Last week in cloud computing: all the news from AWS re:Invent 2014 (so many new services!), while Azure SDK 2.5 and Deploy to Azure hit the virtual streets.
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- AWS held its event, which meant more Amazon cloud announcements than you can shake a thunderstick at. We’ll dive in with AWS Lambda, which allows you to code and link together different AWS platforms in a single environment. Compute time is paid for in 100 millisecond units. Right now, only three regions are offering it — US East, US West and Ireland — but more are expected in the future.
- Elsewhere on the coding front, AWS added three new tools for code management and deployment: CodeDeploy, CodeCommit and CodePipline. Only CodeDeploy, which can deploy a single code base to multiple EC2 instances, is available immediately.
- Docker support has been a major focus for cloud services in recent months. AWS has launched a preview version of EC2 Container Service, which enables running multiple cloud instances across a cluster of EC2 systems.
- Another re:Invent debut was for Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-based database platform. That service is in preview.
- The event saw the launch of AWS Key Management Service (KMS), a management platform for encryption keys.
- New instance types have also been announced for EC2. The new C4 instances use a custom version of Intel’s Haswell chip, with the biggest offering 36 virtual CPUs and 10GBps of network performance. No word yet on pricing or whether these will feature in every AWS region.
- Similarly, while we’ve been told new and larger Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes will launch in the near future, pricing and regions haven’t yet been disclosed. Ditto for AWS Service Catalog.
- AWS Config is available for immediate use, but only in US East — but we are promised all regions will be supported eventually. The configuration management service is designed to automatically track changes to AWS services over time.
- Amazon’s S3 service can now automatically deliver notifications to SQS, SNS or Lambda whenever an object stored in S3 is modified — handy if you’re building apps that rely on S3 for object storage.
- The new Azure SDK 2.5 for .Net is the first SDK to work with the preview version of Visual Studio 2015, which Microsoft announced during the week.
- Microsoft has launched a preview version of Azure Operational Insights, a platform as a service offering aimed at IT managers. The platform includes “Intelligence Packs”, preconfigured analytical tools to help develop and roll out new cloud-based services.
- Another Azure preview rolled out this week was for Azure Websites Authentication/Authorisation, which lets you use Active Directory credentials from Azure when hosting apps online.
- The new Deploy To Azure button provides a simple way to deploy to Azure Websites from a Git repository.
- Azure DocumentDB has updated with support for bulk adding documents and query syntax highlighting.
Cloud Patches rounds up new features and services added to major cloud computing platforms each week..
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