Ten years ago, on August 20, 2012, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Glacier, secure, reliable, and extremely low-cost storage designed for data archiving and backup. At the time, I was working as an AWS customer and it felt like an April Fools’ joke, offering long-term, secure, and durable cloud storage that allowed me to archive large amounts of data at a very low cost. In Jeff’s original blog post for this launch, he noted that: Glacier provides, at a cost as low as $0.01 (one US penny, one one-hundredth of a dollar) per Gigabyte per month, extremely low-cost archive storage. You can store a little bit, or you can store a lot (terabytes, petabytes, and beyond). There’s no…
Tag: AWS News Blog
AWS Trusted Advisor – New Priority Capability
AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that continuously analyzes your AWS accounts and provides recommendations to help you to follow AWS best practices and AWS Well-Architected guidelines. Trusted Advisor implements a series of checks. These checks identify ways to optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce costs, and monitor service quotas. Today, we are making available to all Enterprise Support customers a new capability for AWS Trusted Advisor: Trusted Advisor Priority. It gives you prioritized and context-driven recommendations manually curated by your AWS account team, based on their knowledge of your environment and the machine-generated checks from AWS Services. Trusted Advisor implements over 200 checks in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. Here…
How Grillo Built a Low-Cost Earthquake Early Warning System on AWS
It is estimated that 50 percent of the injuries caused when a high magnitude earthquake affects an area are because of falls or falling hazards. This means that most of these injuries could have been prevented if the population had a few seconds of warning to take cover. Grillo, a social impact enterprise focused on seismology, created a low-cost solution using AWS that senses earthquakes and alerts the population in real time about the dangers in the area. Earthquakes can happen at any time, and there are two actions cities can take to mitigate the damages. First is structural refitting, that is, building structures that can resist earthquakes. This solution doesn’t apply to many areas because they require big investments. The…
A Decade of Ever-Increasing Provisioned IOPS for Amazon EBS
Progress is often best appreciated in retrospect. It is often the case that a steady stream of incremental improvements over a long period of time ultimately adds up to a significant level of change. Today, ten years after we first launched the Provisioned IOPS feature for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), I strongly believe that to be the case. All About the IOPS Let’s start with a quick review of IOPS, which is short for Input/Output Operations per Second. This is a number which is commonly used to characterize the performance of a storage device, and higher numbers mean better performance. In many cases, applications that generate high IOPS values will use threads, asynchronous I/O operations, and/or other forms of…