Amazon Web Services Launches in Germany

Amazon Web Services launched its new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region, its 11th technology infrastructure region globally for AWS and the second region in the European Union (EU).  AWS also operates in Ireland.

AWS said all its data centers are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1, and many more, providing high levels of security for all AWS customers. The new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to data centers in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network.

The AWS EU region in Frankfurt operates on carbon neutral electricity.  It also conforms with EU data protection laws, ensuring that data remains within Germany.
“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”

The new Frankfurt region provides a broad suite of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, AWS CloudHSM, Amazon Glacier, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Storage Gateway, Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS OpsWorks, AWS CloudSearch, Amazon SWF, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon VPC.
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AWS Direct Connect Opens in Sydney

Amazon announced the 12th location where AWS Direct Connect is now available -- the Global Switch SY6 data center in Sydney, Australia.  This is the second Direct Connect location.  It is also offered at the Equinix IBX in Sydney.

Customers who are hosted within an APN Partner can now connect through the Global Switch SY6 data center using a dedicated 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps network connection, which can be provisioned through the AWS Management Console.

http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/details/

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AWS Adds Lowest-cost EC2 Instance Option

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of T2 instances -- the lowest cost Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance type to date. Target applications include web servers, developer environments, and small databases.

Th new tier significantly reduces costs for applications that do not require sustained high CPU performance but benefit from the ability to burst to full core performance. T2 On-Demand Instance prices start at $0.013 per hour ($9.50 per month). When used with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) General Purpose (SSD) volumes, T2 instances also bring high-performance storage options to customers at a very low cost.

Customers can launch T2 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, AWS Marketplace, and third-party libraries. T2 instances are available in three instance sizes and are initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions. T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand and Reserved Instances.

“Amazon EC2 provides an unmatched selection of instances to support customers running whatever workload they want on AWS. Some of our customers have requested instance types that optimize their performance and cost for applications that don’t use the full CPU capability frequently, but require the full CPU resources for short bursts,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2 at Amazon Web Services. “T2 instances address this need by providing a consistent baseline performance with the ability to burst to full CPU core performance – all at a very low cost.”

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2

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AWS Adds Lower-Cost SSD Storage

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new, lower cost SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes.

AWS said the new General Purpose (SSD) volumes are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume.  AWS cites five nines of availability and the ability to burst 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte. Prices start at $0.10/GB.

Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need.

Customers can launch General Purpose (SSD) volumes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs

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AWS Adds CloudFront CDN to Free Usage Tier

Amazon Web Services added its CloudFront content delivery network to its list of AWS Free Usage Tier benefits.

AWS Free Usage Tier is the company's introductory program for customers to launch new applications, test existing applications in the Cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

The free tier for Amazon CloudFront includes up to 50 GB data transfer and 2,000,000 requests per month aggregated across all AWS edge locations.

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

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Amazon Web Services to Launch in China

Amazon Web Services announced plans to launch cloud services from Beijing, China in early 2014.  China Net Center and SINNET will provide the infrastructure, network services, and CDN services.

In a blog posting, AWS cited a number of customers in China already, such as Qihu 360, Xiaomi, FunPlus Game, Mobotap, TCL, Hisense, Tiens, Kingsoft, Light in the Box,  NQ mobile, Papaya mobile, Madhouse, DerbySoft, Tap4fun, DeNA China, Boyaa interactive, Huan.tv, and Sungy Mobile Limited.

AWS China (Bejing) Regions will support a broad collection of services, in compliance with the country's legal and regulatory requirements, including:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• Auto Scaling
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon Glacier
• Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF)
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Amazon ElastiCache
• AWS Storage Gateway
• AWS Management Console
• AWS Premium Support

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Amazon's CloudFront CDN Gets Country-Specific Restriction Capability

Amazon Web Services has enhanced its CloudFront CDN with the ability to restrict content based on the geographic location of the viewer.  Publishers can now choose to whitelist or blacklist specific countries where their content may be viewed.  This is useful for dealing with geographic licensing terms for online media or software distribution.  AWS said the geographic restriction is now a native feature of CloudFront instead of requiring a third-party geo-location product.

http://aws.typepad.com/
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

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AWS Boosts Compute I/O Performance Via SSD

At the AWS re:Invent! show in Las Vegas, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels announced the I2 instances are optimized for high performance random I/O.  

AWS said the greater performance is achieved using 2.5 GHz intel Xeon E5-2670v2 processors with Turbo mode enabled. EC2's new enhanced networking, and SSDs.  At the high-end,  i2.8xlarge instances will be able to deliver 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS. 

Instance Name	vCPU Count	RAM	Instance Storage (SSD)
i2.large	2	15 GiB	1 x 360 GB
i2.xlarge	4	30.5 GiB	1 x 720 GB
i2.2xlarge	8	61 GiB	2 x 720 GB
i2.4xlarge	16	122 GiB	4 x 720 GB
i2.8xlarge	32	244 GiB	8 x 720 GB

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/amazon_ec2/

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Zayo Builds Out Support for AWS Direct Connect

Zayo announced expansion of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect as an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner.

Specifically, Zayo will offer AWS Direct Connect sub-1G hosted connections at all US AWS Direct Connect locations, as well as Telecity in London.  Zayo provides private networks connectivity to each AWS Direct Connect location and offers flat rate Metro/Intercity pricing to its customers for connections directly to AWS in key markets, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Ashburn, Va., and London.

Since 2011, Zayo has provided direct bandwidth up to 10G through AWS Direct Connect portal, and the new APN will enable customers to more easily find high quality technology partners that support the AWS cloud platform.  APN allows customers to establish a private, secure connection directly to AWS platform across Zayo’s expansive network.

“Our support for AWS Direct Connect allows our customers to seamlessly transition onto cloud computing platforms,” says Stephanie Copeland, senior vice president of Ethernet at Zayo Group. “AWS is a pioneer in cloud computing and the APN fully aligns with our goal to provide customers with highly scalable, flexible and cost effective cloud connectivity.

http://www.zayo.com

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Amazon WorkSpaces Delivers Virtual Windows 7 Desktops

Amazon Web Services launched a virtual desktop in the cloud service.

Amazon WorkSpaces provides a Windows 7 desktop with persistent storage and integrated with corporate active directories. Because it is a cloud service, all data is secured in the cloud and not at the user's location.

There are four standard bundles. Here are the hardware specifications for each one:

• Standard - 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB of memory, and 50 GB of persistent user storage - $35 / user / month.
• Standard Plus - 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB of memory, and 50 GB of persistent user storage - $50 / user / month.
• Performance - 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB of memory, and 100 GB of persistent user storage - $60 / month.
• Performance Plus - 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB of memory, and 100 GB of persistent user storage - $75 / month.

All of the bundles include Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, 7-Zip, the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), and other utilities. The Standard and Performance Plus bundles also include Microsoft Office Professional and Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services.

WorkSpaces can also be accessed from iPads, Kindles, and Android tablets.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/amazon-workspaces/

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Amazon's "AWS re:invent" Sold Out in Las Vegas

Amazon's "AWS re:invent" conference this week in Las Vegas (Sands Expo Hall) is completely sold out.

The event has over 175 scheduled sessions covering best practices for AWS services,  training bootcamps, hands-on labs, and hackathon.  The registration fee was $1,299.

http://reinvent.awsevents.com/index.html

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Amazon Web Services Launches Mobile Push Notification Service

Amazon Web Services announced a new "Mobile Push" for its Amazon Simple Notification Service that transmits push notifications from backend server applications to mobile apps on Apple, Google and Kindle Fire devices using a simple, unified API.

The new feature lets app developers send a message to a particular device (direct addressing), or send a message to every device that is subscribed to a particular SNS topic (broadcast).

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. After that, app developers must pay $0.50 for every million publishes and $0.50 per million push deliveries.

http://aws.amazon.com/sns/

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Amazon Web Services Launches CloudFront Edge Locations in India

Amazon Web Services has launched two points-of-presence edge facilities India.  The new Amazon CloudFront POPs, which are located in Chennai and Mumbai, join a global network of 42 edge locations worldwide that Amazon uses to deliver content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.

The new edge locations also support Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

"Organizations in India need the flexibility to rapidly scale IT infrastructure as they grow without spending precious capital on hardware or getting locked into a long term contract with a co-location facility," said Shane Owenby, Amazon Web Services Managing Director of Asia Pacific. "Using AWS has removed the constraint related to infrastructure resources and has enabled many of our customers, ranging from start-ups to enterprises to unleash their ideas, innovate fast and build new businesses quickly. With 9 AWS Regions and 42 Amazon CloudFront edge locations around the world, our customers are able to expand globally virtually overnight while delivering great local user experience for their services."

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

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RiverMeadow Releases Cloud Migration SaaS Version 2.0

RiverMeadow Software, a start-up based in San Jose, California and Westford, Massachusetts, has updated its automated server migration solution developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds.

RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS version 2.0 automates the migration process for moving both Linux and Windows servers into public, private or hybrid clouds. Unlike other solutions that migrate at the application level and have to account for shared libraries, registry entries and other complex interoperability issues, the RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS migrates whole servers and disk volumes at the OS level.

RiverMeadow currently supports AWS and OpenStack.  Support for Microsoft Azure (Hyper-V) is on the roadmap for later this year.

With AWS, Most of the workloads are spun up as  greenfield (new workloads).   RiverMeadow's goal is to make the difficult process of moving out of AWS fairly into a simpler and automated process.  RiverMeadow also aims to simplify migration into and between the various OpenStack clouds and other cloud OS's.

"The cost and complexity of migrating virtual, physical or cloud-based servers into the cloud can be overwhelming — averaging thousands of dollars per server and man-months’ worth of operational effort,” said Mark Shirman, CEO, RiverMeadow. “With the enhancements delivered in RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS 2.0, we continue to remove the barriers of entry for just a fraction of the cost and without the operational headaches, so organizations can immediately gain the economic and practical benefits of cloud computing.”

http://www.rivermeadow.com

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Numecent Offers Native as a Service (NaaS) on AWS

Numecent, a start-up based in Irvine, California with offices in the UK, introduced a "Native as a Service" that uses Amazon Web Services to optimize the delivery of native Windows-based applications.  The idea is to enable independent software vendors to deliver their applications from the cloud with optional subscription billing without any changes to their source code.

Numecent said its NaaS is to cloud-delivered native applications, what SaaS is to Web-applications. The solution aims to reduce or eliminate the revenue loss attributed to piracy as there is never an unencrypted or persistent executable to 'crack' on the client device.

"As the delivery of digital goods moves unstoppably towards the Cloud, companies offering SaaS have been reaping enormous economic benefits with their Web applications," said Osman Kent, co-founder and CEO of Numecent. "However, until the advent of NaaS, most ISVs with native applications have been unable to participate in this new economy due to technical, financial and resourcing barriers. NaaS changes all that – it is an instant enabler for ISVs, large and small, who want to monetize their inventory now – with or without subscription. NaaS is an effortless on-ramp to the Cloud economy for ISVs."

Numecent is offering its NaaS as a white-label offering hosted on AWS.

http://www.numecent.com/

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Equinix Expands its AWS Direct Connect Service

Equinix continues its rollout of AWS Direct Connect Service, which is now available at the Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in Seattle (SE2 and SE3).

AWS Direct Connect provides a private connection to Amazon Web Services (AWS) via a cross connect at the Equinix data center.  It can also be used to onnect to the AWS GovCloud (US) from all existing AWS Direct Connect locations in North America.

Existing Equinix customers can connect to AWS Direct Connect inside the Seattle data center.  Customers can achieve millisecond latency between their infrastructure and AWS infrastructure.

Since the roll out of AWS Direct Connect in Equinix’s Ashburn, Virginia data center campus, AWS Direct Connect has expanded to Equinix locations in Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. Equinix customers such as Badgeville, Box, Carpathia Hosting and NetApp are using AWS Direct Connect to lower network costs into and out of AWS, bypassing the public internet.

http://www.equinix.com

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Project Clearwater Aims for IMS in the Cloud

Project Clearwater, an open-source IMS core initiative for the cloud, launched its website and opened its doors to software developers and systems integrators.


Metaswitch Networks contributed the initial codebase for Project Clearwater and is sponsoring the initiative.

Metaswitch said the goal of Project Clearwater is to deliver critical call and session control functions, along with Telephony Application Server (TAS) capabilities, within any virtualized data center.  Clearwater is being developed for massive scale and "telco-grade" reliability in private or public Cloud environments, together with exceptionally low running costs of around 2 cents per subscriber per year based on Amazon AWS pricing.

Clearwater provides SIP-based call control for voice and video communications and for SIP-based messaging applications.  It is designed for deployment on Amazon Web Services or other private cloud infrastructure.

“Traditional paths to IMS have been expensive and exceedingly vendor-centric,” says Martin Taylor, CTO of Metaswitch Networks. “Our aim is to provide operators and developers with the keys to quickly move to highly-scaled VoIP and VoLTE networks and create tomorrow’s most advanced Web-scale communications applications.

http://www.metaswitch.com/company/project-clearwater
http://www.projectclearwater.org/

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Amazon S3 - Two Trillion Objects, 1.1 Million Requests / Second

Amazon Web Services is currently storing two trillion objects in its S3 cloud storage service, double the number of just one year ago (it took the first six years of the service to reach the first trillion).    Peak loads are often reaching 1.1 million requests/second.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/04/amazon-s3-two-trillion-objects-11-million-requests-second.html

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Amazon Web Services Trims Price for NoSQL Cloud Database

Amazon Web Services is cutting the price of its DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service.  The price of indexed data storage has decreased by up to 75% in all AWS regions. The price of provisioned throughput capacity has decreased by up to 35%.

AWS is also enhancing the service with a new Reserved Capacity option that offers significant savings over the normal price of DynamoDB provisioned throughput capacity. Purchasing Reserved Capacity incurs a one-time upfront fee and a commitment to paying for a minimum usage level, but offers up to 53% savings.

http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/

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Amazon's Elastic Transcoder Targets Video Production in the Cloud

Amazon Web Services introduced a highly scalable service for transcoding video files between different digital media formats in the cloud.

The new Amazon Elastic Transcoder enables content producers to convert their large high resolution “master” video files into smaller versions that are optimized for playback on websites, mobile devices, connected TV’s and other video platforms.

Amazon said its new service manages all aspects of the transcoding process transparently and automatically. It offer transcoding presets that make it easy to transcode video for smartphones, tablets, web browsers and other devices.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder offers pay-as-you-go pricing. Customers are charged based on the number of minutes they need to transcode and the selected resolution. There are no upfront fees or minimum commitments required.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is available in six regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Japan).

http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder

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