Amazon recently announced several new features for the AWS platform, including option to choose Redis for it's ElastiCache service, several RDS related improvements and even the release of their unified command line interface.
Redis is now an option along with MemCached when using the AWS ElastiCache service. It comes with 9 cache node types and same pricing as the MemCached version. You can also easily set it up for usage within AWS OpWorks. However Enhanced cache Nodes are not currently available for Redis.
There were also several improvements announced for the AWS Relation Database Service (RDS)
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Improved Replica feature-set – parallel replica creation, snapshots/recovery for read-replicas and second-tier replicas (this enables each master to have upto 30 total replicas for extremely-high read scenarios)
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Ability to easily Migrate data from an on-premises MySQL instance to RDS and vice-versa
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A new instance type called CR1 with 88 ECU, 244 GB RAM, high performance networking and upto 20,000 IOPS
Apart from these, Amazon also introduced a new open source Geo Library for Amazon DynamoDB targeted towards developers building location based apps.
This week also saw the release of AWS's new Unified Command Line interface. The open-source interface built on python has been in developer preview for some time now, and is a wrapper around all services AWS provides (except a few such as Glacier and CloudFront). Compared to the earlier interface where multiple tools had to be downloaded and installed separately, this promises a much smoother experience for managing AWS for power users.