Amazon News

The AWS Start-up Challenge is back with an expanded world footprint – start-ups in 22 countries across the Americas, Asia, and Europe can compete for a chance to win $100,000 in cash and credits. This year, we will recognize 15 regional semi-finalists, 6 global finalists, and select one global grand prize winner. We’re looking for the most promising start-ups that can grow into significant, meaningful businesses that leverage AWS for their infrastructure. The contest submission closes October 31. To learn more and enter the competition, visit the AWS Start-Up Challenge home page.

We’re excited to announce today that we’ve added Reserved Database Instances (Reserved DB Instances) for Amazon RDS. With Reserved DB Instances, you can now make a one-time, up-front payment to create a one or three year reservation to run your DB Instance in a specific Region and receive a significant discount off of the ongoing hourly usage charge. Your DB Instances will work just as they do today, but can lower your costs over the life of your database. For more information on Reserved DB Instances, visit the Amazon RDS detail page.

Amazon CloudFront, the easy to use content delivery network, now supports the ability to assign a default root object to your HTTP or HTTPS distribution. This default object will be served when Amazon CloudFront receives a request for the root of your distribution – i.e., your distribution’s domain name by itself. This feature should make it easier for you to serve all of your static content from edge locations close to your end users and provide them with a better experience. You can read more about the default root object feature in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide. For more information on Amazon CloudFront, visit the Amazon CloudFront page.

We are excited to announce enhancements to Amazon S3’s Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) option: Notifications for RRS object loss and RRS support in the AWS Management Console. Customers using the console can now select the RRS storage option when uploading new files and can easily move a set of objects or even an entire folder from Standard storage to RRS. Additionally, Amazon S3 customers can now configure their bucket so that when Amazon S3 detects the loss of an RRS object, a notification will be sent through Amazon Simple Notification Service. For more information on these new features, attend the Introducing Amazon S3 Enhanced Support for Reduced Redundancy Storage webinar on July 20. For more information on RRS, visit the Amazon S3 detail page.

We are excited to announce the availability of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, a new instance type specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can now achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2.

Learn more about the new Cluster Compute instances for Amazon EC2 and their use in running HPC applications. Or, sign-up to attend the Introduction to Cluster Compute Instances webinar on July 21.

We are pleased to announce that you can now assign the IP address of your choice to each of your Amazon EC2 instances you launch in your Virtual Private Cloud. This eagerly anticipated feature gives you greater control of your network configuration and makes it easier to run services within Amazon VPC that your users and applications expect to have a consistent IP address, such as DNS servers and Active Directory domain controllers. If you do not require your instance to have a specific IP address, you can continue to launch instances by specifying only a subnet, and AWS will continue to assign an IP address to your instance automatically. Please note that when you specify an IP address, it is retained for the instance’s lifetime. An IP address previously assigned to a running instance can only be used again once that instance is in a “terminated” state.

For more information about how to leverage this highly requested capability, please see the Amazon VPC documentation. Please note that ElasticFox has also been updated to support this capability.

We are pleased to announce beta support for Amazon S3 bucket policies, which gives customers the ability to create conditional rules for managing access to their buckets and objects. Bucket policies can restrict access based on AWS account as well as request-based attributes, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With bucket policies, customers can also now define security rules that apply to more than one object, including all objects or a subset of objects within a bucket. For more information, please refer to the Amazon S3 FAQs and Developer Guide or attend the Introduction to Bucket Policies Webcast on July 13.

Amazon Simple Queue Service now offers a free service tier that makes trying SQS risk free for developers. Starting July 1, 2010, developers and businesses can start leveraging Amazon SQS with no initial charge. Each month, Amazon SQS users will incur no charges for the first 100,000 Amazon SQS Requests. Many SQS applications may be able to operate within this free tier limit and pricing for additional requests continues to be $0.10 per 100,000 requests.

SQS now supports larger message sizes and longer message retention increasing the range of applications that can potentially use Amazon SQS. Previously SQS users were limited to a maximum message size of 8 kB, and this has been raised to accommodate a user configurable maximum of 64 kB. SQS message retention is also now configurable and can be set anywhere from 1 hour to 2 weeks (from a previous limit of 4 days). The option for adjustable message retention provides greater flexibility for application developers who need to accommodate varying message consumption rates or want to define specific message retention behavior.