Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business of Amazon.com has announced a new bulk email offering, called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). The cloud-based service is aimed towards developers and businesses who don’t want to build a in-house email product but want to call upon a powerful service to send large volumes of emails.
The advantage of using Amazon SES is that it integrates with other AWS, such as hosting service EC2, Amazon S3 and others. The email service if offered for free, but Amazon will charge fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfers. Pricing for Amazon SES is $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or recently launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance). → Read More
Amazon has announced the winners of its 2009 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-Up Challenge. The main criteria was to come up with a start-up that could have a lasting impact while utilizing AWS for its infrastructure. The grand prize winner this year is GoodData, a SaaS business analytics startup that helps companies easily visual data and metrics. The company won a combination prize of $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. The San Francisco-based company also has an investment offer from Amazon based on the win.
This year’s runner-up was Bizo, yet another business-oriented company, this one promising to deliver targeted audiences to customers. As the runner-up, Bizo gets $25,000 in AWS credits. → Read More
Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, the service has an ability to scale out across computational, memory and storage requirements while still being treated as a single db instance by the end user. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site. → Read More
Passwords suck. A good password is hard to remember, and a weak password is easy to guess. There are lots of attempts at finding ways to solve the problems of passwords, like one-time passwords, biometric authentication, and more. One of the most attractive solutions is two-factor authentication, which requires that you know something (a short passphrase, usually), and that you have something. The thing that you have is most often a little token generator: every 30 or 60 seconds a new set of digits is displayed on a screen. To successfully log in, you need to supply the passphrase that you know along with the digits displayed on the token. Big businesses have been using two-factor authentication for some time. Now it’s being made available for anyone with an Amazon Web Services account. → Read More
Amazon Web Services are readying their latest service called EC2 which will allow users to setup and run servers and computing capacity in the cloud. Users of the service can setup a server instance which is hosted with Amazon, and then access and use the servers they setup just like any other. With EC2 there would no longer be a requirement to source and setup physical hardware and the virtual server instances are charged back to the user based on the CPU, storage and bandwidth usage. The pricing of EC2 is 10 cents per instance hour (which comes to $72 per month for a server that is always available), 20 cents per GB of bandwidth and 15 cents per GB of storage (storage is with S3). Compared to traditional server providers such as ev1servers this may not be priced low enough (especially the bandwidth cost, considering most hosting providers include 2000GB or more of bandwidth) but it may prove to be a good solution for some users. The way it works is that you use tools that Amazon provides to create a machine image on your local machine (the tools are all written in Java). You can setup the image with a web server, application environments, mail or anything else, the “images” are just Fedora Core and they come with some pre-installed services (Amazon calls them AMI’s, or Amazon Machine Instances). To setup your own server instance you then upload this image to Amazon S3, and then once it is uploaded you go to Amazon EC2 and register the image as a server instance. Once registered, you can boot and access the server instance within minutes. Each server instance is the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. Currently EC2 will allow you to create up to 20 server instances, to create more you need to contact Amazon. While each server instance provides decent computing power applications such as large-to-medium scale databases or large web applications will require work to bring the computing power together to serve requests. Since each instance has a fixed amount of capacity they will be prone to performance issues when under heavy load as achieving scalability requires the user to acquire more server instances. One issue is that having separate server instances is not true “elastic” computing, like what Sun or other vendors provide, → Read More
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