Customers in industries such as architecture, engineering, & construction (AEC) and media & entertainment (M&E) generate the final frames for film, TV, games, industrial design visualizations, and other digital media with a process called rendering, which takes 2D/3D digital content data and computes an output, such as an image or video file. Rendering also requires significant compute power, especially to generate 3D graphics and visual effects (VFX) with resolutions as high as 16K for films and TV. This constrains the number of rendering projects that customers can take on at once. To address this growing demand for rendering high-resolution content, customers often build what are called “render farms” which combine the power of hundreds or thousands of computing nodes to…

Today is April Fool’s Day. About 10 years ago, some tech companies would joke about an idea that was thought to be fun and unfeasible on April 1st, to the delight of readers. Jeff Barr has also posted seemingly far-fetched ideas on this blog in the past, and some of these have surprisingly come true! Here are examples: Year Joke Reality 2010 Introducing QC2 – the Quantum Compute Cloud, a production-ready quantum computer to solve certain types of math and logic problems with breathtaking speed. In 2019, we launched Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place. 2011 Announcing AWS $NAME, a…

Amazon GuardDuty is a machine learning (ML)-based security monitoring and intelligent threat detection service that analyzes and processes various AWS data sources, continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity, and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation. I love the feature of GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring that analyzes operating system (OS)-level, network, and file events to detect potential runtime threats for specific AWS workloads in your environment. I first introduced the general availability of this feature for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) resources in March 2023. Seb wrote about the expansion of the Runtime Monitoring feature to provide threat detection for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate as well as the preview for…