Welcome to our new Weekly News Roundup from the world of AWS and Technology. We monitor a lot of new releases on AWS and interesting new releases from around the technology landscape. This week there are some really interesting new releases that can help save time and costs, as well as provide new functionality.
Windows Server and SQL Server EC2 Instances move to per-second billing
Windows Server and SQL Server running on EC2 instances will now be billed per second rather than per hour, allowing for more accurate costs if an instance is only run for part of an hour.
Crash Consistent AMIs
Amazon has announced a new feature when taking an AMI from an EC2 instance, allowing users to preserve the state of the AMI as it is, without rebooting or having to stop I/O usage, which could be useful for debugging.
New upcoming region in Tel Aviv, Israel
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-tel-aviv-israel/
AWS has announced a new region for Tel Aviv will launch in the first half of 2023, joining the upcoming regions in Australia, Indonesia, Spain, India, Switzerland and UAE, as well as the recently launched new regions in Italy, South Africa and Japan.
re:Invent registration now open
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
Registration is now open for the 2021 re:Invent conference, which will return to being held in person in Las Vegas, as well as begin hosted virtually as it was last year. In-Person tickets are available for $1,799, while registration for the virtual event is Free.
Third AZ open in Beijing region
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-third-availability-zone-in-the-aws-china-beijing-region/
AWS has announced a new third Availability Zone has been opened in Beijing, operated by Sinnet, under the cn-north-1 region.
Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to flag outdated AMI’s
You can now specify a new property called ‘DeprecationTime’ on your Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to indicate when the AMI will become outdated.
Previously, owners of an AMI changed the AMI name or description to indicate that the AMI was outdated. You can now clearly specify when an AMI will become deprecated by using the ‘DeprecationTime’ attribute. An AMI becomes deprecated when the DeprecationTime is reached. Once an AMI is deprecated, it will no longer appear in DescribeImages API calls by default.
Terraform reaches v1.0.0
https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0
Terraform reached a major milestone this month with the release of v1.0.0 of the popular Infrastructure As Code tool.
KMS Keys can now be Multi-Region
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/kms-multi-region-keys/
AWS has announced that Multi-Region KMS keys are now available, which simplifies the process for moving encrypted data from one region to another (such as during a backup or Disaster Recovery process).
AWS Launches new Step Functions Workflow Studio
AWS has launched a new visual tool for building Step Function state machines to allow for easier creation of Step Function workflows for executing Lambdas and other resources in a workflow.
