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.

Amazon Kinesis – Public Beta Now Open

We announced a limited preview of Amazon Kinesis last month at AWS re:Invent. If you aren’t familiar with Kinesis, take a quick look at my recent post, Amazon Kinesis – Real-Time Processing of Streaming Big Data, to learn more. I am pleased to announce that Kinesis is now available in public beta form, and that […]

VM Import / Export for Linux

If you have invested in the creation of “golden” Linux images suitable for your on-premises environment, I have some good news for you. We have extended our popular VM Import/Export feature with support for multiple Linux distributions and virtualization formats. You can import the golden images that you currently run in VMware, Xen, and Microsoft […]

AWS Week in Review – December 9, 2013

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, December 9 We announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Version 5.5 of PHP. Tuesday, December 10 We announced that the AWS Management Console now includes Auto Scaling Support. The AWS Security Blog talked about Enabling Federation to AWS using Windows Active […]

Analyze Large Data Sets on Elastic MapReduce Clusters With Impala

Impala is an open source query tool for Hadoop. You can use familiar SQL-like statements to activate Impala’s distributed in-memory query engine, allowing you to quickly and efficiently process large amounts of data. In many cases, Impala is significantly faster than Hive, allowing you to interact with your data in real-time. Impala can process data […]

C3 Instance Update

As you know, we launched our new compute optimized instance family (C3) a few weeks ago, and wow, are we seeing unprecedented demand across all sizes and all Regions!  As one of our product managers just told me, these instances are simply “fast in every dimension.” They have a high performance CPU, matched with SSD-based […]

Now Available – Global Secondary Indexes for Amazon DynamoDB

As I promised a few weeks ago, Amazon DynamoDB now supports Global Secondary Indexes. You can now create indexes and perform lookups using attributes other than the item’s primary key. With this change, DynamoDB goes beyond the functionality traditionally provided by a key/value store, while retaining the scalability and performance benefits that have made it […]

Background Task Handling for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

My colleague Abhishek Singh sent along a guest post to introduce a really important new feature for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. — Jeff; You can now launch Worker Tier environments in Elastic Beanstalk. These environments are optimized to process application background tasks at any scale. Worker tiers complement the existing web tiers and are ideal for time […]