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Amazon Web Services Continues to Make It Easier to Launch Applications in the AWS Cloud-Introducing AWS CloudFormation
[February 25, 2011]

Amazon Web Services Continues to Make It Easier to Launch Applications in the AWS Cloud-Introducing AWS CloudFormation


SEATTLE --(Business Wire)--

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) LLC, (AWS) an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced AWS CloudFormation, a simple way for developers and businesses to create collections of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. Customers can use AWS CloudFormation's sample templates or create their own templates to describe the AWS resources required to run their application. AWS CloudFormation then manages the complexity of provisioning those resources in the required order so developers don't have to worry about sequencing or interdependencies. AWS CloudFormation is available at no additional charge - customers pay only for the AWS resources required to run their applications. To get started using AWS CloudFormation, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

With AWS CloudFormation, customers describe "what" resources are needed and AWS CloudFormation takes care of "how" those resources are provisioned. For example, AWS CloudFormation templates concisely capture resource relationships, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that must be associated with an Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume that must be in the same Availability Zone as the Amazon EC2 instance. These templates free developers from having to think about and navigate these types of interdependencies. In addition, customers can use AWS CloudFormation templates to create identical copies of the same AWS infrastructure stack that will run over and over as needed, removing the need for developers to manually recreate an application's stack for each deployment.

"The idea for AWS CloudFormation came to us while we were building our own applications on top of AWS services. Rather than repeatedly building the same infrastructure and manually managing the dependencies between resources each time, our developer teams started creating templates to seamlessly handle the provisioning. We found this to be so useful that we decided to offer it up to our customers," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "AWS CloudFormation allows developers and businesses to focus on their applications while leaving the provisioning details to AWS."

Customers can create CloudFormation templates and deploy the associated resource stacks via the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation command line tools or APIs. AWS CloudFormation can be used across multiple AWS Availability Zones to configure a wide range of AWS resources including Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances and Amzon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics.



EA2D is a new studio within Electronic Arts that is building blockbuster and cross-platform social games. "For the release of Dragon Age Legends, EA2D uses highly automated and dynamic infrastructure running on AWS. While this allows us to scale seamlessly, provisioning new environments is still a manual process," said Mike Babineau, Systems Architect, EA2D. "AWS CloudFormation eliminates the manual processes and allows our developers to fire up infrastructure stacks at will. We can now use a single command to launch a duplicate of our production environment, which is perfect for feature development, load tests, or hotfixes."

Ylastic provides a unified management console service to AWS customers. "We are really excited about AWS Cloud Formation (News - Alert)," said Prabhakar Chaganti, CTO of Ylastic. "We have integrated management for AWS CloudFormation into Ylastic services and are releasing it today. This new service simplifies the deployment of resources and makes it easier to build a wide range of cloud-enabled enterprise and business applications."


About Amazon.com (News - Alert)

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle, Kindle 3G and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle 3G and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon. Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, and www.amazon.it. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.


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