Welcome to above the clouds

AWS – Introducing AWS AI Service Cards – a new resource for responsible AI
We are excited to announce AWS AI Service Cards, a new resource to increase transparency and help customers better understand our AWS AI services, including how to use them in a responsible way. AI service cards are a form of responsible AI documentation that provides customers with a single place to find information on the […]

AWS – Introducing new ML governance tools for Amazon SageMaker
Today, we are excited to announce three new purpose-built tools for Amazon SageMaker to improve governance of your machine learning (ML) projects with simplified access control and enhanced transparency across your ML model’s lifecycle. With Amazon SageMaker Role Manager, you can define minimum permissions for users in minutes and onboard new users faster. SageMaker Role […]

AWS – Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection now in preview
Amazon GuardDuty now offers threat detection for Amazon Aurora to identify potential threats to data stored in Aurora databases. Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection profiles and monitors access activity to existing and new databases in your account, and uses tailored machine learning models to accurately detect suspicious logins to Aurora databases. Once a potential threat is […]

AWS – Announcing Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL on Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS
Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL is a new open source development kit to help you build high performance extensions that run safely on PostgreSQL. With Trusted Language Extensions, developers can install extensions written in a trusted language on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon Redshift now supports Multi-AZ (Preview) for RA3 clusters
Amazon Redshift is introducing Multi-AZ deployments (Preview) that support running your data warehouse in multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZ) simultaneously and continue operating in unforeseen failure scenarios. A Multi-AZ deployment is intended for customers with business critical analytics applications that require the highest levels of availability and resiliency to AZ failures. Read More for the […]

AWS – Amazon SageMaker now supports geospatial ML (preview)
Amazon SageMaker now supports geospatial machine learning (ML), making it easier for data scientists and ML engineers to build, train, and deploy models using geospatial data. Today, the majority of all data generated contains geospatial information, but only a small fraction of it is used for ML because accessing, processing, and visualizing the data is complex, time […]

AWS – Amazon SageMaker Studio launches redesigned user interface
Amazon SageMaker Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides a single, web-based visual interface where users can access purpose-built tools to perform all machine learning (ML) development steps, from preparing data to building, training, and deploying ML models. Today, we are excited to announce a redesign that enhances the user experience by improving […]

AWS – Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Elastic Clusters is now generally available
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is announcing the general availability of Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters, a new type of Amazon DocumentDB cluster that let’s you elastically scale your document database to handle millions of reads and writes per second with petabytes of storage. Read More for the details.

GCP – Load testing I/O Adventure with Cloud Run
In 2021 and 2022, Google I/O invited remote attendees to meet each other and explore a virtual world in the I/O Adventure online conference experience powered by Google Cloud technologies. (For more details on how this was done, see my previous post.) When building an online experience like I/O Adventure, it’s important to decide on […]
GCP – BigQuery Geospatial Functions – ST_IsClosed and ST_IsRing
Geospatial data analytics lets you use location data (latitude and longitude) to get business insights. It’s used for a wide variety of applications in industry, such as package delivery logistics services, ride-sharing services, autonomous control of vehicles, real estate analytics, and weather mapping. BigQuery, Google Cloud’s large-scale data warehouse, provides support for analyzing large amounts […]