Rapid Expansion of Amazon's AWS

Since I wrote my last two articles on Amazon Web Services (My intro to AWS and Using AWS), Amazon has continued to pile on capabilities into their of their infrastructure and platform cloud services.  They are rapidly building new products, data centers, and expanding capabilities in existing products.  In just three months since joining the Amazon Web Services Family, they have stuffed my mailbox full news about new product announcements, new data centers, and enhanced or expanded capabilities in existing services.  


This level of investment and drive indicates to me that Amazon believes they have a viable and profitable business (although it’s not broken out in their earnings statement).  As Amazon adds to their portfolio, it continues to raise the barrier to entry for companies that want to bust into that business.

Existing cloud companies that can’t keep up with this level of innovation and growth in capability may pay the ultimate price death by starvation of cash as customers leave or growth flags.

Here are some of the more significant changes in the last few months:

• Amazon Opened a new compute Region, US North West (Portland OR)  (which contains a minimum of two “ Availability Zones” (AKA data centers)
• AWS Multi-Factor Authentication adds support for virtual MFA devices
• AWS Management Console Adds Support for AmazonSES
• Amazon SQS New Features: Delay Queues, Message Timers and Batch APIs
• Amazon SNS Introduces SMS Text Message Notifications
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce Announces Hourly Pricing for Karmasphere Analytics
• BizSpark Licenses on AWS
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 CTP3 on AWS
• Announced Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instance, Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xlarge) for tackling really big problems that need massive compute capabilities.
• Added Route 53 to the management console along with new capabilities
• Enhancement to Elastic Load Balancing
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
• Multiple Enhancements to S3 Storage solution over the last three months.
• Outbound e-mail enhancements
• Added new South America (Sao Paulo) Region
• Additional reserved RDS instances

• ElastiCache was expanded to new regions
• AWS Direct Connect Global Expansion
• Amazon VPC Adds Support for Elastic Network Interfaces
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce Announces Support for cc2.8xlarge Instances, Reduced Pricing for cc1.4xlarge Instances
• Amazon SNS Adds Support for Delivery Policies and Message Formatting
• Amazon CloudFront: Announces Support for Delivery of Files up to 20 GB
• Amazon EC2 Introduces Instance Status Monitoring
• CloudWatch Alarms for Amazon EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes
• Addition of Windows to the free usage tier
• Release of DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service
• Release of AWS Storage Gateway, a way to securely tie on-prem storage to cloud
• RDS now available in virtual private cloud
• Release of Amazon Simple Workflow Service
• New Osaka and Milan edge locations for AmazonCloudFront & Route 53

References

• Using Amazon’s AWS
• Exploring AWS
• Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS
• Advantages of Cloud Computing
• Risks and Challenges of Cloud Computing
• AWS free usage tier
• AWS Case Studies
• Building a Windows Web Server using Amazon EC2
• A Look Inside Amazon’s Data Centers
• Getting Started With Cloud Computing

- Chris Claborne