AWS Nitro SSD – High Performance Storage for your I/O-Intensive Applications

We love to solve difficult problems for our customers! As you have seen through the years, innovation at AWS takes many forms, and encompasses both hardware and software. One of my favorite examples of customer-driven innovation is AWS Nitro System, which I first wrote about back in mid-2018. In that post I told you how Nitro System would allow us to innovate more quickly than ever, with the goal of creating instances that would run even more types of workloads. I also shared the basic building blocks, as they existed at that time, including Nitro Cards to accelerate and offload network and storage I/O, the Nitro Security Chip to monitor and protect hardware resources, and the Nitro Hypervisor to manage…

New Storage-Optimized Amazon EC2 Instances (Im4gn and Is4gen) Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors

EC2 storage-optimized instances are designed to deliver high disk I/O performance, and plenty of storage. Our customers use them to host high-performance real-time databases, distributed file systems, data warehouses, key-value stores, and more. Over the years we have released multiple generations of storage-optimized instances including the HS1 (2012) , D2 (2015), I2 (2013) , I3 (2017), I3en (2019), and D3/D3en (2020). As I look back on all of these launches, it is interesting to see how we continue to provide an ever-increasing set of options that make each successive generation an even better fit for the diverse (and also ever-increasing) needs of our customers. HS1 instances were available in just one size, D2 and I2 in four, I3 in six,…

Machine Learning-Powered Amazon Connect, Now With Call Summarization

At AWS our mission is to make machine learning (ML) accessible to data scientists, developers, and business users. To help businesses easily leverage the power of ML, we create purpose-built solutions that embed ML and deep learning technologies directly into a business process to address real customer needs, rather than leaving companies to sort it out on their own. One place where we have seen ML have an impact is within the contact center—the place you receive and respond to customer inquiries and issues. Because of the growing role of customer experience (CX) and the increase in contact less commerce via phone or email, contact centers are essentials to maintaining the human connections that businesses depend on. However, analog or…

New for AWS Control Tower – Region Deny and Guardrails to Help You Meet Data Residency Requirements

Many customers, such as those in highly regulated industries and the public sector, want to have control over where their data is stored and processed. AWS already offers many tools and features to comply with local laws and regulations, but we want to provide a simplified way to translate data residency requirements into controls that can be applied to single- and multi-account environments. Starting today, you can use AWS Control Tower to deploy data residency preventive and detective controls, referred to as guardrails. These guardrails will prevent provisioning resources in unwanted AWS Regions by restricting access to AWS APIs through service control policies (SCPs) built and managed by AWS Control Tower. In this way, content cannot be created or transferred…