Amazon Web Services revises support plans, cuts prices
Amazon has revised its support pricing for Amazon Web Services, expanding basic free support and lowering the cost of premium support.
The company has also added a number of support features, including alerts and the ability to interact with support personnel through chat.
Launched in 2006, AWS has been widely used by organizations and users looking to outsource their computer infrastructure by tapping into IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings. It provides computing nodes, databases, storage, load balancing and other services, all available on pay-as-you-go pricing plans. Read more...
Amazon offers cloud apps at hourly rates from IBM, SAP, others
Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced a new online marketplace that allows customers to buy software and services from a variety of vendors at hourly rates through its cloud infrastructure platform.
Commercial software vendors including IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and CA Technologies are offering products for sale on the site. A variety of open-source software is also available, including the Drupal content management system, SugarCRM and a number of application development stacks. Read more...
Amazon Web Services launches CloudSearch
Amazon Web Services has introduced CloudSearch, which allows users of its cloud to integrate fully managed and highly scalable search functionality into their applications, the company said on Thursday.
CloudSearch is based on the same A9 technology that powers search for Amazon.com, the company said
To use the search functionality, IT staff start by creating a search domain and uploading the data they want searchable. CloudSearch then automatically provisions the technology resources required and the indexes needed, the company said. Read more...
Amazon Web Services updates Linux implementation
Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL, and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Allowing enterprises to run different versions of applications and programming languages has been one of the major goals with version 2012.03 of the Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image). It allows code that relies on different versions to migrate from older AMIs with minimal changes, according to Amazon. Read more...
Amazon deal alone can’t save Eucalyptus from OpenStack
Private cloud company Eucalyptus got a much-needed boost yesterday when public cloud giant Amazon announced it will support interoperability between Amazon Web Services and the startup's own open source platform.
Though the deal with Amazon should help increase Eucalyptus' enterprise appeal, it by no means guarantees the struggling company's success; rather, it ensures that the company will persevere a while longer in the face of competitive pressure -- particularly from rival open source, private cloud upstart OpenStack. Read more...