Michael Otey

Amazon recently announced the general availability of license-included Visual Studio software on Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances. This means that organizations no longer need to separately purchase and install Visual Studio for their EC2 instances, which are the Amazon Web Services versions of cloud-based virtual machines. “Amazon EC2 provides a broad choice of instances, and customers not…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is without a doubt the world’s leading cloud services provider, and it’s still racing ahead of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and the Google Cloud Platform. However, not everyone may be familiar with AWS and its various services. In this article, we’ll try to answer some of the most common questions you may…

ChatGPT has rapidly ushered AI into mainstream technology in a big way. Launched in November of 2022, ChatGPT has already garnered millions of users with its natural language AI-based responses to a huge variety of queries that range from writing term papers, articles, and software to answering emails, creating song lyrics, and even debugging many…

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports creating custom SQL Server database images using a Custom Engine Version (CEV). Businesses can use Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server using Custom Engine Version to build new custom images based on an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the required Windows operating system (OS), database customizations, and third-party…

Further fueling fears of a coming recession, Amazon has announced that it was laying off 18,000 of its employees. The 18,000 layoffs represent roughly 6 percent of Amazon’s workforce. Amazon, headquartered in Seattle, is the second largest employer in the US behind Walmart. The online retailer employs 1.5 million people globally. Most of the cuts…

Amazon Web Services announced earlier this month Amazon Comprehend for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). This is a new natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning (ML) to uncover relationships and connections in various document types. Amazon Comprehend for IDP enables you to classify and extract entities from PDF documents, Microsoft Word files, and…

Last week, Amazon held its AWS re:Invent 2022 conference in Las Vegas. Re:Invent is Amazon’s premier conference for Amazon Web Services announcements, and this year’s re:Invent was a hybrid conference with the company streaming significant parts of the conference for free. As usual, this year’s re:Invent conference was packed with new AWS announcements. Here are…

Amazon announced earlier this month the availability of the AWS Resource Explorer. This new Amazon Web Services tool enables you to search through the AWS resources in your account across all different Regions. If you have a substantial AWS cloud deployment, then you probably know that finding specific resources in your environment can be a…

To effectively handle various types of security break-ins, many organizations have created an incident response (IR) plan. In this article, I’ll explain what is an incident response plan, how it differs from a disaster recovery plan, and what steps you need to follow to create an effective IR plan for your organization. While most businesses…

Avoid these five common hybrid cloud mistakes to make sure that your environment is ready for the modern infrastructure.