Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is virtually unlimited internet-based storage. Files (or Objects in S3 terminology) are stored in buckets. Think of buckets like file servers or file drives. More information about Amazon S3 can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/.
Today, we are making available a new action for Amazon S3: Copy S3 Objects. This new action will allow you to copy objects (files) from one S3 bucket to another. Those buckets can be in the same region, or they can be in different regions. For example, you can copy objects from US East 1 (Virginia) to US West 2 (Oregon).
Today we are expanding our set of actions for ElastiCache clusters. We have added an action called “Reboot ElastiCache Clusters”. Using this new action, you can reboot one or more of your ElastiCache clusters. They can be rebooted on a schedule, manually, or in response to an SNS notification such as a CloudWatch alert.
This new action is available now. Pricing for this action can be found on our pricing page.
Today, Amazon announces the immediate availability of the new C4 compute-optimized instance type. This new instance type is the highest-performing, compute-based instance type in the EC2 family.
Based on today’s information, it is about $0.01 more expensive than the C3 compute-optimized instance types, but they appear to be EBS-only. So that means that there are no on-board instance storage available (yet).
Today, we are happy to announce that we’ve added our first Simple Workflow Service (SWF) action: Start SWF Workflow Execution.
Amazon Simple Workflow is a service designed to coordinate workflows made up of discrete tasks.
AWS Lambda is an AWS service that allows you to execute your own code without having to spin up your own infrastructure. That is, you don’t have to launch your own EC2 instances in order to run your code.
Currently, AWS Lambda supports Node.js, but other languages are going to be added soon.
More information about AWS Lambda can be found at http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/.
Today, we have made available a new action that you can use with AWS Lambda: Execute Lambda Function.
During AWS re:Invent 2014, J.R. Storment from Cloudability did a session titled “Creating a Culture of Cost Management in Your Organization”. You can view this session on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaOLzxYiZlE
During this session, he mentioned a policy called “Tag or Terminate”. Basically, he says that if an instance has been up for 24-hours and it hasn’t been tagged according to your tagging policies, then the instance could be stopped. This can be an effective way to enforce your tagging policies for costing and reporting.
You can see this at 14:05 in the video.
Today, we’re happy to announce two new enhancements to our “Create RDS Snapshot” action:
These new features allow you to automatically create, tag, and copy your RDS snapshots for a full disaster recovery strategy.
Amazon recently released the ability to add resource tags to your Redshift clusters and snapshots. More information can be read about this new feature on the Amazon Web Services blog:
http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/redshift-tagging-and-more/
Today, we are happy to say that Skeddly’s “Create Redshift Snapshot” action supports adding resource tags to your Redshift snapshots. Simply add the new tags names and values to your action configuration and the extra tags will be added to the new snapshots.
For quite some time, Skeddly has enabled you to create EBS snapshots and tag them according to your backup and disaster recovery strategies. Also, Skeddly has been able to copy EBS snapshots between AWS regions according to your schedule. But this was done separately from the creation process.
Today, we are happy to announce that these capabilities have been combined. When you create an EBS snapshot, you can now choose to have that new EBS snapshot automatically copied to another region. This further streamlines your ability to use Skeddly in your disaster recovery strategies.
AWS re:Invent is Amazon’s largest gathering of Amazon Web Services users, developers, and representatives.
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
I had the opportunity to attend last year’s event and it was very worthwhile. You get the opportunity to meet users of the AWS community, learn use-cases and best-practices from many companies, and even get certified.
If you will be attending AWS re:Invent this year and you would like to meet up with us, feel free to contact us and we can arrange a time during that week.