Amazon Anouncements

Anouncement/Response

EC2 Crosses the Atlantic
Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the European Union (EU) to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when required. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the US.

The servers offered by Amazon sound very appealing for companies. I personally do not have enough traffic.

Public Data Sets
AWS has announced the availability of public data sets hosted in Elastic Block Store (EBS), part of Amazon EC2. These data sets are available for free, with only EC2 runtime charges for accessing and using the data. The first data sets come from various biology, chemistry, and economic sources.

This information could be very valuable to do scientific research. This data could highlight trends in human behavior in order to make some prediction on what will happen.

Requester Pays Option for Amazon S3
Amazon S3 has released the Requester Pays feature that makes it easy and cost-effective to share data stored in Amazon S3. You can now configure a bucket to bill the requester, rather than the bucket owner, for both request and bandwidth fees. Also, when used in conjunction with Amazon DevPay, you can sell access to data stored in Amazon S3 either as a subscription or by marking up individual request fees.

This is not really applicable to me as I do not get nearly enough traffic to even slow down my own server running through DSL.

New SQL-like SELECT API for Amazon SimpleDB
To make it even easier to get started with SimpleDB, the SimpleDB team has released the SELECT API, which is very similar to the SQL syntax. The introduction of this query option allows developers to quickly become productive using the web service without sacrificing the intrinsic benefits of the SimpleDB model: scalability, flexibility, and high availability.

This is interesting. It reminds me of Facebook's FQL.

Featured Case Study: Channel Intelligence
In commercial applications, automated subjective intelligence is neither cheap nor easy to implement. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Channel Intelligence was able to leverage human intelligence around the globe and decrease task-specific costs by 85%. Read the full story.

It is always good to share intelligence!