AWS Introduces New Features at Santa Clara Summit

Amazon Web Services (AWS from here on) announced several new capabilities and services. AWS introduced Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, AWS App Mesh, and AMD-powered Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS from here on) announced several new capabilities and services. AWS introduced Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, AWS App Mesh, and AMD-powered Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances.

Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift is a new feature that automatically adds and removes capacity to handle unpredictable concurrent access demand. Current and new customers can opt into Concurrency Scaling by enabling it on a per query queue basis. To be eligible for Concurrency Scaling a customer's main cluster must be on the EC2-VPC platform, have more than one node but no more than thirty-two nodes, and nodes must be one of dc2.8xlarge, ds2.8xlarge, dc2.large, or ds2.xlarge. There are additional limits on the kinds of queries that can be scaled, but the biggest one is that read-only select queries are the only kinds supported currently. In terms of pricing, Amazon is doing its usual thing of giving out credits, and then charging when you go over your free credits. For every 24 hours that your main cluster is in use, you accrue a one-hour credit for Concurrency Scaling. The price is proportional to the cost of the cluster being scaled and is calculated on a per-second basis.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive entered general availability on March 27th. Glacier Deep Archive is a new storage class that provides object storage for long-term retention of data that is rarely accessed at a budget price. Amazon is starting pricing at just at just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent). For those with large data storage needs, that works out to about $1 per TB-month. Amazon intends for this service to provide an alternative to on-premise magnetic tape libraries or other archival options. Underlining that this is designed only for archival purposes, AWS says it could take up to twelve hours to retrieve data or a bulk retrieval option that lets customers retrieve petabytes of data within 48 hours. Data is protected against most likely scenarios with all objects stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive replicated and stored across at least three geographically-dispersed Availability Zones. 

AWS App Mesh was announced last year and entered general availability on March 27th of this year. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for user services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh standardizes how user services communicate, configuring each service to export monitoring data and implementing consistent communications control logic across the application.This makes it easy to quickly pinpoint the exact location of errors and automatically re-route network traffic when there are failures or when code changes need to be deployed. App Mesh uses the open source Envoy proxy, making it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools.

Amazon added AMD-powered M5ad and R5ad instances designed for general purpose workloads such as web servers, app servers, dev/test environments, gaming, logging, and media processing to Amazon EC2 on March 27th. These new instances are variants of M5 and R5 instances and feature AMD EPYC processors with an all core turbo clock speed of up to 2.5 GHz as well as NVMe-based SSD block level instance storage physically connected to the host server. The new instances are priced 10% lower than comparable EC2 M5 and R5 instances and are available in six sizes ranging from 8 GiB of RAM to 384.

Availability

Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift- Immediately

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