AWS Blog

I’m happy to announce that the latest version of the Amazon Linux AMI (2017.09) is now available in all AWS Regions for all current-generation EC2 instances. The AMI contains a supported and maintained Linux image that is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance environment for applications running on EC2.

Easy Upgrade
You can upgrade your existing instances by running two commands and then rebooting:

$ sudo yum clean all
$ sudo yum update

Lots of Goodies
The AMI contains many new features, many of which were added in response to requests from our customers. Here’s a summary:

Kernel 4.9.51 – Based on the 4.9 stable kernel series, this kernel includes the ENA 1.3.0 driver along with support for TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT (BBR). Read my post, Elastic Network Adapter – High-Performance Network Interface for Amazon EC2 to learn more about ENA. Read the Release Notes to learn how to enable BBR.

Amazon SSM Agent – The Amazon SSM Agent is now installed by default. This means that you can now use EC2 Run Command to configure and run scripts on your instances with no further setup. To learn more, read Executing Commands Using Systems Manager Run Command or Manage Instances at Scale Without SSH Access Using EC2 Run Command.

Python 3.6 – The newest version of Python is now included and can be managed via virtualenv and alternatives. You can install Python 3.6 like this:

$ sudo yum install python36 python36-virtualenv python36-pip

Ruby 2.4 – The latest version of Ruby in the 2.4 series is now available. Install it like this:

$ sudo yum install ruby24

OpenSSL – The AMI now uses OpenSSL 1.0.2k.

HTTP/2 – The HTTP/2 protocol is now supported by the AMI’s httpd24, nginx, and curl packages.

Relational Databases – Postgres 9.6 and MySQL 5.7 are now available, and can be installed like this:

$ sudo yum install postgresql96
$ sudo yum install mysql57

OpenMPI – The OpenMPI package has been upgraded from 1.6.4 to 2.1.1. OpenMPI compatibility packages are available and can be used to build and run older OpenMPI applications.

And More – Other updated packages include Squid 3.5, Nginx 1.12, Tomcat 8.5, and GCC 6.4.

Launch it Today
You can use this AMI to launch EC2 instances in all AWS Regions today. It is available for EBS-backed and Instance Store-backed instances and supports HVM and PV modes.

— Jeff;

As consumers continue to demand faster, simpler, and more on-the-go services, FinTech companies are responding with ever more innovative solutions to fit everyone’s needs and to improve customer experience. This month, we are excited to feature the following startups—all of whom are disrupting traditional financial services in unique ways:

• Acorns – allowing customers to invest spare change automatically.
• Bondlinc – improving the bond trading experience for clients, financial institutions, and private banks.
• Lenda – reimagining homeownership with a secure and streamlined online service.

Acorns (Irvine, CA)

Driven by the belief that anyone can grow wealth, Acorns is relentlessly pursuing ways to help make that happen. Currently the fastest-growing micro-investing app in the U.S., Acorns takes mere minutes to get started and is currently helping over 2.2 million people grow their wealth. And unlike other FinTech apps, Acorns is focused on helping America’s middle class – namely the 182 million citizens who make less than $100,000 per year – and looking after their financial best interests.

Acorns is able to help their customers effortlessly invest their money, little by little, by offering ETF portfolios put together by Dr. Harry Markowitz, a Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. They also offer a range of services, including “Round-Ups,” whereby customers can automatically invest spare change from every day purchases, and “Recurring Investments,” through which customers can set up automatic transfers of just $5 per week into their portfolio. Additionally, Found Money, Acorns’ earning platform, can help anyone spend smarter as the company connects customers to brands like Lyft, Airbnb, and Skillshare, who then automatically invest in customers’ Acorns account.

The Acorns platform runs entirely on AWS, allowing them to deliver a secure and scalable cloud-based experience. By utilizing AWS, Acorns is able to offer an exceptional customer experience and fulfill its core mission. Acorns uses Terraform to manage services such as Amazon EC2 Container Service, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon S3. They also use Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift for data storage, and Amazon Glacier to manage document retention.

Acorns is hiring! Be sure to check out their careers page if you are interested.

Bondlinc (Singapore)

Eng Keong, Founder and CEO of Bondlinc, has long wanted to standardize, improve, and automate the traditional workflows that revolve around bond trading. As a former trader at BNP Paribas and Jefferies & Company, E.K. – as Keong is known – had personally seen how manual processes led to information bottlenecks in over-the-counter practices. This drove him, along with future Bondlinc CTO Vincent Caldeira, to start a new service that maximizes efficiency, information distribution, and accessibility for both clients and bankers in the bond market.

Currently, bond trading requires banks to spend a significant amount of resources retrieving data from expensive and restricted institutional sources, performing suitability checks, and attaching required documentation before presenting all relevant information to clients – usually by email. Bankers are often overwhelmed by these time-consuming tasks, which means clients don’t always get proper access to time-sensitive bond information and pricing. Bondlinc bridges this gap between banks and clients by providing a variety of solutions, including easy access to basic bond information and analytics, updates of new issues and relevant news, consolidated management of your portfolio, and a chat function between banker and client. By making the bond market much more accessible to clients, Bondlinc is taking private banking to the next level, while improving efficiency of the banks as well.

As a startup running on AWS since inception, Bondlinc has built and operated its SaaS product by leveraging Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon RDS across multiple Availability Zones to provide its customers (namely, financial institutions) a highly available and seamlessly scalable product distribution platform. Bondlinc also makes extensive use of Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon SNS to meet the stringent operational monitoring, auditing, compliance, and governance requirements of its customers. Bondlinc is currently experimenting with Amazon Lex to build a conversational interface into its mobile application via a chat-bot that provides trading assistance services.

To see how Bondlinc works, request a demo at Bondlinc.com.

Lenda (San Francisco, CA)

Lenda is a digital mortgage company founded by seasoned FinTech entrepreneur Jason van den Brand. Jason wanted to create a smarter, simpler, and more streamlined system for people to either get a mortgage or refinance their homes. With Lenda, customers can find out if they are pre-approved for loans, and receive accurate, real-time mortgage rate quotes from industry-experienced home loan advisors. Lenda’s advisors support customers through the loan process by providing financial advice and guidance for a seamless experience.

Lenda’s innovative platform allows borrowers to complete their home loans online from start to finish. Through a savvy combination of being a direct lender with proprietary technology, Lenda has simplified the mortgage application process to save customers time and money. With an interactive dashboard, customers know exactly where they are in the mortgage process and can manage all of their documents in one place. The company recently received its Series A funding of $5.25 million, and van den Brand shared that most of the capital investment will be used to improve Lenda’s technology and fulfill the company’s mission, which is to reimagine homeownership, starting with home loans.

AWS allows Lenda to scale its business while providing a secure, easy-to-use system for a faster home loan approval process. Currently, Lenda uses Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon WorkSpaces.

Visit Lenda.com to find out more.

—

Thanks for reading and see you in October for another round of hot startups!

-Tina

My colleague Sanjay Padhi shared the guest post below in order to recognize an important milestone in the use of EC2 Spot Instances.

— Jeff;

A group of researchers from Clemson University achieved a remarkable milestone while studying topic modeling, an important component of machine learning associated with natural language processing, breaking the record for creating the largest high-performance cluster in the cloud by using more than 1,100,000 vCPUs on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running in a single AWS region. The researchers conducted nearly half a million topic modeling experiments to study how human language is processed by computers. Topic modeling helps in discovering the underlying themes that are present across a collection of documents. Topic models are important because they are used to forecast business trends and help in making policy or funding decisions. These topic models can be run with many different parameters and the goal of the experiments is to explore how these parameters affect the model outputs.

The Experiment
Professor Amy Apon, Co-Director of the Complex Systems, Analytics and Visualization Institute at Clemson University with Professor Alexander Herzog and graduate students Brandon Posey and Christopher Gropp in collaboration with members of the AWS team as well as AWS Partner Omnibond performed the experiments.  They used software infrastructure based on CloudyCluster that provisions high performance computing clusters on dynamically allocated AWS resources using Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet. Spot Fleet is a collection of biddable spot instances in EC2 responsible for maintaining a target capacity specified during the request. The SLURM scheduler was used as an overlay virtual workload manager for the data analytics workflows. The team developed additional provisioning and workflow automation software as shown below for the design and orchestration of the experiments. This setup allowed them to evaluate various topic models on different data sets with massively parallel parameter sweeps on dynamically allocated AWS resources. This framework can easily be used beyond the current study for other scientific applications that use parallel computing.

Ramping to 1.1 Million vCPUs
The figure below shows elastic, automatic expansion of resources as a function of time, in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. At just after 21:40 (GMT-1) on Aug. 26, 2017, the number of vCPUs utilized was 1,119,196. Clemson researchers also took advantage of the new per-second billing for the EC2 instances that they launched. The vCPU count usage is comparable to the core count on the largest supercomputers in the world.

Here’s the breakdown of the EC2 instance types that they used:

Campus resources at Clemson funded by the National Science Foundation were used to determine an effective configuration for the AWS experiments as compared to campus resources, and the AWS cloud resources complement the campus resources for large-scale experiments.

Meet the Team
Here’s the team that ran the experiment (Professor Alexander Herzog, graduate students Christopher Gropp and Brandon Posey, and Professor Amy Apon):

Professor Apon said about the experiment:

I am absolutely thrilled with the outcome of this experiment. The graduate students on the project are amazing. They used resources from AWS and Omnibond and developed a new software infrastructure to perform research at a scale and time-to-completion not possible with only campus resources. Per-second billing was a key enabler of these experiments.

Boyd Wilson (CEO, Omnibond, member of the AWS Partner Network) told me:

Participating in this project was exciting, seeing how the Clemson team developed a provisioning and workflow automation tool that tied into CloudyCluster to build a huge Spot Fleet supercomputer in a single region in AWS was outstanding.

About the Experiment
The experiments test parameter combinations on a range of topics and other parameters used in the topic model. The topic model outputs are stored in Amazon S3 and are currently being analyzed. The models have been applied to 17 years of computer science journal abstracts (533,560 documents and 32,551,540 words) and full text papers from the NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) Conference (2,484 documents and 3,280,697 words). This study allows the research team to systematically measure and analyze the impact of parameters and model selection on model convergence, topic composition and quality.

Looking Forward
This study constitutes an interaction between computer science, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing. Papers describing the full study are being submitted for peer-reviewed publication. I hope that you enjoyed this brief insight into the ways in which AWS is helping to break the boundaries in the frontiers of natural language processing!

— Sanjay Padhi, Ph.D, AWS Research and Technical Computing

Last week Amazon Pinpoint launched AWS Global SMS two-way text messaging and we didn’t get an opportunity to cover the launch. AWS Pinpoint users can now programmaticaly respond to their end-users’ text messages. Users can provision both short codes and long codes (10-digit phone numbers) which send inbound messages to an SNS topic. Let’s take a look.

First I’ll navigate to the Pinpoint console where I’ll use the “Create a project in Mobile Hub” button in the top right corner. I’ll follow the steps in the wizard until the project is created.

Next, in the Pinpoint console I’ll click “Account Settings” in the top-right of the console window.

At the bottom of the Account Settings page there is a “Number Settings” section. If you don’t already have any short codes or long codes provisioned you’ll have to open a support ticket to request one. It can take multiple weeks for a short code to be approved by all carriers. Long codes are typically easier to provision.

Since I already have a few numbers provisioned I’ll use one of them now by clicking on it which brings me to that number’s configuration page.

Here I’ll enable 2-way SMS and create an SNS topic for messages.

I could create a quick lambda function to trigger on the SNS topic messages and then respond again with pinpoint.

import boto3
pinpoint = boto3.client('pinpoint')


def lambda_handler(event, context):
    pinpoint.send_messages(
        ApplicationId='557d87b57bdb499f8b5eef575435d3b8',
        MessageRequest={
            'Addresses': {
                event['Records'][0]['Sns']['originationNumber']: {'ChannelType': 'SMS'}
            },
            'MessageConfiguration': {
                'SMSMessage': {
                    'Body': 'Vim is the best!',
                    'MessageType': 'TRANSACTIONAL'
                }
            }
        }
    )

But pinpoint is extremely full-featured and you’re not limited to this simple message type. You can define rich messaging campaigns with various substitutions based on stored user data.

SMS is an area of continued investment for AWS so you can expect to see more advances and improvements as customers give us feedback on these new features. Let us know if you build anything cool with this!

Useful Links

• Pricing
• User Guide
• List of countries

Last year we launched new AWS Regions in Canada, India, Korea, the UK, and the United States, and announced that new regions are coming to China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the US throughout 2017 and 2018.

Middle East Region by Early 2019
Today, I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in the Middle East by early 2019. The new Region will be based in Bahrain, will be comprised of three Availability Zones at launch, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in the Middle East.

AWS customers are already making use of 44 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions. Today’s announcement brings the total number of global regions (operational and in the works) up to 22.

UAE Edge Location in 2018
We also plan to open an edge location in the UAE in the first quarter of 2018. This will bring Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the region, adding to our existing set of 84 points of presence world-wide.

These announcements add to our continued investment in the Middle East. Earlier this year we announced the opening of AWS offices in Dubai, UAE and Manama, Bahrain. Prior to this we have supported the growth of technology education in the region with AWS Educate and have supported the growth of new businesses through AWS Activate for many years.

The addition of AWS infrastructure in the Middle East will help countries across the region to innovate, grow their economies, and pursue their vision plans (Saudi Vision 2030, UAE Vision 2021, Bahrain Vision 2030, and so forth).

Talk to Us
As always, we are looking forward to serving new and existing customers in the Middle East and working with partners across the region. Of course, the new Region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to serve users in the Middle East.

To learn more about the AWS Middle East Region feel free to contact our team at aws-me@amazon.com .

If you are interested in joining the team and would like to learn more about AWS positions in the Middle East, take a look at the Amazon Jobs site.

— Jeff;

As I have noted in the past, the AWS Blog Team is working hard to make sure that you know about as many AWS launches and publications as possible, without totally burying you in content! As part of our balancing act, we will occasionally publish catch-up posts to clear our queues and to bring more information to your attention. Here’s what I have in store for you today:

• Monitoring for Cross-Region Replication of S3 Objects
• Tags for Spot Fleet Instances
• PCI DSS Compliance for 12 More Services
• HIPAA Eligibility for WorkDocs
• VPC Resizing
• AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design Instances
• AMS Connector App for ServiceNow
• Regtech in the Cloud
• New & Revised Quick Starts

Let’s jump right in!

Monitoring for Cross-Region Replication of S3 Objects
I told you about cross-region replication for S3 a couple of years ago. As I showed you at the time, you simply enable versioning for the source bucket and then choose a destination region and bucket. You can check the replication status manually, or you can create an inventory (daily or weekly) of the source and destination buckets.

The Cross-Region Replication Monitor (CRR Monitor for short) solution checks the replication status of objects across regions and gives you metrics and failure notifications in near real-time.

To learn more, read the CRR Monitor Implementation Guide and then use the AWS CloudFormation template to Deploy the CRR Monitor.

Tags for Spot Instances
Spot Instances and Spot Fleets (collections of Spot Instances) give you access to spare compute capacity. We recently gave you the ability to enter tags (key/value pairs) as part of your spot requests and to have those tags applied to the EC2 instances launched to fulfill the request:

To learn more, read Tag Your Spot Fleet EC2 Instances.

PCI DSS Compliance for 12 More Services
As first announced on the AWS Security Blog, we recently added 12 more services to our PCI DSS compliance program, raising the total number of in-scope services to 42. To learn more, check out our Compliance Resources.

HIPAA Eligibility for WorkDocs
In other compliance news, we announced that Amazon WorkDocs has achieved HIPAA eligibility and PCI DSS compliance in all AWS Regions where WorkDocs is available.

VPC Resizing
This feature allows you to extend an existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by adding additional blocks of addresses. This gives you more flexibility and should help you to deal with growth. You can add up to four secondary /16 CIDRs per VPC. You can also edit the secondary CIDRs by deleting them and adding new ones. Simply select the VPC and choose Edit CIDRs from the menu:

Then add or remove CIDR blocks as desired:

To learn more, read about VPCs and Subnets.

AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design Instances
Powered by AMD FirePro S7150x2 Server GPUs and equipped with AMD Multiuser GPU technology, the new Graphics Design instances for Amazon AppStream 2.0 will let you run and stream graphics applications more cost-effectively than ever. The instances are available in four sizes, with 2-16 vCPUs and 7.5 GB to 61 GB of memory.

To learn more, read Introducing Amazon AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design, a New Lower Costs Instance Type for Streaming Graphics Applications.

AMS Connector App for ServiceNow
AWS Managed Services (AMS) provides Infrastructure Operations Management for the Enterprise. Designed to accelerate cloud adoption, it automates common operations such as change requests, patch management, security and backup.

The new AMS integration App for ServiceNow lets you interact with AMS from within ServiceNow, with no need for any custom development or API integration.

To learn more, read Cloud Management Made Easier: AWS Managed Services Now Integrates with ServiceNow.

Regtech in the Cloud
Regtech (as I learned while writing this), is short for regulatory technology, and is all about using innovative technology such as cloud computing, analytics, and machine learning to address regulatory challenges.

Working together with APN Consulting Partner Cognizant, TABB Group recently published a thought leadership paper that explains why regulations and compliance pose huge challenges for our customers in the financial services, and shows how AWS can help!

New & Revised Quick Starts
Our Quick Starts team has been cranking out new solutions and making significant updates to the existing ones. Here’s a roster:

And that’s all I have for today!

— Jeff;

EC2 Spot Instances give you access to spare EC2 compute capacity at up to 90% off of the On-Demand rates. Starting with the ability to request a specific number of instances of a particular size, we made Spot Instances even more useful and flexible with support for Spot Fleets and Auto Scaling Spot Fleets, allowing you to maintain any desired level of compute capacity.

EC2 users have long had the ability to stop running instances while leaving EBS volumes attached, opening the door to applications that automatically pick up where they left off when the instance starts running again.

Stop and Resume Spot Workloads
Today we are blending these two important features, allowing you to set up Spot bids and Spot Fleets that respond by stopping (rather than terminating) instances when capacity is no longer available at or below your bid price. EBS volumes attached to stopped instances remain intact, as does the EBS-backed root volume. When capacity becomes available, the instances are started and can keep on going without having to spend time provisioning applications, setting up EBS volumes, downloading data, joining network domains, and so forth.

Many AWS customers have enhanced their applications to create and make use of checkpoints, adding some resilience and gaining the ability to take advantage of EC2’s start/stop feature in the process. These customers will now be able to run these applications on Spot Instances, with savings that average 70-90%.

While the instances are stopped, you can modify the EBS Optimization, User data, Ramdisk ID, and Delete on Termination attributes. Stopped Spot Instances do not incur any charges for compute time; space for attached EBS volumes is charged at the usual rates.

Here’s how you create a Spot bid or Spot Fleet and specify the use of stop/start:

Things to Know
This feature is available now and you can start using it today in all AWS Regions where Spot Instances are available. It is designed to work well in conjunction with the new per-second billing for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, with the potential for another dimension of cost savings over and above that provided by Spot Instances.

EBS volumes always exist within a particular Availability Zone (AZ). As a result, Spot and Spot Fleet requests that specify a particular AZ will always restart in that AZ.

Take care when using this feature in conjunction with Spot Fleets that have the potential to span a wide variety of instance types. Because the composition of the fleet can change over time, you need to pay attention to your account’s limits for IP addresses and EBS volumes.

I’m looking forward to hearing about the new and creative uses that you’ll come up with for this feature. If you thought that your application was not a good fit for Spot Instances, or if the overhead needed to handle interruptions was too high, it is time to take another look!

— Jeff;

Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power. When we launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news. The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types.

Today, services like AWS Lambda prove that we can do a lot of useful work in a short time. Many of our customers are dreaming up applications for EC2 that can make good use of a large number of instances for shorter amounts of time, sometimes just a few minutes.

Per-Second Billing for EC2 and EBS
Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments.

Per-second billing also applies to several other AWS services:

Amazon EMR – Our customers add capacity to their EMR clusters in order to get their results more quickly. With per-second billing for the EC2 instances in the clusters, adding nodes is more cost-effective than ever.

AWS Batch – Many of the batch jobs that our customers run complete in less than an hour. AWS Batch already launches and terminates Spot Instances; with per-second billing for the EC2 instances, batch processing will become even more economical.

Elastic GPUs – Usage of Elastic GPUs is billed by the second, with a 1 minute minimum.

Provisioned IOPS – Provisioned IOPS for io1 EBS volumes is billed by the second.

Some of our more sophisticated customers have built systems to get the most value from EC2 by strategically choosing the most advantageous target instances when managing their gaming, ad tech, or 3D rendering fleets. Per-second billing obviates the need for this extra layer of instance management, and brings the costs savings to all customers and all workloads.

While this will result in a price reduction for many workloads (and you know we love price reductions), I don’t think that’s the most important aspect of this change. I believe that this change will inspire you to innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways. How can you use it to improve your support for continuous integration? Can it change the way that you provision transient environments for your dev and test workloads? What about your analytics, batch processing, and 3D rendering?

One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them. By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing.

Things to Know
This change is effective in all AWS Regions and will be effective October 2, for all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per-instance.

Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. Marketplace AMIs that do not have a separate hourly charge are eligible for per-second billing.

List prices and Spot Market prices are still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated down to the second, as is Reserved Instance usage (you can launch, use, and terminate multiple instances within an hour and get the Reserved Instance Benefit for all of the instances). Also, bills will show times in decimal form, like this:

The Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and products in AWS Marketplace are still billed on an hourly basis.

— Jeff;

The wait is over. September and October’s Partner Webinars have officially arrived! In case you missed the intro last month, the AWS Partner Webinar Series is a selection of live and recorded presentations covering a broad range of topics at varying technical levels and scale. A little different from our AWS Online TechTalks, each AWS Partner Webinar is hosted by an AWS solutions architect and an AWS Competency Partner who has successfully helped customers evaluate and implement the tools, techniques, and technologies of AWS.

September & October Partner Webinars:

SAP Migration
Velocity: How EIS Reduced Costs by 20% and Optimized SAP by Leveraging the Cloud
September 19, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Mactores: SAP on AWS: How UCT is Experiencing Better Performance on AWS While Saving 60% in Infrastructure Costs with Mactores
September 19, 2017 | 1:00 PM PDT

Accenture: Reduce Operating Costs and Accelerate Efficiency by Migrating Your SAP Applications to AWS with Accenture
September 20, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Capgemini: Accelerate your SAP HANA Migration with Capgemini & AWS FAST
September 21, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Salesforce
Salesforce IoT: Monetize your IOT Investment with Salesforce and AWS
September 27, 2017 | 10:00 am PDT

Salesforce Heroku: Build Engaging Applications with Salesforce Heroku and AWS
October 10, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Windows Migration
Cascadeo: How a National Transportation Software Provider Migrated a Mission-Critical Test Infrastructure to AWS with Cascadeo
September 26, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Datapipe: Optimize App Performance and Security by Managing Microsoft Workloads on AWS with Datapipe
September 27, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Datavail: Datavail Accelerates AWS Adoption for Sony DADC New Media Solutions
September 28, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Life Sciences

SAP, Deloitte & Turbot: Life Sciences Compliance on AWS
October 4, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Healthcare

AWS, ClearData & Cloudticity: Healthcare Compliance on AWS 
October 5, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Storage

NetApp: Give your SaaS Data Security with NetApp and AWS

September 20, 2017 | 9:00 am PDT

N2WS: Learn How Goodwill Industries Ensures 24/7 Data Availability on AWS
October 10, 2017 | 8:00 AM PDT

Big Data

Zoomdata: Taking Complexity Out of Data Science with AWS and Zoomdata
October 10, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Attunity: Cardinal Health: Moving Data to AWS in Real-Time with Attunity 
October 11, 2017 | 11:00 AM PDT

Splunk: How TrueCar Gains Actionable Insights with Splunk Cloud
October 18, 2017 | 9:00 AM PDT

The third annual Prime Day set another round of records for global orders, topping Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day in Amazon retail history. Over the course of the 30 hour event, tens of millions of Prime members purchased things like Echo Dots, Fire tablets, programmable pressure cookers, espresso machines, rechargeable batteries, and much more! July 11th also set a record for the number of new Prime memberships, as people signed up in order to take advantage of hundreds of thousands of deals. Amazon customers shopped online and made heavy use of the Amazon App, with mobile orders more than doubling from last Prime Day.

Powered by AWS
Last year I told you about How AWS Powered Amazon’s Biggest Day Ever, and shared what the team had learned with regard to preparation, automation, monitoring, and thinking big. All of those lessons still apply and you can read that post to learn more. Preparation for this year’s Prime Day (which started just days after Prime Day 2016 wrapped up) started by collecting and sharing best practices and identifying areas for improvement, proceeding to implementation and stress testing as the big day approached. Two of the best practices involve auditing and GameDay:

Auditing – This is a formal way for us to track preparations, identify risks, and to track progress against our objectives. Each team must respond to a series of detailed technical and operational questions that are designed to help them determine their readiness. On the technical side, questions could revolve around time to recovery after a database failure, including the all-important check of the TTL (time to live) for the CNAME. Operational questions address schedules for on-call personnel, points of contact, and ownership of services & instances.

GameDay – This practice (which I believe originated with former Amazonian Jesse Robbins), is intended to validate all of the capacity planning & preparation and to verify that all of the necessary operational practices are in place and work as expected. It introduces simulated failures and helps to train the team to identify and quickly resolve issues, building muscle memory in the process. It also tests failover and recovery capabilities, and can expose latent defects that are lurking under the covers. GameDays help teams to understand scaling drivers (page views, orders, and so forth) and gives them an opportunity to test their scaling practices. To learn more, read Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure or watch the video: GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction.

Prime Day 2017 Metrics
So, how did we do this year?

The AWS teams checked their dashboards and log files, and were happy to share their metrics with me. Here are a few of the most interesting ones:

Block Storage – Use of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) grew by 40% year-over-year, with aggregate data transfer jumping to 52 petabytes (a 50% increase) for the day and total I/O requests rising to 835 million (a 30% increase). The team told me that they loved the elasticity of EBS, and that they were able to ramp down on capacity after Prime Day concluded instead of being stuck with it.

NoSQL Database – Amazon DynamoDB requests from Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and the Amazon fulfillment centers totaled 3.34 trillion, peaking at 12.9 million per second. According to the team, the extreme scale, consistent performance, and high availability of DynamoDB let them meet needs of Prime Day without breaking a sweat.

Stack Creation – Nearly 31,000 AWS CloudFormation stacks were created for Prime Day in order to bring additional AWS resources on line.

API Usage – AWS CloudTrail processed over 50 billion events and tracked more than 419 billion calls to various AWS APIs, all in support of Prime Day.

Configuration Tracking – AWS Config generated over 14 million Configuration items for AWS resources.

You Can Do It
Running an event that is as large, complex, and mission-critical as Prime Day takes a lot of planning. If you have an event of this type in mind, please take a look at our new Infrastructure Event Readiness white paper. Inside, you will learn how to design and provision your applications to smoothly handle planned scaling events such as product launches or seasonal traffic spikes, with sections on automation, resiliency, cost optimization, event management, and more.

— Jeff;