AWS Weekly Roundup: Application Load Balancer IPv6, Amazon S3 pricing update, Amazon EC2 Flex instances, and more (May 20, 2024)

AWS Summit season is in full swing around the world, with last week’s events in Bengaluru, Berlin, and  Seoul, where my blog colleague Channy delivered one of the keynotes.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes – A customer reported how he was charged for Amazon S3 API requests he didn’t initiate and which resulted in AccessDenied errors. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) service team updated the service to not charge such API requests anymore. As always when talking about pricing, the exact wording is important, so please read the What’s New post for the details.

Introducing Amazon EC2 C7i-flex instances – These instances delivers up to 19 percent better price performance compared to C6i instances. Using C7i-flex instances is the easiest way for you to get price performance benefits for a majority of compute-intensive workloads. The new instances are powered by the 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable custom processors (Sapphire Rapids) that are available only on AWS and offer 5 percent lower prices compared to C7i.

Application Load Balancer launches IPv6 only support for internet clients – Application Load Balancer now allows customers to provision load balancers without IPv4s for clients that can connect using just IPv6s. To connect, clients can resolve AAAA DNS records that are assigned to Application Load Balancer. The Application Load Balancer is still dual stack for communication between the load balancer and targets. With this new capability, you have the flexibility to use both IPv4s or IPv6s for your application targets while avoiding IPv4 charges for clients that don’t require it.

Amazon VPC Lattice now supports TLS Passthrough – We announced the general availability of TLS passthrough for Amazon VPC Lattice, which allows customers to enable end-to-end authentication and encryption using their existing TLS or mTLS implementations. Prior to this launch, VPC Lattice supported HTTP and HTTPS listener protocols only, which terminates TLS and performs request-level routing and load balancing based on information in HTTP headers.

Amazon DocumentDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon OpenSearch Service – This new integration provides you with advanced search capabilities, such as fuzzy search, cross-collection search and multilingual search, on your Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) documents using the OpenSearch API. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can now synchronize your data from Amazon DocumentDB to Amazon OpenSearch Service, eliminating the need to write any custom code to extract, transform, and load the data.

Amazon EventBridge now supports customer managed keys (CMK) for event buses – This capability allows you to encrypt your events using your own keys instead of an AWS owned key (which is used by default). With support for CMK, you now have more fine-grained security control over your events, satisfying your company’s security requirements and governance policies.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items, open source projects, and Twitch shows that you might find interesting:

The Four Pillars of Managing Email Reputation – Dustin Taylor is the manager of anti-abuse and email deliverability for Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). He wrote a remarkable post exploring Amazon SES approach to managing domain and IP reputation. Maintaining a high reputation ensures optimal recipient inboxing. His post outlines how Amazon SES protects its network reputation to help you deliver high-quality email consistently. A worthy read, even if you’re not sending email at scale. I learned a lot.

Build On Generative AI – Season 3 of your favorite weekly Twitch show about all things generative artificial intelligence (AI) is in full swing! Streaming every Monday, 9:00 AM US PT, my colleagues Tiffany and Darko discuss different aspects of generative AI and invite guest speakers to demo their work.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter, in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS events

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore 2.5 days of immersive cloud security learning in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania.

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

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