SAN FRANCISCO–Amazon rolled out a massive set of new and updated cloud services at its AWS Summit in San Francisco today. Andy Jassy, the senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told a packed audience inside a cavernous keynote hall at Moscone North about a host of new services and updates to existing services all targeted at improving Amazon’s already robust cloud offerings.
The new AWS Elastic File System is a managed service that makes it easier for users to manage shared file systems in the cloud. As the name implies, EFS automatically scales a customer’s storage to fit the files that they have. In addition, it also scales throughput and input/output operations per second (IOPS) to match a customer’s performance needs. All of the data stored inside EFS can be accessed by multiple instances in the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud. A preview of the service will begin the summer of this year.
The Amazon Container Service, which was announced last year, reached general availability today, and received a few updates to make it more appealing to companies that rely on applications built in Docker containers. With that release, the service received a new management console and availability across four regions: US West, US East, EU West and Japan.
It now integrates with Amazon’s CloudTrail monitoring service, so users can track all the API calls running through the container, and received a new service scheduler. That scheduler will allow developers to scale containers up and down, distribute traffic using AWS’s Elastic Load Balancer service, automatically recover unhealthy containers and easily deploy updated containers and definitions.
AWS Lambda, Amazon’s compute service that’s built to handle quick workloads based on triggers from events, has also become generally available, with added features focused on mobile developers. Developers can call Lambda functions directly inside mobile apps, and the service has now been integrated into the AWS Mobile Software Development Kit to make it simpler for mobile devs to integrate.
All of those updates come alongside a pair of other key announcements for Amazon’s cloud platform. The company announced a Machine Learning service today that makes it easier for developers without a background in data science to take advantage of machine learning techniques. Amazon’s WorkSpaces virtual desktop service also received an update that adds a marketplace and management tools to make it easier to manage application deployment across a wide swath of users.
Overall, AWS is riding high in the cloud services market. There are 1 million non-Amazon users who have actively used AWS in the past month, and non-Amazon use of the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud in the fourth quarter of 2014 grew 93 percent year-over-year.
It’s a good sign for Amazon, which holds a dominant position in the public cloud market. The company is facing increased competition from a number of other players including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
