Updates from AWS re:Invent 2013

Overview

This blog post will follow news and events from the AWS re:Invent.

re:Invent 2013 is the second annual conference by AWS and is being received overwhelmingly by about 9000 people attending it in Las Vegas.

Day 1 Keynote brought out some really interesting facts which very well demonstrate how AWS has positioned itself as a leading provider of Infrastructure Services by enabling its clients to think big & achieve higher goals. Here are some of the updates :

• According to a research report by Gartner, AWS has five times the combined capacity of its next 14 rivals.
• AWS has reportedly helped its customers with whopping $140M in annualized savings though their Trusted Advisor Service.
• Customers who have migrated their applications to cloud are reporting 32% reduction in total application downtime.
• One of AWS’s customers “Bristl-Mayes Squibb” which is a pharmaceutical company  migrated their clinical trials simulation platform to cloud thus performing their simulations in 1.2 hours which would have taken 60 hours instead. That too with 64% reduction in cost.

AWS has also launched the following services.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS gave developers their Christmas gift today in form of a service AWS CloudTrail. A big pain point on AWS what that API calls made to AWS Services did not have any audit trail. It was not possible to figure out who made the API calls and from which location. Now with CloudTrail, you can get 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 the AWS service. These logs get delivered to a S3 bucket & you can also configure to get a SNS notification. Also, this service is available for free … AWESOME. You can find more here.

Amazon WorkSpaces

WorkSpaces is a virtual desktop service that Amazon introduced where you can provision cloud-based desktops for your organization. Like all other services from AWS, here also you don’t need to pay any upfront cost & can create as many machines as you want by paying a monthly fee per machine. This is really useful for organizations which have varying amount of workforce or organizations which are really concerned about security & don’t want sensitive data to reside on end users’s machine. With Amazon WorkSpaces you can provision desktops on cloud & all the data resides within AWS cloud. Another very interesting feature is that Amazon WorkSpaces can easily integrate with your existing on-premises active directory service making is possible to use existing credentials to corporate resources. WorkSpaces is still in Limited Preview, but you can find more about it here.

AppStream

AppStream is a service AWS released to cater a pain point of game developers whose audience is limited by the kind of hardware they own. With AppStream developers can now perform resource intensive operations in cloud itself while streaming processed information back to their clients. It is really powerful in the sense that it allows wider segment of devices that can be used for your application ranging from PCs, tablets or mobile phones. It comes with an SDK which developers can use with their applications. AppStream is supported for multiple platoforms like Android, iOS, Windows etc. SDK for Mac OS X is scheduled to be announced in 2014. AppStream is still in limited preview but you can apply for & find more information about AppStream here.

PostgreSQL for RDS

Starting with MySQL AWS kept on adding more flavors to RDS, Oracle, SQL Server and now PostgreSQL which was one of the highly requested database for RDS. PostgreSQL is already available in all regions & comes with full functionality of RDS including Multi-AZ deployment, launching in VPC, automated backups, point in time recovery etc. You can find more details about it here.

Amazon Kinesis

Kinesis is another brand-new service by AWS providing real-time processing of data at a very large scale. It can consume from up to 1Mb/s ingress data in a single shard making it practically possible to process Terabytes of data in an hour by using single or multiple shards. This service will very well be received by people who wanted to do real-time processing for financial, sensor or social-media data to come up with trends & find anomalies. This service is currently available only in US-East region & is under limited preview. You can find more information about it here.

I will keep updating this page so keep visiting for more information.