AWS Big Data Blog

Category: Technical How-to

Create a custom Amazon S3 Storage Lens metrics dashboard using Amazon QuickSight

Companies use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for its flexibility, durability, scalability, and ability to perform many things besides storing data. This has led to an exponential rise in the usage of S3 buckets across numerous AWS Regions, across tens or even hundreds of AWS accounts. To optimize costs and analyze security posture, Amazon […]

Synchronize and control your Amazon Redshift clusters maintenance windows

Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse that can expand to exabyte-scale. Today, tens of thousands of AWS customers (including NTT DOCOMO, Finra, and Johnson & Johnson) use Amazon Redshift to run mission-critical business intelligence dashboards, analyze real-time streaming data, and run predictive analytics jobs. Amazon Redshift powers analytical workloads for Fortune 500 companies, startups, and […]

Auto scaling Amazon Kinesis Data Streams using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda

This post is co-written with Noah Mundahl, Director of Public Cloud Engineering at United Health Group. Update (03/09/2026): Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand Advantage mode is now the recommended way to natively auto scale your Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. In this post, we cover a solution to add auto scaling to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. […]

Securing Apache Kafka is easy and familiar with IAM Access Control for Amazon MSK

September 2025: This post was reviewed and updated for accuracy. AWS launched IAM Access Control for Amazon MSK, which is a security option offered at no additional cost that simplifies cluster authentication and Apache Kafka API authorization using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles or user policies to control access. This eliminates the need […]

Dynamically scale up storage on Amazon EMR clusters

In a managed Apache Hadoop environment—like an Amazon EMR cluster—when the storage capacity on your cluster fills up, there is no convenient solution to deal with it. This situation occurs because you set up Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes and configure mount points when the cluster is launched, so it’s difficult to modify […]