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.

AWS Price Reduction – CloudWatch Metrics

Back in 2011 I introduced you to Custom Metrics for CloudWatch and showed you how to publish them from your applications and scripts. At that time, the first ten custom metrics were free of charge and additional metrics were $0.50 per metric per month, regardless of the number of metrics that you published. Today, I […]

New – Web Access for Amazon WorkSpaces

We launched WorkSpaces in late 2013 (Amazon WorkSpaces – Desktop Computing in the Cloud) and have been adding new features at a rapid clip. Here are some highlights from 2016: November 2016 – WorkSpaces adds GPU-Powered Graphics Bundles. October 2016 – WorkSpaces becomes available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. August 2016 – WorkSpaces offers hourly […]

New – Auto Scaling for EMR Clusters

The Amazon EMR team is cranking out new features at an impressive pace (guess they have lots of worker nodes)! So far this quarter they have added all of these features: September – Data Encryption for Apache Spark, Tez, and Hadoop MapReduce. September – Open-sourced EMR-DynamoDB Connector for Apache Hive. November – Stream Processing at […]

Human Longevity, Inc. – Changing Medicine Through Genomics Research

Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) is at the forefront of genomics research and wants to build the world’s largest database of human genomes along with related phenotype and clinical data, all in support of preventive healthcare. In today’s guest post, Yaron Turpaz, Bryan Coon, and Ashley Van Zeeland talk about how they are using AWS to […]

New for Amazon Simple Queue Service – FIFO Queues with Exactly-Once Processing & Deduplication

As the very first member of the AWS family of services, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) has certainly withstood the test of time!  Back in 2004, we described it as a “reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components.” Over the years, we have added many features including a dead […]