Amazon Web Services Security Whitepaper (PDF) (Sept. 5, 2008)
The issues of end-to-end security are more sophisticated in the cloud computing world than in a single datacenter.  We've published a document that should help answer some initial questions about physical and operational security processes for network infrastructure controlled by AWS.  Over the coming months, we'll publish even more resources to help you build secure and dependable solutions in the AWS cloud.

Announcing the AWS Start-Up Challenge - Win $100,000 in Prizes (Sept. 3, 2008)
AWS has launched this year's AWS Start-Up Challenge, a contest for entrepreneurs and start-ups that will award the winner $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, a potential investment offer from Amazon.com, and more. Submissions will be accepted until October 3, 2008.  Learn more about the contest and enter your great idea today!

Amazon SimpleDB Releases QueryWithAttributes (August 25, 2008)
This highly requested Amazon SimpleDB feature extends the existing Query functionality and simplifies the application development process. Instead of issuing a query followed by a series of read requests, application developers can now use a single API call to retrieve all information about items stored in Amazon SimpleDB. For more on QueryWithAttributes, see the Amazon SimpleDB Developer Guide.

Amazon Elastic Block Store Now Available (August 20, 2008)
AWS is excited to announce Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) a new persistent storage feature for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With Amazon EBS, storage volumes can be programmatically created and attached to Amazon EC2 instances. Prior to Amazon EBS, storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can choose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. For even more durable backups, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create snapshots of volumes that are stored to Amazon S3. Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. Read more on the Amazon EBS detail page or the press release.

AWS Start-Up Tour (August 14, 2008)
The 2008 AWS Start-Up Tour is set to take off September 3rd. We invite all start-up leaders and entrepreneurs to join us for these half-day events to learn how AWS empowers entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainable growth. Join us in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Boston, New York, Austin, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Toronto, London, and Amsterdam. Seats are limited, RSVP today.