AWS Official Blog

Every month, we set up a series of webinars that are designed to bring you up to speed on the latest AWS services & features, and to make sure that you are aware of the best ways to put them to use. The webinars are conducted by senior AWS Product Managers and Solution Architects and often include a guest speaker from our customer base.

The webinars are free but “seating” is limited and you should definitely sign up ahead of time if you want to attend (all times are Pacific):

Tuesday, December 8
AWS allows you to save money, optimize costs, and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) in several different ways. This webinar will help you to learn more about the economics of the cloud and how they can positively impact your organization.

• Webinar: Strategies to Quantify TCO and Optimize Costs using AWS (9 – 10 AM).

Amazon Aurora is a fast and cost-effective relational database designed to be compatible with MySQL.

• Webinar: Amazon Aurora: Introduction and Migration (10:30 – 11:30 AM).
• Blog Post: Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS.

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps to improve the security and compliance of apps deployed on AWS.

• Webinar: Amazon Inspector (Noon – 1 PM).
• Blog Post: Amazon Inspector – Automated Security Assessment Service.

Wednesday, December 9
Amazon EC2 Container Service simplifies the task of software delivery by making it easy to set up a Continuous Delivery (CD) process.

• Webinar: Continuous Delivery to Amazon EC2 Container Service (9 – 10 AM).
• Blog Post: EC2 Container Service in Action.

Do you need a sweeping overview of the entire set of AWS services? Join me for the AWS Services Overview!

• Webinar: AWS Services Overview (10:30 – 11:30 AM).
• AWS Blog.

Thursday, December 10
Many popular games run on AWS.

• Webinar: Game Developers – Create Great User Experiences (9 – 10 AM).
• AWS Gaming.

Several new AWS services can help you to build fast, responsive backends for your mobile apps.

• Webinar: Build Mobile Backends with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway (10:30 – 11:30 AM).
• Blog Posts: AWS Lambda – Run Code in the Cloud and Amazon API Gateway – Build and Run Scalable Application Backends.

EC2 Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use.

• Webinar: Dedicated EC2 Hosts (Noon – 1 PM).
• Blog Post: Now Available – EC2 Dedicated Hosts.

Friday, December 11
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and highly scalable NoSQL database.

• Webinar: Design Patterns Using Amazon DynamoDB (10:30 – 11:30 AM).
• Blog Posts: Amazon DynamoDB.

— Jeff;

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

New & Notable Open Source

• go-cloudformation is a Go library for reading and producing CloudFormation templates.
• portableR is R statistics ready to run for AWS Lambda.
• satellite-image-processing-environment is a Vagrant environment for processing satellite images on AWS.
• Sparta lets you run Go functions in AWS Lambda.
• aws-key-git-hook is a Git pre-commit hook to stop you from checking in your AWS keys.
• aws-v4-sign-small is a size-optimized library for AWS v4 request signing, designed for use in the browser.
• aws-deployment-guide shows you how to deploy an app to a VPC with Elastic Beanstalk.
• aws-sdk-typescript is a TypeScript bindings generator for the AWS SDK for JavaScript.
• iam-policy-manager is a simple utility to manage AWS IAM roles and policies from a JSON model.
• aws-deployments is a set of deployment examples for F5’s Big IP platform on AWS.

New SlideShare Presentations

• AWS Pop-up Loft Berlin – Presentations.
• Adobe Creative Cloud and AWS.
• Securing Web Applications with AWS WAF.
• IAM Best Practices to Live By.

New Customer Success Stories

• BC Hydro – simulation and modeling (thanks, TriNimbus).
• Assignar -managing compliance, assets, and workforces.
• Human Recognition Systems -biometrics for identity.
• National Trust -SSV (single supporter view) data warehouse.
• Present Group -commissioning and completing electrical projects.
• tixCraft -ticketing services for concerts and other events.
• Travelstart -hosting a travel booking website.
• WirelessCar – automotive telematics.

New YouTube Videos

• re:Invent 2015 Global Partner Summit:
  • Building a Big Data Practice on AWS.
  • CI/CD on AWS.
• Earth Observation in the Cloud Demo Day:
  • How Mapbox does Earth Observation.
  • ArcGIS for Earth Observation in the Cloud.
  • Geospatial Big Data with DigitalGlobe.
  • NOAA Big Data Project.
  • Earth Observation in the Cloud using ENVI.
  • Emerging Hotspots of Global Tree Cover Loss.
  • Earth Observation Data Revolution.
  • Planet Labs on AWS.
  • Earth Observation on AWS.

Upcoming Events

• December 1 (Meetup in Chicago, IL) – APIs and IPAs.
• December 1 (Webinar) – How the City of San Diego Created an App to Resolve Parking Issues – with APN Partner Civic Resource Group International and customer CivicSD.
• December 3 (Webinar) – Migrating Your HIPAA Compliant Healthcare Analytics to AWS – with APN Partner Cloudticity and customer Caremerge.
• December 3 (Meetup in Redwood City, CA) – Loading Data Into Redshift Simplified with Schema-on-Read ELT.
• December 8 (Webinar) – Jana’s Data Warehousing Story: Then vs. Now – with APN Partner Snowflake and customer Jana.
• December 10 (Webinar) – Secure Incoming and Outgoing Traffic to Your Web Application – with APN Partner Barracuda Networks.
• December 14 (Meetup in Oslo, Norway) – Manage AWS Infrastructure as Code Using Terraform.
• AWS Lofts:
  • San Francisco.
  • New York.

Help Wanted

• DubSmash (Berlin) – Engineering Manager.
• Stelligent – DevOps Automation Engineer (Advanced, Senior, Principal).
• Senior Leader: AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
• EC2 Systems Engineering Leader.
• Senior Software Development Manager, EC2 Networking.
• AWS Careers.

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

— Jeff;

I am happy to announce that AWS has achieved ISO 27017 certification. This new criteria builds upon the ISO 27002 standard, with additional controls specifically applicable to cloud service providers. AWS is the first cloud provider to obtain this certification, which is available now for download on our compliance site. Additionally, we’ve posted a Frequently Asked Questions around ISO 27017 should you want to learn more about the regions and services included in the certification.

This certification is certainly good news for customers, providing additional transparency and independent assurance that we follow this internationally recognized cloud security code of practice. However, certifying that we follow yet another best practice won’t come as a surprise; we’ve already proven that information security is job #1 here at AWS. We have made massive investments in protecting customer data – investments that you, our customers, inherit when using our services. Global customers from a wide range of regulated industries (including healthcare, life sciences, federal and state governments, financial services, and public safety) continue to accelerate their use of AWS for their most critical and regulated workloads. Yes, our certifications and attestations are significant, but even more critical is the ability for you, on top of these assurances, to build your own advanced security and compliance capabilities.

With AWS services, our customers have access to innovative new cloud security features such as Amazon Inspector, AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall), and AWS Config Rules. These tools enhance the ability to manage security while establishing reliable and ubiquitous controls in AWS environments, allowing for compliance in a more comprehensive and transparent manner.

At AWS we routinely attain certifications, demonstrating we have a world-class security program, but more importantly we want you to have a world-class security program as well. To learn more about the innovative and industry-leading security capabilities we offer, view the links above and watch Steve Schmidt’s Keynote at re:Invent.

To learn more about how our customers are running sensitive workloads on AWS, take a look at some case studies:

— Jeff;

Sitecore is a popular enterprise content management system that also includes a multi-channel marketing automation component with an architecture that is a great fit for the AWS cloud! It allows marketers to deliver a personalized experience that takes into account the customers’ prior interaction with the site and the brand (they call this feature Context Marketing).

Today we are publishing a new Sitecore Quick Start Reference Deployment.  This 19-page document will show you how to build an AWS cluster that is fault-tolerant and highly scalable. It builds on the information provided in the Sitecore Scaling Guide and recommends an architecture that uses the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling.

Using the AWS CloudFormation template referenced in the Quick Start, you can launch Sitecore into a Amazon Virtual Private Cloud in a matter of minutes. The template creates a fully functional deployment of Sitecore 7.2 that runs on Windows Server 2012 R2. The production configuration runs in two Availability Zones:

You can use the template as-is, or you can copy it and then modify it as you see fit. If you decide to do this, the new CloudFormation Visual Designer may be helpful:

The Quick Start includes directions for setting up a test server along with some security guidelines. It also discusses the use of Amazon CloudFront to improve site performance and AWS WAF to help improve application security.

— Jeff;

Last month, I announced that we would soon be making EC2 Dedicated Hosts available. As I wrote at the time, this model allows you to control the mapping of EC2 instances to the underlying physical servers. Dedicated Hosts allow you to:

• Bring Your Own Licenses – You can bring your existing server-based licenses for Windows Server, SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and other enterprise systems and products to the cloud. Dedicated Hosts provide you with visibility into the number of sockets and physical cores that are available so that you can obtain and use software licenses that are a good match for the actual hardware.
• Help Meet Compliance and Regulatory Requirements – You can allocate Dedicated Hosts and use them to run applications on hardware that is fully dedicated to your use.
• Track Usage – You can use AWS Config to track the history of instances that are started and stopped on each of your Dedicated Hosts. This data can be used to verify usage against your licensing metrics.
• Control Instance Placement – You can exercise fine-grained control over the placement of EC2 instances on each of your Dedicated Hosts.

Available Now
I am happy to be able to announced the Dedicated Hosts are available now and that you can start using them today. You can launch them from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, or via code that makes calls to the AWS SDKs.

Let’s provision a Dedicated Host and then launch some EC2 instances on it via the Console! I simply open up the EC2 Console, select Dedicated Hosts in the left-side navigation bar, and click on Allocate a Host.

I choose the instance type (Dedicated hosts for M3, M4, C3, C4, G2, R3, D2, and I2  instances are available), the Availability Zone, and the quantity (each Dedicated Host can accommodate one or more instances of a particular type, all of which must be the same size).

If I choose to allow instance auto-placement, subsequent launches of the designed instance type in the chosen Availability Zone are eligible for automatic placement on the Dedicated Host, and will be placed there if instance capacity is available on the host and the launch specifies a tenancy of Host without specifying a particular one. If I do not allow auto-placement, I must specifically target this Dedicated Host when I launch an instance.

When  I click Allocate host, I’ll receive confirmation that it was allocated:

Billing for the Dedicated Host begins at this point. The size and number of instances are running on it does not have an impact on the cost.

I can see all of my Dedicated Hosts at a glance. Selecting one displays detailed information about it:

As you can see, my Dedicated Host has 2 sockets and 24 cores. It can host up to 22 m4.large instances, but is currently not hosting any. The next step is run some instances on my Dedicated Host. I click on Actions and choose Launch Instance(s) onto Host (I can also use the existing EC2 launch wizard):

Then I pick an AMI. Some AMIs (currently RHEL, SUSE Linux, and those which include Windows licenses) cannot be used with Dedicated Hosts, and cannot be selected in the screen below or from the AWS Marketplace:

The instance type is already selected:

Instances launched on a Dedicated Host must always reside within a VPC. A single Dedicated Host can accommodate instances that run in more than one VPC.

The remainder of the instance launch process proceeds in the usual way and I have access to the options that make sense when running on a Dedicated Host. You cannot, for example, run Spot instances on a Dedicated Host.

I can also choose to target one of my Dedicated Hosts when I launch an EC2 instance in the traditional way. I simply set the Tenancy option to Dedicated host and choose one of my Dedicated Hosts (I can also leave it set to No preference and have AWS make the choice for me):

If I select Affinity, a persistent relationship will be created between the Dedicated Host and the instance. This gives you confidence that the instance will restart on the same Host, and minimizes the possibility that you will inadvertently run licensed software on the wrong Host. If you import a Windows Server image (to pick one that we expect to be popular), you can keep it assigned to a particular physical server for at least 90 days, in accordance with the terms of the license.

I can return to the Dedicated Hosts section of the Console, select one of my Hosts, and learn more about the instances that are running on it:

Using & Tracking Licensed Software
You can use your existing software licenses on Dedicated Hosts. Verify that the terms allow the software to be used in a virtualized environment, and use VM Import/Export to bring your existing machine images into the cloud. To learn more, read about Bring Your Own License in the EC2 Documentation. To learn more about Windows licensing options as they relate to AWS, read about Microsoft Licensing on AWS and our detailed Windows BYOL Licensing FAQ.

You can use AWS Config to record configuration changes for your Dedicated Hosts and the instances that are launched, stopped, or terminated on them. This information will prove useful for license reporting. You can use the Edit Config Recording button in the Console to change the settings (hovering your mouse over the button will display the current status):

To learn more, read about Using AWS Config.

Some Important Details
As I mentioned earlier, billing begins when you allocate a Dedicated Host. For more information about pricing, visit the Dedicated Host Pricing page.

EC2 automatically monitors the health of each of your Dedicated Hosts and communicates it to you via the Console. The state is normally available; it switches to under-assessment if we are exploring a possible issue with the Dedicated Host.

Instances launched on Dedicated Hosts must always reside within a VPC, but cannot make use of Placement Groups. Auto Scaling is not supported, and neither is RDS.

Dedicated Hosts are available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Brazil) regions.  You can allocate up to 2 Dedicated Hosts per instance family (M4, C4, and so forth) per region; if you need more, just ask.

— Jeff;

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

New & Notable Open Source

• goofyfs is a filey (their terminology) system for S3.
• aws-sdk-perl is an attempt to build a complete AWS SDK in Perl.
• aws-ses-recorder is a set of Lambda functions to process SES.
• flywheel is a proxy for AWS.
• aws-sdk-config-loader is an AWS config file loader for the CLI tools.
• caravan is a lightweight Python framework for SWF.
• rusoto is a set of AWS client libraries for Rust.
• ng-upload-s3 is an AngularJS directive to upload files directly to S3.
• aws-templates is a collection of custom CloudFormation templates.
• ec2-browser is an EC2 browser.
• Consigliere is an AWS Trusted Advisor dashboard that supports multiple accounts.

New SlideShare Presentations

• Chef Cookbook Workflow.
• Internet of Things (IoT) HackDay.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service.
• Serverless Services – Amazon Lambda + API-GW.
• Amazon QuickSight.
• IT Transformation in the Public Sector (A How To Guide).
• How Students Used AWS to Predict Ebola Outbreaks.
• AWS Mobile Hub Overview.
• AWS IoT Overview.
• Easily Govern and Audit your AWS Resources.
• Cloud Adoption Best Practices – Cloudreach.
• Expanding Your Cloud Business with AWS Marketplace.
• AWSome Day Galway Intro.
• The Public Sector Opportunity with AWS.
• Blue Reater – Earth Observation in the Cloud Demo Day.
• AWS Summit (Tel Aviv):
  • Best of re:Invent 2015.
• AWS Summit (London):
  • Keynote.
  • Keynote – Lebara.
  • Gartner Keynote – The Future of Cloud IaaS.
  • Accelerate Track.
  • Programs to Enable Joint GTM with AWS.
  • What Does a Successful Partnership Look Like?
  • AWS for IoT.
  • Creating a Cloud-First Standard.
  • IT Transformation with AWS.
• AWS November Webinar Series:
  • From Local Development to Production Using the Amazon ECS CLI.
  • Using AWS Config Rules to Improve Governance over Configuration Changes to Your Resources.
  • Amazon S3: Standard-Infrequent Access.
  • Amazon QuickSight.
  • Get Started with Automated Mobile Application Testing and AWS Device Farm.

New Customer Success Stories

• Convertale -E-commerce recommendations.
• D-Link -Hosting of service portal.
• Ex Machina -Hosting of second-screen apps.
• Football Addicts -Aggregating fan opinions.
• Frontier Games -Development and hosting of video games.
• MediaTek -International service deployment.
• Meteor Development Group -Hosting the Galaxy cloud service.
• PayGate -Payment processing in South Africa.
• Redlily – Online retail in India.
• Travelbird – Online travel deals.

New YouTube Videos

• AWS Partner Success: Sumo Logic.
• Cloudticity: Amazon Web Services.

Upcoming Events

• December 1 (Meetup in Chicago, IL) – APIs and IPAs.
• December 1 (Webinar) – How the City of San Diego Created an App to Resolve Parking Issues – with APN Partner Civic Resource Group International and customer CivicSD.
• December 3 (Webinar) – Migrating Your HIPAA Compliant Healthcare Analytics to AWS – with APN Partner Cloudticity and customer Caremerge.
• December 3 (Meetup in Redwood City, CA) – Loading Data Into Redshift Simplified with Schema-on-Read ELT.
• December 8 (Webinar) – Jana’s Data Warehousing Story: Then vs. Now – with APN Partner Snowflake and customer Jana.
• December 10 (Webinar) – Secure Incoming and Outgoing Traffic to Your Web Application – with APN Partner Barracuda Networks.
• AWS Lofts:
  • San Francisco.
  • New York.

Help Wanted

• DubSmash (Berlin) – Engineering Manager.
• Stelligent – DevOps Automation Engineer (Advanced, Senior, Principal).
• Senior Leader: AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
• EC2 Systems Engineering Leader.
• Senior Software Development Manager, EC2 Networking.
• AWS Careers.

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

— Jeff;

The AWS Cost Explorer allows you to explore and forecast your AWS costs (read The New Cost Explorer for AWS to learn more). You can use Cost Explorer’s built-in filtering and grouping facilities to analyze your expenditures by Account, Service, Tag, Availability Zone, Purchase Option, and API Operation. For example, here’s a quick look at my personal AWS account, with charges grouped by service:

Earlier this month we added a new feature that allows you to save your Cost Explorer reports. After I create the report above, I can save it by entering a new name (Monthly Spend by Service) and clicking on Save report:

Then I can see the built-in reports, along with the ones that I have created, in the menu:

As you can see from the menu, I also created a report named Daily Spend by Service. I can view it by choosing it from the menu. The reports are saved on a per-account basis. They can be accessed by the “root” account and by any IAM users that have the proper permissions.

I spent some time exploring my own personal expenditures, and found that it was illustrative to explore my costs on a per-API basis. I can actually see the cost of the resources created by each API call:

The tall blue bar on the right indicates the charge that I incurred when I renewed one of the many domain names that I own.

Use it Now
This functionality was released earlier this month. If you have not used Cost Explorer before, you will need to enable it for your account (read Enabling Cost Explorer to learn more).

— Jeff;

My colleague Jon Fritz wrote the guest post below to introduce you to the newest version of Amazon EMR.

— Jeff;

Today we are announcing Amazon EMR release 4.2.0, which adds support for Apache Spark 1.5.2, Ganglia 3.6 for Apache Hadoop and Spark monitoring, and new sandbox releases for Presto (0.125), Apache Zeppelin (0.5.5), and Apache Oozie (4.2.0).

New Applications in Release 4.2.0
Amazon EMR provides an easy way to install and configure distributed big data applications in the Hadoop and Spark ecosystems on managed clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. You can create Amazon EMR clusters from the Amazon EMR Create Cluster Page in the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or using a SDK with EMR API. In the latest release, we added support for several new versions of applications:

• Spark 1.5.2 – Spark 1.5.2 was released on November 9^th, and we’re happy to give you access to it within two weeks of general availability. This version is a maintenance release, with improvements to Spark SQL, SparkR, the DataFrame API, and miscellaneous enhancements and bug fixes. Also, Spark documentation now includes information on enabling wire encryption for the block transfer service. For a complete set of changes, view the JIRA. To learn more about Spark on Amazon EMR, click here.
• Ganglia 3.6 – Ganglia is a scalable, distributed monitoring system which can be installed on your Amazon EMR cluster to display Amazon EC2 instance level metrics which are also aggregated at the cluster level. We also configure Ganglia to ingest and display Hadoop and Spark metrics along with general resource utilization information from instances in your cluster, and metrics are displayed in a variety of time spans. You can view these metrics using the Ganglia web-UI on the master node of your Amazon EMR cluster. To learn more about Ganglia on Amazon EMR, click here.
  
• Presto 0.125 – Presto is an open-source, distributed SQL query engine designed for low-latency queries on large datasets in Amazon S3 and the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS). Presto 0.125 is a maintenance release, with optimizations to SQL operations, performance enhancements, and general bug fixes. To learn more about Presto on Amazon EMR, click here.
• Zeppelin 0.5.5 – Zeppelin is an open-source interactive and collaborative notebook for data exploration using Spark. You can use Scala, Python, SQL, or HiveQL to manipulate data and visualize results. Zeppelin 0.5.5 is a maintenance release, and contains miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. To learn more about Zeppelin on Amazon EMR, click here.
  
• Oozie 4.2.0 – Oozie is a workflow designer and scheduler for Hadoop and Spark. This version now includes Spark and HiveServer2 actions, making it easier to incorporate Spark and Hive jobs in Oozie workflows. Also, you can create and manage your Oozie workflows using the Oozie Editor and Dashboard in Hue, an application which offers a web-UI for Hive, Pig, and Oozie. Please note that in Hue 3.7.1, you must still use Shell actions to run Spark jobs. To learn more about Oozie in Amazon EMR, click here.
  

Launch an Amazon EMR Cluster with Release 4.2.0 Today
To create an Amazon EMR cluster with 4.2.0, select release 4.2.0 on the Create Cluster page in the AWS Management Console, or use the release label emr-4.2.0 when creating your cluster from the AWS CLI or using a SDK with the EMR API.

— Jon Fritz, Senior Product Manager

Earlier this year, my colleague Peter Moon shared our plans to launch an AWS SDK for Go. As you will read in Peter’s guest post below, the SDK is now generally available!

— Jeff;

At AWS, we work hard to promote and serve the developer community around our products. This is one of the reasons we open-source many of our libraries and tools on GitHub, where we cherish the ability to directly communicate and collaborate with our developer customers. Of all the experiences we’ve had in the open source community, the story of how the AWS SDK for Go came about is one we particularly love to share.

Since the day we took ownership of the project 10 months ago, community feedback and contributions have made it possible for us progress through the experimental and preview stages, and today we are excited to announce that the AWS SDK for Go is now at version 1.0 and recommended for production use. Like many of our projects, the SDK follows Semantic Versioning, which means starting from 1.0, you can upgrade the SDK within the same major version 1.x and have confidence your existing code will continue to work.

Since the Developer Preview announcement in June, we have added a number of key improvements to the SDK, including:

• Sessions – Easily share configuration and request handlers between clients.
• JMESPATH support – Query and reshape complex API responses and other structures using simple expressions.
• Paginators – Iterate over multiple pages of list-type API responses.
• Waiters – Wait for asynchronous state changes in AWS resources.
• Documentation – Revamped developer guide.

Here’s a code sample that exercises some of these new features:

// Create a session
s := session.New(aws.NewConfig().WithRegion("us-west-2"))
// Add a handler to print every API request for the session
s.Handlers.Send.PushFront(func(r *request.Request) {
	fmt.Printf("Request: %s/%s\n", r.ClientInfo.ServiceName, r.Operation)
})
// We want to start all instances in a VPC, so let's get their IDs first.
ec2client := ec2.New(s)
var instanceIDsToStart []*string
describeInstancesInput := &ec2.DescribeInstancesInput{
	Filters: []*ec2.Filter{
		&ec2.Filter{
			Name:   aws.String("vpc-id"),
			Values: aws.StringSlice([]string{"vpc-82977de9"}),
		},
	},
}
// Use a paginator to easily iterate over multiple pages of response
ec2client.DescribeInstancesPages(describeInstancesInput,
	func(page *ec2.DescribeInstancesOutput, lastPage bool) bool {
		// Use JMESPath expressions to query complex structures
		ids, _ := awsutil.ValuesAtPath(page, "Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId")
		for _, id := range ids {
			instanceIDsToStart = append(instanceIDsToStart, id.(*string))
		}
		return !lastPage
	})
// The SDK provides several utility functions for literal <--> pointer transformation
fmt.Println("Starting:", aws.StringValueSlice(instanceIDsToStart))
// Skipped for brevity here, but *always* handle errors in the real world :)
ec2client.StartInstances(&ec2.StartInstancesInput{
	InstanceIds: instanceIDsToStart,
})
// Finally, use a waiter function to wait until the instances are running
ec2client.WaitUntilInstanceRunning(describeInstancesInput)
fmt.Println("Instances are now running.") 

We would like to again thank Coda Hale and our friends at Stripe for contributing the original code base and giving us a wonderful starting point for the AWS SDK for Go. Now that it is fully production-ready, we can’t wait to see all the innovative applications our customers will build with the SDK!

For more information please see:

• The AWS SDK for Go repository.
• API Documentation.
• Developer Guide.

Peter Moon, Senior Product Manager

If you build mobile apps, you know that you have two implementation choices. You can build native or hybrid applications that compile to an executable file. You can also build applications that run within the device’s web browser.

We launched the AWS Device Farm in July with support for testing native and hybrid applications on iOS and Android devices (see my post, AWS Device Farm – Test Mobile Apps on Real Devices, to learn more).

Today we are adding support for testing browser-based applications on iOS and Android devices. Many customers have asked for this option and we are happy to be able to announce it. You can now create a single test run that spans any desired combination of supported devices and makes use of the Appium Java JUnit or Appium Java TestNG frameworks (we’ll add additional frameworks over time; please let us know what you need).

Testing a Web App
I tested a simple web app. It opens amazon.com and searches for the string “Kindle”. I opened the Device Farm Console and created a new project (Test Amazon Site). Then I created a new run (this was my second test, so I called it Web App Test #2):

Then I configured the test by choosing the test type (TestNG) and uploading the tests (prepared for me by one of my colleagues):

The file (chrome-with-screenshot.zip) contains the compiled test and the dependencies (a bunch of JAR files):

Next, I choose the devices. I had already created a “pool” of Android devices, so I used it:

I started the run and then checked in on it a few minutes later:

Then I inspected the output, including screen shots, from a single test:

Available Now
This new functionality is available now and you can start using it today! Read the Device Farm Documentation to learn more.

— Jeff;