Author: Jeff Barr

It is a great time to be a software developer with an entrepreneurial mindset. You can get access to development tools, startup resources, and much more at no charge or at a very low cost these days. You don’t need to get venture capital or max out your credit cards in order to get started. […]

Matt Gerber,CEO of managed service provider IT-Lifeline spent some time talking about AWS on camera. Here’s the full video: Matt enumerates the three main benefits that AWS provides him: cost, elasticity, and time to market (sometimes saving 6 months to a year for a new offering). He also talks about security and compliance, and about […]

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (code named “Denali”) has a lot of really intriguing features including high availability, columnstore indexes, self-service Business Intelligence, faster full-text search, data visualization, and improved security and compliance. Consult the feature guide for more information. In order to make it as easy as possible for you to test your applications with […]

  We have added some nice new features to the Simple Queue Service. You can now use batch operations to send and delete messages with greater efficiency and at a lower cost. You can make any of your queues into a delay queue for message queuing, and you can also use message timers to set […]

Due to an overwhelming response, the live registration for tomorrow’s AWS GovCloud Summit has been closed. We will be streaming the entire event and I invite you to sign up now. The event will feature keynote addresses by GSA CIO Casey Coleman and Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, customer presentations, how-to sessions, information on FISMA and […]

Over the past two months, we have had the opportunity to share several exciting developments regarding Spot Instances. We have told you how to Run Amazon Elastic MapReduce on EC2 Spot Instances, we published Four New Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Videos, and we outlined the excitement around Scientific Computing with EC2 Spot Instances. Others in […]

Are you thinking about kicking off a lean startup and wondering what the buzz is all about? In his new book, The Lean Startup, author and entrepreneur Eric Ries (co-founder of IMVU) outlines key principles of the ideal lean startup: Customer-centric, rapid iterations on the product. Application of agile software development methodologies. Use of platforms […]

The AWS Management Console now supports the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). You can create, inspect, and modify queues. You can post new messages to queues and you can peek at the messages in the queues. Here is a tour: You can see all of your message queues for the current region, along with the […]

You can now create custom IAM (Identity and Access Management) policy documents from the IAM tab of the AWS Management Console. You can use a custom policy document to gain access to a number of advanced IAM features such as limiting access by user agent, time, or IP address, requiring a secure transport, or even […]

A lot of technical tasks that seem simple in theory are often very complex to implement. For example, let’s say that you want to encrypt all of the data that you store in Amazon S3. You need to choose an encryption algorithm, create and store keys (while keeping the keys themselves safe from prying eyes), […]