Yesterday’s SAWSUG meeting was held in the soon-to-be old Amazon building on Beacon Hill. Saw great presentations by

• AWS feature rollout since November (A December to remember)
• AWS DB offering overview (EC2 AMIs, RDS and SimpleDB). Don’t forget the 4 hour maintenance window! Rollout of 5.1.4.2 is coming soon.
• Senior VP Engineering Bob Wise from  nuTsie.com (aka Melodeo)
• OpsCode‘s CTO Adam Jacob and VP Engineering Christopher Brown.

Take aways:

• Amazon’s 8th floor presentation room had some rockin’ views of the sound!
• Both presentations hinted that small AWS instances really don’t provide the best bang for your buck. Medium (High CPU) and Large sizes tend to provide better performance.
• Didn’t know that Windows 2008 R2 was now available on AWS (haven’t checked since December).
• CIDR addresses should be “/32″ unless you know what you’re doing!
• HIPPA compliance is at the App level, SAS 70 is at the physical layer.
• Locking your AWS instances can prevent accidental/unintentional shutdowns.
• memcached, memcached, memcached.
• Ecualyptus: Your own private Idaho (in the cloud) is AWS API compatible!