2023

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances are available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. X2idn and X2iedn instances are designed for memory-intensive workloads and deliver improvements in performance, price performance, and cost per GiB of memory compared to previous generation X1 instances. These new instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Ice Lake) and deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance than comparable X1 instances. X2idn has a 16:1 ratio of memory to vCPU and X2iedn has a 32:1 ratio, making these instances a great fit for workloads such as in-memory databases and analytics, big data processing engines, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads.  

Amazon EC2 Console introduces the new and improved launch experience - a quicker and easier way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout allowing you to view all your settings in one location. You no longer need to navigate back and forth between steps to ensure your configuration is correct. The new design also introduces a summary panel, that provides an overview and helps navigate the page.  

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 9TiB of memory (u-9tb1.112xlarge) are available in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with On Demand and Reserved Instance purchase options.

Today, Amazon CloudFormation updates the language extension transform to supports default values and additional intrinsic functions in Fn::FindInMap. Customers can use these features to minimize the length of their CloudFormation templates, and improve their readability. The language transform enables extensions to the CloudFormation template language with functions such as Fn::Length, Fn::JsonToString, etc. Customers can modularize their templates into groups with different attributes in Parameters and Mappings, and use Fn::FindInMap to refer to attributes of these groups. For example, you can use Fn::FindInMap for EC2 resource type with a Mappings section containing a single map, RegionMap, that associates AMIs with Amazon Web Services Regions to your EC2 instances. With these language enhancements, you can use intrinsic functions such as Fn::Split, Fn::Select, and others within Fn::FindInMap. Previously, Fn::FindInMap only supported Fn::FindInMap and Ref intrinsic functions. Additionally, you can define string or list type default values in Fn::FindInMap. To see the list of supported intrinsic functions and learn about Fn:FindInMap, refer to the user guide.

Amazon Backup now offers you the ability to create legal holds on your protected data beyond your defined retention policies, for legal and auditing purposes. Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold. With this feature, Amazon Backup allows you to manage legal hold requests at scale and help prove compliance to outside counsel, auditors, and related third-parties.

Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL is a new open source development kit to help you build high performance extensions that run safely on PostgreSQL. With Trusted Language Extensions, developers can install extensions written in a trusted language on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens now offers lower pricing tiers for customers with 25 billion or more objects, making continuous monitoring of large storage footprints more cost effective. Customers with hundreds of billions of objects will now see progressively lower prices, saving up to 40% on organization-wide storage monitoring.

Today, Amazon Backup is announcing application-aware data protection that enables you to add Amazon CloudFormation stacks to backup policies, making it easier for you to back up and restore your entire applications. Amazon Backup automates the data protection of applications that are defined using Amazon CloudFormation stacks to create immutable application-level backups using Amazon Backup Vault Lock.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams makes it easy to securely stream video from connected devices to Amazon Web Services for analytics, machine learning (ML), playback, and other processing. Kinesis Video Streams automatically provisions and elastically scales all the infrastructure needed to ingest streaming video data from millions of devices. It durably stores, encrypts, and indexes video data in your streams, and allows you to access your data through easy-to-use APIs. Kinesis Video Streams enables you to playback video for live and on-demand viewing, and quickly build applications that take advantage of computer vision and video analytics.

Amazon S3 now automatically applies S3 managed server-side encryption (SSE-S3) as a base level of encryption to all new objects added to S3, at no additional cost and with no impact on performance. SSE-S3 uses 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard and is already applied to trillions of objects. This new base level of encryption helps customers meet their encryption requirements, with no changes to applications. Additionally, customers can still choose to encrypt their objects using customer-provided encryption keys (SSE-C), Amazon Key Management Service keys (SSE-KMS), or a client library such as the Amazon S3 Encryption Client.  

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports Blue/Green Deployments to help you with safer, simpler, and faster updates to your Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS databases. Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments create a fully managed staging environment that allows you to deploy and test production changes, keeping your current production database safe. With a single click, you can promote the staging environment to be the new production system in as fast as under a minute, with no changes to your application and no data loss.

Today, we are introducing a new price and capacity optimized allocation strategy for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD to help you optimize provisioning of Spot Instances via EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet. The price and capacity optimized allocation strategy makes Spot allocation decisions based on both spare capacity availability and Spot Instance price. The price and capacity optimized allocation strategy is the best choice for most Spot applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, image and media rendering, machine learning, and high performance computing (HPC).

Starting today, Amazon Managed Domain Lists for Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall is available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, making it easier for customers to quickly get started with managed protections against DNS threats. In addition, Route 53 now sources threat intelligence from Recorded Future for DNS Firewall, expanding the breadth of DNS threats you can block using Amazon Managed Domain Lists, with new domains continuously added as DNS threats emerge and are identified by Recorded Future’s threat intelligence systems.

Application Auto Scaling now offers customers more visibility about the scaling decision it takes for an auto scaled resource. Application Auto Scaling (AAS) is a service that offers standardized auto scaling experience across 13 different Amazon services beyond Amazon EC2, for example Amazon DynamoDB provisioned read and write capacity, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) services. Application Auto Scaling takes scaling actions based on the customer-defined scaling policies that act as a guideline for scaling decisions. Until now, customers only got details about successful and not about deferred scaling actions. With this feature, customers get more insights about scaling decisions that do not lead to a scaling action in both descriptive and machine-readable format.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports copying option groups during in-region cross-account snapshot copy requests using the API, CLI, or Amazon Backup. Amazon RDS uses option groups to enable and configure features that make it easier to manage your databases. Copying the option groups with the snapshot on cross account copy allows you to restore that snapshot in the target account with the same options as the source snapshot without needing to reconfigure the option groups. 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports updates to encryption in transit on existing cluster resources. You can change the TLS configuration of your Redis clusters without re-building or re-provisioning them or impacting application availability. When enabling encryption in transit, your overall solution can remain connected to Redis clusters.

Amazon Transfer Family announces built-in support for PGP decryption of files uploaded over SFTP, FTPS or FTP to Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS. Customers can now configure and automate decryption of files that are encrypted using PGP keys by their users before upload, which can help them meet their data protection and compliance requirements when exchanging sensitive data with third parties.

We are excited to announce the availability of Reserved nodes for Amazon MemoryDB for Redis in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Reserved nodes allow you to save up to 55% over On-Demand node prices in exchange for a usage commitment over a one- or three-year term. Reserved nodes are complementary to MemoryDB On-Demand nodes and give businesses flexibility to reduce costs. Reserved nodes can be reserved for one-year or three-year terms with No Upfront, Partial Upfront and All Upfront payment options. 

Amazon CloudFormation now supports AllowedValues and AllowedPattern properties for CommaDelimitedList parameter type. You can use the CommaDelimitedList parameter type to specify multiple string values in a single parameter. For example, you can create three different subnets with their own VPC CIDR blocks, and use CommaDelimitedList to specify three different CIDR blocks. With these language enhancement, you can add validation checks to your CommaDelimitedList, and reduce input errors to your CommaDelimitedList while updating your stacks and/or stack sets.