Timothy Patterson on Tim's Tech Thoughts

OpenAI Comes to Amazon Bedrock: A Win for Model Consumers

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In a move that few would have predicted even a year ago, Amazon Web Services and OpenAI have announced a significant partnership that brings OpenAI’s frontier models — including Codex — directly into Amazon Bedrock. For those of us who build on AWS and care about where the AI ecosystem is headed, this is a genuinely exciting development.

You can read the official announcements from both sides here: OpenAI on AWS and AWS: Bedrock OpenAI Models .

Amazon Bedrock's Security Model: What Enterprises Actually Need to Know

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:32:00 -0400

One of the most common blockers I hear from enterprise teams evaluating generative AI isn’t about model quality — it’s about trust. Where does our data go? Can AWS see our prompts? Will our inputs be used to train someone else’s model? Can we meet our compliance requirements? These are the right questions to ask, and Amazon Bedrock has spent considerable engineering effort making sure the answers are satisfying.

This post walks through the core pillars of Bedrock’s security model: how inference stays private, what AWS commits to around your data, how to keep traffic off the public internet, what compliance certifications are in place, how IAM gives you fine-grained access control, and how AgentCore’s Cedar policies extend that control to the level of individual agent tool calls.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: The Infrastructure Layer Your AI Agents Have Been Missing

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:22:00 -0400

Building an AI agent that works in a demo is one thing. Getting it to reliably work in production — across thousands of concurrent users, with proper security, memory, and observability — is an entirely different challenge. If you’ve ever tried to take an AI agent from prototype to production, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Months of undifferentiated infrastructure work: session management, identity controls, persistent memory, tool integrations, monitoring. All of it built from scratch, all of it before you’ve written a single line of your actual business logic.

How Startups & SMBs Can Leverage AWS Marketplace to Accelerate Growth

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 10:00:00 -0500

As a Startup or Small-to-Medium Business (SMB), you’re always looking for ways to move fast and scale smart 💡. AWS Marketplace offers a powerful resource to help you get the tools you need without spending time and money building everything from scratch. It’s a one-stop shop for finding, purchasing, and deploying software and services that meet your business needs.

Cloud marketplaces are becoming a key channel for businesses to quickly discover and purchase software. This is especially critical for startups and SMBs aiming to innovate rapidly and accelerate time-to-value. Explore how AWS Marketplace simplifies software procurement, provisioning, and governance: Learn more here .

Unlocking the Power of AWS Marketplace: A Guide for Every Persona

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:37:00 -0500

Welcome to the start of an exciting journey 🚀, where I dive into the AWS Marketplace! Whether you’re a Startup, SMB, Enterprise, Solution Integrator, or Independent Software Vendor (ISV), the AWS Marketplace offers a treasure trove of tools and services designed to help you scale, innovate, and manage software and data procurement, provisioning, and governance in the cloud.

In this series, I’ll explore how each persona can unlock the full potential of the AWS Marketplace—from discovering ready-to-deploy software solutions to simplifying procurement and streamlining management tasks. But first, let’s set the stage with an overview of what AWS Marketplace is and why it’s valuable for your specific needs.

Encrypt and Copy Existing AWS Backup Recovery Points to a New Account for Enhanced Security

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Backup Best Practices in Data Protection

When designing a secure backup solution on AWS, it is important to ensure that:

Recovery points are stored in a separate account: This prevents an attacker from deleting both the production data and backups in the event of credential compromise.
Backups are encrypted: Even if data is lost or compromised, encryption ensures that it cannot be read or misused.

In this post, I will guide you through a process to implement a solution that satisfies both of these best practices.

Remediating Unencrypted EBS Volumes: Encryption in Action

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recap: Preparing for Full Encryption

In the last two posts, I discussed the importance of encrypting data at rest and how to identify unencrypted EBS volumes attached to EC2 instances by using a Python script. After generating a report, I outlined the initial steps for remediation, which included gathering information about unencrypted volumes.

Now, it’s time to take action in an automated fashion. In this post, I’ll guide you through the process of actually encrypting unencrypted EBS volumes using the encrypt-ec2-ebs-vols.py Python script. This script automates the encryption process, ensuring that your EC2 instances’ volumes are fully secured. Note that EC2 instances will be powered off during these operations, and I’ll handle instances differently based on their initial state.

Data Encryption at Rest: Preparing for EBS Volumes Remediation

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:26:15 -0400

Taking the First Steps Toward Secure Data at Rest

In the previous post , I discussed the importance of encrypting data at rest and introduced the powerful combination of AWS tools and the Prowler open-source framework. After running Prowler’s security assessment, you may have identified some unencrypted resources, particularly EBS volumes attached to EC2 instances.

Remediating unencrypted EBS volumes is critical for ensuring that sensitive data is protected, but it requires a careful, planned approach.

Data Encryption at Rest

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:12:42 -0400

The Critical Role of Data Encryption at Rest

Data encryption at rest is an essential security measure for protecting sensitive information. In today’s digital landscape, organizations face strict compliance requirements, whether for regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS, or for internal data protection policies. Encrypting data at rest ensures that even if storage devices are compromised, unauthorized users cannot read the data. This not only protects privacy but also ensures that businesses meet their compliance obligations and mitigate security risks.

The Evolution of AI: From Monolithic to Task Specific Models

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:08:16 -0500

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has been rapidly evolving, with new advancements and breakthroughs happening at an unprecedented pace. One of the most significant trends we’ve recently observed is the shift from monolithic, all-encompassing AI models to more specialized, task-specific models. This shift mirrors the historical trend in software development, where we moved from monolithic applications to microservices-based architectures.

From Monolithic to Microservices

In the past, software applications were often built as monolithic structures, where a single application would handle all the functionality and features. While this approach had its advantages, such as simplicity and ease of deployment, it also had significant drawbacks. Monolithic applications were often difficult to scale, maintain, and update, and a single failure could bring down the entire system.

Cultivating the Garden of Data With AWS DataZone

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 13:04:19 -0400

I have said it many times before, “Data is the new seed of innovation.”

Data stands as the foundational seed from which innovation sprouts, but how we manage and nurture this data determines whether we cultivate a thriving garden of insights or merely a compost heap of unsorted information. Enter Amazon DataZone.

What is Amazon DataZone?

Amazon DataZone is a data management service designed to streamline the process of cataloging, discovering, governing, sharing, and analyzing data. It acts as a centralized hub, allowing users to share and access data across accounts and supported regions. This service integrates seamlessly with various AWS services, including (but not limited to) Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, and AWS Lake Formation.

Prompt Engineering with AI: The Art of Asking for What You Want

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 15:56:00 -0400

In the world of sales, one principle has stood the test of time: the importance of asking for what you want. Whether it’s nudging a prospect towards a deal or clarifying a client’s needs, the clarity of one’s ask can make or break the outcome. Interestingly, the same logic applies in the realm of AI, particularly in the emerging discipline of Prompt Engineering.

What is Prompt Engineering?

At its core, prompt engineering is the science and art of designing effective prompts to guide AI models, specifically language models, to produce desired outputs. It’s akin to finding the right way to ask a question to obtain the most useful answer. Given the vastness of knowledge and patterns an AI model (like Anthropic’s Claude v2) can recognize, how you ask something significantly influences the information you retrieve.

The Corporate Ladder & Generative AI Training: How Alex's Professional Journey Mirrors AI Training Techniques

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 10:42:56 -0400

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, understanding advanced techniques can sometimes feel overwhelming, but what if we could unravel these complexities through a relatable narrative? In this blog post, we’ll journey alongside Alex, a fresh business graduate, and discover how his professional experiences draw uncanny parallels with the intricacies of generative AI models. From prompt engineering to fine-tuning and domain adaptation, let’s dive into the world of AI, all through the lens of Alex’s corporate adventures.

Data Is the New Seed of Innovation

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 10:46:19 -0400

Data is the new seed of innovation

Seeds represent potential and growth, and similarly, data holds the promise of valuable insights and solutions when properly nurtured and analyzed. By planting the seeds of data in the fertile ground of analytical tools and human ingenuity, organizations and individuals can cultivate a garden of innovations that contribute to progress and success. Seeds give birth to new ideas, discoveries, and advancements.

Shadow Deployments on AWS Part 1: Lambda@Edge

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 10:42:56 -0400

Shadow deployments have become increasingly popular among organizations as they strive to minimize downtime and ensure smooth transitions during application updates.

My goal is in this post is to help illustrate how easy and powerful it is to utilize Lambda@Edge to enable shadow deployments in a production setting for any kind of HTTP based web service.

I will soon publish a “part two” that focuses on how Amazon SageMaker’s native shadow testing capabilities also support this deployment methodology to compare new or tuned ML models vs. models already deployed in production in real-time.

Mac Screenshot Floating Thumbnail Pro Tip

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:18:57 -0500

For all you Mac users out there I just discovered a life-changing command in the depths of Google…

After running the command below, when you take a screenshot using any of the built-in macOS mechanisms the thumbnail will now stick around for 30 seconds instead of the 5 second default!

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve taken a screenshot and then had to hurry to find the right app to drag it into only to have it disappear on me. This is native to macOS and is not a third party utility.

AWS Community Builders!

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 17:00:00 -0500

I woke up to a very surprising email this morning! I have been invited to participate in the AWS Community Builders program for the next 12 months with a focus on storage technology.

The AWS Community Builders program offers technical resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities to AWS technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community.

I am very excited to join this program as I look to share more frequent and relevant content with the AWS community!

Taking the first step...

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0500

Today started like any other… Woke up, brewed coffee, and sat down at my desk in my home office to begin the work day at 9am. However, today was no ordinary day.

Today, I embarked on a new path as a Principal Solutions Architect for Triumph Technology Solutions .

I am thrilled for the opportunity to join the Triumph team! Triumph is an Advanced Tier AWS Consulting Partner, and this role will allow me to flex both my technical breadth and depth. I am looking forward to applying my experience to help customers realize their own disruptive and transformative potential.