AWS Announcement Highlights for February 2021

In spite of the heavy winter weather and ongoing pandemic, Amazon continues to churn out an impressive set of enhancements for AWS. Here are some of the highlights from Amazon’s February 2021 AWS announcements.

AWS Outposts support local snapshots

To better enable businesses to meet their data residency and local data processing needs, Amazon announced EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts. Snapshots on Outpost are stored on your Amazon EBS volumes locally using Amazon S3 on Outposts. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your data that can assist in disaster recovery and improve backup compliance.

EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts requires your AWS Outpost to have S3 on Outposts installed. You can create and manage your EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.

New bare metal EC2 Instances

To enable you to provide your applications with direct access to the Intel Xeon Scalable processor, AWS has announced five new bare metal EC2 instances. These instances are intended to support workloads that require access to the hardware feature set and for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments or for businesses that want to use their own hypervisor. The five new bare metal instances are: m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal. M5 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources. The R5 instances are intended for memory-intensive applications. The z1d instances provide both high compute performance and high memory capacities.

Amazon S3 enhancements

Amazon’s S3 storage also received several enhancements. First, Amazon released AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3. AWS Privatelink for Amazon S3 provides private connectivity between Amazon S3 storage and your on-premises infrastructure using private IP addresses.

Next, you can now perform S3 Delete Object Tagging operations using Amazon S3 Batch Operations.  S3 Delete Object Tagging allows you to delete object tags across many objects with a single API request or from the S3 Management Console. S3 Batch Operations performs the bulk delete actions across all of the objects.

In addition, AWS Outposts now offers a 26 TB storage tier for Amazon S3 on Outposts. This new storage tier enables you to configure 26 TB of Amazon S3 storage in addition to 11 TB of Amazon EBS storage on your AWS Outposts.

New Amazon S3 digital curriculum

Amazon has also released a new online S3 course: Managing Amazon Simple Storage Service. This 150 minute course presents techniques that businesses can use to simplify the management of Amazon S3 storage. It presents the tools you need to monitor your Amazon S3 activity, storage, and performance trends. It shows you how to interpret inventory reports. You’ll also see how to perform large-scale batch operations as well as how to automate key S3 tasks.