We are pleased to announce that customers who require the world’s most powerful professional graphics can now use EC2 G4 instances to setup NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations (Quadro vWS) at no additional cost.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) AWS Region along with the support for AWS Direct Connect. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog with over 230,000 active customers, has announced more pricing options for Container-based software. Starting today, you can find software that is billed on-demand based on new consumption units, such as the number of worker nodes managed. You can also purchase contracts for 1 year or longer to secure the best price for your commitment.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Access Points is a new EFS feature that simplifies providing applications access to shared data sets in an EFS file system. EFS Access Points work together with AWS IAM and enforce an operating system user and group, and a directory for every file system request made through the access point.  

You can now use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage Network File System (NFS) access for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). You can use IAM roles to identify NFS clients with cryptographic security and use IAM policies to manage client-specific permissions. This new capability provides a simplified way to manage access at scale in NFS environments and is complementary to network-based security controls. With IAM for NFS clients you can use the same tools and processes you use today for managing access to other AWS resources. Permission checks are logged to AWS CloudTrail so you can audit client access to your file system. 

AWS Backup automates backup and recovery jobs for Amazon EC2 instances without the need for custom scripts or third-party solutions, saving time and simplifying the backup process. Customers that use EC2 instances will now be able to perform their data protection requirements at the EC2 level, backing up both the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) and the attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. You can now select an EC2 instance from the AWS Backup console, take an on-demand backup, or assign EC2 instances to a backup plan.  

You can now stop your Amazon EC2 Spot Instances backed by Amazon EBS and start them at will, instead of relying on the “Stop” interruption behavior to stop your Spot Instances when interrupted. Earlier, you could only terminate your Spot Instances but now you can stop your Spot Instances and start them from the user initiated stop state provided Spot capacity is available within your maximum price requirements.  

AWS Backup now supports cross-region backup, enabling AWS customers to copy backups across multiple services to different regions. Cross-region backup offers a centralized solution to store a copy of backup data more than a region away from production data, helping you to more easily meet business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements.  

Amazon Lightsail now offers Ghost and Django blueprints. With these additions, Amazon Lightsail expands its selection of blueprints and makes it easier to create blogs and web applications with just a few clicks. Lightsail offers a curated selection of preconfigured application stacks so you can easily find the software you need for your project.  

AWS Backup now provides a streamlined experience for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Item-Level Recovery. You can now use AWS Backup to perform granular recovery of individual files or folders from Amazon EFS backups using a centralized console, for a simplified and fast restore experience, to meet more stringent Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements. To get started, choose the “Item-level Restore” restore type and provide one or more paths you want to recover using the AWS Backup console, SDK or CLI. This release is a continuation of our commitment to make data protection as streamlined and scalable as possible for our customers.