SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May. 18, 2009-- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Amazon CloudWatch, a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources, Auto Scaling for automatically growing and shrinking Amazon EC2 capacity based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing for distributing incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 compute instances. Together, these capabilities provide businesses and developers with visibility into the health and usage of their AWS compute resources, enhance application performance, and lower costs. Registered customers of Amazon EC2 can immediately begin using these new features as part of the service. To learn more about these features, and to sign up for Amazon EC2 and other AWS services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

“Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers,” said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. “Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings.”

Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.

Auto Scaling

Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Customers can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance.

Like all Amazon Web Services and features, Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no up-front fee, minimum spend or long term commitment. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees.

These features have already been adopted by a variety of AWS customers:

“Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing improve the reliability of our applications, reduce support complexity, and improve our time to deployment of new solutions for our customers,” said Simon Plant, Product Lead for Cloud Computing at Capgemini. “We’re also excited by the reduced operational costs of having these features for Amazon EC2 built in because it will lower the total cost for software delivered from our organization.”

“By using Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling features, we are able to dynamically launch and terminate instances in proportion to ShareThis traffic patterns. This removes the operational burden of ensuring our environments are never overloaded or underutilized, and guarantees we only pay for the resources we need,” said Mike Babineau, Head of IT Operations at ShareThis.

The features announced today are included in AWS Premium Support and are currently available in the U.S. region with EU region availability in the next several months.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

Amazon.com, Inc.
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