May 2013

We are excited to announce that Route 53 DNS Failover now supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) endpoints. Starting today, you can use Route 53’s existing health checking and DNS failover features for applications running behind an ELB, to increase redundancy and availability for these apps.

With DNS Failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. When you enable this feature, Route 53 uses health checks—regularly making Internet requests to your application’s endpoints from multiple locations around the world—to determine whether each endpoint of your application is up or down.

For ELB endpoints, Route 53 evaluates the health of the load balancer itself and the health of your application running on the EC2 instances behind it. If any part of the stack goes down, Route 53 detects the failure, routes traffic away from the load balancer, and directs traffic to other healthy ELB endpoints. Route 53 DNS Failover also supports EC2 endpoints as well as endpoints located in your own datacenter.

Using Route 53 DNS Failover, you can run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world. Route 53 automatically removes from service any region where your application is unavailable. You can also take advantage of a simple backup site hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with Route 53 directing users to this backup site in the event that your application becomes unavailable.

Health checks of Amazon ELB endpoints are free, and getting started is easy. To learn more, visit Jeff Barr’s blog post, the Route 53 product page or the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Also, please feel free to join our webinar at 10:00 am PDT on July 9, 2013 to learn more about DNS Failover and the high-availability architecture options that it makes possible.

We are thrilled to announce that we’ve expanded our identity federation capabilities to support web identity federation. This new feature introduces a new AWS Security Token Service (STS) API, AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity, which you can use to create cloud-backed mobile apps that use public identity providers such as Facebook, Google, or the newly launched Login with Amazon service for authentication. With web identity federation, you have an easy way to integrate Amazon.com, Facebook, or Google sign-in into your apps without having to write any server-side code and without distributing long-term AWS security credentials with the app.

For more information about web identity federation and how to get started, please see Creating Temporary Security Credentials for Mobile Apps Using Public Identity Providers in the AWS STS guide.

We are pleased to announce an easier way to monitor the replication status of your Amazon RDS for MySQL Read Replicas. In addition to the option to connect to your Read Replica and run the Show Slave Status command to review the replication status, you can now view the replication status of your Read Replicas by simply looking at the “Replication State” field on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console.

Amazon RDS monitors the replication status of your Read Replicas and updates the Replication State field to Error if replication stops for any reason (e.g., running DML queries on your replica that conflict with the updates made on the master database instance could result in a replication error). You can review the details of the associated error thrown by the MySQL engine by viewing the Replication Error field and take an appropriate action to recover from it. You can learn more about troubleshooting replication issues in the Troubleshooting a Read Replica problem section of the Amazon RDS User Guide. If a replication error is fixed, the Replication State changes to Replicating.

We encourage you to use Amazon RDS Event Notifications to automatically get notified when you encounter a replication error. Separately, you can also monitor the Replication Lag metric and set up a CloudWatch alarm to receive a notification when the lag crosses a particular threshold tolerable by your application. Learn more about monitoring Read Replicas by visiting the Working with Read Replicas section of the Amazon RDS User Guide.

We are delighted to announce that AWS GovCloud (US) has received an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP^SM). FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

Leveraging the HHS authorization, U.S. government agencies can evaluate AWS GovCloud (US) for their applications and workloads, complete their own authorizations to use AWS, and deploy systems into the AWS environment.

Agencies can immediately request access to the "Amazon Web Services - AWS GovCloud (US) Region" FedRAMP package by submitting a FedRAMP Package Access Request Form using package ID "AGENCYAMAZONGC".

Please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started today!

AWS customers who are new to Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager on AWS Marketplace will receive $175 of EC2 Promotional credit if they use at least 200 hours between May 15th and June 30th, 2013. Visit the Stingray Traffic Manager Developer Edition page on Marketplace to learn more.

We are excited to announce that AWS has been granted two Agency Authority to Operate (ATOs) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). FedRAMP is a mandatory U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services.

Some of the major benefits of FedRAMP for agencies include:

• Significant savings in cost, time and resources
• Risk-based security management
• Enhanced transparency

Already numerous government agencies and other entities that provide systems integration and other products and services to governmental agencies are using the wide range of AWS services today. Now all U.S. government agencies can leverage the AWS HHS ATO packages in the FedRAMP repository to evaluate AWS, provide their own authorizations to use AWS, and transition workloads into the AWS environment.

You can learn more by reading the AWS FedRAMP FAQs.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) now supports additional HTTP methods specified in requests from client applications. Previously, ELB restricted the set of supported HTTP methods to those commonly used by conventional web applications.

With an increasing number of applications requiring support for new HTTP extensions, customers have indicated that they would like more control over the HTTP methods used by their applications. ELB will now accept all HTTP methods sent to your applications. Some examples of methods you can use include “PATCH” for Ruby on Rails 4+ applications, and “REPORT” or “MKCALENDAR” for CalDAV applications.

To learn more, visit the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide.

We’re excited to announce seven new enhancements to Amazon Elastic Transcoder that make it easier for you to encode and deliver your content to a wider set of video devices and players. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a web service that converts your video files into versions that will play back on devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs and web browsers.

Starting today you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to output content in three new ways:

• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support lets you create videos that play on compatible players for Apple iOS, Android devices, set-top boxes and web browsers. With HLS support, you can now easily deliver your content without a streaming server – just point your users to the video in Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudFront.
• WebM support lets you transcode content into VP8 video and Vorbis audio for playback in browsers, like Firefox, that do not natively support H.264 and AAC.
• MPEG-2 TS output container support lets you output transport streams that are commonly used in broadcast systems.

We’ve also added four features that make it even easier to use Amazon Elastic Transcoder:

• Multiple outputs per job make it easy to create different renditions of the same content. Instead of having to create one transcoding job per rendition, you can now create a single job to produce multiple renditions. For example, with a single job you can create H.264, HLS and WebM versions of the same video for delivery to multiple platforms.
• Automatic video bit rate optimization takes the guesswork out of choosing the right bit rate for your video content. With this feature, Amazon Elastic Transcoder will automatically adjust the bit rate in order to optimize the visual quality of your transcoded output.
• Enhanced aspect ratio and sizing policies make it easier to resize your content to your output frame size. You can use these new settings in transcoding presets to precisely control scaling, cropping, matting and stretching options to get the output that you expect regardless of how the input is formatted.
• Integration with Amazon S3 permissions and storage options lets you set permissions on your output files from within Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Your files are then created with the right permissions in-place, ready for delivery to end-users.

You can learn more about Amazon Elastic Transcoder and these new features by visiting the detail page. To see these new features in action, don’t forget to register for the “What’s New with Amazon Elastic Transcoder” webinar on May 29, 2013 at 10am Pacific time.

We are excited to announce the availability of Parallel Scan, a new feature that allows you to access your Amazon DynamoDB data even more quickly than before. In addition, we have made it up to four times cheaper to read large amounts of data out of Amazon DynamoDB. This also reduces the cost of copying your data from Amazon DynamoDB to Amazon Redshift. You can read more about these improvements 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.

We are delighted to announce that the AWS Management Console for the AWS GovCloud (US) region now supports Amazon Simple Workflow (Amazon SWF)!

The AWS GovCloud (US) region is designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your AWS GovCloud (US) resources.

Amazon Simple Workflow is a service to coordinate work across multiple machines. With our APIs, ease-of-use libraries, and control engine, you can build multi-step application components that are independent of any single component’s state and progress. This allows you to change and scale your business logic with greater selectivity and ease – across the AWS Cloud or your own data centers.

With Amazon Simple Workflow, there is no need to write your own state machine or infrastructure code. Instead, you can focus on writing the business logic that makes your application unique. The AWS Management Console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage these powerful capabilities of Amazon SWF. Instructions on how to access the console are available in our Users Guide.

To learn more about the service, please visit the Amazon SWF detail page, the AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started!

We are excited to announce AWS OpsWorks now offers a convenient view of the Amazon CloudWatch metrics generated by your OpsWorks instances. Without any additional costs or setup you can see thirteen one-minute metrics that provide an overview of the state of your instances. All metrics are automatically collected, grouped, and filtered. You can start with an overview of CPU, memory and load summarized by stack and then drill down to specific layers and instances. All metrics can be used to create alarms via Amazon CloudWatch.

A few clicks in the the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading how to use the OpsWorks monitoring view.

We are excited to announce developers can now add Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to their OpsWorks application stacks and get all the built-in capabilities ELB is known for, including:

• Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming application traffic.
• SSL certificates are stored using IAM credentials, allowing you to control who can see your private keys.
• Elastic Load Balancing spans multiple AZs for reliability, but provides a single DNS name for simplicity.
• Elastic Load Balancing metrics such as request count and request latency are reported by Amazon CloudWatch.
• By default, Elastic Load Balancing supports SSL termination at the Load Balancer, including offloading SSL decryption from application instances, centralized management of SSL certificates, and encryption to back-end instances with optional public key authentication.

A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading the OpsWorks documentation.

We are excited to announce the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center. The AWS Management Pack enables you to view and monitor your AWS resources directly in the System Center Operations Manager console. This way, you can use a single, familiar console to monitor all your resources, whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud.

The AWS Management Pack gives you a consolidated view of your AWS resources across regions and Availability Zones. It also has built-in integration with Amazon CloudWatch so that the metrics and alarms defined in Amazon CloudWatch surface as performance counters and alerts in Operations Manager. With the AWS Management Pack, you can gain a deep insight into the health and performance of your applications running within the Amazon EC2 instances. The diagram view generated by the management pack makes it easy to traverse between the application and the infrastructure hosting it, with just a few clicks.

The AWS Management Pack is available for “System Center 2012 – Operations Manager” and “System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2”.

To learn more or download the AWS Management Pack, visit https://aws.amazon.com/windows/system-center/.

We are delighted to make two important announcements today - a new AWS Direct Connect location in Seattle supporting the AWS US West (Oregon) region and support for AWS Direct Connect to the AWS GovCloud (US) region from any AWS Direct Connect location are both now available!

You can use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection from your datacenter, office, or colocation environment to AWS. Connections are always made to a particular Direct Connect location, and can run at either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps.

Instructions on how to set up AWS Direct Connect are available in our AWS Direct Connect Users Guide. For AWS GovCloud (US) access, please see the AWS GovCloud (US) Users Guide.

Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on May 14th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST to learn more about AWS Direct Connect for the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

Sign in to your AWS Management Console to order AWS Direct Connect today!

We are excited to announce support for up to 4,000 IOPS per Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volume. This represents a fourfold increase from the original Provisioned IOPS volume performance since its launch last year. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to provide predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads such as databases, distributed file systems and other enterprise applications; all of which are available on AWS Marketplace.

You can get up to 4,000 IOPS from one volume. For performance beyond 4,000 IOPS, you can attach and stripe multiple volumes to deliver thousands of IOPS to your application. You can set the level of performance you need and EBS will consistently deliver it over the lifetime of the volume. To enable your Amazon EC2 instance to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, we recommend launching them as "EBS-optimized" instances, which deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. The EBS-optimized option is currently available for our m1.large, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m2.4xlarge, m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge and c1.xlarge instance types.

One way to get started with Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS is to launch a product from AWS Marketplace with 1-Click. AWS Marketplace is an online store where you can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS such as high-performance versions of MongoDB, NuoDB and OrangeFS. You can learn more about these products on the AWS Marketplace Provisioned IOPS information page.

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-optimized instances and AWS Marketplace products are now supported in all AWS regions except GovCloud. For more information on using Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, please see the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide.

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of the AWS SDK for Node.js. This SDK enables developers to tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud from their Node.js applications. Since releasing the Developer Preview of the AWS SDK for Node.js in December, we expanded support to cover the full set of AWS services, collaborated with the community to fine tune the SDK design patterns, and added a few new features. The latest SDK now supports proxy servers, IAM roles on EC2 instances, and optionally using a Stream interface on operations.

This release moves the SDK to a stable API. Read the Getting Started Guide to begin using the SDK in your Node.js project.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) now supports S3 Server Side Encryption. This feature is useful for any customers that need to move or process large amounts of sensitive data. S3 Server Side Encryption (S3 SSE) makes it easy to encrypt data stored at rest in S3. With S3 SSE, every S3 object is encrypted with a unique key; the key itself is encrypted with a regularly rotated master key. Decryption happens automatically when data is retrieved. S3DistCp is an EMR feature that uses MapReduce to efficiently move large amounts of data from S3 into HDFS, from HDFS to S3, and between S3 buckets. EMR S3DistCp now supports S3 SSE.

To learn more about this feature, please visit EMR’s Developer Guide.

We are excited to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Seoul, Korea to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. This is our first edge location in Korea and each new edge location helps to lower latency and improve performance for your end users. We plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.

If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don't need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Amazon Route 53 is designed to be fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNS servers. Queries for your domain are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server, and thus answered with the best possible performance.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no required minimum commitments.

Like all Amazon CloudFront edge locations, our Seoul edge location supports all Amazon CloudFront features. With the addition of this location, Amazon CloudFront now has a total of 40 edge locations worldwide.

To learn more, please visit the detail page for Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53.