Welcome to AWS Storage Day 2021

Welcome to the third annual AWS Storage Day 2021! During Storage Day 2020 and the first-ever Storage Day 2019 we made many impactful announcements for our customers and this year will be no different. The one-day, free AWS Storage Day 2021 virtual event will be hosted on the AWS channel on Twitch. You’ll hear from experts about announcements, leadership insights, and educational content related to AWS Storage services.

The first part of the day is the leadership track. Wayne Duso, VP of Storage, Edge, and Data Governance, will be presenting a live keynote. He’ll share information about what’s new in AWS Cloud Storage and how these services can help businesses increase agility and accelerate innovation. The keynote will be followed by live interviews with the AWS Storage leadership team, including Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of AWS Block and Object Storage.

The second part of the day is a technical track in which you’ll learn more about Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), AWS Backup, Cloud Data Migration, AWS Transfer Family and Amazon FSx.

To register for the event, visit the AWS Storage Day 2021 event page.

Now as Jeff Barr likes to say, let’s get into the announcements.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
Today, we are pleased to announce Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a new storage service that allows you to launch and run fully managed NetApp ONTAP file systems in the cloud. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP joins Amazon FSx for Lustre and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as the newest file system offered by Amazon FSx.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides the full ONTAP experience with capabilities and APIs that make it easy to run applications that rely on NetApp or network-attached storage (NAS) appliances on AWS without changing your application code or how you manage your data. To learn more, read New – Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points is a new Amazon S3 feature that allows you to define global endpoints that span buckets in multiple AWS Regions. Using this feature, you can now build multi-region applications without adding complexity to your applications, with the same system architecture as if you were using a single AWS Region.

S3 Multi-Region Access Points is built on top of AWS Global Accelerator and routes Amazon S3 requests over the global AWS network. S3 Multi-Region Access Points dynamically routes your requests to the lowest latency copy of your data, so the upload and download performance can increase by 60 percent. It’s a great solution for applications that rely on reading files from Amazon S3 and also for applications like autonomous vehicles that need to write a lot of data to Amazon S3. To learn more about this new launch, read How to Accelerate Performance and Availability of Multi-Region Applications with Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points.

There’s also great news about the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class! The conditions of usage have been updated. There is no longer a minimum storage duration for all objects stored in S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and monitoring and automation charges for objects smaller than 128 KB have been removed. Smaller objects (128 KB or less) are not eligible for auto-tiering when stored in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Now that there is no monitoring and automation charge for small objects and no minimum storage duration, you can use the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class by default for all your workloads with unknown or changing access patterns. To learn more about this announcement, read Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering – Improved Cost Optimizations for Short-Lived and Small Objects.

Amazon EFS
Amazon EFS Intelligent Tiering is a new capability that makes it easier to optimize costs for shared file storage when access patterns change. When you enable Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering, it will store the files in the appropriate storage class at the right time. For example, if you have a file that is not used for a period of time, EFS Intelligent-Tiering will move the file to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class. If the file is accessed again, Intelligent-Tiering will automatically move it back to the Standard storage class.

To get started with Intelligent-Tiering, enable lifecycle management in a new or existing file system and choose a lifecycle policy to automatically transition files between different storage classes. Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering is perfect for workloads with changing or unknown access patterns, such as machine learning inference and training, analytics, content management and media assets. To learn more about this launch, read Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering Optimizes Costs for Workloads with Changing Access Patterns.

AWS Backup
AWS Backup Audit Manager allows you to simplify data governance and compliance management of your backups across supported AWS services. It provides customizable controls and parameters, like backup frequency or retention period. You can also audit your backups to see if they satisfy your organizational and regulatory requirements. If one of your monitored backups drifts from your predefined parameters, AWS Backup Audit Manager will let you know so you can take corrective action. This new feature also enables you to generate reports to share with auditors and regulators. To learn more, read How to Monitor, Evaluate, and Demonstrate Backup Compliance with AWS Backup Audit Manager.

Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS direct APIs now support creating 64 TB EBS Snapshots directly from any block storage data, including on-premises. This was increased from 16 TB to 64 TB, allowing customers to create the largest snapshots and recover them to Amazon EBS io2 Block Express Volumes. To learn more, read Amazon EBS direct API documentation.

AWS Transfer Family
AWS Transfer Family Managed Workflows is a new feature that allows you to reduce the manual tasks of preprocessing your data. Managed Workflows does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, like setting up the infrastructure to run your code upon file arrival, continuously monitoring for errors, and verifying that all the changes to the data are logged. Managed Workflows helps you handle error scenarios so that failsafe modes trigger when needed.

AWS Transfer Family Managed Workflows allows you to configure all the necessary tasks at once so that tasks can automatically run in the background. Managed Workflows is available today in the AWS Transfer Family Management Console. To learn more, read Transfer Family FAQ.

Join us online for more!
Don’t forget to register and join us for the AWS Storage Day 2021 virtual event. The event will be live at 8:30 AM Pacific Time (11:30 AM Eastern Time) on September 2. The event will immediately re-stream for the Asia-Pacific audience with live Q&A moderators on Friday, September 3, at 8:30 AM Singapore Time. All sessions will be available on demand next week.

We look forward to seeing you there!

— Marcia