AWS Blog

EC2 Spot Instances give you access to spare EC2 compute capacity at up to 90% off of the On-Demand rates. Starting with the ability to request a specific number of instances of a particular size, we made Spot Instances even more useful and flexible with support for Spot Fleets and Auto Scaling Spot Fleets, allowing you to maintain any desired level of compute capacity.

EC2 users have long had the ability to stop running instances while leaving EBS volumes attached, opening the door to applications that automatically pick up where they left off when the instance starts running again.

Stop and Resume Spot Workloads
Today we are blending these two important features, allowing you to set up Spot bids and Spot Fleets that respond by stopping (rather than terminating) instances when capacity is no longer available at or below your bid price. EBS volumes attached to stopped instances remain intact, as does the EBS-backed root volume. When capacity becomes available, the instances are started and can keep on going without having to spend time provisioning applications, setting up EBS volumes, downloading data, joining network domains, and so forth.

Many AWS customers have enhanced their applications to create and make use of checkpoints, adding some resilience and gaining the ability to take advantage of EC2’s start/stop feature in the process. These customers will now be able to run these applications on Spot Instances, with savings that average 70-90%.

While the instances are stopped, you can modify the EBS Optimization, User data, Ramdisk ID, and Delete on Termination attributes. Stopped Spot Instances do not incur any charges for compute time; space for attached EBS volumes is charged at the usual rates.

Here’s how you create a Spot bid or Spot Fleet and specify the use of stop/start:

Things to Know
This feature is available now and you can start using it today in all AWS Regions where Spot Instances are available. It is designed to work well in conjunction with the new per-second billing for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, with the potential for another dimension of cost savings over and above that provided by Spot Instances.

EBS volumes always exist within a particular Availability Zone (AZ). As a result, Spot and Spot Fleet requests that specify a particular AZ will always restart in that AZ.

Take care when using this feature in conjunction with Spot Fleets that have the potential to span a wide variety of instance types. Because the composition of the fleet can change over time, you need to pay attention to your account’s limits for IP addresses and EBS volumes.

I’m looking forward to hearing about the new and creative uses that you’ll come up with for this feature. If you thought that your application was not a good fit for Spot Instances, or if the overhead needed to handle interruptions was too high, it is time to take another look!

— Jeff;

Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power. When we launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news. The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types.

Today, services like AWS Lambda prove that we can do a lot of useful work in a short time. Many of our customers are dreaming up applications for EC2 that can make good use of a large number of instances for shorter amounts of time, sometimes just a few minutes.

Per-Second Billing for EC2 and EBS
Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments.

Per-second billing also applies to Amazon EMR and AWS Batch:

Amazon EMR – Our customers add capacity to their EMR clusters in order to get their results more quickly. With per-second billing for the EC2 instances in the clusters, adding nodes is more cost-effective than ever.

AWS Batch – Many of the batch jobs that our customers run complete in less than an hour. AWS Batch already launches and terminates Spot Instances; with per-second billing batch processing will become even more economical.

Some of our more sophisticated customers have built systems to get the most value from EC2 by strategically choosing the most advantageous target instances when managing their gaming, ad tech, or 3D rendering fleets. Per-second billing obviates the need for this extra layer of instance management, and brings the costs savings to all customers and all workloads.

While this will result in a price reduction for many workloads (and you know we love price reductions), I don’t think that’s the most important aspect of this change. I believe that this change will inspire you to innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways. How can you use it to improve your support for continuous integration? Can it change the way that you provision transient environments for your dev and test workloads? What about your analytics, batch processing, and 3D rendering?

One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them. By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing.

Things to Know
This change is effective in all AWS Regions and will be effective October 2, for all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per-instance.

List prices and Spot Market prices are still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated down to the second, as is Reserved Instance usage (you can launch, use, and terminate multiple instances within an hour and get the Reserved Instance Benefit for all of the instances). Also, bills will show times in decimal form, like this:

The Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and products in AWS Marketplace are still billed on an hourly basis.

— Jeff;

The wait is over. September and October’s Partner Webinars have officially arrived! In case you missed the intro last month, the AWS Partner Webinar Series is a selection of live and recorded presentations covering a broad range of topics at varying technical levels and scale. A little different from our AWS Online TechTalks, each AWS Partner Webinar is hosted by an AWS solutions architect and an AWS Competency Partner who has successfully helped customers evaluate and implement the tools, techniques, and technologies of AWS.

September & October Partner Webinars:

SAP Migration
Velocity: How EIS Reduced Costs by 20% and Optimized SAP by Leveraging the Cloud
September 19, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Mactores: SAP on AWS: How UCT is Experiencing Better Performance on AWS While Saving 60% in Infrastructure Costs with Mactores
September 19, 2017 | 1:00 PM PDT

Accenture: Reduce Operating Costs and Accelerate Efficiency by Migrating Your SAP Applications to AWS with Accenture
September 20, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Capgemini: Accelerate your SAP HANA Migration with Capgemini & AWS FAST
September 21, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Salesforce
Salesforce IoT: Monetize your IOT Investment with Salesforce and AWS
September 27, 2017 | 10:00 am PDT

Salesforce Heroku: Build Engaging Applications with Salesforce Heroku and AWS
October 10, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Windows Migration
Cascadeo: How a National Transportation Software Provider Migrated a Mission-Critical Test Infrastructure to AWS with Cascadeo
September 26, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Datapipe: Optimize App Performance and Security by Managing Microsoft Workloads on AWS with Datapipe
September 27, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Datavail: Datavail Accelerates AWS Adoption for Sony DADC New Media Solutions
September 28, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Life Sciences

SAP, Deloitte & Turbot: Life Sciences Compliance on AWS
October 4, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Healthcare

AWS, ClearData & Cloudticity: Healthcare Compliance on AWS 
October 5, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Storage

NetApp: Give your SaaS Data Security with NetApp and AWS

September 20, 2017 | 9:00 am PDT

N2WS: Learn How Goodwill Industries Ensures 24/7 Data Availability on AWS
October 10, 2017 | 8:00 AM PDT

Big Data

Zoomdata: Taking Complexity Out of Data Science with AWS and Zoomdata
October 10, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Attunity: Cardinal Health: Moving Data to AWS in Real-Time with Attunity 
October 11, 2017 | 11:00 AM PDT

Splunk: How TrueCar Gains Actionable Insights with Splunk Cloud
October 18, 2017 | 9:00 AM PDT

The third annual Prime Day set another round of records for global orders, topping Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day in Amazon retail history. Over the course of the 30 hour event, tens of millions of Prime members purchased things like Echo Dots, Fire tablets, programmable pressure cookers, espresso machines, rechargeable batteries, and much more! July 11th also set a record for the number of new Prime memberships, as people signed up in order to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of deals. Amazon customers shopped online and made heavy use of the Amazon App, with mobile orders more than doubling from last Prime Day.

Powered by AWS
Last year I told you about How AWS Powered Amazon’s Biggest Day Ever, and shared what the team had learned with regard to preparation, automation, monitoring, and thinking big. All of those lessons still apply and you can read that post to learn more. Preparation for this year’s Prime Day (which started just days after Prime Day 2016 wrapped up) started by collecting and sharing best practices and identifying areas for improvement, proceeding to implementation and stress testing as the big day approached. Two of the best practices involve auditing and GameDay:

Auditing – This is a formal way for us to track preparations, identify risks, and to track progress against our objectives. Each team must respond to a series of detailed technical and operational questions that are designed to help them determine their readiness. On the technical side, questions could revolve around time to recovery after a database failure, including the all-important check of the TTL (time to live) for the CNAME. Operational questions address schedules for on-call personnel, points of contact, and ownership of services & instances.

GameDay – This practice (which I believe originated with former Amazonian Jesse Robbins), is intended to validate all of the capacity planning & preparation and to verify that all of the necessary operational practices are in place and work as expected. It introduces simulated failures and helps to train the team to identify and quickly resolve issues, building muscle memory in the process. It also tests failover and recovery capabilities, and can expose latent defects that are lurking under the covers. GameDays help teams to understand scaling drivers (page views, orders, and so forth) and gives them an opportunity to test their scaling practices. To learn more, read Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure or watch the video: GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction.

Prime Day 2017 Metrics
So, how did we do this year?

The AWS teams checked their dashboards and log files, and were happy to share their metrics with me. Here are a few of the most interesting ones:

Block Storage – Use of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) grew by 40% year-over-year, with aggregate data transfer jumping to 52 petabytes (a 50% increase) for the day and total I/O requests rising to 835 million (a 30% increase). The team told me that they loved the elasticity of EBS, and that they were able to ramp down on capacity after Prime Day concluded instead of being stuck with it.

NoSQL Database – Amazon DynamoDB requests from Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and the Amazon fulfillment centers totaled 3.34 trillion, peaking at 12.9 million per second. According to the team, the extreme scale, consistent performance, and high availability of DynamoDB let them meet needs of Prime Day without breaking a sweat.

Stack Creation – Nearly 31,000 AWS CloudFormation stacks were created for Prime Day in order to bring additional AWS resources on line.

API Usage – AWS CloudTrail processed over 50 billion events and tracked more than 419 billion calls to various AWS APIs, all in support of Prime Day.

Configuration Tracking – AWS Config generated over 14 million Configuration items for AWS resources.

You Can Do It
Running an event that is as large, complex, and mission-critical as Prime Day takes a lot of planning. If you have an event of this type in mind, please take a look at our new Infrastructure Event Readiness white paper. Inside, you will learn how to design and provision your applications to smoothly handle planned scaling events such as product launches or seasonal traffic spikes, with sections on automation, resiliency, cost optimization, event management, and more.

— Jeff;

Earlier this year I told you about our plan to launch EC2 instances with up to 16 TB of memory. Today I am happy to announce that the new x1e.32xlarge instances with 4 TB of DDR4 memory are available in four AWS Regions. As I wrote in my earlier post, these instances are designed to run SAP HANA and other memory intensive, in-memory applications. Many of our customers are already running production SAP applications on the existing x1.32xlarge instances. With today’s launch, these customers can now store and process far larger data sets, making them a great fit for larger production deployments.

Like the x1.32xlarge, the x1e.32xlarge is powered by quad socket Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 Haswell processors running at 2.3GHz (128 vCPUs), with large L3 caches, plenty of memory bandwidth, and support for C-state and P-state management.

On the network side, the instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth when launched within an EC2 placement group, powered by the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), with support for up to 8 Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) per instance. The instances are EBS-optimized by default, with an additional 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to your EBS volumes, and support for up to 80,000 IOPS per instance. Each instance also includes a pair of 1,920 GB SSD volumes.

A Few Notes
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding the x1e.32xlarge:

SAP Certification – The x1e.32xlarge instances are our largest cloud-native instances certified and supported by SAP for production HANA deployments of SAP Business Suite on HANA (SoH), SAP Business Warehouse on HANA (BWoH), and the next-generation SAP S/4HANA ERP and SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse solution. If you are already running SAP HANA workloads on smaller X1 instances, scaling up will be quick and easy. The SAP HANA on the AWS Cloud Quick Start Reference Deployment has been updated and will help you to set up a deployment that follows SAP and AWS standards for high performance and reliability. The SAP HANA Hardware Directory and the SAP HANA Sizing Guidelines are also relevant.

Reserved Instances – The regional size flexibility for Reserved Instances does not apply across x1 and x1e.

Now Available
The x1e.32xlarge instances can be launched in On-Demand and Reserved Instance form via the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, and AWS Marketplace in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions.

I would also like to make you aware of a couple of other upgrades to the X1 instances:

EBS – As part of today’s launch, existing X1 instances also support up to 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to EBS, along with 80,000 IOPS per instance.

Network – Earlier this week, we announced that existing x1.32xlarge instances also support up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth within placement groups.

— Jeff;

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has been an important part of AWS since 2009, when it was launched as part of a three-pack that also included Auto Scaling and Amazon CloudWatch. Since that time we have added many features, and also introduced the Application Load Balancer. Designed to support application-level, content-based routing to applications that run in containers, Application Load Balancers pair well with microservices, streaming, and real-time workloads.

Over the years, our customers have used ELB to support web sites and applications that run at almost any scale — from simple sites running on a T2 instance or two, all the way up to complex applications that run on large fleets of higher-end instances and handle massive amounts of traffic. Behind the scenes, ELB monitors traffic and automatically scales to meet demand. This process, which includes a generous buffer of headroom, has become quicker and more responsive over the years and works well even for our customers who use ELB to support live broadcasts, “flash” sales, and holidays. However, in some situations such as instantaneous fail-over between regions, or extremely spiky workloads, we have worked with our customers to pre-provision ELBs in anticipation of a traffic surge.

New Network Load Balancer
Today we are introducing the new Network Load Balancer (NLB). It is designed to handle tens of millions of requests per second while maintaining high throughput at ultra low latency, with no effort on your part. The Network Load Balancer is API-compatible with the Application Load Balancer, including full programmatic control of Target Groups and Targets. Here are some of the most important features:

Static IP Addresses – Each Network Load Balancer provides a single IP address for each VPC subnet in its purview. If you have targets in a subnet in us-west-2a and other targets in a subnet in us-west-2c, NLB will create and manage two IP addresses (one per subnet); connections to that IP address will spread traffic across the instances in the subnet. You can also specify an existing Elastic IP for each subnet for even greater control. With full control over your IP addresses, Network Load Balancer can be used in situations where IP addresses need to be hard-coded into DNS records, customer firewall rules, and so forth.

Zonality – The IP-per-subnet feature reduces latency with improved performance, improves availability through isolation and fault tolerance and makes the use of Network Load Balancers transparent to your client applications. Network Load Balancers also attempt to route a series of requests from a particular source to targets in a single subnet while still allowing automatic failover.

Source Address Preservation – With Network Load Balancer, the original source IP address and source ports for the incoming connections remain unmodified, so application software need not support X-Forwarded-For, proxy protocol, or other workarounds. This also means that normal firewall rules, including VPC Security Groups, can be used on targets.

Long-running Connections – NLB handles connections with built-in fault tolerance, and can handle connections that are open for months or years, making them a great fit for IoT, gaming, and messaging applications.

Failover – Powered by Route 53 health checks, NLB supports failover between IP addresses within and across regions.

Creating a Network Load Balancer
I can create a Network Load Balancer opening up the EC2 Console, selecting Load Balancers, and clicking on Create Load Balancer:

I choose Network Load Balancer and click on Create, then enter the details. I can choose an Elastic IP address for each subnet in the target VPC and I can tag the Network Load Balancer:

Then I click on Configure Routing and create a new target group. I enter a name, and then choose the protocol and port. I can also set up health checks that go to the traffic port or to the alternate of my choice:

Then I click on Register Targets and the EC2 instances that will receive traffic, and click on Add to registered:

I make sure that everything looks good and then click on Create:

The state of my new Load Balancer is provisioning, switching to active within a minute or so:

For testing purposes, I simply grab the DNS name of the Load Balancer from the console (in practice I would use Amazon Route 53 and a more friendly name):

Then I sent it a ton of traffic (I intended to let it run for just a second or two but got distracted and it created a huge number of processes, so this was a happy accident):

$ while true;
> do
>   wget http://nlb-1-6386cc6bf24701af.elb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/phpinfo2.php &
> done

A more disciplined test would use a tool like Bees with Machine Guns, of course!

I took a quick break to let some traffic flow and then checked the CloudWatch metrics for my Load Balancer, finding that it was able to handle the sudden onslaught of traffic with ease:

I also looked at my EC2 instances to see how they were faring under the load (really well, it turns out):

It turns out that my colleagues did run a more disciplined test than I did. They set up a Network Load Balancer and backed it with an Auto Scaled fleet of EC2 instances. They set up a second fleet composed of hundreds of EC2 instances, each running Bees with Machine Guns and configured to generate traffic with highly variable request and response sizes. Beginning at 1.5 million requests per second, they quickly turned the dial all the way up, reaching over 3 million requests per second and 30 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth before maxing out their test resources.

Choosing a Load Balancer
As always, you should consider the needs of your application when you choose a load balancer. Here are some guidelines:

Network Load Balancer (NLB) – Ideal for load balancing of TCP traffic, NLB is capable of handling millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies. NLB is optimized to handle sudden and volatile traffic patterns while using a single static IP address per Availability Zone.

Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Ideal for advanced load balancing of HTTP and HTTPS traffic, ALB provides advanced request routing that supports modern application architectures, including microservices and container-based applications.

Classic Load Balancer (CLB) – Ideal for applications that were built within the EC2-Classic network.

For a side-by-side feature comparison, see the Elastic Load Balancer Details table.

If you are currently using a Classic Load Balancer and would like to migrate to a Network Load Balancer, take a look at our new Load Balancer Copy Utility. This Python tool will help you to create a Network Load Balancer with the same configuration as an existing Classic Load Balancer. It can also register your existing EC2 instances with the new load balancer.

Pricing & Availability
Like the Application Load Balancer, pricing is based on Load Balancer Capacity Units, or LCUs. Billing is $0.006 per LCU, based on the highest value seen across the following dimensions:

• Bandwidth – 1 GB per LCU.
• New Connections – 800 per LCU.
• Active Connections – 100,000 per LCU.

Most applications are bandwidth-bound and should see a cost reduction (for load balancing) of about 25% when compared to Application or Classic Load Balancers.

Network Load Balancers are available today in all AWS commercial regions except China (Beijing), supported by AWS CloudFormation, Auto Scaling, and Amazon ECS.

— Jeff;

As a school supply aficionado, the month of September has always held a special place in my heart. Nothing sets the tone for success like getting a killer deal on pens and a crisp college ruled notebook. Even if back to school shopping trips have secured a seat in your distant memory, this is still a perfect time of year to stock up on office supplies and set aside some time for flexing those learning muscles. A great way to get started: scan through our September Tech Talks and check out the ones that pique your interest. This month we are covering re:Invent, AI, and much more.

September 2017 – Schedule

Noted below are the upcoming scheduled live, online technical sessions being held during the month of September. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts.

Webinars featured this month are:

Monday, September 11

Databases

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: What’s New with Amazon DynamoDB

Serverless

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Local Testing and Deployment Best Practices for Serverless Applications

Containers

12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: Managing Secrets for Containers with Amazon ECS

Tuesday, September 12

re:Invent

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: Get Ready for re:Invent 2017 Content Overview

Mobile

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Deep Dive on User Sign-up and Sign-in with Amazon Cognito

Management Tools

12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: Using CloudTrail to Enhance Compliance and Governance of S3

Wednesday, September 13

Big Data

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: Best Practices for Processing Managed Hadoop Workloads

Databases

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Migrating Your Oracle Database to PostgreSQL

DevOps

12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: Configuration Management in the Cloud

Thursday, September 14

Big Data

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: Tackle Your Dark Data Challenge with AWS Glue

Databases

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Deep Dive on MySQL Databases on AWS

Compute

12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: Using AWS Batch and AWS Step Functions to Design and Run High-Throughput Workflows

Tuesday, September 26

AI

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: An Overview of AI on the AWS Platform

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) with Apache MXNet

Storage

12:00 – 12:40 PM PDT: Revolutionizing Backup & Recovery Using Amazon S3

Enterprise

2:00 – 2:40 PM PDT: Securing Your Desktops with Amazon WorkSpaces

Wednesday, September 27

Security & Identity

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: Advanced DNS Traffic Management using Amazon Route 53

Storage

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: Deep Dive on Amazon EFS (with Encryption)

Hands on Lab

12:30 – 2:00 PM PDT: Hands on Lab: Windows Workloads

Thursday, September 28

Security & Identity

9:00 – 9:40 AM PDT: How to use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP Top 10 attacks

IoT

10:30 – 11:10 AM PDT: AWS Greengrass Technical Deep Dive with Demo

Hands on Lab

1:00 – 1:40 PM PDT: Design, Deploy, and Optimize SQL Server on AWS

The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.

– Sara

I told you about the new AWS Application Load Balancer last year and showed you how to use it to do implement Layer 7 (application) routing to EC2 instances and to microservices running in containers.

Some of our customers are building hybrid applications as part of a longer-term move to AWS. These customers have told us that they would like to use a single Application Load Balancer to spread traffic across a combination of existing on-premises resources and new resources running in the AWS Cloud. Other customers would like to spread traffic to web or database servers that are scattered across two or more Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), host multiple services on the same instance with distinct IP addresses but a common port number, and to offer support for IP-based virtual hosting for clients that do not support Server Name Indication (SNI). Another group of customers would like to host multiple instances of a service on the same instance (perhaps within containers), while using multiple interfaces and security groups to implement fine-grained access control.

These situations arise within a broad set of hybrid, migration, disaster recovery, and on-premises use cases and scenarios.

Route to IP Addresses
In order to address these use cases, Application Load Balancers can now route traffic directly to IP addresses. These addresses can be in the same VPC as the ALB, a peer VPC in the same region, on an EC2 instance connected to a VPC by way of ClassicLink, or on on-premises resources at the other end of a VPN connection or AWS Direct Connect connection.

Application Load Balancers already group targets in to target groups. As part of today’s launch, each target group now has a target type attribute:

instance – Targets are registered by way of EC2 instance IDs, as before.

ip – Targets are registered as IP addresses. You can use any IPv4 address from the load balancer’s VPC CIDR for targets within load balancer’s VPC and any IPv4 address from the RFC 1918 ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16) or the RFC 6598 range (100.64.0.0/10) for targets located outside the load balancer’s VPC (this includes Peered VPC, EC2-Classic, and on-premises targets reachable over Direct Connect or VPN).

Each target group has a load balancer and health check configuration, and publishes metrics to CloudWatch, as has always been the case.

Let’s say that you are in the transition phase of an application migration to AWS or want to use AWS to augment on-premises resources with EC2 instances and you need to distribute application traffic across both your AWS and on-premises resources. You can achieve this by registering all the resources (AWS and on-premises) to the same target group and associate the target group with a load balancer. Alternatively, you can use DNS based weighted load balancing across AWS and on-premises resources using two load balancers i.e. one load balancer for AWS and other for on-premises resources. In the scenario where application-A back-ends are in VPC and application-B back-ends are in on-premises locations then you can put back-ends for each application in different target groups and use content based routing to route traffic to each target group.

Creating a Target Group
Here’s how I create a target group that sends traffic to some IP addresses as part of the process of creating an Application Load Balancer. I enter a name (ip-target-1) and select ip as the Target type:

Then I enter IP address targets. These can be from the VPC that hosts the load balancer:

Or they can be other private IP addresses within one of the private ranges listed above, for targets outside of the VPC that hosts the load balancer:

After I review the settings and create the load balancer, traffic will be sent to the designated IP addresses as soon as they pass the health checks. Each load balancer can accommodate up to 1000 targets.

I can examine my target group and edit the set of targets at any time:

As you can see, one of my targets was not healthy when I took this screen shot (this was by design). Metrics are published to CloudWatch for each target group; I can see them in the Console and I can create CloudWatch Alarms:

Available Now
This feature is available now and you can start using it today in all AWS Regions.

— Jeff;

There’s no doubt about it – Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and how it operates. Across industries, organizations from startups to Fortune 500s are embracing AI to develop new products, services, and opportunities that are more efficient and accessible for their consumers. From driverless cars to better preventative healthcare to smart home devices, AI is driving innovation at a fast rate and will continue to play a more important role in our everyday lives.

This month we’d like to highlight startups using AI solutions to help companies grow. We are pleased to feature:

• SignalBox – a simple and accessible deep learning platform to help businesses get started with AI.
• Valossa – an AI video recognition platform for the media and entertainment industry.
• Kaliber – innovative applications for businesses using facial recognition, deep learning, and big data.

SignalBox (UK)

In 2016, SignalBox founder Alain Richardt was hearing the same comments being made by developers, data scientists, and business leaders. They wanted to get into deep learning but didn’t know where to start. Alain saw an opportunity to commodify and apply deep learning by providing a platform that does the heavy lifting with an easy-to-use web interface, blueprints for common tasks, and just a single-click to productize the models. With SignalBox, companies can start building deep learning models with no coding at all – they just select a data set, choose a network architecture, and go. SignalBox also offers step-by-step tutorials, tips and tricks from industry experts, and consulting services for customers that want an end-to-end AI solution.

SignalBox offers a variety of solutions that are being used across many industries for energy modeling, fraud detection, customer segmentation, insurance risk modeling, inventory prediction, real estate prediction, and more. Existing data science teams are using SignalBox to accelerate their innovation cycle. One innovative UK startup, Energi Mine, recently worked with SignalBox to develop deep networks that predict anomalous energy consumption patterns and do time series predictions on energy usage for businesses with hundreds of sites.

SignalBox uses a variety of AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon Elastic Block Store, and Amazon S3. The ability to rapidly provision EC2 GPU instances has been a critical factor in their success – both in terms of keeping their operational expenses low, as well as speed to market. The Amazon API Gateway has allowed for operational automation, giving SignalBox the ability to control its infrastructure.

To learn more about SignalBox, visit here.

Valossa (Finland)

As students at the University of Oulu in Finland, the Valossa founders spent years doing research in the computer science and AI labs. During that time, the team witnessed how the world was moving beyond text, with video playing a greater role in day-to-day communication. This spawned an idea to use technology to automatically understand what an audience is viewing and share that information with a global network of content producers. Since 2015, Valossa has been building next generation AI applications to benefit the media and entertainment industry and is moving beyond the capabilities of traditional visual recognition systems.

Valossa’s AI is capable of analyzing any video stream. The AI studies a vast array of data within videos and converts that information into descriptive tags, categories, and overviews automatically. Basically, it sees, hears, and understands videos like a human does. The Valossa AI can detect people, visual and auditory concepts, key speech elements, and labels explicit content to make moderating and filtering content simpler. Valossa’s solutions are designed to provide value for the content production workflow, from media asset management to end-user applications for content discovery. AI-annotated content allows online viewers to jump directly to their favorite scenes or search specific topics and actors within a video.

Valossa leverages AWS to deliver the industry’s first complete AI video recognition platform. Using Amazon EC2 GPU instances, Valossa can easily scale their computation capacity based on customer activity. High-volume video processing with GPU instances provides the necessary speed for time-sensitive workflows. The geo-located Availability Zones in EC2 allow Valossa to bring resources close to their customers to minimize network delays. Valossa also uses Amazon S3 for video ingestion and to provide end-user video analytics, which makes managing and accessing media data easy and highly scalable.

To see how Valossa works, check out www.WhatIsMyMovie.com or enable the Alexa Skill, Valossa Movie Finder. To try the Valossa AI, sign up for free at www.valossa.com.

Kaliber (San Francisco, CA)

Serial entrepreneurs Ray Rahman and Risto Haukioja founded Kaliber in 2016. The pair had previously worked in startups building smart cities and online privacy tools, and teamed up to bring AI to the workplace and change the hospitality industry. Our world is designed to appeal to our senses – stores and warehouses have clearly marked aisles, products are colorfully packaged, and we use these designs to differentiate one thing from another. We tell each other apart by our faces, and previously that was something only humans could measure or act upon. Kaliber is using facial recognition, deep learning, and big data to create solutions for business use. Markets and companies that aren’t typically associated with cutting-edge technology will be able to use their existing camera infrastructure in a whole new way, making them more efficient and better able to serve their customers.

Computer video processing is rapidly expanding, and Kaliber believes that video recognition will extend to far more than security cameras and robots. Using the clients’ network of in-house cameras, Kaliber’s platform extracts key data points and maps them to actionable insights using their machine learning (ML) algorithm. Dashboards connect users to the client’s BI tools via the Kaliber enterprise APIs, and managers can view these analytics to improve their real-world processes, taking immediate corrective action with real-time alerts. Kaliber’s Real Metrics are aimed at combining the power of image recognition with ML to ultimately provide a more meaningful experience for all.

Kaliber uses many AWS services, including Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 GPU instances, and Amazon S3. These services have been instrumental in helping Kaliber meet the needs of enterprise customers in record time.

Learn more about Kaliber here.

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Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next month!

-Tina

I’m often impressed when I look back to the early days of EC2 and see just how many features from the launch have survived until today. AMIs, Availability Zones, KeyPairs, Security Groups, and Security Group Rules were all present at the beginning, as was pay-as-you-go usage. Even though we have made innumerable additions to the service in the past eleven years, the fundamentals formed a strong base and are still prominent today.

We put security first from the get-go, and gave you the ability to use Security Groups and Security Group Rules to exercise fine-grained control over the traffic that flows to and from to your instances. Our customers make extensive use of this feature, with large collections of groups and even larger collections of rules.

There was, however, one problem! While each group had an associated description (“Production Web Server Access”, “Development Access”, and so forth), the individual rules did not. Some of our larger customers created external tracking systems to ensure that they captured the intent behind each rule. This was tedious and error prone, and now it is unnecessary!

Descriptions for Security Group Rules
You can now add descriptive text to each of your Security Group Rules! This will simplify your operations and remove some opportunities for operator error. Descriptions can be up to 255 characters long and can be set and viewed from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and the AWS APIs. You can enter a description when you create a new rule and you can edit descriptions for existing rules.

Here’s how I can enter descriptions when creating a new Security Group (Of course, allowing SSH access from arbitrary IP addresses is not a best practice):

I can select my Security Group and review all of the descriptions:

I can also click on the Edit button to modify the rules and the descriptions.

From the CLI I can include a description when I use the authorize-security-group-ingress and authorize-security-group-egress commands. I can use update-security-group-rule-descriptions-ingress and update-security-group-rule-descriptions-egress to change an existing description, and describe-security-groups to see the descriptions for each rule.

This feature is available now and you can start using it today in all commercial AWS Regions. It works for VPC Security Groups and for EC2 Classic Security Groups. CloudFormation support is on the way!

— Jeff;