Your hosts meet online to work on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re donating profits of our sticker sales to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Research Response Program through July 1, 2020.

The Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights feature, which gives users an overview of their operational problems, is now generally available. CloudWatch Contributor Insights is also generally available for DynamoDB, though it is 50 percent more expensive per million log events than Insights not for DynamoDB. You can build some neat automation around this.

Back in Episode 51, we covered the new instances with ra3.16xlarge nodes, and now Amazon is adding instances with ra3.4xlarge nodes, which lack the excess power of ra3.16xlarge. At a quarter of the price of the larger larges, that’s some considerable savings.

Amazon Redshift now features elastic resize, allowing users to change node types within minutes. This will be helpful if you want to make the move to those cheaper instances.

If you’re looking for something fun while sheltering in place, you may be pleased to hear that AWS DeepComposer is now generally available (and with new features!) You can buy an Amazon keyboard for $99 or a generic for $50.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports In-Region Read Replicas on SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the Multi-AZ config with Always On Availability. Careful though, you can really rack up a bill this way if you’re careless.

Amazon announced that Amazon Elastic File System has quintupled its speed for General Purpose mode file systems to 35,000 read operations per second. That leads into our next headline: Amazon Elastic