Newsletters
April 2011 - VPC Features, Windows Server 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2
Dear AWS Community,
Amazon VPC has announced several features to help customers launch AWS resources in a customized virtual network and utilize dedicated instances. CloudFormation has added support for Amazon Route53 and CloudFront, making it easier to use these services. Amazon EC2 has added support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server Standard 2008 R2. And, following on our announcement of a new AWS Region in Tokyo, we have added another Availability Zone and will be holding 11 user group events across Japan in April. To expand your knowledge of the cloud, register for an upcoming webinar and learn more about High Scale Computing, Dev and Test, or Evaluating Storage Options on AWS.
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News & Announcements
To keep you up-to-date, here are the latest news items and announcements from AWS.
Two New Features for Amazon VPCAmazon Virtual Private Cloud has added several new features: Dedicated Instances, Virtual Networking and Internet Access Capabilities. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances launched within your VPC that run hardware dedicated to a single customer. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of the AWS Cloud while ensuring that your instances will be isolated at the hardware level. Also, now with Virtual Networking and Internet Access Capabilities you no longer need a VPN or existing infrastructure resources in order to leverage Amazon VPC, you can also connect to your VPC directly through the Internet – you define the virtual network that you wish to use. With Amazon VPC, you can define a virtual network topology that closely resembles a traditional network that you might operate in your own datacenter. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
CloudFormation Support for Amazon Route53 and CloudFront
AWS CloudFormation has announced support for Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront. AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. By supporting Amazon Route 53, you can create stacks with your own DNS names for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, Elastic Load Balancers and AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications. By supporting Amazon CloudFront Distributions, requests for your application or web content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. In addition, we have made it easier to embed links in your websites that allow your customers to create CloudFormation stacks. For more details see the AWS CloudFormation User Guide and Updated Samples.
Amazon EC2 Spot Integration with HPC Instances
Now customers with HPC workloads can use Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Spot Instances in the US East-Virginia Region. This new feature is well suited for complex computational workloads that have the flexibility to handle interruption, but are sensitive to network performance or need substantial processing power. Examples of these workloads include batch processing, grid computing, MPI, financial modeling, video rendering or transcoding, or Hadoop-based workloads. For more information on this new offering, please visit the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and High Performance Computing web pages.
Second Availability Zone in Tokyo Region
A second Availability Zone (AZ) has been launched in the new AWS Tokyo Region. Now customers using this Region can add fault tolerance by running in more than one location. For example, developers can use Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) in Multi-AZ mode, or load balance between web servers running Amazon EC2 in both AZ's. Learn more on the AWS Blog.
Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 has added support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server Standard 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes many exciting new features, such as support for IIS 7.5, additional Active Directory features, new management tools, and performance improvements when deployed on Amazon EC2. Customers can now also purchase both 1 year and 3 year Reserved Instances from Amazon EC2 with Windows and SQL Server as well. Read the details about this announcement and find technical resources.
Mechanical Turk's New Requester Website
A new Requester website has been launched to help customers more easily find information on how to use Mechanical Turk and how companies like Statera and Magnum Photos are using Mechanical Turk's global workforce. There is also a new homepage for Developers which includes information on the robust ecosystem of Applications and Solution Providers who are building useful tools on top of the Mechanical Turk API. Learn more about these changes and newly released features on the Mechanical Turk blog.
Featured Case Studies: PBS and Educations.com
PBS, a non-profit company, delivers educational and entertainment programming to nearly 360 member television stations throughout the United States. PBS Interactive, the department responsible for PBS’ Internet and mobile presence, improved its video streaming performance by utilizing Amazon CloudFront and increasing its existing usage of Amazon S3. Read the full case study.
Educations.com manages 552 Websites worldwide, with a collective average of two million visitors and seven million unique page views every month. The company is able to operate this extensive network of Websites with the combined services of Amazon Route 53, eight Amazon EC2 instances, and a variety of Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS options. Read the full case study.
Developer Resources
Check out these developer resources to help you build and grow on AWS.
Free AWS Book Chapters
Download a free PDF copy of the first three chapters of AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr's book, Host Your Website in the Cloud. Jeff's book covers principal AWS services including EC2, S3, SimpleDB, CloudWatch, and RDS. The book makes use of the AWS SDK for PHP and includes plenty of working examples. Find the book on Amazon.com.
Article: Client-Side Data Encryption with the AWS SDK for Java and Amazon S3
Check out the recently released article that walks you through securely storing your application's data in Amazon S3 using the AWS SDK for Java's client-side encryption mechanism. The SDK automatically encrypts data on the client side when uploading to Amazon S3, and automatically decrypts it for the client when data is retrieved.
Amazon Linux AMI 2011.02.1 Released
Amazon Linux AMI has released version 2011.02.1 which brings new features, security fixes, package updates and additional packages. A HVM version has been released to support Cluster Compute Instances. The kernel has been upgraded to a 2.6.35.11 release and default gcc has been upgraded to gcc4.4. The default filesystem has been upgraded to ext4 and upstart has replaced sysvinit for booting. The yum repository structure as been reworked to provide failover if the repository is unavailable in any region. For upgrade instructions and the full list of package updates, please refer to the release notes.
AWS Solution Providers News
Check out the latest announcements from the AWS Solution Providers community.
Join the AWS Solution Providers Program
The AWS Solution Providers Program is designed to enable Systems Integrators (SIs), Interactive Agencies, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and Channel Partners to broaden their suite of offerings and expand their customer base. The program is designed to support your unique needs as you migrate your business and your customer base to cloud computing. Learn more about the program benefits.
Scott County, MN Moves their ERP to the Cloud with Lawson on AWS
Scott County, Minnesota employs nearly 800 people and uses multiple Lawson enterprise application suites, including Enterprise Financial Management, Procurement and Human Capital Management. Scott County began using Amazon Web Services in 2010 as an early adopter of Lawson's cloud-based Disaster Recovery offering. As Scott County gained more experience with Cloud-based application performance and security, the county then worked with the Lawson Cloud Services team on a full migration to the Amazon Web Services platform for its ERP strategy. Read the full story.
SafeNet Delivers Advanced Cloud-based Encryption and Key Management for AWS
SafeNet has just launched SafeNet ProtectV™. ProtectV provides server and storage based encryption to protect compliance-impacted and other sensitive data stored on virtual machines and storage volumes running on AWS. The solution provides a series of data security controls that can be implemented in AWS to help customers meet compliance requirements including PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA and GRC. ProtectV includes pre-launch authentication, storage encryption, and key management for cloud environments. This is an extremely exciting solution for enterprise IT security departments looking for new innovative solutions that provide robust data security in the cloud. Learn more about this offer.
Free Trial of Gluster on AWS: High Availability Shared Cloud Storage
Gluster’s new AMI offers high availability file storage on AWS. In less than 1 hour, you can create a shared, multi-client storage pool on Amazon EC2/EBS that scales to Petabytes of capacity, 100s of Megabytes of throughput, and n-way replication across availability zones. POSIX/NFS/NAS (no application rewrite required). Get a free trial of Gluster.
On-Demand Performance Testing from Neotys
Available globally, Neotys now offers the NeoLoad performance testing software with on-demand “pay as you go” load testing on Amazon EC2. Using the familiar easy-to-use NeoLoad interface, you can now launch infinitely scalable and realistic test scenarios covering the entire application delivery chain. Provisioning the cloud infrastructure takes just a few minutes and since you only pay for what you use, it’s cost effective too. Visit for a free download.
AWS On The Road
We hope you will join AWS, our customers, and partners at the following events.
AWS Summit 2011 | Navigate the Cloud
June 10, New York City, NY
June 14, London, UK
June 21, San Francisco, CA
Americas
Cloud Computing for Geographers, AAG Annual Meeting
April 12-16, Seattle, WA
AWS 101 for Government
April 14, Herndon, VA
AWS User Group – NYC
April 14, New York City, NY
Mobile App Hackathon
April 16, Seattle, WA
UCLA Cloud Summit
April 19, Los Angeles, CA
Cloud Connections
April 17-21, Las Vegas, NV
Dev Connections Workshop - Moving to the AWS Cloud
April 21, Las Vegas, NV
Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group – Silicon Valley
April 21, Palo Alto, CA
LinuxFest
April 30-May 1, Bellingham, WA
ThoughtWorks Training on AWS
May 13, Dallas, TX
Asia Pacific
ThoughtWorks Training on AWS
April 14, Melbourne, Australia
Japan AWS User Group Kyoto
April 15, Kyoto, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Miyazaki
April 16, Miyazaki, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Kyushu
April 19, Fukuoka, Japan
ThoughtWorks Training on AWS
April 19, Sydney, Australia
Japan AWS User Group Saga
April 20, Saga, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Yamaguchi
April 21, Yamaguchi, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Kanazawa
April 22, Kanazawa, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Osaka
April 23, Osaka, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Sapporo
April 25, Sapporo, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Nagoya
April 26, Nagoya, Japan
AWS 101 Technical Workshop
April 27, Singapore
Japan AWS User Group Tokyo
April 28, Tokyo, Japan
Japan AWS User Group Cloud Joshikai
April 30, Tokyo, Japan
Europe
AWS User Group Helsinki
April 27, Helsinki, Finland
The Next Web
April 27-29, Amsterdam, Netherlands
AWS Tech Summit - Berlin
May 16, Berlin, Germany
Online Events
Learn more about AWS by attending an upcoming webinar or online event.
Live Educational Event: AWS 101 for the Government
April 14, 6:00pm EST (local time) / 11:00pm GMT
Sri Vasireddy, Federal Solutions Architect, will provide instruction on how government agencies and departments are succeeding with Amazon Web Services' cloud computing platform. Sri will also lead a hands-on, no-code, tutorial on how to host a website with Amazon Web Services.
Single Tenant ISV Solutions on AWS using Sage SalesLogix
April 19, 9:00am PDT (local time) / 5:00pm GMT
Attend this live web event to learn how Sage Group, a $2B provider of business management software to 6.3 million customers, is using AWS to offer its SalesLogix product in the cloud. Dan Wilzoch of Sage CRM will discuss how Sage's customers get the best of both worlds - the flexibility and rapid time-to-value associated with traditional on-demand solutions, combined with the security and control associated with on-premise solutions.
High Scale Computing on Amazon Web Services
April 20, 10:00am PST (local time) / 6:00pm GMT
Could your business benefit by solving complex problems with large scale computing resources? Deepak Singh Ph.D, Sr. Business Development Manager, will explain how companies can utilize Amazon EC2's on-demand computing resources to efficiently solve their compute intensive problems.
Introduction to Amazon Web Services
April 21, 9:00am PST (local time) / 5:00pm GMT
What is cloud computing and Amazon Web Services? How can my organization benefit from cloud computing? If you are looking for answers to these questions then listen to Jeff Barr, Senior Technical Evangelist, explain how you can lower costs and increase agility while maintaining or increasing the security of your applications.
Securing Cloud Applications - What Managers Need to Know
April 21, 11:00am PST (local time) / 7:00pm GMT
Attend this live event to learn how Cambridge Technology Enterprises securely deploys, runs, monitors and manages Cloud-based applications on AWS for Enterprises and ISV’s. The presentation will introduce and discuss the following: Designing and building secure applications - The shared responsibility model - Traffic and trust separation - Network security - Data security (at-rest and in-flight) - Identity and access management - Operations security (policies and technology).
Evaluating Storage Options in the AWS Cloud
April 26, 12:00pm EST (local time) / 5:00pm GMT
Is your organization unsure of how to effectively utilize AWS's different storage options when migrating applications to the cloud? Attend this webinar to learn about AWS's storage options, ideal use cases for each type of storage, important cloud-specific characteristics such as elasticity and data security.
Development and Test on AWS
May 11, 9:00am PST (local time) / 5:00pm GMT
Expand your cloud and Development and Test knowledge through an interactive session with AWS Evangelist Jinesh Varia. The Development and Test session will feature how-to demonstrations, best-practices, and focus on live Q&A. Join us to hear Jinesh field a variety of Development and Test questions from an audience of your peers.
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