Amazon Web Services announced a host of new updates at its Chicago Summit this week. The new offerings and solutions are aimed at helping companies better deal with their Big Data. The headline acts are two new Elastic Block Store service volume types based on traditional hard-drive tech, as well as an even bigger Snowball to help companies upload data to its cloud.

The new volume types include the Throughput-Optimized HDD and Cold HDD EBS, both of which allow companies to store data for cheap while ensuring its still useful for workloads involving MapReduce and Kafka. Amazon is essentially following the ‘different horses for different courses’ dictum, with the Throughput-Optimized HDD volume type being most useful for apps that use data frequently, and the Cold HDD service designed for those that only access data now and again.

In related news, Amazon’s customers have obviously taken to its Snowball offering for transferring data to and from AWS’s data centers. When Amazon introduced the service earlier, it’s Snowball portable servers only came in one size – 50 terabytes. Clearly that’s not enough, because the company is now offering an 80 terabyte server too, which customers can request whenever they have a mountain of data they need to upload to AWS safely and securely.

The Snowball service is expanding too, being offered to customers in AWS’s U.S. West region, and also its regions in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia. Previously, it was only available to customers in AWS’ Virginia region.

For those users who don’t need to shift quite so much data to Amazon’s cloud, AWS has their back too with its new S3 Transfer Acceleration Service, which quickly transfers ‘moderate’ amounts of data to the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). The service works via the AWS Edge network, which is also employed by the firm’s Cloudfront CDN and Route 53 DNS services. The company claims customers can upload data 550 percent faster than compared to a regular data transfer.

More mobile tricks

There’s a few big updates in Amazon’s mobile offerings too. One of them is the AWS Device Farm service, which lets developers test mobile apps via Amazon’s cloud. The service has been boosted with full remote access, tapping and gesture support via a web browser. The service is still in beta, only available on Android, with an iOS version to be added later this year.

Another mobile offering to be update is Amazon’s Cognito service, which gains a new feature called User Pools. Each User Pool comes with its own set of attributes, like name, address and so on, plus custom attributes. Password strength can be defined by the user, with multi-factor authentication also available. When used in conjunction with Amazon’s mobile SDKs, this makes it easy to build apps that include sign-up and login to a Cognito User Pool. However, developers should note this is a strategic offering for Amazon because once apps are linked to the service, it becomes much more difficult to move them to a new back-end provider.

And there’s more…

Other services to gain enhancements include AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which gains an option for automatic platform updates subject to configurable health checks. Before, Elastic Beanstalk had to be updated manually by the user.

Elsewhere, Amazon’s Inspector Service, designed to enable automatic application security testing, has hit general availability, and Amazon Kinesis Firehouse data ingestion and Amazon Elasticsearch analytics have been integrated.

Last but not least, Amazon introduced a new Application Discovery Service, a new migration tool for discovering apps running on-premises and their dependencies. The service isn’t yet available, but Amazon promises to make it happen “soon”.

There’s no stunning new developments here, but the incremental improvements show that Amazon is keen to keep reeling its customers in, and have them transfer even more of their data to its cloud. And it’ll keep on doing so until, we assume, there comes a day when there won’t be any more data left to migrate.

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