Document history - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Document history

The following table describes important additions to the Amazon EC2 documentation starting in 2019. We also update the documentation frequently to address the feedback that you send us.

ChangeDescriptionDate

Tag new AMIs and snapshots when copying

When you copy an AMI, you can tag the new AMI and the new snapshots with the same tags, or you can tag them with different tags.

March 7, 2024

Remove AWS Management Pack pages

The AWS Management Pack was primarily used with Windows Server 2012 and prior. Those legacy OS platform versions are no longer supported. To manage and troubleshoot your fleet of servers running on AWS and on-premises, see AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager.

February 12, 2024

EC2 Instance Connect support for CentOS, macOS, and RHEL

You can now install EC2 Instance Connect on supported CentOS, macOS, and RHEL AMIs.

December 6, 2023

Hibernation support for C7a, C7i, R7a, R7i, and R7iz

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on C7a, C7i, R7a, R7i, and R7iz instance types.

December 1, 2023

Amazon Q EC2 instance type selector

Amazon Q EC2 instance type selector considers your use case, workload type, and CPU manufacturer preference, as well as how you prioritize price and performance. It then uses this data to provide guidance and suggestions for Amazon EC2 instance types that are best suited for your new workloads.

November 28, 2023

EC2 Free Tier

You can track your Free Tier usage from the EC2 Dashboard.

November 26, 2023

Console-to-Code

Console-to-Code can help you get started with your automation code. Console-to-Code records your console actions, and then uses generative AI to suggest code in your preferred infrastructure-as code format. You can use the code as a starting point, customizing it to make it production-ready for your specific use case.

November 26, 2023

AWSDataLifecycleManagerSSMFullAccess AWS managed policy

Updated the policy to support application-consistent snapshots for SAP HANA using the AWSSystemsManagerSAP-CreateDLMSnapshotForSAPHANA SSM document.

November 17, 2023

VolumeStalledIOCheck metric

You can use the VolumeStalledIOCheck metric to check whether a volume has passed or failed a stalled IO check in the last minute.

November 16, 2023

PTP hardware clock

Supported instances now have a Precision Time Protocol (PTP) hardware clock.

November 16, 2023

Change instance type of instance enabled for hibernation

You can now change the instance type of an instance enabled for hibernation when it is in the stopped state.

November 16, 2023

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager default policies

You can now create Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager default policies for EBS snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs to backup all volumes and instances in a Region.

November 16, 2023

AWS managed policy for Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

Added the AWSDLMDefaultSnapshotPoliciesServiceRolePolicy and AWSDLMDefaultAMIPoliciesServiceRolePolicy AWS managed policies to support Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager default policies.

November 16, 2023

Amazon EBS snapshot lock

You can lock your Amazon EBS snapshots to protect them against accidental or malicious deletions, or to or store them in WORM format for a specific duration.

November 15, 2023

Amazon EBS performance updates

Updated Amazon EBS performance for C6in, M6in, M6idn, R6in, and R6idn instances.

November 15, 2023

Amazon EBS performance updates

Updated Amazon EBS performance for C6in, M6in, M6idn, R6in, and R6idn instances.

November 15, 2023

Instance topology

You can use the DescribeInstanceTopology API to detect the location of your instances, and then use this information to optimize HPC and ML jobs by running them on instances that are physically closer to each other.

November 13, 2023

Block public access for snapshots

You can now use block public access for snapshots to prevent the public sharing of your snapshots.

November 9, 2023

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager pre and post scripts

You can now use pre and post scripts in your Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager snapshot policies to automate the lifecycle of application-consistent snapshots.

November 7, 2023

AWSDataLifecycleManagerSSMFullAccess AWS managed policy

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager added the AWSDataLifecycleManagerSSMFullAccess AWS managed policy.

November 7, 2023

Windows fast launch shared AMI support

You can now enable Windows fast launch on an AMI that's shared with you. When you enable Windows fast launch on a shared AMI, the pre-provisioned snapshots for faster launching are created in your account.

November 6, 2023

Capacity Blocks for ML

You can now reserve GPU instances on a future date to support your short duration machine learning (ML) workloads.

October 31, 2023

New bare metal instances

.metal-16xl and .metal-32xl bare metal instances for R7iz.

October 30, 2023

New bare metal instances

.metal-24xl and .metal-48xl bare metal instances for M7i, R7i, and C7i.

October 30, 2023

New I4i instances

i4i.12xlarge and i4i.24xlarge instances are now available.

October 26, 2023

Spot Instance hibernation

You can now hibernate your Spot Instances using the same hibernation experience and instance families that are currently available for On-Demand Instances.

October 24, 2023

Default settings for block public access for AMIs

Block public access for AMIs is now enabled by default for all new accounts and for existing accounts with no public AMIs.

October 20, 2023

Amazon EC2 Global View

Amazon EC2 Global View supports additional resource types and customizable display options.

October 18, 2023

R7i instances

New memory optimized instance types that feature 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

October 16, 2023

Disable an AMI

You can disable an AMI to prevent it from being used for instance launches.

October 12, 2023

Attached EBS status checks

You can use the attached EBS status checks to monitor if the Amazon EBS volumes attached to an instance are reachable.

October 11, 2023

New bare metal instance

r7a.metal-48xl bare metal instance for R7a. Bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the physical resources of the host server.

October 4, 2023

C7a instances

New compute optimized instances powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC processors.

October 4, 2023

Hibernation support for Microsoft Windows Server 2022

Hibernate your newly-launched instances that were launched from the Microsoft Windows Server 2022 AMI.

October 2, 2023

Initiate interruption of Spot Instances in a Spot Fleet

You can select a Spot Fleet in the Amazon EC2 console and initiate an interruption of Spot Instances in the fleet so that you can test how the applications on your Spot Instances handle being interrupted.

September 21, 2023

NVMe reservations

Multi-Attach enabled io2 volumes support NVMe reservations, which is a set of industry-standard storage fencing protocols.

September 18, 2023

C7i instances

New compute optimized instance types that feature 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

September 14, 2023

Block public access to AMIs

You can enable block public access for AMIs at the account level to block any attempts to make your AMIs public.

September 12, 2023

R7a instances

New memory optimized instance types featuring 4th generation AMD EPYC 9R14 processors and up to 1536 GiB of system memory.

September 11, 2023

R7iz instances

New high-frequency and high memory instances powered by 4th generation Intel Xeon processors.

September 7, 2023

Hibernation support for M7i and M7i-flex

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on M7i and M7i-flex instance types.

August 22, 2023

Hpc7a instances

New compute optimized instance types that feature 4th generation AMD EPYC processors. These instance types support up to 300 Gbps networking bandwidth, and up to 192 CPU cores with up to 768 GB of system memory.

August 17, 2023

M7a instances

New general purpose instances powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC processors.

August 15, 2023

EC2-Classic has been deprecated

With EC2-Classic, EC2 instances ran in a single, flat network shared with other customers. Amazon VPC replaces EC2-Classic. With Amazon VPC, your instances run in a virtual private cloud (VPC) that's logically isolated to your AWS account.

August 8, 2023

M7i-flex instances

New general purpose instances that offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose applications. They deliver a baseline CPU performance of 40 percent with the ability to deliver up to 100 percent CPU performance for 95 percent of the time over a 24-hour period.

August 2, 2023

M7i instances

New general purpose instance types that feature 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

August 2, 2023

Amazon EBS performance updates

Updated Amazon EBS performance for R6a instances.

June 29, 2023

Dedicated Hosts

You can allocate Dedicated Hosts on specific hardware assets on an Outpost.

June 20, 2023

EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint

You can now connect to an instance via SSH or RDP without requiring the instance to have a public IPv4 address.

June 13, 2023

IMDS Package Analyzer

You can now use the IMDS Packet Analyzer to identify sources of IMDSv1 calls on your EC2 instances.

June 1, 2023

Launch template quotas

You can now view your quotas for launch templates and launch template versions in the Service Quotas console and by using the Service Quotas CLI.

April 3, 2023

Capacity Reservation utilization notifications

AWS Health now sends notifications when capacity utilization for Capacity Reservations in your account drops below 20 percent.

April 3, 2023

Amazon EBS performance updates

Updated Amazon EBS performance for M6a and C6a instances.

April 3, 2023

Capacity Reservation groups

You can now add Capacity Reservations that are shared with you to Capacity Reservation groups that you own.

March 30, 2023

New bare metal instances

Bare metal instances for C6in, M6idn, M6in, R6idn, and R6in.

March 21, 2023

Modify instance metadata options

You can now use the Amazon EC2 console to modify instance metadata options.

March 20, 2023

UEFI preferred

You can now create a single AMI that supports both Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Legacy BIOS boot modes.

March 3, 2023

Modify an AMI for IMDSv2

Modify your existing AMI so that instances launched from the AMI require IMDSv2 by default.

February 28, 2023

Add supported instances for ENA Express

Added a table with new and existing supported instance types for ENA Express.

February 13, 2023

Windows Virtualization-based security - Credential Guard

You can enable Credential Guard, a Virtualization-based security (VBS) feature, on supported Amazon EC2 instances.

January 31, 2023

Fault testing on Amazon EBS

Use AWS FIS to temporarily stop I/O between an EBS volume and the instances to which it is attached to test how your workloads handle I/O interruptions.

January 27, 2023

AMI alias in launch templates

You can specify an AWS Systems Manager parameter instead of the AMI ID in your launch templates to avoid having to update the templates every time the AMI ID changes.

January 19, 2023

Hibernation support for C6i, I3en, and M6i

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on C6i, I3en, and M6i instance types.

December 19, 2022

Torn write prevention

Improve the performance of your I/O-intensive relational database workloads and reduce latency without negatively impacting data resiliency with torn write prevention, a block storage feature.

November 29, 2022

Hpc6id instance

New memory optimized instance featuring 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

November 29, 2022

R6in and R6idn instances

New memory optimized instances for network-intensive workloads.

November 28, 2022

M6in and M6idn instances

New general computing instances types.

November 28, 2022

ENA Express

Increase throughput and minimize tail latency of network traffic between EC2 instances with ENA Express.

November 28, 2022

C6in instances

New compute optimized instances ideal for running high performance computing.

November 28, 2022

Recycle Bin retention rule lock

You can lock retention rules to help protect them against accidental or malicious modifications and deletions.

November 23, 2022

Copy AMI tags

When you copy an AMI, you can copy your user-defined AMI tags at the same time.

November 18, 2022

AMI size for store and restore

The size of an AMI (before compression) that can be stored and restored to and from an Amazon S3 bucket can now be up to 5,000 GB.

November 16, 2022

priceCapacityOptimized allocation strategy for Spot Instances

A Spot Fleet that uses the priceCapacityOptimized allocation strategy looks at both price and capacity to select the Spot Instances pools that are the least likely to be interrupted and have the lowest possible price.

November 10, 2022

price-capacity-optimized allocation strategy for Spot Instances

An EC2 Fleet that uses the price-capacity-optimized allocation strategy looks at both price and capacity to select the Spot Instances pools that are the least likely to be interrupted and have the lowest possible price.

November 10, 2022

Cancel having an AMI shared with your account

If an AMI has been shared with your AWS account and you no longer want it shared with your account, you can remove your account from the AMI's launch permissions.

November 4, 2022

Transfer Elastic IP addresses

You can now transfer Elastic IP addresses from one AWS account to another.

October 31, 2022

Replace root volume

You can replace the root Amazon EBS volume for a running instance using an AMI.

October 27, 2022

Trn1 instances

New accelerated computing instances optimized for deep learning powered by AWS Trainium chips.

October 10, 2022

Automatically connect instance to database

Use the automatic connection feature to quickly connect one or more EC2 instances to an RDS database to allow traffic between them.

October 10, 2022

AMI quotas

Quotas now apply to creating and sharing AMIs.

October 10, 2022

Configure AMI for IMDSv2

Configure your AMI so that instances launched from the AMI require IMDSv2 by default.

October 3, 2022

Initiate Spot Instance interruption

You can select a Spot Instance in the Amazon EC2 console and initiate an interruption so that you can test how the applications on your Spot Instances handle being interrupted.

September 26, 2022

Verified AMI provider

In the Amazon EC2 console, public AMIs that are owned by Amazon or a verified Amazon partner are marked Verified provider.

July 22, 2022

R6a instances

New memory optimized instances featuring 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors.

July 19, 2022

Placement groups on AWS Outposts

Added a host spread strategy for placement groups on an Outpost.

June 30, 2022

Condition keys for Recycle Bin

You can use the rbin:Request/ResourceType and rbin:Attribute/ResourceType condition keys to filter access on Recycle Bin requests.

June 14, 2022

R6id instances

New memory optimized instances featuring 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

June 9, 2022

io2 Block Express volumes

You can modify the size and provisioned IOPS of io2 Block Express volumes and you can enable them for fast snapshot restore.

May 31, 2022

Dedicated Hosts on AWS Outposts

You can allocate Dedicated Hosts on AWS Outposts.

May 31, 2022

M6id instances

New general purpose instances featuring 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

May 26, 2022

C6id instances

New compute optimized instances featuring 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

May 26, 2022

Instance stop protection

To prevent your instance from being accidentally stopped, you can enable stop protection for the instance.

May 24, 2022

C7g instances

New compute optimized instances featuring the latest AWS Graviton3 processors.

May 23, 2022

UEFI Secure Boot

UEFI Secure Boot builds on the long-standing secure boot process of Amazon EC2 and provides additional defense-in-depth that helps customers secure software from threats that persist across reboots.

May 10, 2022

NitroTPM

Nitro Trusted Platform Module (NitroTPM) is a virtual device that is provided by the AWS Nitro System and conforms to the TPM 2.0 specification.

May 10, 2022

AMI state change events

Amazon EC2 now generates an event when an AMI changes state. You can use Amazon EventBridge to detect and react to these events.

May 9, 2022

Describe public keys

You can query the public key and creation date of an Amazon EC2 key pair.

April 28, 2022

Create key pairs

You can specify the key format (PEM or PPK) when creating a new key pair.

April 28, 2022

I4i instances

New storage optimized instances featuring 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

April 27, 2022

Mount Amazon FSx file systems at launch

You can mount a new or existing Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP or Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file system at launch using the new launch instance wizard.

April 12, 2022

New launch instance wizard

A new and improved launch experience in the Amazon EC2 console, providing a quicker and easier way to launch an EC2 instance.

April 5, 2022

Automatically deprecate public AMIs

By default, the deprecation date of all public AMIs is set to two years from the AMI creation date.

March 31, 2022

Instance metadata category: autoscaling/target-lifecycle-state

When using Auto Scaling groups, you can access an instance's target lifecycle state from the instance metadata.

March 24, 2022

X2idn and X2iedn instances

New memory optimized instances featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

March 10, 2022

AMI last launched time

The lastLaunchedTime indicates when your AMI was last used to launch an instance.

February 28, 2022

C6a instances

New compute optimized instances featuring 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (Milan).

February 14, 2022

Recycle Bin for AMIs

Recycle Bin enables you to restore accidentally deleted AMIs.

February 3, 2022

X2iezn instances

New memory optimized instances featuring Intel Xeon Platinum processors (Cascade Lake).

January 26, 2022

New Local Zones added

Add Local Zones in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Seattle.

January 11, 2022

Configure Windows AMIs for faster launching

Configure Windows AMIs to launch instances up to 65% faster, using pre-provisioned snapshots.

January 10, 2022

Instance tags in instance metadata

You can access an instance's tags from the instance metadata.

January 6, 2022

Capacity Reservations in cluster placement groups

You can create Capacity Reservations in cluster placement groups.

January 6, 2022

Recycle Bin for Amazon EBS snapshots

Recycle Bin for Amazon EBS snapshots is a snapshot recovery feature that enables you to restore accidentally deleted snapshots.

November 29, 2021

M6a instances

New general purpose instances powered by AMD 3rd Generation EPYC processors.

November 29, 2021

Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive

Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive is a new storage tier that you can use for low-cost, long-term storage of your rarely-accessed snapshots.

November 29, 2021

R6i instances

New memory optimized instances.

November 22, 2021

G5 instances

New accelerated computing instances featuring up to 8 NVIDIA A10G GPUs and second generation AMD EPY processors.

November 11, 2021

Spot Fleet launch-before-terminate

Spot Fleet can terminate the Spot Instances that receive a rebalance notification after new replacement Spot Instances are launched.

November 4, 2021

EC2 Fleet launch-before-terminate

EC2 Fleet can terminate the Spot Instances that receive a rebalance notification after new replacement Spot Instances are launched.

November 4, 2021

Share AMIs with organizations and OUs

You can now share AMIs with the following AWS resources: organizations and organizational units (OUs).

October 29, 2021

C6i instances

New compute optimized instances featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

October 28, 2021

Spot placement score

Get a recommendation for an AWS Region or Availability Zone based on your Spot capacity requirements.

October 27, 2021

Attribute-based instance type selection for Spot Fleet

Specify the attributes that an instance must have, and Amazon EC2 will identify all the instance types with those attributes.

October 27, 2021

Attribute-based instance type selection for EC2 Fleet

Specify the attributes that an instance must have, and Amazon EC2 will identify all the instance types with those attributes.

October 27, 2021

New Local Zones added

Add Local Zones in Las Vegas, New York City, and Portland.

October 26, 2021

On-Demand Capacity Reservation Fleet

You can use a Capacity Reservation Fleet to launch a group, or fleet, of Capacity Reservations.

October 5, 2021

Hibernation support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Focal

Hibernate your newly-launched instances that were launched from the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Focal AMI.

October 4, 2021

EC2 Fleet and targeted On-Demand Capacity Reservations

EC2 Fleet can launch On-Demand Instances into targeted Capacity Reservations.

September 22, 2021

T3 instances on Dedicated Hosts

Support for T3 instances on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host.

September 14, 2021

Hibernation support for RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS

Hibernate your newly-launched instances that were launched from RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS AMIs.

September 9, 2021

New Local Zones added

Add Local Zones in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City.

September 8, 2021

Amazon EC2 Global View

Amazon EC2 Global View enables you to view VPCs, subnets, instances, security groups, and volumes across multiple AWS Regions in a single console.

September 1, 2021

AMI deprecation support for Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager EBS-backed AMI policies can deprecate AMIs. The AWSDataLifecycleManagerServiceRoleForAMIManagement AWS managed policy has been updated to support this feature.

August 23, 2021

Hibernation support for C5d, M5d, and R5d

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on C5d, M5d, and R5d instance types.

August 19, 2021

Amazon EC2 key pairs

Amazon EC2 now supports ED25519 keys on Linux and Mac instances.

August 17, 2021

M6i instances

New general purpose instances featuring third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

August 16, 2021

CloudWatch metrics for Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

You can monitor your Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies using Amazon CloudWatch.

July 28, 2021

New Local Zone added

Add Local Zone in Denver.

July 27, 2021

CloudTrail data events for EBS direct APIs

The ListSnapshotBlocks, ListChangedBlocks, GetSnapshotBlock, and PutSnapshotBlock APIs can be logged data events in CloudTrail.

July 27, 2021

Prefixes for network interfaces

You can assign a private IPv4 or IPv6 CIDR range, either automatically or manually, to your network interfaces.

July 22, 2021

io2 Block Express volumes

io2 Block Express volumes are now generally available in all Regions and Availability Zones that support R5b instances.

July 19, 2021

Event windows

You can define custom, weekly-recurring event windows for scheduled events that reboot, stop, or terminate your Amazon EC2 instances.

July 15, 2021

Resource IDs and tagging support for security group rules

You can refer to security group rules by resource ID. You can also add tags to your security group rules.

July 7, 2021

New Local Zones added

Add Local Zones in Dallas and Philadelphia.

July 7, 2021

Deprecate an AMI

You can now specify when an AMI is deprecated.

June 11, 2021

Windows per-second billing

Amazon EC2 charges for Windows- and SQL Server-based usage by the second, with a one-minute minimum charge.

June 10, 2021

Capacity Reservations on AWS Outposts

You can now use Capacity Reservations on AWS Outposts.

May 24, 2021

Capacity Reservation sharing

You can now share Capacity Reservations created in Local Zones and Wavelength Zones.

May 24, 2021

High memory virtualized instances

Virtualized high memory instances purpose-built to run large in-memory databases. The new types are u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge, u-9tb1.112xlarge, and u-12tb1.112xlarge.

May 11, 2021

Root volume replacement

You can now use root volume replacement tasks to replace the root EBS volume for running instances.

April 22, 2021

Store and restore an AMI using S3

Store EBS-backed AMIs in S3 and restore them from S3 to enable cross-partition copying of AMIs.

April 6, 2021

EC2 Serial Console

Troubleshoot boot and network connectivity issues by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance.

March 30, 2021

Boot modes

Amazon EC2 now supports UEFI boot on selected AMD- and Intel-based EC2 instances.

March 22, 2021

Amazon EBS local snapshots on Outposts

You can now use Amazon Amazon EBS local snapshots on Outposts to store snapshots of volumes on an Outpost locally in Amazon S3 on the Outpost itself.

February 4, 2021

Create a reverse DNS record

You can now set up reverse DNS lookup for your Elastic IP addresses.

February 3, 2021

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

Use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate the process of sharing snapshots and copying them across AWS accounts.

December 17, 2020

G4ad instances

New instances powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and AMD 2nd Generation EPYC processors.

December 9, 2020

Tag AMIs and snapshots on AMI creation

When you create an AMI, you can tag the AMI and the snapshots with the same tags, or you can tag them with different tags.

December 4, 2020

io2 Block Express preview

You can opt in to the io2 Block Express volumes preview. io2 Block Express volumes provide sub-millisecond latency, and support higher IOPS, higher throughput, and larger capacity than io2 volumes.

December 1, 2020

gp3 volumes

A new Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD volume type. You can specify provisioned IOPS and throughput when you create or modify the volume.

December 1, 2020

D3, D3en, M5zn, and R5b instances

New instance types built on the Nitro System.

December 1, 2020

Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD volume sizes

Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes can range in size from 125 GiB to 16 TiB.

November 30, 2020

Use Amazon EventBridge to monitor Spot Fleet events

Create EventBridge rules that trigger programmatic actions in response to Spot Fleet state changes and errors.

November 20, 2020

Use Amazon EventBridge to monitor EC2 Fleet events

Create EventBridge rules that trigger programmatic actions in response to EC2 Fleet state changes and errors.

November 20, 2020

Delete instant fleets

Delete an EC2 Fleet of type instant and terminate all the instances in the fleet in a single API call.

November 18, 2020

Hibernation support for T3 and T3a

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on T3 and T3a instance types.

November 17, 2020

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

You can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS-backed AMIs.

November 9, 2020

Instance metadata category: events/recommendations/rebalance

The approximate time, in UTC, when the EC2 instance rebalance recommendation notification is emitted for the instance.

November 4, 2020

EC2 instance rebalance recommendation

A signal that notifies you when a Spot Instance is at elevated risk of interruption.

November 4, 2020

Capacity Reservations in Wavelength Zones

Capacity Reservations can now be created and used in Wavelength Zones.

November 4, 2020

Capacity Rebalancing

Configure Spot Fleet or EC2 Fleet to launch a replacement Spot Instance when Amazon EC2 emits a rebalance recommendation.

November 4, 2020

Hibernation support for I3, M5ad, and R5ad

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on I3, M5ad, and R5ad instance types.

October 21, 2020

Spot Instance vCPU limits

Spot Instance limits are now managed in terms of the number of vCPUs that your running Spot Instances are either using or will use pending the fulfillment of open requests.

October 1, 2020

Capacity Reservations in Local Zones

Capacity Reservations can now be created and used in Local Zones.

September 30, 2020

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies can be configured with up to four schedules.

September 17, 2020

Hibernation support for M5a and R5a

Hibernate your newly-launched instances running on M5a and R5a instance types.

August 28, 2020

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes for Amazon EBS

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes are designed to provide 99.999 percent volume durability with an AFR no higher than 0.001 percent.

August 24, 2020

Instance metadata provides instance location and placement information

New instance metadata fields under the placement category: Region, placement group name, partition number, host ID, and Availability Zone ID.

August 24, 2020

C5ad instances

New compute optimized instances featuring second-generation AMD EPYC processors.

August 13, 2020

Wavelength Zones

A Wavelength Zone is an isolated zone in the carrier location where the Wavelength infrastructure is deployed.

August 6, 2020

Capacity Reservation groups

You can use AWS Resource Groups to create logical collections of Capacity Reservations, and then target instance launches into those groups.

July 29, 2020

Fast snapshot restore

You can enable fast snapshot restore for snaphots that are shared with you.

July 21, 2020

EC2Launch v2

You can use EC2Launch v2 to perform tasks during instance startup, if an instance is stopped and later started, if an instance is restarted, and on demand. EC2Launch v2 supports all versions of Windows Server and replaces EC2Launch and EC2Config.

June 30, 2020

Bare metal instances for G4dn

New instances that provide your applications with direct access to the physical resources of the host server.

June 5, 2020

C5a instances

New compute optimized instances featuring second-generation AMD EPYC processors.

June 4, 2020

Bring your own IPv6 addresses

You can bring part or all of your IPv6 address range from your on-premises network to your AWS account.

May 21, 2020

Launch instances using a Systems Manager parameter

You can specify a AWS Systems Manager parameter instead of an AMI when you launch an instance.

May 5, 2020

Customize scheduled event notifications

You can customize scheduled event notifications to include tags in the email notification.

May 4, 2020

Windows Server on Dedicated Hosts

You can use Windows Server AMIs provided by Amazon to run the latest versions of Windows Server on Dedicated Hosts.

April 7, 2020

Stop and start a Spot Instance

Stop your Spot Instances backed by Amazon EBS and start them at will, instead of relying on the stop interruption behavior.

January 13, 2020

Resource tagging

You can tag egress-only internet gateways, local gateways, local gateway route tables, local gateway virtual interfaces, local gateway virtual interface groups, local gateway route table VPC associations, and local gateway route table virtual interface group associations.

January 10, 2020

Connect to your instance using Session Manager

You can start a Session Manager session with an instance from the Amazon EC2 console.

December 18, 2019

Dedicated Hosts and host resource groups

Dedicated Hosts can now be used with host resource groups.

December 2, 2019

Dedicated Host sharing

You can now share your Dedicated Hosts across AWS accounts.

December 2, 2019

Default credit specification at the account level

You can set the default credit specification per burstable performance instance family at the account level per AWS Region.

November 25, 2019

Instance type discovery

You can find an instance type that meets your needs.

November 22, 2019

Dedicated Hosts

You can now configure a Dedicated Host to support multiple instance types in an instance family.

November 21, 2019

Amazon EBS fast snapshot restores

You can enable fast snapshot restores on an EBS snapshot to ensure that EBS volumes created from the snapshot are fully-initialized at creation and instantly deliver all of their provisioned performance.

November 20, 2019

Instance Metadata Service Version 2

You can use Instance Metadata Service Version 2, which is a session-oriented method for requesting instance metadata.

November 19, 2019

Hibernation support for On-Demand Windows instances

You can hibernate On-Demand Windows instances.

October 14, 2019

Queued purchases of Reserved Instances

You can queue the purchase of a Reserved Instance up to three years in advance.

October 4, 2019

G4dn instances

New instances featuring NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

September 19, 2019

Diagnostic interrupt

You can send a diagnostic interrupt to an unreachable or unresponsive instance to trigger a blue screen/stop error.

August 14, 2019

Capacity optimized allocation strategy

Using EC2 Fleet or Spot Fleet, you can launch Spot Instances from Spot pools with optimal capacity for the number of instances that are launching.

August 12, 2019

On-Demand Capacity Reservation sharing

You can now share your Capacity Reservations across AWS accounts.

July 29, 2019

Resource tagging

Launch templates on creation.

July 24, 2019

Host recovery

Automatically restart your instances on a new host in the event of an unexpected hardware failure on a Dedicated Host.

June 5, 2019

Amazon EBS multi-volume snapshots

You can take exact point-in-time, data coordinated, and crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes attached to an EC2 instance.

May 29, 2019

Resource tagging

You can tag Dedicated Host Reservations.

May 27, 2019

Amazon EBS encryption by default

After you enable encryption by default in a Region, all new EBS volumes you create in the Region are encrypted using the default KMS key for EBS encryption.

May 23, 2019

VSS application-consistent snapshots

Take application-consistent snapshots of all Amazon EBS volumes attached to your Windows instances using AWS Systems Manager Run Command.

May 13, 2019

Resource tagging

You can tag VPC endpoints, endpoint services, and endpoint service configurations.

May 13, 2019

Windows to Linux Replatforming Assistant for Microsoft SQL Server Databases

Move existing Microsoft SQL Server workloads from a Windows to a Linux operating system.

May 8, 2019

I3en instances

New I3en instances can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.

May 8, 2019

Windows Automated Upgrade

Perform automated upgrades of EC2 Windows instances using AWS Systems Manager.

May 6, 2019

T3a instances

New instances featuring AMD EPYC processors.

April 24, 2019

M5ad and R5ad instances

New instances featuring AMD EPYC processors.

March 27, 2019

Resource tagging

You can assign custom tags to your Dedicated Host Reservations to categorize them in different ways.

March 14, 2019

Bare metal instances for M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and z1d

New instances that provide your applications with direct access to the physical resources of the host server.

February 13, 2019

History for previous years

The following table describes important additions to the Amazon EC2 documentation in 2018 and earlier years.

Feature API version Description Release date
Partition placement groups 2016-11-15 Partition placement groups spread instances across logical partitions, ensuring that instances in one partition do not share underlying hardware with instances in other partitions. For more information, see Partition placement groups. 20 December 2018
p3dn.24xlarge instances 2016-11-15 New p3dn.24xlarge instances provide 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. 7 December 2018
Instances featuring 100 Gbps of network bandwidth 2016-11-15 New C5n instances can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. 26 November 2018
Spot console recommends a fleet of instances 2016-11-15

The Spot console recommends a fleet of instances based on Spot best practice (instance diversification) to meet the minimum hardware specifications (vCPUs, memory, and storage) for your application need. For more information, see Create a Spot Fleet request.

20 November 2018
New EC2 Fleet request type: instant 2016-11-15 EC2 Fleet now supports a new request type, instant, that you can use to synchronously provision capacity across instance types and purchase models. The instant request returns the launched instances in the API response, and takes no further action, enabling you to control if and when instances are launched. For more information, see EC2 Fleet request types. 14 November 2018
Instances featuring AMD EPYC processors 2016-11-15 New general purpose (M5a) and memory optimized instances (R5a) offer lower-priced options for microservices, small to medium databases, virtual desktops, development and test environments, business applications, and more. 6 November 2018
Spot savings information 2016-11-15 You can view the savings made from using Spot Instances for a single Spot Fleet or for all Spot Instances. For more information, see Savings from purchasing Spot Instances. 5 November 2018
Console support for optimizing CPU options 2016-11-15 When you launch an instance, you can optimize the CPU options to suit specific workloads or business needs using the Amazon EC2 console. For more information, see Optimize CPU options. 31 October 2018
Console support for creating a launch template from an instance 2016-11-15 You can create a launch template using an instance as the basis for a new launch template using the Amazon EC2 console. For more information, see Create a launch template. 30 October 2018
On-Demand Capacity Reservations 2016-11-15 You can reserve capacity for your Amazon EC2 instances in a specific Availability Zone for any duration. This allows you to create and manage capacity reservations independently from the billing discounts offered by Reserved Instances (RI). For more information, see On-Demand Capacity Reservations. 25 October 2018
Bring Your Own IP Addresses (BYOIP) 2016-11-15 You can bring part or all of your public IPv4 address range from your on-premises network to your AWS account. After you bring the address range to AWS, it appears in your account as an address pool. You can create an Elastic IP address from your address pool and use it with your AWS resources. For more information, see Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) in Amazon EC2. 23 October 2018
g3s.xlarge instances 2016-11-15 Expands the range of the accelerated-computing G3 instance family with the introduction of g3s.xlarge instances. 11 October 2018
Dedicated Host tag on create and console support

2016-11-15

You can tag your Dedicated Hosts on creation, and you can manage your Dedicated Host tags using the Amazon EC2 console. For more information, see Allocate Dedicated Hosts.

08 October 2018
High memory instances 2016-11-15 These instances are purpose-built to run large in-memory databases. They offer bare metal performance with direct access to host hardware. For more information, see Memory optimized instances. 27 September 2018
f1.4xlarge instances 2016-11-15 Expands the range of the accelerated-computing F1 instance family with the introduction of f1.4xlarge instances. 25 September 2018
Console support for scheduled scaling for Spot Fleet 2016-11-15 Increase or decrease the current capacity of the fleet based on the date and time. For more information, see Scale Spot Fleet using scheduled scaling. 20 September 2018
T3 instances 2016-11-15 T3 instances are burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. For more information, see Burstable performance instances. 21 August 2018
Allocation strategies for EC2 Fleets

2016-11-15

You can specify whether On-Demand capacity is fulfilled by price (lowest price first) or priority (highest priority first). You can specify the number of Spot pools across which to allocate your target Spot capacity. For more information, see Allocation strategies for Spot Instances.

26 July 2018
Allocation strategies for Spot Fleets

2016-11-15

You can specify whether On-Demand capacity is fulfilled by price (lowest price first) or priority (highest priority first). You can specify the number of Spot pools across which to allocate your target Spot capacity. For more information, see Allocation strategies for Spot Instances.

26 July 2018
R5 and R5d instances

2016-11-15

R5 and R5d instances are ideally suited for high-performance databases, distributed in-memory caches, and in-memory analytics. R5d instances come with NVMe instance store volumes. For more information, see Memory optimized instances.

25 July 2018
z1d instances

2016-11-15

These instances are designed for applications that require high per-core performance with a large amount of memory, such as electronic design automation (EDA) and relational databases. These instances come with NVME instance store volumes. For more information, see Memory optimized instances.

25 July 2018
Automate snapshot lifecycle

2016-11-15

You can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to automate creation and deletion of snapshots for your EBS volumes. For more information, see Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

12 July 2018
Launch template CPU options

2016-11-15

When you create a launch template using the command line tools, you can optimize the CPU options to suit specific workloads or business needs. For more information, see Create a launch template.

11 July 2018
Tag Dedicated Hosts

2016-11-15

You can tag your Dedicated Hosts. For more information, see Tag Dedicated Hosts.

3 July 2018

i3.metal instances

2016-11-15

i3.metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the physical resources of the host server, such as processors and memory. For more information, see Storage optimized instances.

17 May 2018

Get latest console output

2016-11-15

You can retrieve the latest console output for some instance types when you use the get-console-output AWS CLI command.

9 May 2018

Optimize CPU options

2016-11-15

When you launch an instance, you can optimize the CPU options to suit specific workloads or business needs. For more information, see Optimize CPU options.

8 May 2018

EC2 Fleet

2016-11-15

You can use EC2 Fleet to launch a group of instances across different EC2 instance types and Availability Zones, and across On-Demand Instance, Reserved Instance, and Spot Instance purchasing models. For more information, see EC2 Fleet.

2 May 2018

On-Demand Instances in Spot Fleets

2016-11-15

You can include a request for On-Demand capacity in your Spot Fleet request to ensure that you always have instance capacity. For more information, see Spot Fleet.

2 May 2018

Tag EBS snapshots on creation

2016-11-15

You can apply tags to snapshots during creation.

2 April 2018

Change placement groups

2016-11-15

You can move an instance in or out of a placement group, or change its placement group. For more information, see Change the placement group for an instance.

1 March 2018

Longer resource IDs

2016-11-15

You can enable the longer ID format for more resource types. For more information, see Resource IDs.

9 February 2018

Network performance improvements

2016-11-15

Instances outside of a cluster placement group can now benefit from increased bandwidth when sending or receiving network traffic between other instances or Amazon S3.

24 January 2018

Tag Elastic IP addresses

2016-11-15

You can tag your Elastic IP addresses. For more information, see Tag an Elastic IP address.

21 December 2017
Amazon Time Sync Service

2016-11-15

You can use the Amazon Time Sync Service to keep accurate time on your instance. For more information, see Set the time for your Windows instance.

29 November 2017
T2 Unlimited

2016-11-15

T2 Unlimited instances can burst above the baseline for as long as required. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

29 November 2017
Launch templates

2016-11-15

A launch template can contain all or some of the parameters to launch an instance, so that you don't have to specify them every time you launch an instance. For more information, see Launch an instance from a launch template.

29 November 2017
Spread placement

2016-11-15

Spread placement groups are recommended for applications that have a small number of critical instances that should be kept separate from each other. For more information, see Spread placement groups.

29 November 2017
H1 instances

2016-11-15

H1 instances are designed for high-performance big data workloads. For more information, see Storage optimized instances.

28 November 2017
M5 instances

2016-11-15

M5 instances are general purpose compute instances. They provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources.

28 November 2017
Spot Instance hibernation

2016-11-15

The Spot service can hibernate Spot Instances in the event of an interruption. For more information, see Hibernate interrupted Spot Instances.

28 November 2017
Spot Fleet target tracking

2016-11-15

You can set up target tracking scaling policies for your Spot Fleet. For more information, see Scale Spot Fleet using a target tracking policy.

17 November 2017
Spot Fleet integrates with Elastic Load Balancing

2016-11-15

You can attach one or more load balancers to a Spot Fleet.

10 November 2017
X1e instances

2016-11-15

X1e instances are ideally suited for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications. For more information, see Memory optimized instances.

28 November 2017

C5 instances

2016-11-15

C5 instances are designed for compute-heavy applications. For more information, see Compute optimized instances.

6 November 2017

Merge and split Convertible Reserved Instances

2016-11-15

You can exchange (merge) two or more Convertible Reserved Instances for a new Convertible Reserved Instance. You can also use the modification process to split a Convertible Reserved Instance into smaller reservations. For more information, see Exchange Convertible Reserved Instances.

6 November 2017

P3 instances

2016-11-15

P3 instances are compute-optimized GPU instances. For more information, see Windows accelerated computing instances.

25 October 2017

Modify VPC tenancy

2016-11-15

You can change the instance tenancy attribute of a VPC from dedicated to default. For more information, see Change the tenancy of a VPC.

16 October 2017

Stop on interruption

2016-11-15

You can specify whether Amazon EC2 should stop or terminate Spot Instances when they are interrupted. For more information, see Interruption behavior.

18 September 2017

Tag NAT gateways

2016-11-15

You can tag your NAT gateway. For more information, see Tag your resources.

7 September 2017

Security group rule descriptions

2016-11-15

You can add descriptions to your security group rules. For more information, see Security group rules.

31 August 2017

Elastic Graphics

2016-11-15

Attach Elastic Graphics accelerators to your instances to accelerate the graphics performance of your applications. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Graphics.

29 August 2017

Recover Elastic IP addresses

2016-11-15

If you release an Elastic IP address for use in a VPC, you might be able to recover it. For more information, see Recover an Elastic IP address.

11 August 2017

Tag Spot Fleet instances

2016-11-15

You can configure your Spot Fleet to automatically tag the instances that it launches.

24 July 2017

G3 instances

2016-11-15

G3 instances provide a cost-effective, high-performance platform for graphics applications using DirectX or OpenGL. G3 instances also provide NVIDIA GRID Virtual Workstation features, supporting 4 monitors with resolutions up to 4096x2160. For more information, see Windows accelerated computing instances.

13 July 2017

Tag resources during creation

2016-11-15

You can apply tags to instances and volumes during creation. For more information, see Tag your resources. In addition, you can use tag-based resource-level permissions to control the tags that are applied. For more information see, Grant permission to tag resources during creation.

28 March 2017

I3 instances

2016-11-15

I3 instances are storage optimized instances. For more information, see Storage optimized instances.

23 February 2017

Perform modifications on attached EBS volumes

2016-11-15

With most EBS volumes attached to most EC2 instances, you can modify volume size, type, and IOPS without detaching the volume or stopping the instance.

13 February 2017

Attach an IAM role

2016-11-15

You can attach, detach, or replace an IAM role for an existing instance. For more information, see IAM roles for Amazon EC2.

9 February 2017

Dedicated Spot Instances

2016-11-15

You can run Spot Instances on single-tenant hardware in a virtual private cloud (VPC). For more information, see Specify a tenancy for your Spot Instances.

19 January 2017

IPv6 support

2016-11-15

You can associate an IPv6 CIDR with your VPC and subnets, and assign IPv6 addresses to instances in your VPC. For more information, see Amazon EC2 instance IP addressing.

1 December 2016

R4 instances

2016-09-15

R4 instances are memory optimized instances. R4 instances are well-suited for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads such as business intelligence (BI), data mining and analysis, in-memory databases, distributed web scale in-memory caching, and applications performance real-time processing of unstructured big data. For more information, see Memory optimized instances

30 November 2016

New t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge instance types

2016-09-15

T2 instances are designed to provide moderate base performance and the capability to burst to significantly higher performance as required by your workload. They are intended for applications that need responsiveness, high performance for limited periods of time, and a low cost. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

30 November 2016

P2 instances

2016-09-15

P2 instances use NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs and are designed for general purpose GPU computing using the CUDA or OpenCL programming models. For more information, see Windows accelerated computing instances.

29 September 2016
m4.16xlarge instances

2016-04-01

Expands the range of the general-purpose M4 family with the introduction of m4.16xlarge instances, with 64 vCPUs and 256 GiB of RAM.

6 September 2016

Automatic scaling for Spot Fleet

You can now set up scaling policies for your Spot Fleet. For more information, see Automatic scaling for Spot Fleet.

1 September 2016

Elastic Network Adapter (ENA)

2016-04-01

You can now use ENA for enhanced networking. For more information, see Enhanced networking support.

28 June 2016

Enhanced support for viewing and modifying longer IDs

2016-04-01

You can now view and modify longer ID settings for other IAM users, IAM roles, or the root user. For more information, see Resource IDs.

23 June 2016

Copy encrypted Amazon EBS snapshots between AWS accounts

2016-04-01

You can now copy encrypted EBS snapshots between AWS accounts.

21 June 2016

Capture a screenshot of an instance console

2015-10-01

You can now obtain additional information when debugging instances that are unreachable. For more information, see Capture a screenshot of an unreachable instance.

24 May 2016

X1 instances

2015-10-01

Memory-optimized instances designed for running in-memory databases, big data processing engines, and high performance computing (HPC) applications. For more information, see Memory optimized instances.

18 May 2016

Two new EBS volume types

2015-10-01

You can now create Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes.

19 April 2016

Added new NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut metrics for Amazon EC2

Added new NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut metrics for Amazon EC2. For more information, see Instance metrics.

23 March 2016

CloudWatch metrics for Spot Fleet

You can now get CloudWatch metrics for your Spot Fleet. For more information, see CloudWatch metrics for Spot Fleet.

21 March 2016

Scheduled Instances

2015-10-01

Scheduled Reserved Instances (Scheduled Instances) enable you to purchase capacity reservations that recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, with a specified start time and duration.

13 January 2016

Longer resource IDs

2015-10-01

We're gradually introducing longer length IDs for some Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS resource types. During the opt-in period, you can enable the longer ID format for supported resource types. For more information, see Resource IDs.

13 January 2016

ClassicLink DNS support

2015-10-01

You can enable ClassicLink DNS support for your VPC so that DNS hostnames that are addressed between linked EC2-Classic instances and instances in the VPC resolve to private IP addresses and not public IP addresses.

11 January 2016

New t2.nano instance type

2015-10-01

T2 instances are designed to provide moderate base performance and the capability to burst to significantly higher performance as required by your workload. They are intended for applications that need responsiveness, high performance for limited periods of time, and a low cost. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

15 December 2015

Dedicated hosts

2015-10-01

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated host is a physical server with instance capacity dedicated for your use. For more information, see Dedicated Hosts.

23 November 2015

Spot Instance duration

2015-10-01

You can now specify a duration for your Spot Instances. Spot blocks is not supported (January 2023).

6 October 2015

Spot Fleet modify request

2015-10-01

You can now modify the target capacity of your Spot Fleet request. For more information, see Modify a Spot Fleet request.

29 September 2015

Spot Fleet diversified allocation strategy

2015-04-15

You can now allocate Spot Instances in multiple Spot pools using a single Spot Fleet request. For more information, see Allocation strategies for Spot Instances.

15 September 2015

Spot Fleet instance weighting

2015-04-15

You can now define the capacity units that each instance type contributes to your application's performance, and adjust the amount you are willing to pay for Spot Instances for each Spot pool accordingly. For more information, see Spot Fleet instance weighting.

31 August 2015

New reboot alarm action and new IAM role for use with alarm actions

Added the reboot alarm action and new IAM role for use with alarm actions. For more information, see Create alarms that stop, terminate, reboot, or recover an instance.

23 July 2015

New t2.large instance type

T2 instances are designed to provide moderate base performance and the capability to burst to significantly higher performance as required by your workload. They are intended for applications that need responsiveness, high performance for limited periods of time, and a low cost. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

16 June 2015

M4 instances

General-purpose instances that provide a balance of compute, memory, and network resources. M4 instances are powered by a custom Intel 2.4 GHz Intel® Xeon® E5 2676v3 (Haswell) processor with AVX2.

11 June 2015

Spot Fleets

2015-04-15

You can manage a collection, or fleet, of Spot Instances instead of managing separate Spot Instance requests. For more information, see Spot Fleet.

18 May 2015

Migrate Elastic IP addresses to EC2-Classic

2015-04-15

You can migrate an Elastic IP address that you've allocated for use in EC2-Classic to be used in a VPC..

15 May 2015

Importing VMs with multiple disks as AMIs

2015-03-01

The VM Import process now supports importing VMs with multiple disks as AMIs. For more information, see Importing a VM as an Image Using VM Import/Export in the VM Import/Export User Guide .

23 April 2015

New g2.8xlarge instance type

The new g2.8xlarge instance is backed by four high-performance NVIDIA GPUs, making it well suited for GPU compute workloads including large scale rendering, transcoding, machine learning, and other server-side workloads that require massive parallel processing power.

7 April 2015

D2 instances

Dense-storage instances that are optimized for applications requiring sequential access to large amount of data on direct attached instance storage. D2 instances are designed to offer best price/performance in the dense-storage family. Powered by 2.4 GHz Intel® Xeon® E5 2676v3 (Haswell) processors, D2 instances improve on HS1 instances by providing additional compute power, more memory, and Enhanced Networking. In addition, D2 instances are available in four instance sizes with 6TB, 12TB, 24TB, and 48TB storage options.

For more information, see Storage optimized instances.

24 March 2015

Systems Manager

Systems Manager enables you to configure and manage your EC2 instances.

17 February 2015

Systems Manager for Microsoft SCVMM 1.5

You can now use Systems Manager for Microsoft SCVMM to launch an instance and to import a VM from SCVMM to Amazon EC2. For more information, see Create an EC2 Instance and Import your virtual machine.

21 January 2015

Automatic recovery for EC2 instances

You can create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors an Amazon EC2 instance and automatically recovers the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware failure or a problem that requires AWS involvement to repair. A recovered instance is identical to the original instance, including the instance ID, IP addresses, and all instance metadata.

For more information, see Recover your instance.

12 January 2015

C4 instances

Next-generation compute-optimized instances that provide very high CPU performance at an economical price. C4 instances are based on custom 2.9 GHz Intel® Xeon® E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processors. With additional Turbo boost, the processor clock speed in C4 instances can reach as high as 3.5Ghz with 1 or 2 core turbo. Expanding on the capabilities of C3 compute-optimized instances, C4 instances offer customers the highest processor performance among EC2 instances. These instances are ideally suited for high-traffic web applications, ad serving, batch processing, video encoding, distributed analytics, high-energy physics, genome analysis, and computational fluid dynamics.

For more information, see Compute optimized instances.

11 January 2015

ClassicLink

2014-10-01

ClassicLink enables you to link your EC2-Classic instance to a VPC in your account. You can associate VPC security groups with the EC2-Classic instance, enabling communication between your EC2-Classic instance and instances in your VPC using private IP addresses.

7 January 2015

Spot Instance termination notices

The best way to protect against Spot Instance interruption is to architect your application to be fault tolerant. In addition, you can take advantage of Spot Instance termination notices, which provide a two-minute warning before Amazon EC2 must terminate your Spot Instance.

For more information, see Spot Instance interruption notices.

5 January 2015

Systems Manager for Microsoft SCVMM

Systems Manager for Microsoft SCVMM provides a simple, easy-to-use interface for managing AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, from Microsoft SCVMM. For more information, see AWS Systems Manager for Microsoft System Center VMM.

29 October 2014

DescribeVolumes pagination support

2014-09-01

The DescribeVolumes API call now supports the pagination of results with the MaxResults and NextToken parameters. For more information, see DescribeVolumes in the Amazon EC2 API Reference.

23 October 2014

Added support for Amazon CloudWatch Logs

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor, store, and access your system, application, and custom log files from your instances or other sources. You can then retrieve the associated log data from CloudWatch Logs using the Amazon CloudWatch console, the CloudWatch Logs commands in the AWS CLI, or the CloudWatch Logs SDK.

10 July 2014

T2 instances

2014-06-15

T2 instances are designed to provide moderate base performance and the capability to burst to significantly higher performance as required by your workload. They are intended for applications that need responsiveness, high performance for limited periods of time, and a low cost. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

30 June 2014

New EC2 Service Limits page

Use the EC2 Service Limits page in the Amazon EC2 console to view the current limits for resources provided by Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC, on a per-region basis.

19 June 2014

Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD Volumes

2014-05-01

General Purpose SSD volumes offer cost-effective storage that is ideal for a broad range of workloads. These volumes deliver single-digit millisecond latencies, the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time, and a base performance of 3 IOPS/GiB. General Purpose SSD volumes can range in size from 1 GiB to 1 TiB.

16 June 2014

Windows Server 2012 R2

AMIs for Windows Server 2012 R2 use the new AWS PV drivers. For more information, see AWS PV drivers.

3 June 2014

AWS Management Pack

AWS Management Pack now supports for System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2.

22 May 2014

Amazon EBS encryption

2014-05-01

Amazon EBS encryption offers seamless encryption of EBS data volumes and snapshots, eliminating the need to build and maintain a secure key management infrastructure. EBS encryption enables data at rest security by encrypting your data using AWS managed keys. The encryption occurs on the servers that host EC2 instances, providing encryption of data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS storage.

21 May 2014

R3 instances

2014-02-01

Memory-optimized instances with the best price point per GiB of RAM and high performance. These instances are ideally suited for relational and NoSQL databases, in-memory analytics solutions, scientific computing, and other memory-intensive applications that can benefit from the high memory per vCPU, high compute performance, and enhanced networking capabilities of R3 instances.

For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

9 April 2014

Amazon EC2 Usage Reports

Amazon EC2 Usage Reports is a set of reports that shows cost and usage data of your usage of EC2. For more information, see Amazon EC2 usage reports.

28 January 2014

Additional M3 instances

2013-10-15

The M3 instance sizes m3.medium and m3.large are now supported. For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

20 January 2014

I2 instances

2013-10-15

These instances provide very high IOPS. I2 instances also support enhanced networking that delivers improve inter-instance latencies, lower network jitter, and significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance. For more information, see Storage optimized instances.

19 December 2013

Updated M3 instances

2013-10-15

The M3 instance sizes, m3.xlarge and m3.2xlarge now support instance store with SSD volumes.

19 December 2013

Resource-level permissions for RunInstances

2013-10-15

You can now create policies in AWS Identity and Access Management to control resource-level permissions for the Amazon EC2 RunInstances API action. For more information and example policies, see Identity and access management for Amazon EC2.

20 November 2013

C3 instances

2013-10-15

Compute-optimized instances that provide very high CPU performance at an economical price. C3 instances also support enhanced networking that delivers improved inter-instance latencies, lower network jitter, and significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance. These instances are ideally suited for high-traffic web applications, ad serving, batch processing, video encoding, distributed analytics, high-energy physics, genome analysis, and computational fluid dynamics.

For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

14 November 2013

Launching an instance from the AWS Marketplace

You can now launch an instance from the AWS Marketplace using the Amazon EC2 launch wizard. For more information, see Launch an AWS Marketplace instance.

11 November 2013

G2 instances

2013-10-01

These instances are ideally suited for video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics-intensive applications, and other server-side workloads requiring massive parallel processing power. For more information, see Windows accelerated computing instances.

4 November 2013

New launch wizard

There is a new and redesigned EC2 launch wizard. For more information, see Launch an instance using the old launch instance wizard.

10 October 2013

Modifying Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

2013-08-15

You can now modify Reserved Instances in a Region.

11 September 2013

Assigning a public IP address

2013-07-15

You can now assign a public IP address when you launch an instance in a VPC. For more information, see Assign a public IPv4 address during instance launch.

20 August 2013

Granting resource-level permissions

2013-06-15

Amazon EC2 supports new Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and condition keys. For more information, see IAM policies for Amazon EC2.

8 July 2013

Incremental Snapshot Copies

2013-02-01

You can now perform incremental snapshot copies.

11 June 2013

AWS Management Pack

The AWS Management Pack links Amazon EC2 instances and the Windows or Linux operating systems running inside them. The AWS Management Pack is an extension to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

8 May 2013

New Tags page

There is a new Tags page in the Amazon EC2 console. For more information, see Tag your Amazon EC2 resources.

04 April 2013

Additional EBS-optimized instance types

2013-02-01

The following instance types can now be launched as EBS-optimized instances: c1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m3.xlarge, and m3.2xlarge.

19 March 2013

PV Drivers

To learn how to upgrade the paravirtualized (PV) drivers on your Windows AMI, see Upgrade PV drivers on Windows instances.

March 2013

Copy an AMI from one Region to another

2013-02-01

You can copy an AMI from one Region to another, enabling you to launch consistent instances in more than one AWS Region quickly and easily.

For more information, see Copy an AMI.

11 March 2013

Launch instances into a default VPC

2013-02-01

Your AWS account is capable of launching instances into either EC2-Classic or a VPC, or only into a VPC, on a region-by-region basis. If you can launch instances only into a VPC, we create a default VPC for you. When you launch an instance, we launch it into your default VPC, unless you create a nondefault VPC and specify it when you launch the instance.

11 March 2013

High-memory cluster (cr1.8xlarge) instance type

2012-12-01

Have large amounts of memory coupled with high CPU and network performance. These instances are well suited for in-memory analytics, graph analysis, and scientific computing applications.

21 January 2013

High storage (hs1.8xlarge) instance type

2012-12-01

High storage instances provide very high storage density and high sequential read and write performance per instance. They are well-suited for data warehousing, Hadoop/MapReduce, and parallel file systems.

20 December 2012

EBS snapshot copy

2012-12-01

You can use snapshot copies to create backups of data, to create new Amazon EBS volumes, or to create Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

17 December 2012

Updated EBS metrics and status checks for Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes

2012-10-01

Updated the EBS metrics to include two new metrics for Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes. Also added new status checks for Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes.

20 November 2012

Support for Windows Server 2012

Amazon EC2 now provides you with several pre-configured Windows Server 2012 AMIs. These AMIs are immediately available for use in every region and for every 64-bit instance type. The AMIs support the following languages:

  • English

  • Chinese Simplified

  • Chinese Traditional

  • Chinese Traditional Hong Kong

  • Japanese

  • Korean

  • Portuguese

  • Portuguese Brazil

  • Czech

  • Dutch

  • French

  • German

  • Hungarian

  • Italian

  • Polish

  • Russian

  • Spanish

  • Swedish

  • Turkish

19 November 2012
M3 instances 2012-10-01 There are new M3 extra-large and M3 double-extra-large instance types. For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

31 October 2012

Spot Instance request status

2012-10-01

Spot Instance request status makes it easy to determine the state of your Spot requests.

14 October 2012
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace 2012-08-15 The Reserved Instance Marketplace matches sellers who have Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances that they no longer need with buyers who are looking to purchase additional capacity. Reserved Instances bought and sold through the Reserved Instance Marketplace work like any other Reserved Instances, except that they can have less than a full standard term remaining and can be sold at different prices.

11 September 2012

Provisioned IOPS SSD for Amazon EBS

2012-07-20

Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times.

31 July 2012

High I/O instances for Amazon EC2

2012-06-15

High I/O instances provides very high, low latency, disk I/O performance using SSD-based local instance storage.

18 July 2012

IAM roles on Amazon EC2 instances

2012-06-01

IAM roles for Amazon EC2 provide:

  • AWS access keys for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances.

  • Automatic rotation of the AWS access keys on the Amazon EC2 instance.

  • Granular permissions for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances that make requests to your AWS services.

11 June 2012

Spot Instance features that make it easier to get started and handle the potential of interruption.

You can now manage your Spot Instances as follows:

  • Specify the amount you are willing to pay for Spot Instances using Auto Scaling launch configurations, and set up a schedule for specifying the amount you are willing to pay for Spot Instances. For more information, see Launching Spot Instances in Your Auto Scaling Group in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide.

  • Get notifications when instances are launched or terminated.

  • Use AWS CloudFormation templates to launch Spot Instances in a stack with AWS resources.

7 June 2012

EC2 instance export and timestamps for status checks for Amazon EC2

2012-05-01

Added support for exporting Windows Server instances that you originally imported into EC2.

Added support for timestamps on instance status and system status to indicate the date and time that a status check failed.

25 May 2012

EC2 instance export, and timestamps in instance and system status checks for Amazon VPC

2012-05-01

Added support for EC2 instance export to Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere.

Added support for timestamps in instance and system status checks.

25 May 2012

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large instances

2012-04-01

Added support for cc2.8xlarge instances in a VPC.

26 April 2012

AWS Marketplace AMIs

2012-04-01

Added support for AWS Marketplace AMIs.

19 April 2012

Medium instances, support for 64-bit on all AMIs

2011-12-15

Added support for a new instance type and 64-bit information.

7 March 2012

Reserved Instance pricing tiers

2011-12-15

Added a new section discussing how to take advantage of the discount pricing that is built into the Reserved Instance pricing tiers.

5 March 2012

Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) for EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

2011-12-01

Added new section about elastic network interfaces (ENIs) for EC2 instances in a VPC. For more information, see Elastic network interfaces.

21 December 2011

New offering types for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

2011-11-01

You can choose from a variety of Reserved Instance offerings that address your projected use of the instance.

01 December 2011

Amazon EC2 instance status

2011-11-01

You can view additional details about the status of your instances, including scheduled events planned by AWS that might have an impact on your instances. These operational activities include instance reboots required to apply software updates or security patches, or instance retirements required where there are hardware issues. For more information, see Monitor the status of your instances.

16 November 2011

Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute Instance Type

Added support for Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xlarge) to Amazon EC2.

14 November 2011

Spot Instances in Amazon VPC

2011-07-15

Added information about the support for Spot Instances in Amazon VPC. With this update, users can launch Spot Instances a virtual private cloud (VPC). By launching Spot Instances in a VPC, users of Spot Instances can enjoy the benefits of Amazon VPC.

11 October 2011

Simplified VM import process for users of the CLI tools

2011-07-15

The VM Import process is simplified with the enhanced functionality of ImportInstance and ImportVolume, which now will perform the upload of the images into Amazon EC2 after creating the import task. In addition, with the introduction of ResumeImport, users can restart an incomplete upload at the point the task stopped.

15 September 2011

Support for importing in VHD file format

VM Import can now import virtual machine image files in VHD format. The VHD file format is compatible with the Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platforms. With this release, VM Import now supports RAW, VHD and VMDK (VMware ESX-compatible) image formats. For more information, see the VM Import/Export User Guide.

24 August 2011

Support for Windows Server 2003 R2

VM Import now supports Windows Server 2003 (R2). With this release, VM Import supports all versions of Windows Server supported by Amazon EC2.

24 August 2011

Update to the Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter

Added information about the 1.1 version of the Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter virtual appliance (Connector). This update includes proxy support for Internet access, better error handling, improved task progress bar accuracy, and several bug fixes.

27 June 2011

Spot Instances Availability Zone pricing changes

2011-05-15

Added information about the Spot Instances Availability Zone pricing feature. In this release, we've added new Availability Zone pricing options as part of the information returned when you query for Spot Instance requests and Spot price history. These additions make it easier to determine the price required to launch a Spot Instance into a particular Availability Zone.

26 May 2011

AWS Identity and Access Management

Added information about AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which enables users to specify which Amazon EC2 actions a user can use with Amazon EC2 resources in general. For more information, see Identity and access management for Amazon EC2.

26 April 2011

Dedicated instances

Launched within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Dedicated Instances are instances that are physically isolated at the host hardware level. Dedicated Instances let you take advantage of Amazon VPC and the AWS cloud, with benefits including on-demand elastic provisioning and pay only for what you use, while isolating your Amazon EC2 compute instances at the hardware level. For more information, see Dedicated Instances.

27 March 2011

Reserved Instances updates to the AWS Management Console

Updates to the AWS Management Console make it easier for users to view their Reserved Instances and purchase additional Reserved Instances, including Dedicated Reserved Instances.

27 March 2011

Support for Windows Server 2008 R2

Amazon EC2 now provides you with several pre-configured Windows Server 2008 R2 AMIs. These AMIs are immediately available for use in every region and in most 64-bit instance types, excluding t1.micro and HPC families. The AMIs will support multiple languages.

15 March 2011

Metadata information

2011-01-01

Added information about metadata to reflect changes in the 2011-01-01 release. For more information, see Instance metadata and user data and Instance metadata categories.

11 March 2011

Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter

Added information about the Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter virtual appliance (Connector). The Connector is a plug-in for VMware vCenter that integrates with VMware vSphere Client and provides a graphical user interface that you can use to import your VMware virtual machines to Amazon EC2.

3 March 2011

Force volume detachment

You can now use the AWS Management Console to force the detachment of an Amazon EBS volume from an instance.

23 February 2011

Instance termination protection

You can now use the AWS Management Console to prevent an instance from being terminated. For more information, see Enable termination protection.

23 February 2011

VM Import

2010-11-15

Added information about VM Import, which allows you to import a virtual machine or volume into Amazon EC2. For more information, see the VM Import/Export User Guide.

15 December 2010

Basic monitoring for instances

2010-08-31

Added information about basic monitoring for EC2 instances.

12 December 2010

Filters and Tags

2010-08-31

Added information about listing, filtering, and tagging resources. For more information, see List and filter your resources and Tag your Amazon EC2 resources.

19 September 2010

Idempotent Instance Launch

2010-08-31

Added information about ensuring idempotency when running instances.

19 September 2010

Micro instances

2010-06-15

Amazon EC2 offers the t1.micro instance type for certain types of applications. For more information, see Burstable performance instances.

8 September 2010

AWS Identity and Access Management for Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 now integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). For more information, see Identity and access management for Amazon EC2.

2 September 2010

Cluster instances

2010-06-15

Amazon EC2 offers cluster compute instances for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

12 July 2010

Amazon VPC IP Address Designation

2010-06-15

Amazon VPC users can now specify the IP address to assign an instance launched in a VPC.

12 July 2010

Amazon CloudWatch monitoring for Amazon EBS Volumes

Amazon CloudWatch monitoring is now automatically available for Amazon EBS volumes.

14 June 2010

High-memory extra large instances

2009-11-30

Amazon EC2 now supports a High-Memory Extra Large (m2.xlarge) instance type. For detailed instance type specifications, see the Amazon EC2 Instance Types Guide. For pricing information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

22 February 2010

Reserved Instances with Windows

Amazon EC2 now supports Reserved Instances with Windows.

22 February 2010