AWS Week in Review – November 14, 2022

It’s now just two weeks to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, and the pace is picking up, both here on the News Blog, and throughout AWS as everyone get ready for the big event! I hope you get the chance to join us, and have shared links and other information at the bottom of this post. First, though, let’s dive straight in to this week’s review of news and announcements from AWS. Last Week’s LaunchesAs usual, let’s start with a summary of some launches from the last week that I want to remind you of: New Switzerland Region – First and foremost, AWS has opened a new Region, this time in Switzerland. Check out Seb’s post here on the News…

13 surprising ways we’ve collected Street View imagery around the world

You’ve heard of Street View, but have you heard of Sheep View? As un-bahh-lievable as it may sound, these wooly creatures have helped us collect truly ewe-nique Street View imagery. That’s just one of the unexpected ways we’ve added imagery to our Street View collection. Through the years, we’ve captured images on remote islands, along rough terrain and underwater. Since we can’t reach all of those locations by car, we’ve naturally had to get creative. For a peek behind the curtain, here are 13 of the most creative ways we’ve collected Street View imagery — some of which have led to our favorite Street Views ever. 1. By trike 10:25 During a coffee run in 2010, one of Google’s senior…

New feature to help people navigate the energy crisis in Europe

Europe is gearing up for a challenging winter – with rising prices and pressures on the European grid, driven by Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, further driving the need for secure, reliable, sustainable and affordable energy sources. We know that energy security and affordability are top of mind for many across Europe right now. People are turning to Google to ask questions about conserving energy and managing their costs. In the UK, a year ago just one in ten searches on the topic of energy prices was a ‘why’, ‘how’ or ‘when’ question – now it’s one in four. In Germany, we’ve seen search interest trending for queries like ‘how to save natural gas’, ‘heating cost’ and how to save…

A New AWS Region Opens in Switzerland

I am pleased to announce today the opening of our 28th AWS Region: Europe (Zurich), also known by its API name: eu-central-2. An AWS Region allows you to deploy your most demanding workloads and replicate your applications and data across distinct groups of data centers called Availability Zones. This new Region has three fully redundant Availability Zones located in the vicinity of Zurich. It offers your customers low-latency access to your applications while meeting your data residency requirements. Regions and Availability Zones AWS has the concept of a Region. Each Region is fully isolated from all other Regions. Within each Region, we have built Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are fully isolated partitions of our infrastructure that contain a cluster…