Amazon Adds Media Streaming, Spot Instances, and VPC Cloud Services

Amazon AWS just keeps getting better and better. Today the company announced three new services to it’s AWS product line.

Amazon CloudFront Streaming
This new services gives you a world class media server in the cloud. You can now stream media files, audio and video, from a server using Adobe Flash Media Server. As with all Amazon AWS services, this is a pay for what you use, no upfront costs to start and no minimums.

CloudFront puts your files on the networks edge, delivering your content quicker, which is a great benefit when streaming audio or video files. No need to spend thousands on hardware and software.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
This is an interesting concept, your basically given the opportunity to bid on unused EC2 capacity. Minimum prices are set for the unused capacity, called a Spot Price, and as long as your bid doesn’t exceed that Spot Price, you can continue to use the service. I’m probably not doing it justice here, so read more about it.

Because this service may not be available for an extended period of time, suggested uses for this option would be video processing and conversion, processing research data, or modeling or analyzing data. There is some risk for data loss when using EC2 servers in this manner. You will need to make sure your price is high enough that your instance isn’t turned off in the middle of processing data.

Amazon VPC Unlimited Public Beta
This is probably the most exciting feature of the three. VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud (similar to Virtual Private Network or VPN). It’s a standard used by companies allowing users and networks to connect with each other securely. Now the cool part. You can extend your current companies IT infrastructure into isolated Amazon compute resources via VPC, instantly adding secure private capacity to your existing infrastructure. You can also use your existing management tools to safeguard the server while on your network.

This is a hot new feature. It’s worth taking some time to review the options. If your organization often meets or exceeds existing resources, this could be an incredibly cost effective option to increase capacity, and maintain total control as if the servers were on your own network.