Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed, warm storage tier that provides fast, interactive analytics of log data at one-tenth the cost of existing storage options, the company reported on Wednesday.

“UltraWarm is the most cost-effective Elasticsearch-compatible storage solution available. It is also performance-optimized, so customers can investigate and interactively visualize their data while they embrace data at scale,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Databases and Analytics, AWS.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service will simplify the collection, analysis and visualization machine-generated log data from websites, mobile devices, and sensors. UltraWarm will provide Elasticsearch customers a warm storage tier that  will store large amounts of data cost-effectively and provide an interactive experience.

AWS has improve the volume of machine-generated log data as more applications are built using microservices, containers and purpose-built data stores. The company has also ensured real-time analysis of data, which has become essential to customers in order to resolve operational and security issues.

With the growth of log data, storing and analyzing large amounts of data is cost-prohibitive at scale, leading customers to use multiple analytics tools, or delete valuable data, missing important insights that the longer-term data could yield.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service will support two storage tiers, hot and UltraWarm to solve the issue. The hot tier will be used for indexing, updating, and providing the fastest access to data. UltraWarm will provide a distributed cache for more frequently accessed data.

UltraWarm will use advanced placement techniques to determine the blocks of data that are accessed less frequently, and can be moved outside of the cache to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). UltraWarm stores data in Amazon S3, providing up to 50 percent faster query execution versus competing warm-tier solutions.

UltraWarm will also lower cost by 80 percent compared to the warm-tier storage from other managed Elasticsearch offerings. With UltraWarm, customers can manage current and historical log data for interactive operational analysis and visualization in a single cluster.

AWS customers will be able to visualize search results across both recent and longer-term operational data, all from their Kibana interface. Additionally, UltraWarm will support all of the Elasticsearch Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), tools and features.

The tools will enable developers, DevOps engineers and InfoSec experts to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service for the analysis of recent and longer-term operational data without spending days to restore data from archives to an active searchable state in an Elasticsearch cluster.

Sophos has integrated AWS’ new offering. The company is a worldwide leader in next-generation cybersecurity, protecting organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries from today’s most advanced cyber threats.

“Sophos uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service to run a large-scale security monitoring and alerting system, because it is highly performant and scalable,” said Prakash Talreja, Architect, Sophos. “We are excited that UltraWarm will enable us to retain log data for much longer in a cost-effective way. We see great value in leveraging UltraWarm to bring down cost and reduce operational overhead.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) on Tuesday fielded questions from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee during his confirmation hearing for the role of national intelligence director, CNN reported.

Senators questioned Ratcliffe over his views on the intelligence community’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections, treatment of whistleblowers under the Trump administration and origin of the new coronavirus in China.

Ratcliffe told lawmakers that his initial focus would be to seek answers to questions about the origins of the virus and help address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic if confirmed for the DNI role.

"If confirmed, the intelligence community will be laser-focused on getting all of the answers that we can regarding how this happened, when this happened, and I commit to providing with as much transparency to you as the law will allow and with due regard for sources and methods," he said.

In his opening statement, Ratcliffe vowed to provide Congress and the president with impartial intelligence if confirmed. "Let me be very clear. Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I will provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” he said.

The Department of Agriculture has announced a new initiative that will provide $100 million in grants to support the use of ethanol and biofuel.

The Higher Blends Infrastructure Incentive Program is intended to supply funding to promote the use of these fuels, the USDA said Monday. The grants will go towards fuel infrastructure and equipment as well as pump installation.

Sonny Perdue, secretary for the USDA, said that ethanol and biofuel are clean fuels that can be used by farmers and consumers, and that the funding will make these fuels more widely available.