Things I'm hoping to hear in tomorrow's AWS Cloud Event

AWS is making big noise about tomorrow's "AWS Cloud Event" webcast. They are marketing it as "Find out what's next in the AWS Cloud". So marketing and hype aside, here's a short list of things I'd like to hear them announcing:

• Rails/.Net/Python BeanStalk containers




• They need to if they want to compete against Google App Engine and other PaaS providers




• Multi-Region services




• So far all their services are region-specific, which has its advantages but it also adds lots of complexity to the resource management code, so, for example, it would be nice if they allowed to have a VPC span two or more regions while each of the subnets remain region and AZ specific




• Ability to launch RDS instances inside a VPC




• RDS sounds like a promising service to use, but the inability to launch instances inside a VPC makes it a deal breaker for many




• MS SQL Server as an option for RDS




• Again, RDS sound like promising server but there are many applications and customers who work on a SQL Server backend DB. Having this option would add a strong selling point to RDS




• Region-to-region direct connection




• Even if they don't announce any multi-region service support, having region-to-region (with no internet hops) fat pipe would be huge. It would make Disaster Recovery replication and redundancy much simpler and faster

 

While AWS currently has a dominant position in the "Cloud Computing" arena (and much deserved, btw) , the above suggested features would make it even more of a no-brainer for developers to use and for managers to appreciate.