Category: Amazon EC2

Have you ever had to decide between a general purpose tool and one built for a very specific purpose? The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one. Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that […]

I have written about the benefits of GPU-based computing in the past, most recently as part of the launch of the P2 instances with up to 16 GPUs. As I have noted in the past, GPUs offer incredible power and scale, along with the potential to simultaneously decrease your time-to-results and your overall compute costs. […]

Earlier today, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the next wave of updates to the EC2 instance roadmap. We are making updates to our high I/O, compute-optimized, memory-optimized instances, expanding the range of burstable instances, and expanding into new areas of hardware acceleration including FPGA-based computing. This blog post summarizes today’s announcements and links to a […]

In-memory processing is a huge deal. With workloads growing larger by the day and CPUs gaining power with every successive generation, the ability to fit entire datasets into memory is becoming a prerequisite for high-quality Business Intelligence, analytics, data mining, and other real-time workloads that are sensitive to latency. Distributed caching and batch processing workloads […]

AWS customers love the cost-effective, burst-based model that they get when they use T2 instances. These customers use T2 instances to run general purpose workloads such as web servers, development environments, continuous integration servers, test environments, and small databases. These instances provide a generous amount of baseline performance and the ability to automatically and transparently […]

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 […]

I am happy to be able to announce that an EC2 price reduction will go in to effect on December 1, 2016, just in time to make your holiday season just a little bit more cheerful! Our engineering investments, coupled with our scale and our time-tested ability to manage our capacity, allow us to identify […]

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 […]