AWS turns focus to developer

eWeek reports.

As in so many platform battles, the way to the lead is through the developers that build applications and create businesses and services that run on that platform. AWS has taken criticism from competitors for not being developer-oriented enough. Essentially, the company has taken heat for lacking a true platform as a service (PaaS) play or for not having a traditional developer focus on a programme that might be called the Amazon Web Services Developer Network (AWSDN) or some such.

AWS makes weekly, if not daily, updates to its cloud offering, but Paul Burns, an analyst at Neovise, says this is one of AWS' more significant updates. "There are all kinds of great use cases for something like this," PC Advisor quotes him as saying.

Applications are often bottlenecked by the their access to databases, he says, and having high capacity compute power, particularly with 2TB of SSD-backed disks, could help speed database processing for customers.

AWS is not the first company to offer SSD-backed compute instances: Softlayer, for example, has such an offering. And AWS isn't the first to offer high-capacity local storage, either. Managed dedicated hosting providers such as TORQHost and Ajubeo each have high-capacity options. But AWS' offering appears to be one of the highest-capacity SSD-backed cloud-based services, meaning it's instantly accessible via APIs, Burns says.

According to Market Watch, customers can launch High I/O instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs and third-party libraries.

Initially, a Quadruple Extra Large High I/O instance is available in the US-East (Northern Virginia) and EU-West (Ireland) regions (and will be made available in other AWS regions in the coming months). High I/O instances can be purchased as On-demand and Reserved instances.