Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Amazon EC2 Announces General Availability, SLA, and Windows
Dear AWS Developers, We are excited to announce that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). AWS is also releasing, available today, a public beta of Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, we're giving you a sneak peek at some upcoming features that will make Amazon EC2 even easier to operate. Please see details below on these announcements. Amazon EC2 today is entering General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features. Also beginning today, customers can employ Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability, and scalability benefits of Amazon EC2. We are excited to share these exciting new announcements with you, and invite you to visit aws.amazon.com/ec2 for full details.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition): Frederick P. Brooks: Books
The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business: Books: Thomas H. Davenport,John C. Beck
The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World: Vince Poscente: Books
Amazon's cloud has a silver lining - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source
Half a billion dollars. That’s what online retailer Amazon.com will earn from its cloud computing services this year—if you believe UBS Investment Research’s latest report. Not bad for a service that started off renting out Amazon.com’s spare computing capacity. Even more startling are the profit and growth figures. Nearly half of that revenue is pure profit, and with the service growing at 50% every year, Amazon will be making a cool $2,5-billion from the business unit by 2014—nearly 4% of its total revenue. What makes the service so popular? This means that instead of investing great chunks of cash in powerful servers that will sit idle at least some of the time, you can simply rent capacity—literally an hour at a time. When Amazon launched its commercial cloud offering back in 2006, most analysts were skeptical. One of Amazon’s first foray into cloud computing services—Mechanical Turk—launched in 2005. Amazon was neither the first, nor is it the only player in the market.
Updated: AWS Security Whitepaper
Good news for all those interested in security...we've released the fourth version of our Overview of Security Processes whitepaper. It contains ten pages of new and additional detailed information. Highlights of new content include: A description of the AWS control environmentA list of our SAS-70 Type II Control ObjectivesSome discussion of risk management and shared responsibility principlesGreater visibility into our monitoring and communication processes and our employee lifecycleDescriptions of our physical security, environmental safeguards, configuration management, and business continuity management processes and plansUpdated summaries of new AWS security featuresAdditional detail about the security attributes of various AWS components The additional information and greater level of detail should help to answer many common questions. As always, feel free to reach out to us if you're still needing more information. > Steve <
High Performance Computing Hits the Cloud
High Performance Computing (HPC) is defined by Wikipedia as: High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers. The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research or computational science. A related term, high-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). Recently, HPC has come to be applied to business uses of cluster-based supercomputers, such as data warehouses, line-of-business (LOB) applications, and transaction processing. Predictably, I use the broadest definition of HPC including data intensive computing and all forms of computational science. What about HPC in the cloud, the next “it can’t happen” for HPC? No workload is flat and unchanging.
