Amazon Web Services News & Articles

IT management software company CA (news, site)  has announced that it has just closed a cash deal worth US$ 350 million to buy monitoring solutions provider Nimsoft.

The Islandia, NY-based giant says this acquisition will open up a whole new customer base of midmarket/emerging enterprises and management service providers (MSPs).

The upgrade to Bitrix’s Virtual Appliance for Amazon EC2 from 1.4 to 1.5 adds a number of improvements that the company says will enhance the user performance of its content management and enterprise content management software.

With a whole pile of pre-configured settings to nip any software compatibility issues in the bud, Bitrix (news, site) says the new release will speed up all the processes and increase the performance of all the components through its built-in mechanisms.

This version allows users to install Bitrix Site Manager and Bitrix Intranet Portal, or any other applications that use the PHP platform, quicker and more efficiently than previous versions. It also includes the most recent version of the Bitrix web environment with optimized memory usage.

It is protected by both Amazon EC2 security settings and by an integrated firewall which is set up automatically. It also now supports all three data center location regions -- US Standard, US N. California, EU -- Ireland -- after recent EC2 development.

However, that is not all you get. It also comes with the beta release of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Device) customized for Bitrix users giving them 1TB of back-up power for web projects and intranet portals.

Bitrix’s Virtual Appliance is free to download once you have logged in to Amazon Web Services.

Mark Logic (news, site) has just announced that it is providing a new line of cloud services that will enable customers to access and use the MarkLogic server on Amazon EC2.

Apart from the fact that they will now be able to use Mark Logic software on a pay-per-hour basis, they will also be able to subscribe to it directly from Amazon Web Services for ease of access, and use only what they need to use.

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) 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.

The cloud appears to be the new black in the fashion of web content management. One after another, vendors are conquering the cloud in hopes of dazzling their customers with more hosting options and improved scalability.

Ektron’s (news, site) CMS400.NET content management system is now also cloud-friendly, thanks to their eSync technology that can do bi-directional synchronization with the cloud.

Hosting is also part of the offering. Ektron is using the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a hosting option, allowing customers to run and manage their production, development and staging environments in the cloud, in any combination.

Ektron’s eSync technology can be used for bi-directional synchronization between the cloud and a customer’s local environment for the entire web site, specific pages or select pieces of content; giving developers the ability to code locally and sync up with the cloud.

Ektron says it will provide a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), on which customers can deploy their CMS400.NET instances. Using these Ektron-provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with CMS400.NET. Developers can take advantage of the provisioning and automated software deployment.

While the cloud option may not necessarily work for all Ektron Web CMS customers, it is certainly worth looking into.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS (news, site) is has a limited beta out for a new service. Called AWS Import/Export, you will soon have the ability to move your content into and out of the cloud much easier and quicker.

Using Amazon's high speed internal network, you will be able to move your data onto, or off of, just about any storage device -- as long as it meets the compatibility requirements.

It's not to difficult to understand why you would want this capability, but Amazon does offer a few ideas:

• Data Migration: Loading data into the cloud for the first time has never been faster.
• Disaster Recovery: Using Amazon S3 for storage of your website for disaster recovery purposes? Now you can get your website back up and running faster.
• Offsite Backup: Maybe you want to use S3 to store basic backups, whether full or incremental.
• Direct Data Exchange: Partners send you data on devices on a regular basis? Now they can send that data directly to your S3 bucket.

 This new service basically works by you putting your data on a storage device and then ship that device to Amazon Web Services to process in their secure data center. Of course there are a few other steps to complete prior to shipping off your device.

The beta is currently limited to importing data to AWS for US buckets. The export capability and support for EU buckets will come later.

Get yourself registered for the beta program if this new service interests you.

Moving further into the hosted world just as they promised to late last year, Amazon Web Services (news, site) has announced the release of a handful of new tools for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Wanting users to spend less time and energy on the “muck” that is operational burdens and system admin, the new tools focus specifically on enabling visibility into the health and usage of AWS resources, enhancing application performance, and giving wallets a little break.

Amazon Simple Storage Service, also called S3, (news,site) is a great service for those who desire a pay-as-you-go, hosted storage service for building web apps or storing files in the cloud.  CloudBerry Lab, a software vendor, has released a freeware solution called CloudBerry S3 Explorer that makes accessing and managing your Amazon S3 storage easier than ever before.

When it came time to find an Executive Chairman for up-and-coming cloud computing vendor rPath, founder and CTO Erik Troan only had to look back in time -- and his LinkedIn connections -- to find the right candidate.

Adobe has created a virtual development playground combining the use of LiveCycle Developer Express and Amazon Web Services. The goal is to provide developers an environment in which they can easily and quickly build and test enterprise applications. No longer will developers have to wait endless amounts of time to reboot server instances when working.

Now that Amazon Web Services is starting to gain traction in the hosted application market, AWS today announced a new tool that will allow Amazon Web Service users to keep tabs on their AWS services. The first release of the management console is focused on the Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), AWS' virtualized server computing resource.

We have seen tools such as Ylastic that allow for monitoring of AWS utilities such as Amazon EC2, S3, SQS and SimpleDB, but the newly released tool from Amazon Web Services is the first to originate from AWS itself.

Amazon Web Services, the hosted application environment from Amazon.com, announced the availability of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in Europe. Having Amazon EC2 in Europe will mean developers and businesses can build applications and websites on the EC2 platform with less latency, as computational data will not have to travel across the Internet as a part of the workload.

Rackspace, the widely-used Web hosting provider, has announced two major acquisitions that will add value to its cloud computing offerings. In a tandem move, the hosting company has purchased JungleDisk and Slicehost.

JungleDisk is a popular client that gives Windows, Mac and Linux users easy access to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) by providing the cloud storage offering as a drive letter on their computer. Additionally, by acquiring SliceHost, Rackspace picks up a hosting competitor and will integrate Slicehost’s storage capabilities with JungleDisk as an additional storage facility within the JungleDisk client.

An integral part of Amazon’s cloud computing services is showing a sign of maturity, while adding a much anticipated element. The Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2), which facilitates a Linux server environment as a service for Web developers, has come out of beta.

Additionally, as previously rumored, Amazon.com has added an on-demand Windows Server environment to accompany the already existing OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition offerings.