Amazon Web Services is scrambling to recover from a cockup at its facility in Virginia, US, that is causing its S3 cloud storage to fail.…
It was a record-breaking year for finance and HR cloud purveyor Workday for all the right and the wrong reasons: sales reached a new high aided by Oracle’s disruptive buy of NetSuite, but losses soared too.…
We are excited to announce support for 1G and 10G Link Aggregation Groups (LAG). Customers in AWS GovCloud (US), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions can start using LAG to link existing connections on the same AWS device, or request new connections. Customers who wish to purchase multiple ports, but treat them like a single managed connection can now use our LAG feature to do just this. In addition to ordering and managing bundles, customers can now see when their ports fall on the same router so customers can manage your network availability.
You can now use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to enforce encrypted connections between your client applications and your Amazon RDS DB instances running Microsoft SQL Server. SSL support is available in all AWS regions for all supported SQL Server editions. To see the supported editions and versions of Microsoft SQL Server, please visit our documentation page.
AWS Organizations offers policy-based management for multiple AWS accounts and is now generally available for all customers. With Organizations, you can create groups of accounts and then apply policies to those groups. Organizations enables you to centrally manage policies across multiple accounts, without requiring custom scripts and manual processes.
Today, we are introducing a new EC2 Spot Advisor Console to guide customers in using Spot for common applications, and Health Checks for Spot fleet.
Amazon DynamoDB Time-to-Live (TTL) enables you to automatically delete expired items from your tables, at no additional cost. Now, you no longer need to deal with the complexity and cost of manually scanning your tables and deleting the items that you don’t want to retain. Instead, you can simply specify an attribute containing the timestamp when each item in your table should expire and DynamoDB will delete the items for you automatically. You can also view and archive items deleted via TTL using DynamoDB Streams.
Remember when PC or server-makers would breathlessly announce they'd just become the first, the very first, to get their hands on some new silicon and that doing so made them Terribly Clever? And represented enormous advantage to you, because you could buy that silicon right now instead of waiting, well, weeks for someone else to offer it?…
We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Amazon CloudFront. With the addition of the Philadelphia edge location, there are now a total of 24 edge locations in the US and 71 worldwide. To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge locations, please see our edge location list here.
A version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 with cloud turned off is coming in the second quarter.…
Amazon EC2 I3 instances are the latest generation of Storage Optimized High-I/O instances, designed for the most demanding High I/O workloads, featuring low-latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based SSDs. I3 instances are ideal for workloads like transactional processing systems, relational and NoSQL databases, data warehousing applications, analytics workloads and Elasticsearch workloads.
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the EU (London) Region.
We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.8, which includes 234 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports creation and management of custom platforms to provide you with greater control over your Elastic Beanstalk instance and environment configurations.
You can now monitor and track the time that records spend in Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB streams before being processed by your AWS Lambda functions. Using the new IteratorAge metric, you can easily detect delays in stream processing and create alarms that help you efficiently monitor your stream-based operation’s health and performance. The IteratorAge metric is now available as a default metric which is free of charge. It is viewable in the Lambda console’s monitoring tab.
Storage Architect I've been messing about with databases for a long time. I say "messing about" because I've never been a DBA, but as a systems programmer and storage administrator, I've been on the periphery of the application layer and of course I've deployed many personal databases.…
The OpenStack Foundation has announced Ocata, its fifteenth edition. And then tried to un-announce it again.…
For all the hype about cloud it's a bit of a revenue wimp: the abacus-shufflers of IDC have just told the world that it will account for about five per cent of the world's tech spend in 2017.…
Developers can now use Amazon GameLift with their preferred game engine. Whether it’s Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, or custom C# and C++ game engines, developers can leverage Amazon GameLift as a simple, fast, cost-effective tool for hosting dedicated game servers. The Amazon GameLift SDK download contains C# and C++ support and a prebuilt Unreal Engine plugin that accelerates and simplifies integration into Unreal Engine game servers.
AWS Config Rules now supports seven new managed rules, which are predefined rules that AWS Config uses to evaluate whether your AWS resources comply with common best practices.
AWS Config Rules is now available in the Europe (London) AWS region.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports M4, C4, and R4 instance types. M4 and R4 instances provide improved compute performance at lower prices than the previous generation of M3 and R3 instances. With the C4 instance type, you can benefit from better cost effectiveness for workloads that have high indexing requirements. Additionally, on the newly supported instances, Amazon Elasticsearch Service offers increased EBS volume size up to 1.5 TB per node. The increased volume size allows you to store up to 30 TB in a single Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain using EBS-backed data nodes, which is triple the previous limit. For Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes, we have also increased the maximum to 16,000 IOPS to support the most demanding workloads. This release also offers operational enhancements that reduce the time required for performing cluster updates and snapshots, typically by more than 50%.
You now have the ability to automatically update SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine) datasets in Amazon QuickSight based on a schedule. You can specify the Time Zone, the Time of Day, the Frequency (Daily, Weekly, or Monthly), and the Starting Date for your SPICE dataset refresh. This capability eliminates the manual process of updating SPICE datasets and allows you to easily share dashboards with up-to-date information. Scheduled refresh is now available in Amazon QuickSight for all supported AWS, cloud and on-premises data sources, for both new and existing datasets in all regions. For more information, see the AWS Big Data Blog post on Scheduled Refresh.
Customers can now use Amazon Athena to query data stored in Apache AVRO. AVRO is a data serialization system with support for rich data structures, schemas and binary data format. Click here to learn more about using AVRO with Athena. We also added support for the OpenCSV Serde, which allows you to process CSV files with customized separator, quote and escape characters.
Today, AWS Marketplace released new feature enhancements to the Seller Self-Service Listings feature, a web-based interface that lets AWS Marketplace software vendors manage their product listings through the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). Starting today, software vendors that have product listings in AWS Marketplace can use Self-Service Listings to make changes to their Amazon Machine Image (AMI)-based product listings, including updating product metadata, uploading new versions, making changes to instance types and pricing, and more. In addition, Self-Service Listings allows vendors to create new AMI-based or SaaS Subscriptions product listings.
Amazon CloudWatch introduces Alarms on Dashboards, a new feature that enables customers to bring metrics and alarms together on a dashboard. This new feature can help you stay better informed about important changes in your AWS resources and metrics with more informative dashboards that integrate alarm conditions.
The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) has introduced several new updates to improve your serverless application development. AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified syntax for defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application. It is available under Apache 2.0.
Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have committed to providing cloud storage users with fairer contracts after a crackdown by the Competition Markets Authority (CMA).…
We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) can now extract data from Teradata and Oracle data warehouses for direct import into Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte scale data warehouse that was designed for the cloud from the ground up. AWS SCT will run an analysis of your data warehouse, automate the schema conversion, apply the schema to the Amazon Redshift target and extract your warehouse data, regardless of volume. You can use Amazon S3 or Amazon Snowball to move your exports to the cloud, where Amazon Redshift can natively import the data for use.
AWS Marketplace Metering Service is now available in the US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), and EU (London) regions. AWS Marketplace Metering Service enables customers to purchase software from select AWS Marketplace vendors that price by the usage within an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), rather than a flat hourly, monthly, or annual fee for running the AMI. These pricing dimensions better enable customers to pay for only what they need when running software projects. As with other AWS Marketplace products, usage is aggregated at the end of the month, along with other AWS products, and charged as part of an existing AWS bill.
AWS Config now provides ready-to-use AWS CloudFormation templates for all managed rules and supports a new test mode to check the functionality of custom Config rules.
A number of cloud infrastructure providers operating in Europe have signed up to a new data protection code of conduct.…
Dell EMCs software-as-a-service backup outfit, “Spanning”, has expanded into Australia.…
Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports federated sign-in using SAML 2.0. Users can sign in to AppStream 2.0 using their existing credentials, and start streaming applications. As an administrator, you can use your existing user directory to control end-user access to applications available via AppStream 2.0. You can quickly add or remove access for users or groups, restrict access based on user locations, and enable multi-factor authentication. You can enable federated access and controls via any SAML 2.0 compliant identity provider such as Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, Okta, Ping Identity, and Shibboleth.
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data. Starting today, you can tag KMS keys to better organize how keys are used, and to track your KMS costs in the cost allocation report more easily. You can tag a key at the time of key creation or after the key is created.
Amazon API Gateway now integrates with AWS Step Functions, allowing you to call Step Functions with APIs that you create to simplify and customize interfaces to your applications. Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices as a series of steps in a visual workflow. You create state machines in the Step Functions Console or through the Step Functions API to specify and execute the steps of your application at scale. API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” to Step Functions. You can use an API to start Step Functions state machines that coordinate the components of a distributed backend application, such as a web application that tags and resizes uploaded photos, or verifies new users upon registration. You can also integrate human activity tasks in the steps of your application, such as an approval request and response, and make serverless asynchronous calls to APIs of services you use in your application.
Google's close to plugging a long-standing gap in its public cloud, with its Cloud Spanner distributed relational database hitting public beta.…
Oracle has flicked the switch on everything-as-a-service in Australia.…
CostStorage.com is a free public cloud cost calculator covering the Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, BackBlaze and Oracle clouds and their US regions.…
Today we are introducing the Elastic Volumes feature for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). This new capability allows you to modify configurations of live volumes with a simple API call or a few console clicks. Elastic Volumes makes it easy to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume with no downtime or performance impact. You can streamline and automate changes using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda. With Amazon EBS you can provision the capacity and performance you need today with the confidence that you can make modifications in the future as your business needs change.
Amazon Chime is now available to all customers. Amazon Chime is a modern, fully-managed communications service from AWS that makes it easy for you to communicate with people inside and outside your organization using voice, video, and chat. With Amazon Chime, online meetings are easier and more efficient, crystal clear audio and high definition video keep you focused on the discussion, and the service is designed to work seamlessly across desktops and mobile devices. Because Amazon Chime is a managed service that runs on AWS, it doesn’t require you to deploy or maintain complex infrastructure and software. And you benefit from the security that comes with a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.
The best clouds are genuinely competitive with do-it-yourself high performance computing – and Microsoft's top-tier Azure is the best of the lot.…
You can improve the security of your sign in to AWS services, such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight, by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) when using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as Microsoft AD. Enabling MFA helps improve the security of your applications because users must enter a one-time passcode (OTP) in addition to their Active Directory (AD) user name and password. AWS Microsoft AD supports both virtual and hardware MFA OTP tokens.
We are excited to announce support for 1G and 10G Link Aggregation Groups (LAG). Customers in US-East-1, US-East-2, regions can start using LAG to link existing connections on the same AWS device, or request new connections. Users who wish to purchase multiple ports, but treat them like a single managed connection can now useour LAG feature to do just this. In addition to ordering and managing bundles, you can now see when your ports fall on the same router so you can manage your network availability.
SAP has moved the UK corporate brass in a move that could propel cloud sales, The Reg has learned.…
This new Quick Start deploys a standardized environment that supports compliance with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The Quick Start was built by AWS solutions architects and compliance experts who have migrated and deployed workloads that are within scope for HIPAA compliance. It supports the technical controls within the 52 statutes of HIPAA Phase 1 and the 180 statutes of HIPAA Phase 2.
The AWS CloudTrail console now allows you to separately add data events and management events logging options, making it easy to customize your CloudTrail configuration. With data events logging, you can record all API actions on Amazon S3 Objects and receive detailed information such as the S3 object level API activity, AWS account of the caller, IAM user role of the caller, time of the API call, IP address of the API, and other details. With management events logging, you can record operations that occur on your AWS accounts and resources, such as administrative actions to create, delete, and modify EC2 instances or IAM activities.
You can now easily run deep learning in the cloud at any scale on Ubuntu version 14.04 using the Deep Learning AMI hosted on the AWS Marketplace. In addition to the Amazon Linux version, the 64-bit AMI offers an Ubuntu image designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for deep learning applications running on Amazon EC2. It includes popular deep learning frameworks such as MXNet, Caffe, Tensorflow, Theano, Keras, CNTK, and Torch, as well as packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. It also includes the Anaconda Data Science Platform for Python2 and Python3. The AWS Deep Learning AMI is provided at no additional cost beyond the Amazon EC2 hours used.
To learn more, read the details in the blog post and begin using the Deep Learning AMI for Ubuntu on the AWS Marketplace, today!
Starting today you can provision AWS Step Functions resources using AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning and management on AWS. You can create templates for the service or application architectures you want, and have AWS CloudFormation use those templates for quick and reliable provisioning of the services or applications.
The Amazon Redshift UNLOAD command now supports Amazon S3 server-side encryption using an AWS KMS key. The UNLOAD command unloads the results of a query to one or more files on Amazon S3. You can let Amazon Redshift automatically encrypt your data files using Amazon S3 server-side encryption, or you can specify a symmetric encryption key that you manage. With this release, you can use Amazon S3 server-side encryption with a key managed by AWS KMS. In addition, the COPY command loads Amazon S3 server-side encrypted data files without requiring you to provide the key. For more information, see COPY and UNLOAD in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.
You can now estimate the age range for each face detected in an image with Amazon Rekognition. Along with other facial attributes and features such as gender or emotion, Amazon Rekognition now provides an age range to the facial analysis APIs. You can use this feature to better assess demographics or group your image collection with age ranges.
Web scrapbook Instapaper has suffered a 30-plus hour outage and is warning of a week-long restore time.…
Oracle has reached a settlement with a former finance manager who alleged she had been fired for refusing to follow what she believed to be unlawful accounting practices that bumped up the firm's cloud numbers.…
Web scrapbook Instapaper has suffered a 30-plus hour outage and is warning of a week-long restore time.…
You can now attach or replace an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to your existing Amazon EC2 instance. IAM roles enable your applications running on EC2 to use temporary security credentials that AWS creates, distributes, and rotates automatically. Using temporary credentials reduces the risk of long-term key compromise. To enable IAM roles for your existing EC2 instances, follow the example described in the AWS Security Blog post.
Google's explained why new cloudy virtual machines in its cloud engine couldn't connect to the world for a couple of hours in January: a canary didn't fall off its perch, so the company was unaware of a problem.…
AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in the AWS US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations.
You can now create Service Catalog Products using YAML-formatted AWS CloudFormation templates (YAML Version 1.1) in addition to JSON-formatted templates. This allows template creators to choose the format they feel most comfortable working in to describe AWS infrastructure. YAML-formatted CloudFormation templates follow the same anatomy as existing JSON-formatted templates.
This new Quick Start automatically deploys a distributed (clustered) Splunk Enterprise environment on the AWS Cloud in 10-30 minutes.
Amazon WorkSpaces now allows you to integrate with your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory using an interforest trust with the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also called AWS Microsoft AD. By establishing a single interforest trust relationship, you can assign Amazon WorkSpaces for users in any of your on-premises domains. AWS Microsoft AD automatically discovers and routes authentication requests to the correct domain controller, which means that your users can use their existing Microsoft Active Directory credentials to log in to their WorkSpaces, without having to specify their domain name.
You can now limit the maximum number of device minutes that your AWS Device Farm test runs can use by setting a timeout on each device. You can also request that your maximum timeout be extended beyond the default of 60 minutes, allowing you to run longer workloads on real Android and iOS devices in the AWS Cloud. If execution exceeds your timeout, execution on that device will be forcibly stopped, and partial results will be available if possible.
Patent trolls are a growing problem, and Microsoft thinks that it has the solution – an affordable-ish protection scheme for Azure customers.…
Lambda@Edge (in preview today) allows you to run Lambda functions at the AWS Edge locations in response to CloudFront events, without provisioning or managing servers.
AWS Storage Gateway is today adding two new features to file gateway: support for running the gateway virtual machine (VM) in Amazon EC2, and limiting the NFS clients that can connect to a file share.
This Quick Start automatically deploys a Tableau Server standalone or cluster environment on the AWS Cloud in an hour or less. The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Tableau Software, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.
IBM has revealed that the standard tier BlueMix Lift service is now free. Which sounds great save for one small problem: the service was just about free already.…
SAP HANA managed services biz Centiq is launching its cloud-readiness service to help users of the in-memory RDBMS figure out if they should move to the public cloud.…
Amazon's cloud services are growing, just not as much as Wall Street's moneymen would like.…
Microsoft's made another round of cuts to its cloudy costs, for both virtual machines and storage.…
We are pleased to announce support for three new pre-defined security policies ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-1-2017-01, ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-2017-01 and a default security policy, ELBSecurityPolicy-2016-08 for the Application Load Balancer to support your TLS workloads. The new policies give you the flexibility to pick the TLS ciphers and protocols for your workloads on the Application Load Balancer.
We are pleased to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Vienna, our first edge location in Austria.
Adobe, the developer of overpriced software for creative types, is just about to get a whole lot more expensive in the UK with steep rises set to be introduced from next month.…
Another month, another problem with comedy outfit 123-Reg whose long-suffering customers are this time suffering from an email outage.…
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), code running on AWS Lambda, or any Web application. Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.
AWS Lambda is now available in the Europe (London) region.
Code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups.…
