AWS Blog

AWS customers can use AWS Direct Connect to establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. This gives them a more consistent network experience than a shared, Internet-based connection along with increased throughput and the potential to reduce network costs.

We have added several new Direct Connect locations already this year, and are adding even more today. This post summarizes the most recent additions to our roster!

The following locations are for the EU (Frankfurt) Region:

• Berlin, Germany – IPB.
• Munich, Germany – Equinix MU1 & MU3.
• Prague, Czech Republic – CE Colo.
• Zurich, Switzerland – Interxion.
• Vienna, Austria – Interxion.
• Warsaw, Poland – Equinix WA1.

The following location is for the EU (Ireland) Region:

• Marseille, France – Interxion.

The US East (Ohio) Region:

• Columbus, Ohio – Cologix COL2.

The Canada (Central) Region:

• Toronto, Canada – Allied 250 Front St W.

And the US East (Northern Virginia) Region:

• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Lightower.
• Newark, New Jersey – 165 Halsey Street.
• Atlanta, Georgia – Digital Realty ATL1 and ATL2.

See the Direct Connect Product Details for a full list of new and existing locations.

— Jeff;

I am a big believer in hands-on experience. Except under very rare circumstances, the posts in my blog are written only after I have used the service in question. If you happened to read I Love My Amazon WorkSpace, you know that Amazon WorkSpaces is one of my most important productivity tools.

I would like to tell you about an opportunity for you to try WorkSpaces on your own at no charge. The new Amazon WorkSpaces Free Tier allows you to launch two Standard bundle WorkSpaces and use them for a total of 40 hours per month, for up to two calendar months. You can choose either the Windows 7 or the Windows 10 Desktop Experience, both powered by Windows Server. Both options include Internet Explorer 11, Mozilla Firefox, 7-Zip, and Amazon WorkDocs with 50 GB of storage.

In order to take advantage of the free tier you must run the WorkSpaces in AutoStop mode, which is selected for you by default. Unused hours expire at the end of the first calendar month and the free tier offer expires at the end of the second calendar month. After that you will be billed at the hourly rate listed on the Amazon WorkSpaces Pricing page.

To get started, follow the steps in the Quick Setup and choose a bundle that is eligible for the free tier:

This offer is available in all AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is available.

— Jeff;

Earlier this year I told you about Cloud Directory, our cloud-native directory for hierarchical data and told you how it was designed to store large amounts of strongly typed hierarchical data. Because Cloud Directory can scale to store hundreds of millions of objects, it is a great fit for many kinds of cloud and mobile applications.

In my original post I explained how each directory has one or more schemas, each of which has, in turn, one or more facets. Each facet defines the set of required and allowable attributes for an object.

Introducing Typed Links
Today we are extending the expressive power of the Cloud Directory model by adding support for typed links. You can use these links to create object-to-object relationships across hierarchies. You can define multiple types of links for each of your directories (each link type is a separate facet in one of the schemas associated with the directory). In addition to a type, each link can have a set of attributes. Typed links help to maintain referential data integrity by ensuring objects with existing relationships to other objects are not deleted inadvertently.

Suppose you have a directory of locations, factories, floor numbers, rooms, machines and sensors. Each of these can be represented as a dimension in Cloud Directory with rich metadata information within the hierarchy. You can define and use typed links to connect the objects together in various ways, creating typed links that lead to maintenance requirements, service records, warranties, and safety information, with attributes on the links to store additional information about the relationship between the source object and the destination object.

Then you can run queries that are based on the type of a link and the values of the attributes within it. For example, you could locate all sensors that have not been cleaned in the past 45 days, or all of the motors that are no longer within their warranty period. You can find all of the sensors that are on a given floor, or you can find all of the floors where sensors of a given type are located.

Using Typed Links
To use typed links you simply add one or more Typed Link facets to your schema using the CreateTypedLinkFacet function. Then you call AttachTypedLink, passing in the source and destination objects, the Typed Link facet, and the attributes for the link. Other useful functions include GetTypedLinkFacetInformation, ListIncomingTypedLinks, and ListOutgoingTypedLinks. To learn more and to see the complete list of functions, take a look at the Cloud Directory API Reference.

Just as you can do for objects, you can use Attribute Rules to constrain attribute values. You can constrain the length of strings and byte arrays, restrict strings to a specified set of values, and limit numbers to a specific range.

My colleagues shared some sample code that illustrates how to use typed links. Here are the ARNs and the name of the facet:

String appliedSchemaArn   = "arn:aws:clouddirectory:eu-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/AbF4qXxa80WSsLRiYhDB-Jo/schema/demo_organization/1.0";
String directoryArn       = "arn:aws:clouddirectory:eu-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/AbF4qXxa80WSsLRiYhDB-Jo";
String typedLinkFacetName = "FloorSensorAssociation";

The first snippet creates a typed link facet called FloorSensorAssociation with sensor_type and maintenance_date attributes, in that order (attribute names and values are part of the identity of the link, so order matters):

client.createTypedLinkFacet(new CreateTypedLinkFacetRequest()
                                .withSchemaArn(appliedSchemaArn)
                                .withFacet(
                                      new TypedLinkFacet()
                                          .withName(typedLinkFacetName)
                                          .withAttributes(toTypedLinkAttributeDefinition("sensor_type"),
                                                          toTypedLinkAttributeDefinition("maintenance_date"))
                                          .withIdentityAttributeOrder("sensor_type", "maintenance_date")));

private TypedLinkAttributeDefinition toTypedLinkAttributeDefinition(String attributeName) {
 return new TypedLinkAttributeDefinition().withName(attributeName)
 .withRequiredBehavior(RequiredAttributeBehavior.REQUIRED_ALWAYS)
 .withType(FacetAttributeType.STRING);
}

The next snippet creates a link between two objects (sourceFloor and targetSensor), with sensor_type water and maintenance_date 2017-05-24:

AttachTypedLinkResult result = 
    client.attachTypedLink(new AttachTypedLinkRequest()
                               .withDirectoryArn(directoryArn)
                               .withTypedLinkFacet(
                                   toTypedLinkFacet(appliedSchemaArn, typedLinkFacetName))
                                   .withAttributes(
                                        attributeNameAndStringValue("sensor_type", "water"),
                                        attributeNameAndStringValue("maintenance_date", "2017-05-24"))
                                   .withSourceObjectReference(sourceFloor)
                                   .withTargetObjectReference(targetSensor));

private TypedLinkSchemaAndFacetName toTypedLinkFacet(String appliedSchemaArn, String typedLinkFacetName) {
   return new TypedLinkSchemaAndFacetName()
              .withTypedLinkName(typedLinkFacetName)
              .withSchemaArn(appliedSchemaArn);
}

The final snippet enumerates all incoming typed links of sensor_type water and a maintenance_date in the range 2017-05-20 to 2017-05-24:

client.listIncomingTypedLinks(
    new ListIncomingTypedLinksRequest()
        .withFilterTypedLink(toTypedLinkFacet(appliedSchemaArn, typedLinkFacetName))
        .withDirectoryArn(directoryArn)
        .withObjectReference(targetSensor)
        .withMaxResults(10)
        .withFilterAttributeRanges(attributeRange("sensor_type", exactRange("water")),
                                   attributeRange("maintenance_date", 
                                                  range("2017-05-20", "2017-05-24"))));

private TypedLinkAttributeRange attributeRange(String attributeName, TypedAttributeValueRange range) {
   return new TypedLinkAttributeRange().withAttributeName(attributeName).withRange(range);
}

private TypedAttributeValueRange exactRange(String value) {
   return range(value, value);
}

To learn more, read about Objects and Links in the Cloud Directory Administration Guide.

Available Now
Typed links are available now and you can start using them today!

— Jeff;

Amazon Lightsail lets you launch Virtual Private Servers on AWS with just a few clicks. With prices starting at $5 per month, Lightsail takes care of the heavy lifting and gives you a simple way to build and host applications. As I showed you in my re:Invent post (Amazon Lightsail – The Power of AWS, the Simplicity of a VPS), you can choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address.

Since we launched in November, many customers have used Lightsail to launch Virtual Private Servers. For example, Monash University is using Amazon Lightsail to rapidly re-platform a number of CMS services in a simple and cost-effective manner. They have already migrated 50 workloads and are now thinking of creating an internal CMS service based on Lightsail to allow staff and students to create their own CMS instances in a self-service manner.

Today we are expanding Lightsail into nine more AWS Regions and launching a new, global console.

New Regions
At re:Invent we made Lightsail available in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. Earlier this month we added support for several additional Regions in the US and Europe. Today we are launching Lightsail in four of our Asia Pacific Regions, bringing the total to ten. Here’s the full list:

• US East (Northern Virginia)
• US West (Oregon)
• US East (Ohio)
• EU (London)
• EU (Frankfurt)
• EU (Ireland)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
• Asia Pacific (Sydney)

Global Console
The updated Lightsail console makes it easy for you to create and manage resources in one or more Regions. I simply choose the desired Region when I create a new instance:

I can see all of my instances and static IP addresses on the same page, no matter what Region they are in:

And I can perform searches that span all of my resources and Regions. All of my LAMP stacks:

Or all of my resources in the EU (Ireland) Region:

I can perform a similar search on the Snapshots tab:

A new DNS zones tab lets me see my existing zones and create new ones:

Creation of SSH keypairs is now specific to a Region:

I can manage my key pairs on a Region-by-Region basis:

Static IP addresses are also specific to a particular Region:

Available Now
You can use the new Lightsail console and create resources in all ten Regions today!

— Jeff;

We are making two important updates to the AWS Certification program today. We are introducing two new AWS Certification Specialty Exams and our new AWS Certification Benefits Program, giving you another way to validate your skills and to showcase your expertise.

New AWS Certification Specialty Exams
Our new AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty and AWS Certified Big Data – Specialty exams are designed for people with at least one current Associate AWS Certification and deep hands-on experience in the relevant specialty. These credentials can help you stand out from the crowd, get recognized, and provide more evidence of your unique technical skills.

New AWS Certification Benefits
Designed to help showcase your achievement and further advance your AWS expertise, tiered AWS Certification Benefits include newly designed AWS Certified logos and certificates, digital badges, free practice exams, branded merchandise, transcript sharing, and more. Benefits are accessed based on the AWS Certifications you have achieved. The more exams you successfully complete, the more benefits you will receive.

Access Your Specialty Exams and Benefits Today
Sign in to the AWS Training and Certification Portal using an Amazon account or (if you are an APN Partner) your APN Portal credentials. Then click on the Certification link on the AWS Training and Certification Portal to access your AWS Certification Account:

If you previously had an account in Webassessor, you can link your accounts so that your AWS Certification history shows in the portal (read “I already have an AWS Certification account in Webassessor. How do I access my AWS Certification history?” in the AWS Training FAQ to see how to do this).

Learn More
Check out the AWS Certifications FAQ and the AWS Training and Certification Portal FAQ if you have any questions.

— Jeff;

As the sixth month of the year, June is significant in that it is not only my birth month (very special), but it contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours. In the United States, June is also the month in which we celebrate our dads with Father’s Day and have month-long celebrations of music, heritage, and the great outdoors.

Therefore, the month of June can be filled with lots of excitement. So why not add even more delight to the month, by enhancing your cloud computing skills. This month’s AWS Online Tech Talks features sessions on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Storage, Big Data, and Compute among other great topics.

June 2017 – Schedule

Noted below are the upcoming scheduled live, online technical sessions being held during the month of June. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts. All schedule times for the online tech talks are shown in the Pacific Time (PDT) time zone.

Webinars featured this month are:

Thursday, June 1

Storage

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Migrating Big Data Workloads to Amazon EMR

Serverless

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Building AWS Lambda Applications with the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)

Monday, June 5

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Lex

Tuesday, June 6

Management Tools

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Automated Compliance and Governance with AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail

Wednesday, June 7

Storage

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Backing up Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS Snapshots

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Intro to Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Quickly Query Exabytes of Data in S3

DevOps

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Introduction to AWS CodeStar: Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Applications on AWS

Thursday, June 8

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Polly

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Rekognition

Monday, June 12

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Machine Learning

Tuesday, June 13

Compute

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: DevOps with Visual Studio, .NET and AWS

IoT

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Create, with Intel, an IoT Gateway and Establish a Data Pipeline to AWS IoT

Big Data

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Real-Time Log Analytics using Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Wednesday, June 14

Containers

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Batch Processing with Containers on AWS

Security & Identity

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Using Microsoft Active Directory across On-premises and Cloud Workloads

Thursday, June 15

Big Data

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Building Big Data Applications with Serverless Architectures

Monday, June 19

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Deep Learning for Data Scientists: Using Apache MxNet and R on AWS

Tuesday, June 20

Storage

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Cloud Backup & Recovery Options with AWS Partner Solutions

Artificial Intelligence

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: An Overview of AI on the AWS Platform

The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.

– Tara

April showers bring May startups! This month we have three hot startups for you to check out. Keep reading to find out what they’re up to, and how they’re using AWS to do it.

Today’s post features the following startups:

• Lobster – an AI-powered platform connecting creative social media users to professionals.
• Visii – helping consumers find the perfect product using visual search.
• Tiqets – a curated marketplace for culture and entertainment.

Lobster (London, England)

Every day, social media users generate billions of authentic images and videos to rival typical stock photography. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, Lobster enables brands, agencies, and the press to license visual content directly from social media users so they can find that piece of content that perfectly fits their brand or story. Lobster does the work of sorting through major social networks (Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Vk, YouTube, and Vimeo) and cloud storage providers (Dropbox, Google Photos, and Verizon) to find media, saving brands and agencies time and energy. Using filters like gender, color, age, and geolocation can help customers find the unique content they’re looking for, while Lobster’s AI and visual recognition finds images instantly. Lobster also runs photo challenges to help customers discover the perfect image to fit their needs.

Lobster is an excellent platform for creative people to get their work discovered while also protecting their content. Users are treated as copyright holders and earn 75% of the final price of every sale. The platform is easy to use: new users simply sign in with an existing social media or cloud account and can start showcasing their artistic talent right away. Lobster allows users to connect to any number of photo storage sources so they’re able to choose which items to share and which to keep private. Once users have selected their favorite photos and videos to share, they can sit back and watch as their work is picked to become the signature for a new campaign or featured on a cool website – and start earning money for their work.

Lobster is using a variety of AWS services to keep everything running smoothly. The company uses Amazon S3 to store photography that was previously ordered by customers. When a customer purchases content, the respective piece of content must be available at any given moment, independent from the original source. Lobster is also using Amazon EC2 for its application servers and Elastic Load Balancing to monitor the state of each server.

To learn more about Lobster, check them out here!

Visii (London, England)

In today’s vast web, a growing number of products are being sold online and searching for something specific can be difficult. Visii was created to cater to businesses and help them extract value from an asset they already have – their images. Their SaaS platform allows clients to leverage an intelligent visual search on their websites and apps to help consumers find the perfect product for them. With Visii, consumers can choose an image and immediately discover more based on their tastes and preferences. Whether it’s clothing, artwork, or home decor, Visii will make recommendations to get consumers to search visually and subsequently help businesses increase their conversion rates.

There are multiple ways for businesses to integrate Visii on their website or app. Many of Visii’s clients choose to build against their API, but Visii also work closely with many clients to figure out the most effective way to do this for each unique case. This has led Visii to help build innovative user interfaces and figure out the best integration points to get consumers to search visually. Businesses can also integrate Visii on their website with a widget – they just need to provide a list of links to their products and Visii does the rest.

Visii runs their entire infrastructure on AWS. Their APIs and pipeline all sit in auto-scaling groups, with ELBs in front of them, sending things across into Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon Aurora. Recently, Visii moved from Amazon RDS to Aurora and noted that the process was incredibly quick and easy. Because they make heavy use of machine learning, it is crucial that their pipeline only runs when required and that they maximize the efficiency of their uptime.

To see how companies are using Visii, check out Style Picker and Saatchi Art.

Tiqets (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Tiqets is making the ticket-buying experience faster and easier for travelers around the world.  Founded in 2013, Tiqets is one of the leading curated marketplaces for admission tickets to museums, zoos, and attractions. Their mission is to help travelers get the most out of their trips by helping them find and experience a city’s culture and entertainment. Tiqets partners directly with vendors to adapt to a customer’s specific needs, and is now active in over 30 cities in the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

With Tiqets, travelers can book tickets either ahead of time or at their destination for a wide range of attractions. The Tiqets app provides real-time availability and delivers tickets straight to customer’s phones via email, direct download, or in the app. Customers save time skipping long lines (a perk of the app!), save trees (don’t need to physically print tickets), and most importantly, they can make the most out of their leisure time. For each attraction featured on Tiqets, there is a lot of helpful information including best modes of transportation, hours, commonly asked questions, and reviews from other customers.

The Tiqets platform consists of the consumer-facing website, the internal and external-facing APIs, and the partner self-service portals. For the app hosting and infrastructure, Tiqets uses AWS services such as Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon ElastiCache. Through the infrastructure orchestration of their AWS configuration, they can easily set up separate development or test environments while staying close to the production environment as well.

Tiqets is hiring! Be sure to check out their jobs page if you are interested in joining the Tiqets team.

—

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to check out April’s Hot Startups if you missed it.

-Tina Barr

Today seems like a good time to recap some of the features that we have added to Amazon EC2 Container Service over the last year or so, and to share some customer success stories and code with you! The service makes it easy for you to run any number of Docker containers across a managed cluster of EC2 instances, with full console, API, CloudFormation, CLI, and PowerShell support. You can store your Linux and Windows Docker images in the EC2 Container Registry for easy access.

Launch Recap
Let’s start by taking a look at some of the newest ECS features and some helpful how-to blog posts that will show you how to use them:

Application Load Balancing – We added support for the application load balancer last year. This high-performance load balancing option runs at the application level and allows you to define content-based routing rules. It provides support for dynamic ports and can be shared across multiple services, making it easier for you to run microservices in containers. To learn more, read about Service Load Balancing.

IAM Roles for Tasks – You can secure your infrastructure by assigning IAM roles to ECS tasks. This allows you to grant permissions on a fine-grained, per-task basis, customizing the permissions to the needs of each task. Read IAM Roles for Tasks to learn more.

Service Auto Scaling – You can define scaling policies that scale your services (tasks) up and down in response to changes in demand. You set the desired minimum and maximum number of tasks, create one or more scaling policies, and Service Auto Scaling will take care of the rest. The documentation for Service Auto Scaling will help you to make use of this feature.

Blox – Scheduling, in a container-based environment, is the process of assigning tasks to instances. ECS gives you three options: automated (via the built-in Service Scheduler), manual (via the RunTask function), and custom (via a scheduler that you provide). Blox is an open source scheduler that supports a one-task-per-host model, with room to accommodate other models in the future. It monitors the state of the cluster and is well-suited to running monitoring agents, log collectors, and other daemon-style tasks.

Windows – We launched ECS with support for Linux containers and followed up with support for running Windows Server 2016 Base with Containers.

Container Instance Draining – From time to time you may need to remove an instance from a running cluster in order to scale the cluster down or to perform a system update. Earlier this year we added a set of lifecycle hooks that allow you to better manage the state of the instances. Read the blog post How to Automate Container Instance Draining in Amazon ECS to see how to use the lifecycle hooks and a Lambda function to automate the process of draining existing work from an instance while preventing new work from being scheduled for it.

CI/CD Pipeline with Code* – Containers simplify software deployment and are an ideal target for a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) pipeline. The post Continuous Deployment to Amazon ECS using AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon ECR, and AWS CloudFormation shows you how to build and operate a CI/CD pipeline using multiple AWS services.

CloudWatch Logs Integration – This launch gave you the ability to configure the containers that run your tasks to send log information to CloudWatch Logs for centralized storage and analysis. You simply install the Amazon ECS Container Agent and enable the awslogs log driver.

CloudWatch Events – ECS generates CloudWatch Events when the state of a task or a container instance changes. These events allow you to monitor the state of the cluster using a Lambda function. To learn how to capture the events and store them in an Elasticsearch cluster, read Monitor Cluster State with Amazon ECS Event Stream.

Task Placement Policies – This launch provided you with fine-grained control over the placement of tasks on container instances within clusters. It allows you to construct policies that include cluster constraints, custom constraints (location, instance type, AMI, and attribute), placement strategies (spread or bin pack) and to use them without writing any code. Read Introducing Amazon ECS Task Placement Policies to see how to do this!

EC2 Container Service in Action
Many of our customers from large enterprises to hot startups and across all industries, such as financial services, hospitality, and consumer electronics, are using Amazon ECS to run their microservices applications in production. Companies such as Capital One, Expedia, Okta, Riot Games, and Viacom rely on Amazon ECS.

Mapbox is a platform for designing and publishing custom maps. The company uses ECS to power their entire batch processing architecture to collect and process over 100 million miles of sensor data per day that they use for powering their maps. They also optimize their batch processing architecture on ECS using Spot Instances. The Mapbox platform powers over 5,000 apps and reaches more than 200 million users each month. Its backend runs on ECS allowing it to serve more than 1.3 billion requests per day. To learn more about their recent migration to ECS, read their recent blog post, We Switched to Amazon ECS, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.

Travel company Expedia designed their backends with a microservices architecture. With the popularization of Docker, they decided they would like to adopt Docker for its faster deployments and environment portability. They chose to use ECS to orchestrate all their containers because it had great integration with the AWS platform, everything from ALB to IAM roles to VPC integration. This made ECS very easy to use with their existing AWS infrastructure. ECS really reduced the heavy lifting of deploying and running containerized applications. Expedia runs 75% of all apps on AWS in ECS allowing it to process 4 billion requests per hour. Read Kuldeep Chowhan‘s blog post, How Expedia Runs Hundreds of Applications in Production Using Amazon ECS to learn more.

Realtor.com provides home buyers and sellers with a comprehensive database of properties that are currently for sale. Their move to AWS and ECS has helped them to support business growth that now numbers 50 million unique monthly users who drive up to 250,000 requests per second at peak times. ECS has helped them to deploy their code more quickly while increasing utilization of their cloud infrastructure. Read the Realtor.com Case Study to learn more about how they use ECS, Kinesis, and other AWS services.

Instacart talks about how they use ECS to power their same-day grocery delivery service:

Capital One talks about how they use ECS to automate their operations and their infrastructure management:

Code
Clever developers are using ECS as a base for their own work. For example:

Rack is an open source PaaS (Platform as a Service). It focuses on infrastructure automation, runs in an isolated VPC, and uses a single-tenant build service for security.

Empire is also an open source PaaS. It provides a Heroku-like workflow and is targeted at small and medium sized startups, with an emphasis on microservices.

Cloud Container Cluster Visualizer (c3vis) helps to visualize resource utilization within ECS clusters:

Stay Tuned
We have plenty of new features in the works for ECS, so stay tuned!

— Jeff;

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) allows you to create persistent block storage volumes for your Amazon EC2 instances. The volumes offer consistent, low-latency performance and a choice of volume types. You can take snapshot backups of your EBS volumes, keep them for as long as you would like, and then restore them to a fresh volume.

AWS Billing and Cost Management provide you with tools and reports that you can use to track your spending. You can use Cost Allocation Tags to assign costs to your customers, applications, teams, departments, or billing codes at the level of individual resources.

Cost Allocation for Snapshots
Today we are adding cost allocation for EBS snapshots. While I expect AWS customers of all shapes and sizes to make good use of this feature, I know that enterprises will find it particularly interesting. They’ll be able to assign costs to the proper project, department, or entity. Similarly, Managed Service Providers, some of whom manage AWS footprints that encompass thousands of EBS volumes and many more EBS snapshots, will be able to map snapshot costs back to customer accounts and applications.

Tagging Snapshots and Generating Reports
Let’s walk through the process of tagging snapshots and allocating costs.

The first step is to implement a tagging regimen for your existing snapshots. You can create a script that calls the create-tags command or write code that calls the TagResources function. You can also use the Console’s Tag Editor to find the snapshots of interest across any number of AWS Regions:

I have a handful of snapshots and simply tagged some them by hand. My tag key is usage and the values are backup, dev, and metrics. Here are my snapshots:

Next, I need to tell AWS that the new tag key is being used for cost allocation. I open up the Billing Dashboard and click on Cost Allocation Tags:

Then I locate my tag in the list of user-defined tags, select it, and clicked on Activate:

AWS will deliver the first updated report within 24 hours, and will update Cost Explorer at least once per day after that (read Understanding Your Usage with Billing Reports to learn more).

I have two options. I can use Cost Explorer to explore the data visually, or I can create a usage report, download it into Excel and analyze it on my desktop. I’ll show you both!

Using Cost Explorer
I open up Cost Explorer, select the time range of interest, and filter by Usage Type Group, selecting EC2: EBS – Snapshots. Then I set the Group by option to Tag and choose my tag (usage) from the drop-down:

Then I click on Apply and inspect the report:

I can see my costs and my usage (measured in gigabyte-months) at a glance. I can also click on New report, enter a name, and save the report for reuse:

Creating a Cost & Usage Report
I click on Reports and Create Report, to create a report. I named it DailySnapshotUsage and set the Time unit to be Daily:

Then I point it at my jbarr-billing bucket, select ZIP compression, and click on Next:

I confirm my settings on the next page and click on Review and Complete to finalize my report. I check back the next day and my report is ready:

Analyzing the Cost & Usage Report Using Excel
I can also download the cost and and usage report and analyze it using Excel.

I switch to the S3 Console, open up the jbarr-billing bucket, and descend in to the folder structure to find my report:

Then I download and unzip the file, and open it in Excel:

I want to see only the tagged usage, so I scroll over to column DJ (resourceTags/user:usage) and use Excel’s Filter operation to choose the tags of interest:

Then I hide most of the columns and end up with line item costs:

I’m highly confident that your Excel skills are better than mine, and that you can do a far better job of analyzing the data!

Understanding Snapshot Costs
As you create your reports and analyze your EBS snapshot costs and usage, keep in mind that snapshots are created incrementally and that the first snapshot will generally appear to be the most expensive one. If you delete a snapshot that contains blocks that are being used by a later snapshot, the space referenced by the blocks will now be attributed to the later snapshot. Therefore, with respect to a particular EBS volume, deleting the snapshot with the highest cost may simply move some of the costs to a more recent snapshot. Read Deleting an Amazon EBS Snapshot to learn more.

Available Now
This new feature is available now in all commercial AWS regions and you can start using it today.

— Jeff;

AWS Training and Certification can help you get more out of the AWS Cloud.

The new AWS Training and Certification Portal allows you to access and manage your training and certification activities, progress, and benefits – all in one place:

Previously, you had to rely on multiple websites to find and manage training and certification offerings. Now you have a central place where you can find and enroll in AWS Training, register for AWS Certification exams, track your learning progress, and access benefits based on the AWS Certifications you have achieved. This makes it easier for you to build your AWS Cloud skills and advance toward earning AWS Certification.

You can create a new account or simply log in with your existing Amazon account. If you already have an AWS Training account, you can migrate your existing AWS Training history into this new primary account. If you are an APN Partner, you can simply sign in using your APN Portal credentials. If you also had a Webassessor account, be sure to visit the Certification tab and merge this account too.

Once you are set up, you can rely on the AWS Training and Certification Portal to be your place to find the latest AWS training and certification offerings, built by AWS experts.

To learn more, read the AWS Training and Certification Portal FAQs.

— Jeff;