AWS Announces Availability of New Cloud Services at NYC Summit

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to expand the availability of new types of compute capabilities in the cloud.

At AWS Summit New York on July 14, the company provided an update on a series of services that it had announced were in preview at prior events. AWS CTO Werner Vogels was originally scheduled to give the keynote at the past week's summit, but he was unable to attend due to illness. In his place, Martin Beeby, principal developer advocate for AWS, delivered the address, joking that resilience is a hallmark of AWS.

"AWS is a very resilient company. We have backups on the backups," Beeby said. "You can think of me as a sort of Werner Vogels' availability zone."

AWS Cloud WAN Goes GA at AWS Summit NYC

At the AWS re:Invent conference in December 2021, Vogels announced the launch of his company's Cloud WAN service as a preview. Now that service is ready for wider use, and Beeby said it is generally available.

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"It's a service to build, manage, and monitor global wide area networks," he said. "Cloud WAN uses the AWS global network to connect your on-premises data centers, branch offices, and cloud resources to AWS."

The goal of Cloud WAN is to make it easier for organizations to improve network security, and it provides organizations with a single console to manage a global network, Beeby said.

Related:Cloud, Data, and Political Protests Mark the 2022 AWS Summit

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances Now GA

Just ahead of the NYC Summit, AWS announced the general availability of its Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances.

AWS first announced that it was bringing support for running Apple MacOS-based compute instances as a service in its cloud at the AWS re:Invent 2020 conference. A year later, in December 2021, AWS announced a preview of its next-generation Mac service, based on the M1 silicon architecture developed by Apple.

"We had thousands of customers sign up for the EC2 M1 Mac instances preview," Manish Rathaur, principal product manager of Amazon EC2 at AWS, told ITPro Today.

Rathaur said that AWS saw strong customer interest in the EC2 M1 Mac instance preview and received sign-ups from large enterprises; startups; indie developers; and public sector customers across all geographies, industries, and business functions.

The EC2 M1 Mac instances also benefit from the AWS Nitro system, which brings high storage and networking bandwidth capacity for the cloud service.

"EC2 Mac instances are enabled and managed directly by AWS," Rathaur said. "We have however worked closely with Apple business and engineering leadership to innovate on behalf of our joint customers and share the common vision of bringing the scale and benefits of AWS to all Apple developers."

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