This month saw some drastic reduction in prices for a few AWS services.
AWS S3 and Glacier Price Reduction
AWS announced that starting Dec. 1, 2016, both S3 and Glacier storage services will see price reductions. This is to reflect the AWS’s savings derived from technological economies of scale. The original six pricing tiers have been reduced to three.
AWS Glacier storage has also been made more affordable in several AWS Regions. The charge for 1 GB for 1 month of storage in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), or EU (Ireland) Regions, has been reduced by 43% to just $0.004 per month.
Apart from price reduction, Glacier has also gained two new retrieval options. Apart from Standard retrieval ($0.01 per GB along with $0.05 for every 1,000 requests), you can choose from the following:
- Expedited– for quick retrieval of more than 100TB, this costs $0.03 per GB and $0.01 per request and the data may be retrieved in a handful of minutes.
- Bulk– for non-urgent data retrieval $0.0025 per GB (75% less than for Standard Retrieval) along with $0.025 for every 1,000 requests. This transfer may take 5-12 hours.
CloudWatch Metrics Reduced Prices
Continuing the trend for price reductions, AWS is announcing a price reduction for CloudWatch Metrics (the first 10 are still free). The lowest tier only charges $0.02 per metric per month, providing a discount of 96% from current rates (note that this only affects the US East, Northern Virginia region for now).
New T2.Medium DB Instance Class for Amazon Aurora
AWS has announced a new option for Amazon Aurora users. The new steady-state db.t2.medium DB instance class comes with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM.
At normal use, it can take up 40% of the performance of a single core, but can burst to full core usage for heavy loads and CPU-intensive tasks. This new class also comes with a set of CPU credits which are used each time the instance is active, and saved when it is inactive.
The db.t2.medium’s capabilities make it a useful for development and test scenarios and even for some light production workloads.
This brings your DB instance class choices for Amazon Aurora to six. For heaver production loads, you have a choice of others ranging from db.r3.large to db.r3.8xlarge.
The db.t2.medium class is available now, and prices start at $0.082 per hour.
These new AWS CloudWatch rates took effect on December 1, 2016.
Amazon CloudWatch Extended Metrics Retention and New UI
AWS has announced several critical enhancements to their monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch. Namely:
Extended Metrics Retention
Since users have requested for more time to access and see their metrics, system metrics have now been extended from 14 days to 15 months, at no additional charge. Historical data is at a lower granularity level: 1 minute data points are available for 15 days, while 5 minute data points can be viewed for 63 days, and 1 hour data points are viewable up to 15 months.
This gives you time to look at monthly reports, compare performance from year-to-year, and determine changes over time. Starting now and over the course of a year, the metrics will continue to be stored until 15 months of data are recorded.
Improved Metric Graphing
Aside from extending metrics retention, AWS wanted to make reports easier to understand. This feature will do so by introducing new tabs: Graphed metrics and Graph options.
The graphed metrics tab allows you to control your metrics. You may delete it, copy it, rename it, or add an alarm. Using the graph options you may specify ranges you want to see.
These features are available now for free.
Four Ways to Stop Ransomware
While AWS have the highest security and protection levels possible their shared responsibility model means that you still need to protect whatever you put into the cloud.
Malware just keeps getting more vicious each year. Nowadays the gravest threat doesn’t just spy on you; it locks you out of your files and demands payment in exchange for the key. Welcome to the age of ransomware.
Ransomware comes in many insidious forms, the most infamous being CryptoWall and its variants. CryptoWall uses phishing tactics to evade security, disguising themselves as image files or ads to infiltrate your computer. Hence the need to stop ransomware cold.
We can help you secure your environment in AWS. Contact us today at PolarSeven.
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