Amazon Web Services Zocalo Goes Into General Availability

The enterprise-focused, cloud-based document storage and sharing service that Amazon Web Services unveiled last month at AWS Summit–one of many announcements the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider announced at its conference–has gone into general availability.

Zocalo, which has been in limited preview since it was announced in the first half of July, apparently received a lot of attention from Amazon customers following the AWS Summit announcement. Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, indicated in a blog post that many users expressed an interest in evaluating Zocalo, but only so many spaces were available.

For those customers and partners waiting to check out Zocalo, the delay is over. Zocalo is available on a 30-day free trial, duringn which Amazon customers can receive 200 GB of storage per user for up to 50 users. After the free trial, Zocalo is available for $5 per user per month for 200 GB of data storage. Additionally, Amazon WorkSpaces customers can receive access to Zocalo for no additional charge–= at least for 50 GB of storage space. The 200-GB subscription level is a $2 per month add-on for WorkSpaces customers. Check out the Zocalo pricing page for a more extensive list of pricing options.

“As part of this move to general availability, we are also announcing that AWS CloudTrail now records calls made to the Zocalo API. This API is currently internal, but we plan to expose it in the future,” wrote Barr.

Amazon also has developer partners in mind, and has asked developers who would like to build apps that work with Zocalo to express interest via email.

Barr also provided some insight into how he is using Zocalo.

“I generally have between five and 10 blog post drafts underway at any given time. I write the first draft, upload it to Zocalo, and share it with the product manager for initial review. We iterate on the early drafts to smooth out any kinks, and then share it with a wider audience for final review. When multiple reviewers provide feedback on the same document, Zocalo’s Feedback tab lets me scan, summarize, and respond to the feedback quickly and efficiently,” he wrote.