Starting today, AWS customers can enable Spot Instances for AWS Marketplace Amazon Machine Image (AMI) products while launching new instances through the EC2 console Launch Instance Wizard (LIW). With this launch, you can reduce costs on the EC2 instances you need to run your third-party software on AWS. Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts- up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices- so you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs. Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if have flexibility with running your third-party applications and if your applications are fault-tolerant. Customers—including Salesforce, Lyft, Zillow, Novartis and Autodesk—use Spot Instances to reduce costs and get faster results. For example, Salesforce saved over 80% vs On-Demand Instance pricing, and doubled the speed of processing machine learning and ETL workloads with Spot Instances. 

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast can be used in a wide variety of use cases, including product demand forecasting, inventory planning, workforce planning and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB has been updated to support release 10.3.23 and release 10.4.13 of the MariaDB database. These releases include a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

Today we are announcing the availability of more granular CloudWatch metrics for improved network monitoring on the AWS Transit Gateway.

Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) support for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases on AWS Outposts.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) today increased the default service quotas for ECS tasks per service and services per cluster. You can now launch up to 2,000 tasks per service and 2,000 services per cluster, up from 1,000 each.

EC2 Image Builder is now integrated with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and enables customers to build and distribute Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are encrypted with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) encryption. 

Today, we are announcing AWS App2Container (A2C), a new command-line tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications. A2C analyzes and builds an inventory of all applications running in virtual machines on-premises or in the cloud. You simply select the application you want to containerize, and A2C packages the application artifact and run-time dependencies into container images, configures the network ports, and generates the ECS task and Kubernetes pod definitions.

We are happy to announce the availability of Porting Assistant for .NET, an analysis tool that scans .NET Framework applications and generates a .NET Core compatibility assessment, helping you port your applications to Linux faster.

EC2Launch v2 is a redesigned, unified launch agent for EC2 Windows instances, which simplifies the configuration of Windows instances to meet the needs of your workloads. EC2Launch applies AWS-recommended configurations to your Windows instances, such as local administrator username changes, support for increased user data input length, and agent auto-updates. EC2Launch v2 provides you with a single EC2 launch experience regardless of EC2 platform and supported Windows OS.