Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network. 

Amazon EC2 can now hibernate EBS-backed Amazon EC2 T2 instances. You can now hibernate your newly launched instances running on T2 instance types. Hibernation provides you the convenience of pausing and resuming your workloads. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, your application will start right where it left off.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Graphics g4dn instances based on the EC2 G4 family. EC2 g4dn instances deliver the industry’s most cost-effective and versatile GPU instance for running graphics-intensive applications on AWS. g4dn provides the latest generation NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, AWS custom Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, up to 100 Gbps of networking throughput, and up to 1.8 TB of local NVMe storage. These instances are ideal for streaming graphics-intensive applications that rely on NVIDIA GPU libraries such as CUDA.  

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers the ability to encode video using the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) codec. AV1 is an open video coding format designed for internet delivery and developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). A key benefit of AV1 is higher compression efficiency compared to the AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265) codecs. With AV1, you can deliver high-quality SD and HD video to mobile and other devices over congested or bandwidth-constrained networks at bitrates unachievable with traditional codecs. For details on AV1 pricing, please visit the MediaConvert pricing page.

Amazon GuardDuty is reducing the price of threat detection by adding an additional volume discount tier and further optimizing its CloudTrail analysis. Effective March 1, 2020, GuardDuty pricing for VPC Flow Log and DNS Log analysis now includes a new top discount tier of $0.15 per GB, representing a 40% reduction from the existing top discount tier of $0.25 per GB. This top discount tier is applicable to customers that generate more than 10,000 gigabyte (GB) per month in VPC Flow Log and DNS log analysis. The new pricing is now the following for US East (N. Virginia):  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports updating Placement Strategy and Constraints for existing ECS services (in Preview). ECS customers can now update the placement strategies and constraints for their ECS services without having to recreate a service with the desired changes. This flexibility and control in managing the placement of service tasks helps customers save cost and reduce potential service downtime. 

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, is now available in preview in 18 AWS Regions. 

You can now use Amazon Elastic Inference to accelerate inference and reduce inference costs for PyTorch models in Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS. Enhanced PyTorch libraries for EI are available automatically in Amazon SageMaker, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, and AWS Deep Learning Containers, so you can deploy your PyTorch models in production with minimal code changes. Elastic Inference supports TorchScript compiled models on PyTorch. In order to use Elastic Inference with PyTorch, you must convert your PyTorch models into TorchScript and use the Elastic Inference API for inference. Today, PyTorch joins TensorFlow and Apache MXNet as a deep learning framework that is supported by Elastic Inference.

We are excited to announce the launch of Customizations for AWS Control Tower, a new reference implementation that makes it easy for customers to apply custom templates and policies to their AWS Control Tower landing zone.  

You can now tag your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs. A tag is a simple label consisting of a user-defined key and an optional value that can be used to easily manage, categorize and search for your VPC flow log subscriptions based on purpose, owner, or other such criteria.