News Roundup from AWS re:Invent

Amazon Web Services remains on a fast growth track and now has over one million active customers. Traffic, as measured in petabytes, on the Amazon S3 cloud storage service is up 137% over last year. The number of "instance hours" on the Amazon EC2 cloud compute service is likewise up 99% y/y.

Here's a roundup of cloud news from this week's AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

New Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) -- makes its possible to run any number of Docker containers across a managed cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances using APIs and other tools. Amazon eliminates the need to install cluster management software, purchase and maintain the cluster hardware, or match hardware inventory to software needs. ECS sets up and manages clusters made up of Docker containers. It launches and terminates the containers and maintains complete information about the state of your cluster. Amazon said ECS can scale to clusters that encompass tens of thousands of containers across multiple Availability Zones.

New Amazon Aurora - a MySQL-compatible database engine. Aurora is a fully-managed, MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Storage is automatically replicated across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for durability and high availability, with two copies of the data in each Availability Zone.

Bigger Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes - General Purpose (SSD) can now be scaled up to 16 TB and provide up to 10,000 baseline IOPS (up from 1 TB and 3,000 baseline IOPS). Provisioned IOPS (SSD) can now store up to 16 TB and provide up to 20,000 Provisioned IOPS (up from 1 TB and 4,000 Provisioned IOPS).

New compute-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances based on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor, which was custom designed specifically for EC2. It runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Turbo boost.

New event notifications for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) --  brings a new level of programmability to cloud storage. Notifications can be issued to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) when a new object is added to the bucket or an existing object is overwritten.

New AWS Lambda -- a new way to build and run applications in the cloud that lets you take advantage of your existing programming skills and your knowledge of AWS. Lambda is a zero-administration compute platform. You don't have to configure, launch, or monitor EC2 instances. You don't have to install any operating systems or language environments. Lambda is currently in preview status.

New AWS Service Catalog -- a tool that will allow any IT department to deliver AWS-powered services to internal users while maintaining consistency and control. This could help large IT shops reduce support costs and encourage organizations to realize the benefits of cloud computing.

New AWS Config -- a new service that captures the initial state of a client's AWS resources (EC2 instances and related items to start, with others planned) and the relationships between them, and then tracks creations, deletions, and property changes for analysis, visualization, and archiving.

New AWS Key Management Service (KMS) -- provides the client with centralized control over encryption keys. It makes it easier to implement encryption key management at enterprise scale.

New AWS Tools for Code Management and Deployment -- these are designed to help individual developers, teams of developers, and system administrators store, integrate, and deploy their code on the cloud. For instance, one tool efficiently deploys newly released code to a "fleet" of EC2 instances while taking care to leave as much of the fleet online as possible. It can accommodate fleets that range in size from one instance all the way up to tens of thousands of instances.

Netflix has 10+ PB on AWS S3, with 1.2 PB of reads daily and 100 TB written daily.

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/