launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

["Francis J. Lacoste" <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

In the latest news from AWS, there is a feature which allows to boot instances 
from EBS instead from the regular AMI on S3. They advertise better boot time 
and also the possibility to create images without using the command-line 
tools. 

Maybe we could take advantage of that in our EC2 set-up?


----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: New AWS Northern California Region & Enhanced Amazon EC2 Boot Options
Date: December 4, 2009
From: Amazon Web Services <no-reply-aws@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxx" <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxx>

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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-------------------------------------------------------
-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis@xxxxxxxxxx

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