We are excited to announce the capability to launch Encrypted EBS backed EC2 instances from unencrypted AMIs in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. 

Amazon EC2 Fleet is a new feature that simplifies the provisioning of Amazon EC2 capacity across different Amazon EC2 instance types, Availability Zones and across On-Demand, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) and Amazon EC2 Spot purchase options. With a single API call, now you can provision capacity across EC2 instance types and across purchase options to achieve desired scale, performance and cost.

You can create an EC2 fleet specification defining target capacity, which EC2 instance types work for you, and how much of your fleet should be filled using On-Demand, RI and Spot purchase options. You can also indicate whether EC2 Fleet should take into account the number of cores and amount of memory on each instance or consider all instances equal when scaling. EC2 Fleet then launches the lowest price combination of instances to meet the target capacity based on these preferences.

Amazon EC2 Fleet is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Visit AWS GovCloud (US) homepage to learn more about these regions. To learn more about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit our documentation .

We are excited to announce the availability of Encryption by Default for all new EBS volumes created in an account within a region in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. 

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity available in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Spot Instances are easy to launch, scale and manage through AWS services like Amazon ECS and Amazon EMR, or integrated third parties like Terraform and Jenkins.

Spot Instances can be launched via RunInstances API with a single additional parameter. You can also provision compute capacity across Spot Instances, RIs and On-Demand instances to optimize performance and cost using EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet APIs. Spot Instances launched via these APIs are same as any EC2 instance; they provide the reliability, security, performance, control, and elasticity of Amazon EC2, at low market-driven prices. Spot Instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. To learn more about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit our documentation .

AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. Visit AWS GovCloud (US) homepage to learn more about these regions.

Elastic Load Balancing now supports the UDP protocol on Network Load Balancers, in addition to the already supported TCP protocol. With this launch, you can deploy services that rely on the UDP protocol, such as Authentication and Authorization, Logging, DNS, and IoT, behind a Network Load Balancer, benefiting from its low latency, scale, and reliability.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, now provides a new option for integrating Windows file systems with your organization’s user and group identities: you can now directly join your Amazon FSx file systems to on-premises or in-cloud self-managed Microsoft Active Directories (ADs).

AWS Fargate is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that lets you run containers in production without deploying or managing servers. Fargate lets you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports security level options for data transferred between the File Gateway and SMB clients. You can enforce encryption and signing on client requests, or use client-negotiated defaults, helping you meet organizational requirements for security and client compatibility. 

With Service Quotas, you can view and manage your quotas easily and at scale as your AWS workloads grow. Quotas, also referred to as limits, are the maximum number of resources that you can create in an AWS account. AWS implements quotas to provide highly available and reliable service to all customers, and protect you from unintentional spend. Each quota starts with an AWS default value. Based on your needs, you can request to increase quota values for your specific account.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 25 unique items and 4 MB of data per transactional request. Transactions enable developers to simplify their code, and support workflows and business logic that require adding, updating, or deleting multiple items as a single, all-or-nothing operation.