AWS Week in Review – February 20, 2023

Since the devastating earthquake in Türkiye and Syria, Amazon has activated disaster relief services to quickly provide relief items to impacted areas. The company and Amazon customers have donated nearly 100,000 relief items so far, and donations continue to come in.

The AWS Disaster Preparedness and Response team is providing trained technical volunteers and solutions to Help.NGO, a United Nations standby partner assisting in the region.

We continue to support field requests for winter survival equipment, clothing, hygiene products, and other items. If you wish to donate, check out our blog post to find your local donation site and to learn more about how we’ve supported relief efforts so far. Thank you for your support!

Last Week’s Launches
As usual, let’s take a look at some launches from the last week that I want to remind you of:

New Amazon EC2 M7g and R7g instances – Since we launched C7g instances in May 2022, the General Purpose (M7g) and the Memory-Optimized (R7g) instances are generally available. Both types are powered by the latest generation AWS Graviton3 processors, and are designed to deliver up to 25 percent better performance than the equivalent sixth-generation (M6g and R6g) instances, making them the best performers in Amazon EC2.

Here is my infographic to highlight the principal performance and capacity improvements that we have made available with the new instances:

Enable AWS Systems Manager across all Amazon EC2 instances – All EC2 instances in your account become managed instances, with a single action using the Default Host Management Configuration (DHMC) Agent without changing existing instance profile roles. DHMC is ideal for all EC2 users, and offers a simple, scalable process to standardize the availability of System Manager tools for users who manage many instances. To learn more, see Default Host Management Configuration in the AWS documentation.

Programmatically manage opt-in AWS Regions – You can now view and manage enabled and disabled opt-in AWS Regions on your AWS accounts using AWS APIs. You can enable, disable, read, and list Region opt status by using the following AWS CLI commands in case of enabling Africa (Cape Town) Region:

$ aws account enable-region --region-name af-south-1
$ aws account get-region-opt-status --region-name af-south-1 
{ 
   "RegionName": "af-south-1", 
   "RegionOptStatus": "ENABLING" 
}

It will save you the time and effort of doing it through the AWS Management Console. To learn more, see Specifying which AWS Regions your account can use in the AWS documentation.

AWS Modular Data Center (AWS MDC) – AWS MDC is available as a self-contained modular data center unit: an environmentally controlled physical enclosure that can host racks of AWS Outposts or AWS Snow Family devices. AWS MDC lets defense customers run low-latency applications in infrastructure-limited environments for scenarios like large-scale military operations, crisis response, and security cooperation.

At this time, AWS MDC is now available in the AWS GovCloud Regions, and this service can only be purchased by the U.S. Department of Defense under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract. To learn more, read the AWS Public Sector Blog post.

Amazon EKS Anywhere on Snow – This is a new deployment option that helps you create and operate Kubernetes clusters on AWS Snowball Edge devices for provisioning and familiar operational visibility tooling of container applications deployed at the edge.

Amazon EKS Anywhere on Snow is ideal for customers who run their operations using secure and durable AWS Snow Family devices in unconditioned or mobile environments such as construction sites, ships, and rapidly deployed military forces. To learn more, read the AWS Container Blog post.

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

Other AWS News
Here are some other news items that you may find interesting in the last week:

• Now Go Build with Werner Vogels – Digital Humans: The new episode is about how AWS helps Soul Machines create digital people and what makes digital people so human-like. Dr. Werner Vogels visits Soul Machines, an AI company that uses the cloud to deliver meaningful connections between human and machine. Watch full episodes of Now Go Build if you are interested in the future of technology on the cloud.
• This Is My Architecture Special with Scuderia Ferrari: Scuderia Ferrari has launched a new fan app that innovates fan engagement through personalization. Utilizing AWS analytics and event-driven architecture, the app provides a unique look behind the scenes of the most successful Formula 1 team. Join builder Adrian De Luca in Maranello, Italy to learn about the app’s architecture and meet with Ferrari leadership to understand the future of fan engagement in the sport.
• Sustainability at AWS re:Invent 2022: Adrian Cockcroft, ex-VP of Amazon Sustainability, picked out the most relevant and his watched videos related to this topic from AWS re:Invent 2022. You can read the summary of them and find the latest information on progress to Sustainability in the Cloud and Amazon’s 100% renewable energy by 2025.
• AWS Spatial Computing Blog: Spatial computing is about potential digitization (or virtualization, or digital twin) of all objects, systems, machines, people, and their interactions and environments. This new area treats extended reality(XR), digital twin, and three-dimensional simulations, as the future of technology. Read the latest interesting blog posts such as Metaverse Building Blocks and From 3D to Simulation.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS-led events:

AWS at MWC 2023 – Join AWS at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain, February 27 – March 2, and interact with upcoming innovative new service demonstrations, be inspired at one of our many sessions, or request a more personal meeting with us onsite.

AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition – AWS Innovate is a free online event to learn the latest from AWS experts and get step-by-step guidance on using AI/ML to drive fast, efficient, and measurable results. Register now for Asia Pacific & Japan (February 22, 2023), EMEA (March 9), and the Americas (March 14).

AWS Summits – AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. We kick off Paris and Sydney on April 4th and schedule most other Summits from April to June. Please stay tuned and watch for the dates and locations to be announced.

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person, virtual events, and developer focused events such as Community Days.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!