Author: Jeff Barr

Our customers have become very adept at using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to chew through vast amounts of data in short order. As a switch from the corporate examples that I usually provide, I’d like to tell you about a slightly more personal one. My son Stephen is working on his PhD in Finance at the […]

I launched my first “production” EC2 instance almost three years ago, on July 15, 2008. For my purposes, production includes hosting my personal blog and writing code for my AWS book, as well as a host for random development projects that I putter around with from time to time. I am happy to report that […]

Our customers are doing all sorts of interesting work on AWS. We’ve been working with them to produce a number of AWS Case Studies so as to better spread the word about how cloud computing and AWS are changing the world. Here are the latest case studies:   European Space Agency – The Data User […]

The newest version of the AWS SDK for Java has a very convenient client-side encryption feature. Once enabled, the SDK will automatically encrypt data before sending it to Amazon S3, and decrypt it before returning it to your application. You have full control of the keys used to encrypt and decrypt your data and the […]

Today we are coupling two popular aspects of Amazon EC2: Cluster computing and Spot Instances! More and more of our customers are finding innovative ways to use EC2 Spot Instances to save up to two-thirds off the On-Demand price. Batch processing, media rendering and transcoding, grid computing, testing, web crawling, and Hadoop-based processing are just […]

The AWS team will be participating in and putting on a number of live events and webinars this month. Here’s a full list. Live events: April 4 – East Bay Java User Group (Oakland, CA). April 5 – SugarCRM Customer and Developer Conference (San Francisco, CA). April 5 – Rochester AWS User Group (Rochester, NY). […]

As I’ve blogged about in the past, we love to listen to our customers, and what we hear from them has a direct and very visible influence on our development process. I can literally watch as the information flows from customer meetings to trip reports to press releases (we write those first, before we build […]

Our hearts go out to those who have suffered through the recent events in Japan. I was relieved to hear from my friends and colleagues there in the days following the earthquake. I’m very impressed by the work that the Japan AWS User Group (JAWS) has done to help some of the companies, schools, and […]

We continue to listen to our customers, and we work hard to deliver the services, features, and business models based on what they tell us is most important to them. With hundreds of thousands of customers using Amazon EC2 in various ways, we are able to see trends and patterns in the requests, and to […]

We’ve created a new video tutorial, which describes how to setup a cluster of high performance compute nodes in under 10 minutes. Follow along with the tutorial to get a feel for how to provision high performance systems with Amazon EC2 – we’ll even cover the cost of the resources you use, through a $20 […]