Author: Jeff Barr

Back in 2015 we launched the AWS Well-Architected Framework and I asked Are You Well-Architected? The framework includes five pillars that encapsulate a set of core strategies and best practices for architecting systems in the cloud: Operational Excellence – Running and managing systems to deliver business value. Security – Protecting information and systems. Reliability – […]

AWS Step Functions is a fully managed workflow service for application developers. You can think & work at a high level, connecting and coordinating activities in a reliable and repeatable way, while keeping your business logic separate from your workflow logic. After you design and test your workflows (which we call state machines), you can […]

As you know, you can easily build highly scalable AWS applications that launch fresh EC2 instances on an as-needed basis. While the instances can be up and running in a matter of seconds, booting the operating system and the application can take considerable time. Also, caches and other memory-centric application components can take some time […]

When you make use of commercial, licensed software in the AWS Cloud using a BYOL (Bring Your Own License) strategy, you need to make sure that you stay within the provisions of the license, while also avoiding expensive over-provisioning. This can be a challenge when it is so easy to launch instances on demand whenever […]

As promised in Welcome to AWS re:Invent 2018, here’s a summary of the launches, previews, and pre-announcements from Andy Jassy’s keynote. I have included links to allow you to sign up for previews, as appropriate. (photo from AWS Community Hero Eric Hammond) Launches Here are the blog posts that we wrote for today’s launches: Amazon […]

Reinforcement Learning is a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment, using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward. This stands in contrast to […]

A pebibyte (PiB – 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes) is an impressive amount of data, slightly less than half of the estimated memory capacity of a human brain. Data lakes, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) applications traditionally work at this scale, as do more recent data-intensive applications such as Machine Learning and media processing. Amazon […]

Organizations that want to run Windows applications on the cloud are commonly looking for network file storage that’s fully compatible with their applications and their Windows environments. For example, enterprises use Active Directory for identification and Windows Access Control Lists for fine-grained control over access to folders and files, and their applications typically rely on […]