Amazon ElastiCache now offers R5 nodes, the next generation memory and performance optimized nodes to maximize network performance and CPU utilization in the South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. R5 nodes feature the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers nearly all of the compute and memory resources to the guest VMs.

Amazon Neptune is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. You can now create Neptune clusters using R5 instance types in this AWS Region for your graph applications.

AWS Device Farm now lets you test your web applications against different desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers that are hosted in the AWS Cloud.  

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. 

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 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.