Newsletters

To keep you up-to-date, here are the latest news items and announcements from AWS.

Give Us Your Feedback in the 2009 AWS Survey
We take customer feedback very seriously, and encourage you to share your opinions with us in the 2009 Amazon Web Services Survey. This survey is an opportunity for you to provide feedback on current services and services you'd like to see in the future. If you complete the survey and provide us with your e-mail address, you will be entered into a drawing for one $500 Amazon.com gift card or one of 10 $100 gift cards. The survey should take less than 20 minutes to complete and closes August 24, 2009. See Official Rules for more details.

Enter the AWS Start-Up Challenge Before August 26
We want to remind start-up leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel to enter their business ideas or existing start-ups for a chance to win $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. The deadline to enter is August 26. To learn more and enter the competition, visit the AWS Start-Up Challenge home page.

AWS Toolkit for Eclipse Adds Amazon SimpleDB Management
We are excited to introduce support for managing your Amazon SimpleDB data in the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse Java IDE. Using the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse, you'll be able to administer your Amazon SimpleDB domains, items, and attributes without writing a single line of code. We encourage you to check it out and contribute code to the project.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Now Supports Apache Pig
Amazon Elastic MapReduce now supports Apache Pig - making the service even more compelling for large data set processing and analytics. Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. Learn more in the Pig and Amazon Elastic MapReduce tutorial.

Systems Integrator Training
AWS is offering technical training for qualified systems integrators building solutions and practices on our cloud computing services. Trainings are conducted on a recurring monthly basis at several locations in the U.S. and Europe. To apply, please send an email to aws-ecosystem@amazon.com.

Featured Case Study: SOASTA and Intuit
SOASTA's CloudTest solution on AWS enabled Intuit to do massive spike testing as Intuit prepared its TurboTax program to support over 18 million online tax preparers during the peak of tax season. Read the full story

Check out what your peers have built with AWS. If you have a web application built on top of AWS or a tool that helps others integrate with AWS, submit your entry to the Solutions Catalog.

VMLogix LabManager
VMLogix's LabManager-Cloud Edition provides enterprises, ISVs and businesses with virtual lab management capabilities on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Assembla Private
Assembla Private is a dedicated server available as an Amazon EC2 image that helps organizations accelerate software development, collaborate, and save all of their code and knowledge in one place for simple maintenance.

Yebol
Yebol has created a knowledge based search (semantics) engine and has built their entire infrastructure of research, development and web services on the AWS cloud computing platform.

Join AWS and our partners at the following events.

Second Life Community Convention
August 13-16, San Francisco, CA
AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr will present a tutorial on the use of LSL (Linden Scripting Language), PHP, Amazon EC2, and Amazon SimpleDB to create a simple, highly scalable event and information tracking and visualization system for use in Second Life.

Amazon Mechanical Turk Meet-Ups
August 18, 6:00pm-8:00pm Seattle, WA
September 1, 6:00pm-8:00pm New York City, NY
Attend an evening event with the Mechanical Turk team and local users and learn how to use Mechanical Turk’s global, on-demand workforce to help you accomplish your business goals.

IBM Cloud Computing Seminar
August 25, 9:00am-5:00pm, Austin, TX
September 2, 9:00am-5:00pm, Atlanta, GA
September 8, 9:30am-5:30pm, Hursley, UK
October 20, 9:30am-5:30pm, Stuttgart, Germany
Attend these free events and learn from experts at IBM how to use Amazon EC2 pre-loaded with IBM middleware (WebSphere sMash and DB2) to adopt a SaaS model.

IBM Seminar: Introduction to SaaS, Multi-Tenancy, and Cloud Computing
September 1, 9:00am - 12:30pm, Atlanta, GA

AWS User Group - Paris
September 7, Paris, France
Attend the first AWS User Group meeting in Paris hosted by Martin Buhr and Christophe Baroux.

Find upcoming webinars and previously recorded events on the AWS Webinar page.

Data Warehousing in the AWS Cloud
August 12, 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
In this webinar, learn how a major pharmaceutical company, with the help of Recombinant Data Corp., leveraged the Amazon Web Services cloud for their healthcare data warehousing. The project featured 7 instances and is anticipated to expand beyond 37 TB of data. The result: greater scalability & performance which led to higher quality research outcomes, accelerated discoveries and lower costs.

Increase the Performance of Your Website With Amazon CloudFront
August 13, 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
In this webinar, you will learn how Amazon CloudFront can improve the performance of your website and cost you less than a traditional content delivery service (CDN). Amazon CloudFront is an easy to use, high performance content delivery service that lets you quickly and cost-effectively deliver website content to your users using a global network of edge locations in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Monetize Your Innovation With Amazon Payments
August 19, 11:30am -12:30pm PDT
In this webinar we will introduce you to the extensive feature set and functionality offered by Amazon Payments solutions to power your online business - Amazon Flexible Payments Service and Amazon Simple Pay. Join us to learn how you can make it easy for millions of Amazon customers to pay you on your ecommerce, digital goods, online services or social networking website or application.

Partner Webinar: eForms in the Cloud - Optimize Your Business and Solutions
August 24, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT
Learn how IBM Lotus Forms Turbo can be used on the AWS cloud to improve business productivity and streamline business processes. This in-depth webinar will offer complete details on easily building eForms and also introduce you to various types of eForms.

Partner Webinar: Mashups in Minutes - Speed the Creation of Situational Applications with IBM Mashup Center
September 1, 8:00am - 9:00am PDT
Learn how mashups can decrease your development time and reduce your application development backlog. This webinar will walk you through the process of creating your first mashup using IBM Mashup Center on AWS, including creating a new feed, transforming and remixing feeds, discovering widgets, wiring widgets together, and sharing mashups.