QuickBase & Amazon Web Services- Closer Look

A very nice way of representing AWS and Cloud Concepts...

If above is not visible, access it at the SOURCE.

Get Started With Oracle Applications Now With Our New Test Drive Program

AWS has just launched Oracle Test Drive Labs.

The purpose of the Oracle Test Drive program is to provide customers with the ability to quickly and easily explore the benefits of using Oracle software on AWSserver infrastructure.

These labs have been developed by Oracle and AWS partners and are provided free of charge for educational and demonstration purposes.

Each Test Drive lab includes up to 5 hours of complimentary AWS server time to complete the lab, and you can return here and to try any or all of the Test drive Labs at any time, so feel free to experiment and explore!

Please note that there may be some pre-requisitesfor few labs. Kindly understand them, acquire the required accounts or softwares before proceeding with the labs.

For example, Oracle Secure Backup to S3 requires Oracle Technet (OTN) account.

The products vary from Oracle products for Database and Infrastructure, Oracle Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

We can select from nearly a dozen labs which include but are not limited to: 

• Oracle Data Guard Disaster Recovery
• Oracle Secure Backup to S3
• Siebel on AWS

Read below post by Jeff for sample demo of back up Oracle database to AWS using the Oracle Secure Backup product.

One of the key advantages that customers and partners are telling us they really appreciate about AWS is its unique ability to cut down the time required to evaluate new software stacks. These "solution appliances" can now be easily deployed on AWS and evaluated by customers in hours or days, rather than in weeks or months, as is the norm with the previous generation of IT infrastructure.
With this in mind, AWS has teamed up with leading Oracle ecosystem partners on a new initiative called the Oracle Test Drive program.

Amazon RDS - Now Available in the AWS Free Usage Tier

Good News!!!

AWS has announced AWS RDS Support in AWS Free Usage Tier. Prior to this, AWS only supported AWS RDS - SQL Server in Free tier, such as:

 



Earlier



 

But starting today, AWS has announced support for all databases of AWS RDS :



Starting October 1st, 2012



NOTE:
* These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

‡‡ Amazon RDS free tier is currently not available in VPC.


Read below abstract from Jeff's post on AWS Blog :

[...]  Our customers appreciate the fact that they can launch DB Instances on demand at very affordable hourly rates, with the option to purchase Reserved DB Instances to reduce their costs even more. Here's a video (featuring Biswaroop Palit of the Amazon RDS team) with more information about what RDS is and how it will simplify your life:

 

We are now adding RDS to the AWS Free Usage Tier. New AWS customers (see the AWS Free Usage Tier FAQ for eligibility details) can use the MySQL, Oracle (BYOL licensing model), or SQL Server database engines on a Micro DB Instance for up to 750 hours per month, along with 20 GB of database storage, 10 million I/Os and 20 GB of backup storage. When you combine this new capability with the existing EC2 usage available on the Free Usage Tier, you may be to build and run a complete multi-tiered web application without spending a penny. Here's another video with more information on this important new development:

 

 

AWS WEBINAR

 

In order to help you to get the most from Amazon RDS on Oracle, we'll be hosting a free RDS webinar at 10:00 AM (PT) on October 18th.

 

Attend the webinar to learn how RDS lets you focus on your business by addressing the key pain points that come with Oracle database administration.

 

SOURCE for Jeff's Blog Post.

 

AWS Week in Review - September 24th to September 28th, 2012

 

 

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Monday, September 24	The good folks at Newvem published an article on Getting Started with AWS Direct Connect.
Tuesday, September 25	NASDAQ OMX announced FinQloud, a cloud solution for the financial services industry. AWS introduced Provisioned IOPS for Amazon RDS.
Wednesday, September 26	AWS announced that Amazon RDS now supports SQL Server 2012.
Thursday, September 27	You can now run Amazon RDS for Oracle Database starting at just $30/month. The AWS Management Console now includes support for CloudFront Private Content. AWS added two new Direct Connect providers, Telx and Atlantic Metro.
Friday, September 28	AWS added over 50 new listings to the AWS Marketplace including many popular OSS offerings from Turnkey Linux such as Canvas,Sencha, and SugarCRM. AWS also added GoAnimate For Business, Riverbed Cloud Steelhead WAN Optimization and others.

SOURCE

Big Data & The Cloud

A good presentation by Joe Ziegler at the 5th Elephant conference in Bangalore.

View to know WHY Cloud is Big Data's BEST FRIEND !

Big Data & The Cloud from Amazon Web Services

Eucalyptus - An Overview of On-premise IaaS and AWS

Presentation from AWS Worldwide Public Sector team's conference Building and Securing Applications in the Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/campaigns/building-securing-applications-cloud/).

Eucalyptus - An Overview of On-premise IaaS and AWS from Amazon Web Services

Amazon RDS Now Supports SQL Server 2012

Want to try SQL Server 2012 ? Now dont invest in hardware and software. AWS RDS now supports SQL Server 2012 with easy to use interface and very affordable prices.

With added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Amazon RDS customers can use the new features Microsoft has introduced as part of SQL Server 2012 including improvements to manageability, performance, programmability, and security.

Read more below extract from Jeff's Blog on the announcement :

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports SQL Server 2012.You can now launch the Express, Web, and Standard Editions of this powerful database from the comfort of the AWS Management Console. SQL Server 2008 R2 is still available, as are multiple versions and editions of MySQL and Oracle Database.

If you are from the Microsoft world and haven't heard of RDS, here's the executive summary:

You can run the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft in a fully managed environment. RDS will install and patch the database, make backups, and detect and recover from failures. It will also provide you with a point-and-click environment to make it easy for you to scale your compute resources up and down as needed.

What's New?

SQL Server 2012 supports a number of new features including contained databases, columnstore indexes, sequences, and user-defined roles:

• A contained database is isolated from other SQL Server databases including system databases such as "master." This isolation removes dependencies and simplifies the task of moving databases from one instance of SQL Server to another.
• Columnstore indexes are used for data warehouse style queries. Used properly, they can greatly reduce memory consumption and I/O requests for large queries.
• Sequences are counters that can be used in more than one table.
• The new user-defined role management system allows users to create custom server roles.

Read the SQL Server What's New documentation to learn more about these and other features.

You can launch SQL Server 2012 from the AWS Management Console. First you select the edition that best meets your needs:

Then you fill in the details (SQL Server 2012 is version 11), and your DB Instance will be launched in a matter of minutes:

Yes, This is Cool!

You can now get started with SQL Server 2012 without having to invest in hardware or buying a license. If you are eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier,  you can get started without spending a penny. You can launch a DB Instance, evaluate the product, do a trial migration of your data, and learn all about the new features at minimal cost. When the time comes to move your organization to SQL Server 2012, you'll already have experience using it in a real-world environment. 

For more information on what’s new in SQL Server 2012, please visit Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012 MSDN documentation.

To learn more about using RDS for SQL Server 2012, please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server detail page, AWS documentation and FAQs.

Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads

A very well put up Blog on Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads by Eric Hammond. Some useful extract from the Blog.

When you need an AWS command line toolset not provided by Ubuntu packages, you can download the tools directly from Amazon and install them locally.Unfortunately, Amazon does not have one single place where you can download all the command line tools for the various services, nor are all of the tools installed in the same way, nor do they all use the same format for accessing the AWS credentials.

The following steps show how to install and configure the AWS command line tools provided by Amazon [...]

Prerequisites

Install required software packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-6-jre ruby1.8-full libxml2-utils unzip cpanminus build-essential

Create a directory where all AWS tools will be installed:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/aws

Now we’re ready to start downloading and installing all of the individual software bundles that Amazon has released and made available in scattered places on their web site and various S3 buckets.

Download and Install AWS Command Line Tools

These steps should be done from an empty temporary directory so you can afterwards clean up all of the downloaded and unpacked files.

Note: Some of these download URLs always get the latest version and some tools have different URLs every time a new version is released. Click through on the tool link to find the latest [Download] URL.

EC2 API command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-api-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-api-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

EC2 AMI command line tools:

wget --quiet http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip
unzip -qq ec2-ami-tools.zip
sudo rsync -a --no-o --no-g ec2-ami-tools-*/ /usr/local/aws/ec2/

Elastic Detector : Elastic Vulnerability Assessment

 

SecludIT developed a new approach to vulnerability assessment by using the elasticity of IaaS: Elastic Vulnerability Assessment - EVA.

Elastic Detector is Secludit's fully automated security event detection tool for Amazon EC2. 

It helps administrators and users of Amazon EC2-based infrastructures to continuously identify holes on security groups and applications, thus dramatically reducing the risk of external and internal attacks. 

It is Delivered as SaaS or Virtual Appliance (currently only running on US East Region).

In contrary to existing tools, you don’t need to install any additional software, such as agents, and do not need to configure any monitors up-front.

If you want to know more about Elastic Detector, watch the video below or try the service for free under elastic-detector.secludit.com.

AWS Announcement : High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage For Amazon RDS

 

After announcing EBS Provisioned IOPS offering lately which allows you to specify both volume size and volume performance in term of number of I/O operations per second (IOPS),  AWS has now announced High Performance Provisioned IOPS Storage for Amazon RDS.

 

You can now create an RDS database instance and specify your desired level of IOPS in order to get more consistent throughput and performance.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is immediately available for new database instances in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and EU West (Ireland) Regions and AWS plan to launch in other AWS Regions in the coming months.

 

AWs is rolling this out in two phases. Read on more the extract from the announcement on AWS Blog by Jeff.

 

 

    

                   We are rolling this out in two stages. Here's the plan:

 

• Effective immediately, you can provision new RDS database instances with 1,000 to 10,000 IOPS, and with 100GB to 1 TB of storage for MySQL and Oracle databases. If you are using SQL Server, the maximum IOPS you can provision is 7,000 IOPS. All other RDS features including Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and the Virtual Private Cloud, are also supported.
  
  
 
• In the near future, we plan to provide you with an automated way to migrate existing database instances to Provisioned IOPS storage for the MySQL and Oracle database engines. If you want to migrate an existing database instance to Provisioned IOPS storage immediately, you can export your data and re-import it into a new database instance equipped with Provisioned IOPS storage.

We expect database instances with RDS Provisioned IOPS to be used in demanding situations. For example, they are a perfect host for I/O-intensive transactional (OLTP) workloads.

We recommend that customers running production database workloads use Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS for the best possible performance. (By the way, for mission critical OLTP workloads, you should also consider adding the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ option to improve availability.)

Check out the video with Rahul Pathak of the Amazon RDS team to learn more about this new feature and how some of AWS customers were using it:

Responses from AWS customers :

• AWS customer Flipboard uses RDS to deliver billions of page flips each month to millions of mobile phone and tablet users. Sang Chi, Data Infrastructure Architect at Flipboard told us:

"We want to provide the best possible reading and content delivery experience for a rapidly growing base of users and publishers. This requires us not only to use a high performance database today but also to continue to improve our performance in the future. Throughput consistency is critical for our workloads. Based on results from our early testing, we are very excited about Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS and the impact it will have on our ability to scale. We’re looking forward to scaling our database applications to tens of thousands of IOPS and achieving consistent throughput to improve the experience for our users."

• AWS customer Shine Technologies uses RDS for Oracle to build complex solutions for enterprise customers. Adam Kierce, their Director said:

"Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS provided a turbo-boost to our enterprise class database-backed applications. In the past, we have invested hundreds of days in time consuming and costly code based performance tuning, but with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS we were able to exceed those performance gains in a single day. We have demanding clients in the Energy, Telecommunication, Finance and Retail industries, and we fully expect to move all our Oracle backed products onto AWS using Amazon RDS for Oracle over the next 12 months. The increased performance of Amazon's RDS for Oracle with Provision IOPS is an absolute game changer, because it delivers more (performance) for less (cost)."

 

SOURCE 

AWS Week in Review - September 17th to September 23rd, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Monday, September 17	§   AWS added four new checks to the AWS Trusted Advisor including EC2 Reserved Instance Optimization, VPN Tunnel Redundancy, RDS Backup, and RDS Multi-AZ.
Tuesday, September 18	§   AWS introduced Auto Scaling termination policies to give you additonal control over the scale-down process.
Friday, September 21	§ Developer Andy Chilton released version 0.11.0 of Awssum, a collection of node.js modules for AWS.

SOURCE
 

AWS Week in Review - September 10th to September 16th, 2012

 



Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Tuesday, September 11	AWS launched the EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace.
Wednesday, September 12	AWS  announced that Cluster GPU Instances are now available in the EU West (Ireland) region and inside of VPCs. AWS  opened up a new CloudFront / Route 53 edge location in Madrid, Spain.
Thursday, September 13	AWS  published a tutorial to show you how to manage ASP.Net session state using DynamoDB. AWS  announced that Oracle Data Pump can now be used to import and export data from an Amazon RDS DB Instance. AWS  announced the AWS Global Start-Up Challenge. You can now use RDS for SQL Server inside of a Virtual Private Cloud. AWS  added additional VPN features to the Virtual Private Cloud.

SOURCE

Sign in to and Use the AWS Account

In this guide, lets understand below topics:

• Understand AWS Manament Console
• Different ways of logging into the AWS Management Console.
• Sign into the AWS Management Console using the Account level credentials
• Configure AWS Management Console as per your suitability.

AWS Management Console simple definition by AWS :

Access and manage Amazon’s growing suite of infrastructure web services through a simple and intuitive, web-based user interface. The AWS Management Console provides convenient management of your compute, storage, and other cloud resources.

AWS constantly keeps pushing new features and support for various services in the console. If any feature is not available throught the AWS Management Console, the user must employ the APIs and/or SDKs provided by AWS.

In AWS, there are basically two different ways for a user to sign in to the AWS Management Console for handling the services:

• Using the Account level credentials

Consider this as a "POWER USER LOGIN" (this is a term coined by me to set perspective and not by AWS)

A user can sign in using the typical AWS Console login URL. The user must use email-address using which the account is created and password provided.

This way of sign in allows the user complete control over the AWS services, resources and  account management.

In this guide we will be concentrating more on Account-level login to the AWS Management Console.  

• Amazon Indentity and Access Management (IAM) User

Consider this as a "ACCESS CONTROLLED USERs"(this is a term coined by me to set perspective and not by AWS)

In case there is need of more than 1 user to login to the AWS account, you can use the IAM Service. Each user may have same or different access controls over the various AWS services and resources. The users can sign into the console using a different alias, specific to your account and using specific user login name & password. These privilieges are not only applicable to the AWS Management Console. The same can be applied to the use of SDKs and APIs. This can be achieved by creating user specific Access Keys and Secret Keys.

IAM also enables identity federation between your corporate directory and AWS services.

I'm NOT covering IAM user login in this tutorial, but I will surely write a guide on the topic and provide updated links.

Sign into the AWS Management Console using the Account level credentials :

Amazon VPC - New Additions

 

AWS has added 3 new features / options to the  Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service.

 

• Create Hardware VPN connections to your VPC using static routing.
• Configure automatic propagation of routes from your VPN and Direct Connect links (gateways) to your VPC's routing tables
• Launch RDS database instances running Microsoft SQL Server inside of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

 

PFB extract for the two blogs written by Jeff on the same:

 

Amazon VPC - Additional VPN Features

 

The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gives you the power to create a private, isolated section of the AWS Cloud. You have full control of network addressing. Each of your VPCs can include subnets (with access control lists), route tables, and gateways to your existing network and to the Internet.

 

You can connect your VPC to the Internet via an Internet Gateway and enjoy all the flexibility of Amazon EC2 with the added benefits of Amazon VPC. You can also setup an IPsec VPN connection to your VPC, extending your corporate data center into the AWS Cloud. Today we are adding two options to give you additional VPN connection flexibility:

1. You can now create Hardware VPN connections to your VPC using static routing. This means that you can establish connectivity using VPN devices that do not support BGP such as Cisco ASA and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. You can also use Linux to establish a Hardware VPN connection to your VPC. In fact, any IPSec VPN implementation should work.
2. You can now configure automatic propagation of routes from your VPN and Direct Connect links (gateways) to your VPC's routing tables. This will make your life easier as you won’t need to create static route entries in your VPC route table for your VPN connections. For instance, if you’re using dynamically routed (BGP) VPN connections, your BGP route advertisements from your home network can be automatically propagated into your VPC routing table.

If your VPN hardware is capable of supporting BGP, this is still the preferred way to go as BGP performs a robust liveness check on the IPSec tunnel. Each VPN connection uses two tunnels for redundancy; BGP simplifies the failover procedure that is invoked when one VPN tunnel goes down.

Cancel an AWS Account

AWS allows users to cancel their AWS account.

If you wish to cancel your AWS account follow the below steps:

• Login to your AWS Account as a returning user by selecting the option : "I am a returning user and password is:" , click on Sign in using our secure server button.

Create an AWS Account - Free Usage Tier

Amazon Web Services helps its new customers to get started into the cloud by introducing a free usage tier. This tier is available to customers for 12 months. 

Below are the highlights of AWS’s free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except SWF, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely):

NOTE:

Below Image is updated as of October 1st,2012 for AWS RDS announcement. For latest updates, please check AWS Free Tier for more details

 

 

Do check AWS Free Tier for more details.

How to get started:

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace

Superbly detailed blog Post by Jeff on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace

No more words need to be added....

EC2 Options

I often tell people that cloud computing is equal parts technology and business model. Amazon EC2 is a good example of this; you have three options to choose from:

• You can use On-Demand Instances, where you pay for compute capacity by the hour, with no upfront fees or long-term commitments. On-Demand instances are recommended for situations where you don't know how much (if any) compute capacity you will need at a given time.
  
• If you know that you will need a certain amount of capacity, you can buy an EC2 Reserved Instance. You make a low, one-time upfront payment, reserve it for a one or three year term, and pay a significantly lower hourly rate. You can choose between Light Utilization, Medium Utilization, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances to further align your costs with your usage.
  
• You can also bid for unused EC2 capacity on the Spot Market with a maximum hourly price you are willing to pay for a particular instance type in the Region and Availability Zone of your choice. When the current Spot Price for the desired instance type is at or below the price you set, your application will run.

Reserved Instance Marketplace

Today we are increasing the flexibility of the EC2 Reserved Instance model even more with the introduction of the Reserved Instance Marketplace. If you have excess capacity, you can list it on the marketplace and sell it to someone who needs additional capacity. If you need additional capacity, you can compare the upfront prices and durations of Reserved Instances on the marketplace to the upfront prices of one and three year Reserved Instances available directly from AWS. The Reserved Instances in the Marketplace are functionally identical to other Reserved Instances and have the then-current hourly rates, they will just have less than a full term and a different upfront price.