Weekly Roundup: Amazon Fires from all Guns

Monday March 18, 2013 , 2 min Read

Amazon continues to add more features to make AWS more appealing to enterprises and developers. Also, Rackspace has announced the launch of Rackspace Cloud Backup and introduced new features on Rackspace Open Cloud Servers.

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

IaaS leader Amazon has added some advanced features to Amazon VPC coupled with the simplicity of Amazon EC2. Users are now allowed to use features like assigning multiple IP addresses to an instance, changing security group membership on the fly and adding egress filters to your security groups. New features to VPC include DNS Hostnames, DNS Name Resolution, ElastiCache and RDS IP Addresses. Next, they have announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk will now support Node.js applications. Users can now build event-driven Node.js applications and can also use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and manage them on AWS.

Yet another announcement was the availability of the AWS Console for iPhone. The app summarizes the status of your EC2 instances, CloudWatch alarms, total service charges, and AWS Service Health. Also, allow viewing all EC2 instances, filtering and searching for a specific instance, and stop or rebooting an instance. Amazon has introduced a new feature Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy. This feature enables users to easily copy their Amazon Machine Images between AWS Regions.

They have also introduced three new features to make Amazon RDS even more powerful and more scalable:

Up to 3 TB of storage and 30,000 Provisioned IOPS.
Conversion from Standard Storage to Provisioned IOPS storage.
Independent scaling of IOPS and storage.

Finally, they have introduced a new feature that allows performing an in-place upgrade of SQL Server 2008 R2 database instances to SQL Server 2012 with just a few clicks.

Rackspace has announced the launch of Rackspace Cloud Backup. Rackspace Cloud Backup is fully integrated with Cloud Servers and offers a file-based alternative to backing up the whole server image. Next, has introduced some new features and functionality that enable customers to manage their applications on Rackspace Open Cloud Servers include: