One certainty in an uncertain world is that AWS will continue to drive innovation. The Coronavirus pandemic hasn’t slowed the ability of the world’s largest cloud provider to launch new features.

The conveyor belt of new products, services and updates just keeps on rolling!

In case you missed it, here are some of the latest announcements that continue to make AWS the leader of the pack.

Reduce Your Storage Costs

How would you like to increase the performance of your EBS volumes and save money at the same time? With the release of gp3, the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon EBS, that’s exactly what AWS is offering. gp3 delivers a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125MB/s at any volume size and you can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s for an additional fee. But most importantly gp3 is 20% lower per GB than existing gp2 volumes.

Simplify Management Your EC2 Instances

Fleet Manager is a new console based experience in Systems Manager that enables admins to view and administer their fleets of managed instances from a single location. It has many features, but the coolest by far is the ability to display a read-only view of the EC2 file systemwithout having SSH/RDP to them.

Lambda Billing Change

Lambda pricing used to be rounded up to the nearest 100ms, but now it’s to the nearest millisecond with no minimum execution time. It might not sound like a big change, but if you’re a heavy Lambda user, then this will almost certainly reduce your AWS bill.

Command Line Access Made Easy

CloudShell provides a shell based console in your web browser that allows you to access your instances using the AWS CLI. This is particularly useful for people that are scared of the command line or if you need to run an AWS CLI command quickly and easily without having to SSH/RDP.

SFTP Directly to EFS

Transfer Family is the AWS SFTP/FTPS/FTP service that previously only allowed you to send files safely and securely to S3, but now you can send your files directly to EFS to make it easier for Linux based systems to access them.

AWS Goes Local

AWS Local Zones has been extended to 12 additional metro areas. Local Zones allow you to run apps with low latency requirements closer to your end users. Now available in Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and Boston, and coming soon in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.

Apple Fan Boys Rejoice

You can now run MacOS on EC2.

Serverless Databases Made Better

The original Aurora Serverless is a great product, but the scale up time could be slow and add latency to your applications. However, the new version of Aurora Serverless, Aurora Serverless v2, scales up in fractions of a second, making it more viable for intermittent workloads with low latency requirements.

SQL Server Killer

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a new open source capability that makes it possible to run SQL Server applications directly on PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Still early days, but hopefully this is results in a goodbye wave to expensive Microsoft licensing!

Outposts Gets Downsized

AWS Outposts is a way to run AWS services in your own datacenter, the original servers were large and very expensive, but now there are new smaller instances that are much more affordable and are about the size of a pizza box. You can now also run Amazon ECS/EKS in your own datacenter without Outposts in addition to EC2, RDS and EMR.

Please contact databasable if you need more information about any of these new products, features, services or updates or anything else AWS related.