In The Works – AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region

We launched the Canada (Central) Region in 2016 and added a third Availability Zone in 2020. Since that launch, tens of thousands of AWS customers have used AWS services in Canada to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and to drive cost savings. This includes enterprises such as Air Canada, BMO Financial Group, NHL, Porter Airlines, and Lululemon, as well as startups with global reach such as Benevity, D2L, and Hootsuite. AWS is also used by Athabasca University, Humber College, the Vancouver General Hospital, and the Canada Border Services Agency, to name a few. Hello, Calgary I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS region in Calgary, Canada in late 2023 or early 2024. This three-AZ region will…

New – EC2 Instances Powered by Gaudi Accelerators for Training Deep Learning Models

There are more applications today for deep learning than ever before. Natural language processing, recommendation systems, image recognition, video recognition, and more can all benefit from high-quality, well-trained models. The process of building such a model is iterative: construct an initial model, train it on the ground truth data, do some test inferences, refine the model and repeat. Deep learning models contain many layers (hence the name), each of which transforms outputs of the previous layer. The training process is math and processor intensive, and places demands on just about every part of the systems used for training including the GPU or other training accelerator, the network, and local or network storage. This sophistication and complexity increases training time and…

New – AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift

Back in 2019 I told you about AWS Data Exchange and showed you how to Find, Subscribe To, and Use Data Products. Today, you can choose from over 3600 data products in ten categories: In my introductory post I showed you how could subscribe to data products and then download the data sets into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. I then suggested various options for further processing, including AWS Lambda functions, a AWS Glue crawler, or an Amazon Athena query. Today we are making it even easier for you to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data with the introduction of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift. As a subscriber, you can directly use data from providers…

Amazon QuickSight Q – Business Intelligence Using Natural Language Questions

Making sense of business data so that you can get value out of it is worthwhile yet still challenging. Even though the term Business Intelligence (BI) has been around since the mid-1800s (according to Wikipedia) adoption of contemporary BI tools within enterprises is still fairly low. Amazon QuickSight was designed to make it easier for you to put BI to work in your organization. Announced in 2015 and launched in 2016, QuickSight is a scalable BI service built for the cloud. Since that 2016 launch, we have added many new features, including geospatial visualization and private VPC access in 2017, pay-per-session pricing in 2018, additional APIs (data, dashboard, SPICE, and permissions in 2019), embedded authoring of dashboards & support for…