Cloud Month is back with new AWS developments for the month of March.
AWS: New I3 Instances For I/O Heavy Workloads
AWS has just announced the release of I3 instances, designed specifically to support input-output intensive applications. There are six different sizes in all, open to 15 different AWS regions.
With up to 3.3 M IOPS at a 4k block and a maximum of 16 Gig per second sequential disk throughput, these instance types can carry workloads that require high throughput low latency tasks, such as relational or NoSQL databases, search engines, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and disk-based caches.
More information on pricing for different regions can be found here.
Amazon EBS Upgrades with Elastic Volumes
AWS has dedicated itself towards making Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) even better suited for their clients’ needs. In the past, they have improved capacity and performance, and even included two new tiers of storage.
AWS is happy to announce that is has designed even more features to make Amazon EBS more elastic. Elastic Volumes lets you adjust volume size, volume type, and performance according to what you want. To cap it, you may still use your EBS volume even while you make the adjustments.
This way, you can drastically shorten the provisioning cycle by making adjustments on the go. You also simplify the planning, adjustment, and maintenance for block storage.
AWS DynamoDB Adds Time To Live Feature
Time To Live allows users to set an expiration date for AWS DynamoDB entries. This can be done on a per table basis wherein you specify an item attribute containing the expiration time.
Once this attribute is set, DynamoDB will automatically delete the item once it expires. You may also use DynamoDb streams to archive or process each deletion: log them, put them in long-term storage, or use them as triggers for other processes using AWS Lambda.
This feature is a great way to reduce storage costs, as in the case of the company TUNE, which managed to save over $200,000 a year by deleting stale data.
EC2 Instances Introduce Size Flexibility
AWS EC2 had been upgraded in previous months with the release of Regional RIs. These RIs apply the discount for any Availability Zone within their Region, which can go as high as 75% compared to On-demand pricing.
Starting this March, Regional RIs have been upgraded for greater flexibility. Any regional Linux/UNIX RIs with shared tenancy now apply to all instance sizes within an instance family and AWS region. This works even if they’re being used across multiple accounts.
Amazon EMR Instance Fleets Launched
AWS has announced a brand new feature: Amazon EMR instance fleets. This improvement allows you to create a list of up to 5 instance types with weighted capacities and spot bid prices.
Amazon EMR can then provision On-Demand and Spot instances for your cluster, based on the types you specified. As such, EMR instance fleets gives you more control on provisioning instances.
If you prefer, you can also specify Availability Zones and EMR will launch your cluster in one of them. Should there be Spot instance interruptions, EMR can replace instances with any available kinds in your fleet. This way, you can keep your cluster’s capacity at maximum.
AWS Data Migration Service Reaches 20,000 Mark
The AWS Data Migration Service lets you move your critical data from on-site or cloud databases or data warehouses to Amazon databases and data warehouses. These include services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon RedShift, MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL.
This has proven so flexible and cost-effective for users that since a year ago, more than 20,000 unique databases have migrated to AWS using AWS Data Migration Service.
This service has helped users save on data storage. Amazon Aurora, for instance, provides a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible at 10% of the price for a commercial database.
You can find more user testimonials here. If you would like to migrate not just your data but your data infrastructure as well, please contact our AWS experts here at PolarSeven. In the meantime, check us out next month for more cloud news.
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