What happened on January 2nd regarding the AWS Cloud?

This page covers new service announcements, service improvements, and major events from 2022, 2019, 2014, 2013 and 2009, and the Quiz of the Day which covers topics related to these announcements.

Today is the very first of the “On This Day” series. This series looks at service announcements, service improvements, major events and other trivia about the AWS cloud that happened on a particular day. It also includes a “Quiz of the Day” to test your AWS knowledge on topics related to the announcements. So what happened on January 1st regarding the AWS Cloud?

There are lots of options when it comes to improving compute performance. Faster CPUs is one option, and more CPUs, or more cores per CPU can work too, especially if applications make use of threads. More recently, more exotic approaches such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been offered by AWS. This article focusses on using CUDA-C on Amazon EC2 GPU instances with NVIDIA graphics cards.

Holding all AWS certifications is the goal of many AWS practitioners. In addition to considerable bragging rights, holding all AWS certifications shows substantial depth and breadth of knowledge and the eligibility to participate in the Subject Matter Experts (SME) program. At AWS re:Invent, the annual AWS convention for these practices, there is a room dedicated to AWS Certified attendees with swag, drinks and snacks! With over ten certifications, though, what’s the best approach to first attaining and then maintaining them all?

To some, the terms “Global Database” and “Multi-Master” could be a little confusing. Is a “global database” also “multi-master”? Could a “multi-master” database be a global database? Amazon Aurora for Amazon RDS offers both options. Are they actually the same thing? If not, how are they different? This post explains Amazon Aurora: Global Databases vs Multi-Master.

Although Python and JavaScript (via Node.js) seem to be the most popular programming languages for developing AWS Lambda functions, there are cases where Java must still be used. In these cases, it’s important to know about writing AWS Lambda functions in Java.

One example is in highly regulated industries with strict coding standards which may prevent dynamically typed languages like Python and JavaScript in favor of strongly typed languages like Java. Another example might be where code was previously written in Java and it rather than rewriting it in a different programming language and go through another cycle of bugfixes and redeployments it makes sense to convert the existing Java code to a Lambda function.

Lots of the work done in the cloud is for running servers. We setup web servers (such as Apache), application servers (such as Apache TomCat or RedHat JBoss) and database servers (such as PostgreSQL or MariaDB). Amazon Web Services provides lots of options in this space, but sometimes end users need productivity tools for interactive use. Fortunately, AWS has an entire service category devoted to End User Computing. In this article we’ll do an Amazon WorkSpaces simple setup to see just how quickly we can get a Microsoft Windows desktop up and running.