Release: Amazon EC2 on 2008-12-17
New Features
| Feature | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Signature Version 2 | 2008-12-17 | Amazon EC2 now supports signature version 2, a more secure method for signing Query requests. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Developer Guide. |
| Regions | 2008-12-10 | Amazon EC2 now supports the ability to launch instances in multiple geographically For more information, refer to the Amazon EC2 Product Page or the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Developer Guide. |
| Drive letters can be mapped to volume names | 2008-12-10 | Amazon EC2 makes attempts to assign pre-determined drive letters (E:..Z:) to attached EBS volumes. |
| NetBIOS limit |
2008-12-10 | The hostname assigned to a Windows instance meets the NetBIOS 15-character length limit. |
Recommendations for Making Secure Requests
Our recommendations for making secure requests are:
- Always use SSL-protected API endpoints. For SOAP requests, using SSL will soon be required.
- If you are not using SOAP, we have introduced a new method for signing requests for Amazon SQS, Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon EC2, called Signature Version 2. All non-SOAP requests will soon be required to use this new method.
To help protect our customer’s applications, and to ensure that you have sufficient time to adapt your applications, our APIs will continue to accept SOAP requests over HTTP and REST requests using previous signature versions until September 30, 2009. However, we recommend that you migrate your application as soon as possible.
Please see the article Making Secure Requests to Amazon Web Services for more information about these recommendations and how to migrate your application.
Known Issues
| Issue | Description |
|---|---|
| Windows in Europe | The Amazon EC2 region does not currently support Windows instances. |
| Windows AMI launch times | Windows AMIs take longer to launch than Linux/UNIX instances due to larger AMI sizes and multiple reboots. |
| Windows AMI sizes | Windows AMIs are large and can easily reach the 10 GB limit. Before rebundling, check the size of the C:\ volume. |
| Amazon DevPay and Windows instances | Amazon DevPay does not yet support Windows paid or supported AMIs. This means that you currently can’t create a Windows AMI and sell it through DevPay, or associate an Amazon DevPay product code with a Windows AMI. |
| Windows instance availability | Initially, Windows instances will only be available in a single availability zone. Until notified, do not specify an availability zone when using ec2-run-instances; Amazon EC2 automatically launches Windows instances in the correct zone. |
| Limitation on drive mapping | There is currently no support for volume attachment to devices beyond /dev/sdp on instances running Linux/UNIX and xvdp on instances running Windows. |
| Limitation of AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress | AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress does not allow port ranges for group grants when using the command-line tools or the Query API. This is only supported through the SOAP API. |
| Instance limit | New users are limited to a maximum of 20 concurrent instances, but many of our customers use hundreds or thousands of instances. If you need a higher limit, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/ec2-request. |
