Amazon has teleported its cloud business into the management software of a rival that is used in thousands of data centers across the world.…
The AWS Management Portal for vCenter is now available for you to install. If you use VMware infrastructure, you can now install the AWS Management Portal for vCenter as a plug-in for VMware vCenter and use it to manage AWS infrastructure using vCenter. The portal interface is simple to use and is designed to make it easy for users with VMware experience to get started with AWS. There is no cost to use the portal, aside from the cost of the underlying AWS services consumed.
The AWS Management Portal for vCenter includes support for Amazon EC2 and VM Import. Using the portal, you can migrate your existing VMware VMs to Amazon EC2, launch new EC2 instances, create VPCs and Subnets, and manage your EC2 instances. We will add additional functionality to the portal over the coming months. AWS resources created using the portal run in your AWS account, so you get all of the benefits of AWS, when managing your resources using vCenter. You can also use other AWS tools in combination with the portal, including the AWS Management Console and AWS CLI.
The AWS Management Portal for vCenter makes it easy for enterprises to offer self-service access to AWS to their internal users. It includes Single Sign-On support for Active Directory. It provides integrated Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), so you can set fine-grained permissions for what end users can view, create, or modify. Resources created within the portal are automatically tagged, so administrators can also generate tag-based cost allocation reports for any resources that users create with the portal.
Huawei has planted another flag in 802.11ax standardisation, claiming a demonstration of 10.53 Gbps WiFi throughput in the 5 GHz band.…
NICTA has dropped another slab of cash into its kitty with the sale of AWS backup spinoff Yuruware to US-based disaster recovery specialist Unitrends.…
More companies have knocked at the door of Pivotal's floating cloud fortress and, after proffering almost $100,000 each, have been welcomed into the Cloud Foundry Foundation.…
Salesforce is teaming up with Microsoft, a company chief Marc Benioff used to call the 'evil empire'.…
We are excited to announce two new features for Amazon CloudSearch: expanded language support and more user control over search domain scaling. These new features are available immediately for all new and existing CloudSearch domains.
With the expanded language support, you can now configure language specific text processing for Hebrew in addition to the 33 other languages Amazon CloudSearch supports.
The new desired partition count scaling option gives you more control over the starting footprint of a search domain. This option enables you to preconfigure the number of index partitions for a domain when you use the m2.2xlarge search instance type. The desired partition count can be configured through the CloudSearch management console, API, or CLI.
Preconfiguring a search domain to use more partitions enables faster uploads when you have a large amount of data to upload. If you need to boost query performance, you can also add partitions to drop the per-partition document count and speed up complex queries. Amazon CloudSearch will still scale the domain up or down based on the volume of data or traffic, but the number of partitions will never drop below your desired partition count.
Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. For an introduction to Amazon CloudSearch, visit our detail page. To learn more about recently released features, see the Amazon CloudSearch Developer Guide. Please share your thoughts on these and any additional features you'd like to see in the CloudSearch forum. We really appreciate customer feedback and use it to help us prioritize upcoming features.
Salesforce is in talks over a cloud tie-up with Microsoft, a company its chief once branded the "evil empire".…
Hyperscale data centres are wondrous. Gartner's Sydney IT Operations and Data Centre summit this week heard that the likes of Google and Facebook have a sysdamin:server ratio of around 1:24,000, compared to the 1:500 common in the most efficient and virtualised enterprise bit barns. Hyperscale data centres can run at a power usage efficiency rating of a miserly 1.09. These data centres never stop and hardly ever wobble, thanks to designs that assume hardware will sometimes fail and therefore treat servers with the same reverence the rest of us reserve for empty soft drink cans.…
We have four pieces of good news to share regarding Amazon RDS in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. First, you can provision up to 3 TB in storage and up to 30,000 IOPS for your database instances (maximum realized IOPS will vary by engine type). Second, you can convert an existing Amazon RDS instance that uses standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage. Finally, you can scale IOPS and storage independently. All three features are enabled for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle database engines. Here are the details:
Provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS: You can now provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance – three times the previous limit of 1 TB and 10,000 IOPS per database instance. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on an m2.4xlarge instance, you can realize up to 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and 12,500 IOPS for MySQL. However, by provisioning up to 30,000 IOPS, you may be able to achieve lower latency and higher throughput. Your actual realized IOPS may vary from the amount you provisioned based on your database workload, instance type, and database engine choice. Refer to the Factors That Affect Realized IOPS section of the documentation to learn more.
Convert an existing database instance to use Provisioned IOPS storage: You can now convert database instances using standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage and get consistent throughput and low I/O latencies. Use the "Modify" action for your database instance on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console, check the "Use Provisioned IOPS" check box, specify the number of IOPS required for your workload, and proceed through the wizard. You can also perform this operation via the Amazon RDS APIs and the Command Line Interface.
Scale storage and IOPS independently: You can now scale IOPS (in increments of 1000) and storage independently. The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the storage requested (in GB) should be between 3 and 10. For example, for a database instance with 1000 GB of storage, you can provision from 3,000 to 10,000 IOPS. You can scale the IOPS up or down depending on factors such as seasonal variability of traffic to your applications.
M3 Instance Type Support: These new instances provide you with a similar ratio of CPU and memory resources as our previous M1 database instances but offer 50% more computational capability/core, significantly improving overall compute capacity. Out of these new DB instances, the db.m3.xlarge and db.m3.2xlarge are optimized for Provisioned IOPS storage. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on db.m3.2xlarge instance type, it is possible to realize up to 12,500 IOPS for MySQL and 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and PostgreSQL. Refer to the Provisioned IOPS storage section of the User Guide to learn more.
You are also invited to attend the AWS GovCloud (US) Solutions Architect Office Hours on June 3rd and the Introduction to AWS GovCloud (US) webinar with the AWS GovCloud (US) team on June 11th, where you can learn more about the AWS GovCloud (US) region and the new RDS offerings.
Huawei has expanded its software-defined networking support with the launch of the snappily-named Huawei Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution, which El Reg is reluctantly going to have to shorten to ADCCCS to stay within its keystroke budget.…
You can now take advantage of the R3 instance type with Amazon RDS. R3 instances are optimized for memory-intensive applications, have the lowest cost per GiB of RAM among Amazon RDS instance types, and are recommended for high performance database workloads. These new instances feature the latest Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and deliver higher sustained memory bandwidth with lower network latency and jitter at prices up to 28% lower than comparable M2 DB Instances.
Of these new DB instances, db.r3.xlarge, db.r3.2xlarge, and db.r3.4xlarge are optimized for Provisioned IOPS storage. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on db.r3.8xlarge instance type, it is possible to realize up to 20,000 IOPS for MySQL and 25,000 IOPS for PostgreSQL. Refer to the Provisioned IOPS storage section of the User Guide to learn more.
To take advantage of R3 instance types for RDS, you can either launch a new instance of a supported engine type, or perform an instance scale operation on an instance running a supported engine type. We currently support PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MySQL version 5.6 database engines for R3 instances, with support for MySQL version 5.1 and 5.5 coming soon. Amazon RDS for MySQL customers running MySQL 5.5 who wish to take advantage of R3 instances now should first upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6 before performing an instance scale operation.
Pricing for R3 database instances starts at $0.089/hour (effective price) for 3 year Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances and $0.240/hour for On-Demand usage. These pricing examples are for MySQL instances in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region. For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.
These new instances are available in all AWS regions except GovCloud (US), China (Beijing), and South America (São Paulo). Support for RDS R3 instances is coming to those regions in the future.
To learn more about R3 instances, view the RDS instance class table.
We are excited to let you know that you can now log configuration changes to your Amazon CloudFront distributions through AWS CloudTrail, the AWS service that records API calls for your account and delivers log files to you. It can be used to enable security analysis, track changes to your AWS resource, and aid in compliance auditing. AWS CloudTrail logs can now include details for your configuration calls for Amazon CloudFront, including the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by Amazon CloudFront.
If you are already using AWS CloudTrail, you will start seeing Amazon CloudFront API calls in your AWS CloudTrail log. If you haven't turned on AWS CloudTrail for your account, you can turn on CloudTrail from the AWS Management Console. There is no additional charge for turning on CloudTrail, but standard rates for Amazon S3 and Amazon SNS usage apply. Please visit the AWS CloudTrail detail page or the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide to learn more.
To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, please visit the Amazon CloudFront detail page. You can also join technical experts from Amazon CloudFront for an interactive "Office Hours" session on June 25th, 2014 from 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST. These online sessions enable technical audiences to interact directly with our engineers in the form of a live Q&A. Register for Amazon CloudFront Office Hours here.
The US Department of Justice has urged an appeals court to uphold the verdict against Apple that found the fruity firm had violated antitrust laws and conspired with book publishers to fix the price of ebooks.…
Facebook has asked the competition wing of the European Commission to probe its $19bn buyout of WhatsApp in a move to apparently nullify a host of investigations being sparked in multiple EU nations.…
In response to a previous article, a number of readers have submitted their views on essential systems administration tools. A few responses stand out from the rest.…
O2 is touting a new low-cost, low-limit route to 4G mobile broadband, and slipped in a few price rises for good measure. It's still not quite as low as Three UK.…
E-mail and SMS hold-outs are a danger to the Internet, because they foul up media giants' tracking, according to analysts with an interest in flogging social tracking services to media giants.…
Cloud operator Joyent went through a major failure on Tuesday when a fat-fingered admin brought down an entire data center's compute assets.…
By the end of the year there will be more mobile phone connections than people on the planet, although they mostly belong to the richer part of the planet – a whopping half the world’s population doesn’t have connectivity. But at present, the system simply identifies accounts rather than their users.…
IT services firm Atos is to purchase its French colleague Bull, which offers cloud, cybersecurity and big data to enterprise customers, for €620m (£503m, $845m).…
Apple supplier Foxconn is planning to buy a stake in Taiwanese mobile operator Asia Pacific Telecom for $390m to gobble up more of the country’s early 4G market.…
Vodafone needs to get high-speed handsets into the hands of consumers to effectively compete in the market. But the company also needs to worry about how to handle all that data – and it's hoping the European Commission will help it get its hands on some cheaper fibre.…
Nobody ever reads click-through licences. Especially not on phones, where the legalese can run to hundreds of pages. But oh, what gems can be found in there.…
Australia is to get its fourth Perth-Sydney fibre connection, but it's got a twist: instead of thousands of kilometres of trenching, SubPartners is planning a submarine cable for the build.…
The HTTP 2.0 working group appears to be in crisis, with work on integrating Google's SPDDY HTTP-boosting protocol blamed for taking the project off the rails.…
Here's an idea: instead of the $AU10 million worth of reviews designed to pursue an ideological crusade against the National Broadband Network, communications minister Malcolm Turnbull could instead get to work on fixing the creaking competition mechanisms of Australia's telecommunications industry.…
The Competitive Carriers Coalition (CCC) has claimed Telstra “discriminate against consumers trying to buy broadband from competitors by incorrectly claiming their telephone lines were unable to provide a service.”…
An Australian company called Shark Mitigation Systems has come up with something interesting: a sonar-equipped buoy that can spot sharks and then beam information about their presence to lifeguards over Optus' mobile telephony network.…
Fans of new Linux operating system "CoreOS" can now run the lightweight tech on Google's main cloud service.…
Google is now running "everything" in its mammoth cloud on top of a potential open source successor to virtualization, paving the way for other companies to do the same.…
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to process large amounts of data using Hadoop on AWS. Amazon EMR now supports 4 new memory-optimized instances types: r3.xlarge, r3.2xlarge, r3.4xlarge, and r3.8xlarge. These instance types have the lowest cost per GiB of RAM among all Amazon EC2 instance types. They are ideal for applications like Impala and Spark that need large amounts of memory.
You can learn more about these instance types on the EC2 Instance Types page. To use these instance types with EMR, you must use AMI version 2.4.5 or later (for Hadoop 1) or AMI version 3.0.4 or later (for Hadoop 2).
New to Hadoop/EMR? Follow this step-by-step tutorial to launch your first cluster in minutes.
Data plans of up to half a terabyte are on offer from Truphone, the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which targets businesses with lots of globe-trotting execs.…
Facebook has taken the highly unusual step of changing its privacy settings to make them easier to understand and alter.…
Oracle has gained a crucial federal certification that will make it easier for US government agencies to buy cloud services from the database giant.…
We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Transcoder has added multiple parallel processing enhancements that will improve your experience when running transcoding jobs.
The improvements include:
You can learn more about Amazon Elastic Transcoder’s new enhancements by visiting our recent post on the Amazon Web Services Blog. To get started with Amazon Elastic Transcoder using the API or the AWS Management Console, please refer to the detail page.
Amazon EC2 G2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. Amazon EC2 C3 instances are now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Region.
G2 instances are intended for graphics and general purpose GPU compute applications. G2 instances feature a high-performance NVIDIA GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB of video memory, making them ideally suited for video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics-intensive applications, and other server-side workloads requiring massive parallel processing power. G2 instances are available in one size – g2.2xlarge.
C3 instances are ideal for applications that benefit from a higher amount of compute capacity relative to memory, and are recommended for high performance web servers, and other scale-out compute-intensive applications. C3 instances are available in five sizes – c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, c3.4xlarge, c3.8xlarge.
You can purchase G2 and C3 instances as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or as Spot Instances. To learn more about G2 and C3 instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 Instance Types page.
Apple has 'fessed up to an iMessage problem that occasionally clobbers iPhone-toting fanbois if they use non-iOS mobes and vowed to fix it.…
EE have released an Eagle, a Buzzard, a Kite and an Osprey. Sadly a Vulture is missing from the avian ensemble, but we can let that pass. These are devices rather than birds – the Eagle is a tablet and the other items are portable Wi-Fi hotspots.…
A taxpayer-subsidised project to run a test network for Machine-to-Machine communications – aka the Internet of Things – is getting underway in Milton Keynes, with kit being supplied by Brit telco BT and wireless bods at Neul.…
A lot has changed since the '80s. Back in the day, your product arrived when it arrived, often within weeks rather than days and you didn’t get the chance to check where it was.…
Facebook is rolling out a creepy new feature that will - with a user's permission - tap into the mic on their mobile device and listen into music and television playing in the background.…
After a three-year project, the European Grid Infrastructure project has pulled the big red switch on its federated cloud, which it says pools the resources of academic iron in 19 EU countries.…
AWS Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2012 Version 2 is now available.
Version 2 of the AWS Management Pack for SCOM 2012 and SCOM 2012 R2 takes advantage of features introduced in SCOM 2012, most notably resource pools. A resource pool is a collection of management servers used to distribute work amongst themselves and take over work from a failed member. This ensures the continuity of monitoring by providing multiple management servers that can take on monitoring workflows if one of the management servers becomes unavailable and thereby enables customers to reliably monitor large scale AWS environments using SCOM 2012 and SCOM 2012 R2.
The management pack can be downloaded from http://ift.tt/1lU0ukq and for more information you can review the management pack documentation.
We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EBS encryption for new EBS storage volumes, enabling you to meet security and encryption compliance requirements. This frequently requested feature provides you with seamless support for data encryption on block-level storage, at no additional cost.
Until today, you needed third-party security tools to encrypt data for EBS volumes. With Amazon EBS encryption, you can now create an encrypted EBS volume and attach it to a supported instance type. Data on the volume, disk I/O, and snapshots created from the volume are then all encrypted. The encryption occurs on the servers that host the EC2 instances, providing encryption of data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS storage. EBS encryption is based on the industry standard AES-256 cryptographic algorithm.
To get started, simply enable encryption when you create a new EBS volume using the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI. Amazon EBS encryption is available for all the latest EC2 instances in all commercially available AWS regions. To learn more about Amazon EBS encryption, see the Amazon EBS details page.
from AWS News http://ift.tt/1tnmWa8
NBN Co has announced it will start switching off copper connections to homes and businesses in some parts of Australia.…
As IPv4 address-exhaustion shambles ever closer, IANA has begun handing out recovered addresses.…
Microsoft is preparing to give its channel partners another way of selling Azure to their customers.…
If there is one thing that irritates a mobile device user above all else it's the way some apps will chug along perfectly happily for several hours then suddenly enter the lifeless purgatory known as "syncing" as they try to pull some data from a remote cloud server over a rubbish mobile network.…
Starting today, AWS Trusted Advisor will help you monitor service usage for Amazon SES, Amazon VPC, and Auto Scaling, bringing the service coverage from four (Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, and Elastic Load Balancing) to seven. The Service Limits check alerts you if your usage goes over 80% of the default limit, so you can request a service limit increase ahead of time. You can review your Service Limits report in Trusted Advisor’s Performance category.
| Service | Limits |
|---|---|
| Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) | Daily sending quota |
| Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) | Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs) Internet Gateways VPCs |
| Auto Scaling | Auto Scaling groups Launch configurations |
AWS Trusted Advisor has become our customers’ frequently used optimization tool for cost, security, reliability, and performance configurations. In 2013, AWS customers have reviewed 1,000,000+ TA recommendations across categories, taken action to improve and protect their cloud deployment, and reduced spending by more than $207M.
You can also use AWS Trusted Advisor to check whether your AWS CloudTrail and logging information are correctly configured in accordance to our security best practices. We released the AWS CloudTrail Logging check in the Security category in March 2014, and it supports all regions that CloudTrail supports.
For more information about Trusted Advisor and descriptions of all 37 AWS best-practice recommendations, visit AWS Trusted Advisor.
Andy Sutton, principal network architect for UK mobile network EE and a visiting professor at the University of Salford, says 5G will be built around small cells and a heterogeneous network.…
BT has successfully shot down EE's claim in a direct mail ad that it offered "Britain's most reliable broadband for staying connected".…
Salesforce is in the fortunate business where it can simply raise its cloud-coated hand in the air and a fraction of the trillions of dollar bills being blown around the global economy will stick to it.…
IBM's Watson supercomputer team has acquired virtual-assistant maker Cognea.…
Amazon EC2 G2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. Amazon EC2 C3 instances are now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Region.
G2 instances are intended for graphics and general purpose GPU compute applications. G2 instances feature a high-performance NVIDIA GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB of video memory, making them ideally suited for video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics-intensive applications, and other server-side workloads requiring massive parallel processing power. G2 instances are available in one size – g2.2xlarge.
C3 instances are ideal for applications that benefit from a higher amount of compute capacity relative to memory, and are recommended for high performance web servers, and other scale-out compute-intensive applications. C3 instances are available in five sizes – c3.large, c3.xlarge, c3.2xlarge, c3.4xlarge, c3.8xlarge.
You can purchase G2 and C3 instances as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, or as Spot Instances. To learn more about G2 and C3 instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 Instance Typespage.
VMware has let some senior folks from its vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) off the leash and into the wilds of a Reddit Ask Me anything (AMA) session, and they've spilled a few nuggets about future directions for the hybrid cloud offering.…
With a single announcement, Telstra has accidentally skewered the argument that fixed networks are obsolete: the carrier plans to rollout a $AUD100 million cities-and-towns WiFi offload network, which will shift traffic from smartphones and tablets off the 4G network and onto the nearest bit of copper oxide* it can find.…
Amazon S3 now supports lifecycle rules for versioning. This means that you can now use lifecycle rules for S3 buckets regardless of whether they are enabled for versioning or not.
Versioning provides protection against overwrites and deletes by enabling you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Lifecycle rules provide you the ability to configure rules that define what automatically happens to objects stored in your buckets after a specific date or period of time.
Now that lifecycle rules are supported for versioning, you can combine versioning and lifecycle rules to enable scenarios such as easily setting up a rule that stores all your previous object versions in the lower cost Glacier storage class and deletes them from Glacier storage after 100 days. This example would provide a 100 day window to roll back any changes made to your data and automatically lower your storage costs.
To learn more about configuring lifecycle rules with versioning, please review the Amazon S3 Developers Guide.
Cisco CEO John Chambers says customers should expect significant consolidation in the networking industry, even as his own company strives to move into new markets.…
Apple is the latest firm said to be in talks with US ISPs on a deal to provide direct interconnects for improved streaming media performance.…
IBM's Watson supercomputer team has acquired virtual-assistant maker Cognea.…
Microsoft’s first phone as the formal owner of the old Nokia phones business is released today. The Lumia 630 will hit UK stores next week priced at £89, hitting the channels on 29 May.…
A problem in a world of global WiFi equipment is that global spectrum allocations aren't consistent, and in some places, kit clashes with applications like weather radar. A group of Austrian researchers is looking at how to clean up radar images spoiled by nearby WiFi kit.…
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has levied its largest do-not-call fine ever against a US telco, in this case Sprint.…
Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.
When you create or modify your SQL Server database instance to run using Multi-AZ, Amazon RDS will automatically provision a primary database in one Availability Zone and maintain a synchronous "standby" replica in a different Availability Zone. In the event of planned database maintenance or unplanned service disruption, Amazon RDS will automatically fail over the SQL Server database to the up-to-date standby so that database operations can resume quickly without any manual intervention.
Multi-AZ is available with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and 2012 Standard and Enterprise Editions. It is presently available in the US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) AWS Regions, with availability in the US East (Northern Virginia) region coming soon. The increased availability and fault tolerance offered by Amazon RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ are well suited for critical production environments using SQL Server.
To learn more, visit the RDS SQL Server details page.
A major transatlantic cable linking the EU and the US appears to have been cut, causing major problems for cloud operators.…
Google is preparing to bring unruly employee-owned phones under corporate dominion through the acquisition of a company that makes mobile device management tech.…
SAP’s business applications have landed on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud infrastructure service.…
Amazon is a threat to enterprise tech firms like Fujitsu not because of its tech nous but because of its willingness to operate at zero cost to expand its business, the Japanese giant’s president has told The Reg.…
Adobe has blamed a maintenance failure for the 27-hour outage in its Creative Cloud suite that left video and photo editors unable to log into online services.…
Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on its 'Workspaces' desktop-a-as-service offering in its Sydney region.…
We are excited to announce that Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region!
Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud that allows you to easily provision cloud-based desktops that allow end-users to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, or Android tablets. You can also integrate Amazon WorkSpaces with your corporate Active Directory so that your users can continue using their existing enterprise credentials to seamlessly access company resources.
For more information about Amazon WorkSpaces, please visit the product detail page, where you can learn more and watch a short introductory video that will explain the service. You can get started with the service using the AWS Management Console.
The Amazon WorkSpaces Team
In the race to keep mobile performance in line with user demands, carriers around the world are spending big on splitting their cellular networks into ever-smaller chunks. New research suggests that adding some spinning rust to base stations could help improve efficiency, at lower cost.…
Rackspace has retained Morgan Stanley to help it evaluate "inbound strategic proposals," according to Bloomberg News.…
Adobe is struggling to correct a global outage that has already locked customers out of its Creative Cloud online services for nearly 24 hours.…
The US Federal Communications Commission agreed to a proposal this morning that would allow ISPs to offer a "paid priority" internet.…
Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has attacked judges in the European Union's top court, who ruled earlier this week that the ad giant can be held responsible for the type of personal data that appears on its results pages.…
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's grand scheme to make NHS England paperless by 2018 has suffered a significant spending blow after a £60m slice of a tech fund allocated for the system appeared to disappear.…
The agency which predicts tsunamis and earthquakes in Japan has poured cold water on the idea of using the cloud to underpin its supercomputing operations.…
It's a given that the world is short of radio spectrum: now, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is calling on new models of spectrum management involving license-holders sharing their spectrum for unlicensed applications, and “incentive auctions” designed to persuade licensees like broadcasters into relinquishing some of their holdings.…
A strong – almost stunning – rate of 3G-to-4G conversion hasn't stopped Australia's number two mobile carrier Optus losing mobile customers to market leader Telstra, and only its rigorous cost-cutting has allowed the carrier to return a profit for FY 2013-2014.…
We are pleased to announce that you can now use Amazon RDS with AWS OpsWorks. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or PostgreSQL database engine and manages time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
With today's announcement, you can register RDS databases to use with your OpsWorks applications. Configuration details such as the database endpoint are automatically made available to your application servers. To get started, create an RDS DB instance, and then in your OpsWorks stack add the RDS DB instance as a layer and associate it with your applications. To learn more and see examples, see our documentation or get started in the AWS OpsWorks console.
We're excited to announce new features through the AWS Activate program:
Join the AWS Activate program by signing up here.
US broadband customers should expect to be charged wireless-style fees for their wired internet access in the next few years, an executive from US broadband mega-giant Comcast has revealed.…
SAP is swinging the axe and cutting a number of staff as it re-shapes itself as a provider of cloud services.…
Salesforce.com's decision to acquire Heroku has looked an oddity for a while: why does a SaaS juggernaut with its own perfectly good Force.com development platform need a PaaS play like Heroku?…
Australia's NBN Co, the company building the once-FTTP now-“multi-technology model” National Broadband Network (NBN), has been given a deadline: look sexy to private investors by 2018.…
We are excited to share an important update about AWS CloudTrail.
CloudTrail is now available in Northern California, Ireland and Sydney Regions.
CloudTrail records API calls made on your AWS account and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket you specified. The CloudTrail log files enable you to perform operational troubleshooting, security incident analysis, AWS resource change tracking and ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards. For more details, see our compliance white paper, Security at Scale: Logging in AWS. You can also register for AWS security webinar on May 20th 2014 10 am to 11 am PDT featuring AWS CloudTrail, AWS partner Splunk and FINRA (a joint AWS/Splunk customer).
To learn more about CloudTrail, please visit our detail page.
We are pleased to let you know about two new features that we have added to Amazon AppStream:
Log Collection for your streaming application. Amazon AppStream now enables you to collect application logs, standard streams (stdin, stdout), Windows mini dumps, and host utilization logs to quickly debug issues and iterate on your streaming application development. Learn more about setting up log collection for your application here.
YUV444 Support. You now have the option to encode and stream your applications with YUV444 color. YUV444 encoding will result in higher fidelity images for applications with wireframes and drawings, commonly used in CAD applications. For streaming applications with continuous colors such as landscapes, you can continue to use the default color space of YUV420. Learn more about configuring YUV444 here under “Choose a Color Subsampling Rate.”
Visit the AppStream Product Updates page to see all AppStream enhancements since our launch in March.
AWS CloudFormation is introducing the ability to add or remove Amazon SNS topics for monitoring stack creations and updates. You could previously specify the SNS topics when creating a stack but could not change it afterwards.
AWS CloudFormation simplifies resource provisioning and management for a wide range of AWS services. The CloudFormation service quickly and reliably provisions application architectures (or ‘stacks’) that you model in the CloudFormation template files. You can also easily update or replicate the stacks as needed.
Learn more and get started with AWS CloudFormation:
Inertia is a principle well-known in insurance and personal banking circles, but the mobile phone industry has always conducted itself as if subscriber loyalty was governed by discounts and phone upgrades.…
GM has announced how much it will set you back to turn one of its 4G LTE–equipped vehicles into a mobile hot spot for Wi-Fi–only kit such as the one your li'l nipper will use to stream NetFlix in the back seat on the way to grandma's house.…
One of Australian communications minister Malcolm Turnbull's main selling points for his faster-and-cheaper-to-build national broadband network (NBN) plan was that it would ensure the billions of dollars being spent are first directed at those parts of the nation that don't have access to broadband.…
When Rackspace's chief executive Lanham Napier shocked analysts with his resignation last quarter, things looked bad for the company. But its latest financial results indicate that the company has weathered the transition.…
The OpenStack Foundation has launched a catalogue of products, services and even companies based around the cloud management tech.…
Microsoft has made it easier for Windows admins to migrate applications up into the cloud via a sysadmin-friendly file-sharing service.…
Google is working on a radical new redesign of the desktop version of its webmail service Gmail, it has been speculated.…
A Nokia camera guru has been poached by Apple in an apparent bid to beef up the fruity firm's snapper cred.…
We are delighted to announce improvements to query flexibility and data export for Amazon Redshift, a fast, easy-to-use, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud that costs as little as $1,000/TB/Year. Customers can now use three additional regular expressions when writing SQL queries (regexp_instr, regexp_replace, regexp_count) and unload data from their cluster to a single file. These features will be rolling out to all new and existing Amazon Redshift customers over the next two weeks, during maintenance windows. For more information on these and other recently launched Redshift features, please see Jeff Barr's blog post.
To get started with Amazon Redshift, please visit our detail page. To learn more about recently released features, please visit the Developer Guide and the Management Guide history. To receive alerts when new features are announced, please subscribe to our feature announcements thread in the Amazon Redshift forum.
We are pleased to announce that you can now schedule a pipeline to run once, run upon pipeline activation, or run a fixed number of times. These additional scheduling options are available on the new Create Pipeline page in the Management Console.
We also introduced a new pipeline state called "Finished". Pipelines that have a scheduled end date in the past and have no pending executions are now classified as "Finished", making it easier for you to identify pipelines that are no longer actively executing tasks.
Please let us know what you think by clicking on the "Feedback" button in the AWS Data Pipeline Management Console.
