AWS Launches Turbocharged Cloud Virtual Desktop.

Amazon Web Services has launched a new cloud virtual desktop which provides users with turbocharged machine they can access over the internet.

The bundle is meant for the developers, data analysts and other users who want compute and memory-heavy lifting to get their work done. 

Specifications :

• 4 Virtual CPUs
• 16 GiB RAM
• 275 GB Storage

Pricing :

Users will have to pay $78/month for a Power bundle WorkSpace running in AWS’ US-East (Northern Virginia) region. Users have an option to pay $19/month and 68 cents an hour for a Power bundle, if they don’t expect to use the WorkSpace very frequently.

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AWS Lowers The Prices Of Reserved Instances & M4 Instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) lowers the prices of Reserved Instances along with introduction of “No upfront” payment option for 3 year standard RIs. Moreover AWS reduces the prices of M4 instance family (both On-demand & Reserved Instances). This is 61st price reduction by the AWS. All the changes are made effective immediately.

Here are the details :

1. New No Upfront Payment Option for 3 Year Standard RIs

2. Lower prices for No Upfront Reserved Instances by upto 17%

3. Lower Prices for Convertible Reserved Instances by upto 21%

4. Lower prices for M4 Instances by upto 7%

Reference : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-price-reductions-reserved-instances-m4-instances/

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AWS Elastic Volume Changes The Way You Have Been Using EBS.

AWS launches new EBS feature called Elastic Volumes which allows you to increase volume size, adjust performance or change the volume type while the volume is in use. The feature is available for all current-generation EBS volumes attached to current-generation EC2 instances. 

Use cases :

1. Change the volume type on the go.
2. Increase provisioned IOPS of volume to handle the spike in traffic, and then dial it down afterward.
3. Increase the size of the volume and expand the file system to match, with no downtime.

You can manage all of this from the AWS Management Console, via API calls, or from the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

The next step is to expand the file system so that it can take advantage of additional storage space. Here are the steps of Expanding the Storage Space of an EBS Volume on Linux or Expanding the Storage Space of an EBS Volume on Windows.

Reference : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-elastic-volumes-change-everything/

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AWS drops prices of C4, M4, and T2 instances by up to 25 percent.

The cloud market leaded Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced price cuts for a few types of virtual machine (VM) instances. Price cuts are only specific to certain AWS data center regions. 

C4 price cuts are only applicable in following regions :

1. US East (Northern Virginia) : Prices dropped by 5 percent
2. EU (Ireland) : Prices dropped by 5 percent
3. Asia Pacific (Mumbai) : Prices dropped by 20 percent
4. Asia Pacific (Sydney) : Prices dropped by 20 percent 

M4 price cuts are only applicable in following regions :

1. US East (Northern Virginia) : Prices dropped by 10 percent
2. EU (Ireland) : Prices dropped by 10 percent
3. EU (Frankfurt) : Prices dropped by 10 percent
4. Asia Pacific (Singapore) : Prices dropped by 25 percent

T2 price cuts are only applicable in following regions :

1. US East (Northern Virginia) : 10 percent
2. Asia Pacific (Singapore) : 25 percent.

New prices will be effective from December 1.

Reference : http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/14/aws-cuts-prices-of-c4-m4-and-t2-instances-by-up-to-25/

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AWS Launches Application Load Balancer Option For ELB.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched new Application Load Balancer Option for Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). This option runs at Layer 7 and supports a number of advanced features. The original option (now called a Classic Load Balancer) is still available and continues to offer Layer 4 and Layer 7 functionality.

Application Load Balancers support following functionality :

• Content-based routing
• Supports applications that run in containers
• Support a pair of industry-standard protocols (WebSocket and HTTP/2)
• Provide additional visibility into the health of the target instances and containers.
• Web sites and mobile apps, running in containers or on EC2 instances, will benefit from the use of Application Load Balancers.

Here is the step by step guide on How to setup Application Load Balancer (ALB) : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-application-load-balancer/

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OpsDev Is Coming.

OpsDev means that the dependencies of the various application components must be understood and modeled first before the development process begins. 

As you can see, the delivery of such personalized software services impacts the design paradigm and now must be inverted. While DevOps tends to start with the developer-led challenges, it ultimately sits in the wheelhouse of operations teams once the application is promoted into production; OpsDev begins with the end in mind. Once we understand the interdependencies of the different data sources and its availability, we can then design the component that ties everything together.

Reference : https://dzone.com/articles/opsdev-is-coming

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AWS Announces Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

The leading cloud service provider, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has announced immediate availability of the new Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Mumbai is the sixth AWS Region in Asia along with Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. It becomes thirteenth worldwide region. It brings the total number of AWS Availability Zones to 35 worldwide.

The new Mumbai Region is currently available for multiple services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). 

The region is made available with two Availability Zones - ap-south-1a and ap-south-1b. The Mumbai region is cheaper than all other regions from Asia Pacific. Visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ to check the detailed pricing. 

List of services supported by AWS Mumbai Region :

• AWS Certificate Manager
• AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS Config
• AWS Direct Connect
• Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service
• Amazon EMR
• Amazon Glacier
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• AWS Import/Export Snowball
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
• Amazon Kinesis
• AWS Marketplace
• AWS OpsWorks
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Amazon Route 53
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
• AWS Support
• AWS Trusted Advisor
• VM Import/Export

References : http://amzn.to/291KzUX , http://goo.gl/6uowpd

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Top 10 Most Challenging Tech Jobs For Companies To Fill.

Finding the perfect employee/employer match takes time, patience and often a little bit of compromise. Tech companies today struggle with hiring, particularly within a few specific roles. Recent study by Indeed.com has revealed that DevOps engineer is the hardest IT job to fill in North America. Below is the list of top 10 most difficult tech jobs for which companies are struggling to fill up.

Reference : http://mashable.com/2016/05/12/top-ten-hardest-hires-tech/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link#YyMRVL_LuSqD

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Capital One Open Sources Cloud Custodian AWS Resource Management Tool.

Capital One is a huge organization with lots of compliance issues related to being a financial services company. It also an Amazon Web Services customer and it needed a tool to set rules and policies in an efficient way around AWS usage.

Last July it started developing the tool that would become Cloud Custodian. On 19th April, 2016 it announced at an AWS event in Chicago that it was making Cloud Custodian tool available as open source on GitHub.

“Cloud Custodian is a rules engine that lets us define policies to be well-managed in AWS. You can [determine] a number infrastructure resources and every organization has a set of policies to be achieved around those resources,” - Kapil Thangavelu, technical fellow and primary developer of the Cloud Custodian project.

Reference : http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/19/capital-one-open-sources-cloud-custodian-aws-resource-management-tool/

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Amazon Web Services Adds New Datacenter Region In UK.

Amazon has announced that it is opening a datacenter region in the UK.

This new region will provide customers with quick, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and more.

The advantages of a UK regional center include even lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users. The new datacenter region will be Amazon's third in the European Union after Frankfurt and Dublin.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said - "New region will open sometime next year at the earliest -- or possibly not until sometime in 2017."

Reference : http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-web-services-adds-uk-region/

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