AWS Blog

Today we’re launching support for multiple TLS/SSL certificates on Application Load Balancers (ALB) using Server Name Indication (SNI). You can now host multiple TLS secured applications, each with its own TLS certificate, behind a single load balancer. In order to use SNI, all you need to do is bind multiple certificates to the same secure listener on your load balancer. ALB will automatically choose the optimal TLS certificate for each client. These new features are provided at no additional charge.

If you’re looking for a TL;DR on how to use this new feature just click here. If you’re like me and you’re a little rusty on the specifics of Transport Layer Security (TLS) then keep reading.

TLS? SSL? SNI?

People tend to use the terms SSL and TLS interchangeably even though the two are technically different. SSL technically refers to a predecessor of the TLS protocol. To keep things simple I’ll be using the term TLS for the rest of this post.

TLS is a protocol for securely transmitting data like passwords, cookies, and credit card numbers. It enables privacy, authentication, and integrity of the data being transmitted. TLS uses certificate based authentication where certificates are like ID cards for your websites. You trust the person that signed and issued the certificate, the certificate authority (CA), so you trust that the data in the certificate is correct. When a browser connects to your TLS-enabled ALB, ALB presents a certificate that contains your site’s public key, which has been cryptographically signed by a CA. This way the client can be sure it’s getting the ‘real you’ and that it’s safe to use your site’s public key to establish a secure connection.

With SNI support we’re making it easy to use more than one certificate with the same ALB. The most common reason you might want to use multiple certificates is to handle different domains with the same load balancer. It’s always been possible to use wildcard and subject-alternate-name (SAN) certificates with ALB, but these come with limitations. Wildcard certificates only work for related subdomains that match a simple pattern and while SAN certificates can support many different domains, the same certificate authority has to authenticate each one. That means you have reauthenticate and reprovision your certificate everytime you add a new domain.

One of our most frequent requests on forums, reddit, and in my e-mail inbox has been to use the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension of TLS to choose a certificate for a client. Since TLS operates at the transport layer, below HTTP, it doesn’t see the hostname requested by a client. SNI works by having the client tell the server “This is the domain I expect to get a certificate for” when it first connects. The server can then choose the correct certificate to respond to the client. All modern web browsers and a large majority of other clients support SNI. In fact, today we see SNI supported by over 99.5% of clients connecting to CloudFront.

Smart Certificate Selection on ALB

ALB’s smart certificate selection goes beyond SNI. In addition to containing a list of valid domain names, certificates also describe the type of key exchange and cryptography that the server supports, as well as the signature algorithm (SHA2, SHA1, MD5) used to sign the certificate. To establish a TLS connection, a client starts a TLS handshake by sending a “ClientHello” message that outlines the capabilities of the client: the protocol versions, extensions, cipher suites, and compression methods. Based on what an individual client supports, ALB’s smart selection algorithm chooses a certificate for the connection and sends it to the client. ALB supports both the classic RSA algorithm and the newer, hipper, and faster Elliptic-curve based ECDSA algorithm. ECDSA support among clients isn’t as prevalent as SNI, but it is supported by all modern web browsers. Since it’s faster and requires less CPU, it can be particularly useful for ultra-low latency applications and for conserving the amount of battery used by mobile applications. Since ALB can see what each client supports from the TLS handshake, you can upload both RSA and ECDSA certificates for the same domains and ALB will automatically choose the best one for each client.

Using SNI with ALB

I’ll use a few example websites like VimIsBetterThanEmacs.com and VimIsTheBest.com. I’ve purchased and hosted these domains on Amazon Route 53, and provisioned two separate certificates for them in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). If I want to securely serve both of these sites through a single ALB, I can quickly add both certificates in the console.

First, I’ll select my load balancer in the console, go to the listeners tab, and select “view/edit certificates”.

Next, I’ll use the “+” button in the top left corner to select some certificates then I’ll click the “Add” button.

There are no more steps. If you’re not really a GUI kind of person you’ll be pleased to know that it’s also simple to add new certificates via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) (or SDKs).

aws elbv2 add-listener-certificates --listener-arn <listener-arn> --certificates CertificateArn=<cert-arn>

Things to know

• ALB Access Logs now include the client’s requested hostname and the certificate ARN used. If the “hostname” field is empty (represented by a “-“) the client did not use the SNI extension in their request.
• You can use any of your certificates in ACM or IAM.
• You can bind multiple certificates for the same domain(s) to a secure listener. Your ALB will choose the optimal certificate based on multiple factors including the capabilities of the client.
• If the client does not support SNI your ALB will use the default certificate (the one you specified when you created the listener).
• There are three new ELB API calls: AddListenerCertificates, RemoveListenerCertificates, and DescribeListenerCertificates.
• You can bind up to 25 certificates per load balancer (not counting the default certificate).
• These new features are supported by AWS CloudFormation at launch.

You can see an example of these new features in action with a set of websites created by my colleague Jon Zobrist: https://www.exampleloadbalancer.com/.

Overall, I will personally use this feature and I’m sure a ton of AWS users will benefit from it as well. I want to thank the Elastic Load Balancing team for all their hard work in getting this into the hands of our users.

– Randall

Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (launched just a few days ago) includes lots of powerful new features including support for graph databases, automatic database tuning, and the ability to create clusterless Always On Availability Groups. It can also be run on Linux and in Docker containers.

Run on EC2
I’m happy to announce that you can now launch EC2 instances that run Windows Server 2016 and four editions (Web, Express, Standard, and Enterprise) of SQL Server 2017. The AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are available today in all AWS Regions and run on a wide variety of EC2 instance types, including the new x1e.32xlarge with 128 vCPUs and almost 4 TB of memory.

You can launch these instances from the AWS Management Console or through AWS Marketplace. Here’s what they look like in the console:

And in AWS Marketplace:

Licensing Options Galore
You have lots of licensing options for SQL Server:

Pay As You Go – This option works well if you would prefer to avoid buying licenses, are already running an older version of SQL Server, and want to upgrade. You don’t have to deal with true-ups, software compliance audits, or Software Assurance and you don’t need to make a long-term purchase. If you are running the Standard Edition of SQL Server, you also benefit from our recent price reduction, with savings of up to 52%.

License Mobility – This option lets your use your active Software Assurance agreement to bring your existing licenses to EC2, and allows you to run SQL Server on Windows or Linux instances.

Bring Your Own Licenses – This option lets you take advantage of your existing license investment while minimizing upgrade costs. You can run SQL Server on EC2 Dedicated Instances or EC2 Dedicated Hosts, with the potential to reduce operating costs by licensing SQL Server on a per-core basis. This option allows you to run SQL Server 2017 on EC2 Linux instances (SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are supported) and also supports Docker-based environments running on EC2 Windows and Linux instances. To learn more about these options, read the Installation Guidance for SQL Server on Linux and Run SQL Server 2017 Container Image with Docker.

Learn More
To learn more about SQL Server 2017 and to explore your licensing options in depth, take a look at the SQL Server on AWS page.

If you need advice and guidance as you plan your migration effort, check out the AWS Partners who have qualified for the Microsoft Workloads competency and focus on database solutions.

Plan to join the AWS team at the PASS Summit (November 1-3 in Seattle) and at AWS re:Invent (November 27th to December 1st in Las Vegas).

— Jeff;

PS – Special thanks to my colleague Tom Staab (Partner Solutions Architect) for his help with this post!

I often give presentations on Amazon’s culture of innovation, and start out with a slide that features a revealing quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos:

I love to sit down with our customers and to learn how we have empowered their creativity and to pursue their dreams. Earlier this year I chatted with Patrick Brandt from The Coca-Cola Company in order to learn how they used AWS Step Functions and other AWS services to support the Coke.com Vending Pass program. This program includes drink rewards earned by purchasing products at vending machines equipped to support mobile payments using the Coca-Cola Vending Pass. Participants swipe their NFC-enabled phones to complete an Apple Pay or Android Pay purchase, identifying themselves to the vending machine and earning credit towards future free vending purchases in the process

After the swipe, a combination of SNS topics and AWS Lambda functions initiated a pair of calls to some existing backend code to count the vending points and update the participant’s record. Unfortunately, the backend code was slow to react and had some timing dependencies, leading to missing updates that had the potential to confuse Vending Pass participants. The initial solution to this issue was very simple: modify the Lambda code to include a 90 second delay between the two calls. This solved the problem, but ate up process time for no good reason (billing for the use of Lambda functions is based on the duration of the request, in 100 ms intervals).

In order to make their solution more cost-effective, the team turned to AWS Step Functions, building a very simple state machine. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, Step Functions coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices at scale, using visual workflows that are easy to build.

Coke built a very simple state machine to simplify their business logic and reduce their costs. Yours can be equally simple, or they can make use of other Step Function features such as sequential and parallel execution and the ability to make decisions and choose alternate states. The Coke state machine looks like this:

The FirstState and the SecondState states (Task states) call the appropriate Lambda functions while Step Functions implements the 90 second delay (a Wait state). This modification simplified their logic and reduced their costs. Here’s how it all fits together:

What’s Next
This initial success led them to take a closer look at serverless computing and to consider using it for other projects. Patrick told me that they have already seen a boost in productivity and developer happiness. Developers no longer need to wait for servers to be provisioned, and can now (as Jeff says) unleash their creativity and pursue their dreams. They expect to use Step Functions to improve the scalability, functionality, and reliability of their applications, going far beyond the initial use for the Coca-Cola Vending Pass. For example, Coke has built a serverless solution for publishing nutrition information to their food service partners using Lambda, Step Functions, and API Gateway.

Patrick and his team are now experimenting with machine learning and artificial intelligence. They built a prototype application to analyze a stream of photos from Instagram and extract trends in tastes and flavors. The application (built as a quick, one-day prototype) made use of Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Rekognition and was, in Patrick’s words, a “big win and an enabler.”

In order to build serverless applications even more quickly, the development team has created an internal CI/CD reference architecture that builds on the Serverless Application Framework. The architecture includes a guided tour of Serverless and some boilerplate code to access internal services and assets. Patrick told me that this model allows them to easily scale promising projects from “a guy with a computer” to an entire development team.

Patrick will be on stage at AWS re:Invent next to my colleague Tim Bray. To meet them in person, be sure to attend SRV306 – State Machines in the Wild! How Customers Use AWS Step Functions.

— Jeff;

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;