Amazon Prime Day 2022 – AWS for the Win!

As part of my annual tradition to tell you about how AWS makes Prime Day possible, I am happy to be able to share some chart-topping metrics (check out my 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021 posts for a look back). My purchases this year included a first aid kit, some wood brown filament for my 3D printer, and a non-stick frying pan! According to our official news release, Prime members worldwide purchased more than 100,000 items per minute during Prime Day, with best-selling categories including Amazon Devices, Consumer Electronics, and Home. Powered by AWS As always, AWS played a critical role in making Prime Day a success. A multitude of two-pizza teams worked together to make sure that every…

How We Sent an AWS Snowcone into Orbit

I have been a fan of space travel and the US space program since I was 4 or 5 years old. I remember reading about the Mercury and Gemini programs, and watched with excitement as Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon. Today, with the cost to reach Low Earth Orbit (LEO) seemingly declining with each launch, there are more opportunities than ever before to push the boundaries of what we know, conducting ever-more bold experiments and producing vast amounts of raw data. Making the situation even more interesting, today’s experiments can use more types of sensors, each collecting data with higher resolution and at a greater sampling frequency. Dealing with this vast amount of data is a huge challenge.…

New – Amazon EC2 R6a Instances Powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Memory-Intensive Workloads

We launched the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances at AWS re:Invent 2021 and compute-intensive C6a instances in February of this year. These instances are powered by the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors running at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz to offer up to 35 percent better price performance versus the previous generation instances. Today, we are expanding our portfolio to include memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6a instances featuring AMD EPYC (Milan) processors 10 percent less expensive than comparable x86 instances. R6a instances, powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors are well suited for memory-intensive applications such as high-performance databases (relational databases, noSQL databases), distributed web scale in-memory caches (such as memcached, Redis), in-memory databases such as real-time big data analytics (such…

AWS Week In Review – July 18, 2022

Last week, AWS Summit New York was held in person at the Javits Center with thousands of attendees and over 100 sponsors and partners. During the keynote, Martin Beeby, AWS Principal Developer Advocate, talked about how innovations in cloud infrastructure enable customers to adapt to challenges and seize new opportunities. It included Liz Fong-Jones‘s great migration story of AWS Graviton in Honeycomb and Elliott Cordo‘s story of improving pharmacy experiences using AWS analytics and machine learning services in Capsule. Watch the full keynote video! A Recap of AWS Summit NY Announcements During the keynote, we announced the general availability of some new services: Amazon Redshift Serverless – This serverless option lets you analyze data at any scale without having to…