How Grillo Built a Low-Cost Earthquake Early Warning System on AWS

It is estimated that 50 percent of the injuries caused when a high magnitude earthquake affects an area are because of falls or falling hazards. This means that most of these injuries could have been prevented if the population had a few seconds of warning to take cover. Grillo, a social impact enterprise focused on seismology, created a low-cost solution using AWS that senses earthquakes and alerts the population in real time about the dangers in the area. Earthquakes can happen at any time, and there are two actions cities can take to mitigate the damages. First is structural refitting, that is, building structures that can resist earthquakes. This solution doesn’t apply to many areas because they require big investments. The…

A Decade of Ever-Increasing Provisioned IOPS for Amazon EBS

Progress is often best appreciated in retrospect. It is often the case that a steady stream of incremental improvements over a long period of time ultimately adds up to a significant level of change. Today, ten years after we first launched the Provisioned IOPS feature for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), I strongly believe that to be the case. All About the IOPS Let’s start with a quick review of IOPS, which is short for Input/Output Operations per Second. This is a number which is commonly used to characterize the performance of a storage device, and higher numbers mean better performance. In many cases, applications that generate high IOPS values will use threads, asynchronous I/O operations, and/or other forms of…

New – HTTP/3 Support for Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service, a network of interconnected servers that is geographically closer to the users and reaches their computers much faster. Amazon CloudFront reduces latency by delivering data through 410+ globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs) with automated network mapping and intelligent routing. With Amazon CloudFront, content, API requests and responses or applications can be delivered over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) version 1.1, and 2.0 over the latest version of Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and secure communication between the user client and CloudFront. Today we are adding HTTP version 3.0 (HTTP/3) support for Amazon CloudFront. HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a user datagram protocol-based, stream-multiplexed, and secure transport protocol that combines and improves upon…

AWS Week in Review – August 15, 2022

I love the AWS Twitch channel for watching interesting online live shows such as AWS On Air, Containers from the Couch, and Serverless Office Hours. Last week, AWS Storage Day 2022 was hosted virtually on the AWS Twitch channel and covered recent announcements and insights that address customers’ needs to reduce and optimize storage costs and build data resiliency into their organization. For example, we pre-announced Amazon File Cache, an upcoming new service on AWS that accelerates and simplifies hybrid cloud workloads. To learn more, watch the on-demand recording. Two weeks ago, AWS Silicon Innovation Day 2022 was also hosted on the AWS Twitch channel. This event covered an overview of our history of silicon development and provided useful sessions on specific AWS chip innovations such as AWS…