Author: Jeff Barr

The Alexa Prize is an annual competition designed to spur academic research and development in the field of conversational artificial intelligence. This year, students are working to build socialbots that can engage in a fun, high-quality conversation on popular societal topics for up to 20 minutes. In order to succeed at this task, the teams […]

Database administrators spend a lot of time provisioning hardware, installing and patching operating systems and databases, and managing backups. All of this undifferentiated heavy lifting keeps the lights on but often takes time away from higher-level efforts that have a higher return on investment. For many years, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) has taken […]

FreeRTOS is an operating system for the microcontrollers that power connected devices such as appliances, fitness trackers, industrial sensors, smart utility meters, security systems, and the like. Designed for use in small, low-powered devices, Amazon FreeRTOS extends the FreeRTOS kernel with libraries for communication with cloud services such as AWS IoT Core and with more […]

I first told you about Amazon DynamoDB in early 2012, and said: We want you to think big, to dream big dreams, and to envision (and then build) data-intensive applications that can scale from zero users up to tens or hundreds of millions of users before you know it. We want you to succeed, and […]

Amazon Lightsail gives you access to the power of AWS, with the simplicity of a VPS (Virtual Private Server). You choose a configuration from a menu and launch a virtual machine (an instance) preconfigured with SSD-based storage, DNS management, and a static IP address. You can use Linux or Windows, and can even choose between […]

We launched the t1.micro instance type in 2010, and followed up with the first of the T2 instances (micro, small, and medium) in 2014, more sizes in 2015 (nano) and 2016 (xlarge and 2xlarge), and unlimited bursting last year. Today we are launching T3 instances in twelve regions. These general-purpose instances are even more cost-effective […]

I was cleaning up my home office over the weekend and happened upon a network map that I created in 1997. Back then my fully wired network connected 5 PCs and two printers. Today, with all of my children grown up and out of the house, we are down to 2 PCs. However, our home […]

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) lets you create petabyte-scale file systems that can be accessed in massively parallel fashion from hundreds or thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) servers and on-premises resources, scaling on demand without disrupting applications. Behind the scenes, storage is distributed across multiple Availability Zones and redundant storage servers […]