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.

Read More »

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/

Read More »

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/

Read More »

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/

Read More »

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/

Read More »

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

Read More »

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/

Read More »

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/

Read More »

AWS re:Invent 2015 : Five Talking Points.

At the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas this week, AWS announced a bunch of new services which are specifically designed to lower the cost and simplify the tasks of analyzing data, streaming data, moving data, migrating databases and switching to different database management systems in the cloud. Have a look on five new services announced by AWS in AWS re:Invent.

 

1. Kinesis Firehose

Amazon already offered Kinesis Streams, a real-time streaming data option, but that service is for specifically  technical users. Making it available immediate, Kinesis Firehose is intended to make it easier to support streaming scenarios such as mobile apps, Web apps or the collection of telemetry or sensor data.
Instead of writing code, "builders" create an Amazon Kinesis Firehose Delivery Stream in the AWS Management Console." These streams can then be targeted at S3 buckets or Amazon Redshift tables. Users can specify refresh intervals, chunk sizes and compression and encryption settings.

 

2. AWS Snowball

AWS Snowball is a shippable appliance designed to move 50 TB at a time. If you have large, dedicated pipes, it takes a long time to move big data. Amazon has an existing Import/Export service that lets you ship data overnight to AWS on one-terabyte disks, but even that's a time-consuming when moving tens of terabytes.
Amazon Snowball, available immediately, is a PC-Tower-sized appliance in a shipping box that stores up to 50 terabytes at a time. The cost per shipment is $200, and Amazon says it's the fastest and most cost-effective option available for bulk data loading to the cloud.

 

3. AWS Database Migration Service

The Amazon Database Migration Service will easily migrate production databases with minimal downtime. It's said ensure continuous replication from target to source for any size database, with tracking and real-time monitoring. The tool takes 10 to 15 minutes to set up and the cost of the service is about $3 per terabyte.

 

4. QuickInsight 

QuickInsight is a data-analysis, visualization and dashboarding suite. It promises ease of use and costs start at $9 per user, per month. Fast to deploy, easy to use, low cost these are the three promises of QuickSight. This service is currently in preview.
According to the Amazon this service is cheaper than traditional Business Intelligence tools and costs one tenth of the traditional Business Intelligence tools.

 

5. AWS Schema Conversion Tool : MariaDB Database Engine

New AWS Database Migration and Schema Conversion services are intended to ease database moves. The Schema Conversion Tool is said to reliably and easily transform the data from one database type to another, swapping like-for-like tables, partitions, store procedures and more. "We think we'll be able to address 80% of changes automatically" said AWS Senior vice-president Andy Jassy. This will radically change the cost structure and speed of moving from the old world to the cloud world.

Read More »

'CloudFusion', New File Storage Application for AWS.

Avere Systems introduced new file storage application named CloudFusion for Amazon Web Services (AWS). CloudFusion uses the performance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). 

It brings same benefits (low latency, high performance, ease of installation and deployment) as a 'Virtual FXT Edge Filter', which was released by Avere in last November. Along with these, it uses access patterns and internal caching algorithms to cache user data on different tiers of Amazon storage. 

CloudFusion also delivers a NAS feature set which includes snapshots, encryption, compression, easy to use web-based GUI and runs these NAS applications on EC2.
CloudFusion is available from today on AWS marketplace. It comes with three week free trial. After that end-user software pricing will start at $0.99/hour for AWS r3.xlarge instances. Other services, EC2, EBS, S3 which are used by CloudFusion will be separately billed at AWS current rates.

Reference : www.storagereview.com/avere_introduces_cloudfusion_for_aws

Read More »