AWS Official Blog

Earlier this month I spent two exceptionally pleasant days at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. While I was there I sat down with a number of startups and recorded their stories. These stories are part of a new Intel Startup Spotlight series that I’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks and months. As an experiment, I am releasing four podcasts simultaneously.

In the past, I spent a lot of time editing the podcast to remove some pauses and some background noise. This was very time consuming and made for a marginally better product. In an attempt to get these stories to you on a more timely basis, I am now relaxing my standards and presenting the content to you on a more-or-less as-recorded basis. Because these interviews were recorded in the basement of the Loft, you will hear the occasional footstep or siren, along with the rumblings as the BART trains pass by underneath Market Street.

On Monday, August 31 I spoke with the following startups:

• Legion Analytics– Automated lead generation.
• Bohemian Guitars – Next-generation electric guitars.
• Remind – Messaging for teachers, parents, and students.
• Remeeting – Meeting recording and analytics.

One of the big takeaways from two days interviews with these startups (apart from the obvious creativity and intensity) is just how quickly containers have become an integral aspect of the systems that these developers are building. They spoke glowingly of Docker and make good use of Amazon EC2 Container Service to encapsulate applications and to support quick-turn development practices.

Here are the episodes and the show notes (the “Episode” links go directly to the MP3 files):

Episode 107 – Legion Analytics
For Episode 107, I interviewed Jamasen Rodriguez (co-founder and CEO. below in the center) and Sinan Ozdemir (co-founder and CTO, below at left) of Legion Analytics to learn more about how they built an automated lead generation platform on AWS using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and other services. Jamasen and Sinan offered a free trail of their product; email them (yourfriends@legionanalytics.com) for more info.

Episode 108 – Bohemian Guitars
For Episode 108, I interviewed Adam Lee (Co-founder) of Bohemian Guitars. He told me how he and his brother were inspired by the musicians of South Africa, who repurposed discarded materials into musical instruments, starting from a ping-pong table in their parents’ basement. Adam shared some tips that will be useful to anyone who wants to run a successful KickStarter or Indiegogo campaign.

Episode 109 – Remind
For Episode 109 I spoke with engineers Mike Barrett and Eric Holmes of Remind.com to learn more about how they provide teachers with a better way to communicate with students and their parents. They have 25 million users and have sent over 2 billion messages to date, peaking at about 85,000 requests per minute to the API that is consumed by their mobile clients. The site runs on AWS (atop the Empire PaaS that was also built at Remind) and is backed by dozens of microservices. Events are dumped in to a “really big” Redshift cluster for analysis.

Episode 110 – Remeeting
For Episode 110 I spoke with Arlo Faria, founder of Remeeting.com . The voice recorder app runs on iOS and Android devices and uploads the raw (but compressed) audio to AWS for post-meeting analysis. As Arlo puts it, “the magic happens afterward.” Using speech technology that Arlo and his co-founder developed at UC Berkeley, they identify individual speakers and isolate phrases, and present the result in a structured, color-coded form.

In the Works
I will be publishing the second day of Intel Startup Spotlight interviews shortly. After AWS re:Invent, I plan to interview even more startups in Seattle and Portland (Oregon). Stay tuned for more info!

— Jeff;

PS – Special thanks are due to my colleague Gloria Kim for settings up the interviews and for taking the pictures.

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

New & Notable Open Source

• awsfinder is a quick CLI tool for “quickly find X” ad hoc tasks on AWS.
• cloudcycler lets you cycle AWS resources on and off on a time-of-day basis.
• sumologic-kinesis-connector connects a Kinesis Stream to a SumoLogic Collection.
• S3QL is a filesystem that stores its data in S3 (Hacker News discussion).
• vagrant-aws-jenkins deploys a Jenkins server on AWS using Vagrant.
• aws-monitoring pushes custom metrics to CloudWatch and creates alarms on them.
• aws-services is a set of convenient microservices for managing AWS.
• RIFactor automatically refactors Reserved Instances to match running instances.
• npdynamodb is a Node.JS query builder and ORM for DynamoDB.
• ansible is a simple Ansible setup for AWS.

New Customer Success Stories

• International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) – predictive analysis.
• import.io – website scraping.
• Jobvite – social recruiting platform.
• polljoy – improve ratings for mobile apps in marketplaces.
• Samsung Business – mobile app store.
• Slack – messaging platform.
• VidRoll – video monetization platform.
• WOW air – website & booking engine.

New SlideShare Content

• Introducing Amazon Aurora.
• Amazon EC2 Spot.
• Amazon S3 Deep Dive and Best Practices.
• Running Batch Jobs on Amazon EC2 Container Service.
• Analyze Mobile Data and Build Predictive Applications.

New YouTube Videos

• Getting Started with AWS Directory Service.
• An Engineer’s Tour of the Internet of Things.
• How APIs Will Wrangle the IoT’s Coming Data Tsunami.
• Benefits of the PaaS Approach to IoT.

New Marketplace Applications

• BodySYS.
• IOMAD powered by System Sector.
• SEOTOASTER powered by System Sector.
• Codeanywhere.
• SAP IQ.
• Cognizant Engagement Catalyst.
• StackStorm.
• OpMon.
• WebSphere MQ v 8.0.0.3.
• eFront LMS powered by System Sector.
• FortiDirector.
• Kong.
• Magento+Memcached+HHVM+LAMP+Webmin Package powered by SAIN3.
• Magento + Redis + HHVM + LAMP + Webmin Package powered by SAIN3.
• Vidfy.
• BLISS GEO APP.

Upcoming Events

• September 10 – Live Event (Seattle, WA) AWS Workshop and Hackathon (8 AM – 11 PM).
• September 14-18 – Live Event (New York) AWS Professional Services Delivery Best Practices Bootcamp.
• September 22 – Webinar – Scientific Computing in the Cloud: Speeding Access for Drug Discovery – with APN Partner Avere Systems and customer H3 Biomedicine.
• September 24 – Meetup (Warszawa, Poland) – AWS User Group Poland.
• AWS Summits – Latin America.
• AWS re:Invent – Sold out, register for the live stream!

Upcoming Events at the AWS Loft (San Francisco)

• September 10 – Security Incident Response in AWS: Best Practices and Prerequistes (6 PM – 7:30 PM).
• September 11 – IoT Hack Day: AWS Pop-up Loft Hack Series-Sponsored by MediaTek Labs (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 14 – AWS Bootcamp: Architecting Highly Available Applications (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 16 – ClearScale Customer Showcase + Premier Partner Party (6 PM – 9:30 PM).
• September 17 – The Right Tool for the Right Job on AWS (4 PM – 8 PM).
• September 22 – Accelerating to the Hybrid Cloud and Reaping the Rewards (6 PM – 9 PM).
• September 23 – Amazon Launchpad: Paving the Way for Startups to Launch on Amazon (11:30 AM – 2:30 PM).
• September 25 – TechNode San Francisco Demo Day (10 AM – 5 PM).
• September 28 – AWS Bootcamp: Taking Operations to the Next Level (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 29 – Funding Options for Growing Technology Companies (6 PM – 7:30 PM).
• September 30 – Onshape Users (6 PM – 8:30 PM).
• October 1 – Market Differentiators and Elements of API Management plus The Developer Experience – Accelerating Growth (6 PM – 9 PM).
• October 21 – Intro to Using AWS and the Alexa Skills Kit to Build Voice Driven Experiences + Open Hackathon (10 AM – 3 PM).

Upcoming Events at the AWS Loft (New York)

• September 8 – Infrastructure as Code (4:30 PM – 5:30 PM).
• September 8 – Behind the Scenes with Hudl: Development in the Multiverse (6:30 PM – 8 PM).
• September 9 – AWS Lambda Overview (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 9 – AWS Lambda Deep Dive (2 PM – 5 PM).
• September 9 – Bringing Your Game to the Living Room (5 PM – 6 PM).
• September 10 – Amazon API Gateway Overview (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 10 – Amazon API Gateway Deep Dive (2 PM – 5 PM).
• September 10 – Venture Capital Loft Talks (6:30 PM – 8 PM).
• September 14 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 15 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 16 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 17 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 18 – Network with Amazon Business Leaders from NYC Area (6 PM – 9 PM).
• September 24 – Intro to Using AWS and the Alexa Skills Kit to Build Voice Driven Experiences + Open Hackathon (10 AM – 3 PM).
• September 24 – The Life of a Click: How Hearst Publishing Manages Clickstream Analytics with AWS (3 – 4 PM).
• September 24 – How to Implement Top 10 AWS Security Best Practices – Day Workshop with Evident.io (10 AM – 2 PM).
• September 24 – How to Implement Top 10 AWS Security Best Practices – Evening Session with Evident.io (6:30 PM – 8:30 PM).
• September 28 – Onshape Users (6 PM – 8:30 PM).
• October 1 – Behind the Scenes with LearnBop – Bulletproof Blue/Green Deployments – Myths, Pitfalls and Solutions (6:30 PM – 8 PM).

Help Wanted

• Cloud Academy Blog: This Week’s Cloud Computing Jobs.
• AWS Careers.

Stay tuned for next week! In the meantime, follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed.

— Jeff;

I have always advised my family, friends, colleagues, and audiences to plan to spend some time learning something new every day. If you don’t take responsibility for your own continued education, you can soon find that you have fallen far behind your peers!

If you are interested in staying current with AWS, I have a couple of recommendations. You can read this blog, follow me (and @awscloud) on Twitter, check in with the AWS What’s New page from time to time, and make use of our self-paced labs.

When you are ready for a more in-depth look at a certain topic or service, I would strongly advise you to attend one or more of our webinars!

Every month my colleagues assemble a lineup of sessions that are hand-selected to provide you with a detailed look at a subject that they believe will be of value to you. The webinars are presented by senior members of the team including evangelists, product managers, and solution architects.

With that said, I would like to introduce you to our September 2015 webinars (all times are Pacific).

• September 15:
  • 9 AM – Building Your First Big Data Application on AWS.
  • 10:30 AM – Infrastructure Deployment and Monitoring with AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS
  • 12:00 PM – Getting Started with DynamoDB Streams.
• September 16:
  • 10:30 AM – Meet Regulatory Storage Requirements with Amazon Glacier Vault Lock.
• September 17:
  • 9 AM – Running Microservices with Amazon EC2 Container Service.
  • 10:30 AM – Visual Effects Rendering in the AWS Cloud with ThinkBox.
  • 12:00 PM – Build Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with AWS and the New Xamarin SDK.

There’s no charge and no obligation, of course! Please feel free to sign up, and to share this post wiht your friends and colleagues.

— Jeff;

PS – Please feel free to suggest new topics by leaving a comment on this post.

Magento is a very popular open-source content management system for e-commerce sites. Sellers and developers appreciate its open architecture, flexibility, extensibility (hundreds of extensions), and back-end workflows that can be tailored to fit the unique needs of each customer.

Magento Community Edition (Magento CE) Magento Enterprise Edition (Magento EE) are popular among our customers. Some of these deployments have been launched on AWS by way of partners such as Anchor Hosting, Elastera, Tenzing, Razorfish, and Optaros. Others have been launched via the AWS Marketplace (a search for Magento returns more than 20 listings). And still others have been launched in do-it-yourself form.

Today we are publishing a new Magento Quick Start Reference Deployment. This 29-page document will show you how to build an AWS cluster that runs version 1.9.2 of Magento Community Edition. It walks you through best practices, provides cost estimates, and outlines the recommended set of AWS components.

Using the AWS CloudFormation template referenced in the Quick Start, you can launch Magento into a new or existing Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The template will create (if requested) the VPC, along with the necessary EC2 instances (auto scaled instances for the web server and a NAT instance for SSH connectivity), an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instance running MySQL, and Elastic Load Balancing. It will also create the requisite IAM roles and security groups and configure the Auto Scaling to add more EC2 instances when traffic rises and remove them when it subsides. Here’s what the completed system looks like:

The Quick Start also includes a pointer to some sample data that you can download from the Magento site!

— Jeff;

Earlier today we announced that we had reached an agreement to acquire Elemental Technologies of Portland, Oregon. Elemental has pioneered a number of software-based solutions for multiscreen content delivery and powers many of the world’s most innovative app-delivered video offerings and new services like 4K TV. Elemental customers use its software to process and deliver video streams that are customized for a wide variety of different formats, displays, devices, data rates, and environments. Here’s a recent photo of the Elemental team:

We have been working with Elemental to address shared customers in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) business for the past four years. During this time we have been impressed by their penchant for moving fast and their long-term vision for software-defined video.  We quickly realized that we could work together to create solutions that spanned the entire video pipeline.

Today’s announcement will allow us to work even more closely together to provide media companies with a family of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based solutions for Internet-based video delivery. Of course, I’ll do my best to learn about and then share information about any and all new offerings as they become available. Perhaps I’ll even make a trip to Portland to interview the Elemental folks for an AWS Podcast episode.

On behalf of the entire AWS team I would like to extend a warm welcome to our new colleagues!

— Jeff;

You can now use AWS CloudTrail to track bucket-level operations on your Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets.  The tracked operations include creation and deletion of buckets, modifications to access controls, changes to lifecycle policies, and changes to cross-region replication settings.

AWS CloudTrail records API activity in your AWS account and delivers the resulting log files to a designated S3 bucket. You can  look up API activity related to creating, deleting and modifying your S3 resources using the CloudTrail Console, including access to 7 days of historical data. You can also create Amazon CloudWatch Alarms to look for specific API activities and receive email notifications when they occur.

Effective today we are now logging actions on S3 buckets to CloudTrail in all AWS Regions. If you have already enabled CloudTrail, you do not need to take any further action in order to take advantage of this new feature.  If you are not using CloudTrail, you can turn it on with a couple of clicks (read my introductory post – AWS CloudTrail – Capture API Activity) to learn more.

You can use the log files in many different ways. For example, you can use them as supporting evidence if you need to demonstrate compliance with internal or external policies. Let’s say that you store some important files in an S3 bucket. You can set up a CloudWatch Alarm that will fire if someone else in your organization makes changes to the bucket’s access control policy. This will allow you to verify that the change is in compliance with your policies and to take immediate corrective action if necessary.

You can also monitor creation and deletion of buckets, updates to life cycle policies, and changes to the cross-region replication settings.

— Jeff;

My colleague Jonathan Henson sent me a guest post to introduce a brand-new AWS SDK!

— Jeff;

After a long effort, we are proud to announce an open-source C++ SDK for scaling your native applications with Amazon Web Services.

The AWS SDK for C++ is a modern C++ interface with lightweight dependencies. We designed it to be fully functioning, with both low-level and high-level interfaces. However, we also wanted it to have as few dependencies as possible and to be platform-independent. At the moment, it includes support for Windows, OS X, Linux, and mobile platforms.

This SDK has been specifically designed with game developers in mind, but we have also worked hard to maintain an interface that will work for systems engineering tasks, as well as other projects that simply need the efficiency of native code.

Features

• Works with the Standard Template Library (STL).
• Custom memory management support.
• C++ 11 features used and supported.
• Builds with CMake and your native compiler toolchain.
• Lightweight dependencies.
• Exception-safe.
• Extensive, configurable logging.
• Default credentials providers.
• Identity management through Amazon Cognito Identity.
• High-level Amazon S3 interface through TransferClient.
• Uses native OS APIs for cryptographic and HTTP support.

Code Samples

Storing a value in a Amazon DynamoDB table:

Aws::DynamoDB::DynamoDBClient dynamoDbClient;
PutItemRequest putItemRequest;
putItemRequest.WithTableName("TestTableName");
AttributeValue hashKeyAttribute;
hashKeyAttribute.SetS("SampleHashKeyValue");
putItemRequest.AddItem("HashKey", hashKeyAttribute);
AttributeValue valueAttribute;
valueAttribute.SetS("SampleValue");
putItemRequest.AddItem("Value", valueAttribute);
auto putItemOutcome = dynamoDbClient.PutItem(putItemRequest);

if(putItemOutcome.IsSuccess())
{
    std::cout << "PutItem Success Using IOPS " << putItemOutcome.GetResult().GetConsumedCapacity();
}
else
{
    std::cout << "PutItem failed with error " << putItemOutcome.GetError().GetMessage();
}

Downloading a file from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):

Aws::S3::S3Client s3Client;
GetObjectRequest getObjectRequest;
getObjectRequest.SetBucket("sample_bucket");
getObjectRequest.SetKey("sample_key");
getObjectRequest.SetResponseStreamFactory(
    [](){
        return Aws::New(ALLOCATION_TAG, DOWNLOADED_FILENAME, std::ios_base::out | std::ios_base::in | std::ios_base::trunc);
    });
auto getObjectOutcome = s3Client.GetObject(getObjectRequest);
if(getObjectOutcome.IsSuccess())
{
    std::cout << "File downloaded from S3 to location " << DOWNLOADED_FILENAME;
}
else
{
    std::cout << "File download failed from s3 with error " << getObjectOutcome.GetError().GetMessage();
}

It’s that simple! Download the code from GitHub today and start scaling your C++ applications with the power of Amazon Web Services.

Status
We are launching the AWS SDK for C++ in its current experimental state while we gather feedback from users and the open source community to harden the APIs. We also are adding support for individual services as we become more confident that the client generator can properly support each protocol. Support for more services will be coming in the near future. We invite our customers to follow along with our progress and join the development efforts by submitting pull requests and sending us feedback and ideas via GitHub Issues.

— Jonathan Henson, Software Development Engineer (SDE)

Earlier this year we introduced the EC2 Spot fleet API. As I noted in my earlier post, this API allows you to launch and manage an entire fleet of Spot instances with one request. You specify the fleet’s target capacity, a bid price per hour, and tell Spot what instance type(s) you would like to launch. Spot fleet will find the lowest price spare EC2 capacity available, and then work to maintain the requested target capacity.

Today we are making the Spot fleet API even more powerful with the addition of bidding weights. This new feature allows you to create and place bids that are better aligned with the instance types and Availability Zones that are the best fit for your application. Each call to RequestSpotFleet includes a single bid price (expressed on a per-instance basis). This was simple to use, but the simplicity disallowed certain desirable features. For example, there was no way to launch a fleet that had at least 488 GiB of memory spread across two or more R3 (Memory Optimized) instances or least 128 vCPUs spread across a combination of C3 and C4 (both Compute Optimized) instances.

New Resource-Oriented Bidding
Our new resource-oriented bidding model will allow you to make Spot fleet requests of this type. Think of each instance in a fleet as having a number of “capacity units” of some resource that affects how many instances you need to create a fleet of the proper size. In my examples above, the resources might be GiBs of RAM or vCPUs. They could also represent EBS-optimized bandwidth, compute power, networking performance, or another (perhaps more abstract) application-specific unit. You can now request a certain number of capacity units in your Spot fleet, and you can indicate how many such units each instance type contributes to the total.

As a result, you can now use resources of multiple instance types, possibly spread across multiple Availability Zones, without having to be concerned about the instance types that are actually provisioned. Each call to RequestSpotFleet already includes one or more launch specifications, each one requesting instances of a particular type, running a specified AMI. You can now include one or both of the following values in each launch specification:

WeightedCapacity – How many capacity units an instance of the specified type contributes to the fleet. This value is multiplied by the bid price per unit when Spot fleet makes bids for Spot instances on your behalf. You can use this, for example, to indicate that you are willing to pay twice as much for an r3.xlarge instance with 30.5 GiB of memory as for an r3.large instance with  15.25 GiB of memory.

SpotPrice – An override of the bid price per unit specified in the request. You can use this value to introduce a bias into the selection process, allowing you to express a preference (for or against) particular instance types, Availability Zones, or subnets.

Here’s a launch specification that would represent the memory-centric example that I introduced earlier (I have omitted the other values for clarity):

You would then specify a Target Capacity of 488 (representing the desired fleet capacity in GiB) in your call to RequestSpotFleet, along with a Bid Price that represents the price (per GiB-hour) that you are willing to pay for the capacity.In this example, you are indicating that you are willing to pay 16 times as much for an r3.8xlarge instance as for r3.large.

EC2 will use this information to build the fleet using the most economical combination of available instance types, looking for instances that have the lowest Spot price per unit. This could be as simple as one of the following, using a single instance type:

• 2 x r3.8xlarge
• 4 x r3.4xlarge
• 8 x r3.2xlarge
• 16 x r3.xlarge
• 32 x r3.large

Or something more complex and heterogeneous, such as:

• 1 x r3.8xlarge and 2 x r3.4xlarge
• 2 x r3.4xlarge and 8 x r3.xlarge
• 8 x r3.xlarge and 16 x r3.large

Over time, as prices change and instances are interrupted due to rising prices, replacement instances will be launched as needed. This example assumes that your application is able to sense the instance type (and the amount of memory available to it) and to adjust accordingly. Note that that the fleet might be overprovisioned by a maximum of one instance in order to meet your target capacity using the available resources. In my example above, this would happen if you requested a fleet capable of storing 512 GiB. It could also happen if you make a small request and the cheapest price (per unit) is available on a large instance.

About Those Units
The units are arbitrary, and need not map directly to a physical attribute of the instance. Suppose you did some benchmarking and measured the transaction rate (in TPS) for a number of different instance types over time. You could then request a fleet capable of processing the desired number of transactions per second, while knowing that EC2 will give you the of instance types that are the most economical at any given point in time. As I have pointed out in the past, the Spot mechanism sits at the intersection of technology and business, and gives you the power to build systems and to write code that improves the bottom-line economics of your business! There’s a lot of room to be creative and innovative (and to save up to 90% over On-Demand prices) here.

You can also use this mechanism to prioritize specific Availability Zones by specifying a higher WeightedCapacity value in the desired zone. In this case, your launch specification would include two or more entries for the same instance type, with distinct Availability Zones and weights.

Requests can be submitted using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or via calls to RequestSpotFleet.

Available Now
This new functionality is available now and you can start using it today in all public AWS regions where Spot is available.

— Jeff;

PS – For more information about Spot instances, take a look at two of my recent posts: Focusing on Spot Instances and Building Price-Aware Applications.

Last year we announced that the AWS Public IP Address Ranges Were Available in JSON Form. This was a quick, Friday afternoon post that turned out to be incredibly popular! Many AWS users are now polling this file on a regular basis and using it to manage their on-premises firewall rules or to track the growth of the AWS network footprint over time.  If you are using AWS Direct Connect, you can use the file to update your route tables to reflect the prefixes that are advertised for Direct Connect public connections.

Today we are making it even easier for you to make use of this file. You can now subscribe to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic and receive notifications when the file is updated. Your code can then retrieve the file, parse it, and make any necessary updates to your local environment.

Simply subscribe to topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:806199016981:AmazonIpSpaceChanged and confirm the subscription in the usual way (you can use any protocol supported by SNS):

You will receive a notification that looks like this each time the IP addresses are changed:

{
  "create-time":"yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+00:00",
  "synctoken":"0123456789",
  "md5":"6a45316e8bc9463c9e926d5d37836d33",
  "url":"https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json"
}

You can also build a AWS Lambda function that responds to the changes:

In either case, your app will be responsible for fetching the file, parsing the JSON, and extracting the desired information. To learn more about the file, read about AWS IP Address Ranges.

If you build something useful (environment updates) and/or cool (an intriguing visualization) that you would like to share with the other readers of this blog, please feel free to leave me a comment!

— Jeff;

PS – My count shows 13,065,550 IP addresses in the EC2 range as of August 25, 2015.

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

New & Notable Open Source

• mino is a Go-based Amazon S3 client.
• awstools is a collection of handy scripts for working with AWS.
• learn_aws_lambdas shows how to use AWS Lambda functions.
• Data-Science-Tools-for-AWS is exactly what it claims to be.
• aws-snippets is a collection of handy snippets for various AWS tasks.
• AWSLauncher is a CLI tool to interact with AWS.
• remotgo sends commands over SSH to EC2 instances.
• EC2Box is a web-based SSH console to execute commands and manage multiple EC2 instances simultaneously.
• CloudProcessingEngine distributes and scales processes and workflows using AWS.
• aws-ec2-start-stop-tools are simple but useful tools to start and store EC2 instances.

New Customer Success Stories

• GoSquared (customer analytics services).
• Pacific Life Insurance (financial services and products).
• Tado (climate solutions).
• WeMade Entertainment (online game development).

New SlideShare Presentations

• Getting Started with AWS.
• Leveraging AWS to Host MSDN Licenses.
• Getting Started with AWS Service Catalog.

New YouTube Videos

• AWS GovCloud (US): An Overview.
• Introduction to Amazon EC2.
• Amazon RDS (Japanese subtitles).
• Amazon Elastic Filesystem (Japanese subtitles).

Upcoming Events

• September 1 – Meetup (Dublin, Ireland) – AWS Usergroup Ireland.
• September 2 – Webinar – Getting Started with AWS Code Services – with APN Partner Stelligent.
• September 10 – Live Event (Seattle, WA) AWS Workshop and Hackathon (8 AM – 11 PM).
• September 14-18 – Live Event (New York) AWS Professional Services Delivery Best Practices Bootcamp.
• September 22 – Webinar – Scientific Computing in the Cloud: Speeding Access for Drug Discovery – with APN Partner Avere Systems and customer H3 Biomedicine.
• September 24 – Meetup (Warszawa, Poland) – AWS User Group Poland.
• AWS Summits – Latin America.
• AWS re:Invent – Sold out, register for the live stream!

Upcoming Events at the AWS Loft (San Francisco)

• August 31 – Foxpass Presents: DevOps and IT Security Best Practices (6 AM – 8 PM).
• September 10 – Security Incident Response in AWS: Best Practices and Prerequistes (6 PM – 7:30 PM).
• September 11 – IoT Hack Day: AWS Pop-up Loft Hack Series-Sponsored by MediaTek Labs (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 14 – AWS Bootcamp: Architecting Highly Available Applications (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 16 – ClearScale Customer Showcase + Premier Partner Party  (6 PM – 9:30 PM).
• September 17 – The Right Tool for the Right Job on AWS (4 PM – 8 PM).
• September 22 – Accelerating to the Hybrid Cloud and Reaping the Rewards (6 PM – 9 PM).
• September 25 – TechNode San Francisco Demo Day (10 AM – 5 PM).
• September 28 – AWS Bootcamp: Taking Operations to the Next Level (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 29 – Funding Options for Growing Technology Companies (6 PM – 7:30 PM).
• September 30 – Onshape Users (6 PM – 8:30 PM).
• October 1 – Market Differentiators and Elements of API Management plus The Developer Experience – Accelerating Growth (6 PM – 9 PM).
• October 21 – Intro to Using AWS and the Alexa Skills Kit to Build Voice Driven Experiences + Open Hackathon (10 AM – 3 PM).

Upcoming Events at the AWS Loft (New York)

• September 2 – Behind the Scenes with Twilio – SMS for Humans: Using NLP for Better Text Experiences (6:30 PM – 8 PM).
• September 3 – Introduction to AWS Mobile Services (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 3 – Intro to AWS Xamarin SDK for Mobile Services (2 PM – 5 PM).
• September 4 – Building a Mobile Game with AWS and Unity (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 8 – Infrastructure as Code (4:30 PM – 5:30 PM).
• September 8 – Behind the Scenes with Hudl: Development in the Multiverse (6:30 PM – 8 PM).
• September 9 – AWS Lambda Overview (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 9 – AWS Lambda Deep Dive (2 PM – 5 PM).
• September 9 – Bringing Your Game to the Living Room (5 PM – 6 PM).
• September 10 – Amazon API Gateway Overview (10 AM – 1 PM).
• September 10 – Amazon API Gateway Deep Dive (2 PM – 5 PM).
• September 10 – Venture Capital Loft Talks (6:30 PM – 8 PM).
• September 14 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 15 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 16 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 17 – Chef Bootcamp: A Taste of Chef on AWS (10 AM – 6 PM).
• September 18 – Network with Amazon Business Leaders from NYC Area (6 PM – 9 PM).
• September 24 – Intro to Using AWS and the Alexa Skills Kit to Build Voice Driven Experiences + Open Hackathon (10 AM – 3 PM).
• September 24 – How to Implement Top 10 AWS Security Best Practices Evening Session with Evident.io (6:30 PM – 8:30 PM).
• September 25 – How to Implement Top 10 AWS Security Best Practices Day Workshop with Evident.io (10 AM – 2 PM).
• September 28 – Onshape Users (6 PM – 8:30 PM).
• October 1 – Behind the Scenes with LearnBop – Bulletproof Blue/Green Deployments – Myths, Pitfalls and Solutions (6:30 PM – 8 PM).

Help Wanted

• AWS Careers.

Stay tuned for next week! In the meantime, follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed.

— Jeff;