Author: Jeff Barr

If your application needs to process, store, or transmit credit card data, you are probably familiar with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, otherwise known as PCI DSS. This standard specifies best practices and security controls needed to keep credit card data safe and secure during transit, processing, and storage. Among other things, it […]

In 1995 I registered my first domain name and put it online. Back then, registration was expensive and complex. Before you could even register a domain you had to convince at least two of your friends to host the Domain Name Service (DNS) records for it. These days, domain registration is inexpensive and simple. DNS […]

We just added a new BatchDeleteAttributes call to Amazon SimpleDB and you can read all about it in the SimpleDB Developer Guide. This new call will make it easier and quicker for you to delete multiple attributes or multiple items with one request. SimpleDB processes this call more efficiently than it does a series of […]

The Amazon CloudWatch team has put together a really impressive set of new features. Too many, in fact, to fit on this page. I’ve written a series of posts with all of the information. Here’s a summary, with links to each post: Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. […]

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your EC2 instances at no additional charge. CPU load, disk I/O, and network I/O metrics are collected at five minute intervals and stored for two weeks. We call this Basic Monitoring. You can also choose more Detailed Monitoring (one minute intervals) at a cost of $0.015 / […]

Auto Scaling can now take advantage of the instance health information collected by the associated Elastic Load Balancer. Specifically, once a load balancer determines that an instance is unhealthy (using the health checks that were established when the load balancer was created), Auto Scaling can be instructed to terminate the unhealthy instances and to launch […]

The new CloudWatch Alarms feature allows you to watch CloudWatch metrics and to receive notifications when the metrics fall outside of the levels (high or low thresholds) that you configure. You can attach multiple Alarms to each metric and each one can have multiple actions. Here’s how they relate to each other: A CloudWatch Alarm […]

The development team likes to call this feature the “Big Red Button.” You can use CloudWatch’s Auto Scaling feature to scale your EC2 capacity up and down according to conditions that you define. You do this by creating an AutoScaling Group and attaching a trigger to it. A trigger uses CloudWatch Alarms to reference a […]

Perhaps you expect a lot of traffic as part of a planned announcement and you want to increase the size of your EC2 fleet just ahead of your press release. Maybe your site is busy once a day because you have a daily deal or a daily special, or only on weekends when people are […]

The new release of Auto Scaling gives you better control over the policies used to modify the number of EC2 instances running in one of your AutoScaling groups. Auto Scaling now emits metrics for each AutoScalingGroup. You can use CloudWatch to monitor your group size, instances being launched and terminated, and other group activity. Policies […]