AWS Week In Review – May 30, 2022

Today, the US observes Memorial Day. South Korea also has a national Memorial Day, celebrated next week on June 6. In both countries, the day is set aside to remember those who sacrificed in service to their country. This time provides an opportunity to recognize and show our appreciation for the armed services and the important role they play in protecting and preserving national security.

AWS also has supported our veterans, active-duty military personnel, and military spouses with our training and hiring programs in the US. We’ve developed a number of programs focused on engaging the military community, helping them develop valuable AWS technical skills, and aiding in transitioning them to begin their journey to the cloud. To learn more, see AWS’s military commitment.

Last Week’s Launches
The launches that caught my attention last week are the following:

Three New AWS Wavelength Zones in the US and South Korea – We announced the availability of three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tampa, Florida in the US, and Seoul in South Korea on SK Telecom’s 5G network.

AWS Wavelength Zones embed AWS compute and storage services at the edge of communications service providers’ 5G networks while providing seamless access to cloud services running in an AWS Region. We have a total of 28 Wavelength Zones in Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and the US globally. Learn more about AWS Wavelength and get started today.

New Amazon EC2 C7g, M6id, C6id, and P4de Instance Types – Last week, we announced four new EC2 instance types. C7g instances are the first instances powered by the latest AWS Graviton3 processors and deliver up to 25 percent better performance over Graviton2-based C6g instances for a broad spectrum of applications, even high-performance computing (HPC) and CPU-based machine learning (ML) inference.

M6id and C6id instances are powered by the Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, equipped with up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, and deliver up to 15 percent better price performance compared to the previous generation instances.

P4de instances are a preview of our latest GPU-based instances that provide the highest performance for ML training and HPC applications. It is powered by 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 80 GB high-performance HBM2e GPU memory, 2X higher than the GPUs in our current P4d instances. The new P4de instances provide a total of 640GB of GPU memory, providing up to 60 percent better ML training performance along with 20 percent lower cost to train when compared to P4d instances.

Amazon EC2 Stop Protection Feature to Protect Instances From Unintentional Stop Actions – Now you don’t have to worry about stopping or terminating your instances from accidental actions. With Stop Protection, you can safeguard data in instance store volume(s) from unintentional stop actions. Previously, you could protect your instances from unintentional termination actions by enabling Termination Protection too.

When enabled, the Stop or Termination Protection feature blocks attempts to stop or terminate the instance via the EC2 console, API call, or CLI command. This feature provides an extra measure of protection for stateful workloads since instances can be stopped or terminated only by deactivating the Stop Protection feature.

AWS DataSync Supports Google Cloud Storage and Azure Files Storage Locations – We announced the general availability of two additional storage locations for AWS DataSync, an online data movement service that makes it easy to sync your data both into and out of the AWS Cloud. With this release, DataSync now supports Google Cloud Storage and Azure Files storage locations in addition to Network File System (NFS) shares, Server Message Block (SMB) shares, Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS), self-managed object storage, AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon FSx for Lustre, and Amazon FSx for OpenZFS.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Last week, there were lots of announcements of public sectors at AWS Summit Washington, DC.

To learn more, watch the keynote of Max Peterson, Vice President of AWS Worldwide Public Sector.

Upcoming AWS Events
If you have a developer background or similar and are looking to develop ML skills you can use to solve real-world problems, Let’s Ship It – with AWS! ML Edition is the perfect place to start. Over eight episodes of Twitch training scheduled from June 2 to July 21, you can learn hands-on how to build ML models, such as predicting demand and personalizing your offerings, and more.

The AWS Summit season is mostly over in Asia Pacific and Europe, but there are some upcoming virtual and in-person Summits that might be close to you in June:

More to come in August and September.

Please join Amazon re:MARS 2022 (June 21 – 24) to hear from recognized thought leaders and technical experts who are building the future of machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. You can preview Robotics at Amazon to discuss the recent real-world challenges of building robotic systems, published by Amazon Science.

You can now register for AWS re:Inforce 2022 (July 26 – 27). Join us in Boston to learn how AWS is innovating in the world of cloud security, and hone your technical skills in expert-led interactive sessions.

You can now register for AWS re:Invent 2022 (November 28 – December 2). Join us in Las Vegas to experience our most vibrant event that brings together the global cloud community. You can virtually attend live keynotes and leadership sessions and access our on-demand breakout sessions even after re:Invent closes.