What’s New?

Versioning Feature for Amazon S3 Now Available

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Versioning feature for beta use across all of our Amazon S3 Regions. Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

Amazon S3 provides customers with a highly secure and durable storage infrastructure. Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving. For more information, please see the Amazon S3 FAQs and Developer Guide.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Now Supports Job Flow Debugging via the AWS Management Console

We are excited to announce that we’ve added support for debugging Amazon Elastic Map Reduce job flows within the AWS Management Console – making Amazon Elastic MapReduce even easier to use for developing large data processing and analytics applications. This capability allows customers to track progress and identify issues in steps, jobs, tasks, or task attempts of their job flows. The job flow logs are saved in Amazon S3 and the state of tasks and task attempts is saved in Amazon SimpleDB so customers can analyze job flows even after they’ve completed. This functionality is accessible through the Amazon Elastic MapReduce Tab in the AWS Management Console.

Access to the AWS Management Console is provided free of charge at https://console.aws.amazon.com.

AWS Announces Lower Pricing for Outbound Data Transfer

As you know, we are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient. We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices. Today we are pleased to announce that we are lowering AWS pricing for outbound data transfer by $0.02 across all of our services, in all usage tiers, and in all Regions. These changes will be effective February 1, 2010. For more information, consult the pricing section for any of the AWS infrastructure services on the AWS website.

AWS Management Console Adds Support for Elastic Load Balancing

We’re excited to announce today that we’ve added support for Elastic Load Balancing to the AWS Management Console. Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. Now you can use a simple, point-and-click web interface to create and configure load balancers for your Amazon EC2 applications. With AWS Management Console support, you can get started with Elastic Load Balancing faster than ever. This functionality is accessible through the Load Balancers section of the Amazon EC2 tab in the AWS Management Console.

Access to the AWS Management Console is provided free of charge at https://console.aws.amazon.com.

Announcing Amazon CloudFront Streaming

Amazon CloudFront, the easy-to-use content delivery service, now supports the ability to stream audio and video files. Traditionally, world-class streaming has been out of reach of for many customers – running streaming servers was technically complex, and customers had to negotiate long- term contracts with minimum commitments in order to have access to the global streaming infrastructure needed to give high performance.

We’ve designed Amazon CloudFront to make streaming accessible for anyone with media content. Streaming with Amazon CloudFront is exceptionally easy: with only a few clicks on the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you’ll be able to stream your content using a world-wide network of edge locations running Adobe’s Flash® Media Server. And, like all AWS services, Amazon CloudFront streaming requires no up-front commitments or long-term contracts. There are no additional charges for streaming with Amazon CloudFront; you simply pay normal rates for the data that you transfer using the service.

Visit the Amazon CloudFront page to learn more.