Amazon's cloud gives users more control

Amazon's cloud-computing arm has added new features to its services, to help users monitor cloud resources, adjust capacity and balance traffic loads.

In an announcement on Monday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled a public beta of the three new features: the CloudWatch monitoring web service; Auto Scaling for on-demand capacity adjustments; and Elastic Load Balancing for redistributing traffic.

The new features are available immediately to users in the US, according to the AWS team blog, with availability in Europe set to follow in the next few months.

"You can use these services to make your AWS applications perform better without sacrificing application control, freedom of development, choice of tools, speed of deployment, or any other kind of flexibility," according to the blog post.

For the past three years, AWS has been offering on-demand computing and storage through its Elastic Cloud Compute, or EC2, service and Simple Storage Service, known as S3. The company says it deals with 80,000 work requests per second and stores 52 billion objects.

Original article: Amazon gives users more cloud control from ZDNet UK