What's up with the new AWS Console home page?

What's going on with AWS this week? First up, AWS shows off a major overhaul to the Management Console homepage. Plus, launch speeds for Microsoft Windows Server instances on EC2 just got optimized. And AWS has released a new EC2 instance type.

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Hear ye! Hear ye! The AWS Management Console home page has been updated!

AWS says the goal of the redesign was to bring you more relevant content right out the gate each day and that updates were made with user feedback in mind. Those updates include some cool new features. And though the functionally is similar to the previous iteration of the console, visually it's pretty different.

Here's a bit of a preview of what to expect. (Spoiler: it's widgets!)

• There are now eight default widgets right when you log in, including three for anyone new to the cloud (Welcome to AWS, Build a Solution, and Explore AWS).

• The other 5 widgets include: Recently Visited, AWS Health, Cost and Usage, Trusted Advisor, and Favorites.

• These widgets are customizable as well.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the lack of collapsibility of the widgets. But I love the added color and how you can now see all and know all right when you log in. I can't wait to see how they grow this new view over time.

You can check out the new console for yourself are opting in. Or visit the AWS blog for more information about the new functionality.

If you're like me, you would give anything for faster speeds for anything really. Well, faster launch speeds for Microsoft Windows Server instances on EC2 are now a reality!

You can launch Windows Server instances up to 65% faster on EC2.

The beauty of this is that once the AMI is flagged for faster launch times, it will automatically launch any instances from that AMI faster.

There are no service charges for flagging AMIs for faster launching, and customers only pay for the underlying resources used to prepare the instances for launching faster.

This is big news for anyone who need a faster system recovery or run heavy spike workloads. Faster launch times means smoother recoveries and workloads. Configuring the faster launching AMIs is a breeze. Use the console, API, SDKs, or AWS CLI to start or stop faster launching.

The full details are here.

Are you ready for a new EC2 instance type? Well, ready or not, here it comes!

AWS has announced the new compute-optimized Hpc6a instance.

Hp-what-y? HPC as in high performance computing. This would include computational fluid dynamics, reservoir modeling, weather simulations, or finite element analysis.

AWS says the Hpc6a instances offer up 65% better price performance over comparable compute optimized instances. These new instances are powered by 96 cores of 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and 384 GB RAM. They're built on the AWS Nitro System and offer 100 Gbps Elastic Fabric Adapter networking enabled by default for high throughput inter-node communications to help run your workloads at scale.

These instances are currently available in US-East-2 (Ohio) and GovCloud (US West) regions.

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