Credit: ID 45105854 © Duncan Noakes | Dreamstime.com
Amazon has added its CloudWatch Synthetics product and Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs for Snapshots to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Sydney region.
CloudWatch Synthetics allows users to create 'canaries' — configurable scripts that follow the same routes and actions as a customer.
Users can then check the availability and latency of endpoints and application programming interfaces (APIs) through the canary capturing of load time data and screenshots of the user interface (UI).
Canaries can also check applications for transactions, broken and dead links, step task completions, page load errors, load latencies for UI assets, complex wizard flows and checkout flows.
The scripts can be run once or on a schedule and as often as once per minute.
Users interested in utilising Synthetics can do so through the CloudWatch console, which is available on either a free or paid tier.
The free tier allows for 100 canary runs per month, while the paid tier is priced at US$0.0012 per canary run.
Additionally, Amazon also added EBS direct APIs for Snapshots to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.
EBS direct APIs for Snapshots allow backup providers using the Sydney region to track incremental changes on EBS volumes by taking snapshots — incremental backups — with Amazon claiming it can cut backup times by up to 70 per cent.
The APIs also allow users to observe the difference between two snapshots without the need for EBS volumes and EC2 instances.
Amazon EBS direct APIs for Snapshots are available in the paid tier of Amazon EBS at a rate of $0.0007 per thousand ListChangedBlocks and ListSnapshotBlocks requests and $0.0036 per thousand GetSnapshotBlock SnapShotAPIUnits.
