We’re excited to announce that we’ve updated AWS Instance Scheduler, a reference implementation that makes it easier for customers to control their AWS compute resource capacity and cost by configuring start and stop schedules for their Amazon EC2 and RDS instances.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology. Multi-AZ helps you meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snowball Edge jobs directly from the console or via APIs. Many Snowball Edge customers deploy Snowball Edge devices for one or more years. By paying the device fees upfront, Snowball Edge’s long-term pricing options enable you to use Snowball Edge devices for 1 year or 3 years at up to a 62% discount compared to on-demand per-day fees. This pricing is available for all Snowball Edge device types in all regions where Snowball Edge is available.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the following ten additional regions:

• Africa (Cape Town)
• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
• Asia Pacific (Osaka)
• Asia Pacific (Seoul)
• Canada (Central)
• Europe (Milano)
• Europe (Paris)
• Middle East (Bahrain)
• South America (São Paulo)
• US West (N. California)

We’re excited to announce the launch of Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework, a reference architecture that makes it easier for customers to set up Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor Apache workloads running on AWS.

Amazon Connect reduces telephony rates for 3 countries in Europe: Cyprus, Belgium and Portugal. Starting April 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use omnichannel contact center service, decreased the following telephony rates in the EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions:

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is pleased to announce the ability for you to purchase AMS through your preferred Solution Provider, separately from your AWS infrastructure services. AMS understands the need for flexibility in how you buy AWS infrastructure services and AWS Managed Services based on the complexity of workloads and organizational needs. This new feature enables you to purchase AWS infrastructure services directly or through any AWS Solution Provider Partner  (SPP) of your choice, while utilizing an AMS partner for value-added infrastructure operations separately.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications, as a public preview. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

Starting today, you can now use the Node.js 14.x runtime to develop functions in AWS Lambda@Edge. This runtime is in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Node.js 12.x runtimes.

Node.js 14.x, the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js, uses the new V8 8.1 engine and provides better performance than the previous LTS version, 12.x. In addition, Node.js 14.x supports new features such as nullish coalescing (?? operator), options chaining (?. operator), and diagnostic reporting. For more information about the benefits and new features of Node.js 14.x, read the Node.js 14.x announcement post on the AWS Compute Blog.

To get started with Node.js 14.x, upload your code to AWS Lambda through the AWS CLI or Lambda console, and select Node.js 14.x as the runtime. If you already have existing Node.js functions in Lambda, you can switch to the new runtime by making any required code changes to ensure compatibility with the new runtime and then editing the function configuration to set the runtime to Node.js 14.x.

To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page . For more information about the Node.js programming model in AWS Lambda, read the AWS Lambda Node.js documentation .

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: AWS Network Connectivity Options. The course introduces network connectivity concepts, describes network design patterns, and demonstrates how to apply the design patterns to common use cases. This intermediate, 150-minute course includes reading modules, quizzes to check your knowledge, and an optional hands-on lab. The course is designed for network engineers, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, systems engineers, and application architects.