Category: Compute

Many AWS services work just fine by themselves, but even better together! This important aspect of our model allows you to select a single service, learn about it, get some experience with it, and then extend your span to other related services over time. On the other hand, opportunities to make the services work together […]

The long-standing trend toward on-premises virtualization has helped many enterprises to increase operational efficiency and to wring out as much value from their data center as possible. Along the way, they have built up a substantial repertoire of architectural skills and operational experience, but now find that they are struggling to match public cloud economics […]

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 […]

Express is a web framework for Node.js . It simplifies the development of “serverless” web sites, web applications, and APIs. In a serverless environment, most or all of the backend logic is run on-demand in a stateless fashion (see Mike Roberts’ article on Serverless Architectures for a more detailed introduction). AWS Lambda, when used in […]

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 […]

EC2’s M4 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources and are a good choice for many different types of applications. We launched the M4 instances last year (read The New M4 Instance Type to learn more) and gave you a choice of five sizes, from large up to 10xlarge. Today we are […]