Microsoft isn’t the only cloud vendor announcing new products this week. Amazon’s annual re:Invent conference has been taking place in scenic Las Vegas and they too have rolled out a number of new cloud features to the masses. Here’s a brief overview of what’s been announced so far.
Security and Compliance Services
- AWS Key Management Service – 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, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys. AWS Key Management Service is integrated with other AWS services including Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Redshift. AWS Key Management Service is also integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.
- AWS Config (Preview) – AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
- AWS Service Catalog – AWS Service Catalog is a service that allows administrators to create and manage approved catalogs of resources that end users can then access via a personalized portal. You can control which users have access to which applications or AWS resources to enable compliance with your business policies, while users can easily browse and launch products from the catalogs you create. AWS Service Catalog can enable your organization to benefit from increased agility and reduced costs as end users can find and launch only the products they need from a catalog that you control. AWS Service Catalog will be available in early 2015.
ALM Services
- AWS Code Deploy – AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to automate deployments, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations, and the service scales with your infrastructure so you can easily deploy to one EC2 instance or thousands.
- AWS CodeCommit – AWS CodeCommit is a secure, highly scalable, managed source control service that hosts private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need for you to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to store anything from code to binaries, and it supports the standard functionality of Git allowing it to work seamlessly with your existing Git-based tools. Your team can also use CodeCommit’s online code tools to browse, edit, and collaborate on projects. CodeCommit will be available in early 2015.
- AWS CodePipeline – AWS CodePipeline is a continuous delivery and release automation service that aids smooth deployments. You can design your development workflow for checking in code, building the code, deploying your application into staging, testing it, and releasing it to production. You can integrate 3rd party tools into any step of your release process or you can use CodePipeline as an end-to-end solution. CodePipeline enables you to rapidly deliver features and updates with high quality through the automation of your build, test, and release process. CodePipeline will be available in early 2015.
Amazon RDS for Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora joins MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL as the fifth database engine available to customers through Amazon RDS.
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles. You can use EC2 Container Service to schedule the placement of containers across your cluster based on your resource needs, isolation policies, and availability requirements. Amazon EC2 Container Service eliminates the need for you to operate your own cluster management and configuration management systems or worry about scaling your management infrastructure.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. AWS Lambda starts running your code within milliseconds of an event such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device. You can also use AWS Lambda to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. With AWS Lambda you pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run your code. Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.
Amazon EC2 C4 Instances
Coming soon, C4 instances represent the next generation of Amazon EC2 Compute-optimized instances. C4 instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processors that run at a high clock speed of 2.9 GHz, and are designed to deliver the highest level of processor performance on EC2. C4 instances are ideal for running application, gaming and web servers, transcoding, and high performance computing workloads.
Amazon EBS
Amazon will be increasing the performance and size of General Purpose (SSD) and Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes. You will be able to create volumes of up to 16 TB and 10,000 IOPS for Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes and up to 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS for Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes. General Purpose (SSD) volumes will deliver a maximum throughput of 160 MBps and Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes will deliver 320 MBps, when attached to EBS optimized instances.
For more information about Amazon’s re:Invent conference you can watch the keynotes here. You’ll also find more information about Amazon Web Services by visiting this site.