Hello all,

The Amazon Web Services offering is constantly evolving as the services are updated and improved.

From time to time, I will publish articles that discuss these changes in depth, with a view to keeping readers of Programming Amazon Web Services up-to-date with major improvements.

I will add links to these articles in this topic, so keep an eye on it.

Cheers,
James

Programming Amazon EC2 Version 2008-02-01

Amazon has released an updated version of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API with the version name 2008-02-01. This release includes the new features:

• User Selectable Kernels – Choose to run an alternative Linux kernel on your instance, in order to benefit from newer or differently-configured kernel versions.
• Availability Zones – Choose the locations in which your instances will run. You can distribute your instances across different locations for better fault tolerance, or concentrate them in a single location to minimize network latency and data transfer costs.
• Elastic IP Addresses – Reserve your own public IP addresses in the EC2 environment, and assign these addresses to your instances on demand. Elastic IPs allow you to make an instance accessible at a known public IP address, without the need to use a dynamic DNS service to simulate a static IP.

Read the article for a description of the new features, as well as example code for using the updated EC2 client that is available in the latest sample code archive.

I have added an article about the S3 service's POST upload feature to the AWS resources site: Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms.

The article describes how to create HTML POST forms that allow your web site visitors to upload files into your S3 account using a standard web browser.

I have added a new article to the AWS resources site: PAWS Marketplace - A Rails Marketplace Application in the Cloud.

The PAWS Marketplace is a proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails web application that runs entirely on Amazon Web Services. The application’s web site allows anyone with an Amazon Payments account to buy or sell digital products, while the marketplace’s owner earns commissions for the sales it performs. In addition to serving as an example marketplace implementation, this application is interesting because it uses the SimpleDB service to store its data instead of a traditional relational database.

The article describes how to install and run the marketplace web site yourself. It also includes links to the example code, and to a screencast video that demonstrates how to configure and use the marketplace web site.