New features in the management console allow for more flexibility in dealing with instance types, which are Amazon’s way of packaging different amounts of memory, processing power and storage. Using the console, administrators can now change the type of a stopped, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance that uses Amazon’s Elastic Block Store service, which provides block level storage volumes.
However, there are some limitations to changes that can be made. For example, users can’t change types from 32-bit to 64-bit processing or vice versa.
Otherwise, users also can now, via the management console, control how an instance shuts itself down — either stopping the instance so that it can be started again later, or terminating it.
Going forward, the company will continue to add features to the management console in an effort to make it “even more powerful and easier to use,” according to the blog post.
Meanwhile, AWS has also added the option to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on EC2’s Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances, a second blog post said. These allow users to build clustered systems in the cloud.
The commercially supported Linux OS can be used for development, test and production workloads, according to Amazon.
The second blog post also details how to build a “Watson jr” in Amazon’s cloud, based on a recipe written by Tony Pearson, a senior managing consultant for the IBM System Storage product line.
IBM Watson is the supercomputer that recently competed and won on Jeopardy, and uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as its OS.
