Amazon Web Services Newsletter - June

Dear AWS Community,

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News & Announcements Amazon EC2 Launches New Availability Zone in US East Now Available: Monitoring, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for Amazon EC2 Introducing AWS Import/Export for Physical Data Transfer Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions and Free Payment Processing Offer Amazon CloudFront Adds Access Logging Capability AWS Security Center and Security Whitepaper New Partner and Customer Announcements Systems Integrator Training Developer Resources Featured Solutions AWS On The Road Virtual Events

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News & Announcements

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To keep you up-to-date, here are the latest news items and announcements from AWS.

Amazon EC2 Launches New Availability Zone in US East
Starting today, you can use Amazon EC2 instances in Availability Zone us-east-1d. All existing EC2 features such as Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows, EBS, AMIs, and Elastic IPs will work just like in any other zone. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are designed to be insulated from failures in other zones. This allows you to protect your applications from possible failures in a single location. Availability Zones also provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

Now Available: Monitoring, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 customers can now access Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring AWS cloud resources, Auto Scaling for automatically growing and shrinking 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 greater visibility into the health and usage of AWS compute resources, and allow them to further improve the performance of their applications and operate more efficiently.

Introducing AWS Import/Export for Physical Data Transfer
AWS has announced the limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a new offering that accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. You can use AWS Import/Export for migrating data into the cloud, sending backups to AWS, and interchanging data with others.

Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions and Free Payment Processing Offer
You can now use Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions to charge your customers on a recurring basis. If you offer digital content subscriptions, collect membership dues or recurring donations, this service is for you. Plus, now through September 30 get free payment processing for Amazon Simple Pay or Checkout by Amazon, a complete e-commerce checkout solution, offered by Amazon Payments.

Amazon CloudFront Adds Access Logging Capability
Amazon CloudFront has released access logs which show you details about every request delivered through Amazon CloudFront. They contain a comprehensive set of information about requests for your content, including the object requested, the date and time of the request, the edge location serving the request, the client IP address, the referrer and the user agent. There are no fees for using the access logs, beyond normal Amazon S3 charges to write, store and retrieve the logs.

AWS Security Center and Security Whitepaper
This week, we released the AWS Security Center, a central location from which you can obtain the latest versions of our security whitepaper, receive security updates and where you can report any security concerns. In addition, we've published the June 2009 version of our AWS Overview of Security Processes whitepaper (PDF), which should help answer additional questions about physical and operational security processes for network infrastructure controlled by AWS.

New Partner and Customer Announcements
Several partners and customers have recently announced new services on top of AWS: Citrix announced a new cloud solution called Citrix C3 Lab that allows companies of all sizes to use AWS as part of their standard technology infrastructure. Read more about Citrix and AWS. Pegasystems Inc., a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) software solutions, announced its new SmartPaaS Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering on AWS and Infonova, a Next Generation BSS vendor, announced the successful deployment of the Infonova BSS Release 6 on AWS.

Systems Integrator Training
AWS is offering technical training for qualified systems integrators building solutions and practices on our cloud computing services. Trainings are conducted on a recurring monthly basis at several locations in the U.S. and Europe. To apply, please send an email to aws-ecosystem@amazon.com.

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Developer Resources

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Here are a few highlights and new additions to our Developer Resource Center.

Libraries for Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Start building your application on the Amazon Elastic MapReduce APIs using one of the available libraries: Java, PHP, C#, Perl, VB.NET.

LogAnalyzer for Amazon CloudFront
Analyze your Amazon CloudFront access logs using Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Processing and Loading Data from Amazon S3 to the Vertica Analytic Database
Vertica has built a sample application on Elastic MapReduce. In this application, use Elastic MapReduce to process and load a data set from Amazon S3 into the Vertica Analytic Database running on EC2.

Migrating to Amazon SimpleDB API Version 2009-04-15
This article published on May 20, 2009 describes the recent changes to Amazon SimpleDB, including a new WSDL version, deprecation of version 2007-11-07, application impact and migration tips.

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Featured Solutions

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Check out what your peers have built with AWS. If you have a web application built on top of AWS or a tool that helps others integrate with AWS, submit your entry to the Solutions Catalog.

Univa's UniCloud
UniCloud is an extension to Univa UD systems software that provides a pay-per-use model for high-performance computing on Amazon EC2.

nuTsie
nuTsie lets you listen to your iTunes playlists, your friends' iTunes playlists or anybody's playlists on your mobile phone and on any web-connected PC. Discover new music on nuTsie.com and check out nuTsie's 30 iPhone music applications. All built on AWS.

Phurnace
Phurnace enables organizations to quickly deploy J2EE applications into physical, virtual or cloud computing environments. It replaces the hand-crafted scripting currently utilized to configure app servers.

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AWS On The Road

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Join AWS at one of the following events.

SIIA OnDemand Europe
June 9-10, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com will be presenting.

Hadoop Summit
June 10, Santa Clara, CA
Jinesh Varia, AWS Technology Evangelist, will be presenting on Amazon Elastic MapReduce and running a Hadoop on EC2 panel. Also, stop by our table and talk to several engineers from the team.

IBM Cloud Computing Workshop
June 10, Chicago, IL
June 18, Dallas, TX
Attend these free, half-day seminars to learn how to deploy a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering using Amazon EC2 running IBM.

AWS Start-Up Tour
June 15, Los Angeles, CA
June 16, Silicon Valley, CA
Business and technical decision makers can attend this half day seminar and learn how to integrate Amazon Web Services into your business.

Cloud Computing at ISC'09
June 23-26, Hamburg, Germany
Simone Brunozzi, AWS Technology Evangelist, will present at the "Cloud Computing & HPC" session June 24, 9am-1:15pm.

Structure
June 25, San Francisco, CA
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com fireside chat with Om Malik. AWS customers receive $50 discount off the ticket price, register here.

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Virtual Events

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Stay up-to-date on upcoming Amazon Web Services' webinars and find recordings for past events by bookmarking this page on the AWS website: aws.amazon.com/resources/webinars

Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions Webinar
In this webinar, we will introduce you to Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions. With Amazon Simple Pay subscriptions, you can now add recurring payments feature on your website quickly and easily. If you offer digital content subscriptions, collect membership dues on a periodic basis, or provide premium services on your website this webinar is for you.
June 11, 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM PDT

Using Mechanical Turk to Improve Business Performance
Attend this webinar on Thursday, June 25 to learn how Amazon Mechanical Turk helps companies integrate the human judgment of an on-demand workforce directly into business processes. Find out how you can deliver complex workflows and lower operational costs by programmatically assigning workers simple, low cost tasks.
June 25, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Please do not reply directly to this e-mail. If you have any questions or comments regarding this newsletter, please contact us at webservices@amazon.com

Amazon Web Services LLC is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. Amazon.com is a registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. This message produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services, LLC, 1200 12th Ave South, Seattle, WA 98144.
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Internet Business Monster

What makes Tiger Woods so good?

What makes Tiger Woods so good?

One thing is his "make-range" average. He has a wider make range than his opponents. Simply put, Tiger's ADPM—average of the total distance of holed putts—is about six feet longer than the Tour average. That means Tiger sinks more putts on average from further away than the field—a decided advantage. Put another way, Tiger makes the long ones others miss and rarely misses the short ones. This combination is hard to beat no matter how good your golf handicap.

You may not be able to beat Tiger Woods, but can take a golf lesson from him. Since good putting lowers scores, you should work on widening your make range. The wider it is, the more strokes you'll slash from your scores. The more strokes you slash from your scores, the lower your golf handicap. It's that simple. Among the best ways to widen your make range is to drain those 12 to 15 footers that often plague you. Sink more of these and you'll quickly cut your handicap down to size.

Control Putterhead Speed
The key to draining these 12 to 15 footers—or any putt for that matter—is your ability to control putterhead speed. It determines your ability to control ball speed. Most experts agree that ball speed is one of the most important factors in putting, if not the most important. If your ball speed is off, you'll miss a lot of putts—short or long. Learn to control ball speed and you'll sink your fair share of 12 to 15 footers. But you first need to know how to control putterhead speed.

You have three ways to control putterhead speed:

* Spot aiming
* Roll visualization,
* Feel focusing.

Some people are better at spot aiming than roll visualization and feel focusing. Others are better at roll visualization than spot aiming or feel focusing. Then there are those better at feel focusing than spot aiming or roll visualization. Each method uses the eyes to send signals to the brain to apply the necessary energy for the putt. You must find out which method allows you to control putterhead speed best.

Fine-Tuning Your Stroke
A two-part drill tells you which method allows you to control putterhead speed best. Drop a coin on the practice green. Then place a ball about 10 feet from the coin. Now survey the green just as is often discussed in my golf tips. Note if the putt is uphill or downhill, breaks to the right or to the left, and so on. Develop a mental picture of it.

Your job is to roll three putts from the same distance and stop all three within the space of a putterhead behind the coin. You can place a second coin behind the first to get the idea of how far to get the ball to stop no further than one putterhead-length past the coin.

Before hitting the first putt, adopt a plan that will ensure the accuracy of the golf ball's roll using one of the three methods. For example, if the putt is uphill you may want to adjust your focal point beyond the last coin to account for the terrain. Or, you may want to ingrain a picture of the last four feet of roll. Or, you my just want to focus on feel when trying to make the putt.

Sink Three Than Move Back
Use one ball for the drill. If successful, retrieve it and putt from the same spot. Keep putting until you hit three straight putts from the same distance. If you don't, start over. Keep doing the drill until you find the best method—spot aiming, roll visualization, feel focusing—to do the job. Having done this, add a foot to the putt's length. After each successful attempt, add another foot. After a while, you should know which method offers you the best result. Use that method in practice.

Take a golf lesson from Tiger. Widening your make range by determining the putting method that helps you sink more long distance putts. It's. The wider your make range, the greater your chances of sinking 12 to 15 foot putts than before. This in turn will help chop strokes off your scores and your golf handicap. Your make range may never be as wide as Tiger Wood's or even the average pro's. But the wider it is, the lower you're golf handicap will be.

Jack Moorehouse is the author of the best-selling book "How To Break 80 And Shoot Like The Pros." He is NOT a golf pro, rather a working man that has helped thousands of golfers from all seven continents lower their handicap immediately. He has a free weekly newsletter with the latest golf tips, golf lessons and golf instruction.