You can now launch R4 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances, featuring a larger instance size, a new Intel Broadwell processor, improved networking and EBS performance, and cheaper on per GiB of RAM compared to R3 instances. R4 instances are well-suited for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads like Business Intelligence (BI), data mining & analysis, in-memory databases, distributed web scale in-memory caching, and applications performing real-time processing of unstructured big data.

Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like. You can offer AFIs you develop on the AWS Marketplace for other customers to purchase. 

Today we announce the newest member of the AWS Compute family – Amazon Lightsail. Lightsail is designed to be the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. Lightsail plans include everything you need to jumpstart your project – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP – for a low, predictable price.

Today, we announced the general availability of Amazon Athena, a serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. With Athena, there are no clusters to manage and tune, there is no infrastructure to setup, and customers pay only for the queries they run. Athena scales automatically – executing queries in parallel – so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries.

Today, we’re adding PostgreSQL compatibility to Amazon Aurora. With Amazon Aurora’s new PostgreSQL support, customers can get up to several times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database and take advantage of the scalability, durability, and security capabilities of Amazon Aurora – all for one-tenth the cost of commercial grade databases. Read more about Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility in the AWS Blog . 

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”). 

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are the most powerful Compute Optimized instances and the best price to compute performance in EC2. C5 is the first AWS cloud instance based on Intel’s next-generation Skylake Xeon® processors. They are ideal for compute-intensive workloads like ad serving, scientific modeling, 3D rendering, cluster computing, machine learning inference, and distributed analytics.

AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service that can move extremely large amounts of data to AWS in a fast, secure, and cost-effective manner. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration. All data is encrypted with 256-bit encryption and you can manage your encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Snowmobile includes GPS tracking, alarm monitoring, 24/7 video surveillance and an optional escort security vehicle while in transit. 

AWS Snowball Edge is a 100TB data transfer device with on-board storage and compute. You can use Snowball Edge to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS, as a temporary storage tier for large local data sets, or to support independent local workloads in remote locations. 

Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon CloudFront has added a new type of edge location called Regional Edge Cache that further improves performance for your viewers. Regional Edge Caches, in addition to improving performance, also help reduce the load on your origin resources, minimizing operational burden associated with scaling your origin and reducing your origin costs.  Regional Edge Caches are turned on by default for your CloudFront distributions; you do not need to make any changes to your distributions to take advantage of this feature. There are also no additional charges to use this feature.