Latest Information, launches and updates from August in AWS (Amazon Web Services)

1. AUGUST IN AWS
Aug 12, 2013
AWS CloudFormation Introduces Parallel Stack Creation and Nested Stack
Updates
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way
to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and
updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion by using custom
or predefined templates.
Parallel Stack Creation, Update and Deletion
CloudFormation now creates updates and deletes resources in parallel in order
to improve performance of these operations.
Nested Stack Updates
CloudFormation allows nesting a stack as a resource inside a template. This
feature has enabled design and creation of related stacks together.
To learn more about CloudFormation, visit the CloudFormation detail
page, documentation, and watch this introductory video.
Aug 13, 2013
Announcing Mobile Push from Amazon SNS
App developers can now easily send push notifications to Apple, Google and
Kindle Fire devices using one simple API, and easily scale from a few
notifications a day to millions of notifications or higher.
The AWS Free Tier means all AWS customers can send one million push
notifications per month across iOS, Android and Kindle platforms at no charge
To learn more about Amazon SNS Mobile Push, sign up for the webinar on
August 29th, 2013. You can get started right away by
visiting http://aws.amazon.com/sns/ today.

2. Aug 14, 2013
Amazon Route 53 Announces Zone File Import and Integrated Health
Check Graphs
With the zone file import feature, it is now even easier to migrate a domain into
Route 53. The Route 53 console now lets you import standard DNS zone files
that can be exported from many DNS providers or standard DNS server software
such as BIND. When you create a new Route 53 hosted zone for your domain,
you now have the option to paste your zone file directly into the Route 53
console, and Route 53 will automatically create the records in your hosted zone.
To get started with zone file import, read our walkthrough in the Amazon Route
53 Developer Guide. You can also learn more about Route 53 DNS Failover and
health checks in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.
Aug 16, 2013
Amazon Redshift - Resource-level IAM, improved CSV support and CRC32
Amazon Redshit is now with improved security and control by enabling you to
construct resource-level AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for
Amazon Redshift. It has improved loading by adding support for standard CSV
double quote escaping, query flexibility by adding a new function for CRC32 and
manageability by adding a restore progress indicator to the console.
Please visit forum and continue to give us your feedback so we can understand
and prioritize the things you need.
Aug 28, 2013
New Read Replica capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL
These capabilities enhance the manageability experience of your Read Replicas
and will offer performance benefits for some of your use cases. Following are
more details:
Create multiple Read Replicas in quick succession - You can now create
multiple Read Replicas (limited to five per master) of the master database
instance in quick succession without having to wait for the first or any
subsequent create Read Replica operations to complete.

3. Take database snapshot and perform Point in Time Recovery operation
of a Read Replica (supported for MySQL 5.6) You can now take database
snapshots and perform Point in Time Recovery operations of a Read
Replica in addition to performing these operations on a master database
instance.
Create a replica from an existing Read Replica (supported for MySQL
5.6) - You can now create a second-tier Read Replica from an existing
first-tier Read Replica.
Refer to the Working with Read Replicas section of the Amazon RDS User Guide
to learn more.
Aug 28, 2013
AWS CloudFormation now available in AWS GovCloud (US)
AWS CloudFormation provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of
related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and
predictable fashion. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS region designed to
allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into
the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.
Sept 03, 2013
Announcing AWS Command Line Interface - General Availability
With just one tool to download and configure, you can control multiple AWS
services from the command line and automate them through scripts. The GA
release supports 23 services and includes new file commands for Amazon S3.
Using file system command syntax, you can easily list the contents of online
buckets, upload a folder full of files, and synchronize local files with objects
stored in Amazon S3.
To get started with the AWS CLI, see the User Guide.

4. Sept 04, 2013
New Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Capabilities
Customers requiring in-memory performance have taken advantage of Amazon
ElastiCache to offload the operational responsibilities of their Memcached
clusters. Below are the key highlights of the service:
Easy Administration: Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a fully managed
Redis service with features to manage setup and configuration, security,
monitoring, and handling of node failures.
Replication Support: Amazon ElastiCache for Redis allows you to create
replicas for your Redis node in different AWS Availability Zones and allows
the failover of the node to one of the replicas.
Seamless Integration: If you are running Redis on EC2, you can transfer its
contents to a new Amazon ElastiCache for Redis node.
Simple Pay as You Go Pricing: Pick the node type that fits your
application’s memory requirements. Refer to Amazon ElastiCache
pricing for more details.
You can learn more by visiting the Amazon ElastiCache detail page or the AWS
blog post, or join us for a webinar on ElastiCache for Redis on September 26.
Sep 04, 2013
Amazon RDS Supports New High Memory Instance with 244GB memory
and 88 ECUs of compute capacity
AWS customers run a wide range of database workloads on Amazon RDS and
have ever expanding memory, compute and IOPS requirements. This new
instance type has 244GB of memory and 88ECUs of compute capacity (2 Intel
Xeon E5-2670 8-core processors).
This instance also operates on a high bandwidth network. For a workload with
50% writes and 50% reads running on this instance type, it is possible
to realize up to 20,000 IOPS for MySQL, which is 60% more than previously
realizable maximum IOPS of 12,500. These specifications make this instance type
an ideal candidate for high performance workloads in enterprise, social media,
mobile applications or gaming.
For more information on pricing, visit the Amazon RDS pricing page.

5. Sep 04, 2013
AWS OpsWorks announces support for Amazon VPC
With Amazon VPC, you can define a virtual network topology and customize the
network configuration to closely resemble a traditional network that you might
operate in your own datacenter. This release lets you take advantage of the
application management benefits of AWS OpsWorks in your own isolated
network to support common scenarios such as using a private source repository
behind your firewall, running databases in a protected subnet, or using
application servers in a private subnet behind a public load balancer.
To learn more about how to use AWS OpsWorks with Amazon VPC, see
the documentation for a step-by-step example or join AWS OpsWorks webinar
on September 12, 2013 at 10:00 AM PT.
Sept 05, 2013
New data migration capabilities for Amazon RDS for MySQL
These new capabilities allow you to perform near zero downtime data migration
from your external MySQL database instances (running on-premise or on
Amazon EC2) to your Amazon RDS MySQL database instances and vice versa.
With this new feature, once your initial baseline is set, you can simply configure
your Amazon RDS instance as a replication target for your external MySQL
instance and capture all the transactions that have occurred since the time you
setup the initial baseline.
For more information about this feature, please refer to the data import section
of the Amazon RDS User Guide.
Sept 05, 2013
Announcing Geospatial Indexing Library for Amazon DynamoDB
The library takes care of managing geohash indexes. Developers can use these
indexes for fast and efficient execution of location-based queries over Amazon
DynamoDB items representing points of interest (latitude/longitude pairs).

6. Some features of this library are:
Query Support: Box queries return items that fall within a pair of geo points
that define a rectangle as projected on a sphere. Radius queries return items
that fall within a given distance from a geo point.
Life Cycle Operations: Create, retrieve, update, and delete geospatial data
items.
Easy Integration: This library integrates with the AWS SDK for Java, making it
easy to use from your existing Java applications on AWS.
To learn more, visit Jeff Barr’s blog post and the AWS mobile tools page.
Sept 05, 2013
AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Free usage tier eligible customers now have the option to run SLES as part of the
750 hours of free Linux usage each month to test drive SLES on Amazon EC2.You
can also get started on SLES on AWS Free Usage Tier by logging into the AWS
Management Console or through 1-Click on AWS Marketplace.
Visit the Resources Section to find Getting Started Guides, development tools,
and tutorials, or visit the Community Forums to get your questions answered.