Amazon Unveils 'Kinesis' Big Data Service, Expands Tools For Cloud Developers

The big reveal was Amazon Kinesis, a new service for developer partners that build big data apps. It handles real-time processing of huge amounts of data from server logs, social media and Web clickstream data, among other sources. Amazon Kinesis is available now as a limited preview.

Developers use Kinesis to pull in data streams that they can use in their big data apps running on Amazon EC2. The incoming data is automatically replicated to three different Amazon Web Services availability zones, Vogels said in a keynote Thursday at the vendor's conference in Las Vegas.

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With Kinesis, AWS is taking a time-consuming process and turning it into a service, which means its developer partners can focus more on their big data apps and less on the groundwork involved in building them.

Vogels also revealed that AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports PostgreSQL, an open source relational database that's seeing growing popularity with mobile app developers. They'll now be able to build RDS instances with up to 3 TB of storage and 30,000 provisioned input/output operations per second (IOPS), Vogels said in the keynote.

Amazon also unveiled a new instance to its C3 instance family that it's touting as its fastest EC2 instance to date. C3 instances feature fast processors, high memory per virtual CPU and SSD-based storage.

The new C3 instance uses 2.8GHz Intel E5-2680 v2 Ivy Bridge chips and comes in five different configurations, ranging from 3.75 GB of RAM and two virtual cores to 60 GB of RAM and 32 virtual cores.

Instead of investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build this kind of supercomputing infrastructure, companies can rent access to it on an hourly basis, Vogel said in the keynote.

Vogels also teased AWS' upcoming I2 instances, which are geared for high-performance random I/O and designed to work with NoSQL databases and transactional systems. No word yet on when they'll be available.

I2 instances run 2.5GHz Intel Xeon E5-2670v2 processors with Turbo mode enabled, and the most powerful configuration can handle 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, said in a blog post.

PUBLISHED NOV. 14, 2013