Author: Jeff Barr

Colin Percival (developer of Tarsnap) wrote to tell me that the FreeBSD operating system is now running on Amazon EC2 in experimental fashion. According to his FreeBSD on EC2 blog post, version 9.0-CURRENT of FreeBSD is now available in the US East (Northern Virginia) region and can be run on t1.micro instances. Colin expects to […]

A number of our customers want to store very large files in Amazon S3 — scientific or medical data, high resolution video content, backup files, and so forth. Until now, they have had to store and reference the files as separate chunks of 5 gigabytes (GB) or less. So, when a customer wanted to access […]

The Mechanical Turk now has a blog of its very own. The new Mechanical Turk blog will be used to share information with Mechanical Turk Requesters, Workers, and fans of the Mechanical Turk marketplace. It will include product announcements, how-to guides, best practices, case studies, and examples of how businesses are using Mechanical Turk for […]

We want to make it easier for developers to build AWS applications on mobile devices. Today we are introducing new SDKs for AWS Development on devices that run the Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems (iPhones, iPads, and the iPod Touch). The AWS SDK for Android and the AWS SDK for iOS provide developers […]

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 […]