AUGUST IN AWS

Aug 12, 2013

AWS CloudFormation Introduces Parallel Stack Creation and Nested Stack Updates

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion by using custom or predefined templates.

Parallel Stack Creation, Update and DeletionCloudFormation now creates updates and deletes resources in parallel in order to improve performance of these operations.

Nested Stack UpdatesCloudFormation allows nesting a stack as a resource inside a template. This feature has enabled design and creation of related stacks together.

To learn more about CloudFormation, visit the CloudFormation detail page, documentation, and watch this introductory video.

Aug 13, 2013

Announcing Mobile Push from Amazon SNS

App developers can now easily send push notifications to Apple, Google and Kindle Fire devices using one simple API, and easily scale from a few notifications a day to millions of notifications or higher.

The AWS Free Tier means all AWS customers can send one million push notifications per month across iOS, Android and Kindle platforms at no charge

To learn more about Amazon SNS Mobile Push, sign up for the webinar on August 29th, 2013. You can get started right away by visiting http://aws.amazon.com/sns/ today.

Aug 14, 2013

Amazon Route 53 Announces Zone File Import and Integrated Health Check Graphs

With the zone file import feature, it is now even easier to migrate a domain into Route 53. The Route 53 console now lets you import standard DNS zone files that can be exported from many DNS providers or standard DNS server software such as BIND. When you create a new Route 53 hosted zone for your domain, you now have the option to paste your zone file directly into the Route 53 console, and Route 53 will automatically create the records in your hosted zone.

To get started with zone file import, read our walkthrough in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide. You can also learn more about Route 53 DNS Failover and health checks in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Aug 16, 2013

Amazon Redshift - Resource-level IAM, improved CSV support and CRC32

Amazon Redshit is now with improved security and control by enabling you to construct resource-level AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for Amazon Redshift. It has improved loading by adding support for standard CSV double quote escaping, query flexibility by adding a new function for CRC32 and manageability by adding a restore progress indicator to the console.

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Aug 28, 2013

New Read Replica capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL

These capabilities enhance the manageability experience of your Read Replicas and will offer performance benefits for some of your use cases. Following are more details:

Create multiple Read Replicas in quick succession - You can now create multiple Read Replicas (limited to five per master) of the master database instance in quick succession without having to wait for the first or any subsequent create Read Replica operations to complete.

Take database snapshot and perform Point in Time Recovery operation of a Read Replica (supported for MySQL 5.6) You can now take database

snapshots and perform Point in Time Recovery operations of a Read Replica in addition to performing these operations on a master database instance.

Create a replica from an existing Read Replica (supported for MySQL 5.6) - You can now create a second-tier Read Replica from an existing first-tier Read Replica.

Refer to the Working with Read Replicas section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more.

Aug 28, 2013

AWS CloudFormation now available in AWS GovCloud (US)

AWS CloudFormation provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Sept 03, 2013

Announcing AWS Command Line Interface - General Availability

With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS services from the command line and automate them through scripts. The GA release supports 23 services and includes new file commands for Amazon S3. Using file system command syntax, you can easily list the contents of online buckets, upload a folder full of files, and synchronize local files with objects stored in Amazon S3.

To get started with the AWS CLI, see the User Guide.

Sept 04, 2013

New Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Capabilities

Customers requiring in-memory performance have taken advantage of Amazon ElastiCache to offload the operational responsibilities of their Memcached clusters. Below are the key highlights of the service:

Easy Administration: Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a fully managed Redis service with features to manage setup and configuration, security, monitoring, and handling of node failures.

Replication Support: Amazon ElastiCache for Redis allows you to create replicas for your Redis node in different AWS Availability Zones and allows the failover of the node to one of the replicas.

Seamless Integration: If you are running Redis on EC2, you can transfer its contents to a new Amazon ElastiCache for Redis node.

Simple Pay as You Go Pricing: Pick the node type that fits your application’s memory requirements. Refer to Amazon ElastiCache pricing for more details.

You can learn more by visiting the Amazon ElastiCache detail page or the AWS blog post, or join us for a webinar on ElastiCache for Redis on September 26.

Sep 04, 2013

Amazon RDS Supports New High Memory Instance with 244GB memory and 88 ECUs of compute capacity

AWS customers run a wide range of database workloads on Amazon RDS and have ever expanding memory, compute and IOPS requirements. This new instance type has 244GB of memory and 88ECUs of compute capacity (2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core processors).

This instance also operates on a high bandwidth network. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on this instance type, it is possible to realize up to 20,000 IOPS for MySQL, which is 60% more than previously realizable maximum IOPS of 12,500. These specifications make this instance type an ideal candidate for high performance workloads in enterprise, social media, mobile applications or gaming.

For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.

Sep 04, 2013

AWS OpsWorks announces support for Amazon VPC

With Amazon VPC, you can define a virtual network topology and customize the network configuration to closely resemble a traditional network that you might operate in your own datacenter. This release lets you take advantage of the application management benefits of AWS OpsWorks in your own isolated network to support common scenarios such as using a private source repository behind your firewall, running databases in a protected subnet, or using application servers in a private subnet behind a public load balancer.

To learn more about how to use AWS OpsWorks with Amazon VPC, see the documentation for a step-by-step example or join AWS OpsWorks webinar on September 12, 2013 at 10:00 AM PT.

Sept 05, 2013

New data migration capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL

These new capabilities allow you to perform near zero downtime data migration from your external MySQL database instances (running on-premise or on Amazon EC2) to your Amazon RDS MySQL database instances and vice versa.

With this new feature, once your initial baseline is set, you can simply configure your Amazon RDS instance as a replication target for your external MySQL instance and capture all the transactions that have occurred since the time you setup the initial baseline.

For more information about this feature, please refer to the data import section of the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Sept 05, 2013

Announcing Geospatial Indexing Library for Amazon DynamoDB

The library takes care of managing geohash indexes. Developers can use these indexes for fast and efficient execution of location-based queries over Amazon DynamoDB items representing points of interest (latitude/longitude pairs).

Some features of this library are:

Query Support: Box queries return items that fall within a pair of geo points that define a rectangle as projected on a sphere. Radius queries return items that fall within a given distance from a geo point.

Life Cycle Operations: Create, retrieve, update, and delete geospatial data items.

Easy Integration: This library integrates with the AWS SDK for Java, making it easy to use from your existing Java applications on AWS.

To learn more, visit Jeff Barr’s blog post and the AWS mobile tools page.

Sept 05, 2013

AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Free usage tier eligible customers now have the option to run SLES as part of the 750 hours of free Linux usage each month to test drive SLES on Amazon EC2.You can also get started on SLES on AWS Free Usage Tier by logging into the AWS Management Console or through 1-Click on AWS Marketplace.

Visit the Resources Section to find Getting Started Guides, development tools, and tutorials, or visit the Community Forums to get your questions answered.