The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey wasn't just carried out using bits of paper deposited into mailboxes. A significant number of voters chose to fill in their form online. There were just a few weeks from then the government announced the survey to the survey period commencing. And, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was conducting the survey, that meant new systems had to be developed and deployed very quickly - something government agencies aren't well known for.

The 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games might not be as big an event in global terms as the Olympics but they represent a watershed moment in Australian sports broadcasting. Clive Dickens is the COO of Seven West Media and leads the team that is bringing an unprecedented amount of broadcast and streamed sports content across the world. Seven West Media doesn't just have the local broadcast rights - they are also the host broadcaster which means they provide the images used by all the other international broadcasters covering the games. I spoke with Dickens at this week's AWS Summit about how they bring thousands of hours of sport to global audiences watching on everything from a 3.5 inch smartphone to massive screens in homes, pubs and clubs across the world.

In our multi-screen world where video on demand is expected, the challenge is delivering high quality video that can scale to all the different screen sizes and resolutions people use. For broadcasters, who already have the cameras and people in place, being able to deliver the content to any endpoint, is critical. That's where AWS Elemental fits in.

AWS PrivateLink allows AWS users to securely connect to cloud services without exposing those services to the broader Internet. Since its release in 2009, PrivateLink was limited to AWS services using the virtual private cloud service. At the re:Invent conference, taking place in Las Vegas, Amazon has announced support for third-party SaaS services so PrivateLink can be used more broadly.

At this weeks's re:Invent conference, Amazon announced a new service for developers looking to create AR, VR and 3D apps. Sumerian lets developers build realistic virtual environments, populate them with 3D objects and animated characters, and script how they interact with each other and the application’s users.

Amazon has announced a new secret region - I'm not sure why they're calling it a Secret Region given they 've announced it - for workloads up to Secret U.S. security classification level. If you've need to run workloads that require higher security than AWS' regular services then this is for you.

When it comes to choosing a cloud computing platform, companies look for solutions that deliver storage, power, and scalability, which is why Amazon Web Services dominates as the world's largest cloud computing platform. Understanding the nuts and bolts of AWS can make you a hot commodity in the job market, and with the AWS Solution Architect Certification Training Bundle, you can get started for over 90 percent off.

Last week, during Microsoft's annual Ignite shindig, the company unveiled the latest version of their database platform SQL Server. SQL Server 2017 adds a bunch of new features as well as performance and compatibility tweaks so that the Windows and Linux versions are more alike than ever before. And, the new platform is also available on AWS' EC2.

Veeam has announced new data protection and availability software for Azure hybrid cloud environments. This means a single backup, recovery and availability solution can cover you across multiple cloud platforms as well as your own data centre.

Elastic GPUs are GPU resources that can be attached to an Amazon EC2 instance to accelerate the graphics performance of applications. Elastic GPUs come in several different memory capacities and offer the flexibility to choose the right compute, memory, and storage balance for your application. They're best suited for applications that require a small or intermittent amount of additional GPU power.

Splunk's new Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring provides end-to-end security, operational and cost management insights on AWS. It delivers an analytics-based approach to cloud monitoring and provides end-to-end visibility into a customer’s AWS infrastructure, delivering real-time awareness of performance, health, configuration, security and infrastructure spend.

Few things instill more fear when I think of network architecture and security than thousands of tiny devices collecting and sending data across a network. The Internet of Things is a rising tide that will mean there will be between five and ten devices connected to the Internet for every many, woman and child on the planet before the decade is out. A recent experiment sought to discover whether a serverless architecture was worth exploring when deploying an IoT solution.

As we move away from the era of deploying servers - physical or virtual - in order to run applications, developers need to move towards building applications in different ways. AWS has published a guide on building server less web apps that guides you through the process. Of course, it's all very AWS-centric but it looks like a good place to begin a journey down the road of developing server less apps.

DynamoDB is Amazon’s database platform for those applications where you need a database but aren’t interested in setting up a server and all the other rigmarole that goes with it. DynamoDB uses a provisioned capacity model. You set the amount of read and write capacity required by your applications and change provisioning for your table with an API call or button click in the AWS Management Console. Now, DynamoDB has new settings that will auto scale as your needs change.

Pretty much every week I receive a research report, often sponsored by a large IT vendor, telling me about the IT skills shortage. Most of them are focussed on infosec but today's instalment of the "Great IT Skills Shortage" came from AWS.

At the AWS Summit being held in Auckland, analysis from job site Indeed shows job listings for AWS-related roles has increased by 153% over the last three years. It's time for IT employers to do something about it. There's no IT skills shortage. But I think there's a massive shortfall in career investment by incumbent and prospective employers.

The economics of cloud versus on-prem continue to tip further and further towards to the cloud. Amazon has announced a price cut to EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) with upfront fees three-year term for C4, M4, R4, I3, P2, X1, and T2 Standard RIs dropped and price reductions on non-RIs as well.

Tracking what's going on in an AWS account is relatively straightforward but things get more complex when you're trying to work across multiple accounts. That can happen when different parts of the business sign up to separate accounts. Jigar Mistry has put together a guide on securely analysing data from one AWS account from another account using EMRFS (Elastic MapReduce File System).

During this morning's keynote address at the AWS Summit, the company's chief architect Glenn Gore spent some time discussing the changes he's seen in the way software is developed. Two things came to mind during that part of the presentation. The nature of what "software development" is has changed significantly and the skills of today's programmers are in flux.

The fact that Amazon controls a vast swath of cloud computing services became dreadfully clear on Wednesday morning when a string of errors brought countless websites to their knees. This consolidation of power is, perhaps suddenly, a very big problem.