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Dear AWS Customers,
We are excited to announce the immediate availability of two frequently requested features including the new US-West (Northern California) Region and the ability to launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances directly from an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshot.
*The Northern California Region*
You can now choose to locate your AWS resources in our Northern California Region, which like other AWS Regions, contains multiple redundant Availability Zones. Utilizing this Region can reduce your data access latencies if you have customers or existing data centers in the Northern California area. This new Region is available for Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. For Northern California Region pricing, please see the detail page for each service on http://aws.amazon.com
*Amazon EC2 Boot from Amazon EBS*
Amazon EC2 has also announced the ability to boot instances directly from Amazon EBS snapshots, providing significantly increased flexibility in how customers can manage their instances. You can still save an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in an Amazon S3 bucket and boot it from the local instance store, but you can now also choose to save AMIs as Amazon EBS snapshots and boot directly from an Amazon EBS volume. When an instance is booted from an Amazon EBS snapshot, the root partition of the instance is created on an Amazon EBS volume. Instances booted from Amazon EBS volumes can be stopped and later restarted, preserving any of the state that is saved to your volume and allowing you to modify some properties of your instances while it is stopped. For example, you can change your instance size or update the kernel it is using, or attach your root partition to a different running instance, making it easier to do debugging when you are creating new boot images. When booting from an Amazon EBS volume, AMIs and root partitions are no longer limited to 10GB, but can be up to 1TB in size, enabling significantly more complex images. Additionally, you are not charged for stopped instance hours and you will only incur charges for your Amazon EBS volumes while your instance is stopped, allowing you to reduce your Amazon EC2 costs when you do not need your instances running. Customers can now use a newly launched API that makes it easy to bundle images without using the command line tools, and can also take advantage of the fact that the content of an Amazon EBS volume is available to the instance immediately on volume creation which can lead to much faster instance boot times. For more details on this new addition to Amazon EC2, please see the Boot from Amazon EBS Feature Guide (http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/BootFromEBSGSGGuide.pdf).
We are excited to deliver these frequently requested features. Please see the Northern California Region announcement (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/12/03/aws-launches-the-northern-california-region) or the Boot from Amazon EBS Feature Guide (http://ec2-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/BootFromEBSGSGGuide.pdf) to learn more about these new Amazon Web Services features.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team
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