If you are an Amazon Web Services user (aka AWS or Amazon Cloud or Amazon EC2) or are thinking about giving these services a test drive, you may be interested in this video of the Keynote address by Andy Jassy (Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services) at the AWS Summit in January 2015.
While the video may convey a sense of corporate cheerleading, I think it is worth a look because it provides an introduction to AWS’s new services, including the following (and I take the text verbatim from the material at the Summit):
Amazon Elastic File System
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a new, fully-managed service that makes it easy to set up and scale shared file storage in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS supports NFSv4, and is designed to be highly available and durable. Amazon EFS can support thousands of concurrent EC2 client connections, making it ideal for use cases that require on-demand scaling of file system capacity and performance.
Amazon Machine Learning
Amazon Machine Learning makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology. Amazon Machine Learning is based on the same proven machine learning (ML) technology used by Amazon’s internal data scientists. The service guides you through the process of creating ML models and then generates predictions for your application without having to manage any infrastructure.
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now generally available to all AWS customers. Amazon ECS is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure. You can launch and stop container-enabled applications, query the complete state of your cluster, and access many familiar features like security groups, Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
Build Mobile Backends with AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is now generally available for production use and is introducing new features that make it even easier to build mobile, tablet, and IoT backends that scale automatically without provisioning or managing infrastructure. AWS Lambda now supports both real-time (synchronous) and asynchronous events, and has added additional features that make it even easier to configure and manage event sources.
New AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps
AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps is a new category on the AWS Marketplace that makes it easy to search for and buy desktop applications for Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM) makes it easy to manage and deploy these applications on-demand and at scale, or upload, deploy, and manage your own applications.
New Features for Mobile Developers
With the general availability of AWS Lambda, and its integration with Amazon SNS and Amazon Cognito, mobile developers can build apps easily. Run custom code in response to events on mobile devices without worrying about compute, storage, load balancing, or performance. You can also trigger Lambda Functions using Amazon SNS and Amazon Cognito – enabling you to dynamically and automatically improve app experiences.
Many thanks to David Imel for pointing out the video to me.
Astronomy Computing Today 