AWS Week in Review – November 7, 2022

With three weeks to go until AWS re:Invent opens in Las Vegas, the AWS News Blog Team is hard at work creating blog posts to share the latest launches and previews with you. As usual, we have a strong mix of new services, new features, and a surprise or two. Last Week’s Launches Here are some launches that caught my eye last week: Amazon SNS Data Protection and Masking – After a quick public preview, this cool feature is now generally available. It uses pattern matching, machine learning models, and content policies to help protect data at scale. You can find many different kinds of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) in message bodies and either block…

AWS Local Zones Expansion: Taipei and Delhi

In late 2019 I told you about the AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles, California. In that post I described Local Zones as a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that brings select AWS services very close to a particular geographic area. A year after that launch, I announced our plans to add 3 more Local Zones in 2020, and 12 more in 2021. Right now, we are working to bring Local Zones to 33 cities in 27 countries including 6 in Latin America. Applications hosted in a Local Zone benefit from very low (single-digit millisecond) latency access to EC2 instances and other AWS services. Local Zones also give AWS customers additional choices regarding data residency, giving them the ability…

AWS Week in Review – September 19, 2022

Things are heating up in Seattle, with preparation for AWS re:Invent 2022 well underway. Later this month the entire News Blog team will participate in our now-legendary “speed storming” event. Over the course of three or four days, each of the AWS service teams with a launch in the works for re:Invent will give us an overview and share their PRFAQ (Press Release + FAQ) with us. After the meetings conclude, we’ll divvy up the launches and get to work on our blog posts! Last Week’s Launches Here are some of the launches that caught my eye last week: Amazon Lex Visual Conversation Builder – This new tool makes bot design easier than ever. You get a complete view of…

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…