They may have been founded decades apart, but Microsoft and Amazon have a lot in common. Both companies were established out of their founders’ garages. Both make their homes in the larger Seattle area. Both are leading the cloud-computing market. And with gadgets like the Microsoft HoloLens holographic goggles and Amazon Echo digital-voice assistant, both companies want to redefine the notion of computing beyond the PC and smartphone.… Read more

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL with the security, availability, and reliability of a commercial database at one tenth the cost.… Read more

Lightsail lets you connect to AWS resources, such as an Amazon RDS database, through virtual private cloud (VPC) peering. Doing so lets you separate your data tier from the rest of your application. A VPC is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. Everything you create inside Lightsail is inside a VPC, and you can connect your Lightsail VPC to an Amazon VPC.… Read more

On November 30th, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new service called “Lightsail” which promises to deliver easy Virtual Private Servers (VPS) at predictable costs. AWS has been the leader in on-demand computing resources for a decade. They pioneered the space, and have by far the largest footprint when it comes to both customers, available regions, and revenue, which is on track to reach $13 Billion this year, according to a report by Business Insider.… Read more