It’s easy to miss the many updates that Amazon push each month. In November, the Amazon EC2 services saw updates to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk, dedicated hosts, Spot Instances and more.
Here are some of the Amazon EC2 updates that you may have missed:
1) Amazon EC2 High I/O Instances are now available as Spot Instances
In case you’re not sure, Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare EC2 computing capacity. They’re one of the options for provisioning Amazon EC2 servers that aim to save you money by bidding what you want to pay.
Amazon rolled out an update so that Spot Instances now support the EC2 storage-optimised, high I/O i2 instance types. This means you can now bid for spare capacity on i2 servers, potentially saving money if you need storage optimised servers.
2) Elastic Beanstalk Added Detailed Health Metrics to the Management Console
An interesting update was made to AWS Elastic Beanstalk in that it now lets you view detailed health metrics for your apps from the Elastic Beanstalk Management console.
This includes a health status, metrics and causes for your individual EC2 instances within your environments.
With this update, you no longer have to manually monitor application metrics to see if your application is performing as expected. Elastic Beanstalk does this on your behalf and will change the environment health status to warn of any anomalies. Find out more details about this update, here.
3) AWS Elastic Beanstalk Support Added for Environmental Links
Another AWS Elastic Beanstalk update in November includes the addition of support for environmental links. Where previously you had to manually hardcode links between components, which made management and updates difficult, you can now create and model links between different application components when developing apps in Elastic Beanstalk.
Links between application components are modelled using the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK.
4) Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts
Later in the month, we saw the introduction of Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, which are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts could help to reduce costs, allowing you to use existing server-bound software licenses, such as; Windows Server, SQL Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
This AWS update allows you to reliably spin up EC2 instances on the same physical server over time. It will give visibility over how your Dedicated Hosts are utilised and what has been installed on the server.
The bring-your-own-licence (BYOL) method can help minimise licencing costs and help address compliance and regulation requirements.
5) Use AWS Config to track EC2 Instances on Dedicated Hosts
Along with the Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts update came the AWS Config update that allows you to assess licence compliance on Dedicated Hosts by turning on recording for instances and hosts.
Through recording when instances are launched, stopped or terminated on a Dedicated Host, and pairing the information with host and instance information (including: Host ID, Amazon Machine Image IDs, number of sockets and physical cores), AWS Config becomes a data source for licence reporting.
Whilst these are just five of the updates you may have missed for Amazon EC2, Amazon are constantly working on improving and updating AWS and you can find a full list of updates here.
