Category: Launch

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 […]

While computers that talk are great, computers that listen and respond are even better! If you have used an Amazon Echo, you know how simple, useful, and powerful the Alexa-powered interaction model can be. Today we are making the same deep learning technologies (ASR – Automatic Speech Recognition NLU – Natural Language Understanding) that power […]

The amount of data that we all have to deal with grows every day (I still keep a floppy disk or two around in order to remind myself that 1.44 MB once seemed like a lot of storage). These days, many people routinely process and query data in structured or semi-structured files at petabyte scale. […]

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. […]