Serverless applications are event-driven, using ephemeral compute functions ranging from web APIs, mobile backends, and streaming analytics to data processing stages in machine learning (ML) and high-performance applications. While AWS Lambda includes a 512 MB temporary file system (/tmp) for your code, this is an ephemeral scratch resource not intended for durable storage such as Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). However, extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs and content generation workflows such as creating PDF files or media transcoding require fast, scalable local storage to process large amounts of data quickly. Data-intensive applications require large amounts of temporary data specific to the invocation or cached data that can be reused for all invocation in the same execution environment in…
How we kept information on Maps reliable in 2021
In a world that’s constantly changing, it’s important for Google Maps to give you the freshest, most up-to-date information possible — so you can know whether the restaurant down the street from you reopened or if your neighborhood grocery store has curbside pickup. One way we do this is through contributed content. Every day we receive around 20 million contributions from people using Maps. Those contributions include everything from updated business hours and phone numbers to photos and reviews. As with any platform that accepts contributed content, we have to stay vigilant in our efforts to fight abuse and make sure this information is accurate. Thanks to a combination of machine learning and human operators, we continue to decrease the…
Get organized with a little Google Photos spring cleaning
Flowers are blooming, the weather’s getting warmer, the days are a little longer — which means it’s also time for spring cleaning. Over the coming weeks, we’re starting to roll out some updates to Google Photos to make it even easier to sort through your albums, import photos and videos you have saved somewhere else, see your shared content and find screenshots. Let the decluttering begin! A more sortable library tab The best part of spring cleaning is knowing where everything is and being able to find it just like that. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a bunch of favorites, albums, shared albums and (if you’re on Android) on-device folders in your library tab of the Photos…
AWS Week in Review – March 21, 2022
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick round up of interesting news and announcements from AWS! Another week, another round up of the most significant AWS launches from the previous seven days! Among the news, we have new AWS Heroes and a cost reduction. Also, improvements for customers using AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and a new database-to-database connectivity option for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Last Week’s Launches Here are some launches that caught my attention last week: AWS Billing Conductor – This new tool provides customizable pricing and cost visibility for your end customers or business units and helps when you have specific showback and…