announcing two new features for CloudTrail: Support for […]
Oct 01, 2015
Elasticsearch is a real-time, distributed search and analytics engine that fits nicely into a cloud environment. It is document-oriented and does not require a schema to be defined up-front. It supports structured, unstructured, and time-series queries and serves as a substrate for other applications and visualization tools including Kibana. Today we are launching the new […]
Oct 01, 2015
makes it easy for you to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources (which we call a stack). Starting from a template, CloudFormation creates the resources in an orderly and predictable fashion, taking in to account dependencies between them, and connecting them together as defined in the template. A CloudFormation template is nothing […]
Sep 30, 2015
My colleagues Jon Fritz and Abhishek Sinha are both Senior Product Managers on the team. They wrote the guest post below to introduce you to the newest release of EMR and to tell you about new EMR cluster resizing functionality. — Jeff; is a managed service that simplifies running and managing distributed data processing frameworks, […]
Sep 30, 2015
It’s probably no surprise that information security is one of today’s most sought after IT specialties. It’s also deeply important to our customers and any company considering moving to the cloud. So, today we’re launching a new AWS Training curriculum focused on security. The curriculum’s two new classes are designed to help you meet your […]
Sep 29, 2015
My colleague Luis Daniel Soto has been working with AWS Community Hero Lynn Langit to create a comprehensive collection of resources for customers who are ready to run Big Data applications on AWS! Here’s what they have to say…. — Jeff; Today the AWS Marketplace is launching a new on-line video library designed to help […]
Sep 28, 2015
We launched the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) way back in 2011, with a focus on deliverability — getting mail through to the intended recipients. Today, the service is used by Amazon and our customers to send billions of transactional and marketing emails each year. Today we are launching a much-requested new feature for SES. […]
Sep 28, 2015
My colleague Abhishek Singh is the product manager for . He wrote the following guest post in order to let you know that the service now supports Java JAR files and the Go programming language! — Jeff; already simplifies the process of deploying and scaling Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, and Docker web applications […]
Sep 28, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday September 21 We announced the AWS Pop-up Loft in Berlin. The Cloud Academy Blog shared AWS re:Invent 2015 – A Guide to Cloud Computing’s Biggest Event. Cloudability listed Five Talks not to Miss at re:Invent 2015. The Netflix Tech Blog introduced Lemur […]
Sep 25, 2015
is designed to store any amount of archival or backup data with high durability. Amazon Glacier is a very cost-effective solution (as low as $0.007 per gigabyte per month) for data that is infrequently accessed, and where a retrieval time of several hours is acceptable. Earlier this year we introduced a new Amazon Glacier compliance […]
Sep 25, 2015
I love to demo to live audiences! They always appreciate the fact that I can launch a MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or Amazon Aurora database instance with a couple of clicks. Today I would like to bring you up to date on a bunch of improvements that we have recently made to the service. […]
Sep 25, 2015
My colleague Denis Batalov works out of the AWS Office in Luxembourg. As a Solutions Architect, he is often asked about the in-country storage requirement that some countries impose on certain types of data. Although this requirement applies to a relatively small number of workloads, I am still happy that he took the time to […]
Sep 22, 2015
My colleague Max Spevack runs the team that produces the Amazon Linux AMI. He wrote the guest post below to announce the newest release! — Jeff; The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image for use on Amazon EC2. We offer new major versions of the Amazon Linux AMI after a public […]
Sep 22, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday September 14 I discussed Moving Past Windows Server 2003 End of Life using AWS. The announced Windows Server on AWS Bootcamps in Seattle and Bangalore. The showed you How to Create a Policy that Whitelists Access to Sensitive Amazon S3 Buckets. The […]
Sep 22, 2015
My colleague Angel Pizzaro wrote the guest post below to tell you about an amazing new AWS Public Data Set! — Jeff; You can now access the genome sequence data of 3,024 rice varieties that have been aligned and analyzed against five different reference genomes as an AWS Public Data Set. The data contains over […]
Sep 21, 2015
The AWS Pop-up Lofts in San Francisco and New York have become hubs and working spaces for developers, entrepreneurs, students, and others who are interested in working with and learning more about AWS. They come to learn, code, meet, collaborate, ask questions, and to hang out with other like-minded folks. I expect the newly opened […]
Sep 17, 2015
Like all AWS services, the Amazon S3 team is always listening to customers in order to better understand their needs. After studying a lot of feedback and doing some analysis on access patterns over time, the team saw an opportunity to provide a new storage option that would be well-suited to data that is accessed […]
Sep 16, 2015
During my trip to the AWS Loft earlier this month, I spoke to 8 startups for the . Almost all of them told me that they are making use of on AWS, either directly or via . They love the flexibility that it gives them, and appreciate the ease with which they can move from […]
Sep 16, 2015
I love to see all of the cool products and services that the Members of the build and bring to market. In the guest post below, my colleague Shawn Anderson takes you on a tour of Alert Logic’s new Cloud Insight product. — Jeff; In August, Alert Logic introduced Alert Logic Cloud Insight, which identifies […]
Sep 15, 2015
Last week I spoke to a technically-oriented audience at the Pacific Northwest PHP Conference. As part of my talk, I described cloud computing as a mix of technology and business, and made my point by talking about Spot instances. The audience looked somewhat puzzled at first, but as I explained further I could see their […]
Sep 15, 2015
Many AWS applications use to distribute traffic to a farm of instances. An architecture of this type is highly scalable since instances can be added, removed, or replaced in a non-disruptive way. Using a load balancer also gives the application the ability to keep on running if an instance encounters an application or system problem […]
Sep 15, 2015
is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS (EC2 instances, load balancers, and S3 buckets), and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can configure to perform periodic health checks, and to fail over to alternate endpoints […]
Sep 14, 2015
In the guest post below, my colleagues Bryan Nairn and Niko Pamboukas list some options for those of you who are still running your applications on Windows Server 2003. — Jeff; As many of you may already know, on July 14th 2015 Microsoft ended its extended support for Windows Server 2003. Microsoft has published […]
Sep 14, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, September 7 The published a Simpler Serverless Test Harness Using AWS Lambda and also talked about Microservices Without the Servers. The showed you how to Prepare Your Apps for iOS 9. The N2WS Blog listed 3 Reasons to Automate Your Manual Redshift […]
Sep 11, 2015
The Amazon Redshift team is on a tear. They are listening to customer feedback and rolling out new features all the time! Below you will find an announcement of another powerful and highly anticipated new feature. — Jeff; makes it easy to launch a petabyte-scale data warehouse. For less than $1,000/Terabyte/year, you can focus on […]
Sep 08, 2015
Earlier this month I spent two exceptionally pleasant days at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. While I was there I sat down with a number of startups and recorded their stories. These stories are part of a new Intel Startup Spotlight series that I’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks and months. As […]
Sep 07, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 31 The explained The Fine Art of Node.JS Coding in AWS Lambda. We announced that you can now Subscribe to AWS Public IP Address Changes via Amazon SNS. We announced Resource-Oriented Bidding for EC2 Spot Instances. The explained Why You Should […]
Sep 04, 2015
I have always advised my family, friends, colleagues, and audiences to plan to spend some time learning something new every day. If you don’t take responsibility for your own continued education, you can soon find that you have fallen far behind your peers! If you are interested in staying current with AWS, I have a […]
Sep 04, 2015
Magento is a very popular open-source content management system for e-commerce sites. Sellers and developers appreciate its open architecture, flexibility, extensibility (hundreds of extensions), and back-end workflows that can be tailored to fit the unique needs of each customer. Magento Community Edition (Magento CE) Magento Enterprise Edition (Magento EE) are popular among our customers. Some […]
Sep 03, 2015
Earlier today we announced that we had reached an agreement to acquire Elemental Technologies of Portland, Oregon. Elemental has pioneered a number of software-based solutions for multiscreen content delivery and powers many of the world’s most innovative app-delivered video offerings and new services like 4K TV. Elemental customers use its software to process and deliver […]
Sep 02, 2015
You can now use AWS CloudTrail to track bucket-level operations on your buckets. The tracked operations include creation and deletion of buckets, modifications to access controls, changes to lifecycle policies, and changes to cross-region replication settings. AWS CloudTrail records API activity in your AWS account and delivers the resulting log files to a designated S3 […]
Sep 02, 2015
My colleague Jonathan Henson sent me a guest post to introduce a brand-new AWS SDK! — Jeff; After a long effort, we are proud to announce an open-source C++ SDK for scaling your native applications with Amazon Web Services. The AWS SDK for C++ is a modern C++ interface with lightweight dependencies. We designed it […]
Aug 31, 2015
Earlier this year we introduced the EC2 Spot fleet API. As I noted in my earlier post, this API allows you to launch and manage an entire fleet of Spot instances with one request. You specify the fleet’s target capacity, a bid price per hour, and tell Spot what instance type(s) you would like to […]
Aug 31, 2015
Last year we announced that the AWS Public IP Address Ranges Were Available in JSON Form. This was a quick, Friday afternoon post that turned out to be incredibly popular! Many AWS users are now polling this file on a regular basis and using it to manage their on-premises firewall rules or to track the […]
Aug 31, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 24 We announced Enhanced DynamoDB Metrics. We announced Updated AWS CloudFormation Support for Amazon VPC, AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. Ylastic announced some AWS Resource Expiration Checks. Cloudonaut showed you how to Monitor Your AWS Account […]
Aug 26, 2015
My friends and family members who build apps tell me that there’s a huge hurdle to cross on the road to monetization. Users are willing and eager to download new games and tools, but can be reluctant to pay to do so and expect a lot for free. While some apps make good use of […]
Aug 25, 2015
Last month I began writing what I hope to be a continuing series of posts of EC2 Spot Instances by talking about some Spot Instance Best Practices. Today I spoke to two senior members of the EC2 Spot Team to learn how to build price-aware applications using Spot Instances. I met with Dmitry Pushkarev (Head […]
Aug 24, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 17 We announced New Metrics for EC2 Container Service – Clusters & Services. We announced a New Logstash Plugin to Search DynamoDB Content Using Elasticsearch. The showed you How to Migrate Your Microsoft Active Directory Users to Simple AD. To the […]
Aug 20, 2015
Graph databases elegantly and efficiently represent entities (generally known as vertices or nodes) and relationships (edges) that connect them. Here’s a very simple example of a graph: Bill and Candace have a daughter named Janet, and she has a son named Bob. This makes Candace Bob’s grandmother, and Bill his grandfather. Once a graph has […]
Aug 20, 2015
The AWS Pop-up Lofts in San Francisco and New York have become hubs and working spaces for developers, entrepreneurs, students, and others who are interested in working with and learning more about . They come to learn, code, meet, collaborate, ask questions, and to hang out with other like-minded folks. I’m happy to be able […]
Aug 19, 2015
My doctor, my dentist, and my car mechanic each display their diplomas, licenses, and certifications in prominent locations within their offices. These documents reassure me (and prospective patients or customers) that the owners take their professions seriously, that they have invested time in their education, and that they have demonstrated their competency to the appropriate […]
Aug 18, 2015
The helps you to build, run, and scale Docker-based applications. As I noted in an earlier post (EC2 Container Service – Latest Features, Customer Successes, and More), you will benefit from easy cluster management, high performance, flexible scheduling, extensibility, portability, and AWS integration while running in an AWS-powered environment that is secure and efficient. Container-based […]
Aug 17, 2015
When I take a look at our recent service releases and combine it with some of the AWS-related repos on GitHub, an interesting trend becomes apparent. It seems to me that connecting AWS services to each other and to third party tools is becoming more and more common. For example, in a recent post, I […]
Aug 17, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 10 We announced that CloudWatch Logs Now Supports Cross-Account Subscriptions. The discussed Managing Dependencies with AWS SDK for Java. The Flux7 Blog described AWS Config: A Configuration Manager to Save the Day. The Nimbo Blog discussed Amazon Aurora: TCO, Performance, and […]
Aug 12, 2015
I strongly believe that you need to make a continuous investment in learning about new tools and technologies that will enhance your career. When I began my career in the software industry, the release cycles for hardware and software were measured in months, quarters, or years. Back then (the 1980’s, to be precise) you could […]
Aug 12, 2015
My colleague Abhishek Singh shared a guest post that brings word of a helpful new Elastic Beanstalk feature! — Jeff; simplifies the process of deploying and scaling Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications and services on AWS. Today we are making Elastic Beanstalk even more useful by adding support for […]
Aug 10, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 3 We announced that Amazon Redshift Now Supports Dynamic Work Load Management and List Aggregate Functions. The reviewed the AWS SDK for .NET’s SDK Cache. A Reddit post in /r/aws shared Some Extra CloudWatch Metrics. The CloudCheckr Blog talked about Optimizing […]
Aug 06, 2015
I recently spent some time on the phone with the folks from King to learn more about how they use to serve game content to a world-wide audience. All About King The company was founded in 2003. At that time, they built web games easily accessed from the various portal sites that were ever so […]
Aug 05, 2015
My colleague Janna Pellegrino is happy to be able to share news of our latest learning quests in today’s guest post! One of the easiest ways to learn how you can benefit from the AWS cloud is with hands-on practice. Self-paced labs provide this hands-on training in a live practice environment. AWS subject matter experts […]
Aug 04, 2015
The scale of AWS makes it possible for us to take on projects that could be too large, too complex, too expensive, or too time-consuming for our customers. This is often the case for issues in security, particularly in the world of compliance. Establishing and documenting the proper controls, preparing the necessary documentation, and then […]
Aug 03, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, July 27 We announced that Amazon Aurora is Now Available. We announced the WorkSpaces Application Manager (WAM) Lite Plan. The Cloud Academy Blog announced a New Amazon Machine Learning Course. The OpenSource Connections Blog discussed JMESPath Query in the AWS CLI. The […]
Aug 03, 2015
Many of the things that I blog about lately seem to involve interesting combinations of two or more AWS services and today’s post is no exception. Before I dig in, I’d like to briefly introduce all of the services that I plan to name-drop later in this post. Some of this will be review material, […]
Jul 30, 2015
I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes: Adam Smolnik Kai Henry Onur Salk Paolo Latella Raphael Francis Rob Linton The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more. Adam Smolnik Adam […]
Jul 30, 2015
makes it easy for you to deploy applications of all shapes and sizes. It provides you with an integrated management experience that spans the entire application lifecycle including resource provisioning, EBS volume setup, configuration management, application deployment, monitoring, and access control (read my introductory post, AWS OpsWorks – Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using […]
Jul 29, 2015
We launched earlier this month with support for testing apps on Android and Fire OS devices. I am happy to give you a heads-up that you will soon be able to test your apps on Apple phones and tablets! We plan to launch support for iOS on August 4, 2015 with support for the following […]
Jul 28, 2015
We want to make sure that developers can use the programming language of their choice to build AWS-powered applications that run on many different types of devices and in a wide variety of environments. As you can see from the AWS Tools page, we already support multiple mobile (iOS, Android, and Unity) and counter-top (Alexa […]
Jul 28, 2015
We launched in the spring of 2006 with a simple blog post. Over the years we have kept the model simple and powerful while reducing prices, and adding features such as the reduced redundancy storage model, VPC endpoints, cross-region replication, and event notifications. We launched the event notification model last year, with support for notification […]
Jul 28, 2015
We announced last year at (see Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon for more info). With storage replicated both within and across three Availability Zones, along with an update model driven by quorum writes, Amazon Aurora is designed to deliver high performance and 99.99% availability while easily and efficiently scaling to […]
Jul 27, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week. If you find these summaries useful, or if you have ideas for additional types of content, please feel free to leave a comment. Monday, July 20 We announced that Amazon RDS now Supports Oracle 12.1.0.2 and Improved CloudHSM Integration. We announced that Amazon […]
Jul 24, 2015
is a managed cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, on AWS to process and analyze vast amounts of data. By using these frameworks and related open-source projects, such as Apache Hive and Apache Pig, you can process data for analytics purposes and business intelligence workloads. First […]
Jul 23, 2015
If you are tasked with providing and managing user logins to a fleet of instances running Linux, I have some good news for you! You can now join these instances to an Simple AD directory and manage credentials for your user logins using standard Active Directory tools and techniques. Your users will be able to […]
Jul 23, 2015
monitors your cloud resources and applications, including instances. You can track cloud, system, and application metrics, see them in graphical form, and arrange to be notified (via a CloudWatch alarm) if they cross a threshold value that you specify. You can also stop, terminate, or recover an EC2 instance when an alarm is triggered (see […]
Jul 20, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, July 13 We announced that Amazon Redshift now Supports AVRO Ingestion. We announced Amazon Wind Farm US East. An article in Forbes talked about Amazon’s Cloud Ecosystem: Where The Cloud Action Is. A post on the Cloudability Blog reviewed the AWS Summit […]
Jul 17, 2015
We launched last fall at and made it available in production form this past April. We’ve made a lot of enhancements since then and I thought it would be a good time to recap them for you. AWS customers are already making good use of and I’d like to share some of their stories with […]
Jul 16, 2015
I’ve got some really good news for users! First, the DynamoDB Streams feature is now available and you can start using it today. As you will see from this blog post, it is now very easy to use to process the change records from a stream. Second, we are making it really easy for you […]
Jul 14, 2015
AWS customers are deploying at scale in medium and large organizations. For example, health care company Johnson & Johnson is using WorkSpaces to realize the long-promised security and efficacy benefits of virtual desktops, in a world populated by a diverse workforce that would like to use their own computing devices if possible (also known as […]
Jul 13, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, July 6 The showed you how to Reduce Composer Issues on Elastic Beanstalk. The showed you How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector. The CloudBees Blog talked about Continuous Delivery with CloudBees Jenkins Platform and AWS Lambda. […]
Jul 13, 2015
Although the phrase “write once, test everywhere” was coined to describe another technology, I believe that it also applies to mobile applications. The wide variety of carriers, manufacturers, models, operating systems (including versions, patches, and proprietary extensions), screen sizes, input devices, connectivity options, device settings, and permission settings combine to create a test matrix that […]
Jul 09, 2015
I like to think of infrastructure as the part of a system that everyone needs and no one likes to work on! It is often undifferentiated & messy, tedious to work on, difficult to manage, critical to the success of whatever relies on it, and generally taken for granted (as long as it works as […]
Jul 09, 2015
We announced the last fall at . As I wrote at the time (Coming Soon – AWS Service Catalog), we wanted to give large organizations the ability to support line-of-business applications and to deliver all sorts of services to their internal constituency, while giving them the templates, knobs, levers, and fences that they need to […]
Jul 09, 2015
We announced at last fall (see my post, New AWS Tools for Code Management and Deployment for the details). As I said at that time, this tool will help you to model and automate your software release process. The automation provided by CodePipeline is designed to make your release process more reliable and more efficient. […]
Jul 09, 2015
We announced last November (see New AWS Tools for Code Management and Deployment) at . I am happy to announce that it is now generally available and that you can start using it today. Let’s do a quick refresh on the CodeCommit feature set before taking the service for a spin. CodeCommit Overview CodeCommit is […]
Jul 09, 2015
Back in the heyday of shrink-wrap software, the time between major releases was often measured in quarters or years. This created a long, slow feedback loop that often left customers waiting far too long for new features and bug fixes. Today, Software as as Service (SaaS), often powered by an agile development methodology and supported […]
Jul 08, 2015
The makes it easy for you to send email with minimum setup and maximum scalability. SES focuses on deliverability (see my blog post, Introducing the Amazon Simple Email Service to learn more about this) so that the messages you send have a high probability of arriving in the intended inboxes rather than heading straight for […]
Jul 08, 2015
Many AWS customers use for long-term storage of their mission-critical data. They benefit from Glacier’s durability and low cost, along with the ease with which they can integrate it in to their existing backup and archiving regimen. To use Glacier, you create vaults and populate them with archives (either directly or by using S3 lifecycle […]
Jul 08, 2015
As part of our continued effort to allow our partners to share their expertise in particular market segments and topical areas, I’m happy to be able to tell you about our new APN Security Competency. Like all of our competencies, this one gives you access to partners with genuine, hard-earned expertise in an area that […]
Jul 07, 2015
helps you to build systems that respond to changes in the demand for compute power by launching additional instances or terminating existing ones. As I was thinking about this post, I thought it would be fun to deconstruct Auto Scaling to ensure that I (and you) have a full understanding of how it works and […]
Jul 06, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, June 29 We launched AWS Budgets and Forecasts. We announced that AWS Lambda is Now Available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. A post on the Domain Tech Blog talked about Moving an Enterprise Windows Workload into Amazon Cloud. Alex Santos wrote […]
Jun 30, 2015
We seem to have AWS customers in just about every corner of the world (190 countries at last count). We have offices in many countries, localized content on the AWS web site, and a broad array of certifications and accreditations to give those customers the assurances that they can run many different types of workloads […]
Jun 29, 2015
The dynamic, pay-as-you-go nature of the AWS Cloud gives you the opportunity to build systems that respond gracefully to changes in load while paying only for the compute, storage, network, database, and other resources that you actually consume. Over the last couple of years, as our customer base has become increasingly sophisticated and cloud-aware, we […]
Jun 29, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, June 22 We announced Tagging for Amazon Glacier Vaults. We announced a New Version of the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3). We announced that the AWS Storage Gateway Now Supports Dell NetVault Backup 10.0 with Gateway-VTL. The talked about the SDK’s RegisterProfile […]
Jun 26, 2015
EC2’s R3 instances are designed to provide you with the best price per GiB of RAM, along with high memory performance. I am happy to be able to announce that they are now available in the region, in two sizes. Here are the specs: Instance Name vCPU Count RAM SSD Storage Hourly On-Demand (Linux) RI […]
Jun 25, 2015
Earlier today we opened the 6th annual AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofits Symposium in Washington, DC. As part of the event we announced another City on a Cloud Challenge, an upcoming AWS Public Data Set, and some information about the overall usage and growth of AWS in this space. City on a Cloud Challenge We […]
Jun 25, 2015
is a new type of device designed around your voice. Echo connects to Alexa, a cloud-based voice service powered (of course) by . You can ask Alexa to provide information, answer questions, play music, read the news, and get results or answers instantly. When you are in the same room as an , you simply […]
Jun 24, 2015
I often point to EC2 Spot Instances as a feature that can only be implemented at world-scale with any degree of utility. Unless you have a massive amount of compute power and a multitude of customers spread across every time zone in the world, with a wide variety of workloads, you simply won’t have the […]
Jun 23, 2015
We have prepared a pair of new AWS Quick Start Reference Deployments for you! As is the case with all AWS Quick Starts, they help you to deploy fully functional enterprise software the AWS cloud in no time flat! Each of the reference deployments includes a template that follows best AWS practices for security and […]
Jun 22, 2015
is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and online backup (see my post, Amazon Glacier: Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month for an introduction). Since we introduced Glacier in the summer of 2012, we have made it even more useful by adding lifecycle management, data retrieval policies […]
Jun 22, 2015
My colleague Peter Moon sent the guest post below to introduce the newest version of the AWS SDK for Python also known as Boto. — Jeff; Originally started as a Python client for Amazon S3 by Mitch Garnaat in 2006, Boto has been the primary tool for working with Amazon Web Services for many […]
Jun 22, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, June 15 We announced that AWS Lambda can now Run Java Code in Response to Events. We announced Simplified Reserved Instance Options for Amazon RDS. We announced that you can now Send Push Notifications to Mac OS Desktops and VoIP apps on […]
Jun 18, 2015
Earlier this year we gave you the option to set the preferred payment currency for your AWS account, with a choice of twelve currencies when you use an eligible Visa or Mastercard to pay your bill. Today I am pleased to announce that we are giving you the option to specify Canadian Dollars (CAD) as […]
Jun 17, 2015
makes it easy for you to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no minimum usage commitments. In order to make content available with low latency, CloudFront caches objects at each of its 53 (as of this writing) edge locations. Today we are making an update to CloudFront that […]
Jun 17, 2015
The allows partners to differentiate themselves and to share their expertise in particular market segments and topical areas by qualifying for one or more APN Competencies. To date we have recognized partners that have relevant experience and special expertise in the following areas: Big Data Storage Life Sciences Healthcare Digital Media Microsoft SAP Oracle Marketing […]
Jun 17, 2015
We launched the T2 instances last summer (see my post, New Low Cost EC2 Instances with Burstable Performance for more information). These instances give you a generous amount of baseline capacity and the ability to automatically and transparently scale up to full-core processing power on an as-needed basis. The bursting model is based on “CPU […]
Jun 16, 2015
You can now launch SQL Server Enterprise Edition on using a new, pre-configured AMI (Amazon Machine Image). This edition of SQL Server offers some new and unique features including: High Availability – You can configure a primary database and up to four active, readable secondary databases into an Always-On availability group. Self-Service Business Intelligence – […]
Jun 16, 2015
My colleague Jon Fritz wrote the guest post below to introduce a powerful new feature for . — Jeff; I’m happy to announce that Amazon EMR now supports Apache Spark. Amazon EMR is a web service that makes it easy for you to process and analyze vast amounts of data using applications in the Hadoop […]
Jun 16, 2015
Reserved Instances have been a part of the AWS pricing model for quite some time. You can reserve an instance and receive a significant discount, along with a capacity reservation, when you purchase a Reserved Instance (RI). You don’t need to make any code or administrative changes in order to benefit from Reserved Instances. We’ll […]
Jun 15, 2015
Many AWS customers are using to build clean, straightforward applications that handle image and document uploads, process log files from , handle data streamed from , and so forth. With the recently launched synchronous invocation capability, Lambda is fast becoming a favorite choice for building mobile, web and IoT backends. Our internal mailing list is […]
Jun 15, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, June 8 We announced that AWS CloudHSM is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. The showed you how to Use Amazon Cognito and AWS Lambda to Detect Cheating. The announced the the availability of Mesosphere DCOS […]
Jun 12, 2015
I enjoy reading the blog posts that I wrote in the early days of AWS. Way back in 2009, I wrote a post to launch , , and . Here’s what I said at the time: “As soon as you launch some EC2 instances, you want visibility into resource utilization and overall performance. You want […]
Jun 11, 2015
We launched with a single instance type (m1.small) way back in 2006! Since then, we have added many new types in response to customer demand, enabled by improvements in memory and processor technology (see my recent post, EC2 Instance History, for a look back in time). Today we are adding new M4 instances in five […]
Jun 10, 2015
Many organizations collect, store, and analyze network flow logs. They use this information to troubleshoot connectivity and security issues, and to make sure that network access rules are working as expected. Up until now, AWS customers collected this data by installing agents on their instances. Doing so imposed some overhead on each instance, and also […]
Jun 10, 2015
My colleague Tina Adams sent me a guest post to share news of a new instance type and new Reserved Instance offerings for . — Jeff; makes analyzing petabyte-scale data fast, cheap, and simple. It delivers advanced technology capabilities, including parallel execution, compressed columnar storage, and end-to-end encryption, as a fully managed service, letting you […]
Jun 08, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, June 1 We announced that you can now Run Parallel Jobs on Your Amazon EMR Cluster Using AWS Data Pipeline. We gave a heads-up on an Amazon S3 Certificate Renewal. The wrapped up their five-part series on Generating Amazon S3 Pre-Signed URLs […]
Jun 05, 2015
After reading the Greenpeace, Renewable Energy, and Data Centers blog entry from my colleague James Hamilton a couple of weeks back, I took a look at the Greenpeace report on data center power consumption and noted that it’s pretty unusual for an environmental report to not feature energy conservation as a primary evaluation criteria. It […]
Jun 03, 2015
My colleague Loren Segal shared the blog post below. As you can see, he’s really excited about the new AWS SDK for Go! — Jeff; Today we are announcing the first Developer Preview Release of the AWS SDK for Go (v0.6.0). If you have not been following along with development, the AWS SDK for Go […]
Jun 02, 2015
is a managed service designed to handle real-time streaming of big data. It can accept any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed (see my introductory post for more information on Kinesis). Developers can use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) to simplify the implementation of apps that consume […]
Jun 01, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, May 25 We celebrated Memorial Day in the United States. We announced SSLv3 and RC4 Deprecation for Amazon SQS. AWS Community Hero Eric Hammond talked about Debugging AWS Lambda Invocations with an Echo Function. Tuesday, May 26 We announced that AWS Elastic […]
May 28, 2015
I received an interesting tweet last night. Steve Goldsmith of ITOC Australia (an APN Advanced Consulting Partner and recipient of an AWS Customer Obsession award earlier this year) asked me if I had a historical timeline of instance launches: I didn’t have one, but it seemed like a worthwhile thing to have and so I […]
May 27, 2015
Back in the spring of 2002 I wrote a simple PHP wrapper around the then-new Amazon E-Commerce Service. This little wrapper caught Amazon’s attention and before I knew it I was a member of the Amazon Associates team! Later, when I decided to write a book to show people how to use AWS, PHP was […]
May 27, 2015
Many AWS customers use to deliver content to end users at high data transfer speed with low latency. Because CloudFront has no minimum usage commitment, it is a good fit for web properties of any size. Each CloudFront edge location caches recently used objects in order to deliver dynamic, static, streaming, or interactive content as […]
May 26, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, May 18 We announced the EC2 Spot Fleet API for Management of Thousands of Spot Instances with one Request. We announced AWS OpsWorks for Windows. We advised you to Look Before You Leap – The Coming Leap Second and AWS. We announced […]
May 20, 2015
I met with the Amazon Payments developer relations team a couple of weeks ago in order to get an update on Login and Pay with Amazon (see my post, PeachDish – Login, Pay, Cook, and Eat With AWS, to learn more). The team has been working to make it even easier for you to add […]
May 19, 2015
We opened up the first AWS Pop-up Loft last year. By virtue of its location (Market Street in San Francisco) it is accessible to entrepreneurs, students, and others interested in learning more about . Our customers have also used it for co-working and for meetings. Personally, I like to use the AWS Loft in San […]
May 19, 2015
It has been really interesting to watch evolve over the last eight or nine years. At first you could launch a single instance type, in one region, at a predetermined (On-Demand) price. Today, you can launch a plethora of instance types, in any one of ten regions (eleven including ), with your choice of On-Demand, […]
May 19, 2015
My colleague Mingxue Zhao sent me a guest post designed to make sure that you are aware of an important time / clock issue. — Jeff; The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) recently announced that an extra second will be injected into civil time at the end of June 30th, 2015. This means […]
May 18, 2015
gives you an integrated management experience that spans the entire life cycle of your application including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, monitoring, and access control. As I noted in my introductory post (AWS OpsWorks – Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef), it works with applications of any level of complexity and is […]
May 18, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, May 11 We announced that you can now Quickly Filter Data in Amazon Redshift Using Interleaved Sorting. We announced a New VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3. We announced that Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS Now Support Encryption via AWS Key Management Service […]
May 15, 2015
allows you to connect your AWS resources to an existing on-premises Active Directory or to set up a new, standalone directory in the AWS Cloud (see my post, New AWS Directory Service, to learn more). Until today, all operations on a Directory were initiated through the . This was convenient, but was not ideal for […]
May 14, 2015
Unity is a popular cross-platform game development environment. You can build your 2D or 3D game once using C# and then run it on many different platforms and devices. Now Available Today we are launching the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity. This new SDK comes in the form of Unity packages that contain .NET classes. […]
May 14, 2015
Best practices for IT security are often easier to define than to implement. We are doing our best to define best practices at the AWS Security Center, backed up with services and security features that are as easy to implement as possible. In this vein, I want to make sure that you are fully aware […]
May 14, 2015
We want to do our part to help educational institutions all over the world train and graduate students who are ready, willing, and able to power the cloud-powered world of tomorrow! The initiative will provide students and educators with four important resources: Grants of AWS credits for use in courses and projects. Free content to […]
May 12, 2015
I am pleased to be able to announce that registration for AWS re:Invent 2015 is now open! This is our fourth annual event and I expect that it, like its predecessors, will sell out. With less than 5 months to go before the October 6th opening, preparation for the services, presentations, keynotes, hackathons, and entertainment […]
May 12, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, May 4 We updated the Zero Administration AWS Lambda Based Amazon Redshift Database Loader to version 2.0. The Roadtrippers Dev Team wrote about Lambda: Bees with Frickin’ Laser Beams. The published Part 2 of an article on Generating Amazon S3 Pre-signed URLs with […]
May 11, 2015
My colleague Tina Adams sent a guest post to introduce another cool and powerful feature for . — Jeff; Amazon Redshift, our fully managed data warehouse service, makes it fast and easy to analyze all your data. You can get started with a 160GB cluster for free for 2 months, and scale to a couple […]
May 11, 2015
I would like to tell you about a new AWS feature that will allow you to make even better use of and . As you probably know, provides you with secure, durable, and highly scalable object storage. You can use the to create a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud, with full control over […]
May 07, 2015
The provides you with seamless, centralized control over your encryption keys. As I noted when we launched the service (see my post, New AWS Key Management Service, for more information), this service gives you a new option for data protection and relieves you of many of the more onerous scalability and availability issues that inevitably […]
May 05, 2015
As part of a trip to New York last month, I paid a visit to the headquarters of Oscar Health to learn more about what they do and how they use AWS. I sat down with Brent Langston (Site Reliability Engineer) and Mackenzie Kosut (Head of Technical Operations) to learn more. All About Oscar Oscar […]
May 04, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, April 27 We announced Improved JSON Editing and Key Condition Expressions for DynamoDB. We announced Vault Access Policies for Amazon Glacier. We announced that the EC2 Container Service is now Available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. The Realestate.com.au Tech Blog announced […]
Apr 29, 2015
We have added another AWS Quick Start Reference Deployment. The new SAP Business One, Version for SAP HANA document will show you how to get on the fast track to plan, deploy, and configure this enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. It is powered by SAP HANA, SAP’s in-memory database. This deployment builds on our existing […]
Apr 28, 2015
The guest blog post below was written by Jaehyun Wie while he was a developer intern on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Team. It shows you how to run your Docker apps locally using the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (CLI). — Jeff; The Elastic Beanstalk command line interface (EB CLI) makes it easier for developers, […]
Apr 28, 2015
I have become a devoted user of . I draft my blog posts (including this one) and then use WorkDocs to route them to the appropriate people and teams for review and translation. On an average day I probably upload new versions of 4 or 5 draft blog posts and review and respond to feedback […]
Apr 28, 2015
The skills and techniques needed to create, store, process, and manage data sets that start in the hundreds of gigabytes and grow to multiple terabyte size are all too rare. It is time to change that! We have teamed up with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to create the new AstroCompute in the Cloud grant […]
Apr 27, 2015
provides secure and durable data storage at extremely low cost (as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month). Each item stored in Glacier is known as an archive, and can be as large as 40 terabytes. Archives are stored in vaults, each of which can store as many archives as desired. Today we are giving […]
Apr 27, 2015
Thousands of customers use to build popular applications for Gaming (Battle Camp), Mobile (The Simpsons Tapped Out), Ad-tech (AdRoll), Internet-of-Things (Earth Networks) and Modern Web applications (SmugMug). We have made some improvements to DynamoDB in order to make it more powerful and easier to use. Here’s what’s new: You can now add, edit, and retrieve […]
Apr 27, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, April 20 We announced the NOAA Big Data Project. The discussed the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse Integration with AWS OpsWorks. The continued with the re:viewing re:Invent series with a focus on the architecture track. The Cloud Academy Blog discussed Virtual Private Clouds […]
Apr 23, 2015
Enterprise IT architects and system administrators often ask me how to go about moving their existing compute infrastructure to . Invariably, they have spent a long time creating and polishing their existing system configurations and are hoping to take advantage of this work when they migrate to the cloud. We introduced quite some time ago […]
Apr 23, 2015
My colleagues are already hard at work on the services, presentations, sessions, signage, clothing, and entertainment for 2015. As I announced last month, re:Invent will be taking place from October 6 to 9 this year at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Registration will open at 9:00 AM Pacific Time on May 12th, just a couple […]
Apr 21, 2015
I am happy to be able to announce that we have entered into a research agreement with the to explore sustainable models for increasing the amount of open NOAA data that is made available via the cloud. The AWS program hosts large collections of public data that anyone can access for free. We started this […]
Apr 20, 2015
I’m playing catch-up today in order to make sure that you know about some releases that have gone out over the last couple of weeks. You can now create custom CloudFormation resources by calling functions. We added support for some additional Auto Scaling and RDS resources. We also updated our support for some existing CloudFront, […]
Apr 20, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, April 13 We announced that the Amazon WorkSpaces API and CLI is Now Available. The blog showed you how to Store JSON Documents in Amazon DynamoDB Tables. Larry Gadea showed you how to Run Your Own High-end Cloud Gaming Service on EC2 […]
Apr 17, 2015
The GPU-powered G2 instance family is home to molecular modeling, rendering, machine learning, game streaming, and transcoding jobs that require massive amounts of parallel processing power. The NVIDIA GRID GPU includes dedicated, hardware-accelerated video encoding; it generates an H.264 video stream that can be displayed on any client device that has a compatible video codec. […]
Apr 14, 2015
I would like to extend a warm welcome to the newest AWS Community Heroes: Genki Sugawara (Cookpad) Minyoung Jeong (The Beatpacking Company) Brandon Burton (AWS Advent) The Heroes share their enthusiasm for AWS via social media, blogs, events, user groups, and workshops. Let’s take a look at their bios to learn more. Genki Sugawara Genki […]
Apr 14, 2015
We have added a new AWS Quick Start Reference Deployment. The new MongoDB on the AWS Cloud document will show you how to design and configure a MongoDB (an open source NoSQL database) cluster that runs on AWS. The MongoDB cluster (version 2.6 or 3.0) makes use of and , and is launched via a […]
Apr 13, 2015
I’m a big fan of and currently spend most of my day using a single WorkSpace that I can access from multiple locations, devices, and device types (I can’t wait to share even more details about this use case with you). Up until now, all actions on a WorkSpace had to be initiated through the […]
Apr 13, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, April 6 We announced an AWS Config Update, with More Regions, Friendly Notifications, and Partner Support. We announced that MapR Distribution Release 4.0.2 is Now Supported in Amazon EMR. We announced AWS Storage Gateway Support for Symantec Backup Exec 15. We announced […]
Apr 09, 2015
We launched in preview form at last year’s conference (see my post, AWS Lambda – Run Code in the Cloud for more information). As I said at the time, Lambda is a zero-admin compute platform; you don’t have to configure, launch, or, monitor instances, think about scale, or worry about fault tolerance. You simply create […]
Apr 09, 2015
is a highly scalable container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of instances. We launched the preview at and have been receiving a lot of great feedback ever since. We built Amazon ECS because many of you told us that you are using Docker […]
Apr 09, 2015
Over the last month or two I have become a devoted user of . I am able to maintain a single, consistent working environment that I can access from my home, my office, an airport gate, a hotel room, and so forth. Regardless of where I am sitting, I have access to the same applications, […]
Apr 09, 2015
Today, it is relatively straightforward and inexpensive to observe and collect vast amounts of operational data about a system, product, or process. Not surprisingly, there can be tremendous amounts of information buried within gigabytes of customer purchase data, web site navigation trails, or responses to email campaigns. The good news is that all of this […]
Apr 09, 2015
I’d like to give you a preview of a new AWS service that will make its debut later this year. Let’s take a quick look at the AWS storage portfolio. We currently offer: for object storage, presented as buckets of objects and accessible over the Internet using URLs or APIs. for SAN-style block storage, presented […]
Apr 07, 2015
We have recently broadened the AWS Training portfolio in order to do an even better job of meeting your needs. Here are the newest offerings: AWS Business Essentials is a new workshop for IT business decision makers. It’s designed to help you understand the benefits of cloud computing and how a cloud strategy can help […]
Apr 07, 2015
lets you track changes to your AWS resources over time (read my post, Track AWS Resource Configurations With AWS Config for more information, and my AWS Config Update for a walk-through). Today we are making AWS Config available in five additional AWS regions. We are also making Config’s email notification messages a bit more user […]
Apr 06, 2015
When I speak with enterprises and mid-sized companies about their plans to move to the , they often ask me to recommend solution providers that are skilled in the application of AWS and that also have expertise in a particular business domain. We are continuing to add value to the by allowing partners to share […]
Apr 06, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, March 30 AWS Evangelist Ian Massingham reviewed the AWS User Group UK (London), Hull and North (Manchester) Meetups. We added several new presentations to SlideShare including RDS – Letting AWS run your Low Admin, High Performance Database and Delivering Mobile Apps Using […]
Apr 02, 2015
My colleague Omid Behzadian sent a guest post to introduce an important new feature for Amazon Elastic Transcoder. — Jeff; You can now use to apply Microsoft PlayReady DRM protection to your Smooth Streaming and HLS outputs. When creating your transcoding job, simply include the encryption key and license server URL provided by your […]
Apr 02, 2015
My colleague Andy Troutman wrote up the guest post below to share news of a powerful new way to use AWS CodeDeploy. — Jeff; Customers use to manage application updates to their Amazon EC2 instances. CodeDeploy allows developers and administrators to centrally control and track their application deployments across different development, testing, and production environments. […]
Apr 02, 2015
I’ve got good news for users of . You can now launch Database Instances that run Oracle Database 12c (version 12.1.0.1.v1 to be precise). This version of Oracle Database introduces over 500 new features! Here are a few that I found interesting: Data Redaction – You can mask sensitive data fields such as SSNs or […]
Apr 01, 2015
You can now encrypt your Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon RDS for Oracle databases using keys that you manage through (this feature was already available for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL). The encryption applies to data at rest on the underlying storage for the database instance, as well as […]
Apr 01, 2015
is a managed desktop computing services that runs in the AWS cloud. Administrators can easily provision cloud-based desktops that users can access using the desktop or mobile device of their choice. Today I would like to recap a series of updates and improvements that we have made to WorkSpaces over the last couple of months. […]
Mar 31, 2015
We have made two additions to the AWS Console mobile app (available on Amazon Appstore, Google Play, and iTunes). You can view the status of your stacks and you can edit the min, max, and desired capacities of your Auto Scaling groups. Here’s the main screen of the newly revised console: CloudFormation Features You can […]
Mar 31, 2015
Perhaps you, like many other users, store and process huge amounts of data in the cloud. Today we are announcing a new generation of Dense-storage instances that will provide you additional options for processing multi-terabyte data sets. New D2 Instances The new D2 instances are designed to provide you with additional compute power and memory […]
Mar 30, 2015
`Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, March 23 A post on the provided a helpful pointer to some new documentation on Amazon S3 Client-side Crypto Meta Information. The disclosed the availability of a New Security and Compliance Workbook: IT-Grundschultz. Tuesday, March 24 We announced Cross-Region Replication for Amazon […]
Mar 26, 2015
Many AWS customers use tags (key/value pairs) to organize their AWS resources. A recent Reddit thread (Share with us your AWS Tagging standards) provides a nice glimpse into some popular tagging strategies and practices. Late last year we launched Resource Groups and Tag Editor. We gave you the ability to use Resource Groups to create, […]
Mar 26, 2015
Following up on his recent guest post, my colleague Peter Moon has more news for Go developers! — Jeff; Since our initial kickoff announcement in January, we have been revamping the internals of the AWS SDK for Go in the project’s ‘develop’ branch on GitHub, laying out a solid foundation for a well-tested, robustly […]
Mar 25, 2015
Many AWS customers use to process huge amounts of data. Built around Hadoop, EMR allows these customers to build highly scalable processing systems that can quickly and efficiently digest raw data and turn it into actionable business intelligence. EMR File System (EMRFS) enables Amazon EMR clusters to operate directly on data in , making it […]
Mar 25, 2015
We are making some improvements to ‘s reporting feature. These improvements will allow you to learn even more about how and where your content is being accessed, export your data for additional analysis, and easily monitor and set alarms on a set of six metrics that CloudFront publishes to CloudWatch. Let’s take a look at […]
Mar 24, 2015
We launched Amazon S3 nine years ago as of last week! Since that time we have added dozens of features, expanded across the globe, and reduced the prices for storage and bandwidth multiple times. You, our customers, have trusted us with your mission-critical data and have used S3 in thousands of interesting and unique ways. […]
Mar 24, 2015
The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image for use on Amazon EC2. We release new versions of the Amazon Linux AMI every six months after a public testing phase that includes one or more Release Candidates. The Release Candidates are announced in the EC2 forum. Launching 2015.03 Today Today we are […]
Mar 24, 2015
makes it easy for you to find, buy, and quickly start using a wide variety of software products from developers located all over the world: Open in Germany Today we are making AWS Marketplace available to users of our new region. If you are using this region you can make use of over 700 products […]
Mar 23, 2015
We announced the AWS Managed Service Partner program at last year’s . We created the program in order to help our customers to find Partners who can deliver managed services in the cloud. In order for an APN Partner to become an approved member of this program, the quality of their offering must meet a […]
Mar 23, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, March 16 We announced that the EC2 Container Service is now Available in the EU (Ireland) Region. We published the Second Release Candidate of the Amazon Linux AMI. We updated the AWS SDK for Unity. Tuesday, March 17 The announced some Planned […]
Mar 19, 2015
My colleague Jed Sundwall wrote the guest post below to show you how one of the newest AWS Public Data Sets is being put to use. — Jeff; You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket […]
Mar 19, 2015
Last year I told you about Larger and Faster EBS Volumes and asked you to stay tuned for availability. Starting today you can create Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes that store up to 16 TB (terabytes) and process up to 20,000 IOPS, with a maximum throughput of 320 MBps (megabytes per second). You can also create […]
Mar 18, 2015
makes it easy for you to set up, operate, and scale a MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or Oracle relational database in the cloud. Today we are adding support for version 9.4.1 of PostgreSQL to RDS. Among other features, this version allows you to store JSON data in a compact, decomposed binary format known as jsonb. […]
Mar 17, 2015
take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, March 9 The GitLab Blog talked about Moving All Your Data, 9 TB Edition. A post on the Cloudyn Blog discussed AWS’ New Powerful C4 Instance and The Complete EC2 Families Guide. A post on the CB Insights Blog asked and answered How […]
Mar 17, 2015
converts (transcodes) media (video and audio) files into renditions optimized for playback on desktops, mobile devices, tablets, and televisions. Today, we are making even more useful! We’ve added support for generating NTSC outputs (the television standard used in the United States and Canada), and PAL outputs (the standard used in most other countries), and we […]
Mar 12, 2015
My colleague Omid Behzadian sent a guest post with information about a useful new feature for CloudFront. — Jeff; now gives you a new way to secure your private content: CloudFront signed HTTP cookies. In the past, you could control who is able to access your CloudFront content by adding a custom signature to each […]
Mar 12, 2015
My colleague Sivakanth Mundru sent another guest post my way! This one shows you how to look up AWS API activity using . — Jeff; “The ability to look up API activity in AWS CloudTrail helps us easily troubleshoot security incidents and operational issues. We can now take immediate actions such as following up with […]
Mar 11, 2015
Imagine having the opportunity to rebuild a complex, legacy-filled platform from the ground up, moving it from the desktop to the cloud in the process. Imagine being able to replace a complex upgrade model that mandated the use of separate source code branches for each customer with a single, cloud-based application. Sound like a challenge? […]
Mar 11, 2015
You can use to easily create, scale, and maintain cloud-based in-memory key-value stores that use the Memcached or Redis engines. Today we are making ElastiCache even more useful by adding support for version 2.8.19 of the Redis engine. Compared to version 2.8.6 (until now the latest version supported by ElastiCache Redis), this version of Redis […]
Mar 09, 2015
We have set up a new AWS Webinar Series. In March you can attend a webinar and Get started with AWS or a specific AWS Service (OpsWorks or WorkSpaces), master an AWS service (EC2), learn AWS best practices (content delivery, availability, or security), deploy enterprise workloads (SAP), or optimize for cost and performance (RDS). The […]
Mar 09, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, March 2 We announced Amazon EMR Support for New Instance Families and a Price Reduction in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. The N2W Blog showed you How-to Backup Your AWS Cloud Based PostgreSQL Database. The Cloud Academy Blog talked about Windows Server […]
Mar 05, 2015
We have updated . This plug-in runs within your existing vCenter environment and gives you the power to migrate VMware VMs to and to manage AWS resources from within vCenter. Today’s update includes automatic upgrades, log uploading, and queued import tasks. Automatic Upgrades The management console now displays a prompt when a new version is […]
Mar 05, 2015
My colleague Sivakanth Mundru sent me a guest post with and integration news, along with information about a new template to help you to get going more quickly. — Jeff; At re: Invent 2014, we launched integration with Logs in the , , and regions. With this integration, you can monitor for specific API calls […]
Mar 04, 2015
makes it easy for you to save user data such as app preferences in the AWS Cloud without writing any backend logic or managing any infrastructure. You can focus on creating a great app instead of worrying about creating server-side code to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync. Today we are giving you […]
Mar 04, 2015
I am already looking forward to my fourth re:Invent! This year’s conference will take place from October 6 to 9 in Las Vegas. We’ll be announcing more details and opening up the registration system in May. You can sign up here in order to receive email updates. We are already working on the services, presentations, […]
Mar 04, 2015
Continuing with my series of interviews from the , I spoke with Vaibhav Mallya of OfferLetter.io. We chatted about his time at Amazon and Twitter, and his motivation for founding his own company. You can listen to the full interview to learn a lot more. As a special bonus for podcast listeners, Vaibhav made a […]
Mar 03, 2015
is at home in situations where data arrives in a continuous stream. It is real-time and elastic and you can use it to reliably deliver any amount of data to your mission-critical applications. Today we are making an important change to Kinesis. You can now retrieve records (data) immediately after a successful PutRecord or PutRecords […]
Mar 03, 2015
The user base for a successful mobile app or game can reach in to the hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions. In order to generate, manage, and understand growth at this scale, a data-driven approach is a necessity. The service can be a big help here. You can include the in your […]
Mar 02, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, February 23 We launched a Cost Explorer Update, with More Filtering and Grouping Dimensions. We announced support for Data Pipeline Roles and Tags, along with some Security Improvements. We announced that the EC2 Container Service is now Available in the US West […]
Feb 26, 2015
We’re adding four new checks to . As you may know, inspects your AWS environment and looks for ways to save money, increase performance & reliability, and to help close security gaps. Today’s checks are for , with a focus on security and fault tolerance. Security Checks The following new checks are designed to help […]
Feb 26, 2015
We’re adding four new checks to . As you may know, inspects your AWS environment and looks for ways to save money, increase performance & reliability, and to help close security gaps. Today’s checks are for , with a focus on security and fault tolerance. Security Checks The following new checks are designed to help […]
Feb 26, 2015
A few months ago, I discussed 20 new features from Amazon Redshift, our petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse service that lets you get started for free and costs as little as $1,000 per TB per year. The Amazon Redshift team has released over 100 new features since the launch, with a focus on price, performance, […]
Feb 26, 2015
A few months ago, I discussed 20 new features from Amazon Redshift, our petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse service that lets you get started for free and costs as little as $1,000 per TB per year. The Amazon Redshift team has released over 100 new features since the launch, with a focus on price, performance, […]
Feb 24, 2015
After some fits and starts, I am now recording and producing the AWS Podcast on a regular basis. I am committed to releasing at least one new episode every week, with a stretch goal of two! Last week I spent some a couple of days at the in San Francisco! With my trusty Zoom H5 […]
Feb 24, 2015
After some fits and starts, I am now recording and producing the AWS Podcast on a regular basis. I am committed to releasing at least one new episode every week, with a stretch goal of two! Last week I spent some a couple of days at the in San Francisco! With my trusty Zoom H5 […]
Feb 24, 2015
Version 6.6 of Oracle Linux is now available in , with both hourly and annual pricing: The 64-bit Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel was designed to provide scalability, reliability, and performance improvements for demanding enterprise applications, including Enterprise Oracle workloads. This is a fully supported way to run Oracle Linux on AWS. Patches and updates are available […]
Feb 24, 2015
Version 6.6 of Oracle Linux is now available in , with both hourly and annual pricing: The 64-bit Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel was designed to provide scalability, reliability, and performance improvements for demanding enterprise applications, including Enterprise Oracle workloads. This is a fully supported way to run Oracle Linux on AWS. Patches and updates are available […]
Feb 23, 2015
AWS Cost Explorer is a spend management tool that lets you analyze, visualize and allocate your AWS spend to internal teams or projects. Using Cost Explorer, you can visualize your daily or monthly spend in easy-to-read bar and line charts or simple downloadable data tables. You can also choose to see your spend only for […]
Feb 23, 2015
AWS Cost Explorer is a spend management tool that lets you analyze, visualize and allocate your AWS spend to internal teams or projects. Using Cost Explorer, you can visualize your daily or monthly spend in easy-to-read bar and line charts or simple downloadable data tables. You can also choose to see your spend only for […]
Feb 23, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, February 16 We gave you the ability to Set Preferred Payment Currency for your AWS Account. We announced the Internet of Things (IoT) Hack Series at the AWS Loft. We added from ExcelSoft, GranBio, TATA Motors, Philips, and The Weather Company. A […]
Feb 23, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, February 16 We gave you the ability to Set Preferred Payment Currency for your AWS Account. We announced the Internet of Things (IoT) Hack Series at the AWS Loft. We added from ExcelSoft, GranBio, TATA Motors, Philips, and The Weather Company. A […]
Feb 20, 2015
A recent Reddit thread discussed the topic of Keeping Your AWS Accounts Squeaky Clean. The discussion focused on ways to identify (and possibly terminate) AWS resources that were not properly tagged. I had to keep my lips sealed as I read through the discussion because I knew that the features that I am about to […]
Feb 20, 2015
A recent Reddit thread discussed the topic of Keeping Your AWS Accounts Squeaky Clean. The discussion focused on ways to identify (and possibly terminate) AWS resources that were not properly tagged. I had to keep my lips sealed as I read through the discussion because I knew that the features that I am about to […]
Feb 19, 2015
(ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. My colleague Chris Barclay sent a guest post to spread the word about two additions to the service. As Chris explains below, you can […]
Feb 19, 2015
(ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. My colleague Chris Barclay sent a guest post to spread the word about two additions to the service. As Chris explains below, you can […]
Feb 18, 2015
As more companies are adopting cloud computing, they are also establishing DevOps practices within their organizations as a way to provide stable, secure, and predictable IT environments and increase IT efficiency. When I talk to our customers they tell me that they are looking for IT professionals with cloud computing expertise, with a special focus […]
Feb 18, 2015
As more companies are adopting cloud computing, they are also establishing DevOps practices within their organizations as a way to provide stable, secure, and predictable IT environments and increase IT efficiency. When I talk to our customers they tell me that they are looking for IT professionals with cloud computing expertise, with a special focus […]
Feb 18, 2015
simplifies the process of deploying and scaling Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications and services. Today we are making Elastic Beanstalk even more useful by adding three new features: Easy cloning of environments. 1-Click IAM role creation. Support for periodic worker tasks. Let’s take a look at each of these […]
Feb 18, 2015
simplifies the process of deploying and scaling Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications and services. Today we are making Elastic Beanstalk even more useful by adding three new features: Easy cloning of environments. 1-Click IAM role creation. Support for periodic worker tasks. Let’s take a look at each of these […]
Feb 17, 2015
Way back in 2008 I announced that you could run Microsoft Windows on Amazon EC2. Since that time, we have made many additions to the initial offering. You now have your choice of several different versions of Windows Server including 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2012 R2. You can build AWS-powered applications using […]
Feb 16, 2015
Are you familiar with the Internet of Things (IoT) concept? Compact, low-cost, Internet-connected devices are now embedded in cars, buildings, factories, appliances, and so forth. The devices collect light, weight, temperature, humidity, vibration, location, or pressure data and then forward it to another location for storage, processing, analysis, and action. New Challenges The low-cost nature […]
Feb 16, 2015
With customers in 190 countries, AWS is truly a global phenomenon. Today we are making the AWS bill payment process more powerful, by adding support for credit card payments in eleven additional currencies. This support comes in addition to our existing support for US Dollars (USD). This will relieve your accounting department of the burden […]
Feb 16, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, February 9 We added from Financial Times, FreeCharge, Freshdesk, NuBank, and WebMotors. We launched Tagging for ElastiCache Clusters and Snapshots. AWS Evangelist Ian Massingham posted a new What is Cloud Computing Video. A post on the Stelligent Blog talked about Continuous Delivery […]
Feb 12, 2015
Many computer science problems can be solved, the experts like to say, by adding another level of indirection (this proposition is often referred to, with mock seriousness, as the Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering). If you are currently using IAM, you already know that you can use user-based permissions to grant access to specific AWS […]
Feb 11, 2015
is a highly available and scalable Domain Name Service (DNS) web service. In a nutshell, it translates symbolic names such as aws.amazon.com into numerical IP addresses like 176.32.100.36. Today we are making Route 53 even more useful with the addition of four new features: Tagging of domains and hosted zones. API logging via CloudTrail. One-click […]
Feb 10, 2015
Let’s say you are building a data-intensive application. It might be for gaming, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) or simply a modern web application. You are customer-driven and you derive satisfaction from being able to rapidly respond to the ever-changing needs of your users. Their requirements are quickly evolving and the application needs to evolve […]
Feb 10, 2015
I first wrote about last fall as part of our burst of announcements that we made during in Las Vegas. At that time I discussed the dynamic nature of the AWS cloud and how organizations face new challenges with regard to asset tracking, inventory management, change management, and governance when they move their operations to […]
Feb 10, 2015
In a post on the Box Blog, co-founder Aaron Levie rolled out the new Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM) offering. This product was designed to allow companies to use Box’s content management and collaboration tools while retaining control over their own encryption keys. As he notes in the post, Enterprise Key Management is powered by […]
Feb 09, 2015
As you probably know, you can tag many types of AWS resources for tracking and billing purposes. You can use the Cost Explorer to attribute costs to resources and you can use Resource Groups to easily create and maintain collections of resources that share a common set of tags. Today we are giving you the […]
Feb 09, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, February 2 We launched Auto Export for Amazon Mobile Analytics. A post on the presented a CIO Perspective on Security in the Cloud. A post on the Inside Unbounce Blog claimed that You’d be Insane not to Grow your Startup on AWS […]
Feb 05, 2015
The first stable release of version 2 of the is now available, complete with support for more than 40 AWS services. You can install the aws-sdk gem from RubyGems and get started with the new SDK right now. My colleagues have been writing detailed blog posts about the new features as part of the development […]
Feb 02, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, January 26 We added from ClicThat, Concrete Software, eFront, Flypay, Geo.me, Kenshoo, IATA, Tadiran Telecom, Toronto Star, Wix, and YIT. We added a Second Location in Korea for CloudFront and Route 53. A new article showed you how to Build a Mars […]
Feb 02, 2015
I am still working to catch up with our development teams! Near the end of last year, the Amazon Mobile Analytics team released a new Auto Export feature. This relatively new service (see my launch blog post for more information) helps you to collect, visualize, and understand app usage, engagement, and revenue at scale. If […]
Jan 30, 2015
We’ve increased the geographic footprint and international relevance of several AWS services this past month. Here’s a summary: and are now available in the region. is now available in the region. , , and RDS integration with are now available in . We added a second location in Korea for and . is now available […]
Jan 29, 2015
My colleague Peter Moon wrote the guest post below and asked me to get it out to the world ASAP! — Jeff; AWS currently offers SDKs for seven different programming languages – Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and Objective C (iOS), and we closely follow the language trends among our customers and the general […]
Jan 29, 2015
Late last week I met with Andi Gutmans and Michel Gerin of Zend Technologies. Because Andi is a self-described “coffee snob,” we headed directly to the nearby Dilettante Cafe for an in-depth chat. It was interesting to hear how they had grown from an organization focused on the PHP language to one that was taking […]
Jan 28, 2015
Have you ever had to set up, run, and scale an email server? While it has been a long time since I have done this on my own, I do know that it is a lot of work! Users expect to be able to access their email from the application, device, or browser of their […]
Jan 27, 2015
Developers all over the world are using to build applications that take advantage of its ability to provide consistent low-latency performance. The developers that I have talked to enjoy the flexibility provided by DynamoDB’s schemaless model, along with the ability to scale capacity up and down as needed. They also benefit from the DynamoDB Reserved […]
Jan 26, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, January 19 We announced Auto-Recovery for EC2. We announced that is now available in the region. We announced Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing Support in ClassicLink. We updated the Enterprise Backup and Recovery (On Premises to AWS) Guide. The R Shiny […]
Jan 23, 2015
AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and looks for opportunities to save money, increase performance & reliability, and to help close security gaps. Today we are enhancing Trusted Advisor with the addition of Action Links. You can now click on an item in a Trusted Advisor alert to navigate to the appropriate part of […]
Jan 21, 2015
Enterprise-scale AWS customers often ask me for advice on how to connect their existing on-premises compute and storage infrastructure to the AWS cloud. They are not interested in all-or-nothing solutions that render their existing IT model obsolete. Instead, they want to enhance the model by taking advantage of the security, scale, performance, and cost-effectiveness of […]
Jan 21, 2015
We launched the AWS Systems Manager for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) last fall. This add-in allows you to monitor and manage your on-premises VMs (Virtual Machines), as well as your instances (running either Windows or Linux) from within Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. As a refresher, here’s the main screen: Today […]
Jan 21, 2015
Earlier today, after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer that lasted nearly two years, my friend and colleague Mike Culver passed away leaving his wife and adult children behind. Mike was well known within the AWS community. He joined my team in the spring of 2006 and went to work right away. Using his business […]
Jan 20, 2015
We’ve made some important updates to ! As you may already know, this service makes it easy for you to save user data such as app preferences or game state in the AWS cloud without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure. Here’s what’s new: Developer-oriented access to the sync store. Updated AWS console […]
Jan 20, 2015
My colleague Janna Pellegrino sent me a guest post to introduce some new materials to help you to prepare for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam! — Jeff; Are you planning to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam? We now have a new half-day workshop to help you prepare. Designed to complement […]
Jan 20, 2015
Would you like to run Exchange Server 2013 on ? If so, I’ve got some good news for you! Our newest Quick Start Reference Deployment will show you how to do just that. Formally titled [[Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 on the AWS Cloud]], this 34 page document addresses all of the architectural considerations needed to […]
Jan 20, 2015
In November of 2014 we made a long-term commitment to our goal of using 100% renewable energy to power the global AWS footprint. Today, the , , and AWS regions are Carbon-neutral. Now it is time to take another step toward our goal. We have signed a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Pattern Energy Group […]
Jan 19, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, January 12 We released version 0.0.18 of cfncluster; see the CHANGELOG for more information and be sure to read the new cfncluster documentation. Lambdaws cloudifies any JavaScript function for use with . a post on the discussed DynamoDB Provisioning – Simple, Flexible, […]
Jan 19, 2015
An important rule when building a highly available and highly reliable system is to design for failure. In other words, your design model should assume that, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has said, “everything fails all the time.” Fortunately, modern data centers, networks, and servers are highly reliable, and failures are the exception rather than […]
Jan 13, 2015
lets you convert media files in to versions that will play on smart phones, tablets, PCs, and smart TVs. As I have mentioned in the past, it takes care of all of the more tedious aspects of the media transcoding process on your behalf. You create a transcoding job and Elastic Transcoder will take care […]
Jan 12, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, January 5 We announced that you can now Import AWS Data Pipeline Definitions in the AWS Management Console. We announced the availability of EC2 Spot Instance Termination Notices. We made an AWS GovCloud (US) Update – Glacier, VM Import, CloudTrail, and More. […]
Jan 12, 2015
Late last year ago I told you about the New Compute-Optimized EC2 Instances and asked you to stay tuned for additional pricing and technical information. I am happy to announce that we are launching these instances today in seven AWS Regions! The New C4 Instance Type The new C4 instances are based on the Intel […]
Jan 08, 2015
Encryption of stored data (often referred to as “data at rest”) is an important part of any data protection plan. Today we are making it easier for you to encrypt data at rest in database instances running MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle Database. Before today’s release you had the following options for encryption of data at […]
Jan 08, 2015
lets you create and run a logically isolated section of the . Running within a VPC combines the benefits of the cloud with the flexibility of a network topology designed to fit the unique needs of your in-house IT department. For example: Isolation – You can create a network and exercise fine-grained control over internal […]
Jan 07, 2015
Many AWS customers use separate AWS accounts (usually in conjunction with Consolidated Billing) for their development and production resources. This separation allows them to cleanly separate different types of resources and can also provide some security benefits. Today we are making it easier for you to work productively within a multi-account (or multi-role) AWS environment […]
Jan 06, 2015
The Java Message Service (JMS) allows a pair of cooperating Java applications to create, send, receive, and read messages. The loosely coupled nature of JMS allows one part of the application to operate asynchronously with respect to the other. Until now, you needed to stand up, maintain, and scale a multi-instance (for high availability) JMS […]
Jan 06, 2015
When potential users of AWS ask me about ways that it differs from their existing on-premises systems, I like to tell them about EC2 Spot Instances and the EC2 Spot Market. When they learn that they can submit bids for spare EC2 instances at the price of their choice, their eyes widen and they start […]
Jan 05, 2015
I am pleased to be able to announce a set of updates and additions to . We are making a number of new services available including , , and VM Import. We are also enhancing the with support for and the Service Limits Report. As you may know, is an isolated AWS Region designed to […]
Jan 05, 2015
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, December 29 AWS Community Hero Ben Whaley shared his EC2 Container Service Hands On. We released Amazon SQS Client Libraries for Java Messaging Service (JMS). The talked about Using the AWS Cloud for your next Unity 3D Game. A thought piece on the […]
Dec 30, 2014
Earlier this year we welcomed the first AWS Community Heroes. As I wrote at the time, these hard-working folks were selected for the program because they routinely deliver high-quality, impactful, developer-focused activities to the AWS Community. More Heroes Today I would like to welcome eight new heroes! Java developer Satoshi Yokota is the Founder & […]
Dec 30, 2014
Earlier this month an AWS user named Andy emailed the following question to me: We’re interested in using the number of items in our sqs queue as criteria for autoscaling our ec2 workers. The 5 minute delay is really way too long for this application, it would have to keep track of the queue in […]
Dec 29, 2014
Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, December 22 We announced that now supports Lean and Flexible Configuration with Dynamic Fields. A post on the N2WS Blog reviewed EC2 Virtualization Options and the Move from PV to HVM. Weekend posts on AWS Advent talked about Exploring AWS Lambda and Using […]
Dec 24, 2014
Amazon Zocalo is a fully managed file storage and sharing service. It provides
secure, enterprise-ready storage and strong administrative controls, along
with built-in feedback capabilities. Zocalo organizes content into folders
and allows individual items and entire folders to be shared with other
users. The Zocalo sync client runs on your Windows or Mac desktop and
synchronizes your local Zocalo My Documents folder
with the copies in the cloud.
New Shared Folder Syncing
Today we are enhancing the Zocalo sync client with the ability to synchronize content that
has been shared with you via a shared folder. You can set up per-project folders and
share them with members of the project team on an as-needed basis. The project team can view and
edit the documents on their chosen device; new versions are automatically saved to Zocalo. For example,
I use a Zocalo shared folder to distribute draft blog posts to my colleagues for review.
Shaerd folder syncing is an optional feature and you
must explicitly enable it for existing installations. If you are installing a
new client, you can choose to enable syncing of shared folders as part of the
installation and registration process.
Enabling Syncing for an Existing Client
You can enable syncing of shared folders for an existing installation of the
Zocalo sync client by opening up the Zocalo Preferences:
Click on Enable Shared Folder Sync:
The folders that have been shared with me will then show up in Zocalo's
Shared With Me folder on my desktop:
Enabling Syncing During Installation
You can also enable syncing of shared folders when you install the Zocalo sync client. Simply
check Sync all files and folders from Zocalo in the Setup screen at the appropriate
point in the registration process:
You can pause syncing at any time. Your Shared With Me folder will remain
intact and will be brought up to date when you once again turn on shared folder
Dec 22, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, December 15
We announced that
AWS OpsWorks Supports Custom Shutdown Timeouts and Elastic Load Balancing Connection Draining.
A cool post on the
2lemetry Technical Blog talked about
Machine
Learning With Amazon Lambda.
A post on the Cloudability Blog introduced
New
Cloudability tools for Enterprise Management.
We announced that
AWS
Storage Gateway API Calls are now Available in AWS CloudTrail.
We announced that
VM
Import for Amazon EC2 is now Available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.
We announced that the
AWS Management Console in the AWS
GovCloud (US) Region now Supports Auto Scaling.
We announced that
AWS
OpsWorks now Supports Custom Shutdown Timeouts and Elastic Load Balancing Connection Draining.
A very detailed and informative post on the AWS Architecture Blog talked about
Internet Routing and Traffic Engineering.
A guest post on the AWS Big Data Blog talked about
Building
and Running a Recommendation Engine at Any Scale.
A post on the AWS Partner Network Blog took a look at the
re:Invent 2014 Launches from an APN Partner Perspective.
Another post on the AWS Partner Network Blog looked at
Four AWS Partners Coming Together
for AWS Customers: Cloudnexa, AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, and Trend Micro.
A post on AWS Advent
talked about
Finding
AWS Resources Across Regions, Services, and Accounts with skew.
A post on the
Dec 19, 2014
We have updated the AWS Console mobile app
with support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. I'll let the app's update notice tell you what's new:
Let's take a quick look at the new features! The main screen of the app includes a new
Beanstalk Applications section:
I can see all of my Elastic Beanstalk applications:
From there I can zoom and see the Elastic Beanstalk environments for any desired application:
Diving even deeper, I can focus on a particular environment:
I can open up individual sections to see what's going on. Here's the Configuration
section:
If a CloudWatch alarm fires, I can open up the CloudWatch Alarms section to
see what's going on:
I can also take a detailed look at a particular CloudWatch metric:
I can also perform certain operations on the environment:
For example, I can deploy any desired version of the application to the environment:
Download & Install Now
The new version of the AWS Console mobile app is available now and you can start using it today. Here
are the download links:
-- Jeff;
Dec 18, 2014
Now Hiring
As is the case with many parts of AWS, the team behind AWS Support is growing fast and is looking
for top-notch people to fill a multitude of open positions. Here are some of the positions that they
are working to fill (click through to apply or to read a detailed job description):
Cloud Support Engineer - (Dallas, Texas) -
You get to field, troubleshoot, and manage technical customer issues via phone, chat and email. You help
to recreate customer issues and build proof-of-concept applications, and you represent the voice of the
customer to internal AWS teams. You can share your knowledge with the AWS community by creating tutorials, how-to videos, and
technical articles.
Big Data Devops Support Engineer (Dallas, Texas) - This position is similar to the previous one, but
you'll need to have some experience with popular Big Data tools such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Zookeeper, HBase, HDFS, Pig, or Hive. If you
know what ETL is all about and can apply them using Hadoop, that's even better!
Cloud Support Engineer-Deployment (Dallas, Texas) - This position is similar to the first one, with a focus on development and
deployment. You'll need experience with Java, .NET, Node.JS, PHP, Python, or Ruby, familiarity with DevOps principles, and
should be able to work with all tiers of the application stack from the OS on up.
Cloud Technical Account Manager (Dallas, Texas) - In this role you will work directly with customers to build mindshare and broad
usage of AWS within their organizations. You will be their primary technical contact for one or more customers and you'll
get to help them to plan, debug, and monitor their cloud-based, business-critical applications. You will get to help them
to scale for world-class events and you'll represent the customers' needs to the rest of the AWS team.
Senior Cloud Technical Account Manager (Dallas, Texas) - This is a more senior version of the previous position! It requires sign
Dec 18, 2014
For many years, AWS customers have used tags to organize their
EC2 resources (instances, images, load balancers, security
groups, and so forth), RDS resources (DB instances, option groups,
and more), VPC resources (gateways, option sets, network ACLS, subnets,
and the like) Route 53 health checks, and S3 buckets. Tags are
used to label, collect, and organize resources and become increasingly
important as you use AWS in larger and more sophisticated ways. For
example, you can tag relevant resources and then take advantage
AWS
Cost Allocation for Customer Bills.
Today we are making tags even more useful with the introduction of
a pair of new features: Resource Groups and a Tag Editor. Resource Groups
allow you to easily create, maintain, and view a collection of resources
that share common tags. The new Tag Editor allows you to easily manage
tags across services and Regions. You can search globally and edit
tags in bulk, all with a couple of clicks.
Let's take a closer look at both of these cool new features! Both
of them can be accessed from the new AWS menu:
Tag Editor
Until today, when you decided to start making use of tags, you were
faced with the task of stepping through your AWS resources on a
service-by-service, region-by-region basis and applying tags as
needed. The new Tag Editor centralizes and streamlines this process.
Let's say I want to find and then tag all of my EC2 resources. The first
step is to open up the Tag Editor and search for them:
The Tag Editor searches my account for the desired resource types across all of the
selected Regions and then displays all of the matches:
I can then select all or some of the resources for editing. When I click on the
Edit tags for selected button, I can see and edit existing
tags and add new ones. I can also see existing System tags:
I can see which values are in use for a particular tag by simply hover
Dec 17, 2014
We announced the Amazon EC2 Container Service at AWS re:Invent and invited you to join the preview. Since that
time, we've seen a lot of interest and a correspondingly high signup rate for the preview. With the
year winding down, I thought it would be fun to spend a morning putting the service through
its paces. We have already approved all existing requests to join the preview; new requests are
currently being approved within 24 hours.
As I noted in my
earlier
post, this new service will help you to build, run, and scale
Docker-based applications. You'll benefit from easy cluster
management, high performance, flexible scheduling, extensibility,
portability, and AWS integration while running in an AWS-powered
environment that is secure and efficient.
Quick Container Review
Before I dive in, let's take a minute to review some of the terminology and core concepts
implemented by the Container Service.
Cluster -
A logical grouping of Container Instances that is used to
run Tasks.
Container Instance -
An EC2 instance that runs the ECS Container Agent and that
has been registered into a Cluster. The set of instances running within a Cluster create a
pool of resources that can be used to run Tasks.
Task Definition -
A description of a set of Containers. The information contained in a Task Description defines one or
more Containers. All of the Containers defined in a particular Task Definition are run on the same Container Instance.
Task -
An instantiation of a Task Definition.
Container -
A Docker container that was created as part of a Task.
The ECS Container Agent runs on
Container Instances. It is responsible for starting Containers on behalf of
ECS. The agent itself runs within a Docker container (available on
Docker Hub)
and communicates with the Docker daemon running on the Instance.
When talking about a cluster or container service
Dec 17, 2014
My colleague Jarrod Guthrie sent me a blog post with information about four
new reports for CloudFront.
-- Jeff;
Amazon CloudFront continues to add reporting features. Recently, launched we've
usage charts, cache statistics reports, a popular object report, and
near-real time operational metrics via Amazon CloudWatch. Today, CloudFront
added four more reports that will give you more visibility into who
your end users are - Locations, Browsers, and OS (all grouped under
Viewer reports) and a Top Referers report.
Viewer Reports
The Viewer reports include three different ways to look at your users:
by the browser that they're using, by the operating system that
they're using, and by their geographic location.
Browsers - The Browsers report shows top browsers that
your end users used to access your content. You can display either a
bar chart or a pie chart by browser name or by browser name and
version:
Here's what the pie chart looks like:
The Browser Trends report shows daily trends in requests by browser:
Operating Systems - As with the Browser reports, the
Operating Systems report show the top operating systems that your end
users are using as well as daily trends by operating system, either as
a bar chart or a pie chart:
Locations - You can see the top 50 countries where
your end user requests are coming from or the top U.S. states. The
report includes the request count from each country, the number of
requests in a country as a percent of total requests, and the number
of bytes delivered to your end users in each country. You can also
display a trends chart that shows how request counts are changing
for selected countries or states.
Referrer Reports
Any request for an object on your domain has a HTTP header caller
Referer. This header indicates the URL of the webpage from where the
request to the object on your domain (or website) was made. T
Dec 15, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, December 8
We announced that you can now
Delete
all Messages in an Amazon SQS Queue.
We announced an
AWS OpsWorks
Update with Support for Existing EC2 Instances and On-Premises Servers.
The AWS Mobile Development Blog invited you to
Learn
More About AWS Mobile Services - Slides and Videos from AWS re:Invent 2014.
A post on the AWS Application Management Blog talked about
Using
OpsWorks to Perform Operational Tasks.
Tuesday, December 9
We announced new
AWS
Public Data Sets for Earth Science - CGIAR and Landsat.
We announced that
Amazon Zocalo is now
Available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.
We announced that an
Update to
AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 is Now Available .
A guest post on the AWS Startup Collection talked about
Modern
Data Integration with Mortar and Redshift.
A post on the 2nd Watch Blog taught you
How to be Your Company's Cloud Champion in 2015.
The AWS Application Management Blog talked about
Adding
Comments Inside AWS CloudFormation Templates.
Wednesday, December 10
We announced that
Amazon Elastic Transcoder Now Supports Pass-Through Metadata for Jobs.
A post on the AWS Enterprise Blog described the
Enterprise Cloud Journey.
Over the past few months, I've had the
Dec 11, 2014
Amazon Glacier is a secure and durable storage service for data archiving and backup. You can store infrequently accessed data in Glacier for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. When you need to retrieve your data, Glacier will make it available for download within 3 to 5 hours.
Today we are launching two new features for Glacier. First, we are making it easier for you to manage data retrieval costs by introducing the data retrieval policies feature. Second, we are happy to announce that Glacier now supports audit logging with AWS CloudTrail. This pair of features should make Glacier even more attractive to customers who are leveraging Glacier as part of their archival solutions, where managing a predictable budget and the ability to create and examine audit trails are both very important.
Data Retrieval Policies
Glacier's new data retrieval policies will help you manage your data retrieval costs with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. As you may know, Glacier's free retrieval tier allows you to retrieve up to 5% of your monthly storage (pro-rated daily). This is best for smooth, incremental retrievals. With today's launch you now have three options:
Free Tier Only -
You can retrieve up to 5% of your stored data per month. Retrieval requests above the daily free tier allowance will not be accepted. You will not incur data retrieval costs while this option is in effect. This is the default value for all newly created AWS accounts.
Max Retrieval Rate -
You can cap the retrieval rate by specifying a gigabyte per hour limit in the AWS Management Console. With this setting, retrieval requests that would exceed the specified rate will not be accepted to ensure a data retrieval cost ceiling.
No Retrieval Limit -
You can choose to not set any data retrieval limits in which case all valid retrieval requests will be accepted. With this setting, your data retrieval cost will vary based on your usage. This is the default value for existing Amazon Glacier cus
Dec 09, 2014
To support the growing number of Earth science researchers on AWS,
we are adding two new members to the collection of Public Data Sets
on AWS: CGIAR Global Circulation Models (GCM) data and imagery from
the Landsat 8 satellite.
If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you may recall some of our earlier work to encourage Earth science
research. For example, last year we announced that you can
Process Earth Science
Data on AWS With NASA / NEX Public Data Sets. Earlier this year we announced the
Amazon Climate Research Grants and
subsequently made 12 awards (I'll have more to say about the recipients and the results in a bit).
Supporting Climate Research with CGIAR Data
We are working with
CGIAR (a consortium of international agricultural research centers)
to make their data more accessible and more easily available, with the expectation that it will lead
to innovative ways to address critical food security and development challenges. We expect worldwide
public access to this data to help researchers address rural poverty, improve human health & nutrition,
and manage the Earth's natural resources in a sustainable fashion.
Earth's climate is changing. We believe that it is important to understand how the changes will affect
agriculture and the world's ability to feed its ever-growing population. By making CGIAR's
Global Circulation Models (GCM) available, we are giving researchers what is presently believed to be
the most important tool for understanding how the climate could change in the next hundred years. Making
this data available in the Cloud will allow developers to build applications that give non-experts
the ability to access information about current and future climates in visual fashion.
The GCM data comes from the CCAFS Climate Portal and is
stored in Amazon S3 at <href="s3://cgiardata">s3://cgiardata (refer to
the CCAFS-Climate Data page for more info).
There's about 6 TB of data in the
Dec 09, 2014
My colleague Chris Barclay sent a guest post to introduce two powerful new features for AWS OpsWorks.
-- Jeff;
New Modes for OpsWorks
I have some good news for users that operate compute resources
outside of AWS: you can now use AWS OpsWorks to deploy and operate
applications on any server with an Internet connection including
virtual machines running in your own data centers. Previously, you
could only deploy and operate applications on Amazon EC2 instances
created by OpsWorks. Now, OpsWorks can also manage existing EC2
instances created outside of OpsWorks. You may know that OpsWorks is a
service that helps you automate tasks like code deployment, software
configuration, operating system updates, database setup, and server
scaling using Chef. OpsWorks gives you the flexibility to define your
application architecture and resource configuration and handles the
provisioning and management of resources for you.
Click here to learn more about the
benefits of OpsWorks.
Customers with on-premises servers no longer need to operate separate
application management tools or pay up-front licensing costs but can
instead use OpsWorks to manage applications that run on-premises, on
AWS, or that span environments. OpsWorks can configure any software
that is scriptable and includes integration with AWS services such
as Amazon CloudWatch.
Use Cases & Benefits
OpsWorks can enhance the management processes for your existing EC2
instances or on-premises servers. For example:
With a single command, OpsWorks can update operating systems and
software packages to the latest version across your entire
fleet, making it easy to keep up with security updates.
Instead of manually running
commands on each instance/server in your fleet, let OpsWorks run scripts
or Chef recipes for you. You control who can run scripts and are
able to view a history of each script that has been run.
Instead of using one u
Dec 08, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, December 1
We added new AWS Customer Succcess Stories from
Aon Benfield Securities (financial services),
AudioCodes (VoIP infrastructure),
Browan Communications (broadband products and services),
Devicescape (telcom management),
Goodman Group (property management),
HG Data (competitive intelligence),
Magisto (video creation and sharing),
McCormick (international flavors), and
myThings (advertising technology).
An interesting Quora discussion started with the question
Why did Koding move
away from containers and Docker to virtual machines?.
Tuesday, December 2
We announced that we are
Simplifying the
EC2 Reserved Instance Model.
We announced that
AWS Data Pipeline API
Calls are now Available in CloudTrail Log Files.
The AWS Ruby Development Blog published their
AWS re:Invent 2014 Ruby Recap.
The AWS Startup Collection revealed
What's
Hot at the AWS Pop-up Loft in December.
A post on the
CloudCheckr Blog talked about
Understanding the New AWS Reserved Instances.
A post with the same name (but an entirely different focus) also appeared on the
Cloudability Blog.
Wednesday, December 3
A post on the
Flux7 Blog talked about
Building a Continuous Integration Environment in AWS.
Thursday, December 4
We announced an
Amazon Kinesis Update,
Dec 04, 2014
My colleague Adi Krishnan wrote the following guest post to tell you
about the newest addition to the Amazon Kinesis API.
-- Jeff;
Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service for real-time processing of
streaming data at massive scale. Customers love the fact that they can
put any amount of data in to a Kinesis stream and then use it to power
real-time dashboards and generate alerts, or route it to big
data services such as S3 and Amazon Redshift.
Today, the Amazon Kinesis team is excited to release a new API
function, PutRecords, so that you can put data into your
Kinesis stream with greater efficiency and less complexity. You
can use the new PutRecords function to send up to 500 records to
your Kinesis stream in a single HTTP call. Each record in the call
can be as large as 50 KB, up to a limit of 4.5 MB for the entire
request.
Since we launched last November, customers have used Amazon Kinesis
to put data from many different sources, commonly called
producers. A producer could be an application server
running on EC2, a web browser, or a mobile application. The common
theme across these producers is that developers want to get data off
of them and into their Kinesis stream as quickly and efficiently as
possible.
You can use PutRecords to easily build high-throughput producers
that run on EC2 instances. Many customers use multi-threading or
local batching to improve the throughput of these
producers. PutRecords reduces this complexity by improving the
amount of throughput that you can achieve by using a single HTTP call.
For mobile applications, you can use PutRecords to make your
application more robust in the face of intermittent network connections
and limited battery life. PutRecords reduces the overhead
associated with multiple HTTP calls, allowing you to send up to 5 MB
of usage and application logs in a single call.
You can learn more about the new operation in the
Kin
Dec 04, 2014
I am happy to announce that we are reducing the rates for several types
of AWS data transfers, effective December 1, 2014, as follows:
Outbound Data Transfer -
Pricing for data transfer from AWS to the Internet is now
6% to 43% lower, depending on the
Region and the amount of data transferred per month.
Data Transfer to CloudFront -
Data transfer from AWS to Amazon CloudFront is now free of charge.
Data Transfer from CloudFront -
Pricing for data transfer out of CloudFront edge locations in
the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia is now 4% to 29% lower,
depending on the edge location and usage tier.
Price Reduction - Outbound Data Transfer
Here is a summary of the price reductions for outbound data transfer
(See the
EC2 pricing and
S3 pricing
pages for more information):
Price Tier
US Standard, US West (Oregon) &US West (Northern California)
EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt)
Asia Pacific (Singapore)
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
Asia Pacific (Sydney)
First 10 TB/month
-25%
-25%
-37%
-30%
-26%
Next 40 TB/month
-6%
-6%
-43%
-15%
-21%
Next 100 TB/month
-
-
-37%
-5%
-13%
Next 350 TB/month
-
-
-33%
-6%
-14%
The prices for the first 10 TB/month take effect after the bandwidth provided as part
of the AWS Free Tier has been consumed.
Price Reduction - Data Transfer from CloudFront
Here is a summary of the price reductions for outbound data transfer from CloudFront to different
parts of the world (see the
CloudFront pricing,
pages for more information):
Price Tier
United States
Europe
Hong Kong, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Taiw
Dec 02, 2014
EC2's Reserved Instance model provides you with two benefits: capacity assurance and a
lower effective hourly rate in exchange for an upfront payment. After combining customer
feedback with an analysis of purchasing patterns that goes back to when we
first launched
Reserved Instances in 2009, we have decided to simplify the model and are introducing an
important set of changes today.
The New Reserved Instance Model
There is now a single type of Reserved Instance and it has three payment options. All
of the options continue to provide capacity assurance and discounts that are typically
around 63% for a three year term when compared to On-Demand prices.
There are three payment options that so that you can decide how you would like to
pay for your Reserved Instance throughout the term (in descending order
of effective discount):
All Upfront -
You pay for the entire Reserved Instance term (one or three years)
with one upfront payment and get the best effective hourly price
when compared to On-Demand.
Partial Upfront -
You pay for a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront, and then
pay for the remainder over the course of the one or three year
term. This option balances the RI payments between upfront
and hourly.
No Upfront - You pay nothing upfront
but commit to pay for the Reserved Instance over the
course of the Reserved Instance term, with discounts (typically about 30%) when compared
to On-Demand. This option is offered with a one year term.
Learning More
If you have any questions about these changes, please take a look at the updated
Reserved Instance FAQ.
As always, AWS Support is also ready, willing, and able to assist!
-- Jeff;
Dec 01, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, November 24
We announced that
Amazon
Elastic Transcoder Now Supports Media File Encryption.
We announced that the
Amazon WorkSpaces Bundle and Updated Standard Bundles are now Available in the
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region.
The Infinite Wandering blog published an
AWS
Lambda Proof of Concept: Building an Image Index.
A post on the AWS Startup Collection told the story of
Segment:
Scaling a Week-Long Hack Project to Billions of Events a Month.
Tuesday, November 25
We announced that
Route 53 Hosted Zone Comments are now Editable.
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog talked about the new
DynamoDB JSON Support in the
AWS SDK for .NET.
A post on the Cloudability Blog described
How Cloudability helps HGST run massive workloads on AWS.
The Gathering Clouds Blog continued its DevOps series by talking about
How DevOps can Improve Reliability When Deploying with AWS.
Wednesday, November 26
We announced that the
AWS Data Pipeline now Supports Parameterized Templates.
The AWS Big Data Blog showed you how to do
ETL
Processing Using AWS Data Pipeline and Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
A post on the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog showed you how to
Increase Player Engagement with GameCircle Friends.
The AWS Ruby Development Blog reviewed the new
Client Response Stubs.
Nov 26, 2014
AWS Data Pipeline helps you to reliably process and move data between
compute and storage services running either on AWS on on-premises.
The pipelines that you create with Data Pipeline's graphical editor
are scalable and fault tolerant, and can be scheduled to run at
specific intervals. To learn more, read my launch post,
The New AWS Data Pipeline.
New Parameterized Templates
Today we are making Data Pipeline easier to use by introducing support for parameterized
templates, along with a library of templates for common use cases.
You can now select a template from a drop-down menu, provide values for
the specially marked parameters within the template, and launch the
customized pipeline, all with a couple of clicks.
Let's start with a quick tour and then dig in to details. The Create Pipeline
page of the AWS Management Console contains a new menu:
As you can see from the menu, you can access templates for jobs that
use the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift.
We plan to add more templates later and are open to your
suggestions!
I chose Run an Elastic MapReduce job flow. Now all I need to do is to fill
in the parameters for the job flow:
The "+" next to some of the parameters indicates that the template makes provision for
an array of values for the parameter. Clicking on it will add an additional data entry
field:
You can use these templates as a starting point by editing the pipeline before you
activate it (You can download them from s3://datapipeline-us-east-1/templates/).
How it Works
Each template is a JSON file. Parameters are specified like this (this is similar to
the syntax used by AWS CloudFormation):
{
"parameters":[
{
"id": "mys3OutputBucket",
"type":"AWS::S3::ObjectKey",
"description":"S3 output buck
Nov 24, 2014
Whew! I had an incredible time at AWS re:Invent and I know that many readers of this blog did as well. In between
my Sunday night arrival and my Friday afternoon departure I managed to publish seventeen blog posts, record
a bunch of cameo videos for the re:Invent Facebook Page
(including this to-be classic), sit for
interviews with 8 or 9 international jouirnalists, watch
some hungry competitors gnaw their way through hundreds of chicken wings
at the re:Invent Tatonka Challenge, sit in a Lamborghini, meet and
talk to hundreds of blog readers and Twitter followers, attend plenty of social events, and dance to the unique sounds of
Skrillex!
I did not, however, have the time to attend a single one of the re:Invent sessions! Fortunately, almost all of the
content is now online and I have plenty to watch and to listen to. Here's an overview to get you started.
re:Invent Video Content
As I write this, we have published 215 videos on the AWS Video Channel.
We are finalizing the stragglers and they should be up within a day or two.
The videos include the
Day 1 (Andy Jassy) and
Day 2 (Werner Vogels) keynotes, keynote highlights
(Day 1 and Day 2),
launch videos, and over 200 breakout sessions
(Innovation at Scale looks great, as does
A Tale of One Thousand Instances - Migrating from EC2 Classic to EC2-VPC).
re:Invent Audio Content
If you, like me, enjoy content in audio form, be sure to check out the
re:Invent Audio Podcast series.
Audio for more than 200 sessions is already online.
re:Invent Presentations
The slide decks from re:Invent have been tagged with "reinvent2014" and are available on
on SlideShare:
Enjoy
I hope that you find this content interesting, helpful, and valuable. As always, please feel
free to use the link below to send feedback my way.
-- Jeff;
Nov 24, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, November 17
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog announced
AWS Toolkit support for Visual Studio Community 2013.
The
Trend Micro Blog published a sweet
AWS re:Invent Wrap Up.
Network Work published a
re:Cap
of AWS re:Invent: 10 Cool new Amazon Cloud Features.
EnterpriseTech wrote about
A Rare Peek Into the Massive Scale of AWS. This
is a detailed review of the content contained in the
AWS Innovation at Scale talk
given by James Hamilton at re:Invent.
Tuesday, November 18
We announced that
Amazon
Redshift is now Available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.
An article in the
AWS Ruby Development Blog talked about
Using Resources.
The AWS Mobile Development Blog published Part 3 of an series on
Understanding
Amazon Cognito Authentication - Roles and Policies.
The AWS Startup Collection published Part of a guide to
Amazon Simple Notification Service Mobile Push Self-registration for iOS.
An entertaining post on the
Evident.IO Blog talked about
AWS re:Covery 2014 - Now to start that training regimen to prepare for re:Invent 2015. See you there!.
Gigaom published an
AWS re:Invent 2014: Highlights and Analysis.
Wednesday, November 19
We announced a
Price
Reduction and new Features for CloudSearch.
We updated the
EC2 IP Public Address Ra
Nov 21, 2014
Many of our customers have asked us for a detailed list of the IP
address ranges assigned to and used by AWS. While the use cases
vary from customer to customer, they generally involve firewalls and
other forms of network access controls. In the past we have met
this need by posting human-readable information to the EC2, S3, SNS,
and CloudFront Forums.
IP Ranges in JSON Form
I am happy to announce that this information is now available in
JSON form at
https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json.
The information in this file is generated from our internal system-of-record and is authoritative. You can
expect it to change several times per week and should poll accordingly.
Here are the the first couple of lines:
{
"syncToken": "1416523628",
"createDate": "2014-11-20-22-51-01",
"prefixes": [
{
"ip_prefix": "50.19.0.0/16",
"region": "us-east-1",
"service": "AMAZON"
},
{
"ip_prefix": "54.239.98.0/24",
"region": "us-east-1",
"service": "AMAZON"
},
Valid values for the service key include "AMAZON", "EC2",
"ROUTE53", "ROUTE53_HEALTHCHECKS", and "CLOUDFRONT." If you need to know all
of the ranges and don't care about the service, use the "AMAZON" entries. The
other entries are subsets of this one. Also, some of the services, such as
S3, are represented in "AMAZON" and do not have an entry that is specific to
the service. We plan to add additional values over time; code accordingly!
For more information, read the documentation on
AWS IP Address Ranges.
-- Jeff;
PS - By my count, there are now 10,130,200 IP addresses in the EC2 range. My code excludes the first (all zeroes)
and last (all ones) address in each CIDR block.
Nov 21, 2014
The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a rapidly growing ecosystem of
Consulting and Technology partners. These partners push the
boundaries of what can be done with cloud computing by creating and
bringing value-added solutions to their customers. Our goal is to
continue to support the APN partners as they work to build
successful businesses on the AWS platform. As our ecosystem
grows, we continue to launch new programs, benefits, and content for
APN Partners via the AWS Partner Network (APN).
New APN Blog
Today we are launching a new AWS Partner Network Blog that will serve as a
central source for information that will be of interest to current
and prospective APN Partners. We plan to provide up-to-date
coverage of the entire partner ecosystem. Look for posts that
discuss compelling APN solutions built on AWS, details on key AWS
and APN launches of special interest to APN Partners, and stories of
two or more APN Partners working jointly to provide a solution for a
customer. The new blog is designed to serve as a real-time base for
all things APN.
In addition to APN Partner stories, the new blog will keep you informed of
additions to the APN program. We'll continue to launch additional programs,
such as the recent APN Competencies
(including Storage and
the
Life Sciences, with more on the way),
intended to highlight
the APN Partners with proven expertise in particular solution areas such as
Big Data or
specific workloads (Microsoft is a good example)
We also have a program designed for Managed Service Providers.
The new blog will also put new APN launches in to
perspective. You'll be among the first to learn about key
information and why it is important to your organization. It will
also cover new content on the
APN Portal along with
AWS Training and Certification launches and other
news of special interest to APN Partners from across AWS.
Finally, the blog will take a clos
Nov 21, 2014
AppStream can provide our customers with easier access to the tools they need on a wider range of devices than in the past.
Ray MilhemVP of Enterprise Solutions at ANSYS
When I
first
wrote about Amazon AppStream last year, I described the AppStream APIs and showed you
how to use them to modify an existing application to give it the ability to stream
output to a wide variety of output devices. The
AppStream SDK
can be used to build customized streaming experiences
that integrate local and remote applications in a unified fashion. As an example of what can
be done when AppStream is used in this manner, see my blog post,
Amazon
AppStream Can Improve the New-User Experience for Eve Online.
Today I would like to tell you about an important new feature for
AppStream. You can now stream just about any existing Microsoft
Windows application without having to make any code changes. You
simply step through a simple installation and configuration process
using the AWS Management Console. Once you've completed the process, your users
can begin to use the application.
This is a new way to deliver software that obviates the need for
shipping CDs (you do remember those, right?) or waiting for massive
downloads to complete. Your users can access the applications from
devices that run FireOS, Android, Chrome, iOS, Mac OS X, or Microsoft
Windows.
On the development side, running the remote side of the
application in a single, well-understood, cloud-based environment
can dramatically shrink the size of the test matrix. The client
application is relatively simple, with responsibility limited to
authenticating users, decoding video streams, and relaying local
events to AppStream. Because the run-time environment is well-understood
and under your control, issues related to libraries, DLLs, and
video drivers are no longer an issue.
Finally, streaming ap
Nov 20, 2014
I have a couple of pieces of good news for current and potential users of
Amazon Zocalo. Both items are available now and you can start using
them today.
Zocalo Mobile Apps
You can use our new mobile apps to access Zocalo on your iPhone or Android device using
your corporate credentials. You can work offline, make comments, and securely share documents
while you are in the air or on the go! The Android app is available on the
Kindle and
Google Play stores.
The iPhone app is in the
iOS AppStore.
Here's what the Android version
of the app looks like:
And here's the
iPhone version of the app:
Support for 5 TB Files
Zocalo users have been asking us to support larger files. Many of the
requests have been coming from health care and media companies. For
example, one of our largest Zocalo customers is a media production
company. They appreciate the fact that Zocalo stores data in S3
and asked us to match the existing S3 object size limit of 5 TB.
I am happy to report that you can now use Zocalo to upload, sync, and
share files of up to 5 TB! As part of this change, the existing sync clients
have been improved and now handle uploads and downloads with greater
efficiency. They will now automatically resume large uploads and
downloads as necessary (this feature makes use of S3's existing
support for
multipart uploads).
The sync clients will prompt you to update. If you’re not running a
sync client already, you
can install one today.
-- Jeff;
Nov 19, 2014
I've got some good news for current and potential users of
Amazon CloudSearch. As you may already know, CloudSearch is a
a fully-managed service that makes it easy to setup,
operate, and scale a search service for your website or
application. If you use CloudSearch, you will benefit from a price
reduction, additional language support, and control over domain
partitioning (we released these features earlier this year but I
didn't have a chance to blog about them at that time). You can
also take advantage of the recently released support for AWS CloudTrail.
Price Reduction
An ever-increasing number of AWS customers are adopting CloudSearch and we are
scaling accordingly.
We are reducing the hourly charge for CloudSearch by up to 50%, across all
AWS Regions and search instance types. This change is effective as of
November 1, 2014 and will take effect with no action on your part. With this change,
the overall cost to run CloudSearch compares very favorably to the cost of
setting up, running, and scaling your own search infrastructure.
Check out the
CloudSearch Pricing
page for more information.
Additional Language Support
Earlier this year we introduced language-specific text processing for Hebrew. With this addition,
CloudSearch now supports a total of
34 languages. Here's a search of some Hebrew-language content:
In mid-October we added support for custom tokenization dictionaries for Japanese.
You can now control how CloudSearch tokenizes Japanese by adding a custom
tokenization dictionary to the analysis scheme that you use for fields that contain
Japanese-language text. To learn more, read about
Customizing Japanese Tokenization in the
CloudSearch Developer Guide.
Control Over Partitioning
If you are using the
m2.2xlarge search instance type, you can now preconfigure the
number of index partitions for your search domain. Preconfiguring a domain will
improve the performance of large uploads. You can also add
Nov 17, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week. I have augmented selected items with links to their
re:Invent presentations.
Monday, November 10
We announced
CloudTrail Integration With CloudWatch Logs.
We updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with
Read Replicas,
9.3.5 Support, Migration, and Three New Extensions.
We announced a new
AWS Direct Connect Location in Las Vegas.
We announced a
Sneak Preview of DynamoDB Streams.
The AWS Startup Collection published a story on
Mainframe 2:
How the Cloud Became Virtual - With GPU instances soon to go live on AWS, we had a shot at putting Mainframe2 in front of tens of thousands of customers.
The AWS Big Data Blog published
Dispatches from re:Invent - Day 1.
The RightScale Blog talked about
RightScale
at re:Invent: How to Manage AWS, VMware, and Hybrid Cloud.
Tuesday, November 11
We launched
AWS Test Drive 3.0.
The ElasticBox Blog announced
Cloud Reports - A Simple and Easy Way to Track and Optimize Your Cloud Spend.
The Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog announced that
Amazon
CloudDrive is now Accessible via a REST-Based API.
The AWS Big Data Blog published
Dispatches from re:Invent - Day 2.
Wednesday, November 12
We announced
Amazon Aurora, a
New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS (presentation:
Amazon Aurora: Amazon's New Relational Datab
Nov 13, 2014
As Werner just
announced from the stage at AWS re:Invent, we have some great news
for users of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). We are planning to support EBS volumes that
are larger and faster than ever before! Here are the new specs:
General Purpose (SSD) -
You will be able to create volumes that store up to 16 TB and
provide up to 10,000 baseline IOPS (up from 1 TB and 3,000 baseline IOPS).
Volumes of this type will continue to support bursting to
even higher performance levels (see my post on
New
SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage for more information).
Provisioned IOPS (SSD) -
You will be able to create volumes that store up to 16 TB and
provide up to 20,000 Provisioned IOPS (up from 1 TB and 4,000 Provisioned IOPS).
Newly created volumes will transfer data more than twice as fast,
with a maximum throughput of 160 MBps for General Purpose (SSD) and
320 MBps for Provisioned IOPS (SSD).
With more room to store data and the ability to get to it even more
rapidly, you can now run demanding, large-scale workloads without
having to stripe multiple volumes together or to do a complex
dance when it comes time to create and coordinate snapshots. You can
just create the volume and turn your attention to your data and your
application.
Stay tuned for more information on availability!
-- Jeff;
Nov 13, 2014
Our customers continue to increase the sophistication and intensity
of the compute-bound workloads that they run on the
Cloud. Applications such as top-end website hosting, online
gaming, simulation, risk analysis, and rendering are voracious
consumers of CPU cycles and can almost always benefit from the
parallelism offered by today's multicore processors.
The New C4 Instance Type
Today we are pre-announcing the latest generation of compute-optimized
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The new C4 instances are based on the Intel Xeon
E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor. This custom processor,
designed specifically for EC2, runs at a
base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz
with Turbo boost. These instances are designed to deliver the highest level
of processor performance on EC2. If you've got the workload, we've got
the instance!
Here's the lineup (these specs are preliminary and could change a bit before launch time):
Instance Name
vCPU Count
RAM
Network Performance
c4.large
2
3.75 GiB
Moderate
c4.xlarge
4
7.5 GiB
Moderate
c4.2xlarge
8
15 GiB
High
c4.4xlarge
16
30 GiB
High
c4.8xlarge
36
60 GiB
10 Gbps
These instances are a great match for the
SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage that we
introduced earlier this year.
EBS
Optimization is enabled by default for all C4 instance
sizes, and is available to you at no extra charge.
C4 instances also allow you to achieve significantly higher packet per second (PPS)
performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latency using
Enhanced Networking.
Like most of our newer instance types, the C4 instances will use Hardware
Virtualization
(HVM) in order to get the best performance from the underlyin
Nov 13, 2014
Many AWS customers have been building applications that
use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for cost-efficient and highly scalable
persistent or temporary object storage. Some of them want to initiate
processing on the objects as they arrive; others want to capture
information about the objects and log it for tracking or security
purposes. These customers have been asking for a reliable and
scalable way to be notified when an S3 object is created or overwritten.
S3 Event Notifications
Today we are launching a new event notification feature for S3. The bucket owner
(or others, as permitted by an IAM policy) can now arrange for notifications to be
issued to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) when a new object is added to the bucket or an
existing object is overwritten. Notifications can also be delivered to
AWS Lambda for processing by a Lambda function. Here's the general flow:
Here's what you need to do in order to start using this new feature with your application:
Create the queue, topic, or Lambda function (which I'll call the target for brevity) if necessary.
Grant S3 permission to publish to the target or invoke the Lambda function.
For SNS or SQS, you do this by applying an appropriate policy to the topic or the queue. For Lambda, you
must create and supply an IAM role, then associate it with the Lambda function.
Arrange for your application to be invoked in response to activity on the target. As you will see in a moment, you have several options here.
Set the bucket's Notification Configuration to point to the target.
From that point forward the events will be reliably delivered to the target as appropriate.
Notifications are configured at the bucket level and apply to all of the objects in the bucket (we plan to provide
control at a finer level at some point). You can elect to receive notification for any or all of the f
Nov 13, 2014
We want to make it even easier for you to build applications that
run in the Cloud. We want you to be able to focus on your code,
and to work within a cloud-centric environment where scalability,
reliability, and runtime efficiency are all high enough to be simply
taken for granted!
Today we are launching a preview of AWS Lambda, a brand-new way to build and run
applications in the cloud, one that lets you take advantage of your
existing programming skills and your knowledge of AWS. With
Lambda, you simply create a Lambda function, give it
permission to access specific AWS resources, and then connect the
function to your AWS resources. Lambda will automatically run code
in response to modifications to objects uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets,
messages arriving in Amazon Kinesis streams, or table updates in
Amazon DynamoDB.
Lambda is a zero-administration compute platform. You don't
have to configure, launch, or monitor EC2 instances. You don't have to
install any operating systems or language environments. You don't
need to think about scale or fault tolerance and you don't need to
request or reserve capacity. A freshly created function
is ready and able to handle tens of thousands of requests per hour
with absolutely no incremental effort on your part, and on a very
cost-effective basis.
Let's dig in! We'll take a more in-depth look at Lambda,
sneak a peek at the programming model and runtime environment, and then walk through a
programming example. As you read through this post, keep in mind that
we have plenty of items on the Lambda roadmap and that what I am
able to share today is just the first step on what we expect to be an
enduring and feature-filled journey.
Lambda Concepts
The most important Lambda concept is the Lambda function, or function for short. You write
your functions in Node.js (an event-driven, server side implementation
of JavaScript).
Nov 13, 2014
Earlier this year I wrote about
container computing and enumerated
some of the benefits that you get when you use it as the basis for a distributed application
platform: consistency & fidelity, development efficiency, and operational efficiency. Because
containers are lighter in weight and have less memory and computational overhead than virtual machines,
they make it easy to support applications that consist of hundreds or thousands of small, isolated "moving parts."
A properly containerized application is easy to scale and maintain, and makes efficient use of
available system resources.
Introducing Amazon EC2 Container Service
In order to help you to realize these benefits, we are announcing a preview of our new
container management service, EC2 Container Service (or ECS for short).
This service will make it easy for you to run any number of Docker
containers across a managed cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances using powerful APIs and other tools. You do not
have to install cluster management software, purchase and maintain the cluster hardware, or match your hardware
inventory to your software needs when you use ECS. You simply launch some instances in
a cluster, define some tasks, and start them. ECS is built around a scalable,
fault-tolerant,
multi-tenant base that takes care of all of the details of cluster management on your
behalf.
By the way, don't let the word "cluster" scare you off! A cluster is simply a pool of compute, storage, and
networking resources that serves as a host for one or more containerized applications. In fact,
your cluster can even consist of a single t2.micro instance. In general, a single
mid-sized EC2 instance has sufficient resources to be used productively as a starter cluster.
EC2 Container Service Benefits
Here's how this service will help you to build, run, and scale Docker-based applications:
Easy Cluster Management -
ECS sets up and mana
Nov 12, 2014
Running an IT department in a large organization is not easy. On the one hand, you want to
provide your internal users with access to the latest and greatest technology so that they can
be as efficient and as productive as possible. On the other hand, you, as the IT professional,
need to set and maintain corporate standards, collect and disseminate best practices, and
provide some oversight to avoid runaway spending and technology sprawl.
Years ago, early adopters brought AWS in to their organizations in a quiet, bottom-up fashion.
Their agile, cloud-powered success stories spread quickly and came to the attention of upper-level
folks sooner or later. While "shadow IT" is a well-proven model for technology adoption, there
inevitably comes a time when more discipline is required.
The message that we are hearing from these large organizations is amazingly consistent! They are
using AWS to support line-of-business applications and to deliver services of all sorts to their
internal constituency. They want to do so in a manner that allows the benefits of AWS to
come through, while giving them the templates, knobs, levers, and fences that are needed to
maintain consistency, regulate access, promulgate best practices, and manage the budget.
Introducing the AWS Service Catalog
Today I would like to tell you about the upcoming AWS Service Catalog. This product is designed to address
the needs and challenges that I just outlined! It is a tool that will allow any
IT department to deliver AWS-powered services to internal users while maintaining consistency and
control. I believe that the Service Catalog has the potential to reduce support costs, encourage
reuse, and to help organizations to realize the benefits of cloud computing that I've been writing
about in this blog.
The Service Catalog is a full-fledged AWS service. It has two distinct user interfaces -- one for the
administrator and another for the user. It also has a s
Nov 12, 2014
One of the coolest aspects of the Cloud is its dynamic
nature. Resources can be created, attached, configured, used,
detached, and destroyed in a matter of minutes. Some of these
changes are triggered by a direct human action; others have their
origins in AWS CloudFormation templates or take place in response
to Auto Scaling triggers. The resources themselves, as well as their
connections, settings, and other attributes, change over time.
With all of this change happening, organizations of all sizes face
some new challenges when it comes to asset tracking, inventory
management, change management, and governance in the Cloud. They
need to know what was changed, when it happened, and how the change
might affect other AWS resources. This need might arise due to an
unexpected configuration change, a suspected system failure, a
compliance audit, or a possible security incident. Regardless of
the cause, having access to the right data enables a deep,
data-driven forensic analysis.
Traditional configuration management tools were built in an era where
resources and the relationships between them changed
infrequently. These tools were costly, complex, and required some
care and feeding.
Introducing AWS Config
We aim to address these challenges with AWS Config. This new AWS service captures the
initial state of your AWS resources (EC2 instances and related items to start, with others planned)
and the relationships between them, and then tracks creations, deletions, and
property changes for analysis, visualization, and archiving.
You can enable AWS Config with two clicks! Once enabled, it
discovers resources and records their current configurations and any
changes to them. This configuration data can be viewed in timeline
fashion in the AWS Management Console. AWS Config also delivers
these CIs to you. Configuration changes are streamed to an
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic of your ch
Nov 12, 2014
Information security is always of paramount importance, whether data is stored
on-premises or in the cloud. Since the early days of AWS, we've done our
best to provide our customers with the information, services, and features
that they need to have in order to make informed decisions about what kinds
of applications and what kinds of data they can and should store in the cloud.
I think we can all agree that encryption is one of the principal elements of any
data protection strategy. To date we have provided our customers with
multiple options including client-side and server-side encryption for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),
along with server-side encryption for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Redshift,
Amazon RDS for Oracle, and Amazon RDS for SQL Server.
Up until now, the server-side encryption support
provided by these services has made use of "master keys" that are generated,
stored, and managed within AWS.
Today we are adding a powerful new option for key management, one that
can manage keys for applications and services running in the cloud as well
as on-premises!
Introducing the AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
The new fully-managed AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provides you with seamless, centralized
control over your encryption keys. It gives you a new option for data protection and
relieves you of many of the more onerous scalability and availability issues that
inevitably surface when you implement key management at enterprise scale. When properly
used, AWS Key Management Service can even help to address lingering concerns about
moving sensitive data to the cloud.
The service is built on systems that protect your keys with
extensive hardening techniques such as never storing keys on disk,
not persisting them in memory, and limiting which systems can
connect to the device. All access to update software on the service
is controlled by a multi-level approval process tha
Nov 12, 2014
Today I would like to tell you about a trio of new AWS tools
that are designed to help individual developers, teams of
developers, and system administrators store, integrate, and
deploy their code on the cloud. Here is the lineup, in the
order that you'd generally put them to use:
AWS CodeDeploy -
This service efficiently deploys your released code to a "fleet" of
EC2 instances while taking care to leave as much of the fleet online
as possible. It can accommodate fleets that range in size
from one instance all the way up to tens of thousands of
instance.
AWS CodeCommit -
This is a managed revision control service that hosts
Git repositories
and works with all Git-based tools.
You no longer need to worry about hosting, scaling, or
maintaining your own source code control infrastructure.
AWS CodePipeline -
This service will help you to model and automate your software
release process. You can design a development workflow that
fits your organization's needs and your working style and use it
to shepherd your code through the staging, testing, and release
process. CodePipeline works with third-party tools but is also
a complete, self-contained end-to-end solution.
We are launching AWS CodeDeploy today and you can start using it right away. I'll share
additional information on the launch plans for the other two tools as it becomes
available. These tools were designed to work well independently and to provide
even more functionality and value when used together.
Let's take a closer look at each of these tools!
CodeDeploy
CodeDeploy was designed to help you to deploy code at scale, with a
focus on rapid development and rapid deployment in mission-critical
situations where the cost of failure is high. As I mentioned
earlier, it was designed to update an EC2 fleet without the need for any
down time. C
Nov 12, 2014
We
launched
the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) service way back in 2009 to help you to set up, operate, and scale a MySQL database in the
cloud. Since that time, we have added a multitude of options to RDS including
extensive console support, three
additional database engines (
Oracle,
SQL Server, and
PostgreSQL),
high availability (multiple Availability Zones)
and dozens of other features.
We have come a long way in five years, but there's always room to do
better! The database engines that I listed above were designed to
function in a constrained and somewhat simplistic hardware
environment -- a constrained network, a handful of processors, a
spinning disk or two, and limited opportunities for parallel
processing or a large number of concurrent I/O operations.
The RDS team decided to take a fresh look at the problem and to
create a relational database designed for the cloud. Starting from
a freshly scrubbed white board, they set as their goal a material
improvement in the price-performance ratio and the overall
scalability and reliability of existing open source and commercial
database engines. They quickly realized that they
had a unique opportunity to create an efficient, integrated design
that encompassed the storage, network, compute, system software, and
database software, purpose-built to handle demanding database
workloads. This new design gave them the ability to take advantage
of modern, commodity hardware and to eliminate bottlenecks caused by I/O waits
and by lock contention between database processes. It turned out that
they were able to increase availability while also driving far more
throughput than before.
Amazon Aurora - New MySQL-Compatible Database Engine
Today we are launching Aurora, is a fully-managed, MySQL-compatible, relational database
engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end
commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effective
Nov 12, 2014
The AWS Partner Network (APN) helps our technology and consulting partners to build
businesses around AWS. Members of APN have access to business,
technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) resources and support.
The Global APN Summit is an important part of AWS re:Invent. I'd like to
give you a brief report, fresh from the floor of the Summit!
Recognizing Top AWS Partners
The keynote, led by Terry Wise (Director of the AWS Partner
Ecosystem), announced 28 new Premier Consulting partners, 28
leadership award winners, and over 25 additional benefits to the
program. Terry noted that the AWS partner ecosystem has gained a lot
of momentum in the last 12 months.
Premier Consulting Partners
AWS recognized the top APN Consulting Partners who have been
consistently delivering great results for AWS customers. These
partners have been selected based on customer satisfaction, their
progress building teams of AWS trained and certified professionals,
the overall growth of their AWS business, and their long term
commitment to AWS. This list represents our global ecosystem with
partners based in Australia, Brazil, India, Israel, Italy, Japan,
Germany, Nordics, UK and US. Congratulations to the
Premier Consulting Partners:
2nd Watch
DLT Solutions
Accenture
Infosys
Aquilent
Matrix IT
Booz Allen Hamilton
Melbourne IT
Bulletproof Networks
Minjar Cloud Solutions
Capgemini
Nomura Research Institute
Classmethod
NORDCLOUD
Cloudnexa
Serverworks
Cloudpack
Slalom Consulting
Cloudreach
Smart421
Cognizant
Smartronix
CSC
Storm Reply
Datapipe
tecRacer
Dedalus
Wip
Nov 11, 2014
Would you buy a car without driving it? Would you spend tens or hundreds of
thousands of dollars on a license for an enterprise software package without
seeing it run in a real environment? I hope that your answer to both of
these questions is "no way!"
As you might already know, I am a big fan of the AWS Test Drive
program. You can quickly and easily launch a Test Drive on the
cloud and put a wide variety of enterprise applications to the test
without installing any software, spending any money, or bothering
your IT department. In other words, the Test Drive home page is the
online showroom for enterprise solutions and you are more than
welcome to take any of the Test Drives out for a spin around the
cloud!
Test Drive 3.0 Launches at re:Invent
Appropriately enough, we are launching the "3.0" model of the Test Drive program
at the third re:Invent. As part of the APN Summit Keynote,
APN Partners
from around the world are launching a catalog of over 200 new or updated Test
Drive labs that you can now browse through. The catalog includes new Test
Drives for
Microsoft,
Oracle,
SAP,
Red Hat,
Siemens,
NetApp and many others.
It includes new Test Drives for
security,
management,
content management,
line-of-business,
HPC,
big data,
and health sciences.
There are new Test Drives from
Asia Pacific,
Latin America,
Japan,
Europe, and for
AWS GovCloud (US).
This launch at re:Invent marks the culmination of efforts by APN Partners to
launch 120 new Test Drive labs this year, 30 of which are going live today.
The APN Partners have also updated 87 of the older Test Drives from the
2012 and 2013 re:Invent launches.
More re:Invent News
Here are some of the other plans that we have for the Test Drive program at re:Invent:
The Test Drive Showroom at re:Invent
showcases Test Drive and the AWS Partner Network (APN) partners from all around the world. The
Nov 10, 2014
I would like to give you a quick, sneak preview of a new
Amazon DynamoDB feature. We will be demonstrating it at AWS re:Invent
and making it available to curious developers and partners for
testing and feedback.
Many AWS customers are using DynamoDB as the primary storage mechanism for their applications.
Some of them use it as a key-value store, some of them denormalize their relational schemas
in accordance with the NoSQL philosophy,
and others make use of the new
support for JSON documents.
DynamoDB Streams
Many of our customers have let us know that they would like to track
the changes made to their DynamoDB
tables. They would like to build and update caches, run business processes, drive
real-time analytics, and create global replicas.
The new DynamoDB Streams feature is designed to address this very intriguing use case.
Once you enable it for a DynamoDB table, all changes (puts, updates, and deletes) made to
the table are tracked on a rolling 24-hour basis. You can retrieve this stream of
update records with a single API call and use the
results to build tools and applications that function as described
above. You have full control over the records that appear in the
DynamoDB Stream: no values, all values, or changed values.
If you are building mobile, ad-tech, gaming, web or IoT
applications, you can use the DynamoDB Streams capability to
make your applications respond to high velocity data
changes without having to track the changes yourself. With
the recent
free tier increase
(now including 25 GB of storage and over 200 million requests per month), you can
try DynamoDB for your new applications at little or no cost.
This feature will be accessible from the AWS Management Console. You'll be able to enable it for existing
tables by clicking Modify Table. You will also be able to enable it when you
create a new table. Once enabled, changes will be visible in a new Streams
tab.
Nov 10, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, November 3
I discussed some
Sweet Treats for DynamoDB Users.
We launched
SUSE SLES 12 AMIs for EC2.
We announced an
Amazon
Zocalo Update - MFA, Sharable Links, Web Move, and the Ability to Decline Feedback.
We announced that the
AWS
Storage Gateway now Includes Support for Veeam and Microsoft Backup Applications.
We announced that the
Amazon
SWF Workflow Replayer is now Available in the AWS Flow Framework for Ruby .
We updated the
EC2 Public IP Address Ranges. There are now
9,929,504 addresses across all of the public AWS Regions.
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog showed you how to
Stripe
Windows Ephemeral Disks at Launch.
The AWS Startup Collection let you know
What's
Hot at the AWS Pop-up Loft in November.
A post on the OneCloud Blog served to
Introduce
OneCloud Recovery to Bridge the Gap Between the Data Center and the Public Cloud.
Tuesday,November 4
We issued an
Amazon Redshift
Update, 4 New Features + 16 New SQL Commands & Functions.
We published a
Newbie's
Guide to AWS re:Invent.
A post on the AWS Mobile Development Blog showed you how to do
Mobile
Token Management With Amazon SNS.
A somewhat humorous post on the Evident.io Blog talked about
The Sadistic SecOps Manager (or MFA on CLI).
Nov 10, 2014
AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection
from your premises to AWS. You can establish private connectivity
between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation
environment. This has the potential to reduce your data transfer
costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent
network experience than Internet-based connections.
Now in Las Vegas
Today we are introducing our 14th Direct Connect
location: Switch SUPERNAP in Las Vegas, Nevada (see the
Product Details
page for a complete list of Direct Connect locations.
If you are hosted within or wish to use an
APN Partner to connect through the
Switch SUPERNAP data center, you can create a
dedicated 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps network connection through the AWS Management Console:
This will generate an authorization document and assign a Direct Connect port to you.
Direct Connect at re:Invent
This new location is convenient to the
Sands Expo and Convention Center and
we're going to take advantage of it at AWS re:Invent!
Our friends at Level 3 Communications and
Cisco Systems (both APN Advanced Technology Partners)
are providing the connectivity, fiber networking, encryption and
security resources needed to bring Direct Connect live to the
show. AWS Direct Connect will be powering the Test Drive Showroom
and an ongoing demo of Amazon WorkSpaces running on a collection of
zero client
(PCoIP) devices, as well as showcasing the AWS
Management console vCenter plug-in that enables the transfer of
VMware workloads into AWS over Direct Connect.
The Direct Connect implementation at re:Invent is based on a proven
Enterprise reference architecture that several AWS clients have
deployed for production use. Cisco and Level 3 will also be launching their
own joint AWS Direct Connect solution at re:Invent based on this
architecture and will work with Accenture to promote it. To learn
Nov 07, 2014
Today we're announcing a new AWS Certification for the
AWS
Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional. As you probably know,
DevOps practices
increase IT efficiency for your business, allowing you to respond
more quickly to your customers by providing stable, secure, and
predictable IT environments. As cloud computing becomes moves in to
the mainstream, the demand for DevOps skills continues to rise as
companies are seeking to gain benefits from this practice. This
certification helps IT professionals validate their skills in the
DevOps area and allows employers to identify qualified candidates to lead
DevOps initiatives.
If you're going to AWS re:Invent next week, you
can be among the first to take this exam! You can also take
advantage of some fun activities we have planned.
New AWS Certification for DevOps Engineers
AWS Certified
DevOps Engineer - Professional
is the next step in the path for AWS Certified Developers and SysOps
Administrators. This exam validates technical expertise in
provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application
systems on the AWS platform. It is intended to identify individuals
who are capable of implementing and managing systems which are
highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform.
To be eligible for this exam, you must already be certified as an
AWS Certified Developer - Associate or
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate.
You should also have several years of experience
provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments, along with
experience developing code in at least one high-level programming
language, all topped off with experience in automation and testing via
scripting or programming. Additionally, you should understand agile and
other modern development processes and methodologies.
Beta exams will start next week at re:Invent 2014 and will run through
mid-December. You can find out more about this exa
Nov 07, 2014
Hue is an open source web user
interface for Hadoop. Hue allows technical and non-technical
users to take advantage of Hive, Pig,
and many of the other tools that are part of the
Hadoop and EMR ecosystem. You can think of Hue as the primary
user interface to Amazon Elastic MapReduce and the AWS Management Console as the primary
administrator interface.
I am happy to announce that Hue is now available for Amazon Elastic MapReduce as part
of the newest (version 3.3) Elastic MapReduce AMI. You can load your
data, run interactive Hive queries, develop and run Pig
scripts, work with HDFS, check on the status of your jobs, and more.
We have extended Hue to work with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Hue's File Browser
allows you to browse S3 buckets and you can use the Hive editor to
run queries against data stored in S3. You can also define an
S3-based table using Hue's Metastore Manager.
To get started, you simply launch a cluster with the new AMI
and log in to Hue (it runs on the cluster's master node). You can
save and share queries with your colleagues, you can visualize
query results, and you can view logs in real time (this is very helpful
when debugging).
Hue in Action
Here are some screen shots of Hue in action. The main page displays all of my
Hue documents (Hive queries and Pig scripts):
I can click on a document to open it up in appropriate query editor:
I can view and edit the query, and then run it on my cluster with a single click of the
Execute button. After I do this, I can inspect the logs as the job runs:
After the query runs to completion I can see the results, again with one click:
I can also see the results in graphical (chart) form:
I have shown you just a couple of Hue's features. You can read the
Hue Tutorials and the
Hue User Guide to learn more.
You can launch an EMR cluster (with Hue included) f
Nov 07, 2014
I've got some good news for Amazon WorkSpaces administrators and users. We
are introducing new Value bundles, upgrading the existing Standard
bundles, and making Office 2013 available in the Plus bundles. This
is the most recent in a series of feature releases for WorkSpaces
that includes
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA),
zero client support, and
the ability to create
golden images.
Value Bundle
The new Value bundle was designed to meet the needs of casual users, including those
who run a browser and a productivity program or two. The Value bundle includes
1 vCPU, 2 GB of memory, and 10 GB of user storage and costs $25 per month per user.
The Value Plus bundle has the same hardware specs and also includes Microsoft Office Professional;
it costs $40 per month per user (these prices are for the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions; see
the WorkSpaces Pricing page for pricing in other Regions.
Standard Bundle Upgrade
We are upgrading the Standard bundle with additional hardware
resources at no extra charge. All existing WorkSpaces that are
running this bundle will be upgraded from 1 vCPU to 2 and from 3.75
to 4 GB of memory before the end of 2014. The upgrade will take place during the defined
maintenance window for the AWS Region in which the WorkSpace is located (you'll be
notified 5 days ahead of time). The doubled CPU capacity and the extra memory
should result in a meaningful and perceptible performance improvement.
The update will not affect any user data on the C: or D: drives
of the WorkSpace. Users will sign in on the Monday morning following the
maintenance window for this desktop to find that their WorkSpace has been rebooted
and now delivers better performance.
Office 2013
All three of the "Plus" bundles (Value, Standard, and Performance) include
Microsoft Office. You can now choose either Office 2010 or Office 2013 when
you create a new WorkSpace.
A
Nov 06, 2014
Today I would like to give you a quick update on the latest
AWS certification and to bring you up to date on some
of the existing ones.
Back in the early days of AWS and cloud computing, questions about
security and compliance were fairly commonplace. These days,
generally accepted wisdom seems to hold that the cloud can be even
more secure than typical on-premises infrastructure. Security begins
at design time and proceeds through implementation, operation, and
certification & accreditation. Economies of scale and experience
come in to play at each step and give the cloud provider an advantage
over the lone enterprise.
ISO 9001 Certification
I am happy to announce that AWS has achieved ISO 9001 certification!
This certification allows AWS customers to run their
quality-controlled IT workloads in the AWS cloud. It
signifies that AWS has undergone a systematic,
independent examination of our quality system. This quality system
was found to have been implemented effectively and has been awarded
an ISO 9001 certification as a result.
We believe that this certification will be of special interest and value
to AWS customers in the life sciences and health care industries. Companies
of this type (including drug manufacturers, laboratories, and those conducting
clinical trials) have an FDA-mandated obligation to operate a Quality Management
Program.
ISO 9001:2008
is a globally-recognized standard for managing the
quality of products and services. The 9001 standard outlines a
quality management system based on eight principles defined by the
ISO Technical Committee for quality management and quality
assurance. They include:
Customer focus
Leadership
Involvement of people
Process approach
Systematic approach to management
Continual Improvement
Factual approach to decision-making
Mutually beneficial supplier relationships
The key to the ongoing
Nov 05, 2014
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name Service. As you probably
know, it translates domain names in to numerical IP addresses. This level of
indirection allows you to refer to a computer by its name (which usually
remains the same for an extended period of time) instead of by its address
(which could change from minute to minute for any number of reasons).
Up until now, the primary use for Route 53 is for lookup of global,
public names. While it was sometimes possible to use it for private names within an
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the names were still globally visible, even if the IP addresses
were internal to the VPC and hence unreachable.
Today we are announcing Private DNS for Route 53. You can now easily manage authoritative
DNS within your Virtual Private Clouds. This allows you to use custom DNS names for
your internal resources without exposing the names or IP addresses to the public
Internet.
As part of today's launch, we are upgrading the AWS Management Console so
that it provides you with additional information when a health check
fails. We are also announcing support for reusable delegation sets. This
will simplify management of name servers when you are using Route 53 to
manage multiple domains.
Let's take a look at each of these new features!
Private DNS
You can now use Route 53 to manage the internal DNS names for your application
resources (web servers, application servers, databases, and so forth) without
exposing this information to the public Internet. This adds an additional layer of
security, and also allows you to fail over from a primary resource to a secondary one (often called
a "flip") by simply mapping the DNS name to a different IP address.
Route 53 also allows you set up
Split-horizon DNS. Once set up,
a given DNS name will map to one IP address when a lookup is initiated from within a VPC,
and to a different address when the lookup orig
Nov 05, 2014
It is time for a brief update on Amazon Redshift, our fast, easy-to-use, petabyte-scale,
cost-effective (as little as $1000 per Terabyte per year) data warehouse service. We
have added resource tagging, better query management, enhancements to data load
and unload, and 16 new SQL commands and functions.
Let's take a look at each of these new features!
New Resource Tagging
You can now tag the following types of Redshift resources for tracking and cost allocation
purposes:
Cluster
Cluster Security Group
HSM Connection
HSM Client Certificate
Parameter Group
Snapshot
Subnet Group
You can view, edit, and manage tags on these Redshift resources by selecting and clicking
on the Manage Tags item in the button bar or in the Actions menu:
In order to use tags for cost allocation, you must first activate those tags in the
Billing Console as
shown here.
New Query Management
You can now cancel running queries or loads. You can view the
cluster metrics during query execution
and the
cluster metrics during load operations
to decide when this is appropriate.
Enhanced Data Load and Unload
The
COPY
command now allows you to load files that have UTF-16 encoding. This is in addition to the existing
support for files with UTF-8 encoding.
The UNLOAD
command now uses Amazon S3 server-side
encryption (SSE) to automatically
encrypt all unload data files.
Server-side encryption adds another layer of data security with little or no
effect on performance.
Enhanced Query Functionality
You can now take advantage of 16 new and enhanced SQL commands and functions. Here's what you can do
(the links will take you directly to the documentation):
GRANT and
REVOKE
user privileges for all tables in a schema.
DROP a
TABLE,
VIEW,
SCHEMA, or
USER if it exists.
CREATE a
TABLE or
SCHEMA
if it does not exist.
Nov 05, 2014
If you have been to the first and/or second AWS re:Invent, you know how to prepare and you know
how to get the most out of your time in Las Vegas. If this is your first time, you'll appreciate
this Newbie Guide that my colleague Tracy Laxdal has put together!
-- Jeff;
There's only one week to go until AWS re:Invent! We hope you are looking
forward to a great week of new announcements, valuable technical
sessions, fun after-hours activities, and more. If you can't make it to Vegas, feel free to watch the
live stream of the keynotes and the top breakout sessions
(sign up here). If you
will be coming, check out these top 10 tips!
Use the Mobile App -
The mobile app has all the details you need to
navigate AWS re:Invent: the conference agenda, venue maps, session lists, and more.
Get Your Badge & Swag Early -
Registration will be open
Monday (6:30 AM-8:00 PM),
Tuesday (7:00 AM-7:00 PM), and
Wednesday (7:00 AM-7:00 PM). Tip: The best times to get your badge and
swag are 7:00-9:00 AM, Noon-3:00 PM, and 6:00 PM-7:00 PM on Monday and Tuesday.
Arriving on Tuesday? -
If you arrive early on Tuesday (November 11th) and are looking for something to do,
check out the Test Drive Labs (7:00 AM-5:00 PM), the Hands On Labs (1:00 PM-7:00 PM),
or register to take a
Certification Exam.
AWS re:Invent Central (the Expo hall) will open at 5:00 PM. Tip: AWS Partners are
welcome to attend the APN Summit from 11:00 AM-5:00 PM.
Plan Your Schedule in Advance -
Plan your schedule around the sessions
you want to see. Use the
Session Catalog
to find sessions and log
into your
AWS re:Invent account to add them to your Schedule or
download them to your calendar. Sessions are first come-first serve,
so arrive early. Check out the
full event agenda to see what else is
happening.
Find Sessions to Match Your Interests and Level -
Sessions are categorized by track, level, role, tag, day, speaker,
et
Nov 03, 2014
I have become a frequent and devoted user of Amazon Zocalo! I draft my blog posts, share
them with the Product Manager and other interested parties via Zocalo, and wait for
the comments, suggestions, and other feedback to arrive. Given that I generally have between
8 and 10 blog post drafts underway, I have grown to appreciate the easy yet fully
controlled sharing and reviewing model that Zocalo provides.
Today I am happy to announce some helpful new features.
MFA / RADIUS Support
Zocalo now supports Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) using a RADIUS server. This provides an
additional layer of security during the authentication process. Users will need to enter their
user name, password, and a OTP (One-Time Password) supplied by a hardware or software token.
The Zocalo administrator can enable, configure, and manage the MFA and the connection to
the RADIUS server from the Console. Select Manage MFA from the
Actions menu to start:
All of the settings for the MFA are on a single page:
Sharable Links
You can now create link to your Zocalo documents and share them with contributors. The
contributors must already be members of the site.
Declining Feedback
If you are invited to leave feedback on a Zocalo document and are too busy or have
nothing to say, you can now decline a feedback request from the action bar:
Web Move
Zocalo's web user interface now allows you to move documents and folders from folder to folder.
The action bar is displayed when an item is selected; it contains a new Move...
option:
Try Zocalo Now
You can try Zocalo for 30 days at no charge. The
free trial
includes 200 GB of storage per user for up to 50 users.
-- Jeff;
Nov 03, 2014
Our friends at SUSE recently announced the
release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.
This release introduces a new module-based system that allows customers to stay current
with the desired parts of the software stack while sticking with a stable set of core
packages.
I am happy to announce that this new release is now available in Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
form for use on
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The AMIs can receive packages from the following SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
12 modules:
Public Cloud -
This module provides a collection of tools that enables you to
create and manage cloud images from the command line on SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server
Web and Scripting
- This module includes a suite of scripting languages,
frameworks and related tools, to help developers and systems
administrators create of stable, modern web applications using
dynamic languages, such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Python.
Advanced Systems Management -
This module contains three components to support system administrators to
automate routine tasks in the data center and cloud:
CFEngine,
Puppet, and the new
Machinery.
Legacy -
This module helps you to migrate applications from SUSE
Linux Enterprise 10 and 11 and other systems to SUSE Linux Enterprise 12
by providing packages which have been discontinued in the latest
release.
SUSE has also included a technical Preview of Docker in SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server 12. Linux Containers
and Docker are great ways to build, deploy and manage applications
and can be used with tools like
Open Build Service and
the <href="https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:KIWI">KIWI image system for easy
and powerful image building.
The new AMIs are available now in all AWS Regions and you can start using
them today! You can launch them from the Quick Start tab in the
AW
Nov 03, 2014
My friends on the DynamoDB team sent me a tasty bribe (courtesy of Seattle's
Trophy Cupcakes) in a
successful attempt to get me to tell you about
some features that I didn't have time to tell you about
earlier this month!
As you may know from my previous post, we launched support for
JSON, increased the maximum size of a DynamoDB item, and
expanded the AWS Free Tier to 25 GB of storage and up to 200 million
requests.
Here's what I left out, and what I'd like to tell you about today:
JavaScript Web Shell -
You can use DynamoDB Local, the new Web Shell, and a hands-on
tutorial to get started quickly.
SQL-Like Expressions -
This taste of SQL within a NoSQL database makes the APIs more familiar
and more expressive while also improving the readability of the code.
Improved Conditions -
Our new and more expressive server-side filtering reduces the amount
of data transferred to the client and also reduces overhead for
conditional updates.
JavaScript Web Shell
DynamoDB Local
now comes with a free and very helpful web-based user interface known as the
DynamoDB JavaScript Shell. You simply download the DynamoDB Local archive file and extract the contents to
the directory of your choice. Then you launch DynamoDB Local like this:
C:\temp\L> java -Djava.library.path=./DynamoDBLocal_lib -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar
The Web Shell is accessible as /shell on port 8000 (you can specify another port on the
command line if necessary):
The Web Shell looks like this (code editor on the left, console output on the right):
I simply enter my JavaScript on the list and click on the Run button to execute it.
Here's how I would create a table:
The shell contains a template for each method in the DynamoDB API. I can click the "<<"
button to copy it in to the code editor. I can hold down the Control and
S
Nov 03, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, October 27
We announced that
Amazon
Elastic Transcoder API Calls are now Available in CloudTrail.
A post on the Databricks blog earlier this month talked about
Spark the Fastest Open Source Engine for Sorting a Petabyte.
A post on the AWS Java Blog discussed
Client-side
Encryption for Amazon DynamoDB.
A post on the Flux7 Blog discussed
WebSockets with AWS Elastic Load Balancing.
A post on the Runscope Blog featured a
Q&A With
Ryan Park: Runscope Engineer and AWS Community Hero.
The N2W Software Blog published
5 Guidelines for Recovery Drills Within the AWS Cloud
along with a list of
AWS re:Invent Archive, Backup, and DR Sessions.
Tuesday,October 28
We announced that you can now
Interactively Explore,
Analyze & Visualize Data Stored in Amazon EMR with Hunk from Splunk.
A detailed post on the
Intent Media Engineering Blog talked about
Cross
Browser User Bridging With DynamoDB.
We released the Amazon Kinesis Aggregators
to give you a real-time aggregated view of data on your Kinesis stream without writing any code. Data is stored
in Amazon DynamoDB and pushed to Amazon CloudWatch.
We released the Amazon Kinesis Scaling Utility
to give you the ability to scale your Amazon Kinesis streams up and down using operations that are similar to
Auto Scaling.
We announced that
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now Supports Rolling Application Version Updates.
Oct 31, 2014
We are moving the AWS Support Center in to the AWS Management Console in order to provide you with a better and
more productive experience! You can now log on as a federated user and you can now manage your support
cases more efficiently.
Federated Access Support
We recently gave you the ability to enable your users to sign in to the Console using SSO after
authenticating themselves to your existing identity and authorization system. With today's
launch, these users can now sign in to the Support Center with their existing (non-AWS)
credentials. To learn how to set this up, read the documentation on
Giving
Federated Users Direct Access to the AWS Management Console.
Improved Case Management
The Support Center is your hub for managing your AWS Support cases. You can now pack up to
ten service limit increase requests (for a single service) in to a single case and you can easily
filter your cases based on type, severity, and status. For certain services, you can even create
a service limit increase case directly from the
Trusted Advisor:
Customers with Business and Enterprise levels of support can ask for a callback at the phone
number of their choice. They can also strike up a conversation with a Support Engineer
via chat. Enterprise level customers even have direct access to their dedicated
Technical Account Manager (TAM):
You can also sort and filter your open and resolved cases:
We've Got Your Back
AWS Support offers plans designed to work for AWS customers of all shapes and sizes. If you do not
currently have a support plan, you can easily
sign up now!
-- Jeff;
Oct 29, 2014
Many enterprise-scale AWS customers also have a large collection of virtualized Windows servers
on their premises. These customers are now moving all sorts of workloads to the Cloud and have been
looking for a unified solution to their on-premises and cloud-based system management needs.
Using multiple tools to accomplish the same basic tasks (launching, monitoring, and controlling
virtualized servers or instances) is inefficient and adds complexity to the development of
solutions that use a combination of on-premises and cloud resources.
New Add-In
In order to allow this important customer base to manage their resources with greater
efficiency, we are launching the AWS System Manager for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). This add-in allows you to monitor and manage
your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances (running either Windows or Linux) from within
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
You can launch new instances and you can also perform common maintenance tasks such as restarting, stopping,
and removing instances. You can even connect to the instances using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
Let's take a quick tour of the add-in! Here's the main screen:
You can select any public AWS Region:
After you launch an EC2 instance running Windows, you can use the add-in to retrieve,
decrypt, and display the administrator password:
You can select multiple instances and operate on them as a group:
Available Now
The add-in is available for download today at no charge.
After you download and
install it, you simply enter your IAM credentials. The credentials will be
associated with the logged-in Windows user on the host system so you'll have to enter
them just once.
As is the case with every AWS product, we would be thrilled to get your feedback
(feature suggestions, bug reports, and anything else that comes to mind). Send it to
scvmm-
Oct 29, 2014
Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed desktop service in the Cloud. It allows
administrators to provision cloud-based desktops that can be accessed
from laptops (PC and Mac), tablets ( Kindle Fire, Android, and iPad), and
zero client devices.
Today we are making WorkSpaces even more flexible with the addition
of a new image creation feature. Administrators can now create
customized golden images for use within their organization. They
can add additional applications, remove existing applications, and
set configurations in order to provide their users with an
environment that is appropriate for their needs.
Creating a Custom Image
Let's create a custom WorkSpaces image. I'll start by launching one of the built-in
bundles. Wait for it to launch:
Then I connect as usual, configure it as desired, and then disconnect. I used the Kindle client for
WorkSpaces, and chose to install
PuTTY to illustrate
this post:
Next, I return to the WorkSpaces Console and find the WorkSpace that was launched and
customized. I select it and choose Create Image from the
Instance Actions menu:
Now I fill in the name and description, click Create Image, and wait
for the image creation process to finish (this can take up to 45 minutes):
I can check the WorkSpace Images tab to see when my image
is ready. Behind the
scenes, WorkSpaces will make a copy of the source WorkSpace, copy the user
profile to the default profile, prepare the image for use
(Sysprep),
validate the custom image with a test launch, and publish the image to your
account. The Status will change to Available when the image
is ready:
Once the image is ready I am ready to create a bundle from it by selecting the
image and choosing Create Bundle from the menu:
I simply fill in the name and description and choose the hardware:
When the bundle is ready I can launch WorkSpaces f
Oct 27, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, October 20
We provided some options for
Fast, Easy, Free Data Sync
from RDS MySQL to Amazon Redshift.
The AWS Java Blog published Part 2 of a series aimed at
Introducing DynamoDB Document API.
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog kicked off a series of articles on Amazon DynamoDB with a look at the
Low-Level APIs in the DynamoDB SDK.
The Evident.io Blog talked about
Defending
Against AWS Account Takeover Using ESP.
A post on the ElasticBox Blog is
Calling all AWS CloudFormation Users.
Tuesday, October 21
We talked about
Next Generation Genomics with AWS.
We announced that you can now
Speak to Amazon Kinesis with Python.
We published a
Kinesis Storm
Spout Update with Support for Ack/Fail Semantics.
We published a new white paper
Amazon
Kinesis and Apache Storm - Building a Real-Time Sliding-Window Dashboard over Streaming Data.
We announced a
CloudWatch Update - Enhanced Support for Windows Log Files.
The AWS Application Management Blog reviewed this feature in a post titled
Using CloudWatch Logs with Amazon EC2 Running Microsoft Windows Server.
We launched a
CloudFront Update,
with Trends, Metrics, Charts, and More Timely Logs.
We launched the
New AWS Directory Service.
We announced that you can now
See
the last Sign-In Time for a User in the IAM Console.
Oct 24, 2014
Like every AWS offering, Amazon ElastiCache started out simple and then grew in
breadth and depth over time. Here's a brief recap of the most important milestones:
August 2011 -
Initial launch with support for the Memcached caching engine in one AWS Region.
December
2011 - Expansion to four additional Regions.
March 2012 -
The first of several price reductions.
April 2012 - Introduction
of Reserved Cluster Nodes.
November 2012 -
Introduction of four additional types of Cache Nodes.
September 2013 -
Initial support for the Redis caching engine including Replication Groups with replicas for increased read throughput.
March 2014 -
Another price reduction.
April 2014 - Backup and restore of
Redis Clusters.
July 2014 - Support for M3 and R3 Cache Nodes.
July 2014 - Node placement across more than
one Availability Zone in a Region.
September 2014 - Support for T2 Cache Nodes.
When you start to use any of the AWS services, you should always anticipate a steady stream of enhancements.
Some of them, as you can see from list above, will give you additional flexibility with regard to architecture,
scalability, or location. Others will improve your cost structure by reducing prices or adding opportunities to purchase
Reserved Instances. Another class of enhancements simplifies the task of building applications that are
resilient and fault-tolerant.
Multi-AZ Support for Redis
Today's launch is designed to help you to add additional resilience and fault tolerance to your
Redis Cache Clusters. You can now create a Replication Group that spans multiple Availability Zones
with automatic failure detection and failover.
After you have created a Multi-AZ Replication Group, ElastiCache will monitor the health and connectivity
of the nodes. If the primary node fails, ElastiCache will select the read replica
that has the lowest r
Oct 23, 2014
This past summer, we launched Cognito to simplify the task of
authenticating users and storing, managing, and syncing their data
across multiple devices. Cognito already supports a variety of
identities — public provider identities (Facebook, Google, and
Amazon), guest user identities, and recently announced
developer authenticated identities.
Today we are making Amazon Cognito even more flexible by enabling
app developers to use identities from any provider that supports
OpenID Connect (OIDC).
For example, you can write AWS-powered apps
that allow users to sign in using their user name and password from
Salesforce or Ping Federate. OIDC is an open standard enables
developers to leverage additional identity providers for
authentication. This way they can focus on developing their app
rather than dealing with user names and passwords.
Today's launch adds OIDC provider identities to the list. Cognito
takes the ID token that you obtain from the OIDC identity provider
and uses it to manufacture unique Cognito IDs for each person who
uses your app. You can use this identifier to save and synchronize
user data across devices and to retrieve temporary,
limited-privilege AWS credentials through the AWS Security Token Service.
Building upon the
support for SAML
(Security Assertion Markup Language) that we launched last year, we hope that today's addition of
support for OIDC demonstrates our commitment to open standards. To learn more and to see some sample
code, see our new post,
Building
an App using Amazon Cognito and an OpenID Connect Identity Provider
on the AWS Security Blog. If you are planning to
attend Internet Identity Workshop next week, come meet the members of
the team that added this support!
-- Jeff;
Oct 23, 2014
It is time to expand the AWS footprint once again, this time
with a new Region in Frankfurt, Germany. AWS customers in Europe
can now use the new EU (Frankfurt) Region along with the existing EU (Ireland)
Region for fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS
infrastructure services. You can now build multi-Region applications
with the assurance that your content will stay within the EU.
New Region
The new Frankfurt Region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services including
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.
It also supports
AWS Elastic Beanstalk,
AWS CloudFormation,
Amazon CloudFront,
Amazon CloudSearch,
AWS CloudTrail,
Amazon CloudWatch,
AWS Direct Connect,
Amazon DynamoDB,
Amazon Elastic MapReduce,
AWS Storage Gateway,
Amazon Glacier,
AWS CloudHSM,
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM),
Amazon Kinesis,
AWS OpsWorks,
Amazon Route 53,
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS),
Amazon Redshift,
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS),
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and
Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF).
The Region supports all sizes of T2,
M3,
C3,
R3, and
I2 instances. All EC2 instances must be launched within a
Virtual Private Cloud in this Region (see my blog post,
Virtual
Private Clouds for Everyone for more information).
There are also three edge locations in Frankfurt for Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront.
This is our eleventh Region (see the AWS Global Infrastructure map for more
information). As usual, you can see the full list in the Region menu
of the AWS Management Console:
Rigorous Compliance
Every AWS Region is designed and built to meet rigorous compliance standards including
ISO 27001, SOC 1, PCI DSS Level 1, to name a few (see the
AWS Compliance
Oct 23, 2014
Yesterday, the team at MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM)
launched MLB.com
Statcast for the 2014 World Series.
This cool new video experience, powered by AWS, demonstrates for fans
how high-resolution cameras and radar equipment precisely
track the position of the ball and all of the players on the field during a baseball game.
The equipment captures 20,000 position metrics for the ball every second. It also captures
30 position metrics for each player every second.
The data is used to create a newly introduced video overlay experience —
MLB.com Statcast powered by AWS — to display the computed
performance metrics that measure the performance of each player.
This data, and the renderings that it creates, help
to provide today's baseball fans with the detailed and engaging online content that they
crave.
Here are a couple of examples that will show you more about the data collected and displayed
through Statcast, using a
diving
catch from Game 6 of the ALCS. First, the pitch:
The reaction in center field:
And the catch:
Watch the
complete video
to see and hear the action!
-- Jeff;
Oct 22, 2014
The advertising space is going through a rapid, technology-enabled, data-driven transformation!
Many of the companies driving this change are using AWS services like
Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon CloudFront
to serve, ingest, process, store, analyze, track, and optimize their
online advertising campaigns.
If you work for an ad tech company in the San Francisco area you
should consider attending a free one-day event for developers and
architects this coming Friday (October 24th) in San Francisco.
Attend, Learn, Meet
If you attend the event you will get to learn AWS in a series of five
technical deep dive sessions that are laser focused on the key AWS
technologies that I mentioned above. You will also get to hear AWS
customers such as
Adroll (ad retargeting),
Blinkx (video discovery and sharing),
Bloomreach (big data marketing),
Krux Digital (cross-screen data management),
SetMedia (digital video classification),
Tune and
Viglink (automated monetization)
share their real-life use cases, architectures, and
the lessons they learned on their journey to the cloud. The day will end
with a networking reception at 5:00 PM.
This event is designed for developers and architects who are already
familiar with AWS and are looking to increase their knowledge of key
ad tech enabling services and learn directly from their industry
peers. This is not an introductory or business-level event.
Register Now
The event runs from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM this coming Friday. It will be held in the
AWS Pop-up Loft at 925 Market Street in San Francisco. Registration is mandatory,
space is limited, and there's no charge to attend. To register:
Go to the
AWS Pop-up Loft site
and click Register to attend the AWS Loft. If this is your first time
registering for an event at the AWS Pop-Up Loft, you'll need to create a new
account first. Otherwise, just log in to the site first.
Oct 22, 2014
Virtually every organization uses a directory service
such as Active Directory
to allow computers to join domains, list and authenticate users, and to locate and connect to
printers, and other network services including SQL Server databases. A centralized
directory reduces the amount of administrative work that must be done when an employee
joins the organization, changes roles, or leaves.
With the advent of cloud-based services, an interesting challenge has arisen. By design,
the directory is intended to be a central source of truth with regard to user identity. Administrators
should not have to maintain one directory service for on-premises users and services, and a separate,
parallel one for the cloud. Ideally, on-premises and cloud-based services could share and make use
of a single, unified directory service.
Perhaps you want to run
Microsoft Windows on EC2 or centrally
control access to AWS applications such as Amazon WorkSpaces or
Amazon Zocalo. Setting up and then running a directory can be a fairly
ambitious undertaking once you take in to account the need to
procure and run hardware, install, configure and patch the operating
system, and the directory, and so forth. This might be overkill if
you have a user base of modest size and just want to use the AWS
applications and exercise centralized control over users and
permissions.
The New AWS Directory Service
Today we are introducing the AWS Directory Service to address these challenges! This managed service
provides two types of directories. You can connect to an existing on-premises directory or you can set up and
run a new, Samba-based directory in the Cloud.
If your organization already has a directory, you can now make use
of it from within the cloud using the
AD Connector directory type. This is a gateway technology that serves as a cloud proxy to your
existing directory, without the need for complex synchronization technology or federat
Oct 22, 2014
The Amazon CloudFront team has added a slew of analytics and
reporting features this year. I would like to recap a pair of recent
releases and then introduce you to the features that we are
releasing today. As you probably know, CloudFront is a
content delivery web service that integrates with the other parts of
AWS for easy and efficient low-latency delivery of content to
end users.
CloudFront Usage Charts
We launched a set of
CloudFront
Usage Charts back in March. The charts let you track trends in data transfer and requests
(both HTTP and HTTPS) for each of your active CloudFront web distributions. Data is shown with
daily or hourly granularity. These charts are available to you at no extra charge.
You don't have to make any changes to your distribution in order to collect the data or to
view the charts. Here is a month's worth of data for one of my distributions:
You can easily choose the distribution of interest, the desired time period and
the reporting granularity:
You can also narrow down the reports by billing region:
Operational Metrics
Earlier this month CloudFront began to publish a set of
Operational Metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. These metrics
are published every minute and reflect activity that's just a few
minutes old, giving you information that is almost real-time in
nature. As is the case with any CloudWatch metric, you can display and
alarm on any of the items. The following metrics are available for
each of your distributions:
Requests -
Number of requests for all HTTP methods and for both HTTP and HTTPS requests.
BytesDownloaded - Number of bytes downloaded by viewers for
GET, HEAD, and OPTIONS requests.
BytesUploaded - Number of bytes uploaded to the origin with
CloudFront using POST and PUT requests.
TotalErrorRate - Percentage of all requests for which the HTTP status code is 4xx or 5xx.
4xxErrorRate - Percentage of all requests for which the HTTP
Oct 21, 2014
Earlier this year, we
launched
a log storage and monitoring feature for Amazon CloudWatch. As a quick recap, this
feature allows you to upload log files from your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to
CloudWatch, where they are stored durably and easily monitored for specific
symbols or messages.
The EC2Config service runs on Microsoft Windows instances
on EC2, and takes on a number of important tasks. For example it is responsible for
uploading log files to CloudWatch. Today we are enhancing this service with support for
Windows Performance Counter data and
ETW (Event Tracing for Windows)
logs. We are also adding support for custom log files.
In order to use this feature, you must enable CloudWatch logs
integration and then tell it which files to upload. You can do this
from the instance by running EC2Config and checking
Enable CloudWatch Logs integration:
The file %PROGRAMFILES%\Amazon\Ec2ConfigService\Settings\AWS.EC2.Windows.CloudWatch.json
specifies the files to be uploaded.
To learn more about how this feature works and how to configure it, head on
over to the AWS Application Management Blog and read about
Using
CloudWatch Logs with Amazon EC2 Running Microsoft Windows Server.
-- Jeff;
Oct 21, 2014
My colleague Rahul Patil
sent me a nice guest post. In the post Rahul shows
you how to use the new Kinesis Client Library (KCL) for Python developers.
-- Jeff;
The Amazon Kinesis team is excited to release the Kinesis Client
Library (KCL) for Python developers! Developers can use the KCL to
build distributed applications that process streaming data reliably at
scale. The KCL takes care of many of the complex tasks associated with
distributed computing, such as load-balancing across multiple
instances, responding to instance failures, checkpointing processed
records, and reacting to changes in stream volume.
You can download the KCL for Python using
Github, or
PyPi.
Getting Started
Once you are familiar with key concepts of
Kinesis
and
KCL,
you are ready to write your first application. Your code has the following duties:
Set up application configuration parameters.
Implement a record processor.
The application configuration parameters are specified by adding a properties file. For example:
# The python executable script
executableName = sample_kclpy_app.py
# The name of an Amazon Kinesis stream to process.
streamName = words
# Unique KCL application name
applicationName = PythonKCLSample
# Read from the beginning of the stream
initialPositionInStream = TRIM_HORIZON
The above example configures KCL to process a Kinesis stream called
"words" using the record processor supplied in
sample_kclpy_app.py. The unique application name is used to coordinate
amongst workers running on multiple instances.
Developers have to implement the following three methods in their record processor:
initialize(self, shard_id)
process_records(self, records, checkpointer)
shutdown(self, checkpointer, reason)
initialize() and
shutdown() are self-explanatory; they are called once
in the lifecycle of the record processor to initialize and clean up
the record processor respectively. If the shutdown reason is
Oct 21, 2014
My colleague Matt Wood
wrote a great guest post to announce
new support for one of our genomics partners.
-- Jeff;
I am happy to announce that AWS will be supporting the work of
our partner, Seven Bridges Genomics,
who has been selected as one of
the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots. The
cloud has become the new normal for genomics workloads, and AWS has
been actively involved since the earliest days, from being the first
cloud vendor to host the
1000 Genomes Project,
to newer projects like
designing synthetic microbes,
and development of novel genomics
algorithms that work at population scale. The NCI Cancer Genomics
Cloud Pilots are focused on how the cloud has the potential to be a
game changer in terms of scientific discovery and innovation in the
diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
The NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots will help address a problem in cancer
genomics that is all too familiar to the wider genomics community:
data portability. Today's typical research workflow involves
downloading large data sets, (such as the previously
mentioned
1000 Genomes Project or
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)) to
on-premises hardware, and running the analysis locally. Genomic
datasets are growing at an exponential rate and becoming more
complex as phenotype-genotype discoveries are made, making the
current workflow slow and cumbersome for researchers. This data is
difficult to maintain locally and share between organizations. As a
result, genomic research and collaborations have become limited by
the available IT infrastructure at any given institution.
The NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots
will take the natural step to solve this problem, by bringing the
computation to where the data is, rather than the other way
around. The goal of the NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots are to create
cloud-hosted repositories for cancer genome data that reside
alongside the tool
Oct 20, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, October 13
We announced the first
Internet of Things (IoT) Hack Day at re:Invent.
We announced that
Amazon Elastic Transcoder now Supports HLSv4.
The AWS Java Blog published Part 1 of the
Introducing the DynamoDB API series.
The AWS Ruby Development Blog launched a series of articles on the topic of
Ruby on
Rails on Amazon Web Services.
Tuesday, October 14
A post on the AWS Security Blog announced
Easier
Role Selection for SAML-Based Single Sign-On.
The AWS Mobile Development Blog
published Part 2 of a series on
Understanding
Amazon Cognito Authentication - Developer Authenticated Identities.
A post on the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog invited you to
Join
the Amazon Appstore Team at the AWS Loft in San Francisco.
Wednesday, October 15
We published a new
AWS Quick Start for Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub.
The AWS Big Data Blog showed you how to
Deploy
Cloudera's Enterprise Data Hub on AWS.
We annouced that
Amazon WorkSpaces now Supports PCoIP Zero Clients.
The Amazon Simple Email Service Blog
talked about
SPF and Amazon SES.
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog talked about
Getting Ready for re:Invent.
The AWS Ruby Development Blog showed you how to
Deploy
Ruby on Rails Applications to AWS OpsWorks.
Oct 20, 2014
As you know, I'm a big fan of Amazon RDS. I love the fact that it
allows you focus on your applications and not on keeping your
database up and running.
I'm also excited by the
disruptive price, performance, and ease of use
of Amazon Redshift, our petabyte-scale, fully
managed data warehouse service that lets you get started for
$0.25 per hour and costs less than $1,000 per TB per year. Many customers agree,
as you can see from recent posts by
Pinterest,
Monetate, and
Upworthy.
Many AWS customers want to get their operational and
transactional data from RDS into Redshift in order to run analytics. Until
recently, it's been a somewhat complicated process.
A few week ago, the RDS team
simplified the process by enabling
row-based binary logging,
which in turn has
allowed our AWS Partner Network (APN) partners to build products that continuously replicate data from RDS
MySQL to Redshift.
Two APN data integration partners,
FlyData and
Attunity,
currently
leverage row-based binary logging to continuously replicate data from RDS
MySQL to Redshift. Both offer free trials of their software in
conjunction with Redshift's
two month free trial. After a few simple
configuration steps, these products will automatically copy schemas and data
from RDS MySQL to Redshift and keep them in sync. This will allow
you to run high performance reports and analytics on up-to-date data
in Redshift without having to design a complex data loading process
or put unnecessary load on your RDS database instances.
If you're using RDS MySQL 5.6, you can replicate directly from your
database instance by enabling row-based logging, as shown below. If
you're using RDS MySQL 5.5, you'll need to set up a MySQL 5.6 read
replica and configure the replication tools to use the replica to
sync your data to Redshift. To learn more about these two solutions,
see
FlyData's
Free Trial Guide for RDS MySQL to Re
Oct 15, 2014
Amazon WorkSpaces provides a persistent, cloud-based desktop experience that can be accessed from a variety of
devices including PC and Mac desktops and laptops, iPads, Kindle Fires, and Android tablets.
Support for PCoIP Zero Clients
Today we are making WorkSpaces even more flexible by adding support for
PCoIP zero clients.
WorkSpaces desktops are rendered on the server and then transmitted to the endpoint as a highly compressed bitmap
via the PCoIP protocol.
Zero clients are simple, secure, single-purpose clients that are equipped with a monitor,
keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. The clients use a dedicated PCoIP chipset for bitmap
decompression and decoding and require very little in the way
of local software maintenance (there is no operating system running on the device),
making them a great match for Amazon WorkSpaces.
You can use any zero client device that contains the Teradici Tera 2 zero client chipset. Currently, over 30
hardware manufacturers provide such devices; check Teradici's
supported devices list
for more information.
Getting Started
In order to connect your existing zero clients to Amazon WorkSpaces, first verify that they are running
version 4.6.0 (or newer) of the PCoIP firmware.
You will need to run the
PCoIP Connection Manager authentication appliance
in a Virtual Private Cloud. The Connection Manager is built on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
and is available as an HVM AMI. It brokers the authentication process and enables the creation
of streaming sessions from WorkSpaces to the clients, thereby offloading all non-streaming
work from the clients. The Connection Manager must be run in the VPC that hosts
your Amazon WorkSpaces endpoint.
To learn more about this important new AWS feature, read the
PCoIP Zero Client Admin Guide.
-- Jeff;
Oct 15, 2014
date: 2014-10-15 2:03:16 PM
The new Quick
Start Reference Deployment Guide for Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub does exactly what the title suggests! The
comprehensive (20 page) guide includes the architectural considerations and configuration steps that will help you to
launch the
new Cloudera Director and
an associated Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) in a matter of minutes. As the folks at Cloudera said in their
blog post,
"Cloudera Director delivers an enterprise-class, elastic, self-service experience for Hadoop in cloud environments."
The reference deployment takes the form of a twelve-node cluster that will cost between $12 and $82 per hour in the
US East (Northern Virginia) Region, depending on the instance type that you choose to deploy.
The cluster runs within a
Virtual Private Cloud that includes public and private subnets, a NAT instance, security groups, a placement group for
low-latency networking within the cluster, and an IAM role. The EDH cluster is fully customizable and
includes worker nodes, edge nodes, and management nodes, each running on the EC2 instance type that you
designate:
The entire cluster is launched and configured by way of a parameterized AWS CloudFormation template that is
fully described in the
guide.
-- Jeff;
Oct 14, 2014
Version 3 of the AWS SDK for PHP is now in Developer Preview and
available on
GitHub and
Composer. Along with significant performance
improvements, v3 brings a number of brand new features. Using the
new version, you can now make asynchronous requests with Futures and
Promises, query API responses with
JMESPath, and bind default request
parameters to service clients.
The new SDK also includes some important architectural improvements.
you can provide your own HTTP adapter and take advantage of a more
streamlined event system offered by the latest version of the
Guzzle library.
The development team is happy to be able to share this preview and is
looking forward to your feedback. You can send it to them via
GitHub Issues.
To learn more about this Developer Preview, visit the
AWS PHP Developer Blog
and read about the
Version
3 Preview of the AWS SDK.
-- Jeff;
Oct 13, 2014
Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert media files in to versions that will play on
smart phones, tablets, and PCs. It manages all of the tedious
aspects of the media transcoding process on your behalf; you simply create
a transcoding Job, specify the location of the source
media file, and indicate which output format(s) you need. Elastic Transcoder
will take care of everything else; you don't have to worry about hardware,
software, scaling, tuning, or licensing.
HLS v4 Support
Today we are adding support for version 4 of the HTTP Live Streaming
(HLS) protocol. This
adaptive streaming protocol is commonly used by newer iOS (5+) and Android (4.4+)
devices.
Our support for version 4 of HLS includes the following features:
Byte-Range Requests -
The transcoded files contains enough information to allow the client media
player to request video segments as needed. This obviates the need
to create and manage thousands of smaller files. With this change, Elastic Transcoder generates
one file per bitrate instead of one file per video segment per bitrate.
Late Binding Audio -
Audio and video can now be streamed separately. This allows you to reuse
the same audio file with any number video files in order to eliminate redundant
storage and superfluous data transfer.
I-Frame Only Playback -
This feature enables "trick play" features such as enhanced fast forward,
rewind, and seeking. It works by generating a separate playlist that
consists solely of what are commonly called I-frames. This is short for
"intra frame," and is commonly called a key frame in other video
encoding formats. To make a long story short, an I-frame does not
depend on any other frames in the stream, and can be displayed in its
entirety. If you are curious, Apple Technical Note 2288
(Example
Playlist Files for use with HTTP Live Streaming) contains more
Oct 13, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, October 6
We introduced
New APN Competencies for Storage and Life Sciences.
The AWS Application Management Blog showed you how to
Get
Started With CloudWatch Logs.
The Cloudlytics Blog showed you how to
Decode ELB Log Entries.
Tuesday, October 7
We introduced
Wildcard
Cookies and Options Caching for Amazon CloudFront.
We announced that you can now
Modify Your
Elastic Beanstalk Data Tier Configuration From the Elastic Beanstalk Management Console.
The AWS Big Data Blog talked about
Ensuring
Consistency When Using Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic MapReduce for ETL Workflows.
The AWS Java Blog previewed some of their plans for
Java AWS re:Invent 2014.
The AWS Startup Collection talked about
A
Better Dev/Test Experience: Docker and AWS.
The Netflix Tech Blog talked about
Using Presto in our Big Data Platform on AW<S/a>.
Wednesday, October 8
We announced
JSON Support,
an Expanded Free Tier, Flexible Scaling, and Larger Items for DynamoDB.
The AWS Mobile Development Blog announced that
AWS
Mobile SDK for Xamarin is now Available on AWSLabs.
Thursday, October 9
We announced that
Amazon
SNS is now Integrated With CloudTrail.
A new post on the AWS Big Data Blog talk
Oct 13, 2014
Are you familiar with the Internet of Things? Before too
long, many of the devices in your life will be connected to the Internet and to the cloud on a full or part-time
basis. They will generate a constant stream of position, condition, and sensor data and send it to the AWS Cloud
for storage (S3 and DynamoDB), messaging (SNS), identity (Cognito),
real-time processing (Kinesis), and analysis (Redshift and Elastic MapReduce).
For example, I have a Fuse plugged in to one of my vehicles. I plugged it
in to the OBD port, configured my account, and was good to go. The device sends vehicle condition information
(pulled from the OBD data) and position data (from its built-in GPS) to the cloud using a built-in cellular modem.
I can easily track the position and condition of my car, regardless of which member of my family happens to be driving it.
IoT HackDay at re:Invent
We are very excited about the prospects for the Internet of Things. In order to help you to learn more, we
will be conducting our first-ever
Internet of Things HackDay at re:Invent. As a
participant in this event you will learn how to build your first "Hello World" application on an AWS-connected
device. After that you will spend the rest of the time conceptualizing, prototyping, and
building your something cool and demo-worthy.
Our friends at
Intel and
Spark Labs
will bring their latest microcontrollers and boards, along with a big pile of
sensors, wires, LEDs, and breadboards to help you get started. Bring your laptop, your
imagination and some good ideas; we'll have plenty of geeky giveaways and plenty of fuel -- snacks, coffee, and beer!
Space is limited and we can only accommodate 200 re:Invent attendees. To sign up, log in to your
re:Invent account and add this event to your schedule. If you want to create a team ahead of time,
register and then stand by for our pre-event survey. We'll collect enough additional info
Oct 10, 2014
Big changes in the technology world seem to come about in two
ways. Sometimes there's a big splashy announcement and a visible
public leap in to the future. Most of the time, however, change is a
bit more subtle. Early adopters find a new technology that makes
them more productive and share it amongst themselves. Over time the
news spreads to others. At some point the once-new technology
suddenly (for those who haven't been paying attention) seems to have
become very popular, seemingly overnight! This technology adoption
model can be seen in the recent growth in the popularity of
container computing, exemplified by the rising awareness
of Docker. Containers are
lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient. Even better, they can be
run in a wide variety of environments. You can, if you'd like,
build and test a container locally and then deploy it to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for
production.
Benefits of Container Computing
Let's take a closer look at some of the benefits that accrue when
you create your cloud-based application as a collection of
containers, each specified declaratively and mapped to a single,
highly specific aspect of your architecture:
Consistency & Fidelity -
There's nothing worse than creating something that works great
in a test environment yet fails or runs inconsistently when
moved to production. When you are building and releasing code in
an agile fashion, wasting time debugging issues that arise from
differences between environments is a huge barrier to
productivity. The declarative, all-inclusive packaging model
used by Docker gives you the power to enumerate your
application's dependencies. Your application will have access to
the same libraries and utilities, regardless of where it is
running.
Distributed Application Platform -
If you build your application as a set of distributed services,
each in a Doc
Oct 10, 2014
In June of this year I introduced you to the new
SSD-backed
Elastic Block Storage
option for EC2. Just a few months after release, this new option (formally known as
General Purpose (SSD)) is already being used for
about 90% of the newly created EBS volumes. Our customers have told us that they love the
consistent baseline performance (3 IOPS per GB of provisioned storage) and the ability to burst
up to 3,000 IOPS without regard to the amount of provisioned storage.
Today we are bringing the same consistent baseline performance and bursting capability to
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). As an RDS user, you now have your choice of three different types of storage:
General Purpose (SSD) storage is suitable for
a wide variety of database workloads that have moderate I/O requirements. The baseline
of 3 IOPS per GB and the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS will provide you with predictable
performance well-suited to many applications.
Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage is ideal
for the most demanding database workloads, including OLTP. This storage provides the most
consistent performance and allows you to provision between 1,000 and 30,000 IOPS as
required by your application.
Magnetic Storage
(formerly known as RDS Standard storage) is a good match for small
database workloads where data is accessed infrequently.
You can use the new General Purpose (SSD) storage in conjunction with other powerful
RDS features such as Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Pricing for this new option
starts at $0.115 per GB per month in the US East (Northern
Virginia) Region. As usual, full pricing information can be found on the
RDS Pricing page.
Get Started Today
This new storage option is available in all AWS Regions and can be used with the
MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database engines.
-- Jeff;
Oct 08, 2014
Amazon DynamoDB Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database
service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit
millisecond latency at any scale. Our customers love the fact that
they can get started quickly and simply (and often at no charge,
within the AWS Free Tier) and then seamlessly scale to store any amount
of data and handle any desired request rate, all with very
consistent, SSD-driven performance.
Today we are making DynamoDB even more useful with four important
additions: Support for JSON data,
an expanded free tier, additional scaling options, and the capacity to store larger items.
We've also got a new demo video and some brand-new customer
references.
JSON Document Support
You can now
store entire JSON-formatted documents as single DynamoDB items (subject to the
newly increased 400 KB size limit that I will talk about in a moment).
This new document-oriented support is implemented in the AWS SDKs
and makes use of some new DynamoDB data types. The document support
(available now in the AWS SDK for Java, the SDK for .NET, the SDK for Ruby,
and an extension to the SDK for JavaScript in the Browser)
makes it easy to map your JSON data or native language object
on to DynamoDB's native
data types and for supporting queries that are based on the
structure of your document. You can also view and edit JSON
documents from within the AWS Management Console.
With this addition, DynamoDB becomes a full-fledged document
store. Using the AWS SDKs, it is easy to store JSON documents
in a DynamoDB table while preserving their complex and possibly
nested "shape." The new data types could also be used to store
other structured formats such as HTML or XML by building a
very thin translation layer.
Let's work through a couple of examples. I'll start with the following
JSON document:
{
"person_id" : 123,
"last_name" : "Barr",
"first_name" : "Jeff",
"cur
Oct 06, 2014
When I talk to enterprises and mid-sized companies about their plans to gain
agility and cost-effectiveness by their workloads and applications to the Cloud,
they are eager to move forward and often want to seek the assistance of
solution providers with AWS expertise. We created the AWS Partner Network (APN) a couple of
years ago to provide business, technical, marketing, GTM (go to market)
support for companies that find themselves in this situation.
With the continued growth and speciation of AWS, along with the increasing
diversity of AWS use cases,
we have begun to recognize partners that have demonstrated their competence
in specialized solution area such as
Big Data,
Managed Services,
Microsoft,
SAP, and
Oracle.
New Storage and Life Sciences Competencies
We recently launched new APN Competencies for Storage and Life Sciences.
The
Storage Competency Partners
can help you to evaluate and use techniques and technologies that
allow you to effectively store data in the AWS Cloud. You can
search for APN Storage Partners based on primary use case such as Backup,
Archive, Disaster Recovery, and Primary File Storage / Cloud NAS. Our
initial Storage Competency Partners are
Avere Systems,
CommVault Systems,
CTERA Networks,
Druva,
Panzura,
Riverbed,
and
Zadara Storage.
The
Life
Sciences Competency Partners can help you conduct drug
discovery, manage clinical trials, initiate manufacturing and distribution
activities, and do R&D of genetic-based treatments and
companion diagnostics. Our initial Life Science Competency Partners includes
both Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs).
The initial ISV partners are
Seven Bridges Genomics,
DNAnexus,
Cycle Computing,
Medidata Solutions Worldwide,
Core Informatics, and
Syapse.
The initial SI partners are
BioTeam,
Booz Allen Hamilton,
Cognizant,
G2 Technology Group,
HCL Technologies,
Infosy
Oct 06, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, September 29
We published a
New Quick
Start - Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) on AWS.
We announced that
Cloudformation
Support for ELB, CloudFront, OpsWorks, and SNS has been updated.
We announced that
Version 2
of the AWS Mobile SDK is now Generally Available.
We announced that
Amazon
Cognito now Includes Enhanced Identity Support.
We updated the
EC2 Public IP Address Ranges. There are
now 9,437,992 IP addresses in the public AWS Regions. The announcement also notes that one of the
existing /16 ranges in the US East (Northern Virginia) Regions will be split in to a pair of /17's,
one of which will be moving to the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region.
The AWS Startup Collection told us
What's
Hot at the AWS Pop-up Loft in October.
Tuesday, September 30
We announced that
Amazon
CloudWatch Logs are now Available in the US West (Oregon) and EU West (Ireland) Regions.
We announced that
Amazon AppStream is now Available in Japan.
We announced that
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now Supports IAM Users and Federated Roles.
The Gathering Clouds blog kicked off a planned 10-part series on DevOps with an article on
Scalability in Cloud Computing: Old Problems With New Solutions.
Wednesday, October 1
We published a second
EC2 Maintenance Update.
We announced that
Oct 02, 2014
My colleague
Derek Lyon
sent along a great guest post to introduce some important enhancements to
the AWS Management Portal for vCenter.
-- Jeff;
We have recently added a number of new features to the
AWS Management Portal for vCenter. These enhancements make it significantly easier for VMware
professionals to setup the portal and start managing their AWS
resources using their vSphere Client.
New Federation Proxy Option
We recently added a new setup option that significant reduces the
complexity of setting-up the portal. You now have the option to use
the portal without having to setup SAML integration yourself. To do
this, you can use the AWS Connector as an authentication proxy. This
provides an easy way to offer end-users federated access to your AWS
resources via the portal. With the proxy option, your end-users will
access the portal using the same credentials they use to login to
vCenter, with support for both system domain users and directory
users.
Previously, the portal only supported SAML-based authentication.
This required you to setup Active Directory Federation Services
(ADFS) or an equivalent SAML-based identity provider (IdP) for
federating identity into AWS. The new SAML-based authentication
provides a powerful tool for
customers who want to manage their own single-sign on
(SSO) infrastructure. However, it can also be challenging to set up if you are
not familiar with these technologies, or if you do not already have
a compatible Identity Provider (IdP) configured.
Now you have an alternative option. You can choose to have the
AWS Connector act as an identity federation proxy. When you use
this option, you eliminate the complexity that comes with configuring the single
sign-on infrastructure yourself. This is significantly simpler to
set up and will provide the best experience for customers who do not
wish to manage their own IdP.
To set up the portal using the new federation p
Oct 01, 2014
Amazon Elastic
Transcoder is a scalable, fully managed media (audio and video)
transcoding service that works on a cost-effective, pay-per-use
model. You don't have to license or install any software, and you
can take advantage of transcoding presets for a variety of popular
output devices and formats, including H.264 and VP8 video and AAC,
MP3, and Vorbis audio formatted into MP4, WebM, MPEG2-TS, MP3, and
OGG packages. You can also generate segmented video files (and the
accompanying manifests) for HLS video streaming.
Earlier this year we improved Elastic Transcoder with an increase in the
level of parallelism and
support for captions.
Today we are adding support for
Smooth Streaming (one of
several types of
adaptive bitrate streaming)
over HTTP to platforms such as XBox, Windows Phone, and clients that make use of
Microsoft Silverlight players.
This technology improves the viewer experience by automatically switching to data streams of
higher and lower quality that are based on local network conditions and CPU utilization on the playback
device. In conjunction with Amazon CloudFront, you can now distribute high-quality audio and video
content to even more types of devices.
New Smooth Streaming Support
Adaptive bitrate streaming uses the information stored in
a manifest file to choose between alternate
renditions (at different bitrates) of the same content. Although
the specifics will vary, you can think of this as low, medium, and high
quality versions of the same source material. The content
is further segmented into blocks, each containing several seconds
(typically two to ten) of encoded content. For more information about
the adaptation process, you can read my recent blog post,
Amazon CloudFront Now Supports Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
Each transcoding job that specifies Smooth Streaming as an output format generates
three or more files:
ISM — A
Oct 01, 2014
I'd like to give you an update on the
EC2 Maintenance
announcement that I posted last week. Late yesterday (September 30th),
we completed a reboot of less than 10% of the EC2 fleet to protect you from any
security risks associated with the Xen Security Advisory
(XSA-108).
This Xen Security Advisory was embargoed until a few minutes ago; we
were obligated to keep all information about the issue confidential until it was
published. The Xen community (in which we are active participants)
has designed a two-stage disclosure process that operates as follows:
Early disclosure to select organizations (a list maintained
and regularly evaluated by the Xen
Security Team based on a set of public criteria established by
the Xen Project community) with a limited time to make
accommodations and apply updates before it becomes widely known.
Full disclosure to everyone on the public disclosure date.
Because our customers’ security is our top priority and because the
issue was potentially harmful to our customers, we needed to take
fast action to protect them. For the reasons mentioned above,
we couldn’t be as expansive as we’d have liked on why we had to take such fast action.
The zone by zone reboots were completed as planned and we worked very closely
with our customers to ensure that the reboots went smoothly for them.
We'll continue to be vigilant and will do our best to protect all
AWS customers from similar issues in the future. As an AWS user, you
may also want to take this opportunity to re-examine your AWS architecture
to look for possible ways to make it even more fault-tolerant.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
Run instances in two or more
Availability Zones.
Pay attention to your Inbox and to the alerts on the AWS Management Console.
Make sure that you fill in the "Alternate Contacts"
Oct 01, 2014
Amazon AppStream allows you to build complex applications that run on
simple devices, taking advantage of cloud-based graphical rendering
(both 2D and 3D) and reducing the need for local compute power and
storage. Our customers are also using AppStream to simplify their
beta testing process and to control the dispersion of their Intellectual Property (IP).
As I have
noted in the past, your applications run in a Windows 2008 R2
environment hosted on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance.
Earlier this year I announced that
that AppStream
was available to all developers. At that time, all AppStream applications
were streamed from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region.
Expanding to Japan
Today I am happy to be able to announce that AppStream applications can now be streamed
from the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. Developers with a
customer base in and around Japan can now deliver their applications with
lower latency and improved interactive performance. This is important because
streaming responsive video across the Internet is very sensitive to latency
and is, of course, limited by the speed of light. Putting the application as
close to the user as possible minizes latency and improves the overall experience.
Launching AppStream in Tokyo will give developers the ability to reach even more
users with their streamed applications.
As part of the AWS Free Tier, developers have access to up to 20 hours of streaming per
month for a period of one year at no charge. Additional streaming time is billed at
$1.20 per hour. In either case, usage time is calculated and accumulated based on
the individual streaming sessions (see the
AppStream pricing page for more information).
AppStream in Action
Nissan Motor Company Limited
(one of world's largest automobile manufacturers) uses the NVTS (Nissan Virtual Training System)
to train mechanics in new procedures without the need for a real vehicle.
By using NVTS th
Sep 29, 2014
Version 2 of the
AWS Mobile SDK
has been available in Developer
Preview since early July (See my blog post,
New AWS Mobile Services
to learn more). During the Developer Preview, many developers used the
AWS Mobile SDK in their apps and provided us with a lot of really good feedback.
Today we are wrapping up the Developer Preview and making the AWS Mobile SDK Generally Available.
You can
download it here and
get started with the AWS Mobile Services.
We responded to the feedback that we received during the developer preview and made a number of improvements to the SDK.
You can find the details in the release notes section (
iOS,
Android). Here are some of the more significant
improvements:
The method count in the AWS Mobile SDK for Android has
been reduced by 40% to 13K. This will reduce the size of the final APK and keeps you clear
of Android's limit on the number of methods.
The SDK supports offline sync using
Amazon Cognito.
The SDK queues requests made when the device is offline.
The requests (pending sync operations) are executed when internet connectivity is available.
Details can be found
here.
The AWS Mobile SDK for iOS now includes support for pre-signed Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) URLs.
You can use these URLS to perform background transfers using the
NSURLSession class.
To get started, take a look at the
AWS Mobile SDK Getting Started Guide for iOS and the
AWS Mobile SDK Getting Started Guide for Android. You can also take a look at the
iOS Samples
and the Android Samples on the
AWS Labs GitHub repo.
-- Jeff;
Sep 29, 2014
Amazon Cognito, as you may already know, simplifies the task of
authenticating users and storing, managing, and syncing their data
across multiple devices. We launched Cognito this past summer with
support for three public identity providers. The identity providers
(Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are used to create unique Cognito
identifiers (there's also support for unauthenticated guest
users). This allows new users to start using your app without taking
the time to register a new identity. You can
read my blog post, New AWS Mobile Services,
to learn more about Cognito and its role as an identity provider.
Enhanced Identity Support
Today we are making Cognito even more flexible by allowing you to make use of the user identity
system of your choice. You can use this feature to allow your users to create an identity that is
separate and distinct from their existing social identity.
With today's launch, Cognito takes an identifier that you supply and uses it to
manufacture unique Cognito IDs for each person who uses your app. You can use this identifier
to save and synchronize user data across devices and to retrieve temporary,
limited-privilege AWS credentials through the AWS Security Token Service.
To use this new facility, you must first implement a backend identity provider of your own.
Then you call the new GetOpenIdTokenForDeveloperIdentity function and supply it with the name of your
identity pool. The function will return a unique Cognito ID and an OpenID connect token.
To learn more about how to do this and to see some sample code, read the
post Amazon Cognito:
Announcing Developer Authenticated Identities
on the AWS Mobile Development Blog.
-- Jeff;
Sep 29, 2014
PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a powerful tool for
system administrators. Introduced as part of
Windows
Management Framework 4.0, it helps to automate system setup
and maintenance for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012
R2, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Linux environments. It can install
or remove server roles and features, manage registry settings,
environment variables, files, directories, and services, and
processes. It can also manage local users and groups, install and
manage MSI and EXE packages, and run PowerShell scripts. DSC can
discover the system configuration on a given instance, and it can
also fix a configuration that has drifted away from the desired
state.
We have just published a new
Quick Start Reference Deployment to
make it easier for you to take advantage of PowerShell Desired
State Configuration in your AWS environment.
This new document
will show you how to:
Use AWS CloudFormation and PowerShell DSC to bootstrap your servers and
applications from scratch.
Deploy a highly available PowerShell DSC pull server environment on AWS.
Detect and remedy configuration drift after your application stack has been deployed.
This detailed (24 page) document contains all of the information that you will need to
get started. The deployed pull server is robust and fault-tolerant; it includes a pair
of web servers and Active Directory domain controllers. It can be accessed from
on-premises devices and from instances running in the AWS Cloud.
-- Jeff;
Sep 29, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week. I recently discovered a brand-new set of
in-depth AWS articles from Intense School. I am more than happy
to include informative, relevant, and timely articles from other partners, bloggers, and so forth. Please
let me know when you publish something that you believe would
be of attention to the AWS community. I'll do my best to check it out.
Monday, September 22
The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog talked about
Object Lifecycles.
The CloudCheckr Blog talked about how
CPXi
Uses CloudCheckr to Reduce Their Costs on Amazon Web Services by 40%.
Intense School published
Understanding
AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell - Part I.
Late last month, the CloudEndure Blog published a list of
7 Must-view Cloud Migration Presentations and
Top 7 AWS AMIs to Secure Your Application Stack.
Tuesday, September 23
We announced that the
Amazon Linux AMI 2014.09 is Now Available.
A guest post on the AWS Startup Collection from AlertLogic presented
A Users Guide to Cloud Security for Startups.
Intense School published
Understanding
AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell - Part II.
The
Cloudability Blog wrapped up a series of posts on the
The Five Stages of AWS Cost Efficiency with a
post on
Understanding
the Business Value of Increasing Cloud Spending.
Wednesday, September 24
We announced that the
AWS Console Mobile App Now Supports DynamoDB.
We
Sep 25, 2014
Today I’ve received a few questions about a maintenance update we’re performing late
this week through early next week, so I thought it would be useful to provide an update.
Yesterday we started notifying some of our customers of a timely security and operational
update we need to perform on a small percentage (less than 10%) of our EC2 fleet globally.
AWS customers know that security and operational excellence are our top two priorities.
These updates must be completed by October 1st before the issue is made public as part
of an upcoming Xen Security Announcement (XSA). Following security best practices, the details
of this update are embargoed until then. The issue in that notice affects many Xen
environments, and is not specific to AWS.
As we explained in emails to the small percentage of our customers who are affected
and on our forums, the instances that need the update require a system restart of the
underlying hardware and will be unavailable for a few minutes while the patches are being
applied and the host is being rebooted.
While most software updates are applied without a reboot, certain limited types of updates
require a restart. Instances requiring a reboot will be staggered so that no two regions or
availability zones are impacted at the same time and they will restart with all saved data and all
automated configuration intact. Most customers should experience no significant issues with the
reboots. We understand that for a small subset of customers the reboot will be more inconvenient;
we wouldn’t inconvenience our customers if it wasn’t important and time-critical to apply this update.
Customers who aren’t sure if they are impacted should go to the “Events“ page on the
EC2 console, which will list any pending instance reboots for their AWS account.
As always, we are here to help walk customers through this or to answer questions after the maintenance update completes. Just open a support case.
P.S. Note that this update is not in any way associated with what is
Sep 25, 2014
We are launching a preview of a new, resource-style API model for the AWS SDK for Ruby.
I will summarize the preview here, and refer you to the post
AWS SDK for Ruby 2 Preview Release on the
AWS Ruby Development Blog for full information!
If you’ve used Version 1 of the AWS SDK for Ruby, you are likely
already familiar with resource objects available for a number of
services. These resource objects allow you to work with AWS resources
as Ruby objects with attributes that are automatically loaded from
the service and instance methods that map to API
actions that can be taken on the resource.
The interface also provides collection classes for easy
iteration.
With the lessons learned from resource objects in Version 1, we’re
now introducing improved resource APIs in the Version 2 of the
SDK. We have made three big changes to the model.
First, resource objects now hold on to metadata retrieved from the
service until explicitly reloaded by the user. This provides more
control over network calls made by the SDK and helps users avoid
unwanted or unnecessary HTTP requests. Second, we are newly
introducing resource waiters, which allow you to wait on a resource
to reach a specified state. Third, the resource objects are now
data-driven by models defined in JSON. This allows a more structured
and consistent definition of resource objects across different AWS
services. Additionally, because we plan to share the same models in
AWS SDKs for other languages, customers who need to work with
multiple languages will be able to easily go from one language to
another and work with similar resource definitions in the future.
Here’s an example of using a resource object representing an EC2
instance, along with a waiter method wait_until_stopped (new in the
Version 2 SDK):
instance = ec2.instance('i-1234567') # Get reference to instance
instance.stop # Stop instance
instance.wait_until_stopped # Wait until instance is sto
Sep 24, 2014
We have updated the
AWS Console mobile app
with support for Amazon DynamoDB. You can now browse your tables in summary and detail form,
modify provisioned throughput, and examine CloudWatch metrics and alarms for them.
Take a Look
Let's take a tour of the new features of the Console mobile app! I created a couple of tables and
then opened up the Console mobile app to inspect them. There's a new
DynamoDB summary on the main page of the console, and I tapped the summary to zoom in to the list of tables:
I installed the latest version of the AWS SDK for PHP and wrote a quick loop to
populate the table. Then I returned to the app and zoomed
in to my acct_table:
I waited a bit and then took a look at the accumulated CloudWatch metrics for the table.
While my PHP code was running I adjusted the table's read and write
capacity a couple of times for demo purposes. This was easy to do from the
app (I could imagine doing this while relaxing somewhere other than in
front of my computer):
Then I took a closer look at the read capacity since I had adjusted it a couple
of times:
But Wait, There's More
The Console mobile app displays the current state of the CloudWatch alarms
defined for each table. It also provides access to the Global and Local Secondary Indexes
for each DynamoDB table. You can see the metrics and alarms associated with each one
and you can also modify the throughput.
Download & Install Now
The new version of the AWS Console mobile app is available now and you can start using it today
(I never get tired of saying that). Here are the download links:
-- Jeff;
Sep 24, 2014
I love the community that has formed around AWS! Many of our customers have
decided, with no help or encouragement from us, to actively and independently
promote our services, solutions, blog posts, success stories, and best practices
to their peers online. They do this by blogging, tweeting, creating videos, writing and
sharing sample code, authoring books and tutorials, setting up and running
AWS user groups, and so forth.
AWS Community Heroes
In order to recognize and publicly acknowledge the efforts of these hard-working folks,
we have launched the AWS Community Hero program. An AWS Community Hero has routinely delivered
high-quality, impactful, developer-focused activities to the AWS Community.
Welcome
Our first group of Community Heroes are based in the United States. We plan to add
additional heroes from the US and other parts of the world before too long.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce the first group!
Valentino Volonghi currently designs and implements the globally
distributed architecture behind AdRoll. He is the President and Founder of the
Italian Python Association that runs PyCon Italy. Since 2000,
Valentino has specialized in distributed systems and actively worked
with several Open Source projects. In his free time, he shows off
his biking skills on his Cervelo S2 on 50+ mile rides around the
Bay.
Peter Sankauskas is the CEO of
CloudNative, Founder
of Answers for AWS, a
NetflixOSS Cloud Prize winner, and organizer of
the Advanced AWS Meetup in San Francisco. His passion for scalability,
reliability and simplicity has helped countless people get the most of
out of the cloud, and it has only just begun.
Adrian Cockcroft has had a long career working at
the leading edge of technology. He’s always been fascinated by what
comes next, and he writes and speaks extensively on a range of
subjects. At
Battery Ventures,
he advises the
Sep 23, 2014
The Amazon Linux AMI
is a supported and maintained Linux image for use on Amazon EC2.
We release new versions of the Amazon Linux AMI every six months
after a public testing phase that includes one or more Release
Candidates. The Release Candidates are announced in
the EC2 forum and are available to all EC2 users in
all AWS Regions.
Launching 2014.09 Today
Today we are releasing the 2014.09 Amazon Linux AMI for use in PV and HVM mode, with support for
EBS-backed and Instance Store-backed AMIs. This AMI is supported on all
EC2 instance types
and in all AWS Regions.
You can launch this new version of the AMI in the usual ways. You
can also upgrade existing EC2 instances by
running yum update and then rebooting your instance.
Updated Kernel
The Amazon Linux AMI uses version 3.14.19 of the Linux kernel. This is the latest long-term-supported
upstream Linux kernel; it includes plenty of new features and fixes.
Important features added since the last release of the AMI include
low latency networking polling,
zswap (compressed swap)
zram (in-kernel memory compression module),
RAID multithreading (more IOPS on fast devices),
numerous memory management scalability improvements,
numerous improvements to popular file systems (ext4, xfs, btrfs),
support for nftables (a successor to iptables), and
numerous networking improvements (for example,
TCP Fast Open is now enabled by default). In
order to fully appreciate
all of the changes that have taken place between the 3.10 and 3.14 kernels, you will need to spend
some time studying the
Linux 3.11,
Linux 3.12,
Linux 3.13, and
Linux 3.14 release notes.
Instances that run HVM AMIs will now restart 30 seconds after encountering a kernel
panic instead of hanging indefinitely. By contrast, PV AMIs have always restarted in
this situation. If your system is dependent on the old behavior, set
kernel.panic to 0 in /etc/sysctl.c
Sep 22, 2014
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:
Monday, September 15
We announced that
ElastiCache Calls are now
Available in AWS CloudTrail.
The AWS PHP Developer Blog offered some tips on
Keeping up With the Latest Release.
Tuesday, September 16
The Cloud Health Technologies blog revealed
6 Things
You May Not Know About Reserved Instances.
We announced that you can now use popular business intelligence tools such as
Microsoft Excel, MicroStrategy, QlikView, and Tableau with
Amazon Elastic MapReduce to explore and visualize your data by way of our
new
OBDC and JDBC drivers for Hive, Impala, and HBase.
We announced that
Amazon AppStream
Now Supports Chrome Browser and Chromebooks.
We announced that you can now
Choose an
EBS General Purpose (SSD) Volume as the Boot Device When Setting up an Elastic Beanstalk Environment.
The AWS Security Blog talked about
Sharing AWS
CloudTrail Log Files Between Accounts.
The AWS Startup Collection talked about
Cloudlytics
and Drawing Meaing out of Your Data Chaos.
the Search AWS channel talked about how the
Federal
Register Opts for AWS Public Cloud.
Wednesday, September 17
We introduced a new
Consistent
File System View for Elastic MapReduce.
Thursday, September 18
We announced that the
AWS Pop-up Loft in San
Sep 18, 2014
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a fast, flexible, managed push service that makes it simple and cost-effective
to push notifications to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices, as well as
Android devices in China with Baidu Cloud Push.
With yesterday's launch of iOS 8,
Apple has introduced new features that enable some rich
new use cases for mobile push notifications — interactive push
notifications, third party widgets, and larger (2 KB) payloads.
With these new features, you can message and engage your customers
even when your app is not currently active.
Today, we are pleased to announce support for the new mobile push
capabilities announced with iOS 8. We are publishing a new iOS 8
Sample App that demonstrates how these new features can be
implemented with SNS, and have also implemented support for larger
2KB payloads.
Interactive Push Notifications and Widgets
The new iOS 8
Interactive Push Notifications lets apps present custom options in the push banner. These custom options
allow users to interact with the app without moving it to the foreground, resulting in a less intrusive and
more fluid experience.
Widgets are miniature versions of your mobile app that users can dock
to the Notifications Center. Interactive notifications and widgets
are great for quick extensions to your core app that extend the
experience throughout the day.
Both interactive push notifications and widgets can be implemented
by adding additional parameters to your push notifications. You can
use SNS platform-specific payloads
to specify those additional parameters for your iOS customers.
Suppose you have the following message payload (yes, this is JSON within JSON):
{"APNS":"{\"aps\":{\"alert\":\"MESSAGE\",\"category\":\"MESSAGE_CATEGORY\"} }"}
Your iOS app can set up a notification category using the following code:
UIMutableUserNotificationCategory *messageCategory = [[UIMutable
Sep 18, 2014
As I
promised
earlier this year, the AWS Pop-up Loft is reopening on Wednesday,
October 1st in San Francisco with a full calendar of events designed
to help developers, architects, and entrepreneurs learn about and
make use of AWS.
Come to the AWS Loft and meet 1:1 with an AWS technical expert, learn
about AWS in detailed product sessions, and gain hands-on experience
through our instructor-led Technical Bootcamps and our self-paced
hands-on labs. Take a look at the
Schedule of Events
to learn more about what we have planned.
Hours and Location
The AWS Loft will be open Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 6 PM, with special evening events
that will run until 8 PM. It is located at 925 Market Street in San Francisco.
Special Events
We are also setting up a series of events with
AWS-powered startups and partners from the San Francisco area. The
list is still being finalized but already includes cool companies like
Runscope (Automated Testing for APIs and Backend Services),
NPM (Node Package Manager),
Circle CI (Continuous Integration and Deployment),
Librato (Metrics, Monitoring, and Alerts),
CoTap (Secure Mobile Messaging for Businesses), and
Heroku (Cloud Application Platform).
A Little Help From Our Friends
AWS and Intel share a passion for innovation, along with a track record of helping startups
to be successful. Intel will demonstrate the latest technologies at the AWS Loft, including
products that support the Internet of Things and the newest Xeon processors. They will also host several
talks.
The folks at Chef are also joining forces with the AWS Loft and will be bringing their
DevOps expertise to the AWS Loft through hosted sessions and a training
curriculum. You'll be able to learn about the Chef product — an automation platform for deploying and configuring
IT infrastructure and applications in the data center and in the Cloud.
Watch This!
In order to get a taste for the variety of a
Sep 17, 2014
Many AWS developers are using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (a managed
Hadoop service) to quickly and
cost-effectively build applications that process vast amounts of
data. The EMR File System (EMRFS) allows AWS customers to use
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as a durable and cost-effective data store that is independent of the memory
and compute resources of any particular cluster. It also allows
multiple EMR clusters to process the same data set.
This file system is accessed via the s3:// scheme.
Because S3 is designed for
eventual
consistency, if one application creates an S3 object it may
take a short time (typically measured in tens or hundreds of
milliseconds) before it is visible in a LIST operation. This
small window can sometimes lead to inconsistent results when the
output files produced by one MapReduce job are used as the input
of another job.
Today we are making EMRFS even more powerful with the addition of a
consistent view of the files stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). If you enable this
feature, you can be confident that all of your files will be
processed as intended when you run a chained series of MapReduce
jobs. This is not a replacement file system. Instead, it extends the
existing file system with mechanisms that are designed to detect and
react to inconsistencies. The detection and recovery process
includes a retry mechanism. After it has reached a configurable
limit on the number of retries (to allow S3 to return what EMRFS
expects in the consistent view), it will either (your choice) raise
an exception or log the issue and continue.
The EMRFS consistent view creates and uses metadata in an Amazon DynamodB table to
maintain a consistent view of your S3 objects. This table tracks certain
operations but does not hold any of your data. The
information in the table is used to confirm that the results returned from an
S3 LIST operation are as expected, the
Sep 16, 2014
As you might know from reading my earlier posts
(Amazon AppStream -
Deliver Streaming Applications from the Cloud and
Amazon AppStream - Now Available to All Developers),
Amazon AppStream gives you the power to build complex applications that run from simple devices, unconstrained by the
compute power, storage, or graphical rendering capabilities of the device. As an example of what AppStream can do, read
about the Eve
Online Character Creator (pictured at right).
Today we are extending AppStream with support for desktop
Chrome browsers (Windows and Mac OS X) and
Chromebooks.
Developers of CAD, 3D modeling, medical imaging, and other types of
applications can now build compelling, graphically-intense
applications that run on an even wider variety of
desktops (Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows)
and mobile devices (
Fire OS,
Chromebooks, Android, and iOS).
Even better, AppStream's
cloud-based application hosting model obviates the need for large downloads, complex
installation processes and sophisticated graphical hardware on t