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Amazon Web Services (AWS) frequently updates its 200+ products and services for improved user experience and performance.
With dozens of announcements and blogs published each month, it can be challenging to sift through and understand the most impactful changes.
That’s why we developed this monthly series highlighting the most notable recent AWS news. Find out the most important recent updates and what they mean for your cost optimization strategy — plus extra GenAI updates for this month.
May 2024 Updates
Check out these impactful updates:
#1: Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes 1.30, upgrade now to save
The recently released Kubernetes version 1.30 includes stable support for pod scheduling readiness and minimum domains parameter for PodTopologySpread constraints.
Starting today, you can create new EKS clusters using v1.30 and upgrade your existing clusters to v1.30 using the Amazon EKS console, the eksctl command line interface, or through an infrastructure-as-code tool.
Upgrade now to save — Amazon EKS clusters running on old Kubernetes versions in the extended support window will be charged $0.60 per cluster per hour.
#2: Amazon S3 drops charges for unauthorized requests
Good news — unauthorized requests that customers did not initiate are now free of charge.
With this change, bucket owners no longer incur request or bandwidth charges for requests that return an HTTP 403 (Access Denied) error response if initiated from outside their individual AWS account or AWS Organization.
#3: Faster AWS Cost Anomaly Notifications
Cost Anomaly Detection leverages Machine Learning to identify unusual changes in spend, helping you to detect and avoid unexpected costs.
With this new update, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection analyzes cost and usage data up to three times a day, instead of daily, so you can detect anomalies more quickly. You can get started creating monitoring and alerts by consulting the AWS documentation.
#4: Even More EC2 Instances
Amazon EC2 new C7i-flex instances that deliver up to 19% better price performance compared to C6i instances are now available. C7i-flex instances expand the EC2 Flex instances compute-optimized portfolio.
AWS also expanded region availability for Amazon EC2 M7i-flex, M7i, C7i, and R7i instances this month.
Why do engineers still have to know EC2 instance types?
#5: Amazon EC2 simplifies visibility into your active AMIs
Starting today, you can check when your Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) were last used to launch EC2 instances by simply describing your AMIs, enabling you to efficiently filter and track your active AMIs. Previously, you needed to use complex scripts, which were cumbersome and prone to errors as the number of AMIs increased.
This visibility improvement makes it much easier to monitor and clean up at scale the unused resources associated with your AMIs. This can lead to substantial savings on EBS and EC2.
#6: Amazon Cognito tiered pricing for machine-to-machine (M2M) usage
Amazon Cognito has introduced pricing for machine-to-machine (M2M) authentication, which was previously free. While this introduces a cost, the change potentially enhances Cogito’s long-term sustainability and ensures dedicated support and development.
There is no change to Amazon Cognito’s user based pricing (monthly active users or MAUs). Customer accounts currently using Amazon Cognito for M2M use cases will be exempt from pricing for 12 months
#7: Amazon DynamoDB introduces configurable maximum throughput for On-demand tables
Amazon DynamoDB now allows for configurable maximum throughput settings on On-demand tables, enhancing cost management and performance balance. This feature enables users to set limits on read and write throughput for individual tables, which helps prevent unintended cost spikes by throttling requests that exceed the set limits, safeguarding against accidental surges.
IOPS can be a large part of your RDS spending, making this a significant potential opportunity to save.
Bonus Tip: Scaling strategies for Elastic Load Balancing
Effective scaling is highly important to cost optimization. Sharding is a form of horizontal scaling that helps to deliver a high degree of reliability and enables higher scalability of applications by distributing the workload across multiple load balancers through Domain Name Service (DNS) using Amazon Route 53 pointing to the same set of backend targets.
Check out this recent article discussing key considerations for sharding your Network Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer and Classic Load Balancer along with how to implement sharding for ELB to handle large volumes of traffic.
Editor’s Pick: ML updates for May
Dive into this month’s top machine learning enhancements and new capabilities across AWS services:
#8: Preview of Amazon Bedrock Studio
AWS announced the preview launch of Amazon Bedrock Studio is an SSO-enabled web interface that allows for developers across an organization to collaborate and build generative AI applications in a playground settings.
Bedrock Studio offers a rapid prototyping environment and streamlines access to multiple Foundation Models (FMs) in and tools like Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Guardrails.
There is no additional cost to using Bedrock Studio, customers only pay for Bedrock usage (for example, API calls to FMs and hosting of Knowledge Bases) in the AWS account.
#9: Global expansion for Inf2 GenAI-optimized EC2 instances
Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances, tailored for high-performance generative AI, are generally available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), South America (Sao Paulo) regions.
These instances deliver high performance at the lowest cost in Amazon EC2 for generative AI models. You can use Inf2 instances to run popular applications such as text summarization, code generation, video and image generation, speech recognition, personalization, etc.
#10: New Polly voices
AWS has released a new generative engine for Amazon Polly, is most advanced text to speech model for creating speech-enabled applications. It comes with three new English Amazon Polly voices: two American English voices, Ruth and Matthew, and one British English voice Amy.
#11: Meta Llama 3 models now available on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia based instances
AWS has enhanced Amazon SageMaker JumpStart by supporting the deployment of Meta Llama 3 models on AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium instances. These instances provide a cost-effective option, reducing deployment costs by up to 50% compared to other EC2 instances.
This update is key for developers requiring high-performance accelerators for real-time applications like chatbots and AI assistants, making advanced AI more accessible and affordable.
About nOps
If you’re looking to save on your AWS costs, nOps makes it easy and painless for engineers to take action on cloud cost optimization.
The nOps all-in-one cloud platform features include:
- Business Contexts: Understand and allocate 100% of your AWS bill down to the container level
- Compute Copilot: Intelligent provisioner that helps you save with Spot discounts to reduce On-Demand costs by up to 90%
- Commitment management: Automatic life-cycle management of your EC2/RDS/EKS commitments with risk-free guarantee
- Storage migration: One-Click EBS volume migration
- Rightsizing: Rightsize EC2 instances and Auto Scaling Groups
- Resource Scheduling: Automatically schedule and pause idle resources
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $1.5+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.
Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
