Today AWS announced the availability of gp3, the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that enable customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity and provides up to 20% lower price-point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. With gp3 volumes, customers can scale IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput without needing to provision additional block storage capacity, and pay only for the resources they need.  

Today AWS announced availability, in preview, of io2 Block Express volumes that are designed to deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, while also delivering sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block express refers to io2 volumes running on EBS Block Express architecture. EBS Block Express is the next generation of Amazon EBS storage server architecture purpose-built to deliver the highest levels of performance with sub-millisecond latency. Designed to provide up to 4,000 MB/s throughput , 256,000 IOPS, 64 TiB storage capacity, and 1,000 IOPS/GB per volume, io2 Block Express offers the highest performance block storage in the cloud. This makes io2 Block Express ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.  

Babelfish for Amazon Aurora is a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don’t have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) company, launched AWS Proton, the first fully managed deployment service for container and serverless applications. Platform teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports creating and managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances using Amazon EKS managed node groups following Spot best practices. This enables you to take advantage of the steep savings and scale that Spot Instances provide for interruptible workloads running in your Kubernetes cluster. Starting today, you can supply multiple instance types when creating a new Managed Node Group, further allowing you to enhance availability of your applications running on Spot. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to see the Kubernetes API resources and applications running on your Amazon EKS cluster using the AWS Management Console. This makes it easy to visualize and troubleshoot Kubernetes applications using Amazon EKS.

Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity.  

You can now package and deploy AWS Lambda functions as a container image of up to 10 GB. This makes it easy to build Lambda based applications using familiar container tooling, workflows, and dependencies. Just like functions packaged as ZIP archives, functions deployed as container images will benefit from AWS Lambda’s operational simplicity, automatic scaling with sub-second startup times, high availability, and native integrations with 140 AWS services. Customers can start building functions as container images by using either a set of AWS base images for Lambda, or by using one of their preferred community or enterprise images.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to install and manage Kubernetes operational software (add-ons) as part of the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API. Today, EKS supports managing the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin , with more add-ons coming soon.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Distro is the same Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS for customers who create Kubernetes clusters manually wherever their applications are deployed. Amazon EKS Distro provides builds and code of open source Kubernetes, etcd, CoreDNS, upstream CNI Core binaries, CSI Sidecar Containers, and the latest security patches. Amazon EKS Distro is available as an open source project from GitHub and Amazon ECR Public Gallery .