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.

This Quick Start deploys Matillion ETL for Amazon Redshift on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in either a single instance with an Amazon Aurora database or a high availability (HA) cluster in about 20 minutes, following AWS best practices.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region and the tool has been localized into Korean. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures. 

You can now enable your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java applications to access resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This feature was previously announced in four regions on November 25th, 2019 and is now available in all regions where Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is available. For a list of where Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is available, please see the AWS Region Table.

AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) customers can now whitelist client IP addresses using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Security Groups, providing an additional layer of security to their SFTP servers. Customers can also associate Elastic IP addresses with their server’s endpoint, enabling end users behind firewalls to whitelist access to the endpoint. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool now offers you a simple way to share workloads with other AWS accounts. Many customers use multiple AWS accounts to provide administrative autonomy for their teams. With Workload Shares, you can now create workloads in the AWS account of your choice and share them with AWS accounts used by other members of your review team or with a centralized AWS account. This feature enables shared visibility into High Risk Issues (HRIs) identified in workloads and streamlines collaboration with other workload reviewers, such as a Cloud Center of Excellence Lead, a member of your AWS account team or an AWS Well-Architected Partner Program member. The Workload Shares feature can help you manage and drive down HRIs over time without requiring direct access to the AWS account where the workload is defined.