re:Cap of AWS re:Invent: 10 cool new Amazon Cloud features

At Amazon Web Services' third annual re:Invent cloud computing conference the market's leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public provider revealed a variety of new cloud service features. Here's a recap of AWS's announcements from re:Invent 2014.

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). AWS says it combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Aurora can process 6 million inserts to its database per minute, and 30 million selects per minute. AWS says that's five times faster than using MySQL on its EC2 VMs.

Cost: Pricing is based on the instance type and starts as low as .29/hour.

Availability: In preview now

AWS CodeCommit

AWS made a number of announcements related to application life-cycle management (ALM), which is the process of building and managing new applications. One service is AWS CodeCommit,which works with Git to host private repositories of code in AWS's cloud.

Cost: No pricing information yet

Availability: Early 2015.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: More hot products from AWS re:Invent partners +

AWS Config

Last year AWS announced CloudTrail, a service that lets users get a list of all the actions that have happened in a user's account. This year AWS introduced AWS Config, a sort of next generation version of that offering that provides customers with full visibility into their AWS resources and associated relationships, lets them audit resource configuration history, and notifies them of resource configuration changes.

Cost: Pricing is $0.003 per Configuration Item recorded.

Availability: In preview now

AWS CodeDeploy

Another ALM tool, CodeDeploy is a scalable service that lets developers quickly and simply automate the process of deploying and updating applications on Amazon EC2.

Cost: No additional charge for AWS CodeDeploy. You pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances or S3 buckets) you create to store and run your application though.

Availability: Now

AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline is an automated continuous delivery service to ease deployments. It's based off of a tool AWS uses internally to build code, and allows developers to check code in, edit code and release it to production.

Cost: No pricing details are available yet.

Availability: Early 2015.

Amazon EC2 Container Service

Amazon EC2 Container Service is a service for creating and scaling containers that supports Docker. It works with EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual machines, allowing users to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances using containers.

Cost: No additional price above the underlying services, such as EC2 or Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Availability: Preview available now

New EC2 Instance type: C4

C4 is a new compute-optimized virtual machine instance type that includes new 2.9 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processors. They run up to 36 virtual CPUs and are optimized to be used with AWS EBS (Elastic Block Storage).

Pricing: Not yet available

Availability: Coming soon

AWS Key Management Service

AWS Key Management Service makes it easy for customers to create and control the keys used to encrypt their data on the AWS Cloud. It uses the Hardware Security Module, a box that sits on customers' premises, and works with all the other AWS services. It provides centralized control of encryption including new key creation and rotation, usage policies, and logging from the AWS Management Console, or by using the API.

Cost: Pricing is based on number of keys and usage. Each key created in the AWS Key Management Service costs $1/month. If a customer opts in to have a key automatically rotated each year, each new version will cost $1/month. Customers are not charged for the storage of default service keys, which are automatically created on their behalf. AWS Key Management Service provides a free tier that includes up to 20,000 requests/month. Each operation for which a customer uses a key in AWS Key Management Service (outside of the free tier) costs $0.03 per 10,000 requests.

Availability: Now

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda was the most heralded new service announced by AWS. It runs developers' code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for them. This makes it easy to build and manage applications that respond quickly to new information. For example, using Lambda, a user could set it so that whenever an image is loaded into AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), a thumbnail version is created. Or if an update is made to a database that change can be programmed to automatically update a business application that relies on the database. There are a multitude of use cases.

Availability: In preview now

Cost: AWS Lambda customers only pay only for what they use and are charged based on the number of requests for functions and the time code is executed. The first 1 million requests per month and the first 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time are include in a free tier. Thereafter, customers pay $0.20 per 1 million requests and $0.00001667 for every GB-second used.

AWS Service Catalog

AWS Service Catalog is a management tool for AWS resources, but hosted in the cloud. It allows enterprise administrators to select what AWS resources they want their employees deploying, in what configurations, who has access to each of these options, and then makes them discoverable to employees via a personalized portal.

Cost: No pricing details yet.

Availability: Early 2015.