Author: Jeff Barr

‘Building powerful web applications in the AWS cloud’ is a (fictional) love story about scalability. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a boy named Andy. Andy, like other 25-year olds, was having a tough time to find a friday-night date. Every Thursday, he used to be frustrated and impatient about […]

We’ve added some new features to the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console to make it even more powerful and even easier to use. You can now change the instance type of a stopped, EBS-backed EC2 instance. This means that you can scale up or scale down as your needs change. The new instance […]

You can now run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on EC2’s Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances. As I noted in the post that I wrote last year when this distribution became available on the other instance types, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a proven, commercially supported Linux platform that is ideal for development, test, and […]

We’ve teamed up with JumpBox to make it even easier and less expensive for you to host a WordPress blog, publish a web site with Drupal, run a Wiki with MediaWiki, or publish content with Joomla. You can benefit from two separate offers: The new JumpBox free tier trial for AWS customers lets you launch […]

The folks at ActiveState have cooked up an ActivePython AMI to make it easy for you to build and deploy web application written in Python.You can get started in minutes without having to download, install, or configure anything. The AMI is based on the 64-bit version of Ubuntu and includes MySQL, SQLite, Apache, ActivePython, Django, […]

The new Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector is a virtual appliance (vApp) plug-in for VMware vCenter. Once installed, you can import virtual machines from your VMware vSphere infrastructure into Amazon EC2 using the GUI that you are already familiar with. This feature builds on top of the VM Import feature that I blogged about late […]

When you create an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) DB Instance you need to specify the desired times for the daily backup window and the weekly maintenance window: If you have enabled backups for a particular DB Instance (by setting the Backup Retention Period to a non-zero value), Amazon RDS will create a snapshot backup […]

I have made many visits to Japan over the last several years to speak at conferences and to meet with developers. I really enjoy the people, the strong sense of community, and the cuisine. Over the years I have learned that there’s really no substitute for sitting down, face to face, with customers and potential […]

We have a plethora of trade shows, live events and webinars on our calendar for March of 2011. First, the trade shows and live events: March 1 – Chicago AWS User Group Meetup. March 2-4 – Game Developers Conference (San Francisco, CA). March 2-3 – Nikkei BP Cloud Days (Tokyo, Japan). March 5-7 – ESRI […]

The AWS Management Console now includes full support for AWS CloudFormation. You can create stacks from templates, monitor the creation process, access the parameters and the outputs, and terminate the stack when you are done with it. As is my custom, here’s a tour! Start out on the AWS CloudFormation tab. This tab displays all […]