AWS News Blog

Jeff Barr

Author: Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) – A Speed Boost for Your Amazon Redshift Queries

Amazon Redshift already provides up to 3x better price-performance at any scale than any other cloud data warehouse. We do this by designing our own hardware and by using Machine Learning (ML). For example, we launched the SSD-based RA3 nodes for Amazon Redshift at the end of 2019 (Amazon Redshift Update – Next-Generation Compute Instances […]

CloudWatch Metric Streams – Send AWS Metrics to Partners and to Your Apps in Real Time

When we launched Amazon CloudWatch back in 2009 (New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch), it tracked performance metrics (CPU load, Disk I/O, and network I/O) for EC2 instances, rolled them up at one-minute intervals, and stored them for two weeks. At that time it was used to monitor […]

IAM Access Analyzer Update – Policy Validation

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an important and fundamental part of AWS. You can create IAM policies and service control policies (SCPs) that define the desired level of access to specific AWS services and resources, and then attach the policies to IAM principals (users and roles), groups of users, or to AWS resources. […]

New Amazon EC2 X2gd Instances – Graviton2 Power for Memory-Intensive Workloads

We launched the first Graviton-powered EC2 instances in late 2018 and announced the follow-on Graviton2 processor just a year later. The dual SIMD units, support for int8 and fp16 instructions, and other architectural improvements between generations combine to make the Graviton2 a highly cost-effective workhorse processor. Today, you can choose between General Purpose (M6g and […]

AWS Fault Injection Simulator – Use Controlled Experiments to Boost Resilience

AWS gives you the components that you need to build systems that are highly reliable: multiple Regions (each with multiple Availability Zones), Amazon CloudWatch (metrics, monitoring, and alarms), Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, several forms of cross-region replication, and lots more. When you put them together in line with the guidance provided in the Well-Architected Framework, […]

S3 Storage Modes

Amazon S3 Glacier Price Reduction

The Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is ideal for data archiving and long-term backup of information that will be accessed at least once per quarter (Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a better fit for data that is seldom accessed). Amazon S3 Glacier stores your data across three Availability Zones (AZs), each physically separated from […]

Celebrate 15 Years of Amazon S3 with ‘Pi Week’ Livestream Events

I wrote the blog post that announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) fifteen years ago today. In that post, I made it clear that the service was accessed via APIs and that it was targeted at developers, outlined a few key features, and shared pricing information. Developers found that post, started to write code […]