#AWS review 2014 services workspace Zocalo CodeDeploy Aurora Config

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Top 10 announcements of AWS in 2014

2014 was a busy and challenging year for AWS Cloud, which faced a tough competition from other leading players such as Microsoft Azure, Google compute engine, who aggressively played catch up by announcing price reductions and new feature additions. However, Amazon has been an innovation leader in rolling out new features at a faster pace in the Cloud market.  

As mentioned by an analyst Carl Brooks “There has been a concerted effort from Amazon to become more enterprise-friendly. They still remain the gold standard of the cloud and they have at least a year’s lead over the competition in innovation,”.

By the end of the re:Invent 2014 conference, AWS had added over 454 significant features and services. And, AWS was the first one to announce one million active users on its cloud platform. Their customers include startups to over 900 government agencies – such as the navy and intelligence security agencies – academic institutions and large enterprises.

Here is a quick recap of the top 10 announcements of Amazon Web Services in 2014.

Early this year, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon WorkSpaces, a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud. One of the significant features that allow users to easily provision cloud-based desktops to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, or Android tablets. Users can also integrate Amazon WorkSpaces securely with their corporate Active Directory to seamlessly access company resources.

Amazon Mobile Analytics, a service that lets a user easily collect, visualize, and understand app usage data at scale. Amazon Mobile Analytics is designed to deliver usage reports within 60 minutes of receiving data from an app so that users can act on the data more quickly.

Amazon Cognito, a simple user identity and data synchronization service that helps customers securely manage and synchronize app data for their users across their mobile devices. Users can save app data locally on their devices allowing applications to work even when the devices are offline.

Amazon Zocalo, a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity. Users can comment on files, send them to others for feedback, and upload new versions without having to resort to emailing multiple versions of their files as attachments.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS), a managed service that makes it easy for users to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of keys. AWS Key Management Service is integrated with other AWS services including Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Redshift.

AWS Config, a fully managed service that provide users with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config users can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time.

AWS CodeDeploy, a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for users to rapidly release new features, helps avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications. AWS CodeDeploy can be used to automate deployments, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations, and the service scales with infrastructure so users can easily deploy to one EC2 instance or thousands.

Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a commercial database while delivering similar performance and availability.

AWS Lambda, a compute service that runs user’s code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. AWS Lambda can also be used to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. With AWS Lambda users pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run the code.

Amazon EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allow users to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EC2 Container Service lets users launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows to query the state of cluster from a centralized service, and gives access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.

With these incredible services, AWS has maintained its innovation leadership in the Cloud space. Let’s see how 2015’s cloud market pans out.

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Stay tuned!