What’s New at AWS?

Here at Digital Cloud Training, we are aware of how important it is to keep up with the latest releases in the world of AWS. It seems that there are announcements of new products and services on an almost daily basis. Let’s catch you up on the most interesting and most important new releases in the world of AWS. 

AWS Carbon Footprint Tool

The New AWS Carbon Footprint tool is a way of being able to track and understand how sustainable your workloads are when they are running in the cloud. Whilst previously, due to the shared tenancy of cloud environments, it has been difficult to gain any insight into how much resources your applications where running. With the new Carbon Footprint tool you can move your workloads in a more sustainable direction using native tooling.

Service Health Dashboard Upgrade

Whilst the old Service Health Dashboard looked rather outdated, and was somewhat confusing to read – the new SHD has combined the old SHD with your Personal Health Dashboard in one unified place. The user interface is much sleeker too, with up to 65% faster load times too.

New and Faster RDS Multi-AZ Option

RDS is already a powerful tool, which has a lot of reliability and availability built in. however this month AWS announced the Amazon RDS) Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database instances across three Availability Zones. This new option for RDS Multi-AZ can give you transaction commit latency twice as fast as the prior option alongside, quicker automated failovers and also readable standbys to further cement RDS as a powerful database tool.

New AWS Architect Associate Exam

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam (C02) will be replaced by the newer and more up to date SAA-C03 exam on the August 30, 2022. Whilst the structure or content wont change per se, it is getting a revamp of newer concepts which in AWS’s words will “reflect the rapid pace of innovation on the AWS platform and the latest in best practices for architecting on the AWS Cloud.”

New AMI ‘lastLaunchedTime’ feature

For many reasons, you may want to see not only how often your AMIs are getting launched into EC2 instances, but when the last time this happened was . Not only for security purposes, but for cost-optimisation purposes the new ‘lastLaunchedTime’ feature allows you to see clearly when your AMI was last used. This will give AMI owner more detailed understanding of when they should deprecate any AMIs that are no longer in use.

New EC2 Instance Types (X2idn and X2iedn)

There are new EC2 instances types too, which are the latest addition to the memory-optimised. As with most newer instances, they offer a better price to performance ration, of 50% compared to previous generation X1 instances. These particular instances offer a choice of 16:1 or 32:1 ratio of memory to vCPU and are powered by the AWS Nitro System – a combination of dedicated hardware and a lightweight hypervisor that delivers the compute and memory resources of the host hardware much more efficiently to your instances.

DynamoDB Default Quota Increase

By default, all AWS Accounts could only have 256 DynamoDB tables per Region before a service limit increase was needed with AWS support. The new base figure has increased to 2500, and you can also now perform up to 500 concurrent table management operations, whereas you could only perform 50 previously.

Route 53 launches Geolocation and Latency-Based Routing for Private DNS

Geolocation and latency-based routing has existed with Public hosted zones for a long time, however now AWS have announced that Route 53 now supports these options for Private DNS. This allows customers to route traffic for their private hosted zones based on the location of the source or based on whichever route provides the lowest latency.

Amazon Chime SDK New Features

The Amazon Chime SDK (not only used for Chime itself, but for many video / audio conferencing solutions) has benefited from new changes. The Amazon Chime SDK now supports Amazon Lex voice bots, Amazon Polly, noise reduction and presenters can now deliver real-time media to 10,000 participants.

Amazon ECS now supports warm pools for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

ECS now can help customers scale our quicker by making sure that customers are using pools of pre-initiated EC2 instances, that are ready to quickly serve application traffic. If you application is particularly time consuming, you would be best using pr-warmed instances to enable rapid deployment of your containers.

Slack Support for AWS Chatbot now GA.

AWS Chatbots are now integrated with Slack in every major region, allowing you to carry out numerous functions in your AWS account through Slack integration. This could be receiving diagnostic information, creating and interacting with support cases and so on.

10G Ephemeral Storage for Lambda Functions

Previously, AWS Lambda only allotted 512MB of ephemeral storage, but the recent change to the AWS Lambda service allows access to a secure, low-latency ephemeral file system up to 10 GB in size. This will in some cases remove the need to fetch and load data from something like S3 or EFS, and allows the need for easier scalability with Lambda. It opens up Lambda to be useful for other use cases like ETL jobs, ML inference, or other data-intensive workloads.

Thanks for reading this recap on the most exiting and important updates in the world of AWS!

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