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The Amazon RDS team has been cranking out feature releases at an incredibly rapid pace. I'm working double secret overtime just to keep up with them. Here's what they've released in the past month (Click on the image to learn more about RDS):
9/13: SQL Server VPC supportThe team is expanding and they are now looking for some top-notch developers in Seattle and Vancouver (BC):
To apply, send your resume to rds-jobs at amazon.com.
-- Jeff;
We want to make EC2 Spot Instances even easier to use. One way we are doing this is by making the bidding and processing more open and more transparent.
You probably know that you can use Spot Instances to bid for unused capacity, allowing you to obtain compute capacity at a price that is based on supply and demand.
When you submit a bid for Spot capacity, your request includes a number of parameters and constraints. The constraints provide EC2 with the information that it needs to satisfy your bid (and the other bids that it is competing with) as quickly as possible. EC2 stores and then repeatedly evaluates the constraints until it is able to satisfy your bid. The following constraints (some mandatory and some optional) affect the evaluation process:
Spot Life Cycle
Each bid has a life cycle with multiple states. Transitions between the states occur when constraints are fulfilled. Here's the big picture:
We want to give you additional information so that you can do an even better job of making Spot Bids and managing the running instances. You might find yourself wondering:
Spot Instance Bid Status
In order to give you additional insight in to the evaluation process, we are making the Spot Bid Instance Status visible through the AWS Management Console and the EC2 APIs. The existing DescribeSpotInstanceRequests function will now return two additional pieces of information - bidStatusCode and bidStatusMessage.This infomation is updated every time the Spot Bid's provisioning status changes or is re-evaluated (typically a few seconds, but sometimes up to 3 minutes).
You can find the complete set of codes and messages in the Spot Instance documentation. Here are some of the more interesting codes:
You can click on the Bid Status message in the AWS Management Console to see a more verbose message in the tooltip:
What is $100 Worth of Spot Good For?
If you are wondering about the value of Spot Instances, the new post, Data Mining the Web: $100 Worth of Priceless, should be helpful. The developers at Lucky Oyster used the Common Crawl public data set, EC2 Spot Instances, and a few hundred lines of Ruby to data mine 3.4 billion Web pages and extract close to a Terabyte of structured data. All in 14 hours for about $100.
Learn About Spot
I recently interviewed Stephen Elliott, Senior Product Manager on the EC2 team, to learn more about the Spot Instances concept. Here's our video:
Stephen and his team are interested in your feedback on this and other Spot Instance features. You can email them at spot-instance-feedback@amazon.com .
If you are new to Spot Instances, get started now by signing up for EC2 and watching our HOWTO video. To learn even more, visit our EC2 Spot Instance Curriculum page.
-- Jeff;
Max Spevack of the Amazon EC2 team brings news of the latest Amazon Linux AMI.
-- Jeff;
The Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09 is now available.
After we removed the “Public Beta” tag from the Amazon Linux AMI last September, we’ve been on a six month release cycle focused on making sure that EC2 customers have a stable, secure, and simple Linux-based AMI that integrates well with other AWS offerings.
There are several new features worth discussing, as well as a host of general updates to packages in the Amazon Linux AMI repositories and to the AWS command line tools. Here's what's new:
The Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09 is available for launch in all regions. Users of 2012.03, 2011.09, and 2011.02 versions of the Amazon Linux AMI can easily upgrade using yum.
The Amazon Linux AMI is a rolling release, configured to deliver a continuous flow of updates that allow you to roll from one version of the Amazon Linux AMI to the next. In other words, Amazon Linux AMIs are treated as snapshots in time, with a repository and update structure that gives you the latest packages that we have built and pushed into the repository. If you prefer to lock your Amazon Linux AMI instances to a particular version, please see the Amazon Linux AMI FAQ for instructions.
As always, if you need any help with the Amazon Linux AMI, don’t hesitate to post on the EC2 forum, and someone from the team will be happy to assist you.
-- Max
PS - Help us to build the Amazon Linux AMI! We are actively hiring Linux Systems Engineer, Linux Software Development Engineer, and Linux Kernel Engineer positions:
As I described in my original blog post, you can easily create and manage read replicas using Amazon RDS for MySQL. From the AWS Management Console, you simply right-click on the database instance of interest and choose the Create Read Replica option:
Adding one or more Read Replicas gives you the ability to handle an increasing amount of read-heavy traffic to your database.
Today we are enhancing the Read Replica function with support for promotion. You can now convert a MySQL Read Replica into a "standalone" RDS database instance using the Promote Read Replica function. Two things happen when you do this:
Promotion in Motion
There are a number of different uses for this new feature. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Perform DDL Operations - Table-level DDL operations such as adding columns or indices can take a long time and can impose a performance penalty on your master database instance. Here's another way to do it:
Shard a Table - Sharding involves splitting a table into smaller tables, often using a hashing algorithm on the table's primary key to partition the key space across tables. You can move from a single table model to a sharded model using Read Replicas and Promotion as follows:
Implement Failure Recovery - Amazon RDS provides multiple options for data recovery during failures including Multi-AZ deployments and Point in Time Recovery. With the ability to promote, Read Replica can be considered as an additional data recovery scheme against failures. However, you will want to make sure that you understand the ramifications of the asynchronous replication model and its limitations before electing to use this option as a recovery mechanism. If your use case requires synchronous replication, automatic failure detection and failover, we recommend you run your DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment. If you do want to use Read Replica as a data recovery mechanism, you would start by creating a Read Replica, and then monitoring the master for failures. In the event of a failure you would proceed as follows:
Because you can perform all of these operations from code using the Amazon RDS APIs, consider automating the procedures above using the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. Let me know what you come up with!
-- Jeff;
As you can probably tell from the pace of releases on this blog, the Amazon RDS team has been designing, implementing, and deploying new features at a very rapid clip. They've added a number of data protection and security features to create a product that's a great match for enterprise deployments.
Today, we're announcing SSL support for RDS for SQL Server.
With this change, you can now protect and secure your data both in transit and at rest:
Enabling SSL Support
Here's all you need to do to enable SSL Support:
Making SSL Connections
You can establish an SSL connection to your RDB database instance running SQL Server in a number of ways. Here are two of the most common.
If you are making a programmatic connection to RDS, add "encrypt=true" to your connection string. For example:
Server=##.##.##.##;Database=dbname;uid=username;pwd=password;encrypt=true
If you use SQL Server Management Studio, select the "Encrypt connection" option:
Your Turn
I believe that the combination of these three features makes RDS for SQL Server a perfect fit for just about any enterprise. What do you think?
-- Jeff;
PS - Before you ask, you can also establish SSL connections to an RDS database instance running MySQL (see my blog post for more information).
AWS GovCloud (US) is a gated community cloud designed to support the compliance needs of customer workloads with direct or indirect ties to U.S. Government functions, services, or regulations. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. Workloads that are appropriate for the AWS GovCloud (US) region include all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), including ITAR, as well as Government oriented publicly available data. The customer community utilizing AWS GovCloud (US) includes U.S. Federal, State, and Local Government organizations as well as U.S. Corporate and Educational entities.
Today we are adding a number of important new features to AWS GovCloud (US) in order to open it up to even more types of workloads. Here's what's new:
The combination of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch alarms means that applications running in the AWS GovCloud can now meet stringent requirements for scalability and availability.
In general, GovCloud is functionally the same as our standard commercial regions, and customers used to AWS will feel right at home. The services in GovCloud have the same APIs and semantics, with very few exceptions. There are some important differences, however:
-- Jeff;
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