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 EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon ECS and Amazon EMR, or integrated third parties like Terraform and Jenkins.

AWS Chatbot now makes it easy to receive notifications from AWS Systems Manager in your team’s Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms. For example, you can receive notifications about configuration compliance or status change for a Run Command. Receiving notifications in your channels or chat rooms enables your entire team to review and collaborate quickly.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge Location in Manama, Bahrain. With this new Edge location, viewers in Bahrain will now see up to a 40% improvement in latency when accessing content through CloudFront. CloudFront now has 189 Points of Presence spread across 71 cities in 32 countries.

A full list of CloudFront’s global infrastructure is available at CloudFront Features .

Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework is a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. The solution features fast and robust data ingestion; highly reliable and durable storage of equipment data; and serverless event-driven applications that help manage the factory configuration. The solution is easy to deploy, and can help drive an increase in plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility, and identify new business opportunities.

We are excited to announce that you can take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam from the comfort and convenience of your home or office. The exam is delivered online and supervised, or proctored, through your webcam. You can schedule to sit for the exam around the clock, on the hour and again every fifteen minutes. You’ll need a reliable internet connection, a webcam, and a quiet, private place to test.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. A1 instances, introduced at re:Invent 2018, are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based workloads. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm community.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is now available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and US West (N. California) regions. AMS operates AWS on your behalf, providing a secure and compliant AWS Landing Zone, a proven enterprise operating model, on-going cost optimization, and day-to-day AWS operations management.

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 3 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 12 on Amazon RDS. 

Starting today, you can now import the released Java binaries of Glue ETL libraries using Maven on your Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) locally. This feature allows you to seamlessly develop, compile, debug, and single-step Glue ETL scripts and complex Spark applications in Scala and Python locally before deploying them to your production environments on the Glue job system or Glue Development endpoints.

You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace messages that pass through Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). AWS X-Ray makes it easy to troubleshoot performance issues and errors in your distributed applications and microservice architecture.