What's New

Amazon Virtual Cloud (VPC) now provides customers an opportunity to recover EIPs that they might have released accidentally. The released EIPs are available for recovery as long as they are not assigned to a different customer. The sooner customers try to recover their EIPs, the better are the chances of recovering them. Customers can recover their EIPs via CLI by using the allocate-address command and specifying the IP address using the --address parameter.

AWS CloudTrail Event History is now available to all customers. CloudTrail Event History (formerly known as API Activity History) lets you view, search, and download your recent AWS account activity. This allows you to gain visibility into your account actions taken through the AWS Management Console, SDKs, and CLI to enable governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account.

Previously, you could only view your account activity by setting up CloudTrail for your account. Now, you can view the past 7 days of CloudTrail Event History immediately through the AWS CloudTrail console and AWS CLI without setting up CloudTrail. You can still set up CloudTrail to deliver your CloudTrail events to Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon CloudWatch Events if you want to archive, analyze, and respond to changes in your AWS resources. Please visit AWS CloudTrail documentation page for more information.

You can now launch M4 instances when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server in the China (Beijing) Region Operated by Sinnet. Amazon RDS is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

You can now configure policies to automatically add (scale out) and terminate (scale in) nodes in your Amazon EMR cluster. Amazon EMR can programmatically scale out applications like Apache Spark and Apache Hive to utilize additional nodes for increased performance and scale in the number of nodes in your cluster to save costs when utilization is low. Your cluster can scale based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics provided by Amazon EMR, including YARN utilization metrics.

AWS CloudTrail now enables you to download CloudTrail account activity history from within the CloudTrail console. Previously, you could only analyze or share account activity offline by using the CloudTrail LookupEvents API, copying and pasting relevant information directly from the CloudTrail console, or searching the CloudTrail S3 bucket for the correct log files. Now, you can download your account activity to a CSV or JSON formatted files. You can use downloaded files to compare activity searches, analyze account activity with 3rd party tools, or to backup and store activity offline. Please visit AWS CloudTrail documentation page for more information.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows customers to create a new default VPC directly from the console or by using the CLI. With this release, customers no longer need to contact AWS support if the default VPC has been deleted, as they can create a new default VPC by using this self-service feature. Customers can also take remedial actions against accidental deletion of default VPCs, by automating creation of a new default VPC using the API.

We are excited to announce that CloudWatch now supports High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms, enabling you to monitor custom applications and infrastructure in near real-time, down to per-second resolution. 

You can now launch X1 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 instances optimized to run large-scale, enterprise-class, in-memory applications. X1 instances are ideal to run in-memory databases such as SAP HANA and host memory intensive and latency sensitive workloads such as Apache Spark, and Presto. X1 instances are also ideal for generating real time analytics, processing giant graphs using Neo4j or Titan, or creating enormous caches.  

Starting today, when you create a new DynamoDB table using the AWS Management Console, the table will have Auto Scaling enabled by default.  DynamoDB Auto Scaling automatically adjusts read and write throughput capacity, in response to dynamically changing request volumes, with zero downtime. 

AWS Direct Connect is announcing general availability of Amazon CloudWatch monitoring for customers’ physical connections to the AWS (Beijing Region) Operated by Sinnet. AWS Direct Connect customers can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metrics to monitor their physical connections, and use Amazon CloudWatch Alarms to notify them of changes in their physical AWS Direct Connect connection and to trigger actions with the help of Amazon SNS topics.

AWS IoT is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet.

Auto Scaling now supports a new type of scaling policy called target tracking scaling policies that you can use to set up dynamic scaling for your application in just a few simple steps. Adding Auto Scaling to your application is one way to maximize the benefits of AWS. Auto Scaling helps you build systems that respond to changes in demand by automatically launching or terminating Amazon EC2 instances based on conditions that you define. This dynamic scaling helps to improve application availability and reduce costs. For example, you can use Auto Scaling to automatically launch EC2 instances for your Auto Scaling group when demand increases to help maintain performance, and terminate instances when demand drops to save money.

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) and Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) are now available in the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet.

Amazon ECS is a container management service for deploying and scaling Docker containers in production. Amazon ECR is a container registry for you to easily store, manage, and share large numbers of container images.

We are making a change to how we present CloudWatch charges in your AWS bill and Cost and Usage Reports, to make it easy for you to understand your monthly CloudWatch spend. These changes will be effective in all AWS Regions, including BJS operated by Sinnet, beginning July 2017.

You can now use Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway in the China (Beijing) Region Operated by Sinnet. NAT Gateway is a highly available AWS managed service that makes it easy to connect to the Internet from instances within a private subnet in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Previously, you needed to launch a NAT instance to enable NAT for instances in a private subnet.

Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server now allows you to easily stop and start your database instances. This makes it easy and affordable to use databases for development and test purposes, where the database is not required to be running all of the time.

Today we are announcing that Amazon EBS now supports cost allocation tags for EBS snapshots within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboard. Using cost allocation tags, you can now classify snapshot costs to match the needs of your business for better transparency and visibility. You can use this feature to allocate snapshot costs to internal teams or to provide accurate reports for customer billing. With this additional information, you can better manage your snapshot costs.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is now available in the China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet.

Today we are announcing the general availability of the new Amazon S3 console to all users. The new Amazon S3 console provides a new user interface, a streamlined user experience, and introduces user interface support for two new S3 features – object-level tagging and storage analytics. Many S3 users having been experiencing the new Amazon S3 console by opting-in as part of our original launch of the new Amazon S3 console on 29th, November 2016. Now all S3 users get this experience without any additional work. 

You can now define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to provide control over which Auto Scaling resources users can access, and the actions that they are permitted to perform on these resources. Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define. You can use Auto Scaling to help ensure that you are running your desired number of Amazon EC2 instances. With resource-level permissions, you can enable different users within an organization, such as application developers and IT specialists, to access and modify Launch Configurations and Auto Scaling groups with appropriately configured permissions.

Amazon EC2 now offers SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the AWS China (Beijing) Region Operated by Sinnet running on any instance type with a minimum of 4 vCPUs, including M4, R4, and several other instance types. You can now launch SQL Server Enterprise on Windows Server 2012R2 and Windows Server 2016 operating systems.

AWS CodeDeploy is now available in the China (Beijing) AWS region.

We are excited to announce that Amazon ElastiCache now supports enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing. In October 2016, we launched support for Redis Cluster with Redis 3.2.4. In addition to scaling your Redis workloads across up to 15 shards with 3.5TiB of data, it also allowed creating cluster-level backups, which contain snapshots of each of the cluster’s shards. With this launch, we are adding the capability to restore a backup into a Redis Cluster with a different number of shards and slot distribution, allowing you to resize your Redis workload. ElastiCache will parse the Redis key space across the backup’s individual snapshots, and redistribute the keys in the new Cluster according to the requested number of shards and hash slots. Your new cluster can be either larger or smaller in size, as long as the data fits in the selected configuration.

Today, we are announcing enhancements to Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) that make them more flexible and easy to use, helping you get the most out of your RI discount.

Today we are introducing the Elastic Volumes feature for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). This new capability allows you to modify configurations of live volumes with a simple API call or a few console clicks. Elastic Volumes makes it easy to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume with no downtime or performance impact. You can streamline and automate changes using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda where available (AWS Lambda is not available in the Beijing Region as of the date of this post). With Amazon EBS you can provision the capacity and performance you need today with the confidence that you can make modifications in the future as your business needs change.

We are excited to announce support for 1G and 10G Link Aggregation Groups (LAG). Customers in AWS China (Beijing Region), operated by Sinnet can start using LAG to link existing connections on the same AWS device, or request new connections. Users who wish to purchase multiple ports, but treat them like a single managed connection can now use our LAG feature to do just this. In addition to ordering and managing bundles, you can now see when your ports fall on the same router so you can manage your network availability.

CloudWatch announced the extension of metric retention from 14 days to 15 months, free of charge. CloudWatch has already stored at least 2 months of all existing metrics, which customers can begin using immediately to analyze seasonality, monthly trends and in the future, year-over-year comparisons and forecasts.

We happily announce that an EC2 price reduction will go in to effect on December 1, 2016, just in time to make your holiday season just a little bit more cheerful! Our engineering investments, coupled with our scale and our time-tested ability to manage our capacity, allow us to identify and pass on the cost savings to you.

We are reducing prices for C4, M4, and T2 instances, depending on platform (Linux, RHEL, SUSE, Windows, and so forth). Price cuts apply across all AWS Regions. For example:

• AWS China (BJS) region, operated by SINNET, reduces the price of M4 and T2 instances up to 10%, and C4 instances up to 5%.
  

As always, you do not need to take any action in order to benefit from the reduction in On-Demand prices. If you are using billing alerts or our newly revised budget feature, you may want to consider revising your thresholds downward as appropriate.

AWS China (BJS) region operated by SINNET

 

We are reducing the base price of CloudWatch Metrics from 3.11 CNY per metric per month to 2.00 CNY per metric per month, a 36% reduction in price. In addition, we are introducing new volume-based tiered pricing with even lower prices per metric, with savings up to 96%. These take effect in AWS China (BJS) region, operated by Sinnet, beginning December 1st, 2016.

We’re excited to announce new features to the growing portfolio of Amazon S3 Storage Management capabilities to help you better analyze and manage your storage. Today’s release includes:

You can now launch R4 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances, featuring a larger instance size, a new Intel Broadwell processor, improved networking and EBS performance, and cheaper on per GiB of RAM compared to R3 instances. R4 instances are well-suited for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads like Business Intelligence (BI), data mining & analysis, in-memory databases, distributed web scale in-memory caching, and applications performing real-time processing of unstructured big data.

You can now launch the t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge, the newest Amazon EC2 burstable-performance instances. The t2.xlarge features 16 GiB of memory and 4 vCPU, and the t2.2xlarge features 32 GiB of memory and 8 vCPU. These two new instances provide burstable-performance options for larger workloads. As with other T2 instances, t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge are well suited for workloads that require a consistent baseline performance with the ability to burst. T2 instances are backed by Intel Xeon processors with clock speeds up to 3.3 GHz.

You can now use RIs that apply discounts regionally and purchase Convertible RIs in the AWS China (Beijing) region.

The Amazon CloudWatch Events service is now available in the China (Beijing) region.

You can now launch D2 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Dense-storage instances. D2 instances are designed for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to very large data sets, such as Hadoop distributed computing, massively parallel processing data warehousing, and log processing applications.

AWS Config is now available in the China (Beijing) region. AWS Config is a fully managed service that gives you an inventory of your AWS resources, notifies you when the configurations of your resources change, and lets you audit the history of the configurations for those resources to enable security and governance.

We are excited to announce the availability of the m4.16xlarge, the largest instance size in the latest generation of EC2 General Purpose instances, featuring 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory. The m4.16xlarge offers a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and is a good choice for many applications including databases, data processing tasks, cluster computing, and web servers that require high computational horsepower or memory size.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), in collaboration with Beijing Sinnet Technology Co. Ltd. (“Sinnet”), announced that the AWS China (Beijing) Region is generally available to customers from datacenters in China that are being operated by Sinnet. Through this collaboration, AWS provides technology, guidance, and expertise to Sinnet while Sinnet operates and delivers AWS Cloud services. Specifically designed for the AWS Beijing Region, this expanded partnership with Sinnet, which commenced on Aug. 1, 2016, represents AWS’s commitment to bring best-in-class cloud services to customers looking to run workloads from datacenters in China. Developers, start-ups, enterprises, government organizations, and non-profits based in China or internationally can leverage the AWS China (Beijing) Region to run their technology applications from infrastructure in China, based on the same technology as AWS’s global service and operated locally by Sinnet.

Users can sign up to start using the AWS Beijing Region at: http://www.amazonaws.cn/en/sign-up

Amazon Connect Technology Services (Beijing) Co. Ltd. (“Amazon”) and Beijing Sinnet Technology Co. Ltd. (“Sinnet”) are announcing a broader operating relationship. This new partnership is specifically designed for the Beijing Region and represents a further example of AWS’s commitment to making our best-in-class cloud service available to customers wishing to run workloads from datacenters in China. Beginning 1 August, AWS Cloud services in the Beijing Region will be operated and provided by Sinnet. AWS will continue to provide technology, guidance, and expertise to Sinnet. Please note that there will be no price changes as part of this transition, nor will there be changes to the AWS Cloud services experience. Additionally, customers of the AWS Beijing region can expect a simplified billing process.

Questions and Answers

1. Q: Why is AWS broadening the operating relationship with Sinnet?

A: Chinese telecom regulations for operators of cloud services continue to evolve. By partnering with Sinnet, AWS is able to make its Beijing Region cloud services available to customers in a way that complies with these regulations, while still offering the same best-in-class standards offered in other AWS Regions. At the same time, we are simplifying elements of our billing and fapiao processes.

2. Q: Is this model compliant with applicable telecom regulations?

A: Yes, the new operating model is compliant with all current applicable telecom regulations.

3. Q: What is the operating relationship with Sinnet?

A: Beginning 1 August, AWS Cloud services from the Beijing Region will be operated and provided by Sinnet, with AWS continuing to provide technology, guidance, and expertise to Sinnet. This new operating model will apply to all existing customers and new customers running in the Beijing Region. Under the new operating model, Sinnet will enter into the customer agreement with customers, issue bills and fapiaos, and receive payment for AWS services.

4. Q: Sinnet was already an important partner of AWS in China. How is this new model different from the earlier one?

A: In the earlier model, Sinnet was AWS’s IDC partner in Beijing, which meant that they provided AWS customers IDC services, as well as billed for those services. AWS provided and billed for IT and software services. In the new model, Sinnet will provide and bill for both IDC and AWS IT and software services. Additionally, Sinnet will enter into customer agreements with users of the Beijing Region and offer customer support via the AWS console and other channels.

5. Q: Will service prices be changing as a result of this adjustment to the operating model?

A: No, there will be no service pricing adjustments as a result of this change.

6. Q: How will customer’s bills change and when will that change occur?

A: Beginning with the August billing cycle (which customers will see in September), customers will no longer see the billing lines “Sinnet Services – IDC” and “Sinnet Services – ISP” and related VAT for each itemized service charge. Instead, customers will see two lines per itemized service charge, one from Sinnet for the service charge and another for the VAT. Customers will also see a new logo on the bill (“AWS operated by Sinnet”) and references to “AWS” replaced by “Sinnet.” There will also be new payment remittance instructions, reflecting a new PayEase bank account.

7. Q: How many fapiaos will customers receive, and who issues them?

A: Under the new operating model, customers will receive only one fapiao, issued by Sinnet.

8. Q: Will my customer agreement change, as a result of this adjustment to the operating model?

A: Sinnet will be the counterparty to all customer agreements as of 1 August, 2016, and not AWS. The customer agreement will also be modified to reflect recent regulatory developments. However, the terms and conditions of the agreement will otherwise be substantially similar.

In January, Amazon Web Services announced that longer IDs for EBS volumes and snapshots would be available in April. Starting today, you can opt in to using longer volume and snapshot IDs for EBS and Storage Gateway using APIs or the AWS Management Console.  

We are excited to announce that Amazon Redshift is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region.

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all of your data using your existing business intelligence tools for less than a tenth the cost of traditional data warehousing solutions.

Today, AWS announced that we are collapsing Amazon S3 price tiers and reducing storage prices across Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. We will collapse the number of Amazon S3 price tiers from six to three – 0-50 TB; 50 TB-500 TB; and 500+ TB – making it easier to understand your bill and project future costs. We will also reduce Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier storage prices by more than 20% in global regions. Together, these changes will help AWS customers even further reduce their cost of storage while still enjoying the simplicity, durability, and massive scalability of Amazon’s object storage services.
The price adjustment for storage products in AWS China (BJS) Region, operated by SINNET, is as below:
Glacier – 0.0334 RMB/GB/MONTH 55% reduction

AWS customers will see the effect of these prices in their billing effective December 1, 2016.

In addition to the S3 and Glacier storage price reductions, Glacier is enabling data to be retrieved in minutes, is offering an ultra-low-cost retrieval option, and is replacing the rate-based retrieval pricing with flat per-GB pricing.

New retrieval options
Customers now have three options for retrieving data from Glacier: Expedited, Standard, and Bulk.
• Standard: Customers can access any of their archives within within 3 – 5 hours. This the existing option and is the default option for unspecified requests.
• Expedited: Customers can now quickly access their data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required. For all but the largest archives (250MB+),data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1 – 5 minutes. There are two types of Expedited retrievals: On-Demand and Provisioned. On-Demand requests are like EC2 On-Demand instances and are available the vast majority of the time. Provisioned requests are guaranteed to be available when you need them (but require the purchase of provisioned capacity for a nominal monthly fee).
• Bulk: Bulk retrievals are Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, enabling customers to retrieve large amounts, even petabytes, of data inexpensively in a day. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5 – 12 hours.

These retrieval options are effective now.

As a managed database service, Amazon RDS takes care of the more routine aspects of setting up, running, and scaling a relational database. We first launched support for SQL Server in 2012. Continuing our effort to add features that have included SSL support, major version upgrades, transparent data encryption, enhanced monitoring and Multi-AZ, we have now added support for SQL Server native backup/restore.

SQL Server native backups include all database objects: tables, indexes, stored procedures and triggers. These backups are commonly used to migrate databases between different SQL Server instances running on-premises or in the cloud. They can be used for data ingestion, disaster recovery, and so forth. The native backups also simplify the process of importing data and schemas from on-premises SQL Server instances, and will be easy for SQL Server DBAs to understand and use.

To learn more please visit AWS Blog China

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs in the AWS China (Beijing) region.

With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using log data from other AWS services along with your own system, application, and custom log files. Logs are streamed in near real-time to highly durable, low-cost storage. In the Amazon CloudWatch Console, you can view and search your logs plus configure metrics extraction for specific phrases, values or patterns in your log data.

To learn more about how CloudWatch Logs can help you better understand and operate your systems and applications, see the Amazon CloudWatch product details.

We are excited to announce that on December 15, 2014, AWS launched Trusted Advisor in the China (Beijing) region. AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance and reliability, or enhancing security. Since 2013, customers have viewed over 2.6 million best-practice recommendations and realized over $350 million in estimated cost reductions.

In the China region, Trusted Advisor provides 14 checks for Business and Enterprise support customers for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Elastic IP addresses, service limits, and security group configuration. All AWS users can access two of the Trusted Advisor performance and security checks: Service Limits and Open Security Groups. The Trusted Advisor user interface appears in the AWS Management Console.

The Trusted Advisor recent changes feature on the console dashboard brings status changes to your attention. The action links in some checks take you to the relevant service console if changes are necessary.

For more information about Trusted Advisor, visit http://www.amazonaws.cn/en/support/trustedadvisor/

We are excited to announce that on December 15, 2014, AWS launched Trusted Advisor in the China (Beijing) region. AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance and reliability, or enhancing security. Since 2013, customers have viewed over 2.6 million best-practice recommendations and realized over $350 million in estimated cost reductions.

In the China region, Trusted Advisor provides 14 checks for Business and Enterprise support customers for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Elastic IP addresses, service limits, and security group configuration. All AWS users can access two of the Trusted Advisor performance and security checks: Service Limits and Open Security Groups. The Trusted Advisor user interface appears in the AWS Management Console.

The Trusted Advisor recent changes feature on the console dashboard brings status changes to your attention. The action links in some checks take you to the relevant service console if changes are necessary.

For more information about Trusted Advisor, visit http://www.amazonaws.cn/en/support/trustedadvisor/

AWS is excited to announce its limited preview of its China (Beijing) Region. Throughout the limited preview, we will continue to invite both China-based and multinational companies with customers in China to begin using the new Beijing Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses or software developers can apply for access to the limited preview of AWS services in the AWS China Region today at www.amazonaws.cn.

As a reminder, customers who wish to use the new Beijing Region are required to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to the China (Beijing) Region. Customers with existing AWS credentials will not be able to access resources in the new Region, and vice versa.

Please visit the new China website for more information at www.amazonaws.cn.

AWS is excited to announce its limited preview of its China (Beijing) Region. Throughout the limited preview, we will continue to invite both China-based and multinational companies with customers in China to begin using the new Beijing Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses or software developers can apply for access to the limited preview of AWS services in the AWS China Region today at www.amazonaws.cn.

As a reminder, customers who wish to use the new Beijing Region are required to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to the China (Beijing) Region. Customers with existing AWS credentials will not be able to access resources in the new Region, and vice versa.

Please visit the new China website for more information at www.amazonaws.cn.

AWS is excited to announce its upcoming limited preview of its China (Beijing) Region. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using the new Beijing Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses or software developers can apply for access to the limited preview of AWS services in the AWS China Region today at http://www.amazonaws.cn.

Customers who wish to use the new Beijing Region are required to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to the China (Beijing) Region. Customers with existing AWS credentials will not be able to access resources in the new Region, and vice versa.

Under the Limited Preview phase, access to the new Region will be by invitation only. AWS will periodically review applicants for the limited preview and invite more and more customers to experience our services in China. The China (Beijing) Region aims to help customers reduce latency to end-users based in China while avoiding the up-front expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated with maintaining and operating their own infrastructure. Beijing joins Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo as the fourth Region in Asia Pacific and as the tenth Region worldwide. We will gradually open up the Region for a wider range of customers over time.

AWS’s new Beijing Region will support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Management Console, and AWS Premium Support.

Please visit the new China website for more information at www.amazonaws.cn.

AWS is excited to announce its upcoming limited preview of its China (Beijing) Region. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using the new Beijing Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses or software developers can apply for access to the limited preview of AWS services in the AWS China Region today at http://www.amazonaws.cn.

Customers who wish to use the new Beijing Region are required to sign up for a separate set of account credentials unique to the China (Beijing) Region. Customers with existing AWS credentials will not be able to access resources in the new Region, and vice versa.

Under the Limited Preview phase, access to the new Region will be by invitation only. AWS will periodically review applicants for the limited preview and invite more and more customers to experience our services in China. The China (Beijing) Region aims to help customers reduce latency to end-users based in China while avoiding the up-front expenses, long-term commitments, and scaling challenges associated with maintaining and operating their own infrastructure. Beijing joins Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo as the fourth Region in Asia Pacific and as the tenth Region worldwide. We will gradually open up the Region for a wider range of customers over time.

AWS’s new Beijing Region will support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Management Console, and AWS Premium Support.

Please visit the new China website for more information at www.amazonaws.cn.