Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones across AWS accounts

By Dustin Ward

Last year, we introduced Volume Clones of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone. Today, we are extending Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes into other AWS accounts and…

Two zones or three? A design framework for zone-resilient Azure workloads

By Dustin Ward

Takeaway: Zone resiliency isn’t a single number you apply to a whole workload. The useful question isn’t “how many zones?” but “how many zones does each component need to survive the loss of one?” Decide zone patterns component by component, use service-managed zone redundancy wherever it fits, and reserve three-zone designs for the components that…

Beyond the benchmark: How an adaptive approach drives scientific discovery

By Dustin Ward

For research and development (R&D) organizations, the promise of agentic AI is not a better one-time answer. It is a new way to explore complex scientific and engineering problems: pursuing multiple hypotheses, validating them against evidence, learning from what does not work, and adapting their approach as new information becomes available. This unique nature of…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Fable 5.1 on AWS, Amazon Linux 2027 preview, AWS Certified AI Business Strategist, and more (September 7, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

Last week, Claude Fable 5.1 became available on AWS. According to Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1 delivers frontier intelligence for ambitious tasks across coding, scientific research, and enterprise workflows. Claude Fable 5.1 is built for long-running, high-stakes work that runs for hours and spans many applications. It can own more of a software project on its…

Enterprise AI transformation relies on the end-to-end platform: Azure was built for this moment

By Dustin Ward

Summary The recognition for Microsoft over the past couple of weeks comes down to models, infrastructure, data, applications, and developer tools working as one system when AI moves into production. Enterprise AI is moving into production, and our customers are becoming multi-model. Organizations will use frontier models where capability matters, and smaller, specialized, and open-weight…