"Hello, I hope all is well with you. As you probably noticed I scheduled our next meeting and our focus will be back on EC2 to continue where we left off in our December meeting. ... MoreThe goal is to be very "hands on" and show the actual steps of setting up servers in EC2. I encourage you to take a second to fill out a one question survey to help us know if you would rather we focus the next session on Windows, Linux or the ROI/Costs of using EC2. Click here to put in your vote! In April we will be doing a joint meeting with Amazon and focusing entirely on Mechanical Turk. So if you or anyone you know has used Mechanical Turk and is interested in sharing your story during the April meeting, let me know. General Announcements Cloud Camp Chicago is coming up March 5th and 6th at the ITA, click here to register Model Metrics is hosting a free 30 minute webinar "Infrastructure A La Carte with Amazon Web Services" this Thursday at 1PM/CST. If you or any co-workers are interested in attending, click here to register Best regards, John John Barnes CTO - Model Metrics Email: [masked] "

"Today Amazon made a couple of interesting announcements. First off they have opened a new region (Northern California) with multiple availability zones (analogous to data centers, but each on separate flood plains and electrical grids). ... MoreThis further increases their computing capacity and also puts data closer to all of the start-up’s in the Bay area that rely on Amazon. The also have a US-East region, EU region and will have regions in Asia in 2010. The key announcement however centers around some changes and enhancements to EC2 (their virtualized computing layer). One of the main criticisms and design challenges with EC2 has been around the fact that when you shut down a server, the state of that server is lost (unlike VMWare). There were ways around it (such as storing all data on EBS (analogous to a mounted drive on your virtual instance), but it did present some challenges. Today they announced the availability to save server state with a new Stop command, which unlike Terminate, saves the state of that running server. This feature is enabled because you can also now boot from EBS, instead of S3. This leads to a faster boot time, and also makes it easier to tune your kernel or make other changes to an image. Upon boot you can also mount multiple EBS volumes which can lead to some very robust configurations. Another challenge of EC2 was creating an image (AMI) of a server once you had it set up. This was fairly easy for a windows instance (using the Bundle process) but was more difficult for a Linux instance. Now you can use the CreateImage command to create a new AMI and register it in one easy step. See all the details here. These are great enhancements to EC2 and are a welcome addition to the AWS offering. "