Category: News

Our customers have become very adept at using Amazon Elastic MapReduce to chew through vast amounts of data in short order. As a switch from the corporate examples that I usually provide, I’d like to tell you about a slightly more personal one. My son Stephen is working on his PhD in Finance at the […]

You’ve been able to use the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to construct a secure bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud using an encrypted VPN connection. All communication between Amazon EC2 instances running within a particular VPC and the outside world (the Internet) was routed across the VPN connection. Today we are […]

We’ve added two new features to the AWS Management Console: forced detach of EBS volumes and termination protection. Forced DetachFrom time to time an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume will refuse to cleanly detach itself from an EC2 instance. This can occur for several reasons, including continued system or user activity on the volume. Under […]

We’ve just opened a new Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 location. The new location in Paris is our fifth in Europe and should result in even better performance and response time for users in that part of the world. You don’t have to make any changes to your application or your configuration to take […]

From aeronautics to genomics to financial services, High Performance Computing is becoming a common requirement in many fields of industry and academia. Traditionally, the barrier to entry into this area has remained high, with the expertise and cost needed to provide such facilities proving to be prohibitive. With Amazon EC2’s Cluster Compute instances, extremely high […]

We’ve just opened up an additional edge location for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. Located in picturesque Jacksonville, Florida, this new edge location enjoys long walks on the beach and responding to requests for content (CloudFront) and IP addresses (Route 53) from requesters in the southeast United States. This location brings the total number […]

We want to make it easier for developers to build AWS applications on mobile devices. Today we are introducing new SDKs for AWS Development on devices that run the Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems (iPhones, iPads, and the iPod Touch). The AWS SDK for Android and the AWS SDK for iOS provide developers […]

The Amazon CloudWatch team has put together a really impressive set of new features. Too many, in fact, to fit on this page. I’ve written a series of posts with all of the information. Here’s a summary, with links to each post: Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. […]

If you have a mid-range or high-end video card in your desktop PC, it probably contains a specialized processor called a GPU or Graphics Processing Unit. The instruction set and memory architecture of a GPU are designed to handle the types of operations needed to display complex graphics at high speed. The instruction sets typically […]

Amir of Diversion, Inc. wrote to tell me about his company’s newest release, an AWS-powered Facebook game called FameTown. FameTown lets you play the role of a movie star in a digital version of Hollywood. You can start on the D-List (a total unknown) and attempt to progress to the A-List, earning points by completing […]