I find quantum computing fascinating! At its simplest level, it extends the concept of bits, that have 0 or 1 values, with quantum bits, or qubits, that can have a combination of two different (quantum) states. Two characteristics make qubits really interesting: When you look at the value of a qubit, you get only one of the two possible states with a probability that depends on how its own states are combined. Multiple qubits can be “connected” together (this is called quantum entanglement) so that by changing the state of one, even just by reading its value, you alter the states of the others. These characteristics come from low-level properties described by quantum mechanics, a fundamental theory in physics that…
Month: November 2021
New – Amazon EC2 M6a Instances Powered By 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors
AWS and AMD have collaborated to give customers more choice and value in cloud computing, starting with the first generation AMD EPYC processors in 2018 such as M5a/R5a, M5ad/R5ad, and T3a instances. In 2020, we expanded the second generation AMD EPYC processors to include C5a/C5ad instances and recently G4ad instances, combining the power of both second-generation AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Pro GPUs. Today, I am happy to announce the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6a instances featuring the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, running at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz to offer up to 35 percent price performance versus the previous generation M5a instances. You can launch M6a instances today in ten sizes in the AWS US East…
New – Securely manage your AWS IoT Greengrass edge devices using AWS Systems Manager
In 2020, we launched AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0, an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software and applications. Today, we’re very excited to announce the ability to securely manage your AWS IoT Greengrass edge devices using AWS Systems Manager (SSM). Managing vast fleets of varying systems and applications remotely can be a challenge for administrators of edge devices. AWS IoT Greengrass was built to enable these administrators to manage their edge device application stack. While this addressed the needs of many typical edge device administrators, system software on these devices still needed to be updated and maintained through operational policies consistent with those of their broader IT organizations. To this end, administrators would typically…
New – Real-User Monitoring for Amazon CloudWatch
Way back in 2009 I wrote a blog post titled New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch. In that post I talked about how Amazon CloudWatch helps you to build applications that are highly scalable and highly available, and noted that it gives you cost-effective real-time visibility into your metrics, with no deployment and no maintenance. Since that launch, we have added many new features to CloudWatch, all with that same goal in mind. For example, last year I showed you how you could Use CloudWatch Synthetics to Monitor Sites, API Endpoints, Web Workflows ,and More. Real-User Monitoring (RUM) The next big challenge (and the one that we are addressing today) is monitoring web…