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:

Infographic: Why are more more businesses moving to the cloud?

The cloud is one of the quickest growth areas in the IT sector, more and more businesses are using the cloud for their day to day processes and according to analysts TechMarketView, the UK market for cloud computing reached £1.2bn in 2011, 38 percent higher than the previous year. That’s some serious growth!

But why are businesses moving to the cloud? The reality is the cloud is fast becoming hard to ignore and in the infographic below we take a look at why:

SOURCE