AWS launches new billing preferences that give you control over how AWS credits and RI discounts are shared among the accounts in your organization. 

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager now supports inventory collection from Windows Registry, Windows services, roles and features enabled in Windows Server, and Windows and Linux file metadata such as when a file is created, modified, or accessed. 

AWS CloudFormation has increased the number of stack instances you can create per StackSet to manage your AWS resources. Previously, you could create maximum of 50 stack instances per StackSet. Now, you can create a maximum of 500 stack instances per StackSet allowing you to provision more stack instances across accounts and regions from a single template with a single operation. 

The AWS Price List API lets you access detailed pricing information for AWS services in JSON form. You can also opt in to receive updates when prices change by subscribing to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics.  

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the next generation of Amazon EC2’s compute optimized instances and are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake). C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customers’ instances. As a result, C5 instances deliver the best price/compute performance in the EC2 product family, with a 25% improvement in price/performance compared to C4 instances and certain applications delivering greater than 50% improvement. C5 instances are ideal for running compute-heavy workloads like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), machine/deep learning inference, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

You now have a number of new Amazon S3 features to augment data protection and simplify compliance.

AWS Batch users are now able to create Managed Compute Environments which launch Amazon EC2 P3 instances. This allows developers to submit GPU-accelerated jobs without having to worry about managing compute resources.  

In September 2016, we introduced Convertible RIs which provide customers with the flexibility to change an RI’s instance type, OS, tenancy or payment option during its term. Today, we are announcing a few enhancements to Convertible RIs.

This Quick Start automates the design, setup, and configuration of hardware and software to implement a data lake on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The Quick Start provisions Talend Big Data Platform components and AWS services such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to build a data lake. It also provides an optional sample dataset and Talend jobs developed by Cognizant Technology Solutions to illustrate big data practices for integrating Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3 technologies into a data lake implementation. 

Starting today, AWS Glue API calls are recorded and available in AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.