How we kept information on Maps reliable in 2021

In a world that’s constantly changing, it’s important for Google Maps to give you the freshest, most up-to-date information possible — so you can know whether the restaurant down the street from you reopened or if your neighborhood grocery store has curbside pickup. One way we do this is through contributed content. Every day we receive around 20 million contributions from people using Maps. Those contributions include everything from updated business hours and phone numbers to photos and reviews. As with any platform that accepts contributed content, we have to stay vigilant in our efforts to fight abuse and make sure this information is accurate. Thanks to a combination of machine learning and human operators, we continue to decrease the…

Get organized with a little Google Photos spring cleaning

Flowers are blooming, the weather’s getting warmer, the days are a little longer — which means it’s also time for spring cleaning. Over the coming weeks, we’re starting to roll out some updates to Google Photos to make it even easier to sort through your albums, import photos and videos you have saved somewhere else, see your shared content and find screenshots. Let the decluttering begin! A more sortable library tab The best part of spring cleaning is knowing where everything is and being able to find it just like that. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a bunch of favorites, albums, shared albums and (if you’re on Android) on-device folders in your library tab of the Photos…

AWS Week in Review – March 21, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick round up of interesting news and announcements from AWS! Another week, another round up of the most significant AWS launches from the previous seven days! Among the news, we have new AWS Heroes and a cost reduction. Also, improvements for customers using AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and a new database-to-database connectivity option for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Last Week’s Launches Here are some launches that caught my attention last week: AWS Billing Conductor – This new tool provides customizable pricing and cost visibility for your end customers or business units and helps when you have specific showback and…

New and Updated AWS Well-Architected Lenses

Since 2015, the AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers and partners improve their cloud architectures. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. At AWS re:Invent 2021, we introduced a new Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing. In 2017, we introduced AWS Well-Architected Lenses and extended the best practice guidance to specific industry and technology domains, such as serverless, high performance computing (HPC), internet of things (IoT), software as a service (SaaS), foundational technical review (FTR), and financial services. Use the applicable Lenses together with the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to fully evaluate your workloads. In 2021,…