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).

Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action.

To help businesses improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES offers a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

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.

And finally, this year’s supplemental winner is FlightCaster, a company that says it can accurately predict flight delays. We’ve actually written about this Y Combinator startup a few times. With their AWS win they get $10,000 in AWS credits. Not bad, but probably not as big of a deal had they not just landed $1.3 million in new funding.

For next year’s AWS Challenge, Amazon is promising to open it up to a broader range of countries. They say they’ll announce details in early 2010.

Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are:

You also have to provision a set amount of storage, which is charged at $0.10 per GB-month (pre-provisioning means that you can run out of disk space, it wont grow out). Requests are charged at an additional $0.10 per million requests.

Backups are available (full, snapshots etc.) and backup space equivelant to the provisioned storage space is available for free. Additional space is $0.15 per month. Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB).

AWS offer a large range of services, and full RDBMS hosting seemed like an obvious service to offer. AWS has the existing SimpleDB service, which is a key-value based data store.

My initial take on the new RDS service is that it seems that it involves pre-defined and pre-configured EC2 instances with MySQL running. This makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances.

Your application will have to recognize that more resources are required, and make the appropriate API calls to either step up or down along the tiers of instances available. RDS, like most AWS services, provides building blocks for developers to use.

Update: Amazon has now officially announced the service on the AWS blog.

The Amazon Web Services blog brings word of the availability of two-factor authentication for AWS accounts. At thirteen bucks this is a pretty low-cost way to add substantial security to your AWS account. Hopefully we’ll see a broader adoption of two-factor authentication in the near future, as costs continue to come down.

The handset is available now, with no contract for $169.

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, since the user is responsible for clustering and or load-balancing solutions between the servers.

For users who need smaller scale solutions then EC2 would work well. I would say that it will only be a matter of time before we see some front-end providers pop up and offer “instant on” servers pre-configured for tasks such as web and mail hosting. How billing would be handled by these providers is an unknown, but this could open up the lower-end shared and virtual hosting markets since it can provide the end user everything they need where they pay only what they use for. The biggest advantage this service has is that it is a very quick way to setup a new server online, and you pay for what you use, starting at just the base rate for server time (10c per hour).

No word yet on when this service will be opened up to the general public, it is currently being trialed by a small number of long-time Amazon Web Services customers. Full documentation and forums are available on the site now.