Welcome to above the clouds
AWS – Spaces now available in AWS Builder Center
AWS Builder Center now offers Spaces, a community collaboration tool that enables builders to create and join groups around specific AWS topics, use cases, and interests. With Spaces, you can connect with peers, share knowledge, and collaborate with other builders to build applications and discuss solutions to common AWS challenges. Spaces provides three distinct space […]
AWS – AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports Slurm CLI Filter plugins
AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports Slurm CLI Filter plugins, enabling you to extend and modify how Slurm schedules and processes your high performance computing (HPC) workloads without modifying Slurm directly. Using CLI Filter plugins, you can now define custom policies for job submission to your clusters. For example, you can define policies that […]
GCP – How Lightricks trains video diffusion models at scale with JAX on TPU
Training large video diffusion models at scale isn’t just computationally expensive — it can become impossible when your framework can’t keep pace with your ambitions. JAX has become a popular computational framework across AI applications, now recognized for its capabilities in training large-scale AI models, such as LLMs and life sciences models. Its strength lies […]
GCP – BigQuery under the hood: How Google brought embeddings to analytics
Embeddings are a crucial component at the intersection of data and AI. As data structures, they encode the inherent meaning of the data they represent, and their significance becomes apparent when they are compared to one another. Vector search is a technique that uncovers the relative meaning of those embeddings by evaluating the distances between […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 C8gd, M8gd, and R8gd instances are now available in additional AWS Regions
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gd instances are now available in Europe (London), and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. Additionally, M8gd instances are available in South America (Sao Paulo) and R8gd instances are available in Europe (London) AWS Region. These instances feature up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage and are powered […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 C6id and R6id instances are now available in additional regions
Amazon EC2 C6id instances are available in AWS Region Europe (Milan) and R6id instances are available in AWS Region Africa (Cape Town). These instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage. C6id […]
AWS – Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is now included in Amazon Linux 2023
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is now available in Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), simplifying how you get started and manage updates. Previously, you had to download the Mountpoint package from GitHub, install dependencies, and manually manage updates. Now, when using AL2023, you can install or update to the latest release of Mountpoint with a single command, […]
AWS – Amazon U7i instances now available in Europe (Stockholm and Ireland) Regions
Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances with 6TB of memory (u7i-6tb.112xlarge) are now available in the Europe (Stockholm and Ireland) region. U7i-6tb instances are part of AWS 7th generation and are powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids). U7i-6tb instances offer 6TB of DDR5 memory, enabling customers to scale […]
AWS – Amazon CloudWatch Composite Alarms adds threshold-based alerting
Amazon CloudWatch now enables you to create more flexible alerting policies by triggering notifications when a specific subset of your monitored resources need attention. Using CloudWatch composite alarms, you can create a rule to take action only when a certain combination of alarms is activated. This enhancement lets you choose to receive alerts only when […]
GCP – Introducing Agent Sandbox: Strong guardrails for agentic AI on Kubernetes and GKE
Google and the cloud-native community have consistently strengthened Kubernetes to support modern applications. At KubeCon EU 2025 earlier this year, we announced a series of enhancements to Kubernetes to better support AI inference. Today, at KubeCon NA 2025, we’re focused on making Kubernetes the most open and scalable platform for AI agents, with the introduction […]