Road tripping on Route 66

Ninety-six years ago on April 30th, one of the original highways in the U.S. Highway System was assigned its numerical designation of 66, creating what we know today as Route 66. But to say Route 66 is just a highway is a grave understatement. After all, it is the most-searched U.S. highway of all time. One of the perks of working as a Doodler (I promise, it’s a real job) was getting to drive the 2,448-mile journey from Chicago to Los Angeles in my ‘72 Chevelle. I got to experience this captivating road trip firsthand, to create a Doodle celebrating Route 66. This Doodle, which is essentially an animated sketchbook of various historic spots along the route, is the product…

Ease back into your office routine with Google

As many people start returning to the office, we know there’s a lot to (re)figure out — like what to wear on the first day back, how long your commute will take and how to stay productive. So we’re sharing some tips for getting back into the office groove with a little help from Google products. Rebuild a routine Google Assistant Routines can help you automate tasks so you have less to do and think about before you head to work. Just say “Hey Google, good morning” and your Assistant can share news, weather or traffic updates, tell you what’s on your calendar, and even get your smart coffee maker started on your morning brew. You can create a Routine…

Amazon MSK Serverless Now Generally Available–No More Capacity Planning for Your Managed Kafka Clusters

Today we are making Amazon MSK Serverless generally available to help you reduce even more the operational overhead of managing an Apache Kafka cluster by offloading the capacity planning and scaling to AWS. In May 2019, we launched Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka to help our customers stream data using Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an open-source platform that enables customers to capture streaming data like clickstream events, transactions, and IoT events. Apache Kafka is a common solution for decoupling applications that produce streaming data (producers) from those consuming the data (consumers). Amazon MSK makes it easy to ingest and process streaming data in real time with fully managed Apache Kafka clusters. Amazon MSK reduces the work needed to…

New – Storage-Optimized Amazon EC2 Instances (I4i) Powered by Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors

Over the years we have released multiple generations of storage-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances including the HS1 (2012) , D2 (2015), I2 (2013) , I3 (2017), I3en (2019), D3/D3en (2020), and Im4gn/Is4gen (2021). These instances are used to host high-performance real-time relational databases, distributed file systems, data warehouses, key-value stores, and more. New I4i Instances Today I am happy to introduce the new I4i instances, powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz. The instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices that are custom-built by AWS, and are designed to minimize latency and maximize transactions per second (TPS) on…