UPDATED 12:04 EDT / AUGUST 23 2012

Amazon Web Services Follows Up with New Service Tags

Amazon Web Services logoAmazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing its efforts to please its corporate customers. The latest update is a new tagging mechanism to help organizations more easily manage costs.  The new feature allows companies to categorize AWS usage so that the costs can later be allocated to a specific project, department or other billing unit. AWS evangelist, Jeff Barr, announced the cost-based tags via a recent blog post.

The new tags extend AWS Elastic Compute Cloud’s (EC2) existing tagging system with a new set of tags that the billing system can use. The system provides several buckets for cost allocation:

  • S3 buckets
  • EC2 Instances
  • EBS volumes
  • Reserved Instances
  • Spot Instance requests
  • VPN connections
  • Amazon RDS DB Instances
  • AWS CloudFormation Stacks

Companies can apply up to ten tags  to each resource and can specify which tags have significance for billing. Amazon plans to enhance the tagging feature over time with new capabilities such as greater than ten tags per resource and including the upfront fee for Reserved Instance purchases.

Earlier this week Amazon Web Services had yet another launch –  it debuted Glacier, a low cost service  for cold data. Customers can pay as little as one penny per gigabyte per month. Amazon intends for customers to use the service to replace traditional tape back up, but to be sure the service isn’t abused, it has taken a few precautions . Data retrieval is slow and costs are high. Before Glacier, AWS added support for Python and some the more popular tool used with the language to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Amazon will have to continue to innovate if it wishes to continue to lead the public cloud market.


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