Amazon News & Articles

ECM company Alfresco (news, site) heads for the clouds with a small biz beta version of its social ECM, hosted on Amazon EC2.

A sure sign of the tough times we’re living in at the moment is the number of companies that are starting to offer SaaS, including solutions for security, data backup and analytics. The last week has seen a lot of activity on this front in the SMB sector.

 This week Amazon Simple Storage Service (news, site) scored a new versioning function, allowing users to maintain a history of every file uploaded to the database.

In this week’s web publishing roll up, Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and Talk, wants you to know that “American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them” and not because the internet is killing them.

In an act that could possibly bring them up to par with some of the better known CDNs in the market, Amazon Web Services (news, site) has tossed cheap audio and video streaming support into the mix with CloudFront, their typically low-key service for content delivery.  

Amazon (news, site) Web Services is bursting at the seams with a raft of new features and services that will make it easier and more affordable to work in the cloud.

CloudBerry (news, site) adds more to features to its useful freeware app that extends your S3 buckets to the desktop.

The new update for CloudBerry S3 Explorer supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) import and export of data, allowing companies to keep a better hold and watch on their cloud-stored data. The Explorer automates the creation of the manifest file, digitally signing it and the job identifier with your AWS Secret Access Key. It also automatically places that digital signature file on the device.

The latest update, version 1.7.1 also allows for connection to Amazon's US-West servers to decrease loading times for those on the West Coast. 

Allowing access to multiple accounts, users can move and copy files between local and Amazon storage. They can allow others access to the files and monitor usage while automating regular backup or transfer tasks.

A PRO version is also available offering more features including encryption and FTP support, while a mobile version of the freeware edition is in the pipes for the truly on-the-go Web citizen.

At the end of August, Microsoft released a preview of their Azure SQL database, a database rival to Amazon's Simple DB. But while Simple DB is non-relational and designed for fast querying, the Azure SQL would support relational queries. An Azure Team blog post at the time said, "we are leading the industry by offering a relational database service." Amazon Web Services (site, news) seems to have heard that loud and clear. Here's the response.

Amazon (news, site) may be one of the 200lb information gorillas in the cloud, but it's not immune to taking a good beating, as an unfortunate customer story shows.

Late last week a customer using Amazon's Web Services came under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack from an unknown source. The target was code-hosting site Bitbucket who found its hosted information all but unavailable and its site inaccessible to customers.

Both Bitbucket and its customers were soon looking to Amazon for answers and none seemed forthcoming until the outage starting appearing on Twitter messages from various disgruntled members.

Amazon stalled when first contacted (clearly following step one of the customer support manual) but soon recognized and began to address the problem. It's good to see that during the outage, several hosting companies got in touch with Bitbucket to offer their services. Nothing like a crisis to see a firm reassess its priorities.

Over the weekend there were several waves of attack, followed by further downtime due to corruption of the company databases as a result of the attack. It turns out the site was being hammered by UDP packets, leaving genuine requests flailing in a sea of traffic.

To get the fine detail on this story, the Twitter feed of Bitbucket's chief, Jesper Noehr makes for interesting reading, as does the more detailed blog posts of the outage.

This story should act as a statutory warning to those who sign up to any online-only service. Perhaps wowed by the glossy brochure, the guarantee of 99.9% uptime and the promise of tech support from the head of computing himself, even on weekends -- nothing is perfect and always have a backup.

The Web offers a virtual ton of solutions built on top of Amazon's (news, site) infamous cloud, so now the company is attempting to make some sense of all the chaos. Their new Solution Providers Program lends accepted applicants support from Amazon Web Services business development, marketing, and technical resource teams.

Additionally, perusable by all is their new Web Services Directory. The list is a directory of all the companies that have developed software and services based on Amazon's offerings, and is handy dandy for individuals looking for a comprehensive catalog of their options.

The directory lists companies all the way from Acquia to Zmanda (there are more than 60 in total), and users can search the archive based on services and geographic locations.

Though it's too early to tell whether or not Amazon has bigger plans for the directory, it's doesn't hurt to mention that this time last year the company received a patent for "Providing a marketplace for Web services." Could this be the first step to a third party cloud services shop? Let's wait and see.

Microsoft's ASP.NET team has launched a free AJAX content delivery network (CDN) that will provide improved performance for your AJAX-enabled web applications.

The CDN is a network of edge cache servers around the world that stores Microsoft's AJAX libraries so your application can download necessary files faster, thus increasing web application performance.

This service is similar to Amazon's CloudFront CDN. The Amazon CDN is primarily targeted at small to medium sized businesses and developers who can't afford, and don't necessarily need, the more well-known, expensive CDNs like Akamai and Limelight. It supports the caching of images, css files, video and other static content.

Unlike Amazon's CloudFront CDN, the AJAX CDN is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and provides caching support for only AJAX libraries such as jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX.

Using the CDN is as simple as adding a couple of script elements to a page in your application that wants to access the AJAX libraries on the CDN. Also available are debug versions of the script. A single script is required to access the JQuery library.

You can get a list of the current scripts available on the CDN on the Microsoft AJAX website. Make sure you read the terms of use statement.

As libraries are updated, they will be added to the CDN.

If you are using ASP.NET 4, you can use the ScriptManager control to access the CDN. It has a new property called EnableCdn. If set to true, it will automatically request Javascript files from the CDN.

Learn more about how to use the ScriptManager control and  ASP.NET AJAX Preview 5 in Scott Gu's post introducing the new AJAX CDN.

Alfresco (news, site) has launched a new developer program designed to support cloud-based development on the Alfresco Enterprise CMS platform.

Called the Cloud Content Application Developer Program, it includes a developer toolkit and an Amazon EC2-ready stack.

Move over Kindle, Sony is throwing its hat into the ePublishing ring. Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, has announced that it will start selling digital books only in the ePub format by the end of the year.

By adopting open standards for ePublishing developed by the International Digital Publishing Form, which are already supported by a growing number of major publishers and a growing number of reading devices, Sony will end its proprietary DRM software (that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied) in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe.

Amazon (news, site) opens up some more services for its AWS users, allowing fast movement of data between locations.

Now out of limited beta, a new service called AWS Import/Export, provides the ability to move your content into and out of the cloud much easier and quicker.

A few years ago, after Amazon threw developer-friendly Amazon Payments into the mix and Google made things more interesting with Google Checkout, the Web payments throne was seized from PayPal and it was every payment service for themselves.

Today it’s still that way, but it seems PayPal has finally upped the ante. The service is opening up its platform to third-party developers this fall, meaning global payment options (different countries, different currencies, different devices) can be plugged into applications from the start.