Author: Jeff Barr

Amir of Diversion, Inc. wrote to tell me about his company’s newest release, an AWS-powered Facebook game called FameTown. FameTown lets you play the role of a movie star in a digital version of Hollywood. You can start on the D-List (a total unknown) and attempt to progress to the A-List, earning points by completing […]

In the last year or two we’ve added free tiers of service to Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SimpleDB. We have learned that developers like to be able to try out our services without having to pay to do so. In many cases, they have created non-trivial applications that can run entirely within the […]

We added SSL support to the Elastic Load Balancer a couple of weeks ago. This met the needs of many of our users, but not all of them. Some of our users wanted to be able to tell if the HTTP requests arriving at their EC2 servers had been transmitted across the Internet using HTTPS. […]

We’ll accept the final entries for the 2010 AWS Start-Up Challenge at 11:59:59 PM (PT) on October 31, 2010.If you have been planning to submit your entry, now is the time. Sean Knapp, CTO and Founder of 2007 winner Ooyala, had this to say about the challenge: Participating in the AWS Start-Up Challenge was a […]

As AWS technology evangelists, we often meet startups working on cool stuff.  Every so often we discover startups that have done incredible things on AWS.  Recently, I came across Navitas, a Berkeley-based company with development teams in Silicon Valley, Ecuador, and Thailand. Since I am deeply interested in location-based services and geo apps in the […]

Early next month, Khawaja Shams and John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be speaking at QCon 2010 in San Francisco. The title of their session is Out of This World Cloud Computing. Here’s the description: This session will present MER operations as an excellent candidate for cloud computing. MER is the first NASA […]

We’ve partnered with Apptis to make FISMA-compliant cloud services available to the United States Government at FedCloud. Apptis has been awarded a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) contract from the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service. Under the agreement, Apptis will use AWS to provide technology infrastructure that enables government […]

We will stop accepting entries for the 2010 AWS Start-Up Challenge at midnight PST on October 31, 2010. I was lucky enough to be chosen to be one of the judges and I can’t wait to start reviewing the submissions. There are some great prizes (topping out at $50,000 in cash and another $50,000 in […]

Our customers have used Amazon Elastic MapReduce to process very large-scale data sets using an array of Amazon EC2 instances. One such customer, Seattle’s Razorfish, was able to side-step the need for a capital investment of over $500K while also speeding up their daily processing cycle (read more in our Razorfish case study). Our implementation […]

Ho hum – another web site (pictured at right) running on Amazon EC2. No big deal, right? Actually, it is a pretty big deal. Take look at the top left of the site. What does it say? An Official Website of the United States Government A number of US Government regulations, including an important one […]