The Amazon Web Service Customer & Partner Event was held in Las Vegas for only the second time but is set to become of the industries largest conferences in years to come. Around 9000 attendees and lots of product, customer and training announcements took place.

For me, the big announcements were Workspaces and Appstream however each of the items is covered below. We will provide a more detailed update in the future as we go through the limited preview.

Workspaces

Following customers request, Amazon added its own VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solution, featuring a complete Windows 7 desktop in different flavours ranging from one vCPU, 3.75 GiB of RAM and 50Gb of persistent user storage to 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB of RAM and 100Gb of storage always backed up to S3.

Pre-installed software includes the basic Adobe tools, Firefox and Java. Plus bundles spot Microsoft Office Professional and Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services

AWS’ desktop computing experience pricing starts at $35, per-user, monthly.

AppStream

This new service allows developers to run compute or rendering intensive applications, such as 3D games or interactive HD videos, on EC2 and then easily stream them to a variety of devices.

Using the all-new Amazon STX protocol, developers can access to device’s sensors or just render their graphics in the cloud. AppSteam runs on the new GPU instances, called G2 so that as A.Jassy said in its keynote “application is not constrained by the compute power, storage, or graphical rendering capabilities of the device”.

This service is currently in Limited Preview and its SDK runs only in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.

CloudTrail

It is now possible to track down calls to AWS APIs made using AWS Console, AWS CLI, SDKs, our Applications and third-party software. Logs from multiple accounts can be aggregated and published, in JSON format, to S3 buckets. SNS notifications are available to get notified every time a log file is uploaded.

PostgreSQL On RDS

Not sexy but a long-awaited announcement. The Amazon Relational Database Service adds support for PostgreSQL. Alongside the “usually” RDS goodies like Multi-AZ Deployments, Automated Backups, Point-in-time Recovery, Provisioned IOPS and the latest Cross-Region Snapshot Copy, PostgreSQL offers its own:

• Full-text search;
• Index-only scans;
• GiST Indexes, partial indexes, bitmap indexes and expression-based indexes;
• Data compression (Storage TOAST);
• Cost-based optimizer;
• Hstore and JSON data types.
• EC2 Instances

High Compute And I/O Performance Instances:

C3 Type: compute-optimized instances equipped with 2 SSD for Compute-Intensive Workloads. C3’s virtual cores (vCPU) are hardware Hyper-Thread cores running on a 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 with Ivy Bridge-EP microarchitecture. When launched from an HVM AMI, inside a Virtual Private Cloud these instances can benefit of the new EC2′s enhanced networking, installing the ixgbevf driver (if using other Linux flavours) and enabling the sriovNetSupport attribute.

I2 Type: High I/O Performance instances, spotting up to 8 x 720 GB Solid State Disks, 224 GiB of RAM, 32 vCPUs running on a 2.5 GHz Xeon E5-2670v2 – Ivy Bridge with Turbo mode enabled. Amazon claims the i2.8xlarge flavour will be capable of 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS.

Amazon Kinesis

A service for real-time processing of Big Data streaming, scalable in both processing and sharding aspects: “It can accept any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed.” and after that results are stored in S3, RedShift or DynamoDB or eventually discarded. More info on the Amazon Kinesis product page.