What’s New?

Amazon Simple Email Service Announces Domain Verification

We are excited to announce that Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now supports domain verification. Now, instead of needing to verify each email address you want to send from, you can simply verify your entire domain and send from any email address on it.

You can verify any domain in the Amazon SES tab of the AWS Management Console, or you can verify domains via the API. You can use whichever method works best for you. This feature is also integrated with Amazon Route 53 so that you can verify any domain you manage with Amazon Route 53 with a few clicks of your mouse.

To make Amazon SES even easier to use, we have also expanded the number of verified email addresses and domains that you can have in your account from 100 to 1,000.

We encourage you to try this new feature today, and let us know what you think by visiting the Amazon SES forum. For more information, please refer to the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudFront Now Supports Dynamic Content

We’re very excited to announce that you can now use Amazon CloudFront to deliver dynamic content. This new capability gives you a simple, cost-effective way to improve the performance, reliability and global reach of your dynamic websites. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with dynamic applications running in Amazon EC2 or your origin running outside of AWS without any custom coding or proprietary configurations, making the service simple to deploy and manage. And, there are no additional costs beyond Amazon CloudFront’s existing low prices for data transfer and requests, and no long-term commitments for use.

Amazon CloudFront can now deliver all of your content, including the dynamic portions of your site that change for each end-user. First, you can configure multiple origin servers for your Amazon CloudFront distribution. This allows you the flexibility to keep your content in different origin locations without the need to create multiple distributions or manage multiple domain names on your website. Second, you can include query string parameters to help customize your web pages for each viewer. Third, you can configure multiple cache behaviors for your download distribution based on URL patterns on your website. These cache behaviors give you granular control over how you want Amazon CloudFront to cache different portions of your website. In addition, Amazon CloudFront has implemented several performance optimizations that accelerate the delivery of your dynamic website from the origin to your end users. These performance improvements include maintaining persistent connections with the origin and other network path optimizations to speed up the delivery of dynamic content.

You can get started at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Learn more about Amazon CloudFront’s support for dynamic content on the AWS blog or by visiting the Amazon CloudFront page.

TCO Study for SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS) White Paper

Research Finds that Running SAP on AWS Provides Costs Savings of Up to 69%!

As more enterprises seek to understand cost savings of cloud deployments, Germany based consulting firm, VMS AG leveraged its industry-leading intelligence to develop a detailed cost analysis of running SAP on AWS using the best practices of more than 2,600 SAP environments. The research discovered that running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure savings of up to 69% compared to an SAP Business All-in-One system running on-premises. Download the full TCO White Paper today to learn more.

Monitor Your AWS Charges with Billing Alerts Using Amazon CloudWatch

Announcing API and AWS Identity & Access Management Support for AWS Storage Gateway

We are delighted to announce two new features for AWS Storage Gateway.

First, you can now configure your AWS Storage Gateway resources programmatically through an API. You can use this API to automate your backup and disaster recovery workflows. You can develop scripts ahead of time so that, when necessary, you can quickly and seamlessly shift your operations to Amazon EC2. This API can be used directly or, if you prefer, you can use the AWS SDKs for .NET, PHP, and Java. Learn more by visiting the AWS SDK page, or referring to the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.

Second, we're announcing AWS Storage Gateway support for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). With IAM, you can easily control which users in your organization have access to your AWS Storage Gateway resources. You can create multiple Users within your AWS Account, and specify which AWS Storage Gateway actions a User or a group of Users can perform on specific gateways. IAM also makes it easy to enable or disable a User's access to your gateways, simplifying and securing management of access credentials. Learn more by visiting the IAM page, or referring to the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.

New Managed Services for Windows Developers Worldwide

We are excited to announce the launch of Amazon RDS for SQL Server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. You can now take advantage of these managed database and application services to deploy, manage and scale SQL Server databases and ASP.NET applications using familiar Microsoft tools.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server: Deploying and managing databases is one of the most complex, time-consuming, and expensive activities in IT. Amazon RDS removes this complexity and makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, fully managing database administration tasks such as software installation and patching, database and log back-ups for disaster recovery, and monitoring. Businesses of all sizes have taken advantage of Amazon RDS to offload the operational responsibilities of their MySQL and Oracle databases. With this launch, Amazon RDS brings the same benefits to all SQL Server customers. Below are the key highlights of the service:

• Free Usage Tier: If you are new to Amazon RDS, you can get started with Amazon RDS for SQL Server with a Free Usage Tier, which includes 750 hours per month of Amazon RDS micro instances with SQL Server Express Edition, 20GB of database storage and 10 million I/O requests per month for a full year.
• Multiple Editions: Amazon RDS supports Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2, and plans to add support for SQL Server 2012 later this year.
• Flexible pricing options: Beyond the Free Usage Tier, you can run SQL Server on Amazon RDS using the “License Included” or the “Bring Your Own License” service models, with prices starting at $0.035/hour. Refer to Amazon RDS for SQL Server pricing for more details.

ASP.NET Support for Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you an easy way to quickly deploy and manage your Java, PHP and as of today, ASP.NET applications in the AWS cloud. Below are the key highlights of the service:

• Easy to Begin: You simply upload your ASP.NET application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
• Compatible and Inexpensive: Because Elastic Beanstalk leverages the familiar IIS 7.5 software stack, existing applications can be deployed with minimal changes to the underlying code. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications.

You can use the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to get started, and create applications, environments and database instances directly from your Visual Studio environment. For a hands-on demo on how to deploy an ASP.NET application on Beanstalk with Amazon RDS for SQL Server, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. To learn more about getting started with Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS Getting Started Guide.

New and Updated Microsoft SQL Server Offerings on Amazon EC2

We are excited to announce support for several new instance sizes as well as support for new Microsoft SQL Server versions that will expand your options and lower the cost of running many of your SQL server database workloads on Amazon EC2. Starting today we are:

• Offering the ability to run SQL Server on our Standard Small and Medium instance types, lowering the minimum size of a SQL Server database instance on EC2.
• Providing support for SQL Server Web edition, which provides customers with internet-facing workloads similar functionality to SQL Standard at a significantly lower cost.

In addition, we are excited to announce support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on EC2 at no additional cost over existing Microsoft SQL Server offerings. Customers now have immediate access to Amazon published AMIs for Express, Web, and Standard editions of SQL Server 2012.

For more details, please visit the Windows on Amazon EC2 page.

New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

We are excited to announce new Amazon RDS for Oracle service capabilities and Multiple Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployment improvements.

New Multi-AZ deployment capability for Amazon RDS for Oracle

Multi-AZ is a deployment option that significantly enhances database availability by synchronously replicating updates made to a primary DB instance to a standby instance located in a separate Availability Zone (AZ) within the same AWS Region. Many Amazon RDS MySQL customers already use the Multi-AZ option to increase the reliability of their production deployments and we are excited to make this feature available to Amazon RDS for Oracle customers.

New Console and API Option to trigger a Failover in Multi-AZ deployments

Many customers have requested the ability to initiate a failover from their primary to their standby DB instance. The typical use cases for this feature include testing the resilience of a new application by forcing a failover. The results can help customers tune DNS caching and connection retry mechanisms. To support this and other use cases, Amazon RDS has added a new console and API option to give Multi-AZ customers the ability to trigger a failover from primary to standby when rebooting a DB instance. This option is available immediately for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for Oracle.

New Multiple Character Set Support Option for Amazon RDS for Oracle

Oracle provides the capability to set a character set preference that controls which languages you can represent in your database. Amazon RDS for Oracle now enables customers to specify their preferred character sets when creating new DB instances. Customers can now specify any of thirty character sets, including Shift-JIS, when creating new DB instances.

To learn more about Multi-AZ and Character Set Support for Amazon RDS for Oracle and the ability to failover on reboot for all Multi-AZ customers, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle Detail Page and the Amazon RDS FAQs and Documentation.

If you are new to Amazon RDS, you can get started for free with our sixty-day free trial.

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance Type Support Now Available in Amazon VPC

We are excited to announce that Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports the EC2 Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large instance type.

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xlarge) instances provide you with on-demand supercomputing class performance by giving you access to the latest Intel Xeon processors and high bandwidth, low latency networking. Many of our customers in life sciences, oil and gas, manufacturing, space exploration, and business computing have asked for the ability to launch cc2.8xlarge instance into an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for improved network management and isolation for business critical tasks. At this time cc2.8xlarge instances can be launched into a VPC in a single Availability Zone in the US-East (N. Virginia) region. We will add support for additional Availability Zones and Regions in the coming months.

For more information or to get started with Cluster Compute instances in Amazon VPC, visit the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

AWS CloudFormation Support for Creating VPC Resources

We are excited to announce that AWS CloudFormation now supports the creation of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources. AWS CloudFormation allows you to easily provision, manage and update a collection of related AWS resources. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create a private, isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

Now, you can create new Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), subnets, gateways, network ACLs, routes and route tables using CloudFormation templates. CloudFormation templates are declarative and allow you to easily enumerate what VPC resources, configuration values and interconnections you need to implement a VPC with public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN access.

Resource types such as Amazon EC2 instances, security groups and Elastic IP addresses, Elastic Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups and Amazon RDS Database instances can already be deployed into any existing Amazon VPC using CloudFormation templates. A CloudFormation can now fully represent your VPC configuration along with all the resources needed to run your application in the VPC.

To get started creating VPCs using CloudFormation, visit the CloudFormation user guide and try out the new VPC sample templates.

Amazon DynamoDB Now Available in Three Additional Regions

We are excited to announce that Amazon DynamoDB is now available in the US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. These new Regions join the US East (Northern Virginia), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions as locations in which DynamoDB is available.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can easily create a new DynamoDB database table or scale your table’s request capacity to the level that you need without incurring any downtime.

To learn more about DynamoDB, you can attend our webinar on Wednesday, May 16th, from 10am-11am PDT. Register here.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Now Available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Developers can now leverage the service in both the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region and the US East (North Virginia) region.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides an easy way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Elastic Beanstalk currently supports Java applications running on the familiar Apache Tomcat stack, and PHP applications running on the Apache HTTP Server stack. Elastic Beanstalk allows you to deploy and manage your applications using a set of tools, including the AWS Management Console, Git deployment and the command line interface, and the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. With Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling.

There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk – you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications. To get started, visit the Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Amazon DynamoDB Announces BatchWriteItem Feature

We are happy to announce the availability of a new feature for DynamoDB: BatchWriteItem.

BatchWriteItem allows you to add, delete, or replace up to 25 items in a single operation. With BatchWriteItem, you can:

• Achieve higher throughput by writing, deleting, or replacing multiple items in a single request
• Take advantage of parallelism without having to manage multiple threads on your own
• Achieve lower average latencies, compared to using single PutItem or DeleteItem operations, when writing, deleting, or replacing multiple items

To learn more about BatchWriteItem, you can view our documentation here: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/API_BatchWriteItems.html

To use the BatchWriteItem feature, make sure you have the latest SDK libraries, which you can download at http://aws.amazon.com/code.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

Introducing AWS Marketplace

Amazon Web Services is pleased to announce AWS Marketplace, an online store where customers can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS.

You can select software from well-known vendors including CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point, IBM, Microsoft, SUSE, Red Hat, SAP, and Zend as well as many widely used open source offerings, including Wordpress, Drupal, and MediaWiki.

AWS Marketplace includes pay-as-you-go products, free software (AWS infrastructure fees still apply), and hosted software with varied pricing models.

When you find the software you’d like to purchase, you can use AWS Marketplace’s 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured server images, or deploy with familiar tools like the AWS Console. You’ll be charged for what you use, by the hour or month, and software charges will appear on the same bill as your other AWS services.

Here’s how to get started:

• Go to http://aws.amazon.com/marketplace and search for software.
• Learn about products, including pricing, support information, and customer reviews.
• Launch the product in your EC2 account with 1-Click or, for hosted software, visit the vendor’s website to sign up.

If you are a software vendor interested in selling your product on the AWS Marketplace, please visit our Seller Portal and participate in a webcast on May 29th.

AWS Announces The Availability of the Microsoft SharePoint Server on AWS Reference Architecture White Paper

We are excited to announce the availability of the Microsoft SharePoint Server on AWS Reference Architecture White Paper.

This white paper discusses general concepts regarding how to run SharePoint on AWS and provides detailed technical guidance on how to configure, deploy, and run a SharePoint Server farm on AWS. It illustrates reference architecture for common SharePoint Server deployment scenarios, such as an intranet SharePoint Server farm or internet Website or service based on SharePoint Server, and discusses their network, security, and deployment configurations in detail so you can run SharePoint Server workloads in the cloud with confidence.

This white paper is targeted to IT infrastructure decision-makers and administrators. After reading it, a customer should have a good idea on how to set up and deploy the components of a typical SharePoint Server farm on AWS.

To learn more, please register to download the SharePoint Server on AWS Reference Architecture White Paper.

To learn more about Microsoft on the AWS Cloud, please visit the Microsoft landing page on our website at aws.amazon.com/microsoft.

AWS Announces CloudSearch

We are excited to announce Amazon CloudSearch, a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications.

Amazon CloudSearch enables search functionality for your website or application without the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a search service. You don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, data partitioning, setup and configuration, or software patches.

Built for high throughput and low latency, Amazon CloudSearch supports a rich set of features including free text search, faceted search, customizable relevance ranking, configurable search fields, text processing options, and near real-time indexing.

With Amazon CloudSearch, you get:

• Fast & Easy Deployment
• Automatic Scaling For Data & Traffic
• High Performance
• Easy Administration

To learn more, please visit the Amazon CloudSearch Overview or Jeff Barr’s blog post on Amazon CloudSearch.

You can get started by watching a service overview video, or a demo showing how to build a search application using Amazon CloudSearch.

Please also join us for an Introduction to Amazon CloudSearch webinar on May 10 – reserve your seat now!

Announcing the Availability of Reserved Cache Nodes for Amazon ElastiCache

We are excited to announce the availability of Reserved Cache Nodes for Amazon ElastiCache. This allows you to save up to 70% over On Demand prices while adding an in-memory cache to your application architecture in a matter of minutes.

Amazon ElastiCache improves the performance of your web applications by retrieving data from a fast, in-memory cache instead of relying entirely on disk-based storage. Unlike other caching mechanisms, Amazon ElastiCache is fully-managed so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your own caching infrastructure. In addition, it is Memcached-compatible, so if you have existing Memcached-enabled applications, they will work with ElastiCache without any code changes.

Amazon ElastiCache can reduce the load on your databases significantly and improve throughput for read-heavy or compute-intensive workloads including:

• Social Networking
• Mobile and Social Gaming
• E-Commerce Sites
• Media Sites
• Recommendation Engines

To learn more about Amazon ElastiCache and saving money with Reserved Cache Nodes, please visit the Amazon ElastiCache detail page.

Live Smooth Streaming for Amazon CloudFront

We are excited to announce the launch of Live Smooth Streaming for Amazon CloudFront. Smooth Streaming is a feature of Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services that enables adaptive streaming of live media to Microsoft Silverlight clients. You can also use this solution to deliver your live stream to Apple’s iOS devices using the Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format. And you can benefit from the scale and low-latency offered by Amazon CloudFront when delivering your live Smooth Streams.

We've made it simple to get started by creating an AWS CloudFormation template that provisions the AWS resources you need for your live event. You only pay for the AWS resources you consume, and have full control over the origin server (Amazon EC2 instance running Windows Media Services) so you can configure additional IIS Live Smooth Streaming functionality for your specific needs.

To learn more, please visit our blog post on Live Smooth Streaming for Amazon CloudFront. You can get started by reading our Live Smooth Streaming tutorial or visit the Amazon CloudFront product page for more information about Amazon CloudFront.

Improved Live Streaming for Amazon CloudFront

We are pleased to announce that you can now use Amazon CloudFront with Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 running on Amazon EC2 to configure live HTTP streaming for both Flash-based and Apple iOS devices. With this solution, you can easily and cost-effectively deliver your live video via AWS to multiple platforms and to a world-wide audience, while paying for the AWS resources you consume.

Our improved live streaming solution uses the lower minimum content expiration period we recently announced for Amazon CloudFront. With this feature, both long-lived live video fragments and the frequently updated live manifest file can be cached at Amazon CloudFront edge locations. This helps you scale your live event without having to scale the origin infrastructure (Amazon EC2 instance running Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5).

The best way to get started is to follow the instructions in our live streaming tutorial. You can also learn more by reading about our blog post or by visiting the Amazon CloudFront product page.

We'd also like to invite you to register for our webinar with speakers from both Amazon CloudFront and Adobe on May 4th, 2012, where we will be providing an overview and a demo of our improved live streaming solution.

Amazon RDS Launches Free Trial program

AWS is introducing a limited time free trial program to help new Amazon RDS customers get started. Customers eligible for the free trial will be able to run one free Single-AZ Small DB Instance for sixty (60) days, along with 20 GB of database storage capacity and 10 million IO requests. You can run a MySQL or Oracle database (using the BYOL model) on your free DB Instance. The free trial is now available in all regions.

For more information about the Amazon RDS Free Trial program, please visit the Amazon RDS Free Trial page. To learn more about Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS page.

Amazon Route 53 Adds Latency Based Routing

We are excited to announce Latency Based Routing (LBR) for Amazon Route 53, AWS’s highly reliable cost-effective DNS service. LBR, one of Amazon Route 53’s most requested features, helps you improve your application’s performance for a global audience. LBR works by routing your customers to the AWS endpoint (e.g. EC2 instances, Elastic IPs or ELBs) that provides the fastest experience based on actual performance measurements of the different AWS regions where your application is running.

You can learn more about LBR from Jeff Barr's blog post on Route 53's Latency Based Routing feature, by reviewing the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide or by visiting the Amazon Route 53 product page.

PHP and Git Deployment for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports a PHP runtime and Git deployment. Elastic Beanstalk already makes it easier to quickly deploy and manage Java applications in the AWS cloud. Now, Elastic Beanstalk offers the same functionality for your PHP applications.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon Simple Notification Service, to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure to run your PHP applications. You can easily launch a PHP environment using the AWS Management Console or the Elastic Beanstalk command line interface.

You can now set up your Git repositories to directly deploy changes to your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. Git speeds up deployments by only pushing your modified files to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In seconds, PHP applications get updated on a set of Amazon EC2 instances.

To learn more about how to launch your PHP environment and use Git to deploy, go to "Deploying PHP Applications Using Git" in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudFront Lowers Minimum Content Expiration Period

Amazon RDS Increases Backup Retention Period

The automated backup feature of Amazon RDS enables point-in-time recovery for your DB Instance, allowing you to restore your DB Instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last five minutes.

Many customers have requested for longer backup retention periods for compliance purposes. We are excited to announce that the maximum retention period for automated backups has been increased from eight days to thirty five days. This new limit will enable you to store more than a month of backups. To modify the retention period for your DB instance to a higher limit, please visit the AWS Management Console.

To learn more about Amazon RDS, please visit the Amazon RDS Page.

AWS Storage Gateway Now Available in South America

AWS Identity and Access Management enables password management and IAM user access to account billing information.

We are excited to announce that we have added the following AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) features:

• Customers can now grant IAM users direct access to the Account Activity and/or Usage Reports pages without having to give them access to other AWS resources.
• Customers can now define an account-wide policy in the IAM console that enforces password strength for their IAM users upon password changes.
• IAM users can now use a simple graphical user interface in the IAM console to change their own password.

To learn more, visit the Using IAM guide.

Amazon DynamoDB Now Available in Europe

We are excited to announce that Amazon DynamoDB is now available in the EU (Ireland) Region. The EU (Ireland) region joins the US East (Northern Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions as the third region in which customers can run the service.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can easily create a new DynamoDB database table, or scale your table’s request capacity to the level that you need without incurring any downtime.

To learn more about DynamoDB, you can attend our webinar on Tuesday, March 20th, from 10am-11am GMT. Register here.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

Announcing three new Amazon EC2 features

We are announcing three new features that will make it even easier for you to use Amazon EC2 for your application and development needs.

• Customers can now launch 64-bit Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on m1.small and c1.medium instances. This capability allows you to scale across micro, standard, high CPU and high memory EC2 instances with a single 64-bit AMI.
• We are launching the thirteenth Amazon EC2 instance type, m1.medium. m1.medium instances are ideal for many applications that require a reasonable amount of CPU and memory, but do not require all the resources of an m1.large instance. This new instance type supports both 32 and 64-bit AMIs.
• Customers can now log into their Linux instances directly from within the Amazon EC2 management console without the need to install additional software clients

To learn more about Amazon EC2 and to try these new features, please visit the Amazon EC2 Page

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Now Supports Resource Permissions

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports resource permissions through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Whether you are an agency building applications for different customers, a large organization with many development teams, or a single developer, you now have fine grained control over which IAM users and groups have access to your Elastic Beanstalk resources.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a quick way to deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. IAM enables you to manage permissions for multiple users within your AWS account. With Elastic Beanstalk and IAM, you now have fine grained access controls over specific Elastic Beanstalk resources such as applications, application versions, and environments. For example, if you have multiple development teams working on different Elastic Beanstalk applications, you can allow specific developers to create application versions for a specific application and only allow them to deploy to a staging environment. You can then allow a trusted IAM user or group of trusted IAM users to deploy the application versions in the staging environment to a production environment.

To learn more about using IAM with Elastic Beanstalk, go to Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

New, lower pricing for Amazon EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache

We are excited to announce a reduction in Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache prices. Reserved Instance prices will decrease by up to 37% for Amazon EC2 and by up to 42% for Amazon RDS across all regions. On-Demand prices for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache will drop by up to 10%. We are also introducing volume discount tiers for Amazon EC2, so customers who purchase a large number of Reserved Instances will benefit from additional discounts. Today’s price drop represents the 19th price drop for AWS, and we are delighted to continue to pass along savings to you as we innovate and drive down our costs.

All of your On-Demand usage will automatically be charged at the new lower rate as of March 1st. New Reserved Instance prices will only apply to Reserved Instances purchases made on or after March 6th. With the new pricing, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 71% compared to On-Demand instances, so you may want to take this opportunity to review your current usage and to determine if you would like to purchase additional Light, Medium, or Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances.

Please visit the Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache pricing pages for the complete list of new lower prices and an overview of the new volume discount program.

Amazon DynamoDB Now Available in Japan

We are excited to announce that Amazon DynamoDB is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. The Tokyo region joins the US East (Northern Virginia) Region as the second location in which customers can run the service.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can easily create a new DynamoDB database table, or scale your table’s request capacity to the level that you need without incurring any downtime.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

Amazon ElastiCache Now in Two Additional Regions

We are excited to announce that Amazon ElastiCache is now available in two additional Regions: US West (Oregon) and South America (Sao Paulo). Starting today, you can use Amazon ElastiCache in these Regions to add an in-memory cache to your application architecture in a matter of minutes.

Amazon ElastiCache improves the performance of web applications by retrieving data from a fast, managed, Memcached-compatible, in-memory caching system, instead of relying entirely on disk-based databases. It can significantly improve throughput for read-heavy or compute intensive workloads including:

• Social Networking
• Mobile and Social Gaming
• E-Commerce Sites
• Media Sites
• Recommendation Engines

To learn more about the service, please view our recorded webinar: “Turbo-charge Your Web Apps Using Amazon ElastiCache” and review our Getting Started Guide. You can launch a multi-node Memcached-compatible cluster with a few clicks using the AWS Management Console or a few simple API calls.

AWS Announces Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF)

We are excited to announce Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), a workflow service for coordinating the various processing steps in your application and managing distributed execution state. Whether automating business processes for finance or insurance applications, building sophisticated data analytics applications, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF reliably coordinates all of the processing steps within an application.

Amazon SWF provides:

• Consistent execution state management. You can rely on Amazon SWF to reliably track the execution state of an application across distributed components. The components themselves including the application flow logic do not have to deal with maintaining distributed execution state.
• Reliable task distribution. Amazon SWF guarantees non-duplicated dispatch of tasks to application components and allows you to control the routing of tasks. Using such features, you can easily implement even complex application flows.
• Ease of use. You can easily use Amazon SWF without having to learn new programming languages. You can use a combination of programming languages in implementing the application components and the application flow logic.
• Full control over application execution. Amazon SWF manages task execution dependencies, scheduling and concurrency based on the application flow that you define. You have complete freedom in building, deploying and selectively scaling application components.
• The AWS Flow Framework, a programming framework that helps developers easily incorporate asynchronous and event-driven programming into their applications using Amazon SWF.

To learn more about the service, visit the Amazon SWF page. You can easily get started with Amazon SWF with the free tier of service. You can also run a sample workflow in the AWS Management Console.

Amazon S3 announces new lower prices for standard storage

We are excited to announce that we’ve reduced the Amazon S3 standard storage prices in all regions, effective February 1st. With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a reduction in their storage costs. For instance, if you store 50 TB of data on average, you’ll see a 12% reduction in costs, and if you store 500 TB of data on average, you’ll see a 13.5% reduction in costs. The price reduction applies to all standard storage- both existing storage and new added storage. You can find the new updated prices on the Amazon S3 Detail Page. We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to innovate and drive down our costs.

Announcing AWS CloudFormation Support For VPC

We are pleased to announce AWS CloudFormation support for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS CloudFormation allows you to easily provision, manage and update a collection of related AWS resources. With Amazon VPC, you can now define a virtual network topology using a CloudFormation template and customize the network configuration to closely resemble a traditional network that you might operate in your own datacenter.

All resource types such as Amazon EC2 instances, security groups and Elastic IP addresses, Elastic Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups and Amazon RDS Database instances can now be deployed into any existing Amazon VPC using CloudFormation templates. The templates allow you to run multi-tier web applications and corporate applications in a private network. With Amazon VPC and CloudFormation, you can easily control which resources you want to expose publicly and which ones should be private.

To get started using AWS CloudFormation and Amazon VPC, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide and try out the sample VPC templates in the template library.

New Osaka and Milan Edge Locations for Amazon CloudFront & Amazon Route 53

We’re excited to announce the launch of new edge locations in Osaka, Japan and Milan, Italy to serve Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. Each new edge location helps lower latency and improves performance for your end users. We plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.

With the launches in Osaka and Milan, our first edge location in Italy, Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 now have a total of 26 edge locations worldwide. Each new edge location helps lower latency and improves performance for your end users. These are the first two edge location launches of 2012 and we plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53, visit their respective product detail pages on our website.

Amazon Web Services Introduces New Premium Support Features

We are excited to announce the addition of two new features for Gold and Platinum Premium Support customers - 3rd Party Software Support and AWS Trusted Advisor. With these support enhancements, customers of all sizes and technical abilities can continue drawing on AWS’s broad experience to successfully utilize the products and features provided by the AWS cloud.

3rd Party Software Support: Providing 3rd Party Software Support enables customers to work directly with Premium Support on questions related to the customer’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance operating system as well as the configuration and performance of the most popular 3rd Party Software components on AWS. This support covers most widely used operating systems including Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux, Novell’s SuSE Linux, and Amazon Linux, as well as systems software including Apache, IIS, Amazon SDKs, FTP, Sendmail, and Postfix. AWS support engineers will now be available to address common problems that derail customers in the setup, configuration, and troubleshooting of their infrastructure components. In addition, through the use of desktop sharing technology, customers will have the option to share their desktops in real time with support engineers, allowing for a more hands on support experience.

AWS Trusted Advisor: Building on our aggregated history of serving hundreds of thousands of customers, the AWS Trusted Advisor program is a best practices auditing service that monitors a customer’s use of AWS services and automatically recommends configuration changes or new services that may save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps. AWS has built systems to regularly run best practice feature checks against a customer’s AWS environment to flag potential opportunities for improvement. AWS Trusted Advisor launches with 8 checks and additional ones will be continuously deployed throughout the year. A more detailed description of AWS Trusted Advisor can be found in Jeff Barr’s Blog.

Amazon RDS announces support for Amazon VPC

We are pleased to announce support for running Amazon RDS DB Instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). With Amazon VPC, you can define a virtual network topology and customize the network configuration to closely resemble a traditional network that you might operate in your own datacenter.

You can now take advantage of the manageability, availability and scalability benefits of Amazon RDS DB Instances in your own isolated network. The same functionality of Amazon RDS including managing backups, replication for high availability, automatic failure detection and recovery, software patching, and ease of scaling your compute capacity and storage based on your application demand, are now available in Amazon VPC.

To learn more about running Amazon RDS DB Instances in VPC, refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide and Amazon RDS FAQs.

Announcing AWS Storage Gateway

We are excited to announce the public beta launch of the AWS Storage Gateway, a new service connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s on-premises IT environment and AWS’s storage infrastructure. The service enables you to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for cost effective backup and rapid disaster recovery. The AWS Storage Gateway supports industry-standard storage protocols that work with your existing applications. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining data on your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading this data to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Using the AWS Storage Gateway, you can back up point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data to Amazon S3 for future recovery. In the event you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery purposes, or if you want to leverage Amazon EC2’s on-demand compute capacity for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run your normal workloads, you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to mirror your on-premises data to Amazon EC2 instances. Learn more by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway page or check out the Introducing Storage Gateway Video.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Enables Identity Federation to the AWS Management Console

We are excited to announce that AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has extended support for identity federation, now enabling federated users to access the AWS Management Console. Identity federation enables you to use your existing corporate identities to grant secure and direct access to the AWS Management Console without creating a new AWS identity for those users. You can enable your users to sign in to your corporate network and then access the AWS Management Console without having to sign in to AWS, providing them single sign on access to AWS. This complements IAM’s existing identity federation capability that enables you to provide federated users secure and direct access to AWS service APIs.

To learn more about IAM and identity federation, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/iam

AWS Announces DynamoDB

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can easily create a new DynamoDB database table, or scale your table’s request capacity to the level that you need without incurring any downtime.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes Windows

We are excited to announce that starting today, the AWS Free Usage Tier will now include Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of t1.micro instances running Microsoft Windows Server for free.

With this announcement, customers familiar with Windows Server can gain hands-on-experience with AWS at no-cost. Customers can select from a range of pre-configured Amazon Machine Images with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Once running, customers can connect via Microsoft Remote Desktop Client to begin building, migrating, testing, and deploying their web applications on AWS in minutes. The expanded Free Usage Tier with Microsoft Windows Server t1.micro instances is available today in all regions, except for AWS GovCloud.

For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier web page. To get started using Microsoft Windows Server on AWS, visit the AWS Windows web page.

AWS Direct Connect announces four new locations worldwide

We are excited to announce four new AWS Direct Connect locations at CoreSite One Wilshire in Los Angeles, TelecityGroup Docklands 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 offers several benefits for customers:

• It lowers bandwidth costs out of AWS, which is valuable for applications that have bulk data transfer requirements
• It offers more consistent network performance over Internet-based connections for applications that require real-time data feeds
• It provides an alternative means to connect to the AWS cloud for customers who may have security or compliance policies that prevent VPN connectivity to the cloud

To get started with AWS Direct Connect, click here to complete a sign-up form indicating your connection requirements (primarily the number of connections you require and connection bandwidth). AWS will contact you, usually within one business day.

Additional AWS Direct Connect locations are planned worldwide in 2012. For more details, including pricing, please refer to the AWS Direct Connect page and a list of frequently asked questions.