Category: Amazon EC2

Many AWS customers are getting great results with the General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes that we launched in mid-2014 (see New SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage for more information).  If you’re unsure of which volume type to use for your workload, gp2 volumes are the best default choice because they offer balanced price/performance for a […]

The Amazon Linux AMI is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance execution environment for applications running on EC2. With limited remote access (no root login and mandatory SSH key pairs) and a very small number of non-critical packages installed, the AMI has a very respectable security profile. Many of our customers have asked […]

Early this year I announced that Longer EC2 Resource IDs are Now Available, and kicked off the start of a transition period that will last until early December 2016. During the transition period, you can opt in to the new resource format on a region-by-region, user-by-user basis. At the conclusion of the transition period, all […]

You can now run Windows Server 2016 on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This version of Windows Server is packed with new features including support for Docker and Windows containers.  We are making it available in all AWS regions today, in four distinct forms: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter with Desktop Experience – The mainstream […]

Earlier this year we made the x1.32xlarge instance available. With nearly 2 TiB of memory, this instance type is a great fit for memory-intensive big data, caching, and analytics workloads. Our customers are running the SAP HANA in-memory database, large-scale Apache Spark and Hadoop jobs, and many types of high performance computing (HPC) workloads. Today […]

You have had the power to store your own business, application, and system metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for quite some time (see New – Custom Metrics for Amazon CloudWatch to learn more).  As I wrote way back in 2011 when I introduced this feature, “You can view graphs, set alarms, and initiate automated actions based […]

I like to watch long-term technology and business trends and watch as they shape the products and services that I get to use and to write about. As I was preparing to write today’s post, three such trends came to mind: Moore’s Law – Coined in 1965, Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors […]

We launched EC2 Reserved Instances almost eight years ago. The model that we originated in 2009 provides you with two separate benefits: capacity reservations and a significant discount on the use of specific instances in an Availability Zone. Over time, based on customer feedback, we have refined the model and made additional options available including […]