Facebook's “Free Basics” service - which bundles together the Social NetworkTM's pick of news, weather and health apps and delivers it via UAE telecoms giant Etisalat to millions of Egyptians - has been shuttered in the land of pyramids.…
The BBC News website has evidently decided it's had enough of 2015, and is this morning taking a New Year's Eve break.…
Average internet speeds have increased in the US over the last year, but America is still falling behind many other developed economies when it comes to data speeds and latency.…
PC gaming biz Valve has explained why its Steam software store blurted people's personal details to strangers on Christmas Day.…
Engineers at ISP iiNet are still battling to restore connectivity to subscribers left for days without internet access in Western Australia.…
Virtual server host Linode has been on and offline since Christmas Day as it weathers a fierce ongoing denial-of-service attack. Four days in, its customers are getting grumpy.…
2015 Year Review One star eclipsed all others in the enterprise in 2015: Amazon. Or, rather, its cloud division, AWS.…
You can now configure Amazon CloudFront to add custom headers, or override the value of existing headers, to requests forwarded to your origin. You can use these headers to help validate that requests made to your origin were sent from CloudFront; you can even configure your origin to only allow requests that contain the custom header values you specify. Additionally, if you use multiple CloudFront distributions with the same origin, you can use custom headers to distinguish origin request made by each different distribution. Finally, custom headers can be used to help determine the right CORS headers returned for your requests. You can configure custom headers via the CloudFront API and the AWS Management Console. There are no additional charges for this feature. For more details on how to set your custom headers, you can read more here.
You can now launch D2 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Dense-storage instances. D2 instances are designed for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to very large data sets, such as Hadoop distributed computing, massively parallel processing data warehousing, and log processing applications.
China has passed its first antiterrorism law – a worrying development for companies looking to do business securely in the Middle Kingdom.…
AWS CloudFormation has added support for two additional AWS services and several new features.
You can now provision the following AWS services using CloudFormation. Visit here for a full list of supported services.
SAP’s software is to be offered as a private cloud service, says Hitachi Consulting, the services wing of the Japanese tech giant.…
Sysadmin's 2015 review part 1 With 2015 drawing to a close and 2016 about to begin, it is time to reflect on the fact that the world never stops changing. The tech industry certainly changes, and so here's one sysadmin's view of the industry's movers and shakers.…
Facebook's “Free Basics” program, which sees its Indian telecoms partner Reliance Communications offer free internet access to a select group of sites, has reportedly earned the ire of India's telecoms regulator.…
Oracle has unveiled plans for what looks like the first-of-its kind “next-generation technology” campus inside the US.…
In the wake of the Juniper router backdoor scandal, Cisco is reviewing its source code to make sure there are no similar nasty surprises lurking within.…
Everyone's favorite ISP Comcast says it has switched on its first live gigabit internet service without having to lay a single inch of new cable.…
You can now use additional Amazon CloudWatch metrics published by Amazon ECS for monitoring the reserved amount of CPU and memory resources used by running tasks in your clusters. You can create a CloudWatch alarm using these metrics that will add more Amazon EC2 instances to the Auto Scaling group when a cluster’s available capacity drops below a threshold you define. For more information on how to scale using CloudWatch alarms and Auto Scaling groups, see the documentation.
You can now create Amazon EMR clusters in private subnets in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Previously, Amazon EMR only supported creating clusters in public subnets, which required an attached Internet gateway. With Amazon EMR release 4.2.0 and later, you can now also launch your clusters in a private subnet with no public IP addresses or attached Internet gateway. You can create an endpoint for Amazon S3 in your VPC to give your Amazon EMR cluster direct access to data in Amazon S3, and optionally create a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance for your cluster to interact with other AWS services that do not currently support endpoints in VPC.
You can now use two additional parameters for running Docker-enabled applications on Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). You can set the minimumHealthyPercent parameter to provide a lower limit on the number of running tasks during a deployment, enabling you to deploy without using additional cluster capacity. You can also set the maximumPercent parameter to provide an upper limit on the number of running tasks during a deployment, enabling you to define the deployment batch size. To learn more about these deployment options, see the documentation.
Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon EC2 Container Service.
The High Court has ruled in favour of Cornwall Council's decision to ditch its 10-year £160m outsourcing deal with BT, following moves by the telco provider to stop the authority canning the deal.…
UK internet service provider (ISP) Sky Broadband will turn on family filters by default for all new subscribers as of 2016.…
Microsoft has revealed the hardware required to run the preview of Azure Stack, its on-premises and ever-so-hybrid version of the cloud Azure operating environment.…
Google has outlined its approach to deprecating the compromised SHA-1 hash in its Chrome browser.…
Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is now available to all customers.
Amazon ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow. Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate your own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure. Amazon ECR hosts your images in a highly available and scalable architecture, allowing you to reliably deploy containers for your applications. Integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides resource-level control of each repository. With Amazon ECR, there are no upfront fees or commitments. You pay only for the amount of data you store in your repositories and data transferred to the Internet.
Click here to learn how to get started with Amazon EC2 Container Registry. Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon EC2 Container Registry.
Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is now available to all customers. Amazon ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow. Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate your own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure. Amazon ECR hosts your images in a highly available and scalable architecture, allowing you to reliably deploy containers for your applications. Integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides resource-level control of each repository. With Amazon ECR, there are no upfront fees or commitments. You pay only for the amount of data you store in your repositories and data transferred to the Internet.
Click here to learn how to get started with Amazon EC2 Container Registry. Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon EC2 Container Registry.
Comment A few weeks ago I attended the Italian VMUG user conference. One of the most interesting sessions at the event was “Strategic Private Cloud”, presented by Alan Civita of Sky UK, who confirmed what is now a common trend in very large IT organisations: a strategy based on two different private clouds.…
The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has named Cloud Foundry as its preferred platform-as-a-service.…
Premium video content is a must have for the Christmas period and to avoid missing out consumers are signing up to a multitude of OTT services, but this will only be a festive fling for a large proportion.…
You can't make this stuff up: after selling its copper hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) networks to nbn, Telstra has won contracts to maintain those networks and to re-design the latter to carry the DOCSIS 3.1 data transmission standard.…
You can now export API definitions for Amazon API Gateway. Through a new API you can export your API configurations as a Swagger file from the API Gateway Management Console. You can export Swagger definitions including the API Gateway integration tags as well as POSTMAN annotations. Read our documentation to learn more about this feature.
You can now get deeper visibility into the health of your Amazon RDS instances in real time with Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS. It provides a comprehensive set of over 50 new system metrics and aggregated process information for your instances, at granularity of up to 1 second. You can visualize the metrics on the RDS console, and also integrate them with CloudWatch and third-party applications.
ICANN's exiting CEO has stunned internet governance experts by fronting a new Chinese government initiative to expand its view of how the internet should be run.…
AWS Config Rules allows you to create rules that continuously check the configuration of relevant AWS resources recorded by AWS Config, and notifies when resources do not comply with these guidelines. Using the rules dashboard, you can track overall compliance status and troubleshoot specific resource configurations that do not comply. The preview of Config Rules was announced on Oct 7, 2015 at AWS re:invent.
AWS IoT is now Generally Available (GA) for production use, and is releasing new features to make it even easier to use AWS IoT to connect devices to the cloud and to other devices.
A flurry of the tech world’s great and good signed up the Cloud Native Computing Foundation yesterday, and kicked off a technical board to review submissions – which will be tested and fattened up on a vast Intel-based “computer farm”.…
Turn on a Trail across all regions: You can now turn on a trail across all regions in the for your AWS account. CloudTrail will deliver log files from all regions to the Amazon S3 bucket and an optional CloudWatch Logs log group you specified. Additionally, when AWS launches a new region, CloudTrail will create the same trail in the new region. As a result, you will receive log files containing API activity for the new region without taking any action. Using the CloudTrail console, you can specify that a trail applies to all regions. For more details, refer to the Applying a trail to all regions section of the CloudTrail FAQ.
Amazon CloudFront can now compress your objects at the edge. You can now configure CloudFront to automatically apply GZIP compression when browsers and other clients request a compressed object with text and other compressible file formats. This means that if you are already using Amazon S3, CloudFront can transparently compress this type of content. For origins outside S3, doing compression at the edge means you don’t need to use resources at your origin to do compression. The resulting smaller size of compressed objects makes downloads faster and reduces your CloudFront data transfer charges.
More than 13,000 people have complained about Comcast's imposition of a new 300GB monthly data cap, a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed.…
We are excited to announce that we’ve raised the limit of Security Groups from 100 to 500 in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A security group acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic. With 500 security groups you can now increase the granularity of your security profile for your EC2 instances and further customize your virtual network in the AWS cloud.
AWS Marketplace, which lists popular 3rd party software for sale by independent software vendors, has announced support for Clusters and AWS Resources. Using AWS CloudFormation, these features make deploying software from AWS Marketplace faster and easier than ever before, from testing to production.
You can now use Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway, a highly available AWS managed service that makes it easy to connect to the Internet from instances within a private subnet in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Previously, you needed to launch a NAT instance to enable NAT for instances in a private subnet.
EE has confirmed it will not apply extra charges to customers who don't return their Power Bars, despite the mass recall announced this morning.…
The Cloud Foundry Foundation has created what amounts to a good cloudkeeping seal of approval.…
Google's 'fessed up to another bungle that browned-out its cloud.…
British carrier EE has issued a recall for all “Power Bars”, the company's name for external USB batteries.…
Cloud backup outfit Carbonite has acquired Seagate's EVault cloud backup service.…
Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) region.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a mapping tool that shows how internet data moves around and how the NSA can use just a few surveillance sites to scoop up online traffic.…
Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (WAM) is now available in the EU (Ireland) region and has two new management features. These new features allow you to share application packages with other AWS accounts and delete packages within your AWS account using the Amazon WAM Studio. Package sharing allows you to virtualize an application one time, and share it with many AWS accounts. You can then customize the application configuration for each user to which the application is assigned using Configurable App Events.
The FCC has extended a rule that will exempt small broadband carriers from portions of its 2015 Open Internet rules.…
Today we launched AWS Cost and Usage Reports. These new reports provide a number of features that allow you to better understand and manage your costs.
Google has extended its Fi wireless service to support LTE-equipped tablets.…
Four new checks have been added to Trusted Advisor to provide guidance related to EBS, CloudFront, and IAM access keys, with two updates released for existing S3 and service limit checks. These checks provide additional guidance to help provision your resources to improve system performance and reliability, increase security, and optimize cost.
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services, and helps you achieve consistent governance and meet your compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services they need.
Virgin Media has admitted its new spam filters are continuing to block the legitimate emails of various people and companies, and says it is working with individual businesses to unblock their comms.…
The chief executive of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, has told MPs that she alone is responsible for cyber security at the company, but that the operator does not yet know if the major hack it experienced in October was avoidable.…
Panasonic company AeroMobile Communications Limited claims to have launched the first in-flight 3G service.…
Today we are excited to announce that we have added the ability to use EC2 Run Command with your Linux instances. Back in October, we launched EC2 Run Command, a feature that enables you to securely manage the configuration of your Amazon EC2 instances. With the addition of Linux support, you can now easily and consistently administer your EC2 instances regardless of your choice in operating systems.
Slack is a messaging app that makes it easy for teams to communicate with each other and with their automated systems. AWS Lambda now makes it easy to get started building chat-based DevOps solutions with new console blueprints. These blueprints help you post Amazon CloudWatch alarms and other Amazon SNS messages to your team’s Slack channel as an incoming webhook, where your team can keep track of IT operations and quickly take action. Lambda is also the easiest way to create and run Slack commands. A new blueprint for building Slack commands using Lambda functions makes it quick to automate tasks and expose business logic as chat-based commands. AWS Lambda makes Slack developers more productive by eliminating the need to manage servers, scaling, and deployments when building commands and automated notifications. Both blueprints are available in JavaScript (Node.js) and Python.
You can now launch the t2.nano, the newest Amazon EC2 burstable-performance instance. Starting at only $4.75 per month ($0.0065 per hour), it is the lowest priced Amazon EC2 instance. The t2.nano features 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU, making it well suited for workloads that require a consistent baseline performance with the ability to burst. T2 instances are backed by the latest Intel Xeon processors with clock speeds up to 3.3 GHz.
Red Hat has launched a dedicated cloud platform for companies that want their developers to focus on coding.…
Earlier this year at AWS re:Invent, we announced the aws-shell project, which provides a number of convenience and productivity features to users of the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The project is now available on GitHub (http://ift.tt/1Uw2ktu) and PyPI (http://ift.tt/1mmyz31). The current list of key features include:
Mobile carriers are poised to see a significant hit to their bottom lines with the looming rollout of new rules on roaming charges.…
A group of US Senators is asking the FCC to dial back its support for local governments that wish to set up municipal ISPs.…
We are excited to announce that starting today the Amazon Machine Images (AMI) Copy Service supports copying AMIs from another AWS account within the same AWS region or across regions.The process of copying AMIs from another AWS account is same as copying AMIs within your account. You can use the AWS Management Console, EC2 Command Line Interface, or EC2 API.
Starting today, you can launch Amazon EC2 instances with an encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) boot volume, which together with EBS data volume encryption means you can now encrypt all your EBS storage.
EE has once again topped Ofcom's naughty list for the most-complained about broadband providers, despite previous promises by the operator to try harder.…
Communication providers will need to invest in new equipment if they are to capture people's internet connection records (ICRs) and comply with planned new UK surveillance laws, three major UK internet service providers (ISPs) have said.…
News that VMware has bailed from VirtuStream, the hybrid cloud joint venture it struck with EMC, should come as a relief to VMware users and those contemplating its cloudy offerings.…
You can now launch Oracle Database Standard Edition Two (SE2) instances under the Bring Your Own License (“BYOL”) licensing model as well as take advantage of Oracle 12c and 11g October 2015 Oracle Patch Set Updates (PSU).
You can now use DynamoDB as the storage backend for the newest version of the Titan graph engine, 1.0.0. Titan 1.0.0 provides support for TinkerPop 3, as well as several bug fixes and optimizations. Tinkerpop 3 is the latest version of the Tinkerpop graph computing framework. For full list of updates in Titan 1.0.0 please see the release notes.
Nokia and ARM are at the heart of a bid to revamp the ageing TCP/IP stack to make it better suited to networks that need to operate at very high speed and/or low latency. Among the plethora of industry alliances at the intersection of telecoms, IT and IP, this looks like one with a genuine contribution to make to the evolution of future standards, including 5G.…
Reassuringly expensive software maker Adobe is laughing all the way to the bank after shunting more of its customers into the cloud - like they had any choice in the matter.…
Cloud pusher AWS has released a price list API, in a bid to add a bit more transparency to the foggy pricing model of public cloud services.…
If 2014 was a year of brave new mobile operating systems, challenging Android’s dominance with open platforms and modern cloud-oriented designs, 2016 looks set to be the year when their hopes die.…
Microsoft's decided it needs to offer a Linux certification.…
Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.…
Tag-based, resource-level permissions and the ability to apply default access privileges to new database objects make it easier to manage access control in Amazon Redshift. In addition, you can now use the Amazon Redshift COPY command to load data in BZIP2 compression format. More details on these features below:
VMware's foes have again protested its attempts to strike a new deal with much of the US military.…
AWS Config continuously records changes to the configuration of your AWS resources and notifies you of these changes through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Config rules monitor these resources for compliance with desired configurations you specify.
You can now enhance the security and visibility of Amazon Machine Learning API calls with AWS CloudTrail, to deliver log files containing records of your API calls. You can use AWS CloudTrail logs for security analysis to troubleshoot operational and security incidents, or for auditing and resource tracking for your Amazon ML API usage. You can receive logs for Amazon Machine Learning API calls when you turn on AWS CloudTrail from the AWS CloudTrail console.
Verizon is reportedly looking to roll out a controversial data plan some believe violates net neutrality principles.…
HP Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise has cut the ribbons on its EU-wide tech-as-a-service market stall Cloud28 - let’s hope the UK doesn’t vote to pull itself out of the union, necessitating a name change.…
Vodafone has initiated legal proceedings against Netherlands-based telco KPN, with the claim that the latter's business practices have affected competition and consumer choice in the country.…
You can now query for prices of AWS Services using the AWS Price List API. You can also subscribe to an SNS topic and receive notifications when AWS prices update. For example, when new instance types are launched, when services are introduced in new regions or when new services are introduced you will get an SNS notification. AWS Price List API makes prices available in two formats, JSON and CSV.
AWS CodeDeploy is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS region.
We are excited to announce new operating system support and new VM Import/Export and AWS Management Portal features that make it easier to migrate virtual machines from your on-premises environments to Amazon EC2.
We are pleased to announce that Elastic Load Balancing now supports automatic re-registration of back-end instances when they are stopped and restarted. You can reduce costs by using the ability in Amazon EC2 to stop your EBS-backed instances when they are not needed. With the automatic re-registration functionality, when you restart a stopped instance that is registered with a load balancer, it is automatically brought back into service with the load balancer.
We are thrilled to announce 5 new AWS Direct Connect locations. The new locations are at Equinix Slough (supporting our Dublin region), Equinix Dallas (supporting our Northern VA region), GPX in Mumbai (supporting our Singapore region), Tivit in Sao Paolo (supporting our Sao Paolo region), and a dedicated location for our AWS GovCloud (US) region at Equinix San Jose. This brings our total location count up to 23.
The IAM console now displays service last accessed data that shows the hour when an IAM entity (a user, group, or role) last accessed an AWS service. Knowing if, and when an IAM entity last exercised a permission can help you remove unnecessary rights and tighten your IAM policies with less effort. This helps you write more secure access control policies that better adhere to the principle of least privilege—that is, granting only the permissions required to perform a task.
IBM has slurped up video services company Clearleap for an undisclosed pile of cash, part of Big Blue's ongoing moves to reinvent itself as a cloudy player.…
Cloud storage gateway startup CTERA Networks now has an enterprise file services platform to protect server data across any cloud infrastructure, presented as part of a cloud server data protection offering.…
Google's App Engine suffered a long overnight outage that may have also sent high-profile customer Snapchat into a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) state.…
Google has added two of the largest cities in the US to its ranks of potential fiber markets.…
Long-time indy ISP Linknet on the NSW north coast is shuttering its business, saying it's been overbuilt by the NBN and can't recapitalise to become a reseller.…
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of batch export to Amazon S3 for Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
The internet's root servers came under a concerted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week that effectively knocked three of the 13 critical pillars of the internet offline for several hours.…
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services, and helps you achieve consistent governance and meet your compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services they need.
Loss-making mobile chip blueprint scribbler Qualcomm was today slapped with antitrust charges by the European Commission for allegedly using bully-boy tactics to snuff out the competition.…
You can now specify multiple Availability Zones and VPC subnets in a single Amazon EC2 Spot fleet launch specification. Because the Spot price fluctuates independently for each Availability Zone, listing more availability zones can enable you to run your instances at even lower prices. By default, Spot instances will be placed into the zones where the Spot price is lowest at the time of launch.
The Amazon Auto Scaling service now allows you protect instances from termination during a scale-in event.
The Pirate Bay's .org addresses have been suspended as part of a controversial verification process run by domain name overseer ICANN.…
Dropbox is going to be nixing the Mailbox and Carousel services early next year.…
Amazon Aurora now allows you to encrypt your databases using keys you manage through AWS Key Management Service (KMS). On a database instance running with Amazon Aurora encryption, data stored at rest in the underlying storage is encrypted, as are the automated backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster. Encryption and decryption are handled seamlessly so you don’t have to modify your application to access your data. When you create a new Aurora database instance, you can choose to enable encryption via the AWS Management Console or API. You may use the default RDS key automatically created in your account or use a key you created using KMS to encrypt your data. For more information about the use of AWS Key Management Service with Amazon Aurora, see the Amazon RDS User's Guide. To learn more about AWS KMS, visit the AWS KMS overview page.
Most companies in the UK, France and Germany collect data they never use, according to a new survey.…
nbn, the company building Australia's national broadband network (NBN), will hire 400 tech bods over the next two years to staff its upcoming Cyber Security Operations Centre in Melbourne's south.…
A security hole that has been known and patched for the last three years remains vulnerable in over 6.1 million connected devices.…
Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) allows you to run either MySQL 5.5 or MySQL 5.6 on supported instances. For MySQL 5.5, this now includes standard (M4), memory-optimized (R3), and burst-capable (T2) instances. For more information on the instances available through Amazon RDS, please visit the Instance Classes page.
We are pleased to announce that Amazon Web Services has opened an office in Turkey to help support the growth of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and its rapidly expanding customer base in the country. The office is now open and operational in Istanbul and is supporting businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to Turkey's oldest and most established enterprises, as they make the transition to the AWS cloud.
To learn more about working with AWS in Turkey, customers can visit the AWS Turkey page.
Ofcom has halted its 4G spectrum auction, following threats of legal action from Telefónica UK and Hutchison.…
Google is suffering a cloud cockup, and hasn't been able to fix it for more than 24 hours.…
AWS Directory Service now lets you run a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as a managed service. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, is powered by Windows Server 2012 R2. When you select and launch this directory type, it is created as a highly available pair of domain controllers connected to your virtual private cloud (VPC). The domain controllers run in different Availability Zones in a region of your choice. Host monitoring and recovery, data replication, snapshots, and software updates are automatically configured and managed for you.
Microsoft AD enables you to run directory-aware workloads in the AWS cloud, including Microsoft SharePoint, custom .NET and SQL Server-based applications. You can also configure a trust relationship between Microsoft AD in the AWS cloud, and your existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory, providing users and groups with access to resources in either domain, using single sign-on (SSO).
US telco Frontier Communications has cleared its final hurdle towards a $10.54bn deal that will see it take over Verizon's landline phone, TV, and ISP business in California, Texas, and Florida.…
You can now set up your Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) model evaluations to be more accurate through a random splitting strategy, enabling you to train and evaluate ML models based on random subsets of input data records. Random splitting may be the best strategy to establish that your evaluation data is representative of your training data, ensuring that your model evaluation is correct. You can choose your splitting strategy through the Amazon ML console or API, and receive alerts when the training and evaluation data are not similar, enabling you to select a different data splitting strategy for the next model iteration.
We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow, an easy-to-use and cost-effective traffic management service that lets you manage how your end-users are routed to your application’s endpoints—whether in a single AWS region or distributed around the globe. End user routing is managed via simple policies you can build like a flowchart in the Amazon Route 53 console, and then import or export via the Amazon Route 53 API in JSON format.
AWS CloudFormation has added support for four additional AWS services and several new features.
Kazakhstan may be about to intercept and decrypt its citizens' internet traffic – by ordering them to install rogue security certificates.…
Microsoft's new high-end Office 365 plan, E5, has gone live with pricing around 50 per cent higher than the existing E3 plan, which remains available. E3 costs $20 (£14.70) per user per month, whereas E5 is $35.00 (£21.80), a bigger price differential for US users.…
You can now use Chef 12 to configure and manage Linux on your Amazon EC2 and on-premises instances. This is in addition to existing Chef 12 support in AWS OpsWorks for Windows. OpsWorks is a service that helps you automate operational tasks like code deployment, software configurations, package installations, database setups, and server scaling using Chef.
CloudFlare is introducing HTTP/2 support for all of its users, to be available on all SSL/TLS connections – while still supporting SPDY – so netizens can spend more time with their families instead of waiting for pages to load this Christmas.…
Big Data and All That The media appear to suffer from a congenital compulsion to simplify everything down to a level they can grasp. Big data is one of those simplifications: something that can be shoved down a Fat Pipe. Enid Blyton passed away before the IT explosion and only got as far as Big Ears.…
Alas, poor Redmond has acknowledged the Azure Active Directory is "having issues" alongside the disappearance of its Office 365 service in the UK and Europe.…
Microsoft's Office 365 service has gone offline for many users in the UK and Europe, though the cause and extent of the outage is not yet known.…
Comment Here I am on day 3 at the Supercomputing Summit.. I think I’ve been waiting for more than 15 or 20 years to re-live this kind of experience, which is very similar to what it was like going to conferences back in the 1990s.…
You read it here first, folks, Ingram Micro has indeed acquired service-provider-centric virtualiser Odin from Parallels.…
Australia's shadow communications minister ALP's Jason Clare is pimping a leak of a March 2015 internal document penned by nbnTM , the entity building Australia's national broadband network (NBN) to prove another cost blowout in the rollout. But his arguments may not add up to much.…
It's no secret that people are getting increasingly jumpy about poor security within the Internet of Things.…
Comcast has started bending the intent behind net neutrality rules with a new service, just as those rules are heading to a DC court this week.…
Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region.
Analysis Hillary Clinton has announced a $250bn plan to build out the United States' broadband infrastructure and ensure that everyone has fast internet access at an affordable price by 2020.…
Kiwicon Hipsters and selfie addicts beware: infosec man Steve Lord has crafted a tool designed to sever your line of addiction to Instagram by quietly blocking it over public Wi-Fi.…
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability.
We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Chicago, Illinois for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. The new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application and supports all Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 features at no additional cost. With the addition of the Chicago edge location, there are now a total of 21 edge locations in the US and 54 worldwide.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a risk and reward element hard wired into the 10-year cloudy infrastructure deal with Deutsche Bank and will lose money if things don’t go as planned, an exec has confirmed.…
BlackBerry is dumping one of the more attractive features of its enterprise software comeback plan only a year after launching it.…
Microsoft Research boffins in Singapore and India have put up a novel idea: an app designed to identify where a smartphone's downloads are suffering and route around the problem without bothering the network operator.…
The government of the Australian state of New South Wales has completed a review of emergency services telecommunications, and has decided it wants a single statewide network.…
Starting today, RDS PostgreSQL has added support for three popular PostgreSQL extensions:
The UK's communications watchdog has released a Wi-Fi checker app to help broadband customers with wireless set-up in their homes and offices.…
Banking startup Tandem has been cleared to offer digital financial services in the UK.…
Price hikes and last-minute service tweaks to cloud storage offerings have caught unwanted attention from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.…
Microsoft wants to become your phone company, at least for for voice.…
Belkin's home routers can be commandeered by hackers, thanks to a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability and other bugs, we're told.…
The answer to getting affordable broadband access to all citizens may lie in more municipal networks funded by local government, according to the OECD.…
Microsoft has announced PowerApps, a new way to create and host applications for its Azure cloud service.…
In brief Blighty telecoms giant BT has struck a cloudy deal with HP Enterprise for an undisclosed sum.…
Virgin Media has whined about the UK government's broadband rollout scheme, claiming that the £680m taxpayer-funded pot of cash doesn't represent "value for money".…
Google's asked the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to let it play with millimetre-wave technology America-wide for two years.…
A mistaken peering advertisement from a European network took Google Cloud's europe-west1 region offline last week for around 70 minutes.…
Freeview is safe. For now. Mobile operators with broadband services were denied the 470-694MHz frequency used by the terrestrial TV service.…
UK registry operator Nominet is planning to increase the cost of .uk domains by 50 per cent starting 1 March 2016, raising questions over its historic nonprofit status.…
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is buddying up to Microsoft on public cloud, chief executive Meg Whitman has confirmed.…
Internet provider Eclipse has been hit by a DDoS attack, the second wave of an attack which began on Monday.…
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability.
Fontdeck, a service which provided fonts to websites, is to close. Fonts can no longer be purchased, and existing fonts will no longer be served after 1 December 2016.…
Blog web hosting service provider WordPress.com is embracing JavaScript and open-sourcing its code base, in what the platform’s chief reckons is a big, risky and controversial bet.…
Currently, there are as many mobile subscriptions as people in the world, and every second, 20 new mobile broadband subscriptions are activated. This, and the increased video consumption on mobile devices, is pushing data consumption to new heights - mobile data traffic in Q3 2015 was 65 per cent higher than the previous year, according to Ericsson’s latest version of its bi-annual Mobility Report.…
Adobe's announced it will close Revel, its Flickr-like cloudy photo storage service.…
This is different from hosting how exactly? Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on “EC2 Dedicated Hosts” - a new cloud service that offers “physical servers fully dedicated for your use.”…
You can now create and model links between different application components (for example: frontend and worker, or frontend and API) when developing microservices-based applications in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Previously, you had to manually hardcode links between components, making it difficult to manage and update multi-component applications. Now, you can easily model dynamic links between application components and then the components of your application can be updated as a group, or individually, using a configuration template and a single command. Links between application components are modeled using the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK.
You can now use AWS Config to assess license compliance on Dedicated Hosts by turning on recording for instances and hosts. AWS Config records when instances are launched, stopped, or terminated on a Dedicated Host, and pairs this information with host and instance level information relevant to software licensing, such as Host ID, Amazon Machine Image (AMI) IDs, number of sockets and physical cores. This enables you to use AWS Config as a data source for license reporting.
You can now provision Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (subject to your license terms), and can also help you meet compliance requirements.
AWS CloudTrail integration with Amazon CloudWatch Logs is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). With this feature, you can monitor for specific API activity and receive email notifications when those specific API calls are made.
An unknown number of TalkTalk Business customers have been unable to access their email messages for days, after the budget telco's servers went down on Friday.…
EE may have a pretty pathetic customer service record, but the company is hoping to cheer up its 27-million-strong subscriber base by potentially allowing them to block ads on their mobile phones.…
We are pleased to announce two new features for Amazon Redshift, making it easier for you to control access to your clusters and expanding query capabilities.
Amazon Redshift makes it easy to launch a fast, petabyte-scale data warehouse for less than $1000/TB/year. Get started with a free 2-month trial.
Network carrier Level3 says a severed cable is to blame for an outage that hit portions of the US Friday morning.…
Ofcom’s annual survey of digital literacy amongst children reveals strong support from parents for tools to limit or block net access - and some gullibility amongst children.…
You can now deploy new applications on your Amazon EMR cluster. Amazon EMR release 4.2.0 now offers Ganglia 3.6, an upgraded version of Apache Spark (1.5.2), and upgraded sandbox releases of Apache Oozie (4.2.0), Presto (0.125), and Apache Zeppelin (0.5.5). Ganglia provides resource utilization monitoring for Hadoop and Spark. Oozie 4.2.0 includes several new features, such as adding Spark actions and HiveServer2 actions in your Oozie workflows. Spark 1.5.2, Presto 0.125, and Zeppelin 0.5.5 are maintenance releases, and contain bug fixes and other optimizations.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now lets you view detailed health metrics for your applications from the Elastic Beanstalk Management Console. You can now view health status, metrics, and causes for individual EC2 instances within your environments. Previously, this view was limited to the Elastic Beanstalk CLI.
VMware cofounder and CEO Dianne Greene is to head all of Google's cloud efforts.…
You can now preview real-time predictions directly within the Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) console, before creating your smart applications. With this new feature, no code is necessary to request individual predictions and immediately see the results. You simply provide the content of a data record within the Amazon ML console, push a button, and quickly review the response. There is no additional cost to try real-time predictions from the Amazon ML console.
Visit the documentation for more information on trying real-time predictions from the Amazon Machine Learning console.
The AWS SDK for Go is now generally available and recommended for production use. We have been working on a number of improvements since the Developer Preview announcement in June, including:
We will continue to add timely support for new AWS APIs and introduce additional features to the SDK. As always, please find us on GitHub and let us know how we can improve your developer experience.
For more information, please see:
The AWS SDK for Go repository: http://ift.tt/1Jlx79T
API Documentation: http://ift.tt/1JXm5T0
Developer Guide: http://ift.tt/1Jlx79Y
Domain name overseer ICANN has spent $2.5m in the past year lobbying the US government, putting the small non-profit on a par with multi-national corporations.…
You can now test iOS, Android, and web apps against a large (and growing) collection of real phones and tablets without the complexity and expense of deploying and maintaining your own device labs and automation infrastructure. Simply select the tests that you want to run against your app, choose the devices from a fleet of unique device/OS combinations, and within minutes you receive detailed reports that pinpoint bugs and performance problems.
Your first 250 device minutes are free. Start testing today.
Starting today, you can upgrade your RDS PostgreSQL database instance from major version 9.3 to 9.4 with just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. PostgreSQL 9.4 offers several performance and feature benefits over PostgreSQL 9.3 for many customers. This includes support for the JSONB datatype, which allows you to manage schemas more flexibly. We encourage you to read about what's new in PostgreSQL 9.4 and test your application for compatibility before you upgrade your databases to version 9.4. To upgrade, simply select the "Modify" option on the AWS Management Console corresponding to the DB instance you want to upgrade, choose the version of PostgreSQL 9.4 you want to upgrade to, and proceed with the wizard. Some of the earlier versions may not be available for upgrade to avoid the possibility of upgrading to a version that was released by the community before your current version. The upgrade may be applied immediately (if you select the "Apply Immediately" option), or during your next maintenance window (by default). Please note that in either case, your database instance will have an availability impact for a few minutes as the upgrade completes, and your database instance is rebooted. Please review the AWS User Guide to learn more.
BT has attacked Ofcom's decision to lift a five-year-long obligation on Sky to offer its sports channels to competitors in the market.…
Amazon has pressed the AWS new-service release stream to persuade enterprises against being tempted by tasty deals from cloud weakling Oracle.…
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has allocated the 79 GHz spectrum for use in motor vehicle applications.…
Google's just done something interesting with its cloud by adding a configurator that lets you roll your own servers.…
The government of Bangladesh shut down its internet for an hour earlier today in response to the announcement of the death penalty in a high-profile war crime trial.…
Amazon VPC Endpoints for S3 is now available in US GovCloud Region. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon S3 without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance. With VPC endpoints, the data between the VPC and S3 is transferred within the Amazon network, helping protect your instances from internet traffic.
Amazon VPC Endpoints for Amazon S3 provides two additional security controls to help limit access to S3 buckets. You can now require that requests to your S3 buckets originate from a VPC using a VPC endpoint. Additionally, you can control what buckets, requests, users, or groups are allowed through a specific VPC endpoint.
Amazon VPC Endpoints for Amazon S3 is available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and US GovCloud regions.
To learn more about Amazon VPC endpoints for S3, visit Using VPC Endpoints.
Qualified researchers can now access two of the world’s largest collections of cancer genome data as AWS Public Data Sets.
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) corpus of raw and processed genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data from thousands of cancer patients is now freely available on Amazon S3 for registered users of the Cancer Genomics Cloud, one of the funded cancer cloud pilots of the National Cancer Institute.
Over 2,400 whole genomes from 1,100 unique donors from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) data set is also freely available on Amazon S3 for credentialed researchers subject to the ICGC data sharing policies.
Access to the TCGA and ICGC data sets on AWS will be administered by third-party Trusted Partners who will also curate a set of cloud-based tools to accelerate use of the data. Making these data and tools available in the cloud to qualified researchers drastically lowers the barrier to entry in working with petabyte scale cancer genomic data, enhance collaboration across research groups, and potentially accelerate the development of new treatments for cancer patients.
Learn more about these genomics resources on our blog: http://ift.tt/1YguOK0.
Visit the TCGA on AWS page for information on accessing the data: http://ift.tt/1l68DaR.
Visit the ICGC on AWS page for information on accessing the data: http://ift.tt/1NbKD2O.
Cumulo Hopkintus is forming new product shapes as cloud winds strengthen in the data centre. There’s no bending with these gales, and EMC is having to go with the flow, enabling data movement off its arrays and into the public cloud.…
Comment Cloud computing has elements of a fool’s paradise. We’re told it’s elastic, infinitely elastic even, with thousands of virtual servers spun up in minutes. But there's just one problem ... this is palpable nonsense, short-term excess capacity being mopped up by early entrants to a large resource.…
Analysis US Congressmen have called on America's broadband regulator to figure out how to shut down websites and social media accounts used by the Islamic State.…
Matthew Prince, CloudFlare's cofounder and CEO, has hit back at Anonymous, which claimed his firm backs ISIS by keeping terror websites up and running.…
Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) launched the preview of the Short Message Service (SMS) multi-factor authentication (MFA) option for verifying IAM users when signing in to the AWS Management Console. MFA is a security best practice that adds an extra layer of protection in addition to users’ passwords. Until now, you could enable MFA for IAM users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use the text messaging functionality of a mobile phone to verify IAM users with MFA. After enabling SMS MFA, users are prompted for their password, as well as for an MFA security code that can only be received on their mobile phone via SMS. To sign up for the preview, register on the AWS MFA page.
Microsoft claims it really does care about privacy and securing the cloud and Windows 10, promising to build cybersecurity teams and investing in the area.…
There are now more SIMs than people in the world, with the former surpassing the latter a little earlier this year, or so says mobile network supplier Ericsson, with that particular factoid – and many others – found in its annual Christmas Pudding of traffic stats and forecasts, the 2015 Mobility Report.…
ECTA Regulatory Conf '15 TalkTalk boss Dido Harding has described the departure of BT Openreach’s chief Joe Garner as a big headache for the former state monopoly – which is in the midst of battling to retain the infrastructure wing of its business.…
Less than 24 hours after BT Openreach chief Joe Garner quit the telco's troubled infrastructure division, BT customers all over the UK are saying they can't get online – with the apparent network outage possibly taking up to three days to fix.…
ECTA Regulatory Conf '15 "We’re not going to pilot the first generation of VR games because the infrastructure isn’t good enough," according to the European Commission's head of broadband, Anna Krzyzanowska, who added: "That might be one of the greatest opportunities lost in the current time."…
Liberty Global – the owner of UK telco Virgin Media – has agreed to buy Caribbean-based operator Cable & Wireless Communications for £3.5bn ($5.3bn).…
Fujitsu Forum 2015 Fujitsu has outlined a timetable for its hybrid IT digital platform after inking a deal to acquire French-based fluffy white services outfit UShareSoft.…
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has paved the way for banks, insurers and other financial services companies to take advantage of cloud computing services, so long as "appropriate safeguards" are in place, said one commentator.…
Netflix has released Spinnaker, an open-source tool for testing and rolling out software updates in the cloud.…
Network neutrality has never been the flame-bait topic in Australia that it is in America, but that could be about to change, courtesy of the “Netflix effect”.…
At Oracle’s recent OpenWorld conference, Larry Ellison asserted: “We never, ever see IBM” or SAP in the cloud.…
BT's Openreach chief Joe Garner has quit the telecoms giant during a deeply unsettling time for the firm's infrastructure division.…
In a probably-inevitable outcome of the Australian government's mandated multi-technology model for the National Broadband Network, a Queensland city wants to go it alone and install its own fibre-to-the-premises network.…
Spot instances now support Amazon EC2’s storage-optimized, high I/O i2 instance types. These instances provide very fast SSD-backed instance storage that is optimized for very high random I/O performance at a low cost. With i2 Spot instances, you can add high-memory worker nodes to your Hadoop and Spark clusters, perform data-intensive social media and advertising analytics, and simulate production environments for your continuous integration and deployment applications.
You can launch i2 Spot instances using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon EC2 CLI/SDK tools using the RequestSpotFleet and RequestSpotInstances APIs. I2 Spot instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions.
The end of this year will see yet one more effort by some governments to grab greater control of the internet when the United Nations General Assembly meets in New York.…
We are pleased to announce that Amazon ElastiCache now supports Redis version 2.8.23 with enhanced capabilities. Customers can launch new clusters with Redis 2.8.23, as well as upgrade existing ones to the new engine version.
Another day, and another person steps forward to add their voice to the chorus of people demanding that BT breaks away from its Openreach division.…
BT's Openreach has released a tiny amount of information about data usage over the former state monopoly's fibre network.…
Count the likes of eBay, Facebook, and Twitter among those who support the FCC's plan to allow municipal governments to become ISPs.…
Telstra has moved to bury rumours that it's in a battle with nbnTM over the residents of South Brisbane.…
The Amazon DynamoDB console has been redesigned to make it easier to create and manage your tables. A simplified interface and clean look give you easy access to the main DynamoDB features. You’ll find tips and help options throughout the console to guide you through the process of creating and configuring your tables. It’s now easier than ever to add new items, scan, filter, and query your tables, and update and delete items right within the new interface.
Today, we updated Cost Explorer—AWS’s interactive visual cost reporting tool—to allow users to better manage their custom cost reports. As Cost Explorer’s reporting capabilities have expanded to include many options on which to filter and group costs (e.g., by Account, Service, Tag, Availability Zone, Purchase Option, and API Operation) and the ability to display budgeted and forecasted costs, the number and utility of Cost Explorer reports created by users has increased significantly. In order to help users better manage those reports, this new feature allows users to easily save, access, modify, and share those reports in Cost Explorer. To illustrate, a user could create a report displaying monthly costs grouped by service for all costs tagged with the key “Department” and value “Marketing” incurred during the 3rd quarter of this year, apply the title “Q3 2016 AWS Spend – Marketing Dept.,” and click the save button. All approved users within the organization could then easily access that report via Cost Explorer’s report title drop-down. If the user later needs to modify this report, they can do so with as few as two clicks in the “View/Manage All Reports” screen.
To get started, simply navigate to the Cost Explorer link under the Billing and Cost Management dashboard. To learn more about forecasting in Cost Explorer, please refer to the Cost Explorer User Guide.
Efforts to protest Facebook's Internet.org project at the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) being held in Brazil this week were shut down by United Nations security staff.…
Call it “safe harbour” in action: Microsoft has announced it's going to go along with Germany's data privacy concerns and start hosting Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online in that country.…
Nextgen Group's stalled plans to build a submarine cable from Perth to Singapore are moving again, with M2 takeover target Vocus signing a memorandum of understanding to take a half-share in the build.…
EMC has announced Gen 8 of its Isilon operating system, providing it in software-only form for small offices, and adding the ability to send less active data to the cloud with the Cloud Pool construct.…
Huawei's Mobile Broadband Forum While BT and the UK government may think that 10Mbps is plenty of speed, nobody else does it seems, and the mobile world is now gearing up for 1Gbps. In fact, the so-called 4.5G even has an official name, LTE-Advanced Pro.…
