AWS Backup logically air-gapped vault now supports Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive. Logically air-gapped vaults are a type of AWS Backup vault that allows secure sharing of backups across accounts and AWS Organizations, supporting direct restore to reduce recovery time from a data loss event. You can now archive Amazon EBS backups held in a logically air-gapped vault to Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, a low-cost tier for snapshots you rarely access. A logically air-gapped vault stores immutable backups that are locked by default, and isolated with encryption using AWS owned keys or customer-managed keys. This helps you meet long-term retention and compliance requirements at lower storage cost. You can get started using the AWS Backup console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. In a backup plan rule that runs monthly or less often, specify a logically air-gapped vault as the primary backup destination or copy destination. Then enable Archive Amazon EBS snapshots in the backup rule lifecycle or copy lifecycle and set the time in warm storage before the backup transitions. This support is available in all AWS Regions where both logically air-gapped vault and Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive are available. For more information and detailed regional availability, visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/backup-feature-availability.html#features-by-region. To learn more about logically air-gapped vaults, visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/logicallyairgappedvault.html and https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/.

AWS Backup logically air-gapped vault now supports Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive. Logically air-gapped vaults are a type of AWS Backup vault that allows secure sharing of backups across accounts and AWS Organizations, supporting direct restore to reduce recovery time from a data loss event. You can now archive Amazon EBS backups held in a logically air-gapped vault to Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, a low-cost tier for snapshots you rarely access. A logically air-gapped vault stores immutable backups that are locked by default, and isolated with encryption using AWS owned keys or customer-managed keys. This helps you meet long-term retention and compliance requirements at lower storage cost. You can get started using the AWS Backup console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. In a backup plan rule that runs monthly or less often, specify a logically air-gapped vault as the primary backup destination or copy destination. Then enable Archive Amazon EBS snapshots in the backup rule lifecycle or copy lifecycle and set the time in warm storage before the backup transitions. This support is available in all AWS Regions where both logically air-gapped vault and Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive are available. For more information and detailed regional availability, visit the AWS Backup documentation. To learn more about logically air-gapped vaults, visit the product documentation and pricing page.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/transform/latest/userguide/transform-app-assessments.html now evaluate on-premises storage for migration to AWS. Instead of manually analyzing thousands of volumes across protocols, capacity, and performance, you upload a storage inventory and AWS Transform does the mapping for you. It matches each workload to the best-fit service, sizes the recommendation, and projects costs to produce a total cost of ownership business case. Bring NAS shares, SAN LUNs, direct-attached disks, or backup repositories via a NetApp Digital Advisor export, RVTools file, or other inventory. AWS Transform routes workloads across Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx (NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, OpenZFS, Lustre). Run what-if scenarios to compare deployment options such as Single-AZ vs. Multi-AZ or cost-optimized vs. performance-optimized, then ask follow-up questions about any result in chat. Storage migration assessments are available in all AWS Regions where AWS Transform is available. To learn more, see the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/transform/latest/userguide/transform-app-assessments.html.

Migration assessments in AWS Transform now evaluate on-premises storage for migration to AWS. Instead of manually analyzing thousands of volumes across protocols, capacity, and performance, you upload a storage inventory and AWS Transform does the mapping for you. It matches each workload to the best-fit service, sizes the recommendation, and projects costs to produce a total cost of ownership business case. Bring NAS shares, SAN LUNs, direct-attached disks, or backup repositories via a NetApp Digital Advisor export, RVTools file, or other inventory. AWS Transform routes workloads across Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx (NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, OpenZFS, Lustre). Run what-if scenarios to compare deployment options such as Single-AZ vs. Multi-AZ or cost-optimized vs. performance-optimized, then ask follow-up questions about any result in chat. Storage migration assessments are available in all AWS Regions where AWS Transform is available. To learn more, see the AWS Transform User Guide.

There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar. This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon […]

AWS introduces Amazon EBS Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes into other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones now supports copying EBS volumes across AWS accounts with re-encryption. You can copy EBS volumes to any AWS account, re-encrypting with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. This enables organizations that separate production and development workloads into different accounts to copy data across those account boundaries. With cross-account copy, you can clone a production database volume into an isolated development account, giving developers a fresh copy of production data to experiment with safely. This capability also supports teams that require encryption key separation across environments, such as maintaining separate KMS keys for production and non-production accounts. Cross-account copy is supported for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. To copy a volume across accounts, you first share the volume with the target account using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), and then the target account creates a copy of the shared volume in the same Availability Zone. You can access this capability using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. It is available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones, including all Commercial Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS China Regions, and supported Local Zones. To learn more, visit the Amazon EBS Volume Clones documentation.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones now supports copying EBS volumes across AWS accounts with re-encryption. You can copy EBS volumes to any AWS account, re-encrypting with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. This enables organizations that separate production and development workloads into different accounts to copy data across those account boundaries. With cross-account copy, you can clone a production database volume into an isolated development account, giving developers a fresh copy of production data to experiment with safely. This capability also supports teams that require encryption key separation across environments, such as maintaining separate KMS keys for production and non-production accounts. Cross-account copy is supported for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. To copy a volume across accounts, you first share the volume with the target account using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), and then the target account creates a copy of the shared volume in the same Availability Zone. You can access this capability using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. It is available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones, including all Commercial Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS China Regions, and supported Local Zones. To learn more, visit the Amazon https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-copying-volume.html.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) now supports up to four Elastic Volumes modifications per volume within a rolling 24-hour window in AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) Region. Elastic Volumes modifications allow you to increase the size, change the type, and adjust the performance of your EBS volumes. With this update, you can start a new modification immediately after the previous one completes, as long as you have initiated fewer than four modifications in the past 24 hours. This enhancement improves your operational agility to immediately scale storage capacity or adjust performance in response to sudden data growth or unanticipated workload spikes. With Elastic Volumes modifications, you can modify your volumes without detaching them or restarting your instances, allowing your application to continue running with minimal performance impact. The Elastic Volumes modifications enhancement is automatically available in the Region without requiring changes to your existing workflows. To learn more, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-modify-volume.html in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Today, AWS announces increased Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) performance for Amazon EC2 C8gn, M8gn, and R8gn instances in 48xlarge and metal-48xl sizes. EC2 C8gn, M8gn, and R8gn instances are network optimized instances powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards. With the latest enhancements to AWS Nitro System, we have doubled the maximum EBS performance on these instances in 48xlarge and metal-48xl sizes, from 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 240,000 IOPS to 120 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 480,000 IOPS. Customers running network-intensive workloads while requiring additional block storage performance such as data analytics and high-performance file systems can benefit from the improved EBS performance. All existing and new C8gn, M8gn, and R8gn instances in 48xlarge and metal-48xl sizes launched starting today will benefit from this performance increase at no additional cost. For running instances, customers can stop and start instances to enable this performance increase. The higher EBS performance is available in all AWS regions where these instance types are generally available today. To learn more, see Amazon https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/c8g/, https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m8g/, and https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r8g Instances and https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-optimized.html. 

AWS Compute Optimizer makes it easier to identify snapshots that are created when snapshotting and deleting unattached Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes by automatically applying an AWS-generated tag during creation. This enhancement improves visibility and tracking of EBS snapshots created through Compute Optimizer Automation. When Compute Optimizer creates a snapshot before deleting an unattached EBS volume—whether initiated through manual actions or automation rules—the snapshot now receives the tag aws:compute-optimizer:automation-event-id with a tag value that links the snapshot to the unique identifier of the automation event that created it. This allows you to easily identify, track, and manage snapshots created through the automated optimization process, helping you maintain better governance over your backup resources and understand the source of snapshots in your environment. This is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Compute Optimizer Automation is available. To get started with automated optimization, go to the AWS Compute Optimizer console or visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/latest/ug/automation.html documentation.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) now supports up to four Elastic Volumes modifications per volume within a rolling 24-hour window. Elastic Volumes modifications allow you to increase the size, change the type, and adjust the performance of your EBS volumes. With this update, you can start a new modification immediately after the previous one completes, as long as you have initiated fewer than four modifications in the past 24 hours. This enhancement improves your operational agility to immediately scale storage capacity or adjust performance in response to sudden data growth or unanticipated workload spikes. With Elastic Volumes modifications, you can modify your volumes without detaching them or restarting your instances, allowing your application to continue running with minimal performance impact. This feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and the China Regions. This capability is automatically enabled without requiring changes to your existing workflows. To learn more, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-modify-volume.html in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Today, we are introducing automation rules, a new feature in AWS Compute Optimizer that enables you to optimize Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes at scale. With automation rules, you can streamline the process of cleaning up unattached EBS volumes and upgrading volumes to the latest-generation volume types, saving cost and improving performance across your cloud infrastructure. Automation rules let you automatically apply optimization recommendations on a recurring schedule when they match your criteria. You can set criteria like AWS Region to target specific geographies and Resource Tags to distinguish between production and development workloads. Configure rules to run daily, weekly, or monthly, and AWS Compute Optimizer will continuously evaluate new recommendations against your criteria. A new dashboard allows you to summarize automation events over time, examine detailed step history, and estimate savings achieved. If you need to reverse an action, you can do so directly from the same dashboard. AWS Compute Optimizer automation rules are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (São Paulo). To get started, navigate to the new Automation section in the AWS Compute Optimizer console, visit the AWS Compute Optimizer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/latest/ug/automation.html, or read the https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/introducing-automated-amazon-ebs-volume-optimization-in-aws-compute-optimizer/ to learn more.

Recycle Bin for Amazon EBS, which helps you recover accidentally deleted snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs, now supports EBS Volumes. If you accidentally delete a volume, you can now recover it directly from Recycle Bin instead of restoring from a snapshot, reducing your recovery point objective with no data loss between the last snapshot and deletion. Your recovered volume can immediately achieve the full performance without waiting for data to download from snapshots. To use Recycle Bin, you can set a retention period for deleted volumes, and you can recover any volume within that period. Recovered volumes are immediately available and will retain all attributes—tags, permissions, and encryption status. Volumes not recovered are deleted permanently when the retention period expires. You create retention rules to enable Recycle Bin for all volumes or specific volumes, using tags to target which volumes to protect. EBS Volumes in Recycle Bin are billed at the same price as EBS Volumes, read more on the https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/. To get started, read the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/recycle-bin.html. The feature is now available through the https://aws.amazon.com/cli/, https://aws.amazon.com/tools/, or the https://aws.amazon.com/console/ in all AWS commercial, China, and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

I’ve been inspired by all the activities that tech communities around the world have been hosting and participating in throughout the year. Here in the southern hemisphere we’re starting to dream about our upcoming summer breaks and closing out on some of the activities we’ve initiated this year. The tech community in South Africa is […]

AWS launched Amazon EBS Volume Clones, a new capability that allows users to create instant point-in-time copies of EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone with a single API call, eliminating the previous multi-step process of taking snapshots and creating volumes from them.

Amazon EBS now provides additional visibility to monitor the average IOPS and average throughput of your Amazon EBS volumes with two new CloudWatch metrics - VolumeAvgIOPS and VolumeAvgThroughput. You can use the metrics to monitor the I/O being driven on your EBS volumes to track performance trends. With these new volume level metrics, you can troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and optimize your volume’s provisioned performance to meet your application needs. The metrics will provide per-minute visibility into the driven average IOPS and average throughput on your EBS volume. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can use the new metrics to create customized dashboards and set alarms that notify you or automatically perform actions based on the metrics. The VolumeAvgIOPS and VolumeAvgThroughput metrics are available by default at a 1-minute frequency at no additional charge and are supported for all EBS volumes attached to an EC2 Nitro instance in all Commercial AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and AWS China Regions. To learn more about these new metrics, please visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/using_cloudwatch_ebs.html.

Today, Amazon announced two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics that provide insight into when your application exceeds the I/O performance limits for your EC2 instance with attached EBS volumes. These two metrics, Instance EBS IOPS Exceeded Check and Instance EBS Throughput Exceeded Check, monitor if the driven IOPS or throughput is exceeding the maximum EBS IOPS or throughput that your instance can support. With these two new metrics at the instance level, you can quickly identify and respond to application performance issues stemming from exceeding the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-optimized.html. These metrics will return a value of 0 (performance not exceeded) or a 1 (performance exceeded) when your workload is exceeding the EBS-Optimized IOPS or throughput limit of the EC2 instance. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can use these new metrics to create customized dashboards and set alarms that notify you or automatically perform actions based on these metrics, such as moving to a larger instance size or a different instance type that supports higher EBS-Optimized limits. The Instance EBS IOPS Exceeded Check and Instance EBS Throughput Exceeded Check metrics are available by default at a 1-minute frequency at no additional charges, for all Nitro-based Amazon EC2 instances with EBS volumes attached. You can access these metrics via the EC2 console, CLI, or CloudWatch API in all Commercial AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and China Regions. To learn more about these CloudWatch metrics, please visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/viewing_metrics_with_cloudwatch.html#ebs-metrics-nitro.

I’ve been inspired by all the activities that tech communities around the world have been hosting and participating in throughout the year. Here in the southern hemisphere we’re starting to dream about our upcoming summer breaks and closing out on some of the activities we’ve initiated this year. The tech community in South Africa is […]

AWS launched Amazon EBS Volume Clones, a new capability that allows users to create instant point-in-time copies of EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone with a single API call, eliminating the previous multi-step process of taking snapshots and creating volumes from them.

Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. io2 Block Express leverage the latest generation of EBS storage server architecture designed to deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. With a single io2 Block Express volume, you can achieve 256,000 IOPS, 4GiB/s throughput, and 64TiB storage capacity. You can also attach an io2 Block Express volume to multiple instances in the same Availability Zone, supporting shared storage fencing through NVMe reservations for improved application availability and scalability. With the lowest p99.9 I/O latency among major cloud providers, io2 Block Express is the ideal choice for the most I/O-intensive, mission-critical deployments such as SAP HANA, Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM DB2. Customers using io1 volumes can upgrade to io2 Block Express without any downtime using the https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-modify-volume.html API to achieve 100x durability, consistent sub-millisecond latency, and significantly higher performance at the same or lower cost than io1. With io2 Block Express, you can drive up to 4x IOPS and 4x throughput at the same storage price as io1, and up to 50% cheaper IOPS cost for volumes over 32,000 IOPS. io2 Block Express is now available in all the Amazon Web Services regions. You can create and manage io2 Block Express volumes using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI), or Amazon SDKs. For more information on io2 Block Express, see our https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/ebs/latest/userguide/provisioned-iops.html#io2-block-express.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) now supports higher volume-level limits for its General Purpose (gp3) volumes. With this update, gp3 volumes can scale up to 64 TiB in size (4X the previous 16 TiB limit), up to 80,000 IOPS (5X the previous 16,000 IOPS limit), and up to 2,000 MiB/s throughput (2X the previous 1,000 MiB/s limit). These expanded limits help reduce operational complexity for storage-intensive workloads by enabling gp3 volumes with larger capacity and higher performance. You can consolidate multiple striped volumes into a single gp3 volume, streamline architectures, and lower management overhead. The increased limits particularly benefit customers running containerized workloads with limited support for striping multiple volumes, applications that rely on single-volume architectures, and growing workloads approaching current gp3 limits. The pricing model remains unchanged: you pay for storage plus any additional IOPS and throughput provisioned beyond the baseline performance. The new gp3 limits are available in all AWS Commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where gp3 volumes are available. To get started and learn more, please visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/general-purpose.html.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a high-performance block storage service, announces the general availability of snapshot copy for AWS Local Zones. This new feature helps you meet your business and compliance requirements by ensuring that your EBS Snapshots are copied to the AWS Region or AWS Local Zone. Snapshot copy copies a point-in-time local snapshot of an EBS volume and stores it in Amazon S3 in the Region or to another Local Zone. Customers use EBS Snapshots to back up their EBS volumes and copy them across multiple AWS Regions and Local Zones for disaster recovery, data migration, and compliance purposes. Amazon EBS snapshot copy is available in Local Zones that support local snapshots through the AWS Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, see the technical documentation for https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ebs/latest/userguide/ebs-copy-snapshot.html.

Today, AWS Transform introduced three enhancements to help you better assess and plan your migration and modernization journey. These new features include enhanced assessments to analyze EBS cost, .NET agent to analyze code complexity, and an expanded interactive chat interface for .NET modernization guidance. First, AWS Transform assessments now includes Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) cost analysis, enabling you to better understand and plan for storage costs in your migration initiatives. This enhancement helps you make more informed decisions about resource allocation and budget planning for your transformation projects. Second, AWS Transform for .NET now supports enhanced code assessment capabilities that help you accelerate modernization planning with greater confidence, efficiency, and time savings. You can view repository transformation complexity, receive transformation group recommendations, and view transformation assessment reports with natural language summaries, all within a single, unified experience. Finally, AWS Transform now expands chat capability to provide an interactive chat experience that allows you to query specific aspects of your assessment and .NET transformation progress in natural language. You can quickly access relevant information about your modernization journey, get clarification on recommendations, and receive contextual guidance for specific use cases. These new features are now available in the following https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/: US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt). To learn more, visit the https://docs.aws.amazon.com/transform/latest/userguide/what-is-service.html and the https://aws.amazon.com/transform/faq.

You can now use Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD volumes (gp3) volumes with the second-generation AWS Outposts racks for your workloads that require local data processing and data residency. The latest generation of gp3 enables you to provision performance independently of storage capacity, delivering a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s at any volume size. With gp3 volumes, you can scale up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s, delivering 4x the maximum throughput of the previously supported gp2 volumes. EBS gp3 volumes on second-generation AWS Outposts are ideal for a wide variety of performance-intensive applications, including MySQL, Cassandra, virtual desktops, and Hadoop analytics clusters. AWS Outposts racks offer the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises data center or colocation space for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Second-generation AWS Outposts racks support the latest generation of x86-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, starting with C7i, M7i, and R7i instances. These instances deliver twice the vCPU, memory, and network bandwidth, as well as up to 40% better performance compared to C5, M5, and R5 instances on first-generation AWS Outposts racks. You can manage gp3 volumes using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or the AWS SDKs in all Regions and countries/territories where second-generation AWS Outposts racks are supported. For more information on gp3 volumes, see the https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/volume-types/. For a current list of AWS Regions and countries/territories where second-generation AWS Outposts racks are supported, check out the https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/rack/faqs/#product-faqs%23in-which-countries-and-territories-is-outposts-rack-available-trigger