What's New | 2006

Alexa Internet announces the launch of a new web service, Alexa Web Search. This service offers programmatic access to Alexa’s web search engine. Developers can use this service to incorporate search results directly into their web sites or services. In addition, developers can now access Historical Traffic and Sites Linking In data through the Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS). For more information about the changes to AWIS and Alexa Top Sites, and how to migrate an existing application to the new versions of these services, please see the recent forums announcement.

Take a tour of the AWS Developer Connection’s newest updates, designed to help developers more easily browse our resources, get started with Amazon Web Services, and market AWS-based solutions. Visit the new Product Centers by clicking on any web service name in our Resource Center, and read the community newsletter online. Learn about our co-marketing opportunities, and work with Amazon Web Services to spread the word about your solution.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa’s large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl. This web service enables developers to enhance web sites, search results, web directories, blog entries, and other web real estate with Alexa thumbnails images. Including web site thumbnail improves user experience by allowing end users to preview sites before clicking on the thumbnail’s associated link.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time. Read more.

La Nacion, Microsoft, and SmugMug represent the breadth of companies choosing to use the web scale storage offered by Amazon S3. Global enterprises like Microsoft are using Amazon S3 to dramatically reduce their storage costs without compromising scale or reliability. On the opposite end of the spectrum, small businesses that depend on storage, such as SmugMug, are using Amazon S3’s benefits of scale and cost-efficiency that were previously only available to large companies. Amazon continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business as well, recently launching new digital initiatives that store and retrieve large data files using Amazon S3. Go to http://www.amazon.com/pr to read other press releases.

Amazon Web Services is proud to announce the launch of its new Solutions Catalog, a directory showcasing the innovations of Amazon Web Services Developers. Businesses, consumers, developers, Amazon Associates and Marketplace Sellers can browse, search for, and rate innovative applications built for them using any of our services. AWS developers will be able to view the same Solutions Catalog listings from within the existing Amazon Web Services Developer Connection, and submit their own solutions for listing in the Solutions Catalog.

Amazon Mechanical Turk offers a tool allowing Requesters to easily create HITs in the system without writing code. Developers can use the HIT Wizard to get up and running immediately, and learn about the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace. Visit the Requester web site to start using the HIT Wizard. If you are not yet an Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester, read more about this web service.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

With the launch of the Amazon Web Services Developer Connection (http://aws.amazon.com/connect), you can benefit from an expanded and improved online community experience. This integrated environment connects you with the people and resources that will help you build AWS-based applications more quickly and effectively. Explore the new Resource Center, containing the documents and tools that were previously housed in our Technical Library. Visit the Developer Connection to learn more about how you can enjoy an increasingly rich and interactive Amazon Web Services development experience.

Amazon Web Services is proud to launch a new, rich developer forums environment to support its rapidly growing community. Explore how our new community recognition program and improved forum features enable you to innovate more effectively with Amazon Web Services.

Just released, Alexa Top Sites provides ranked lists of the top web sites you can use to incorporate web site traffic intelligence into your applications.

We recently held a live, two-part, web-based training series for business and technical audiences to learn about Amazon Mechanical Turk. In case you missed the sessions, you can now view recordings of those sessions and download the session materials.