I have been following the progress of AWS BuilderCards for several years. Players of all skill levels use the cards to learn about AWS in a fun and engaging way, competing (in a friendly fashion) to combine their cards to form architectures, gaining knowledge and scoring points as they play: To date, more than 15,000 sets of BuilderCards have been printed and put to use over the course of three re:Invents, fifteen AWS Summits, and multiple community events. For example, here is a group of AWS enthusiasts having a good time in Tokyo during JAWS Days 2024: Feedback from players has been incredibly positive, with a 4.8 star customer satisfaction score (CSAT) across more than 1500 replies. Second Edition Now…
Category: AWS
Reposts from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS Weekly Roundup: 20 years of AWS News Blog, Express brokers for Amazon MSK, Windows Server 2025 images on EC2, and more (Nov 11, 2024)
Happy 20th Anniversary of the AWS News Blog! On November 9, 2004, Jeff Barr published his first blog post. At the time, he started a personal blog site using TypePad. He wanted to speak to his readers with his personal voice, not the company or team. On April 29, 2014, we created a new AWS blog site and migrated all posts to that page. There are currently over 4,300 posts on the AWS News Blog, with Jeff contributing over 3,200 of them. Since December 2016, the AWS News Blog has added new writers, but we are still following Jeff’s leadership principals for AWS News Bloggers in accordance with Day One. What’s unique about the AWS News Blog is that the…
Announcing new APIs for Amazon Location Service Routes, Places, and Maps
Today, Amazon Location Service released 17 new and enhanced APIs that expand and improve capabilities for the Routes, Places, and Maps functionalities, creating a more cohesive and streamlined experience for developers. By introducing enhanced features and offering simplified migration, these updates make Amazon Location Service more accessible and useful for a wide range of applications. You can now access advanced route optimization, toll cost calculations, GPS traces snapping, and a variety of map styles with static and dynamic rendering options, and perform proximity-based search and predictive suggestions, with rich, detailed information on points of interest. At Amazon, the vast majority of our roadmaps are driven by customer feedback. Many customers building applications with Amazon Location Service have shared that they…
Introducing Express brokers for Amazon MSK to deliver high throughput and faster scaling for your Kafka clusters
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Express brokers, a new broker type for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK). It’s designed to deliver up to three times more throughput per-broker, scale up to 20 times faster, and reduce recovery time by 90 percent as compared to Standard brokers running Apache Kafka. Express brokers come preconfigured with Kafka best practices by default, support Kafka APIs, and provide the same low latency performance that Amazon MSK customers expect, so they can continue using existing client applications without any changes. Express brokers provide improved compute and storage elasticity for Kafka applications when using Amazon MSK provisioned clusters. Amazon MSK is a fully-managed AWS service that makes it easier for you…