Author: Jeff Barr

AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud. Today we are enhancing this Region with the addition of five more EC2 instance types. Instances of these types can be launched directly or through Auto Scaling groups. Let’s take a look […]

Sitting here at my desk in Seattle, I am surrounded by colleagues that are working non-stop to make this year’s AWS re:Invent conference the best one yet! I get to hear all about the keynotes, sessions, and the big party without even leaving my desk. In 2013, five exciting startups had the opportunity to launch […]

I am pleased to announce that Elastic MapReduce now supports version 13 of Hive. Hive is a great tool for building and querying large data sets. It supports the ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) process with some powerful tools, and give you access to files stored on your EMR cluster in HDFS or in Amazon Simple Storage Service […]

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 […]