Study on the go with the new BackSpace Academy mobile site!

Due to popular demand we are introducing two platforms for doing the BackSpace AWS Certification prep courses. The BackSpace Academy mobile site for IOS and Android.

When you go to https://user.backspace.academy you will be automatically directed to the mobile site if you are using a mobile phone.

Great for studying practice exams on the go!

New S3 Storage Class

AWS has just announced another storage class type for S3.

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) is an Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. Standard - IA offers the high durability, throughput, and low latency of Amazon S3 Standard, with a low per GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make Standard - IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery. The Standard - IA storage class is set at the object level and can exist in the same bucket as Standard, allowing you to use lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

The following table summarizes the durability and availability offered by each of the storage classes.

Storage Class	Durability (designed for)	Availability (designed for)	Other Considerations
STANDARD	99.999999999%	99.99%	None
STANDARD_IA	99.999999999%	99.9%	There is a retrieval fee associated with STANDARD_IA objects which makes it most suitable for infrequently accessed data. For pricing information, see Amazon S3 Pricing.
GLACIER	99.999999999%	99.99% (after you restore objects)	GLACIER objects are not available for real-time access. You must first restore archived objects before you can access them and restoring objects can take 3-4 hours. For more information, see Restoring Archived Objects.
RRS	99.99%	99.99%	None

Our certification courses will be updated this week with the changes.

Multiple Subnets per Availability Zone with Auto Scaling groups

You can now select more than one subnet per availability zone in an Autoscaling group.
You no longer need to remove an existing subnet from an Autoscaling group in order to reconfigure the subnets. You can simply add more subnets without affecting your applications availability.

More details in the docs at:
AutoScaling Developer Guide

New 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS EBS Volumes

AWS have now made available Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes with up to 16 TB and 20,000 IOPS and a maximum throughput of 320 MBps.

Before you would need to attach 16 x 1 TB 1250 IOPS volumes to achieve the same performance.

General Purpose (SSD) volumes are also now available with up to 16 TB and 10,000 IOPS and a maximum throughput of 160 MBps.

General Purpose (SSD) volumes are also now designed to deliver a consistent baseline performance of 3 IOPS/GB to a maximum of 10,000 IOPS, and provide up to 160 MBps of throughput per volume.

More information in the docs:
Amazon EBS Product Details
EC2 User Guide

Cross-Region Replication for Amazon S3

To  provide 99.999999999% durability, AWS S3 has always had a high degree of replication. In the past, the location of that replicated data has been a mystery to the account holder. This has made it difficult for those that, as part of their organization's compliance, require that data be in totally different geographical locations.
With the release today of Cross-Region Replication for AWS S3, you can now specify the region and bucket location in that region to replicate data to. The process is extremely easy and straightforward.

There are requirements though:

• The source and destination buckets must be versioning-enabled.
• You can replicate from a source bucket to only one destination bucket.
• An IAM role must be created to grant permissions for S3 actions on the buckets.
• If the source bucket owner is not the owner of the destination bucket then you must have permissions for the S3 actions.

More detailed information in the docs at:
Amazon Simple Storage Service - Developer Guide - Cross-Region Replication