New AWS Announcements for August 2023

Amazon ElastiCache Welcomes M7g and R7g Graviton3-Based Nodes

Amazon ElastiCache expanded its compatibility with Graviton3-based M7g and R7g node families. These new ElastiCache Graviton3 nodes provide enhanced price performance compared to their Graviton2 counterparts. 

For example, if you choose ElastiCache for Redis on an R7g.4xlarge node, you’ll get 28% more speed for data and up to 21% less delay than an R6g.4xlarge node. Furthermore, these nodes furnish an impressive 25% increase in networking bandwidth.

Graviton3 processors outshine their Graviton2 predecessors in many aspects. Also, the Graviton3-based R7g and M7g instances are the pioneers in incorporating cutting-edge DDR5 memory. This advancement translates to a 50% surge in memory bandwidth compared to DDR4, enabling rapid access to data stored in memory.

Grab more information by clicking here

Enhanced Performance of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 Storage

AWS Backup has supercharged its backup speed for Amazon S3, now providing up to a 10 times increase for buckets containing over 300 million items. This upgrade paves the way for faster initial S3 backup processes and facilitates seamless backup of buckets harbouring more than 3 billion items.

AWS Backup, a user-friendly and budget-friendly solution, employs policies to manage and automate data security for Amazon S3 and other AWS services and external applications spanning storage, computation, and databases. 

This speed enhancement comes at no extra charge and is automatically activated in all AWS Backup-supported regions for Amazon S3.

Read the documentation for additional details.

Experience Up to 85% Faster Data Restore Times with Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval now offers lightning-fast data restoration that accelerates your processes by up to 85%, all without additional charges. This advancement automatically benefits the Standard retrieval tier when employing Amazon S3 Batch Operations. 

You can effortlessly expedite your data restoration from archives, whether it’s media transcoding, operational backup restoration, machine learning model training, or historical data analysis. The power of S3 Batch Operations empowers you to scale up the restoration of archived data effortlessly.

Also read: Overcome Merge Hell with Trunk based development and Continuous Integration

By furnishing a manifest of target objects and specifying the desired retrieval tier, you gain the advantage of the newly improved Standard retrieval tier, which starts the restoration within minutes, a substantial enhancement from the previous 3–5 hour activation time. 

Read more by clicking here

Introducing Network Load Balancer’s new support for Security Groups

Network Load Balancers (NLB) now provide better security by adding security groups. These groups let you control which traffic the NLB allows, ensuring it only accepts trusted traffic from specific IP addresses. This boosts your application’s security and makes management easier.

This update brings new security features. Cloud admins and security teams can enforce rules for security groups, even when converting IPv6 to IPv4 or using peered VPCs. App owners can also limit access through the load balancer, preventing uneven load distribution caused by direct access.

Also read: Leverage Azure Migrate to Discover and Assess Your AWS Instances for Smooth Migration to Azure

For Kubernetes users, enabling security groups on NLB is possible with AWS Load Balancer Controller version 2.6.0 or later. This improves security and scaling, simplifying rules and maintaining a steady number of security group rules per cluster.

To learn more, please visit the link and NLB documentation page.

Introducing Mountpoint for Amazon S3

AWS has released Mountpoint for Amazon S3, an open-source file client that accelerates access to Amazon S3. This reduces processing times and costs for data lake tasks.

It’s great for large datasets, like those in machine learning and autonomous vehicle processing. Mountpoint translates local file actions to S3 actions, offering high throughput and support for various read and write operations. 

It’s open source and backed by AWS support, enabling 24/7 AWS Business and Enterprise Support access to cloud support engineers.

Visit page, for more information.

Introducing general purpose Amazon EC2 M7a instances

AWS has introduced a new Amazon EC2 M7a instance. These instances use advanced processors from AMD (called 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors or Genoa), which run with the greatest frequency of 3.7 GHz. These new instances are around 50% faster than the previous M6a instances.

These M7a instances come with new abilities in the processor, like AVX3-512, VNNI, and bfloat16. They are also SAP certified. They use a type of memory called DDR5, which lets them access data at a high speed. They can handle 2.25 times more data compared to the older M6a instances.

Read also: The AWS Well-Architected Framework Checklist: 28 Key Principles for Best Performance

M7a instances are available in 12 sizes, ranging from medium to 48x large including a bare-metal size. These computers are built on something called the AWS Nitro System, and they’re beneficial for things that need a lot of power and speed, like money-related apps, servers for apps, making models, playing games, storing medium-sized amounts of data, making apps, and keeping temporary copies of data.

Read more to learn about new Amazon EC2 M7a instances.

Introducing Amazon EC2 Hpc7a Instances

AWS has introduced Amazon EC2 Hpc7a instances featuring 4th-generation AMD EPYC processors for remarkable performance. Compared to Hpc6a instances, Hpc7a offers up to 2.5x better performance, with 2x higher core density (up to 192 cores), 2.1x higher memory bandwidth, 2x memory (768 GB), and 3x network bandwidth. 

These instances offer 300 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network bandwidth, making them perfect for low-latency internode communications. Hpc7a instances, built on the AWS Nitro System, are optimized for compute-intensive HPC tasks like CFD and weather forecasting, offering improved efficiency and performance.

Learn more about Amazon Hpc7a Instances

Introducing Amazon GameLift Support for Instances Driven by AWS Graviton3 Processors

Amazon GameLift now supports the latest AWS Graviton instances, renowned for compute optimization. This fully managed service empowers game developers to handle and expand dedicated servers for multiplayer games. The new Graviton3-powered instances outperform Graviton2 by up to 25%, boasting advanced performance. 

Amazon GameLift extends its support to 68 instance families across 23 regions, including eight novel ones like C7g, perfect for high-performance Linux-based workloads in game programming languages like C++, C#, and C, as well as Unreal Engine game servers.

Moreover, Graviton3 instances consume 60% less energy for equal performance, reducing the environmental impact. This launch aids Amazon GameLift users in enhancing their performance and cost-efficiency through AWS Graviton technology.

For more information, visit page 

Amazon FSx for Lustre Revealed Latest File Update

Amazon FSx for Lustre offers managed shared storage featuring the scalability and high performance of Lustre file systems tailored to support Linux-based workloads. It excels in high-demand scenarios, improving storage speed, reducing bottlenecks, and speeding up value delivery for AI, ML, HPC, financial modelling, and media processing workloads. 

An exciting announcement has been unveiled in the form of a file release for FSx for Lustre. This feature has empowered users to manage their data lifecycle by releasing synchronized file data from Amazon S3. File release optimizes storage space, allowing uninterrupted data writing to the file system while retaining the ability to access released files on-demand through FSx for Lustre’s lazy loading from Amazon S3.

Users can specify the directory for data release and set a minimum time since the last access, ensuring that only data from the specified directory and, if specified, meeting the minimum access time criteria, is released. File release streamlines data lifecycle management by moving less frequently accessed file data to S3, thus enabling users to leverage the benefits of S3 tiering.

Read more in the documentation

Introducing the Latest General Purpose Amazon EC2 Instances: M7i-Flex and M7i Seventh-Generation Models

Amazon has launched new types of instances called M7i-Flex and M7i instances. These are supercharged with special Intel processors and work best on Amazon’s cloud service. They can do tasks up to 15% faster than what other cloud services can offer with regular Intel processors.

The M7i-Flex versions come in five different sizes and are a good deal because they give you more power for your money. They can be up to 19% better in price and performance than older versions like M6i. These are great for running websites, applications, and databases.

The M7i instances are even more powerful and come in nine sizes, including some big ones. They’re 15% better in price and performance than the previous generation. These are best for heavy-duty tasks like big applications, gaming, machine learning, and streaming video.

Also read: What are the Benefits of Amazon S3 Glacier?

If you want something cheaper but still good, the M7i-Flex versions are 5% better in price and performance than the regular M7i instances. They are good for tasks that don’t need a lot of computing power all the time but can ramp up when needed, like running websites or databases.

Visit the link to see the different instances based on their specifications.