What’s New?

Amazon SimpleDB Introduces Consistent Reads and Conditional Puts & Deletes

Amazon SimpleDB – the highly available, scalable, and flexible non-relational data store – now enables Consistent Reads and Conditional Puts & Deletes. Consistent Reads provide the ability to specify the consistency characteristic you require for each read call within your application, with an eventually consistent read optimized for lowest latency and highest throughput and a consistent read that provides “read my last write” capability. Conditional Puts & Deletes are mechanisms for inserting, updating, or deleting one or more attributes of an item with full transactional semantics using a single PutAttributes or Delete Attributes API call.

Previously, Amazon SimpleDB provided only eventually consistent reads. By offering a new Consistent Reads option and transactional semantics, AWS aims to facilitate development of additional classes of applications with Amazon SimpleDB. Visit the Amazon SimpleDB page to learn more.

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances with Windows Now Available

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Reserved Instances with Windows, which work like Reserved Instances with Linux/UNIX. You simply pay a low, upfront fee for each Reserved Instances with Windows you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly price during a 1 or 3 year period. After the one-time payment, that Windows-based instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it. You can find more detailed information on Reserved Instances at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/.

Amazon EC2 Now Offers Extra Large High Memory Instances

• Extra Large: 17.1 GB memory, 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 ECU each), 420 GB storage, 64-bit platform

Announcing Consolidated Billing for AWS Accounts

We’re excited to announce Consolidated Billing, a new billing option that enables you to consolidate payment for multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts within your company by designating a single paying account. Consolidated Billing enables you to see a combined view of AWS costs incurred by all accounts in your department or company, as well as obtain a detailed cost report for each individual AWS account associated with your paying account. Consolidated Billing may also lower your overall costs since the rolled up usage across all of your accounts could help you reach lower-priced volume tiers more quickly.

In the future, AWS will continue to provide additional billing and account features, including self-service invoicing, the ability to set cost targets and receive notifications when those targets have been reached, and more sophisticated user management capabilities that will allow you to better manage access and permissions of multiple AWS users in your department or company.

To learn more about Consolidated Billing or to start using it, read the Consolidated Billing Guide.

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.