How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

You've probably heard before a lot of hype about how much money you can make with affiliate programs. Maybe you've even set up a site yourself, only to find that after buying the domain, a few bucks a month in hosting, software or a web designer to design your site, etc., that the piddly affiliate fees hardly even covered your cost. Well, here's the hype-free way to really make money with an Amazon.com affiliate site. And it'll only take a day to make the site. The secret? Low cost, low effort.

 

Difficulty: Hard

 

Time Required: One day

Here's How:

1. If you don't already know it, learn some basic HTML. You have to do this to keep your costs down and still get what you want. Even if the site is basically laid out for you, you're going to need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting. Our HTML Guide offers a free 10-week HTML class and a great collection of beginning HTML tutorials. Get over any anxiety you have about this. Just do it. You'll thank me for it later.
2. Decide on your topic. You're going to be doing product reviews and recommendations, so pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.
3. Choose your domain name. Make it keyword-rich, not clever. Think how people will find your site in the search engines. Here are some ideas (all available when I first wrote this, though a cfew have been snatched up):
   Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
   Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts-and-Crafts-Books.com, Books-by-Stephen-King.com, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
   Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com
4. Register your domain name. If you're not technically inclined at all, register your domain wherever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a lower-cost provider. Not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be for ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, who have great domain management tools and are less than $10 a year. The least expensive I've found from a reputable source is 1&1, whose price is around $7 a year last I checked.
5. Set up your web hosting. This is where most people get burned. For this kind of site, you do not need $10 a month web hosting! Our Online Business Guide has a list of Cheap Web Hosting for Under $10. Some are as little as $4 a month, with unlimited domains, i.e., you can run several sites like this on the same hosting package.
6. Install blog software. "Blog, you say?" Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My pick is WordPress, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, and yet very powerful. Many hosts have a one-step installation process for it, or you can download it and follow their installation instructions.
7. Make it pretty. One of the great things about WordPress is the huge variety of templates available for it -- they can completely change the look-and-feel. Our Weblogs Guide has a list of 5 Sites for Free Wordpress Themes, where you can find hundreds of free WordPress themes.
8. Set up categories. Most blog software allows you to create sub-categories to help organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow in even more specifically on their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com might have one group of categories for genre — rock, country, blues, etc. — and another for city of origin — Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.
9. Sign up as an Amazon Associate. It's simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click on the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here's a direct link for your convenience). Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you don't have any content there yet, as they'll review the site manually before approval.
10. Create your blog posting bookmarks/links. There are two links that are going to be essential for you to make this easy. First is the blog posting link. In your blog software, on the posting page (see their instructions), at the bottom of the page there should be a "bookmarklet". Click on the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it up to your Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer), or your Favorites menu. This will allow you to blog a product with one mouse click.
11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link bookmark/link. This will make it easy to build the link with your affiliate ID built in. Log in to Associates Central, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links, find Individual Items. Click and drag this onto your Links toolbar or Favorites menu.
12. Build your first link. Go to Amazon and log in with your Associates account. Find the product you want to review and use the Site Stripe (gray stripe at the top of the screen that you'll see when logged in as an Associate) to get your personalized link to the item. They also offer a variety of other options for creating links and banners.
13. Blog your review. Now click on your blog posting link (Press It! by default in WordPress). If you're using WordPress, you should now see two pieces of link code in your posting form, the first one ending with "Associates Build-A-Link >< /a >". Delete through that point. The second part is a link to the product with your Amazon Associate ID built in. Now just write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it, and hit Publish.
14. Build out your site. Before you promote your site, you want to have some substantial content there. Write several product reviews. Have at least 2-3 in each category you've created. You may also want to make a categories for articles, news, and commentary about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are getting notified automatically, assuming you turned on the notifications mentioned in step 6.
15. Promote your site. The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers writing about similar topics, and to participate in online communities where your topic is discussed. See the Online Business Networking category for ideas, as well as the Internet Marketing category.

Tips:

1. You have to learn some basic HTML and basic concepts about running a web site. It's just not that hard. If you have to rely on purchased software, you won't be able to get exactly what you want, you won't know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll end up spending money you don't need to. Spend the time to learn it. It will be well worth the investment.
2. I slightly recommend music over books and other products, mainly because you can listen to the clips of an entire album in about 10 minutes and get a good enough feel for it (without buying it) to do a short review. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, great, but make sure you have a unique angle on the topic. People can get reviews about a lot of those consumer products anywhere. You need to give them a reason to come to your site.
3. To pick up some extra pennies, sign up for Google AdSense. It probably won't generate a lot of revenue, but it's free to sign up and completely effortless to maintain.
4. Set reasonable expectations for earnings. You've only invested $20. You're going to make 5% on most products. That means that you need to sell $400 worth of stuff to make back your investment. To make $20 an hour, what you write must generate $400 worth of purchases. You get credit for other purchases customers you send make while at Amazon besides just the product you linked to, so it's not as hard as it may sound. It won't make you rich, but it's not hard to be profitable, and it builds over time.

What You Need

• A credit card with about $20 available

 

Amazon Sparks Siri-Clone Rumours with Text-to-Speech Buy

Amazon has acquired the text-to-speech technology company Ivona Software, which already powers the "Text-to-Speech," "Voice Guide" and "Explore by Touch" features on Kindle Fire tablets.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, although the move is being cited as a possible move by Amazon to develop its own clone of Apple's Siri service.

Additionally, Ivona delivers text-to-speech products and services for other non-Amazon customers.

"Ivona's exceptional text-to-speech technology leads the industry in natural voice quality, accuracy and ease of use. Ivona is already instrumental in helping us deliver excellent accessibility features on Kindle Fire," said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle.

Ivona offers voice and language portfolios with 44 voices in 17 languages, and was established in 2001 by Łukasz Osowski and Michał Kaszczuk, fellow graduates of the Gdańsk University of Technology.

Amazon 4th Quarter Profits Down 45% - Posts Full Year Loss

Amazon has announced that its fourth-quarter revenues rose by 22 percent to reach US$21.3 billion, but net profits fell by 45% to US$91 million.

For the full year, the company posted a net loss of US$39 million on sales of US$61.1 billion.

"We're now seeing the transition we've been expecting," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "After 5 years, eBooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast - up approximately 70% last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5%. We're excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever expanding ecosystem and selection."

For the second year in a row, Amazon's tablet was the most popular item for customers - Kindle Fire HD continued its run as the best-selling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon worldwide. At year-end, Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle held the top four spots on the Amazon worldwide best seller charts since launch.

Amazon Warns Against Latest Apple Kindle Software Upgrade

Amazon is warning Apple users not to download its latest Kindle App or upgrade their existing one after a slew of complaints highlighted a serious flaw in the software.

In a short statement on the iTunes service, Amazon said that "There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time."

Some of the comments below the sales page where users have reacted to the latest update suggest that it has been deleting the users books and their bookmarks when the iPad is reset.

Quite what is causing the bug is unclear, but the scale of the data being erased from users devices seems to be significant.

Strategies and Tips to Make Money with Amazon Associates

The Amazon Associates Affiliate Program is one of the world's largest affiliate marketing programs, due to Amazon selling just about every kind of product available in the marketplace. Many companies use Amazon.com as an introduction to new customers, then invite them later to browse their own websites for more products or services.

The Amazon Associates Affiliate Program is a well developed, easy to use, affiliate marketing program that can be used on Squidoo lenses, blogs, and website pages to promote products related to your niche topic for free, and you can earn between 4% and 8.5% commission on sales depending on your volume of sales referrals. Amazon Associates links are easy to insert in your articles, and if you follow the strategy that I will outline in this article, I guarantee that you will build success with Amazon's affiliate program.

Featured: Banner to Amazon's main page

How to Make Money as an Amazon Associate

This book is available on Kindle for just $2.99 or if you are a prime member can be borrowed on Kindle for free. It gives step by step tips on how to make money on Amazon as an associate. It makes an excellent reference to have on hand while you are learning.

Becoming a successful affiliate marketer has a learning curve just like any new skill. Once you understand how the system works, you can apply your own expertise in your niche to develop a following of customers.

How to Make Money as an Amazon Associate

To go directly to a section, click on the link below

1. How to Make Money as an Amazon Associate
2. How Do You Earn Money with Amazon Associates?
3. Amazon.com Sells a Lot More Than Just Books
4. The Best Way to Use Amazon's Links and Ads
5. What is Affiliate Marketing?
6. The Best Amazon Associates Strategy to Grow Your Earnings
7. This Amazon Associates Strategy is Simple, But Takes a Lot of Hard Work
8. Guide to Writing a Profitable Product Review
9. The Easiest Way to Sell Products is to Write Product Reviews

More

How Do You Earn Money with Amazon Associates?

A two tiered program

When you first read how to make money with Amazon Associates, you may be confused with how the program works. So let me break it down for you here. There are essentially two ways to increase your earnings on Amazon, with a higher quantity of sales, and with higher dollar amount sales.

With Amazon Associates, you earn a higher percentage when you have more sales. Payments and earnings are calculated on what ships out, not what is ordered, so you will show the earnings when an item actually ships from Amazon. Percentages (shown to the right) are based on how many items ship.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. Some categories have a lower profit margin, and therefore have a lower percentage, and others have a higher percentage, usually when Amazon is trying to market them more. These do change from time to time, and you can keep abreast of changes in your Amazon Associates account.

The second way you make more money is to sell a higher dollar amount item. So for instance, if you are making 4%, if you sell a $10 item, you will get $ .40, but a $100 item will net you $ 4.00. However, it is less likely that people will buy as many high dollar items as they would low dollar items.

Amazon.com Sells a Lot More Than Just Books

While Amazon.com became originally know as a source for books, they sell a lot, lot more than that now. You could name almost anything, and find it on Amazon. When I am searching for items to buy, I often use Amazon as a reference for pricing and manufacturers.

As an Amazon Associate, you can usually earn more on sales on items that are not books. Some of the newest items that you can refer people to on Amazon are digital. These include music and movies than can be downloaded or watched directly on the site.

For instance, this link takes you to The Hunger Games [HD] that can be watched on Amazon Instant Video. This movie is free for prime members to watch online.

The Best Way to Use Amazon's Links and Ads

Linking directly to the product

Amazon Associates provides the affiliate marketer with a lot of wonderful ads, widgets, and links. But I have to admit that I find that I get the most success on all of my sites with two kinds of links only. These are direct product text links, and direct product text and picture links.

A direct product text link is a link that is just words directing the customer to a specific product page. You attach your html link to your anchor text which lead to an Amazon product page. Amazon's product pages are very nicely laid out, and include a lot of product information, product reviews, and a direct link to the shopping cart. Once the customer sees that product page they can learn all they need to about the product.

A direct product text and picture link is a direct product text link with a direct product picture link near it. In other words both the picture and the text are links to the product page. You can use both of these types of links on Squidoo as well as most other sites. As far as I am concerned, most of the widgets and banner ads look pretty, but don't produce well for me.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a term that many people have not heard before. What it really means is that you make a small percentage or commission off of referring people to products or services. It is different than direct sales because it is done online, and you do not have to present anything to a group of people.

Becoming an Amazon Associate is becoming an affiliate marketer. You refer people to items on Amazon, and when they buy them, you earn a referral fee or commission. It is ideal for people who do not want to make or grow anything, but do like to refer people to items that they themselves like. You don't have to bother with the buying, billing or shipping. You just refer, and leave the rest up to Amazon.

Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online

by Rosalind Gardner

Buy Now

The Best Amazon Associates Strategy to Grow Your Earnings

Simple Plan, Excellent Results

The biggest trick to earning more and more money with Amazon Associates is to alternate your sales strategy between two different game plans.

• Plan One: Refer customers to Amazon to buy a lot of very inexpensive items. This will build your number of sales.


• Plan Two: Refer customers to Amazon to buy a few select expensive or high end items. Remember, often Amazon has the best prices on those items. This will build your total earnings dollar amount faster.


• Repeat.

Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Pictured here is an actual Amazon Associates statistics chart. It shows how many items have shipped, how many have been ordered, and what the associate has earned so far during the month. You can get details for every click that someone makes both for what they buy and what they click on and don't buy. These types of statistics can help you refine your website offerings based on what people actually are interested in.

Notice you can also see how many items this associate needs to ship in order to reach the next percentage tier, and what their conversion rate is between clicks and sales.

All of the detailed statistics can be found in your Amazon Associates account.

This Amazon Associates Strategy is Simple, But Takes a Lot of Hard Work

While the plan itself is simple, it does take a lot of hard work, because as I mentioned earlier, the best producing links are product links. And that means that you need to create referral pages, posts, or lenses for each item or group of items that you refer. The more expensive the item, the better your referral page needs to be, in order for people to trust your recommendations.

Squidoo is an excellent platform to learn how to do simple product reviews for Amazon items. If you don't already have your own Amazon Associates account, you can cut your teeth on the Squidoo Amazon modules. If you do have an Amazon Associates account, you can directly refer customers to Amazon, using your Amazon Associates product links in any text module.

Guide to Writing a Profitable Product Review

• 

  How to Write a Profitable Product Review

  If you are looking for ways to earn money on Squidoo, one of the best ways to earn money is by writing product review articles. By reviewing products that people...

The Easiest Way to Sell Products is to Write Product Reviews

Original content product reviews bring targeted traffic

If you want to refer a customer to Amazon or to any other site, the easiest way is with original content product reviews. Squidoo is an excellent site to start on, and when you are ready, you can graduate to creating entire blogs and websites around product reviews. With your own site you have total control over the layout and ad placement of the entire page. You can learn to do this on your own for free, or you can pay for products and software to help you set this up more quickly.

There really is no secret formula to writing product reviews or sending readers to Amazon. If you write in your own voice as if you are talking to a friend, then you will get the best results.

What Does Amazon Sell?

Amazon sells everything. Well, almost everything. There are a few categories or companies that they don't carry. But they do carry quite a bit. As you can see below, Amazon sells everything from kayaks to infant toys.

I usually do a search in the All Products category before I narrow it down. Often you will find stuff that you did not expect to under All Products.

Lifetime Manta Tandem Kayak with Paddles and Backrests (Yellow, 10-Feet)

Amazon sells kayaks and lots of other cool sporting equipment and accessories.

Buy Now

Wilton Print Your Own Fan Kit

Amazon sells lots of wedding accessories, clothing and more.

Buy Now

Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes

There are loads of fun toys on Amazon for kids and adults along with any accessories you might need to add on to them.

Buy Now

Why Do Product Reviews Work to Refer Customers to Amazon?

Product reviews, written correctly, with a tight focus, keyword research, search engine optimization, and original content are the best way to refer customers to Amazon and other product or service websites. The reason is that people want to know what other people have to say about products that they have used, what their opinion is, how much they liked the product, and whether they thought it was worth the money.

When writing reviews, it is also a good idea to include anything about the product that you didn't like. You may say that this product is good for a beginner swimmer, but would not hold up to a professional. And then you can refer the customer to a better product for that person.

People like to feel that they are making a decision based on their own experience and other people's experiences. You should write your reviews to help them think through the buying decisions, and if the product is right for them, then they will buy. And you will get a commission for referring them.

How Much is This Going to Cost Me?

You can learn how to do everything you need to do to earn money through Amazon Associates completely for free, and start making money from your referrals. But it will take you time, and you will have to put in a lot of sweat equity.

Or you can pay some money to buy books and ebooks on this topic and learn faster.

Whichever route you choose, there is a lot of money to be made from Amazon Associates, both here on Squidoo, and on your own websites. And when you get good at earning from Amazon, you can turn to other affiliate marketing programs and earn from them too.

Pleasing Google and Other Search Engines

2013

Search engines have become more and more adept at finding and eliminating spam. Two of the types of spam that they are removing directly relate to Amazon Associates.

Fake reviews
This has to do with Amazon.com's website. Amazon has cracked down very hard on items with fake reviews. This behavior was becoming rampant especially in the Kindle book category, where authors would write under a pseudonym and write reviews of their own work under a different name. This is just a way to deceive and spam customers which is why Amazon is cracking down on it. And in addition, it made Amazon look bad to search engines. Therefore, when referring people to a product, make sure that you are not trying to deceive them. This is a bad practice and will just cause a loss of your Associates account if discovered.

Thin content
Google has made it clear in the last two years that they do not consider thin content to be good content, and they are slowly downgrading or eliminating any site that relies solely on thin content. Thin content means basically that all the page or site has is a bunch of links to another site.

Therefore, when you are using Squidoo or your own site to refer readers, you want to ensure that you create more than just a thin content page. Add pictures, commentary, reviews, and your experience and opinion of the item that you are linking to. This gives your readers more value, and will keep your page higher in the search engine where it can be found.

You've probably heard before a lot of hype about how much money you can make with affiliate programs. Maybe you've even set up a site yourself, only to find that after buying the domain, a few bucks a month in hosting, software or a web designer to design your site, etc., that the piddly affiliate fees hardly even covered your cost. Well, here's the hype-free way to really make money with an Amazon.com affiliate site. And it'll only take a day to make the site. The secret? Low cost, low effort.

Difficulty: Hard

Time Required: One day

Here's How:

1. If you don't already know it, learn some basic HTML. You have to do this to keep your costs down and still get what you want. Even if the site is basically laid out for you, you're going to need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting. Our HTML Guide offers a free 10-week HTML class and a great collection of beginning HTML tutorials. Get over any anxiety you have about this. Just do it. You'll thank me for it later.

2. Decide on your topic. You're going to be doing product reviews and recommendations, so pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.
3. Choose your domain name. Make it keyword-rich, not clever. Think how people will find your site in the search engines. Here are some ideas (all available when I first wrote this, though a cfew have been snatched up):
   Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
   Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts-and-Crafts-Books.com, Books-by-Stephen-King.com, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
   Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com
4. Register your domain name. If you're not technically inclined at all, register your domain wherever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a lower-cost provider. Not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be for ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, who have great domain management tools and are less than $10 a year. The least expensive I've found from a reputable source is 1&1, whose price is around $7 a year last I checked.
5. Set up your web hosting. This is where most people get burned. For this kind of site, you do not need $10 a month web hosting! Our Online Business Guide has a list of Cheap Web Hosting for Under $10. Some are as little as $4 a month, with unlimited domains, i.e., you can run several sites like this on the same hosting package.
6. Install blog software. "Blog, you say?" Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My pick is WordPress, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, and yet very powerful. Many hosts have a one-step installation process for it, or you can download it and follow their installation instructions.
7. Make it pretty. One of the great things about WordPress is the huge variety of templates available for it -- they can completely change the look-and-feel. Our Weblogs Guide has a list of 5 Sites for Free Wordpress Themes, where you can find hundreds of free WordPress themes.
8. Set up categories. Most blog software allows you to create sub-categories to help organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow in even more specifically on their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com might have one group of categories for genre — rock, country, blues, etc. — and another for city of origin — Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.
9. Sign up as an Amazon Associate. It's simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click on the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here's a direct link for your convenience). Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you don't have any content there yet, as they'll review the site manually before approval.
10. Create your blog posting bookmarks/links. There are two links that are going to be essential for you to make this easy. First is the blog posting link. In your blog software, on the posting page (see their instructions), at the bottom of the page there should be a "bookmarklet". Click on the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it up to your Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer), or your Favorites menu. This will allow you to blog a product with one mouse click.
11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link bookmark/link. This will make it easy to build the link with your affiliate ID built in. Log in to Associates Central, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links, find Individual Items. Click and drag this onto your Links toolbar or Favorites menu.
12. Build your first link. Go to Amazon and log in with your Associates account. Find the product you want to review and use the Site Stripe (gray stripe at the top of the screen that you'll see when logged in as an Associate) to get your personalized link to the item. They also offer a variety of other options for creating links and banners.
13. Blog your review. Now click on your blog posting link (Press It! by default in WordPress). If you're using WordPress, you should now see two pieces of link code in your posting form, the first one ending with "Associates Build-A-Link >< /a >". Delete through that point. The second part is a link to the product with your Amazon Associate ID built in. Now just write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it, and hit Publish.
14. Build out your site. Before you promote your site, you want to have some substantial content there. Write several product reviews. Have at least 2-3 in each category you've created. You may also want to make a categories for articles, news, and commentary about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are getting notified automatically, assuming you turned on the notifications mentioned in step 6.
15. Promote your site. The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers writing about similar topics, and to participate in online communities where your topic is discussed. See the Online Business Networking category for ideas, as well as the Internet Marketing category.

Tips:

1. You have to learn some basic HTML and basic concepts about running a web site. It's just not that hard. If you have to rely on purchased software, you won't be able to get exactly what you want, you won't know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll end up spending money you don't need to. Spend the time to learn it. It will be well worth the investment.
2. I slightly recommend music over books and other products, mainly because you can listen to the clips of an entire album in about 10 minutes and get a good enough feel for it (without buying it) to do a short review. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, great, but make sure you have a unique angle on the topic. People can get reviews about a lot of those consumer products anywhere. You need to give them a reason to come to your site.
3. To pick up some extra pennies, sign up for Google AdSense. It probably won't generate a lot of revenue, but it's free to sign up and completely effortless to maintain.
4. Set reasonable expectations for earnings. You've only invested $20. You're going to make 5% on most products. That means that you need to sell $400 worth of stuff to make back your investment. To make $20 an hour, what you write must generate $400 worth of purchases. You get credit for other purchases customers you send make while at Amazon besides just the product you linked to, so it's not as hard as it may sound. It won't make you rich, but it's not hard to be profitable, and it builds over time.

What You Need

• A credit card with about $20 available

Amazon Instant Video on the PS3 Review! Sharp's 4K 32 HDTV, IGZO Means Brighter LCDs, Samsung OLED!

More than 120,000 movies and TV shows... is Amazon's Instant Video better than Netflix on the PS3? Is Sharp going Retina with IGZO LCDs that use Ultraviolet Vertical Alignment Technology? Samsung OLED is coming.

Amazon's First Smartphone Could Come with Larger Screen

Amazon's rumoured entry into the smartphone market got a boost following a report that suppliers are being lined up for display screens in the 4.7 inch domain.

Citing industry supply chain sources, Taiwan's DigiTimes reported that the company was previously considering a 4.3-inch screen but later scrapped the idea after witnessing increased demand for larger size screens among consumers

The sources also indicated that while Amazon is looking to a second-quarter release date for the device, there could be delays due to production issues at Foxconn.

Quite what those production issues could be was not clear, but Foxconn did have problems late last year with Apple's latest iPhone and had to revamp some of its assembly work practices as a result.

Amazon's Mobile Ad Business Generating $500 Million in Revenue

Amazon's mobile advertising business, although not widely reported on, is reputed to already be a US$500 million per year business, and is growing.

The company has had an internal advertising sales team for its websites for some time, but recently set up a mobile advertising agency that is now pushing adverts onto mobile websites and tablets.

The company benefits from its vast customer base, which it can use to provide demographic information to advertisers so that they can more closely target adverts.

"Amazon spent a lot of time developing algorithms to make recommendations to consumers shopping on Amazon.com," an executive who oversees an ad exchange that is a partner of Amazon's told the Reuters news agency.

Amazon can use its demographic data to then bid on adverts in global publisher exchanges and more accurately target the delivery on behalf of its own advertisers.

"Amazon is not a retailer anymore, it is the largest behavioral marketing company in the world," added Yaakov Kimelfeld, chief research officer at Kantar Media Compete.

With an estimated US$500 million in revenue over the past year, it is however still tiny when compared to Amazon's US$75 billion in annual turnover. However, the division is also understood to post profit margins at least four times higher than Amazon's core retail business.

Amazon Adds Accessibility Features to Kindle Reading Apps

Amazon today announced new accessibility features for the Kindle reading app, making it easier for blind and visually impaired customers to navigate their Kindle libraries and read their books.

These new features are available starting today on Kindle for iOS, and accessibility enhancements will be available on additional platforms in the future.

"With this update, we're also making customer-favorite features-such as X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking -- more accessible." said Dorothy Nicholls, Vice President, Amazon Kindle.

The updates allow the Kindle app to read aloud over 1.8 million titles available in the Kindle Store using Apple's VoiceOver technology.

The software also allows users to read character-by-character, word-by-word, line-by-line, or continuously, as well as move forward or backward in the text.

Users can also customize the reading experience including changing the font, text size, background color, margin, and brightness. Finally, it supports iOS accessibility features like Zoom, Assistive Touch, and Stereo to Mono, as well as peripheral braille displays.

Blind and visually impaired customers can also choose Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin, a free application for Windows PCs.

Amazon Launches Paid App Store in China

Amazon has beaten Google in allowing paid downloads of mobile apps in China. Currently, Google only offerd free app downloads.

Amazon launched its own App Store over the weekend, and enabled the paid download option, the company confirmed to Reuters.

The launch of a major western brand into the mobile apps market may shake up the local app providers, a number of which have a poor reputation for distributing virus infected copies of commercial apps. Amazon has promised to vet all apps prior to their release on its website.

Amazon China spokesman Billy Huang added that Amazon is the first Western technology company to offer a platform for paid Android apps in China.

Amazon doesn't currently sell its Kindle e-readers in the country, but the launch of the app store has heightened speculation that it is close to a product launch.

Amazon Working on Smartphone with 3D-Display

Amazon has previously said that it is working on a series of new products and services, and now a report has suggested that one of the mystery products could be a high-end smartphone with a 3D display.

Citing sources familiar with the plans, the Wall Street Journal said that by using retina-tracking technology, images on the smartphone would seem to float above the screen like a hologram and appear three-dimensional at all angles.

The company, which already has a range of Android based tablets and its own mobile apps store has been long suspected to be working on its own smartphone, but the specifications were scarce.

Rumours of a TV-box for video streaming have also emerged, and now the WSJ reports that the new hardware is part of a broader foray into developing consumer electronics of their own.

Though Amazon has goals of releasing some of these devices in the coming months, the WSJ sources cautioned that some or all of the devices could be shelved because of performance, financial or other concerns.

3D displays for mobile phones are not a new development though, and Japan's DoCoMo developed a system for showing 3D images on a small screen back in 2006, while LG showed off a functioning smartphone in 2011.

Amazon Offering $5 Of Free Mobile Apps for Kindle Users in the USA

Amazon has expanded its own in-house micropayments system, Amazon Coins to permit the purchase of apps for Kindle ebooks.

To mark the launch, existing and new Kindle Fire customers in the USA have had 500 Coins -- a US$5 value -- deposited into their Amazon accounts today. With discounts of up to 10% for purchasing Coins in bulk, it's also an opportunity for customers to save money on their app and game purchases.

"Today we are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds Star Wars. And with discounts of up to 10% when you buy Coins, this is a great way for customers to save money when they buy apps, games and in-app items," said Mike George, Vice President of Apps and Games at Amazon.

Amazon Appstore developers will earn their standard 70% revenue share when customers make purchases using Amazon Coins. No Coins-specific changes are required for developers with apps and games currently in the Amazon Appstore.

Amazon's tax arrangements are nothing short of a work of art. Bravo!

There's something fishy about Google's motto, "Don't be evil." I'm not saying it's controversial but it makes you think, "Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?" It's suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they're not – which my colleague Charlie Brooker said on 10 O'Clock Live was, "rather like someone who's just moved in next door saying, 'Hi, I'm Geoff, your non-dogging neighbour.'"
But we mustn't assume that the maxim was an attempt by executives to draw a line under some diabolical brainstorm, in which the internet giant pulled itself back from the brink of green-lighting a scheme to grind our bones to make its bread. It could just as easily have come out of a discussion of the possibility of doing good. "Always do good", "Try to do some good" or "Be good" might have been previous drafts of the motto before they concluded that goodness was as impractical as malevolence was distasteful and decided on "Don't be evil" as more realistic in a modern business environment. "Settling for one notch below altruism" is all the slogan really means.
Still, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. And there's no earthly reason why Google should do any good to anyone but itself – which is presumably why it pays so little tax. Although that's not how Matt Brittin, Google's head of sales in northern Europe, explained the situation to the House of Commons public accounts committee on Thursday. "No one in the UK can execute transactions," he said. He wasn't bemoaning a lack of competence in British workers but proudly talking MPs through a tax dodge. Even though there are sales staff in Britain, "No money changes hands." Nudge nudge, wink wink. Since the vast majority of Google's £3.2bn of UK sales are routed through Ireland, the company paid only £6m of corporation tax. I'm not saying that's necessarily evil, but it's certainly not good.
Amazon, in contrast, has never ruled out evil as part of its business plan, aspiring only to "Work hard. Have fun. Make history." It sounds like an Apprentice contestant's Twitter profile. Last week it emerged that, despite £4.2bn of UK sales, the company paid only £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012. In the same year it received £2.5m in government grants. Which makes it a net benefits scrounger. And, in terms of sheer rapacious acquisitive nerve, I'd say that has made a little bit of history.
Is there any point in my being angry about this? Everyone else already is. It feels like the interesting thing would be to come out in favour of it. After all, as the company's spokesman proudly announced: "Amazon pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction that it operates within." So maybe it's fine. Better than that, maybe it's crazy and interesting. It's a challenging artwork, but instead of oil paint or wood or clay or the excrement of the artist, it's constructed out of pure injustice. A huge, malevolent sculpture of unfairness, ground-breaking and thought-provoking, reminding us of the iniquities of the natural world – a corporate metaphor for the worms that will one day eat all of our corpses.
Like any really important work of art, it's bound to upset a few people. Just as Banksy causes collateral damage to the neatness of walls, so Amazon's masterpiece is a defacement of the public purse. But it's not just some hooligan's tag, like Google's artless Irish scam. This shows an impish wit and a dark insight. What elevates Amazon's activity is the fact that it applied for government grants. The elegance of that corporate choice is like the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa's smile, the ruthlessness of Mike Tyson's punch and the adaptability of the malaria virus combined. There is no point in criticising anyone or anything that can do that. They can only be admired or destroyed.
The more you think about it, the more brilliant it is. At first glance, the deftness of securing government funding, which was intended to sustain and encourage marginal businesses, is rather pleasing. The thought of the thousands of small enterprises that could have been nourished and helped to survive by the cash Amazon has swallowed in one tax-cancelling mouthful is challenging and absorbing. It's the monster that's made a myriad food parcels into its canapé.
But it gets even better. If, for a second, you make the mistake of thinking that giving Amazon handouts might nevertheless help the UK – by incentivising the company to create jobs in Britain even if, for tax purposes, it exists only in Luxembourg – then think again. Because Amazon is the great job-killer. For every job it creates, more than one is destroyed on the high street. It's the great annihilator of work and yet it's receiving a job-creation government subsidy. It doesn't just absorb money that would be better spent creating employment elsewhere, it deploys it to decimate the chances of that employment.
I understand that the changes in work and business patterns being caused by the internet are inevitable and irreversible. To try to stop them would be railing against the tide. Still, it's amazing that Amazon, in an act of dazzling contempt, has persuaded the treasury actually to pump water into the rising sea.
I don't really think that these problems can be fixed. It's the role of politicians to say that something must be done – with a sense of purpose if in power, and outrage if in opposition. But their jobs are too tenuous and short-lived, the international tax system too complex and the corporations too tenacious to stop this sort of thing happening. Loopholes will crop up by accident and, where they don't, the intense and remorseless lobbying of the already astronomically wealthy will ensure that more are created.
We can work ourselves up in impotent fury or – and this is a calmer way to live – just sit back and enjoy the majesty of a terrible thing done well. Amazon's tax and grant arrangements are the beautiful ivory candlestick revealed by the silhouettes of British taxpayers' incredulous faces. The politicians and public provide the backdrop of incompetence and rage in front of which huge companies can display their work of corporate perfection. As the mushroom cloud showed us decades ago, evil can be beautiful.

What’s New?

May 20, 2013	AWS Achieves FedRAMP℠ Compliance We are excited to announce that AWS has been granted two Agency Authority to Operate (ATOs) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). FedRAMP is a mandatory U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. Some of the major benefits of FedRAMP for agencies include: Significant savings in cost, time and resources Risk-based security management Enhanced transparency Already numerous government agencies and other entities that provide systems integration and other products and services to governmental agencies are using the wide range of AWS services today. Now all U.S. government agencies can leverage the AWS HHS ATO packages in the FedRAMP repository to evaluate AWS, provide their own authorizations to use AWS, and transition workloads into the AWS environment. You can learn more by reading the AWS FedRAMP FAQs.
May 20, 2013	AWS GovCloud (US) Achieves a FedRAMP℠ Compliant Agency ATO We are delighted to announce that AWS GovCloud (US) has received an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM). FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Leveraging the HHS authorization, U.S. government agencies can evaluate AWS GovCloud (US) for their applications and workloads, complete their own authorizations to use AWS, and deploy systems into the AWS environment. Agencies can immediately request access to the "Amazon Web Services - AWS GovCloud (US) Region" FedRAMP package by submitting a FedRAMP Package Access Request Form using package ID "AGENCYAMAZONGC". Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on May 21st, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST and the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region webinar on June 12th, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST to learn more about AWS FedRAMP Compliance. Please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started today!
May 20, 2013	What’s New: Elastic Load Balancing now supports additional HTTP methods Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) now supports additional HTTP methods specified in requests from client applications. Previously, ELB restricted the set of supported HTTP methods to those commonly used by conventional web applications. With an increasing number of applications requiring support for new HTTP extensions, customers have indicated that they would like more control over the HTTP methods used by their applications. ELB will now accept all HTTP methods sent to your applications. Some examples of methods you can use include “PATCH” for Ruby on Rails 4+ applications, and “REPORT” or “MKCALENDAR” for CalDAV applications. To learn more, visit the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide.
May 16, 2013	Amazon Elastic Transcoder Announces Seven New Enhancements, Including HLS Support We’re excited to announce seven new enhancements to Amazon Elastic Transcoder that make it easier for you to encode and deliver your content to a wider set of video devices and players. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a web service that converts your video files into versions that will play back on devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs and web browsers. Starting today you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to output content in three new ways: HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support lets you create videos that play on compatible players for Apple iOS, Android devices, set-top boxes and web browsers. With HLS support, you can now easily deliver your content without a streaming server – just point your users to the video in Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudFront. WebM support lets you transcode content into VP8 video and Vorbis audio for playback in browsers, like Firefox, that do not natively support H.264 and AAC. MPEG-2 TS output container support lets you output transport streams that are commonly used in broadcast systems. We’ve also added four features that make it even easier to use Amazon Elastic Transcoder: Multiple outputs per job make it easy to create different renditions of the same content. Instead of having to create one transcoding job per rendition, you can now create a single job to produce multiple renditions. For example, with a single job you can create H.264, HLS and WebM versions of the same video for delivery to multiple platforms. Automatic video bit rate optimization takes the guesswork out of choosing the right bit rate for your video content. With this feature, Amazon Elastic Transcoder will automatically adjust the bit rate in order to optimize the visual quality of your transcoded output. Enhanced aspect ratio and sizing policies make it easier to resize your content to your output frame size. You can use these new settings in transcoding presets to precisely control scaling, cropping, matting and stretching options to get the output that you expect regardless of how the input is formatted. Integration with Amazon S3 permissions and storage options lets you set permissions on your output files from within Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Your files are then created with the right permissions in-place, ready for delivery to end-users. You can learn more about Amazon Elastic Transcoder and these new features by visiting the detail page. To see these new features in action, don’t forget to register for the “What’s New with Amazon Elastic Transcoder” webinar on May 29, 2013 at 10am Pacific time.
May 15, 2013	Amazon DynamoDB Announces Parallel Scan and Lower-Cost Reads We are excited to announce the availability of Parallel Scan, a new feature that allows you to access your Amazon DynamoDB data even more quickly than before. In addition, we have made it up to four times cheaper to read large amounts of data out of Amazon DynamoDB. This also reduces the cost of copying your data from Amazon DynamoDB to Amazon Redshift. You can read more about these improvements here. With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get: Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations. Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region. Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console. Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale. Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.
May 14, 2013	AWS Management Console in AWS GovCloud (US) adds support for Amazon SWF We are delighted to announce that the AWS Management Console for the AWS GovCloud (US) region now supports Amazon Simple Workflow (Amazon SWF)! The AWS GovCloud (US) region is designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your AWS GovCloud (US) resources. Amazon Simple Workflow is a service to coordinate work across multiple machines. With our APIs, ease-of-use libraries, and control engine, you can build multi-step application components that are independent of any single component’s state and progress. This allows you to change and scale your business logic with greater selectivity and ease – across the AWS Cloud or your own data centers. With Amazon Simple Workflow, there is no need to write your own state machine or infrastructure code. Instead, you can focus on writing the business logic that makes your application unique. The AWS Management Console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage these powerful capabilities of Amazon SWF. Instructions on how to access the console are available in our Users Guide. To learn more about the service, please visit the Amazon SWF detail page, the AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started!
May 14, 2013	AWS OpsWorks launches Amazon CloudWatch metrics view We are excited to announce AWS OpsWorks now offers a convenient view of the Amazon CloudWatch metrics generated by your OpsWorks instances. Without any additional costs or setup you can see thirteen one-minute metrics that provide an overview of the state of your instances. All metrics are automatically collected, grouped, and filtered. You can start with an overview of CPU, memory and load summarized by stack and then drill down to specific layers and instances. All metrics can be used to create alarms via Amazon CloudWatch. A few clicks in the the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading how to use the OpsWorks monitoring view or joining our AWS OpsWorks webinar on May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.
May 14, 2013	AWS OpsWorks supports Elastic Load Balancing We are excited to announce developers can now add Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to their OpsWorks application stacks and get all the built-in capabilities ELB is known for, including: Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming application traffic. SSL certificates are stored using IAM credentials, allowing you to control who can see your private keys. Elastic Load Balancing spans multiple AZs for reliability, but provides a single DNS name for simplicity. Elastic Load Balancing metrics such as request count and request latency are reported by Amazon CloudWatch. By default, Elastic Load Balancing supports SSL termination at the Load Balancer, including offloading SSL decryption from application instances, centralized management of SSL certificates, and encryption to back-end instances with optional public key authentication. A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading the OpsWorks documentation or joining our AWS OpsWorks webinar on May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.
May 08, 2013	AWS Direct Connect location in Seattle and access to AWS GovCloud (US) now available We are delighted to make two important announcements today - a new AWS Direct Connect location in Seattle supporting the AWS US West (Oregon) region and support for AWS Direct Connect to the AWS GovCloud (US) region from any AWS Direct Connect location are both now available! You can use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection from your datacenter, office, or colocation environment to AWS. Connections are always made to a particular Direct Connect location, and can run at either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. Instructions on how to set up AWS Direct Connect are available in our AWS Direct Connect Users Guide. For AWS GovCloud (US) access, please see the AWS GovCloud (US) Users Guide. Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on May 14th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST to learn more about AWS Direct Connect for the AWS GovCloud (US) region. Sign in to your AWS Management Console to order AWS Direct Connect today!
May 08, 2013	Announcing AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center We are excited to announce the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center. The AWS Management Pack enables you to view and monitor your AWS resources directly in the System Center Operations Manager console. This way, you can use a single, familiar console to monitor all your resources, whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud. The AWS Management Pack gives you a consolidated view of your AWS resources across regions and Availability Zones. It also has built-in integration with Amazon CloudWatch so that the metrics and alarms defined in Amazon CloudWatch surface as performance counters and alerts in Operations Manager. With the AWS Management Pack, you can gain a deep insight into the health and performance of your applications running within the Amazon EC2 instances. The diagram view generated by the management pack makes it easy to traverse between the application and the infrastructure hosting it, with just a few clicks. The AWS Management Pack is available for “System Center 2012 – Operations Manager” and “System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2”. To learn more or download the AWS Management Pack, visit https://aws.amazon.com/windows/system-center/.
May 07, 2013	Raising the bar: Amazon announces 4,000 IOPS per EBS Volume and Provisioned IOPS products on AWS Marketplace We are excited to announce support for up to 4,000 IOPS per Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volume. This represents a fourfold increase from the original Provisioned IOPS volume performance since its launch last year. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to provide predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads such as databases, distributed file systems and other enterprise applications; all of which are available on AWS Marketplace. You can get up to 4,000 IOPS from one volume. For performance beyond 4,000 IOPS, you can attach and stripe multiple volumes to deliver thousands of IOPS to your application. You can set the level of performance you need and EBS will consistently deliver it over the lifetime of the volume. To enable your Amazon EC2 instance to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, we recommend launching them as "EBS-optimized" instances, which deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. The EBS-optimized option is currently available for our m1.large, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m2.4xlarge, m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge and c1.xlarge instance types. One way to get started with Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS is to launch a product from AWS Marketplace with 1-Click. AWS Marketplace is an online store where you can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS such as high-performance versions of MongoDB, NuoDB and OrangeFS. You can learn more about these products on the AWS Marketplace Provisioned IOPS information page. Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-optimized instances and AWS Marketplace products are now supported in all AWS regions except GovCloud. For more information on using Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, please see the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide.
May 06, 2013	Announcing General Availability of the AWS SDK for Node.js We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of the AWS SDK for Node.js. This SDK enables developers to tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud from their Node.js applications. Since releasing the Developer Preview of the AWS SDK for Node.js in December, we expanded support to cover the full set of AWS services, collaborated with the community to fine tune the SDK design patterns, and added a few new features. The latest SDK now supports proxy servers, IAM roles on EC2 instances, and optionally using a Stream interface on operations. This release moves the SDK to a stable API. Read the Getting Started Guide to begin using the SDK in your Node.js project.
May 01, 2013	Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) now supports S3 Server Side Encryption Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) now supports S3 Server Side Encryption. This feature is useful for any customers that need to move or process large amounts of sensitive data. S3 Server Side Encryption (S3 SSE) makes it easy to encrypt data stored at rest in S3. With S3 SSE, every S3 object is encrypted with a unique key; the key itself is encrypted with a regularly rotated master key. Decryption happens automatically when data is retrieved. S3DistCp is an EMR feature that uses MapReduce to efficiently move large amounts of data from S3 into HDFS, from HDFS to S3, and between S3 buckets. EMR S3DistCp now supports S3 SSE. To learn more about this feature, please visit EMR’s Developer Guide.
May 01, 2013	Announcing New Edge Location in Seoul, Korea for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 We are excited to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Seoul, Korea to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. This is our first edge location in Korea and each new edge location helps to lower latency and improve performance for your end users. We plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide. If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don't need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Amazon Route 53 is designed to be fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNS servers. Queries for your domain are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server, and thus answered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no required minimum commitments. We’d also like to invite you to join our “Whole Site Delivery with Amazon CloudFront” webinar on May 16th at 10:00AM Pacific Time. In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your site to deliver both static and dynamic content (portions of your site that change for each end-user). You can register here for this webinar. Like all Amazon CloudFront edge locations, our Seoul edge location supports all Amazon CloudFront features. With the addition of this location, Amazon CloudFront now has a total of 40 edge locations worldwide. To learn more, please visit the detail page for Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53.
Apr 30, 2013	Announcing Amazon Web Services Global Certification Program We are excited to announce the launch of the Amazon Web Services Global Certification Program. AWS Certifications designate individuals who demonstrate knowledge, skills and proficiency with AWS services. This program is built around the three primary roles for engineering teams delivering cloud-based solutions: Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, and Developer. Role-based certification credentials can be earned on three proficiency levels: Associate, Professional and Master. AWS certifications are designed to certify the technical skills and knowledge associated with best practices for building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using AWS technology. To earn an AWS Certification, individuals must prove their proficiency by passing an exam. Exams are administered through Kryterion testing centers in more than 100 countries and 750 testing locations worldwide. Once achieved, individuals can display the AWS Certified logo on business cards and resumes to gain visibility for their AWS expertise while fostering credibility with employers and peers. The first certification to be offered is the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level,” which certifies skills for technical professionals and solutions architects involved in the design and development of applications on AWS. Additional role-based certifications, including certifications for Systems Operations (SysOps) Administrators and Developers, will follow later this year. To learn more about the AWS Certification Program, visit http://aws.amazon.com/certification.
Apr 25, 2013	AWS OpsWorks now supports more Amazon EC2 instance types including the micro instance We are excited to announce the addition of Amazon EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instances to give users more instance types to choose for their development needs, including the AWS Free Usage Tier-eligible micro instance. Users now have the ability to use micro instances to reduce costs in development environments as well as larger instance types such as the second generation M3 family for applications that demand more performance. See offer terms for more details and other restrictions on the AWS Free Usage Tier. A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading our documentation walk-through.
Apr 24, 2013	AWS Marketplace Applications Now Available With 1-Click Deployment In Sydney AWS Marketplace applications are now available to all customers using the AWS Sydney Region with 1-Click Deployment for building solutions and running their businesses. Customers can easily find, compare, and immediately start using the software listed in AWS Marketplace, and experience lower latency when deploying in Sydney. Over 100 software products for production, testing and development purposes are currently available, including MongoDB, aiCache, Citrix Netscaler, F5, MicroStrategy and others. Sellers continually add new AWS Marketplace products for deployment the AWS Sydney Region. For more information or to find software on AWS Marketplace, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.
Apr 23, 2013	AWS Management Console now available for AWS GovCloud (US) We are delighted to announce that the AWS Management Console is now available for access to the AWS GovCloud (US) region! When you sign in using the AWS GovCloud (US) specific login page, the console provides access to your AWS GovCloud (US) resources and is completely isolated from other AWS regions. The console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your AWS GovCloud (US) resources. Consoles available today are Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. The Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR and Amazon SWF consoles will be coming soon. Instructions on how to access the console are available in our Users Guide. Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on April 30th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST for a live demonstration of the console and to learn more about AWS GovCloud (US). Also, register now for the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region Webinar on May 15, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST. To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started!
Apr 22, 2013	Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances available in EU West (Ireland) We are thrilled to announce that Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in EU West (Ireland). Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. The service is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance for less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse. High Storage Instances (hs1.8xlarge) are an Amazon EC2 instance type that is ideal for customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets. High Storage instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives, delivering over 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance. Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and EU West (Ireland), with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon Redshift detail page and the Amazon EC2 instance type page.
Apr 18, 2013	Amazon DynamoDB Announces Support for Local Secondary Indexes We are thrilled to announce that we have expanded the query capabilities of DynamoDB. We call the newest capability Local Secondary Indexes (LSI). While DynamoDB already allows you to perform low-latency queries based on your table’s primary key, even at tremendous scale, LSI will now give you the ability to perform fast queries against other attributes (or columns) in your table. This gives you the ability to perform richer queries while still meeting the low-latency demands of responsive, scalable applications. With LSI we expand DynamoDB’s existing query capabilities with support for more complex queries. Customers can now create indexes on non-primary key attributes and quickly retrieve records within a hash partition (i.e., items that share the same hash value in their primary key). The enhanced query flexibility that local secondary indexes provide means DynamoDB can support an even broader range of workloads. At Amazon, we have already come to start with DynamoDB as the default choice for every application that does not require the flexibility of relational databases like Oracle or MySQL. Customers tell us they’re adopting the same practice, particularly in the areas of digital advertising, social gaming and connected device applications where high availability, seamless scalability, predictable performance and low latency are very critical. Today, local secondary indexes must be defined at the time you create your DynamoDB tables. In the future, we plan to provide you with an ability to add or drop LSI for existing tables. If you want to equip an existing DynamoDB table to local secondary indexes immediately, you can export the data from your existing table using Elastic Map Reduce, and import it to a new table with LSI. Local secondary indexes are available today in all regions except GovCloud. You can get started with DynamoDB and Local Secondary Indexes by reading the developer guide.
Apr 18, 2013	Amazon RDS for Oracle Now Supports Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption We have good news to share. Many of you have told us that data encryption, at rest and in transit, is very important to you as you move mission-critical database workloads to Amazon RDS. Today, Amazon RDS is announcing support for Oracle’s Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption in all regions. Both of these features are components of Oracle’s Advanced Security option for the Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition. Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition is available on Amazon RDS for Oracle under the Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) model. There is no additional charge to use these features. Oracle Transparent Data Encryption encrypts data before it is written to storage, and automatically decrypts data when reading from storage. Oracle Transparent Data Encryption enables you to encrypt table spaces or specific table columns using industry standard encryption algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES). Oracle Native Network Encryption encrypts the data as it moves into and out of the database. Oracle Native Network Encryption enables you to encrypt network traffic travelling over Oracle Net Service using industry standard encryption algorithms such as AES and Triple DES. To learn more about using Oracle Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption on Amazon RDS for Oracle, please visit our User Documentation
Apr 18, 2013	Citrix NetScaler Promo - $175 EC2 Credit AWS customers who are new to Citrix NetScaler on AWS Marketplace will receive $175 of EC2 Promotional Credit if they use a least 200 hours between April 15th and May 31st, 2013. Visit the Citrix NetScaler VPX Platinum Edition page on Marketplace to learn more.
Apr 17, 2013	AWS Elastic Beanstalk Supports IAM Roles We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. Elastic Beanstalk makes it easy to deploy and run your applications on AWS, and with IAM roles, these applications can securely access AWS services. IAM roles manage the muck of securely distributing your AWS access keys out to your EC2 instances that have been launched through Elastic Beanstalk. When creating new environments using the Elastic Beanstalk console or using the eb command line, Elastic Beanstalk can automatically create an IAM role. You can also create and assign existing roles to Elastic Beanstalk environments. You can easily grant additional permissions to this role to allow your application to access AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon S3. To learn more about IAM roles and Elastic Beanstalk, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.
Apr 10, 2013	AWS Storage Gateway Now Supports Microsoft Hyper-V The AWS Storage Gateway helps you connect your on-premises IT environment with the AWS cloud. Today, we are excited to announce support for running the AWS Storage Gateway on an additional virtualization platform, Microsoft Hyper-V. You can use the AWS Storage Gateway in two configurations. Gateway-Cached volumes provide local, low-latency access to your most frequently used files while storing all your data in Amazon S3’s elastic, highly durable storage infrastructure. Gateway-Stored volumes provide scheduled off-site backups to Amazon S3 for your on-premises data. With support for Microsoft Hyper-V in addition to already-supported VMware ESXi, you can now run the AWS Storage Gateway on two of the most popular virtualization platforms. Learn more and get started by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.
Apr 09, 2013	AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon EMR We are thrilled to announce that Amazon EMR is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region! Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to process or analyze vast amounts of data using Hadoop in the AWS cloud. Using Amazon EMR, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region was built with Government customers in mind. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. You can run workloads, including all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and government oriented publically available data, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Depending on your requirements, you can also run unclassified workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to utilize the unique capabilities of this region. Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on April 16th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST which will feature a guest speaker from the Amazon EMR team. Also, register now for the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region webinar on May 15, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST. To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page, read about our Public Sector case studies, and contact us to get started!
Apr 08, 2013	AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET Supports Amazon VPC and Configuration Files We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now supports configuration files as well as integration with Amazon VPC and Amazon RDS. AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET allows you to easily run and manage your .NET applications on AWS using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012. Using configuration files, you can setup software on Amazon EC2 instances within your environment, without having to create a custom AMI. For example, you can install and configure Windows services to run on the same instances as your web application. You can also use configuration files to provision resources such as an Amazon DynamoDB table, an Amazon CloudWatch alarm, or an Amazon SQS queue. To learn more about configuration files, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. Elastic Beanstalk .NET environments now seamlessly integrate with Amazon RDS and can also run inside existing VPCs. Using Amazon VPC, you can now easily deploy private .NET web applications including intranet web applications and web service backends. To learn more about deploying your Elastic Beanstalk application in a VPC or connecting to RDS, visit "Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon VPC" and "Using Amazon RDS" in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.
Apr 04, 2013	Announcing Price Reduction for Windows On-Demand EC2 Instances We are excited to announce a price reduction of up to 26% on Windows On-Demand EC2 instances. Today’s price drop continues the AWS tradition of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our customers. This reduction applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families. All prices are automatically effective from April 1, 2013. As an example, a typical Microsoft Windows Application Server running on an m1 large On-Demand instance in US East (N. Virginia) would now cost only $0.364 per hour instead of $0.460 per hour– a 20% drop in price, which translates into more than $2000 in quarterly savings for running 10 such instances. The size of the reduction varies by instance family and region. We encourage you to visit the AWS Windows page for more information about Windows pricing on AWS.
Apr 03, 2013	AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Adds Support for Variables in Access Control Policies We are excited to announce that we have extended the access policy language to include support for policy variables. This new feature allows you to define general purpose policies that include variables so you do not have to explicitly list all the components of the policy. For example, you can now use variables such as ‘username’ to create policies that lock down users’ access to a specific S3 folder determined by their username, or allow users to manage their own access keys and assign the policy to a group instead of assigning an individual policy to each user. This will simplify your policy management by reducing the number of policies necessary to grant individualized access control to AWS resources. For more information about the access control language and policy variables, please visit the Policy Variables section of the Using IAM guide. To get started please visit the AWS Management Console
Apr 02, 2013	Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances available in US West (Oregon) We are thrilled to announce that Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US West (Oregon). Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. The service is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance for less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse. High Storage Instances (hs1.8xlarge) are an Amazon EC2 instance type that is ideal for customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets. High Storage instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives, delivering over 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance. Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon Redshift detail page and the Amazon EC2 instance type page.
Apr 02, 2013	Announcing New Lower Request Pricing for Amazon S3 We are excited to announce that we are reducing Amazon S3 request prices in all nine of our regions. We are lowering the prices for GET requests by 60% and the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY, and POST requests by 50%. For example, in the US Standard Region, we are reducing the price of every 1,000 PUT requests from $0.01 to $0.005 and the price of every 10,000 GET requests from $0.01 to $0.004. We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to drive down our costs. The new lower prices for all regions can be found on the Amazon S3 pricing page. New prices are effective April 1st and will be applied to your bill for all requests on or after this date.
Mar 26, 2013	Announcing AWS CloudHSM We are excited to announce AWS CloudHSM, a new service enabling customers to increase data security and meet compliance requirements by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud. The CloudHSM service allows customers to securely generate, store and manage cryptographic keys used for data encryption in a way that keys are accessible only by the customer. AWS provides a variety of solutions for protecting sensitive data within the AWS platform. But for some applications and data subject to rigorous contractual or regulatory mandates for managing cryptographic keys, additional protection is necessary. Until now, organizations’ only options were to maintain data in on-premises datacenters or deploy local HSMs to protect encrypted data in the cloud. Unfortunately, those options either prevented customers from migrating their most sensitive data to the cloud or significantly slowed application performance. With AWS CloudHSM, customers maintain full ownership, control and access to keys and sensitive data while Amazon manages the HSM appliances in close proximity to their applications and data for maximum performance. For more information about Amazon HSM, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/.
Mar 19, 2013	Adobe ColdFusion now on AWS Marketplace Adobe ColdFusion 10 on AWS Marketplace is an easy and affordable way to access powerful yet easy-to-use features to build high performing, enterprise-ready applications that scale dynamically to meet your business needs. Easily create interactive web applications leveraging unique built-in HTML5 support. 1-Click deploy running on Windows Server or Ubuntu.
Mar 19, 2013	Announcing EBS-Optimized Support for Additional Instance Types We are excited to announce the global availability of EBS-optimized support for four additional instance types: m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge, m2.2xlarge, and c1.xlarge. EBS-optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Megabits per second and 1,000 Megabits per second depending on the instance type used. EBS-optimized instances are designed for use with both Standard and Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes. Standard volumes deliver 100 IOPS on average with a best effort ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS, making them well-suited for workloads with moderate and bursty I/O needs. When attached to an EBS-optimized instance, Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to consistently deliver up to 2000 IOPS from a single volume, making them ideal for I/O intensive workloads such as databases. For more information on Amazon EBS-optimized EC2 instances, please see the Amazon EC2 detail page.
Mar 18, 2013	AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon SWF We are delighted to announce that Amazon Simple Workflow is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region! Amazon Simple Workflow provides customers with the building blocks and processing engine to handle the complexity of application infrastructure programming and state machinery. This lets customers focus on the business logic that makes them unique. By using Simple Workflow to assemble applications with multiple interrelated steps, customers get cluster-wide functionality to coordinate tasks, manage the state of processes, retry on failed steps, and distribute task load. Customers are using Simple Workflow’s building blocks to: create SaaS analytics platforms, process big data, transcode video, manage web-based orders, train machine learning algorithms, deploy enterprise mobile assets, distribute mobile media, manage data center deployments, optimize on-line advertising, and much more. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region was built with Government customers in mind. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. You can run workloads, including all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and government oriented publically available data, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Depending on your requirements, you can also run unclassified workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to utilize the unique capabilities of this region. To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page, read about our Public Sector case studies, and contact us to get started!
Mar 13, 2013	Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Upgrading from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 Are you developing, testing, or migrating to SQL Server 2012? Your task just got easier with Amazon RDS for SQL Server. We are pleased to announce that you can upgrade existing SQL Server 2008 R2 DB Instances to SQL Server 2012 starting today using the new Major Version Upgrade feature. The Major Version Upgrade feature is available in all AWS regions for all SQL Server editions, including Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise. With the Major Version Upgrade feature, you can easily develop and test your applications using the new features Microsoft has introduced as part of SQL Server 2012. In addition, you can upgrade your existing SQL Server 2008 R2 DB Instances and leverage new SQL Server 2012 features with your applications. A few of these new features are highlighted below: Contained database – a database that is isolated from other SQL Server databases including system databases like the ‘master’ database. This simplifies the task of moving databases from one instance of SQL Server to another by removing dependencies to other SQL Server databases. Columnstore index – a new type of index for data warehouse type queries. Columnstore indexes can greatly reduce I/O and memory utilization on large queries. Sequence object – an object that acts as a counter similar to SQL Server’s identity column, but is not restricted to a single table. User-defined roles – a new role management system in SQL Server 2012 which allows users to create custom server roles. Upgrading your DB Instances to SQL Server 2012 is as easy as pushing a button on the Amazon RDS Console or using the Command Line Interface. This new feature further enhances the many benefits Amazon RDS for SQL Server offers to Microsoft SQL Server customers including easy deployment, push button scalability, automated back-ups, point-in-time restore, automated software upgrades and patching, and pay-as-you-go flexibility. For more information on upgrading your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB Instances, please visit our Major Version Upgrade documentation. To learn more about Amazon RDS for SQL Server, please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server detail page, our documentation and our FAQs.
Mar 13, 2013	Amazon RDS now supports 3TB and 30,000 Provisioned IOPS per database instance We have three pieces of good news to share. First, you can provision up to 3 TB in storage and up to 30,000 IOPS for your database instances (maximum realized IOPS will vary by engine type). Second, you can convert an existing Amazon RDS instance that uses standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage. Finally, you can scale IOPS and storage independently. All three features are enabled for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle database engines. Here are the details: Provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS: You can now provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance – three times the previous limit of 1 TB and 10,000 IOPS per database instance. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on an m2.4xlarge instance, you can realize up to 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and 12,500 IOPS for MySQL. However, by provisioning up to 30,000 IOPS, you may be able to achieve lower latency and higher throughput. Your actual realized IOPS may vary from the amount you provisioned based on your database workload, instance type, and database engine choice. Refer to the Factors That Affect Realized IOPS section of the documentation to learn more. Convert an existing database instance to use Provisioned IOPS storage: You can now convert database instances using standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage and get consistent throughput and low I/O latencies. Use the "Modify" action for your database instance on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console, check the "Use Provisioned IOPS" check box, specify the number of IOPS required for your workload, and proceed through the wizard. You can also perform this operation via the Amazon RDS APIs and the Command Line Interface. Scale storage and IOPS independently: You can now scale IOPS (in increments of 1000) and storage independently. The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the storage requested (in GB) should be between 3 and 10. For example, for a database instance with 1000 GB of storage, you can provision from 3,000 to 10,000 IOPS. You can scale the IOPS up or down depending on factors such as seasonal variability of traffic to your applications. Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud. To learn more and get started with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS, please refer to the Working with Provisioned IOPS storage section of the Amazon RDS User Guide. You are also invited to attend the webinar Amazon RDS - Running low admin, high performance databases in the cloud with the Amazon RDS team on March 27th, where you can learn more about Provisioned IOPS storage and how customers are using it to successfully run high performance applications. Register here.
Mar 12, 2013	Amazon ElastiCache now in Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, global expansion of M3 cache nodes, and price reduction in select regions We are excited to share three announcements today that give you more flexibility and lower costs when deploying Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed, in-memory, Memcached-compatible caching service. Amazon ElastiCache availability in Sydney. Starting today, customers can use Amazon ElastiCache clusters for their scale-out caching needs in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Sydney joins Singapore and Tokyo as the third Region in Asia Pacific and as the ninth Region worldwide. Global expansion of enhanced (M3) cache nodes. The enhanced (M3) cache nodes, built on the next generation AWS infrastructure, are now available in all regions except AWS GovCloud. Reduced cache node pricing. We have reduced prices of M1 cache nodes in the US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. As a result, the m1.small cache node is now 19% cheaper in these regions. In addition, we reduced prices for M2, M3 and C1 cache nodes in the South America (São Paulo) region. Amazon ElastiCache improves the performance of your web applications by retrieving data from a fast, in-memory cache instead of relying entirely on disk-based storage. Unlike other caching mechanisms, Amazon ElastiCache is fully managed so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your own caching infrastructure. In addition, it is Memcached-compatible, so existing Memcached-enabled applications should work with ElastiCache without any code changes. To learn more about the service, please see our recent presentation from the first AWS re:Invent Conference, and review the Getting Started Guide. You can launch a cache cluster with a few clicks using the AWS Management Console or a few simple API calls. For more information about the new cache node types and prices, please visit the Amazon ElastiCache page.
Mar 12, 2013	Announcing AMI Copy for Amazon EC2 We are excited to announce the immediate availability of a new feature: Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy. AMI Copy enables you to easily copy your AMIs across AWS regions, enabling the following scenarios: Consistent and Simple Multi-Region Deployment - You can copy an AMI from one region to another, enabling you to easily launch consistent instances based on the same AMI into different regions. Scalability - You can more easily design and build world-scale applications that meet the needs of your users, regardless of their location. Performance - You can increase performance by distributing your application and locating critical components of your application in closer proximity to your users. You can also take advantage of region-specific features such as instance types or other AWS services. Even Higher Availability - You can design and deploy applications across AWS regions, to increase availability. To use AMI Copy, simply select the AMI to be copied from within the AWS Management Console, choose the destination region, and start the copy.  AMI Copy can also be accessed via the EC2 Command Line Interface or EC2 API as described in the EC2 User’s Guide. Once the copy is complete, the new AMI can be used to launch new EC2 instances in the destination region. There are no additional charges for using AMI Copy, but you will be charged to transfer the AMI out of the source region and to store the copied AMI in the destination region. We recently launched Amazon EBS Snapshot Copy, which enables you to copy EBS Snapshots across AWS regions, and last month we significantly lowered the cost of transferring data between AWS Regions (by 26% to 83%). Together with AMI Copy we hope that these updates make it easier for you to take advantage of the AWS global footprint.
Mar 11, 2013	Announcing AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Node.js applications. Elastic Beanstalk already makes it easier to quickly deploy and manage Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and .NET applications on AWS. Now, Elastic Beanstalk offers the same functionality for Node.js applications. Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js supports a wide number of configuration settings to help you customize the environment for your application. You can easily configure HTTP or TCP load balancing, configure the version and command to launch your Node.js application, and improve performance by offloading static content handling to Apache or Nginx. To get started using Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. Also check out the walkthroughs for how to deploy Express and Geddy applications on Elastic Beanstalk. Using Elastic Beanstalk, you can seamlessly integrate your application with Amazon RDS. You can also use configuration files to customize your Amazon EC2 instances or to provision additional AWS resources such as Amazon DynamoDB tables and Amazon ElastiCache clusters. To learn more about customizing your Elastic Beanstalk environment, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.
Mar 08, 2013	SAP Hana One Promo - $120 AWS Credit AWS customers who are new to SAP Hana One on the AWS Marketplace will receive $120 of AWS Promotion Credit if they use at least 10 hours of SAP Hana One between February 18 and March 31, 2013. Visit the SAP Hana One product page on Marketplace to learn more.
Mar 07, 2013	Amazon DynamoDB Reduces Prices We are excited to announce a reduction in Amazon DynamoDB pricing in all AWS regions. The price of indexed data storage has decreased by up to 75%. The price of provisioned throughput capacity has decreased by up to 35%. We have also introduced a new Reserved Capacity offering. Reserved Capacity pricing offers significant savings over the normal price of DynamoDB provisioned throughput capacity. When you buy Reserved Capacity, you pay a one-time upfront fee and commit to paying for a minimum usage level for the duration of the Reserved Capacity term. Using Reserved Capacity pricing, you can save up to 53% with a 1-year term and up to 76% with a 3-year term. With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get: Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations. Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region. Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console. Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale. Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.
Mar 05, 2013	AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes Amazon ElastiCache We are excited to announce that starting March 2013, the AWS Free Usage Tier will include Amazon ElastiCache nodes. With this announcement, customers can gain hands-on-experience with Amazon ElastiCache at no-cost. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of a t1.micro cache node. The expanded Free Usage Tier with Amazon ElastiCache t1.micro cache nodes is available today in all regions, except for Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS GovCloud. For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page. To get started using Amazon ElastiCache, visit the Amazon ElastiCache detail page.
Mar 04, 2013	Announcing New Lower Pricing for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances We are excited to announce a reduction in reserved instance pricing for Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Linux/UNIX Reserved Instance prices will decrease by up to 27 % for Amazon EC2 for the Standard (M1), Second-Generation Standard (M3), High-Memory (M2), and High-CPU (C1) Instance families. New Reserved Instance prices will only apply to Reserved Instances purchases made on or after March 5th. Today’s price drop represents the 26th price drop for AWS, and we are delighted to continue to pass along savings to you as we innovate and drive down our costs. With the new pricing, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 65 % compared to On-Demand instances, and you will automatically receive additional savings on your future purchases of Reserved Instances in that AWS Region when you have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instances. We recommend that you take this opportunity to review your current usage and to determine if you would like to purchase additional Reserved Instances. To learn more, please visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page for the complete list of new lower prices and an overview of the volume discount program. For more details on optimizing your AWS costs, please visit the AWS Economics Center. And during the month of March you can take advantage of a free trial of AWS Trusted Advisor to generate a personalized report on how you can optimize your bill by taking advantage of the new, lower Reserved Instance prices.
Mar 04, 2013	Announcing point-and-click access to Amazon RDS database logs We are pleased to announce a significantly easier way for you to monitor a number of log files generated by your Amazon RDS DB Instances. You so far had the option to monitor most of these database logs by querying the database. You can now view database log files directly using the AWS Management Console or download them using Amazon RDS APIs to diagnose, trouble shoot and fix database configuration or performance issues. This functionality is available for all the database engines supported by Amazon RDS -- MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. You have three different ways to access the log files using the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs: View: You can view the content of a log file as of a point in time in the AWS Management Console. Just navigate to the "logs" section corresponding to your DB Instance, select the log file you are interested in and click "View". Watch: You can obtain real time updates to log files directly using the AWS Management Console. Just navigate to the "logs" section corresponding to your DB Instance, select the log file you are interested in and click "Watch". You will then be able to see the last few lines of the log file and any ongoing updates being made by the database engine as they occur. Download: You can use the rds-download-db-logfile command to download the content of your log files. Note that this functionality is not currently available through the AWS Management Console. Visit the Downloading a Database Log File section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more. The type of log files available through this functionality by database engine are as follows: MySQL: You can monitor MySQL Error Log, Slow Query Log and General Log directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. While the MySQL Error Log is generated by default, you need to configure DB Parameter Groups to enable the generation of Slow Query and General Logs to the file system. All these log files are rotated every hour and only the files corresponding to the last 24 hours are retained. Visit the Working with MySQL Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more. Oracle: You can access Alert Log and Trace Files directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. These files are retained for seven days by default. You can configure the retention period as per your needs. Visit the Working with Oracle Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more. SQL Server: You can access Error Log, Agent Log and Trace Files directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. These files are retained for seven days by default. You can configure the retention period as per your needs. Visit the Working with SQL Server Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more.
Feb 28, 2013	Amazon SQS and SNS Announce Lower Prices and Expanded Free Tiers - 50% price drop for SQS We have good news to share. Effective March 1, 2013, we are reducing prices and expanding the free tier for AWS messaging services – the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS). 1. SQS API prices will decrease by 50% to $0.50 per million API requests. 2. SNS API prices will decrease by 17% to $0.50 per million API requests. 3. The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10X from 100K requests per month. Our customers constantly discover powerful new ways to build more scalable, elastic and reliable applications using SQS and SNS. We learned, for example, that some customers use SQS as a buffer ahead of their databases and other services. Other customers combine SNS + SQS to fanout/transmit identical messages to multiple queues. Over time, we've optimized our own systems in order to lower costs, and make SQS and SNS available for new customers and new workloads. Price cuts coupled with SQS features such as long polling (which reduces extraneous polling) and extensions to AmazonSQSAsyncClient (enables easier batching of outgoing messages, and also pre-fetching of incoming messages) give our customers a very cost-effective solution for their messaging needs. SQS can be even more cost effective for customers that use batching as SQS batches cost the same amount as single messages. We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to innovate and drive down our costs. The expanded free tier and lower prices will be available in all regions except GovCloud. To learn more or get started with SQS and SNS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sqs and http://aws.amazon.com/sns.
Feb 27, 2013	Amazon CloudSearch Now Available in Three Additional Regions Worldwide We are excited to announce that Amazon CloudSearch is now available in the the US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. These new Regions join the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, and the recently added EU (Ireland) Region. Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index. Getting started with Amazon CloudSearch is easy with our free trial program. To learn more, see the Amazon CloudSearch Page.
Feb 26, 2013	Announcing AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server - Beta We are excited to announce the beta release of AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server. AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server is an easy to use tool that you can run on your EC2 Windows Server instances. It is a very valuable tool not just for collecting log files and troubleshooting issues, but also proactively identifying possible areas of concern. This tool can, for example, be used to diagnose configuration mismatch issues between the Windows Firewall and the Amazon EC2 security group that may affect your applications. It can even examine EBS boot volumes from other instances and collect relevant logs for troubleshooting Windows Server from the volume. The AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server is free for AWS Customer. You can learn more about it at http://aws.amazon.com/windows/awsdiagnostics/. Also note that this tool is in beta release and your feedback will be extremely useful in further improving this tool. You can give us feedback here.
Feb 20, 2013	Announcing New AWS CloudFormation Deployment Enhancements We are excited to announce new AWS CloudFormation deployment enhancements and expanded support for EBS-Optimized instances. AWS CloudFormation makes it easy for you to provision and configure a set of related resources, including installing and configuring software on your Amazon EC2 instances. Rolling Deployments for Auto Scaling Groups You can now define update policies on Auto Scaling groups in CloudFormation templates. These update policies describe how instances in the Auto Scaling group are replaced or modified as part of a stack update operation. Update policies give you control over the number of instances that can be modified concurrently, the number of instances that should remain in service, and the wait time between instances to be updated. With rolling deployments, you reduce downtime when updating your application. To learn more about update policies for Auto Scaling, see the AWS CloudFormation User Guide. Cancel and Rollback Action for Stack Updates AWS CloudFormation now supports the ability to cancel a stack update. Using the cancel action, you can interrupt the stack update operation and trigger a rollback. The cancel action can be used in concert with update policies to automate the cancellation and rollback of a deployment. As you apply updates to your Auto Scaling group, you can validate your deployment and decide to cancel the operation. To learn more about the cancel action, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide. EBS-Optimized Instances for Auto Scaling Groups Starting today, you can also provision EBS-optimized instances inside Auto Scaling groups using CloudFormation templates. EBS-optimized instances provide dedicated throughput to Amazon EBS and an optimized configuration stack to provide optimal EBS I/O performance. To learn more about how you can leverage EBS-optimized instances for Auto Scaling groups, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
Feb 18, 2013	Announcing AWS OpsWorks We are excited to announce AWS OpsWorks, a new application management service for managing applications of any scale or complexity on the AWS cloud. OpsWorks features an integrated experience for managing the complete application lifecycle, including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, monitoring, and access control. Three key attributes of OpsWorks are: Operational Control. OpsWorks promotes conventions and sane defaults, such as template security groups. It also supports the ability to customize any aspect of an application’s configuration. Developers can reproduce exact configurations on new instances and apply changes to all instances, ensuring consistency. Automation. OpsWorks uses automation to simplify operations. Users can leverage its event-driven configuration system and rich deployment tools to efficiently manage an application over its lifetime. OpsWorks supports customizable deployments, rollback, patch management, auto scaling, and auto healing. Application updates can be deployed by updating a single configuration and clicking a button, reducing the time spent on routine tasks. Flexibility. OpsWorks supports a wide variety of application architectures and any software with a scripted installation. Because OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, developers can use existing recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations. A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by visiting the AWS OpsWorks detail page or joining our Introduction to AWS OpsWorks webinar on March 18, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.
Feb 14, 2013	Amazon Redshift Now Available to All Customers We are thrilled to announce the availability of Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. Amazon Redshift is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance at less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. On-demand pricing starts at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, scaling linearly to a petabyte or more. Reserved instance pricing lowers the effective price to $0.228 per hour or under $1,000 per terabyte per year. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse. Amazon Redshift is available in US East (N. Virginia) with additional regions coming soon. To learn more, visit the Amazon Redshift detail page.
Feb 13, 2013	Amazon RDS Reduces Price of Multi-AZ Deployments We have good news to share. Effective at the beginning of this month (February 1, 2013), Amazon RDS is lowering Multi-AZ deployment prices globally for MySQL and Oracle editions. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments offer enhanced availability for your production database workloads. When a database is run as a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS operates a standby instance which maintains an up-to-date copy of the primary database. In case of an instance, storage, or network failure, Amazon RDS automatically initiates a failover from the primary to the standby. This ensures minimal database availability impact to your application. Today, many customers run production workloads on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments. However, we also know that there are many customers who‘ve wanted to run Amazon RDS Multi-AZ but haven’t been able to do so yet at the current price. So, we’re excited to lower our Amazon RDS Multi-AZ to make it even easier for customers to run production databases on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments. For your quick reference, new pricing for an M1.Small instance for On-demand MySQL and Oracle (BYOL) Multi-AZ deployments is shown in table 1 below. Table 1: Amazon RDS for MYSQL and Oracle BYOL On-Demand Multi-AZ Deployment Prices for M1.Small DB Instance Region Old Price New Price Savings US East (Northern Virginia) $0.180 $0.153 15% US West (Northern California) $0.230 $0.167 27% US West (Oregon) $0.180 $0.153 15% AWS GovCloud (US) $0.240 $0.187 22% Europe (Ireland) $0.230 $0.167 27% Asia Pacific (Singapore) $0.230 $0.196 15% Asia Pacific (Tokyo) $0.240 $0.204 15% Asia Pacific (Sydney) $0.230 $0.196 15% South America (Sao Paulo) $0.300 $0.204 32% To learn more about Amazon RDS Multi-AZ and our new prices, please visit Amazon RDS . Sincerely, The Amazon Relational Database Service Team
Feb 11, 2013	Announcing DNS Failover for Amazon Route 53 We are excited to announce the release of DNS Failover for Route 53, Amazon’s Domain Name System (DNS) web service. With DNS Failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. When you enable this feature, Route 53 health-checking agents will monitor each location (or "endpoint") of your application to determine its availability. In the event an endpoint fails, Route 53 will route traffic away from the failed endpoint and to other, healthy endpoints. This helps add redundancy to your applications and maintain high availability for your end users. You can take advantage of Amazon Route 53’s traffic management capabilities to improve the availability of your applications. For example, if you host your website on Amazon EC2, you can now leverage a simple backup site hosted on Amazon S3. You can also run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world, with Route 53 automatically removing from service any region where your application is unavailable. Getting started is easy, and there are no upfront costs. See the Route 53 product page for full details and pricing. To get started with DNS Failover for Route 53, read Jeff Barr’s blog post, visit the Route 53 product page, or review our walkthrough in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.
Feb 07, 2013	AWS CloudFormation Supports Tags for Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 We are excited to announce that AWS CloudFormation now supports tags for Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 resources. AWS CloudFormation makes it easy for you to provision and configure a set of related resources. Tagged resources allow you to view your AWS usage based on your business dimensions (such as cost centers, application names, or owners). With cost allocation reports, you can also track your AWS costs by tag. CloudFormation automatically adds preset tags to your EC2, S3, and RDS resources. These preset tags contain the stack name and ID. Additionally, you can specify your custom tags at the stack level and have them propagate to all resources. Alternatively, you can specify tags for specific resources in your template, allowing you fine-grained control over what resources get tagged. To learn more about tagging resources in CloudFormation, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
Feb 04, 2013	Amazon RDS Announces Support for DB Event Notifications via Email and SMS We are pleased to announce a new feature that enables you to receive email and SMS notifications when certain events occur with your Amazon RDS DB Instances, DB Parameter Groups, DB Security Groups, or DB Snapshots. For example, you can be notified when a restore from snapshot has been completed or when your multi-AZ DB Instance has initiated a failover. Currently over 40 events are supported and can be subscribed to via the new DB Event Subscription object found in the Amazon RDS Console, CLI, and API. Event notifications for Amazon RDS are available with all RDS-supported database engines (i.e. MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server). In addition, email notifications are supported in all AWS regions while SMS notifications are currently only supported in the US East region. For a complete list of supported events, as well as to learn more about DB Event Subscriptions, please refer to the events section of the Amazon RDS User Guide. For more information about using Amazon RDS, please visit our detail page, our documentation and our FAQs.
Jan 31, 2013	Price reduction for Amazon EC2, global expansion of M3 Standard Instances, and reduced data transfer pricing. We have a trio of announcements today that will help you run your applications globally at a reduced cost. 1. Global Expansion of Second Generation Standard Instances Last year, we announced Second Generation Standard (M3) instances. M3 instances have the same CPU and memory ratio as First Generation Standard (M1) instances but provide more CPU capability, and the option of an instance type with 8 virtual cores. In this initial launch, M3 instances were only available in the Northern Virginia region, but now you can launch instances as On Demand, Reserved or Spot instances in the Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and GovCloud (US) regions as well. We will launch M3 instances in the São Paulo region in the coming weeks. For more on M3 instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 instance type page. 2. Price reduction for Amazon EC2 We are reducing Linux On Demand prices for First Generation Standard (M1) instances, Second Generation Standard (M3) instances, High Memory (M2) instances and High CPU (C1) instances in all regions. All prices are effective from February 1, 2013. These reductions vary by instance type and region, but typically average 10-20% price drops . For complete pricing details, please visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page. 3. Reduced Data Transfer Pricing We are reducing prices for data transfer between AWS locations. Our new lower pricing applies to data transfer between all 9 global AWS regions, and from AWS regions to all global CloudFront edge locations. Previously, we have charged normal internet bandwidth prices for data transfer, but are now lowering these charges significantly -- allowing you to even more cost effectively move data between regions for serving customers in local geographies, for disaster recovery, and for many other use cases. The new prices are effective February 1, 2013, and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of these new prices. To learn more, please visit the Amazon S3 pricing page.
Jan 30, 2013	Amazon Simple Workflow in Seven Additional Regions and Extends IAM Support We are pleased to announce that Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is now available in seven additional AWS regions. In addition, you can also now use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control permissions to SWF domains and APIs. With domain-level permissions, you can control access to individual SWF domains you’ve defined such as development, QA, and production regions. For example, if you have an operations team that uses a web-based app to interact with automated workflows, you can now control which employees can view workflows and limit which employees may stop, start, or interrupt them. With API permissions you can control access to individual APIs within those domains. If your organization has workflows that operate on sensitive information, you can enforce a policy that makes sure only automated processes with the appropriate permissions can execute these workflows. With the addition of seven new regions, you can help reduce latency and improve your applications’ performance by choosing to run Amazon SWF workflows in the AWS region that is closest to your users and processes. To learn more about all AWS offerings and locations, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page. To learn more about SWF, visit the the SWF page. To learn more about extended IAM functionality with SWF please read Jeff Barr's blog for an overview and our Developer Guide for details. To learn ore about IAM, visit the the IAM page.
Jan 28, 2013	Announcing Amazon Elastic Transcoder Amazon Web Services is excited to announce the beta release of Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a new AWS service that makes it easy to convert video between different digital media formats in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is designed to transcode videos from popular formats that are stored in Amazon S3 into versions that will work on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs. Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides you an easy, cost effective way to get high quality video on an increasing array of devices without having to become an expert in video or using expensive software. As with all Amazon Web Services, you pay only for what you use, and there are no up-front expenses or long-term commitments. We built Amazon Elastic Transcoder to be: Easy-to-use – Amazon Elastic Transcoder is designed to be very simple to use. You can easily get started by using the AWS Management Console or the API. System transcoding presets make it easy to get transcoding settings right the first time for popular devices and formats. Low cost – Amazon Elastic Transcoder has easy to understand pricing: you pay according to the duration of your video. Prices start at just $0.015/minute for Standard Definition content, and $0.030/minute for High Definition content with no minimums or monthly commitments. Plus, you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder as part of AWS' free usage tier that lets you transcode up to 20 minutes of SD video or 10 minutes of HD video a month free of charge. To see terms and additional information, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page. Highly scalable – Amazon Elastic Transcoder scales to meet your growing and often unpredictable video transcoding requirements. Secure – You store your content in your own Amazon S3 buckets so you only give us access to what you want to transcode. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also makes use of AWS security best practices. You can get started at aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You can learn more by visiting the Amazon Elastic Transcoder detail page or joining our Introduction to Amazon Elastic Transcoder webinar on February 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.
Jan 21, 2013	Announcing High Memory Cluster Instances for Amazon EC2 We are excited to announce the immediate availability of High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large (cr1.8xlarge) instances for Amazon EC2. This new Amazon EC2 instance type is ideal for applications that benefit from a high level of memory capacity, computational power and network bandwidth. High Memory Cluster instances provide customers with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core processors, 244 GiB of RAM, 240 GB of SSD-based instance storage, and high bandwidth networking with support for cluster placement groups. Customers can use these instances for a variety of memory-intensive applications including in-memory databases and analytics, graph and stream processing, engineering design, and scientific computing. High Memory Cluster instances are currently available in three availability zones in the US East (N. Virginia) region. Support for other regions is planned for the coming months. You can learn more about the specifications and capabilities of High Storage instances for Amazon EC2 by visiting the Amazon EC2 instance type page. Detailed pricing information is available on the EC2 pricing page.
Jan 15, 2013	AWS Storage Gateway Announces Gateway for Amazon EC2 In October, we launched Gateway-Cached volumes for AWS Storage Gateway. This capability provides you with the ability to store your application’s primary data in Amazon S3 while retaining frequently accessed data on-premises in the form of a Gateway-Cached volume. We’re excited to announce that AWS Storage Gateway for EC2 is now in the AWS Marketplace. This gives you a cloud-hosted solution that can mirror your entire production environment in case your on-premises infrastructure goes down or if you choose to add additional on-demand compute capacity. You can now make an EBS snapshot copy of a Gateway-Cached volume available to an EC2 instance of your on-premise application using AWS Storage Gateway in EC2. Using Amazon EC2, you can configure virtual machine images of your application servers in AWS. When you have a DR scenario or you need additional compute capacity, you can launch your application EC2 instances and an AWS Storage Gateway in EC2. You can then restore a snapshot from your on-premises Gateway-Cached volume to a new volume for your AWS Storage Gateway in EC2, connect your EC2 application instances to your restored volume through iSCSI, and your DR or on-demand environment is up and running. You only pay for these servers when you need them, so you can have your DR or on-demand environment at the ready without having to pay for capacity when it’s not in use. Learn more and get started by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.
Jan 14, 2013	Amazon RDS Now Provides the Ability to Rename Database Instances We are pleased to announce a new feature that enables you to rename an existing database instance. You can now change the name and endpoint of your existing DB Instances via the AWS Management Console, Amazon RDS API, or the Amazon RDS command line toolkit. DB instance renaming feature is available with all RDS-supported database engines (i.e. MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server) and in all AWS regions. You can use this feature for a number of use cases: Assume the name and endpoint of an existing DB Instance: Amazon RDS provides multiple options for data recovery include Point in Time Recovery, Read Replica Promotion, and Restore from DB Snapshot. With the ability to “Rename”, you can now have these “new” DB Instances assume the identity of an existing DB Instance, thus allowing you to avoid updating your applications with a new endpoint. Create a new name and endpoint for an existing DB Instance: As your applications grow on Amazon RDS, the role of your DB Instances may evolve. “Rename” functionality will allow you to keep the names of your DB Instances in sync with the new roles your instances may take on. Please refer to the DB Instance section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more. For more information about using Amazon RDS, please visit our detail page, our documentation and our FAQs.
Jan 09, 2013	Amazon SNS Announces Support for 64KB Payloads We're pleased to announce support for 64KB payloads in SNS. Previously, SNS notifications were capped at 32KB. Customers tell us larger payloads will enable new use cases that were previously difficult to accomplish. When subscribing SQS queues to SNS topics, customers can now take advantage of the full 64kb payloads that SQS allows. 64KB SNS payloads are available today in all regions. Getting started with Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS is easy with our free tiers of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon SNS page and the Amazon SQS page.
Jan 08, 2013	Use Amazon CloudWatch to Detect and Shut Down Unused Amazon EC2 Instances We are pleased to announce that starting today you can use Amazon CloudWatch alarms to detect and shut down unused Amazon EC2 instances automatically. Whether you are an individual developer who uses an Amazon EC2 instance for occasional projects, or an IT professional who manages many Amazon EC2 instances for multiple developers, you can now use Amazon CloudWatch to avoid accumulating unnecessary usage charges. Stop or Terminate EC2 Instances That are Unused or Underutilized Amazon CloudWatch collects monitoring data for your AWS resources and applications. Amazon CloudWatch alarms help you react quickly to issues by emailing a notification to you or executing automated tasks when data values reach a threshold you set. Starting today, you can also set alarms that automatically stop or terminate Amazon EC2 instances that have gone unused or underutilized for too long. For example, a student who wants to stay within the AWS Free Usage Tier can set an alarm that automatically stops an instance once it has been left idle for an hour. Or, if you are a corporate IT administrator, you can create a group of alarms that first sends an email notification to developers whose instances have been underutilized for 8 hours, then terminates an instance and emails both of you if utilization doesn't improve after 24 hours. Get Started Using Automated Shutdown Alarms Today It's easy to set Amazon CloudWatch alarms that detect and shut down idle Amazon EC2 instances. To get started, first visit Amazon EC2 in the AWS Management Console, select an instance, and click the 'Create Alarm' button in the Monitoring tab that appears in the lower panel. Then, enter an email address to notify, choose 'Stop' or 'Terminate', set a utilization threshold that suits your needs, and you're done. If the threshold is ever reached, Amazon CloudWatch will shut down the instance and email you a notification. You can also set these alarms using the Amazon CloudWatch console, AWS SDKs, Amazon CloudWatch API, and command-line interface. For more information, visit Create Alarms That Stop or Terminate an Instance in the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.
Jan 04, 2013	AWS Management Console Announces Tablet and Mobile Support We are pleased to announce the AWS Management Console now supports tablet devices. The Management Console lets you access and manage Amazon Web Services through a simple and intuitive web-based user interface. You can access the Management Console using your tablet’s web browser to view some of the changes we’re making that put your information front and center, such as full-screen wizards and tables, and a new monitoring view. To learn more about our tablet changes, please see our What's New guide or visit the Management Console. We are also pleased to announce the availability of the AWS Management Console app for Android phones. You can use this companion mobile app to quickly and easily view and manage your existing EC2 instances and CloudWatch alarms from your phone. To learn more or download the app, please visit our mobile detail page.
Jan 02, 2013	Amazon ElastiCache Announces Auto Discovery Client For PHP We are pleased to announce the availability of the Amazon ElastiCache Cluster Client for PHP. This Client supports Auto Discovery, a novel way to connect to your Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Auto Discovery enables automatic discovery of cache nodes by clients when the nodes are added to or removed from an ElastiCache cluster. As before, Amazon ElastiCache remains protocol-compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and popular tools that you use today with existing Memcached environments will continue to work seamlessly with Auto Discovery. To get started you will need the Amazon ElastiCache Cluster Client which is now available for both Java and PHP and can be downloaded from the Amazon ElastiCache Console.