The new AWS service can enhance existing solutions such as, online backups and introduce new ones such as, storing snapshots of on-premises applications. Also, it can help organizations integrate their disaster recovery and capacity scalability processes with Amazon’s EC2 and S3. The AWS Storage Gateway’s software appliance is installed on a host machine in the organization’s data center.

Read more – http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/?ref_=pe_12300_22527220

This is the seventh Region, and the fourth in North America. You can see the full list in the Region menu of the AWS Management Console. You can launch EC2 instances or store data in the new Region by simply making the appropriate selection from the menu.

For Region pricing, please see the detail page for each service at http://aws.amazon.com/products/

 To put you into perspective, Amazon compares the number of Objects as follows:

• 1,440 objects for every resident of the United States.
• 64 objects for each person on Planet Earth.
• 4 objects for every neuron in your brain.
• About as many S3 objects as there are stars in the Milky Way.

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With the new features you can configure your S3 bucket as a website. Requests made to your bucket configured as a website are served in HTML such as, returning the root document. In addition, you can set HTML error documents for use when a 4xx-class error occurs.

The mechanics of the new features are based on what is called Website Endpoints where Amazon S3 exposes a new website endpoint according to the region it resides in. Existing buckets continue to work the same way they always have and this makes the implementation smoother! You can specify the index document you want returned for requests made to the root of your website or for any subdirectory.

You can use the S3 tab of the AWS Management Console to enable your bucket as a website.

S3 is storage for the Internet provided by Amazon and was one of the first services offered to customers. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. It is based on a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

To store objects larger than 5 gigabytes, users have to use the Multipart Upload feature, which allows parallel uploads and streaming of large objects into Amazon S3 as they are being created. The AWS SDKs, the Amazon S3 Management Console, and the AWS Import/Export service have all added support for objects up to 5 terabytes in size. For more information on uploading large objects into Amazon S3, review the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

The cloud is not just a cool technology model but it is also a business model. It is a well-known fact that Amazon at the outset, designed the infrastructure for their own use but it evolved into a product or better a service offered as – Amazon’s Web, EC2, S3, or Amazon’s cloud. It is quite evident that now they are trying to increase their revenue by pushing their infrastructure to the limits through new offers such as, – Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. We all heard of power outages, resources that disappear and slower response times that may be a consequence of an overloaded setup. However, through personal experience I can say that these incidents are very rare with big providers such as, Amazon. Remember, that downtime is also possible with in-house solutions!

One common SaaS is email – if the main criteria are costs, then outsourcing email is your best option. Although, big corporations can negotiate favorable agreements with email providers such as, Google – remember that small to medium businesses may not get the same favor! A word about Google email and applications services – it is very hard to get reasonable support and you may need to rely on third-party tools for basic stuff such as, backing up email boxes. In addition, there is no guarantee that user data would be secure and backed up.

All cloud services share the available resources and therefore, you are competing for computer resources with other customers. A good alternative would be to place your assets with two different providers or use the cloud just to scale-up your systems when the demand rises. Although, you may implement all of the security measures provided by the cloud provider and by the systems themselves, there is still the risk of possible intrusion/destruction from neighboring hosts. Neighboring hosts are virtual machines that are running on the same server or in the same data center. One university claims to have a prototype/model that can identify the exact location of a virtual machine and eventually can start a neighboring VM (Virtual Machine) with high utilization that can hook the underlying platform! In the event of using the cloud as a storage provider, implementing data encryption would adequately harden security – read Securing your online backup archives

No cloud standards yet exist! If you are using the cloud as an infrastructure service, it is impossible to move your assets elsewhere say, to another cloud provider without rebuilding your systems from scratch and moving all your data, as virtual machines setups are not compatible from one provider to another. If you are using software as a service then you need to find another provider that provides the same service and data migration capabilities. Apart from all this, one of the major setbacks remains your Internet connection – so before contemplating to use cloud services make sure to invest in a good and reliable Internet connection, otherwise, you will be disappointed!