AWS re:Post – A Reimagined Q&A Experience for the AWS Community

The internet is an excellent resource for well-intentioned guidance and answers. However, it can sometimes be hard to tell if what you’re reading is, in fact, advice you should follow. Also, some users have a preference toward using a single, trusted online community rather than the open internet to provide them with reliable, vetted, and up-to-date answers to their questions. Today, I’m happy to announce AWS re:Post, a new, question and answer (Q&A) service, part of the AWS Free Tier, that is driven by the community of AWS customers, partners, and employees. AWS re:Post is an AWS-managed Q&A service offering crowd-sourced, expert-reviewed answers to your technical questions about AWS that replaces the original AWS Forums. Community members can earn reputation…

New – Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers improve their cloud architectures since 2015. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. Today we are introducing a new Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve their workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing. Similar to the other pillars, the Sustainability Pillar contains questions aimed at evaluating the design, architecture, and implementation of your workloads to reduce their energy consumption and improve their efficiency. The pillar is designed as a tool to track your progress toward policies and best practices that support a more sustainable future, not just a simple checklist. The Shared…

Announcing General Availability of Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit Version 2

Today, I’m happy to announce that both the Construct Hub and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) version 2 are now generally available (GA). The AWS CDK is an open-source framework that simplifies working with cloud resources using familiar programming languages: C#, TypeScript, Java, Python, and Go (in developer preview). Within their applications, developers create and configure cloud resources using reusable types called constructs, which they use just as they would any other types in their chosen language. It’s also possible to write custom constructs, which can then be shared across your teams and organization. With the new releases generally available today, defining your cloud resources using the CDK is now even more simple and convenient, and the Construct Hub…

Use New Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances to Build & Test Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV

Last year at AWS re:Invent, Jeff Barr wrote about the exciting availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances. Today, we’re announcing the preview of a new EC2 M1 Mac instance. The introduction of EC2 Mac instances brought the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. EC2 Mac instances are dedicated Mac mini computers attached through Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, which lets the Mac mini appear and behave like another EC2 instance. It connects to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), boot from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and leverage EBS snapshots, security groups and other AWS services. EC2 Mac instances let you scale your build and test fleets of Macs,…