Newsletters
January 2012 - New AWS Region, Expansion of AWS Direct Connect, new CloudWatch and Autoscaling features, CloudFront news and more
Happy new year! We’re starting the new year with some great announcements, tons of interesting events and a couple new developer resources – all to help you better utilize Amazon Web Services. We recently announced a new AWS region in Brazil, and the global expansion of our AWS Direct Connect services. In addition to these two announcements, we added the Object Expiration feature to Amazon S3, Amazon VPC added support for elastic network interfaces and both Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Amazon SNS announced new features as well. Be sure to check out our live event on January 18 to hear more about what’s next for the AWS.
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Special Event
Find out what's next in the AWS Cloud
Please join us on January 18th at 9am PST for a live online event and be the first to hear Amazon CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, announce the latest innovation in the AWS cloud.
Register for the live event now.
News & Announcements
Check out the latest news items and announcements from AWS.
Amazon S3 Announces Object Expiration
Amazon S3 announced a new feature, Object Expiration that allows you to schedule the deletion of your objects after a pre-defined time period. Using Object Expiration to schedule periodic removal of objects eliminates the need for you to identify objects for deletion and submit delete requests to Amazon S3. You can define Object Expiration rules for a set of objects in your bucket. Each Object Expiration rule allows you to specify a prefix and an expiration period in days. The prefix field (e.g. "logs/") identifies the object(s) subject to the expiration rule, and the expiration period specifies the number of days from creation date (i.e. age) after which object(s) should be removed. Once the objects are past their expiration date, they will be queued for deletion. You will not be billed for storage for objects on or after their expiration date. To learn more about Object Expiration, please visit the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.
Amazon Web Services New South America (Sao Paulo) Region
AWS introduced its new South America (Sao Paulo) Region. South America-based businesses and global companies with customers in South America can now run their applications and workloads in the new Sao Paulo Region. This new Region significantly reduces latency to end-users in South America and allows those needing their data to reside in Brazil to easily do so. AWS now operates eight Regions worldwide serving customers from over 190 countries. You can learn more about AWS's growing global infrastructure footprint here.
AWS Direct Connect Global Expansion
We announced four new AWS Direct Connect locations at CoreSite One Wilshire in Los Angeles, TelecityGroup Sovereign House in London, Equinix in Singapore, and Equinix in Tokyo. These locations serve the US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. To learn more and get started, see the AWS Direct Connect product page.
Amazon VPC Adds Support for Elastic Network Interfaces
We announced support for Elastic Network Interfaces in Amazon VPC. Elastic Network Interfaces are virtual network interfaces that can be attached to EC2 instances in your VPC. You can use Elastic Network Interfaces to run dual-homed network appliances in your VPC or create a back-end management network for your public facing instances. You can also move an Elastic Network Interface from one instance to another and network traffic to that interface will be automatically directed to the new instance.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce Announces Support for cc2.8xlarge Instances, Reduced Pricing for cc1.4xlarge Instances
Amazon Elastic MapReduce announced support for the new Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instance, Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xlarge). Like other Cluster Compute instances, cc2.8xlarge instances are optimized for high performance computing, giving customers very high CPU capabilities and the ability to launch instances within a high bandwidth, low latency, full bisection bandwidth network. cc2.8xlarge instances provide customers with more than 2.5 times the CPU performance of the first Cluster Compute instance (cc1.4xlarge) instance, more memory, and more local storage at a very compelling cost. Please visit the Instance Types section of the Amazon Elastic MapReduce detail page for more details.
In addition, we are pleased to announce an over 18% reduction in Amazon Elastic MapReduce pricing for cc1.4xlarge instances, dropping the total per hour cost to $1.57. Please visit the Amazon Elastic MapReduce pricing page for more details.
Amazon SNS adds support for Delivery Policies and Message Formatting
Amazon SNS added support for two new features- configurable delivery policies and protocol-specific message formatting. Configurable delivery policies provide control over http retry behavior and improve end-to-end notification reliability. Amazon SNS delivery policies make machine-to-machine notifications more reliable by supporting configurable retry behavior to overcome server or network availability issues. New message formatting support allows message content to be tailored to fit the requirements of different delivery protocols such as email, SMS and http. Amazon SNS notification content can now be optimized to provide richness that is suitable for each message type used. Both of these new Amazon SNS features can be accessed from the AWS Management Console.
Amazon CloudFront: Announces Support for Delivery of Files up to 20 GB
Amazon CloudFront is excited to announce that it now supports objects up to 20 GB. This works not only with download (HTTP) distributions, but also with streaming (RTMP) of HD video files. And the feature works whether you're using Amazon S3 as the origin or your own custom origin. There's no need to configure anything special, you can just start using Amazon CloudFront for objects up to 20 GBs. Read more about Amazon CloudFront's Support for Larger Objects.
Amazon CloudFront Tutorial on Restricting Content Based on Geographic Location of End Users
Amazon CloudFront has built a tutorial (with sample code) that shows you how you can use a third-party geolocation service to restrict access to files in an Amazon CloudFront distribution based on the geographic location of end users. For end users whose access is blocked, your application can display a meaningful message instead of returning an error code. Learn more about Restricting Access to Files in a CloudFront Distribution Based on Geographic Location (Geoblocking).
Amazon EC2 introduces Instance Status Monitoring
You can now use instance status monitoring features to gain additional visibility in the operational status of your Amazon EC2 instances. View status checks to detect problems that may impair an instance's ability to run your applications, and view scheduled events to determine when AWS is planning maintenance activities such as patch upgrades that may impact your instances. Visit the AWS blog to learn more about status checks and scheduled events
Easily create CloudWatch alarms for Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes
It's now even easier to create Amazon CloudWatch alarms for your Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes. In the Amazon EC2 Management Console, first select an instance or volume, then click the "Monitoring" tab that appears below, and then click "Create Alarm". As before, you can also view metrics and create alarms in the Amazon CloudWatch Management Console.
Auto Scaling adds support for multiple VPC subnets
You can now run Amazon EC2 instances in a single Auto Scaling group within a VPC across multiple Availability Zones and VPC subnets. It is now easier to use Auto Scaling to build and manage high-availability applications within your own virtual network. Learn more about using Auto Scaling with Amazon VPC.
Amazon Web Services: Enabling Cost-Efficient Disaster Recovery Leveraging Cloud Infrastructure
A new research paper from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) titled has been published. This Enterprise Strategy Group white paper outlines the problems organizations face when implementing disaster recovery, describes how the cloud changes the game, and provides insight into a suite of components from Amazon Web Services that make DR in the cloud simple and cost-efficient. Download the whitepaper.
Amazon Web Services: MongoDB on AWS
This whitepaper provides an overview of general best practices that apply to all major NoSQL options and discusses one of most popular NoSQL Systems - MongoDB - and how to best run it on AWS. It further examines different MongoDB configurations so you can optimize it for performance, durability, and security. Download the whitepaper.
Amazon Web Services: How AWS Pricing Works
This whitepaper will help you understand how to effectively estimate the costs of running your specific project on AWS. It provides several examples that leverage the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator. For each example, this paper discusses its architecture, example usage of each service, cost breakdown for each service, and the total estimated monthly charge. Download the whitepaper.
Featured Case Study: Sogeti
Sogeti utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide cloud-based infrastructure for its DR plan, in conjunction with the Oracle Data Guard data replication mechanism. After clients choose one of the DR plan options, Sogeti establishes an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance within the AWS US East (Northern Virginia) region. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are mounted to the Amazon EC2 instances for extra storage, as needed. The company establishes safe and reliable communication between the DR infrastructure and the primary database by leveraging AWS security capabilities. Read the full case study here.
Featured Case Study: IBM
IBM Information Management provides database servers, information integration solutions, and Big Data solutions for Internet-scale data analytics. The division is advancing development of database and Big Data analytics skills by sponsoring and leading BigDataUniversity.com and DB2University.com, which deliver "at your place, at your pace" education. To manage massive amounts of video content, and enable students to experience the value of cloud-based infrastructure, the division uses a number of solutions from Amazon Web Services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53. Read the full case study.
Developer Resources
Check out these developer resources to help you build and grow on AWS.
The AWS SDK for Java now supports Amazon Route 53
With the Amazon Route 53 Java client in the SDK, you can easily access your Amazon Route 53 resources and manage your Amazon Route 53 hosted zones. Click here for the SDK.
Sample Code and Articles For Powering Mobile Apps With AWS SDKs
The AWS SDK for iOS and the AWS SDK for Android now include sample code and articles showing how to use AWS to implement features like storing high scores, uploading photos and messaging users from mobile applications.
AWS Solutions Provider News
Check out the latest announcements from the AWS Solutions Provider community
Be Part of Cloud Innovation. Join SafeNet's Beta Program and Help Define Cloud Security.
SafeNet has seen an unprecedented amount of demand since its cloud security launch, and is introducing a beta release for its much anticipated cloud security product: ProtectV - a powerful combination of VM and storage encryption, with pre-launch authentication. Be the first to get your hands on ProtectV - participation is limited, sign up today.
Trusteer Uses Blitz to Validate the Performance of its Secure Web Access Services
Trusteer, a leading provider of secure Web access services, needed a way to test the performance of its service. With the service offered by many of the world's premier financial institutions, and accessed millions of times a day, Trusteer understands that any disruptions or downtime would not be acceptable. With Blitz, deployed across all EC2 regions worldwide, Trusteer is able to simulate real world users to understand exactly what to expect when its solution is deployed by its customers. Blitz's easy to use User Interface, no scripting solution and affordable service helps Trusteer ensure maximum protection for its customers against malware and fraud. View the case study here.
Datapipe deploys high performance, highly available, database clusters (Oracle, SQL, MySQL) to meet the demands of real-time Enterprise production workloads
Datapipe, a Featured AWS Solution Provider and Oracle Gold Partner, can provide a single provider solution including integration between web and application tiers running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and high performance Oracle databases running at Datapipe, facilitated through a Direct Connect to AWS's cloud computing platform in both the Northern California and Virginia regions with minimal latency. This allows redundancy at the host, network and storage layer reducing node downtime; uses best practices for rolling maintenance, including required OS and database patches performed, allowing RAC clusters to process transactions during the maintenance window and clients to grow their database storage on demand. Datapipe SAN infrastructure and Oracle software configuration allow for hot expansions (no downtime) to existing database volumes. Datapipe can also add the AWS Direct Connect/Oracle-as-a-Service solution to an existing architecture and has the in-house technical expertise to cover all layers of this build. Click here to learn more.
Fast track your app with Couchbase, RightScale and Amazon Web Services
For developers considering NoSQL solutions for new projects, The Fast-Track Bundle is a complete, ready-to-launch application stack for developers building scalable web applications in the cloud. Pre-configured with a sample application, this trial bundle includes free Amazon Web Services credits for the duration of the trial, free use of RightScale cloud management software, and free use of Couchbase, the NoSQL database for the cloud. Take advantage of this 15-day trial to see how technology trusted by millions can help you quickly build and launch your web application in the cloud. Register here.
Autodesk Taps AWS to Help Build Autodesk 360
Autodesk Cloud provides a powerful foundation to enable all Autodesk customers to begin using the cloud to access and store their work from anywhere; to view their work through web browsers or mobile devices; and to share their work with other users, even users without Autodesk software. Additional cloud services exclusive to Autodesk Subscription customers give designers, engineers and digital artists sophisticated new capabilities, such as high-performance 3D visual communication, simulation and collaboration that were once limited to organizations with privileged access to expensive, high-end supercomputing centers. Enabled by Autodesk Cloud, the recently announced Autodesk 360 solutions provide a powerful and complete digital view of information and processes, combined with the ability to securely manage data, ensuring that the right information is accessible wherever and whenever it is needed. For more information on Autodesk 360 for Product Lifecycle Management and Autodesk 360 for Building Information Modeling, visit http://usa.autodesk.com/.
AWS On The Road
We hope you will join AWS, our customers, and partners at the following events.
Americas
Oracle on AWS: Strategic Value of Using Cloud Across IT Implementation Life Cycle
February 1, 2012, 3:00 - 5:00PM, Boston, MA
Strata Conference: Making Data Work
The leading event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. Use code AWS25 to save 25% on passes
February 28 - March 1, 2012, Santa Clara, CA
Asia Pacific
The 24 Hours Business Plan Challenge
January 14-15, Singapore, Singapore
Beyond the Info-plosion
January 17,
Tokyo, Japan
Cloud & Network Device Seminar
January 19,
Japan
Big Data Nerds
January 19,
Singapore, Singapore
High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS) 2012
January 24-26,
Nagoya, Japan
Ideas Meet Skills
January 27,
Singapore, Singapore
What's AWS? Let's start from scratch!
January 27,
Japan
Facebook application hands-on & hackathon
January 28,
Japan
Europe
Running a Lean Startup with AWS | Berlin
January 23,
Berlin, Germany
Powering Games with AWS | London
January 24,
United Kingdom
Ahead in the Cloud - The Power of Infrastructure as a Service
January 26,
United Kingdom
Online Events
Learn more about AWS by attending an upcoming webinar or virtual event.
AWS Meister Series #13, Provide Details of ElastiCache
January 17, 5:00 PM
[In Japanese]
Using SMTP with Amazon Simple Email Service
January 19, 10:00 AM PST
Join us to learn how Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) just got simpler with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) support. You will learn how to create your Amazon SES SMTP credentials, discover and use SMTP settings, and configure SMTP and Amazon SES with some common programs. After the presentation, we will be answering audience questions.
AWS Meister Series Reloaded, Provide details of Amazon EC2 & EBS
January 23, 6:00 PM
[In Japanese]
AWS Meister Series Reloaded, Provide details of Identity and Access Management & Consolidated Billing
January 30, 6:00 PM
[In Japanese]
Using Amazon Web Services for Disaster Recovery
February 1, 10:00 AM PST
In the event of a disaster, you can quickly restore data and locally launch resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help ensure business continuity. Join us to learn about the AWS services that you can leverage for your disaster recovery (DR) solution, four common DR architectures that leverage the AWS Cloud, and how to get started. After the presentation, we will be answering audience questions.
Expand Your Enterprise Cloud Strategy with AWS Direct Connect and Equinix
February 7, 10:00 AM PST
Register to attend the AWS Direct Connect Webinar scheduled February 7 featuring experts from AWS and Equinix. You'll learn more about AWS Direct Connect, how our customers are benefitting from the service, and key industry trends.
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