Last week, there were some offerings and new features release from Amazon. Microsoft made an announcement on Windows Azure Store expansion and new add-ons. Google has published some interesting Google Cloud Platform case studies. Plus, Scalr has announced the extension of their multi-cloud capabilities.

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Early last week, IaaS leader Amazon added three new features to the CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux. New features include IAM Role Support, Auto Scaling and Aggregate Metrics. These scripts can be run in the background to periodically report system metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. Next, they have announced the beta release of AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server. The AWS Diagnostics tool addresses a user request to make the intersection between AWS and Windows Server easier to analyse and troubleshoot.

They have also reduced the price and expanded free tier for the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Simple Notification Service (SNS). Here are the pricing details:

• SQS API prices will decrease by 50%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
• SNS API prices will decrease by 17%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
• The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10x from 100K requests per month.

Finally, Amazon has shared a few FAQs on AWS OpsWorks and scheduled OpsWorks webinar session for users to learn more about the service.

PaaS player Microsoft has posted that there was a Windows Azure Storage outage that impacted HTTPS traffic. This was due to an expired SSL certificate. They have decided to provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with the SLA. Next, they have announced that they have expanded the availability of Windows Azure Store in 25 new markets, raising its market count to 36. They have also introduced four new add-ons in the Windows Azure Store.

Google has published an interesting collection of case studies to the Google Cloud Platform site. These case studies help current and prospective users gain an insight into the vast array of their applications. They have also included some new content to the Google Developers Academy to help users improve their App Engine skills. New tutorial content include use of the Python NDB API, Jinja2 templates, discussion of data consistency and datastore indexes. Also, they have announced that DevTable will now support the development of Google App Engine apps with Python directly on the cloud, without having to install and run the App Engine SDK locally.

Scalr has announced the extension of their multi-cloud support for OpenStack, Rackspace Open Cloud and Google Compute Engine. Scalr now allows users to deploy and manage workloads on Google Compute Engine. ActiveState has released Stackato 2.8 as an update to its private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology.

Stay tuned until next week!