Author: Jeff Barr

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Doug Grismore, Director of Storage Operations for AWS. Doug has some useful performance tips and tricks that will help you to get the best possible performance from Amazon S3. There’s also information about a special S3 hiring event that will take place later this week in Seattle. […]

AWS works hard to lower our costs so that we can pass those savings back to our customers. We look to reduce hardware costs, improve operational efficiencies, lower power consumption and innovate in many other areas of our business so we can be more efficient. The history of AWS bears this out — in the […]

Were excited to work with the Plat_Forms programming contest, an effort organized in Berlin, at Freie Universitt this spring.   Focus on Scalability & Cloud ArchitecturesThe Plat_Forms contest has been around in Germany since 2007. Its hallmark is celebrating the diversity and strength of various development languages (Java EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.). […]

Today’s guest blogger Rahul Pathak, a Senior Product Manager on the AWS Database Team. Rahul has some news to share. — Jeff; Amazon ElastiCache is now available in two additional Regions: US West (Oregon) and South America (Sao Paulo). Caching systems perform best when they are right next to your application servers, so were excited […]

Simple Workflow Today we are introducing the Amazon Simple Workflow service, SWF for short. This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both). Amazon Simple Workflow coordinates the flow of synchronous or asynchronous tasks (logical application steps) so that you can focus […]

Esri is a leading provider of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and geo-database management applications. Their powerful mapping solutions have been used by Governments, industry, academics, and NGOs for nearly 30 years (read their history to learn more). Over the years, they have ported their code from mainframes to minicomputers (anyone else remember DEC and Prime?), and […]

Its always exciting to find out that an app that has changed how I consume news and blog content on my mobile devices is using AWS to power some of their most engaging features. Such is the case with Pulse, a visual news reading app for iPhone, iPad and Android. Pulse uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce, […]

Earlier today, GigaOM published a cost comparison of self-hosting vs. hosting on AWS. I wanted to bring to your attention a few quick issues that we saw with this analysis: Lower Costs in Other AWS Regions – The comparison used the AWS costs for the US West (San Francisco) Region, ignoring the fact that EC2 […]