Newsletters
March 2008
Newsletter #35
Greetings AWS Developers,
This newsletter includes a description of the Amazon SQS changes we announced last month. If you’re a customer of our other infrastructure web services who’s interested in this service, we encourage you to read more below. The new pricing makes SQS more cost-effective for you to use, and the Developer Resources section beneath provides a variety of resources that can help you get started with the new API. Also in this edition: Amazon S3 customers can now enjoy high-performance networking options, plus an important Amazon ECS 3.0 migration reminder.Kathrin Jackson
Amazon Web Services
Amazon SQS Migration and Pricing Change
Last month, we announced that we are making some changes to the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), based on customer feedback and watching the way customers are using the service. One thing we’ve heard consistently from Amazon EC2 and other AWS customers is that they want to be able to use SQS along with our other services (e.g. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3), but need SQS to be less expensive for this to be more feasible. We looked at our architecture and feature set, and found a way to make a few, targeted changes by deprecating a few infrequently used requests, which allows us to operate the service much more efficiently. Simultaneously, we are introducing a new pricing structure that replaces the previous per-messages-sent charge ($0.10 / 1,000 messages) with a new per-request fee ($0.01 / 10,000 requests, including all Amazon SQS operations). As a result, we’re excited to tell you that the new pricing will not only result in significantly lower charges for most developers already being billed for SQS, but will also provide new opportunities for Amazon EC2 customers to take advantage of SQS, for example using Amazon SQS to ensure smooth workflow for applications running in Amazon EC2. For more details, please see the full announcement on the Amazon SQS forum or the Amazon SQS detail page.
Amazon S3 Adds Support for High-Performance Networking
Amazon S3 is pleased to have recently made high-performance networking options available to its customers by enabling TCP window scaling and selective acknowledgements. During the community beta testing phase, customers reported significant improvements to throughput in both directions when accessing Amazon S3. Some newer operating systems support these higher-performance networking features by default, others may need system tweaks to enable these features (as described in our documentation).
Amazon ECS 3.0 – Important Migration Reminder
This is an important reminder that the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 3.0 will be deprecated on March 31st, 2008, after which we will no longer accept Amazon ECS 3.0 requests. If you are still using Amazon ECS 3.0, please upgrade to the Amazon Associates Web Service (previously called Amazon E-Commerce Web Service 4.0) by then to ensure that you or your customers are not affected by the deprecation. This deprecation was first announced in February 2007, and we are continuing to notify current customers via e-mail. Amazon ECS 3.0 has had complete feature and data parity with the Amazon Associates Web Service since June 2006 (Version: 2006-06-28). We will re-invest the existing maintenance effort saved by discontinuing Amazon ECS 3.0 into the Amazon Associates Web Service to allow for the introduction of more features and capabilities.
Developer Resources
New Libraries and ScratchPad for Amazon SQS
Looking to take advantage of the new Amazon SQS pricing? Here are a few resources that use the latest API.
How to Create a Marketplace Application
This tutorial describes how to create a marketplace application with Amazon FPS, including the steps for adding new sellers.
Tips for Securing Your EC2 Instances
Help keep your Amazon EC2 instances safe by following these best practices.
Solutions Catalog Highlights: What Your Peers Are Building
Elastra Infinite Database
The world’s first infinitely scalable solution for running standard relational databases in an on-demand computing cloud. Elastra’s exclusive, high-performance S3DFS storage technologies enable a standard RDBMS to be deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a permanent data store. Built using Amazon S3 and EC2.
An online HTML form builder that strives to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet. Helps anybody create and design beautiful surveys, registrations, and simple online orders. Integrated with Amazon Mechanical Turk, you can now easily collect, view and analyze your HITs without writing a single line of code.
SendAlong.com
Send large files up to 2GB in size to any email address. Leverages Amazon’s infrastructure for reliable storage and fast up/downloads. Built using Amazon S3 and EC2.
Not listed in the Solutions Catalog yet? Start with our community co-marketing. Check out the AWS blog for more news about AWS developers and their applications.
Upcoming Events
Don’t forget to let the AWS evangelists know where you’d like them to visit!
O’Reilly ETech – San Diego, CA
March 3-6, 2008
London, Washington DC, and Philadelphia trips
March 10-27, 2008
Join Jeff Barr anywhere between London and Philadelphia during his mid-March travels. Read more about the details of his UK itinerary and follow-on trip to DC and Philadelphia using the links directly above.
Bellingham .NET Users Group – Bellingham, WA
March 12, 2008
Mike Culver
TheServerSide Java Symposium – Las Vegas, NV
March 26-28, 2008
Jinesh Varia will be hosting two separate sessions about scalable and highly-available architectures
Grid Computing for Financial Services 2008 – London, UK
March 31 – April 2, 2008
Mike Culver
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