Ec2 News & Articles

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.

Alfresco (news, site) is expanding its cloud horizons by offering complex configuration deployment options in the cloud for its Enterprise CMS via a partnership with RightScale.

The joint solution is aimed to provide faster full-blown deployments and better management of the cloud infrastructure. RightScale is a cloud computing management company that has a SaaS cloud management platform and supports Amazon EC2 among other clouds.

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform has several features that many organizations may find appealing, including prepackaged cloud-ready ServerTemplates, ability to manage entire deployments centrally, automation throughout the deployment lifecycle, and visibility and control of all levels of a cloud app.

For Alfresco customers it means that they have a way of deploying fully-configured, fault-tolerant and load-balanced Alfresco cloud instances that can automatically scale to meet various infrastructure needs as they arise. As often it is with the cloud, one of the benefits is reduced costs, when customers only pay for what they use, when they use it.

In addition to the recently released Alfresco EC2 image and the Cloud Content Application Developer Program aimed at developers wanting to try out the Enterprise CMS in the cloud, the vendor now also offers a hosted Amazon cloud-based trial of a full implementation of Alfresco Share, using Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.1, for you to explore.

Back in September, Alfresco (news, site) released an Amazon EC2 image for those wanting to use Alfresco Server in the cloud. This image has recently received some significant updates that might interest those who've been following recent developments with Alfresco products.

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.

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.

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.

Well known as being the pioneer for cloud computing services, Amazon has released the beta version of its latest initiative — a content delivery network. Amazon’s CloudFront CDN is cheap enough that SMB web publishers are now able to serve their more popular content to their customers quickly and easily.

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.

New Bamboo, a software company that’s been developing solutions using the infamous Ruby on Rails since its conception, released Panda — a new Open Source platform designed for the easy uploading, transcoding and streaming of videos on websites.

We’ve recently discovered two resources that will make your life a little easier should you work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) either as a data manager or developer.

Ylastic is a tool built upon AWS Infrastructure Services. With this tool, you can manage Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, and SimpleDB all from one easy to use interface. The Ylastic tool also allows users to set up monitoring, alerts, reporting tools and functional dashboards to keep tabs on one’s AWS cloud computing utilization and health.

Also, if you are a developer, the Amazon Web Services Developer Relations team has collected the most used data types, function calls and command line tools for their popular services in Quick Reference Cards. The cards are available for Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon DevPay, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fulfillment Web Service and Amazon Associates Web Service, with more guides to come in the coming months.

Amazon has recently informed its AWS customers that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will allow users to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server later this fall. For those who take advantage of those two Microsoft products, this is surely news to get excited about.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a provider of Internet data storage and delivery services, is expanding options for developers and enterprises looking to host their databases on the AWS cloud computing platform.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a scalable web service solution offered by AWS, is now the first authorized cloud computing platform to run supported Oracle databases.

You’ve got an idea for the next great Facebook application, assuming Scrabulous and Vampires are not great enough, and you want the application to be available to all 55 million active (and growing) Facebook members.

What you don’t have is a bucket full of money (or venture funding) to pay for a server farm?

What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?