Author: Jeff Barr

I think it is really interesting to see how breakthroughs and process improvements in one scientific or technical discipline can drive that discipline forward while also enabling progress in other seemingly unrelated disciplines. The Bioinformatics field is rife with examples of this pattern. Declining hardware costs, cloud computing, the ability to do parallel processing, and […]

Weighing in at a whopping 500 GB (388 GB of data and 112 GB of free space to allow for some in-place decompression), the Wikipedia XML data is our newest Public Data Set. This data set contains all of the Wikimedia wikis in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. We’ll be […]

The folks at Infochimps have just released the Daily Global Weather Public Data Set. This 20 GB data set incorporates daily weather measurements (temperature, dew point, wind speed, humidity, barometric pressure, and so forth) from over 9000 weather stations around the world. The data was originally collected as part of the Global Surface Summary of […]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS, is now available as a Public Data Set. Weighing in at 180 GB, the SDSS is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. The researchers have used a 2.5 meter, 120 megapixel telescope located in Apache Point, New Mexico to capture images of over one quarter of the […]

Today we are adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store  (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list […]

If you are interested in both IBM software and Cloud Computing, theres an online event that you need to know about. Its no secret that large enterprises are rapidly setting up shop in the Cloud. Applications that range from CRM to ERP to in-house infrastructure. Cloud computing removes so many barriers that adoption seems self […]

I’m happy to announce that the following AWS services are now available in Europe: Amazon SimpleDB – Highly available and scalable, low/no administration structured data storage. Amazon CloudWatch – Monitoring for the AWS cloud, starting with providing resource consumption (CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk I/O) for EC2 instances. Elastic Load Balancing – Traffic distribution […]

Our AWS Solution Providers have scheduled some webinars. These are free, but advance registration is required. Here’s what’s coming up this month: September 22 – Optimizing Performance in the cloud. Featuring SOASTA SOASTA will share best practices for performance testing in the cloud on AWS and feature two of its customers actively using the services. […]

Our new AWS Solution Providers Program is designed for Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators with an offering built on AWS. Among other benefits, official AWS Solution Providers are listed in the AWS Solution Providers Directory, have exclusive access to the AWS Solution Provider logo, and receive specialized Systems Integrator training. They receive priority for […]

We are pleased to be sponsoring, speaking at, and attending the upcoming Hadoop World conference (October 2nd in New York). Peter Sirota of Amazon will be delivering the keynote: Making Hadoop Easy on Amazon Web Services.. Peter will discuss Amazon Elastic MapReduce including our recent addition of support for Apache Pig (tutorial here). Later in […]