Author: Jeff Barr

Among many other responsibilities, a relational database system must make efficient use of main memory (RAM) for buffering and caching purposes. RAM is far faster and easier to access than SSD or magnetic storage; a properly sized and tuned cache or buffer pool can do wonders for database performance. Today we are improving Amazon RDS […]

As an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) user, you probably know just how simple and easy it is to launch EC2 instances on an as-needed basis. Perhaps you got your start by manually launching an instance or two, and later moved to a model where you launch instances through a AWS CloudFormation template, Auto […]

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August 25 We announced Enhanced Throughput for Provisioned IOPS (SSD) and General Purpose (SSD) EBS Volumes. The AWS DevOps Blog showed you how to Customize Ephemeral and EBS Volumes in Elastic Beanstalk Environments. Tuesday, August 26 We announced that Amazon WorkSpaces is now Available […]

We are launching a preview of a new, resource-style API model for the AWS SDK for Java. I will summarize the preview here, and refer you to the AWS Java Blog for full information! The new resource-oriented APIs are designed to be easier to understand and simpler to use. It obviates much of the request-response […]

Amazon Zocalo has been available in a Limited Preview since early July (see my blog post, Amazon Zocalo – Document Storage and Sharing for the Enterprise to learn more). During the Limited Preview, many AWS users expressed interest in evaluating Zocalo and were admitted in to the Preview on a space-available basis. Today we are […]

Back in the old, pre-cloud days, updating your data center to use the latest and greatest hardware was expensive, somewhat risky, and resource intensive. You would have to make the capital investment to acquire new hardware based on your usual 3 or 5 year refresh cycle, field test it, and then migrate your systems and […]

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, August  18 We announced that the Amazon CloudWatch Logs Agent is now Available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS. A post on the High Scalability blog asked (and answered) the question “What would you build if you could process 1 […]

Earlier this year we opened up the AWS Pop-up Loft for a pilot run of almost four weeks in San Francisco. During that time, many AWS developers dropped in to network, listen, learn, work, and socialize. Some developers came and enjoyed the structured, scheduled events. Others came in with their laptops, found a quiet corner, […]