With dozens of announcements and blogs published each week, it can be challenging to sift through and understand the most impactful updates in the world of AWS.

That’s why we developed this monthly series highlighting the most notable recent AWS news and thought leadership, curated by the nOps engineering team.

Find out what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s going to save you money on your AWS bill.

September 2024: The latest in Cost Optimization News

First, let’s dive into the AWS updates with the biggest impact on your cloud costs.

Lots of shiny new EC2 Instances

In September, you now have access to:

  • OR1 instances for existing Amazon OpenSearch Service domains with 30% price-performance improvement over existing instances
  • X8g Instances powered by AWS Graviton4 delivering up to 60% better performance than AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 X2gd instances, for memory-intensive workloads
  • C8g instances and M8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 processors deliver up to 30% better performance over Graviton3-based instances.
  • G6 instances powered by NVIDIA L4 GPUs now available in Europe (Spain) region for various ML and graphics-heavy use cases
  • M7G instance support now available in Europe (London) makes it easy to upgrade existing x-86 based based M5 or T3 instances to more cost-effective M7G instances

New purchase recommendations for Amazon DynamoDB reserved capacity

DynamoDB reserved capacity allows you to save up to 77% compared to provisioned capacity in exchange for a usage commitment over a one or three-year term. With the update, Cost Explorer provides recommendations for 7 services: EC2, RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, MemoryDB, and now DynamoDB reserved capacity.

IPv6 support continuing to roll out

Starting February 1, 2024, AWS began charging for all public IPv4 addresses, which were previously free. As many organizations make the migration to IPv6, AWS is adding new support. This month’s updates include:
reddit-img
Image source: reddit.com

Goodbye, Amazon App Mesh

AWS is killing App Mesh on September 30, 2024 due to its complexity and sidecar management overhead. To migrate from App Mesh to the more streamlined and fully managed Amazon ECS Service Connect, check out this guide.

GitLab Runners Now on CodeBuild

CodeBuild can now integrate natively with GitLab self-hosted runners. You can set up webhooks, update your GitLab CI YAML, and take advantage of AWS security features like IAM and AWS Secrets Manager. This means more flexibility for CI/CD workflows, minus the management overhead of managing infrastructure.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports AWS KMS with customer managed keys

Starting today, you can use AWS KMS customer managed keys to encrypt data at rest, with no impact on performance.

What’s the cost optimization angle? S3 Bucket Keys are free and reduce the number of requests to AWS KMS by up to 99%, optimizing both performance and costs.

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AWS Cloud Cost Allocation: The Complete Guide

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SNS now delivers SMS text messages via AWS End User Messaging

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) announces integration with AWS End User Messaging for the delivery of SMS messages. Starting today, SNS customers can start using new features like SMS resource management, two-way messaging, granular resource permissions, country block rules, and centralized billing for all AWS SMS messaging without making any changes to configurations or the global AWS SMS network used by SNS.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports Aurora cluster-level configuration

No more configuring each Aurora instance one by one. You can now configure Performance Insights or Enhanced Monitoring on all the instances within an Aurora cluster with a single click in the console or through APIs — new instances added by AWS Auto Scaling will automatically inherit the settings as well.

This month AWS also announced that RDS Performance Insights also now support queries run through Data API.

Editor’s Pick — The Best of Blogs & Articles This Month

Our favorite reads over the past month include:

GenAI

Methodology for incident response on generative AI workloads
Image source: Business Insider

Accelerate quantum software development on Amazon Braket with Claude-3

Image source: AWS
From students to seasoned professionals, developers are increasingly using generative AI assistants to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate their development cycles by up to 30%. This article discusses how to build a customized quantum computing code assistant with Amazon Bedrock using a Claude-3 LLM enhanced by RAG.

Building an efficient MLOps platform with OSS tools on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate

Find out how Zeta Global built a custom MLOps platform to automate and scale the machine learning lifecycle using open-source tools like Airflow, Feast, dbt, and MLflow. If you’re interested in scalable AI/ML infrastructure or looking to streamline your own machine learning workflows, it’s worth a read.

The Best in Cost Optimization

How Samsung Cloud optimized Amazon DynamoDB costs

This blog post explores five approaches Samsung Cloud has taken to continuously lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40% since migrating from Apache Cassandra to DynamoDB in 2015: Modeling, DynamoDB auto scaling, TTL, Reserved capacity, and Standard-IA.

Optimize storage cost for your Athena queries

When you run Amazon Athena queries on your CUR, you store the results in S3 which incurs costs. Many overlook the importance of setting up the bucket configuration to remove unused results, leading to unnecessary spending — this article explains how to do it cost optimally.

Transition data to cheaper storage with Amazon S3 Lifecycle + custom filtering

Amazon S3 Lifecycle lets users transition objects across different storage classes, to optimize their Amazon S3 storage costs. Find out how to extend out-of-the-box S3 Lifecycle filtering capabilities by using S3 Batch Operations to create S3 object tags based a specific file extension and then use the tags in an S3 Lifecycle rule to transition tagged objects to a cheaper storage class.

Optimizing Amazon S3 data transfers over Direct Connect

Data transfer fees can drive a big portion of your AWS bill. This post discussed different network architectures for transferring large datasets between on-premises environments and Amazon S3 using AWS Direct Connect.

About nOps

If you’re looking to save on your AWS costs, nOps makes it easy for engineers to take action on cloud cost optimization.

The nOps all-in-one cloud platform features include:

  • Business Contexts: Understand and allocate 100% of your AWS bill down to the container level
  • Compute Copilot: Intelligent provisioner that helps you save with Spot discounts to reduce On-Demand costs by up to 90%
  • Commitment management: Automatic life-cycle management of your EC2/RDS/EKS commitments with risk-free guarantee
  • Storage migration:One-Click EBS volume migration
  • Rightsizing: Rightsize EC2 instances and Auto Scaling Groups
  • Resource Scheduling: Automatically schedule and pause idle resources

nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $1.5+ billion in cloud spend for our customers.

Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!