Author: Jeff Barr

Developers typically have to set up and operate a shared build server to run continuous integration builds and tests on their source code changes. Because of the maintenance overhead, many developers avoid that and just run builds on their local machines, often leading to situations where code that works for one developer does not work […]

From what I can tell, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Grace Hopper was the first person to apply the term debugging to the process of identifying and removing errors from programs. While I have never had to extract an actual bug from a computer, I did spend plenty of time debugging assembly language programs early […]

Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new […]

A I was preparing to write this blog post I went back and read the post I wrote when we launched AWS Snowball last year (AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances) and then cataloged all of the updates that we have made since then. To recap, Snowball started […]

Computing and data processing within the confines of a data center or office is easy. You can generally count on good connectivity and a steady supply of electricity, and you have access to as much on-premises or cloud-based storage and compute power as you need. The situation is much different out in the real world. […]

Just two years ago (it seems like yesterday), I introduced you to Amazon Aurora in my post Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. In that post I told you how the RDS team took a fresh, unconstrained look at the relational database model and explained how they built a relational […]

As I was getting ready to write this post, I thought back to my childhood (largely spent watching TV) and some of the popular computer and robot voices of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In just a few minutes, pleasant memories of HAL-9000, B9 (Lost in Space), the original Star Trek Computer, and Rosie (from The […]

What do you see when you look at this picture? You might simply see an animal. Maybe you see a pet, a dog, or a Golden Retriever. The association between the image and these labels is not hard-wired in to your brain. Instead, you learned the labels after seeing hundreds or thousands of examples. Operating […]