News

Amazon.com formally added three new capabilities to its cloud computing portfolio with the introduction of Direct Connect and the updates to the Virtual Private Cloud and Identity and Access Management services. These offerings are targeted at organizations looking to construct hybrid or private clouds on the Amazon Web Services platform.

Since April 21, 2011, 1:41 AM PDT Amazon's US-EAST EC2 Datacenter reported major outages (due to failing EBS volumes) affecting many sites like Reddit, Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite and Heroku which rely on EC2 services. The article links to discussions about reliability of Availability Zones of EC2 datacenters and EC2 SLA's as well as desaster recovery and prevention.

Last week Amazon announced Elastic Beanstalk, but there is also an Open Source project named SteamCannon. SteamCannon is sponsored by RedHat and has been in active development since September 2010. With similar objectives, how do they stack up against each other?

Amazon has announced the availability of Cluster GPU instances for high performance applications starting with an instance of 2 NVidia Tesla GPUs and going up to a cluster of 128 or more instances, appealing to financial analysis, imaging, biology, simulation, and other domains.

Amazon has announced the new AWS SDK for Java this March. The aim of the new SDK is to simplify the development of java applications that use the Amazon EC2. The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse automates most of the steps required for the development cycle such as deployment, debugging, instance launching and network access management on the Amazon cluster

Amazon extends their Windows VM offering, and offers customers the possibility to use their enterprise license to run Windows instances on EC2 through a pilot program consented with Microsoft. Microsoft is going to evaluate the results of the program, possibly offering the same license mobility in the future, and promises to support Windows VM on Azure some time this year.

Last week saw the first OSGi DevCon London, held in conjunction with JAX London in Hammersmith's Novotel. Topics included features from the upcoming OSGi Enterprise Expert Group publication, using and testing OSGi in the cloud, accessing objects through JPA on an OSGi system and how modularity can defeat complexity brought on by exponential software growth.

David Chappell, the Principal of Chappell & Associates, US, has written a whitepaper proposing several solutions for Single Sign-on (SSO) access to applications deployed on Amazon EC2 from a Windows domain. InfoQ explored these solutions to understand what the benefits and tradeoffs each one presented.

There have been various reports from the community of Amazon EC2 users, that their instances are suffering poor performance, as the result of high internal network latency. This has led to speculations that Amazon's Cloud might be getting oversubscribed.

FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.

Engine Yard announced Flex at this year's Rails Conf. Flex runs on Amazon's EC2, but unlike its smaller brother Solo, Flex scales over more than one instance. We talked to Michael Mullany, VP of Marketing at Engine Yard to get more information.

It has been possible to run Hadoop on EC2 for a while. Today Amazon simplified the process by announcing Amazon Elastic MapReduce which automatically deploys EC2 instances for computational use and includes a API for interacting with them.

This presentation discusses how Amazon's Web Services can help Web developers solve common but vexing problems, including scaling. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple DB are discussed in detail along with the Simple Queue, Simple Storage, and Flexible Payment Services. Each discussion covers basic concepts, example APIs, and brief introductions of case studies.

Continuous Integration (CI),test first development and daily builds are fundamental agile practices. Together they support high performance teams, but also generate a significant, often variable demand for resources. Atlassian's Bamboo CI Server 2.2 includes a feature to Run Builds Remotely in Amazon EC2.

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