Hello Cloud Gurus, and welcome to AWS This Week, where we bring you a few minutes of the most exciting news about AWS over the past week. This week, we'll be covering Amazon Neptune now has global databases. AWS Lambda now has tiered pricing. EC2-Classic has just a week until retirement and the AWS all builders grant for re:Invent. I'm Stephen Sennett, bringing you another episode of AWS This Week. Amazon Neptune has released a new update with the release of Neptune Global Database. Amazon's managed graph database service already supported read replicas across zones in the same region. While this is great for localized outages,

cross-region resilience is an increasingly visible topic for cloud architects. Using this feature, you can create secondary clusters in additional regions. Now this isn't entirely automatic and you still need to handle the process of detaching and promoting your database cluster. Another critical point is that your Neptune Cluster has a DNS name, which is attached as a regional endpoint. While read operations querying unaffected clusters should continue to work, you will need to have a process to reconfigure your application to use the new endpoint for any new mutation queries.

Amazon has written a solid guide for using this feature, which we will include in the description below. If you're going to utilize this feature, make sure to take some time to test it with your deployment and test procedures in case you need to use it in production. AWS Lambda now uses a tiered pricing model, offering discounted pricing of up to 20%, based on your compute duration. For some context, AWS Lambda is priced based on how long the Lambda function runs and how many gigabytes of memory it's been allocated. These are multiplied together into a "gigabyte-second".

This means if your Lambda function ran for one second and used one gigabyte of memory, it would cost the same as a Lambda function that runs for two seconds and used half a gigabyte of memory. Now, this makes the most difference to organizations using Lambda to do a lot of heavy lifting. To reach the second tier of Lambda pricing, you need to be spending about $100,000 a month in your compute time. So if that line item in your bill already shows a pretty extraordinary number, this is excellent news for you. For most of us with more incidental uses, the free tier still offers a whopping 400,000 gigabytes seconds for free.

You can also continue reducing your costs using Compute Savings Plans, and by running your functions on AWS's arm-based Graviton2 processors. There's nothing needed to set this up and it's already in immediate effect for all regions, except those in China. This week, we say farewell to EC2-Classic, which after 16 years, is being retired on Monday the 15th of August. Unless you've been using AWS since before 2013, you won't need to worry about this and may not have even known the EC2-Classic existed. Before we had VPC's letting us design and structure our cloud networks however we wanted, we just had one single flat network with only public IPs; EC2-Classic. This came with many limitations,

as you couldn't structure your network to best suit your needs. Since this affects everything using the EC2-Classic network, it's also worth knowing that this impacts other services which have used EC2-Classic networking, including services like RDS, Elasticache, Redshift, Elastic Beanstalk, and the like. AWS does have their EC2-Classic Resource Finder script available, which can help you find any stragglers, and tools like the AWS Application Migration Service, or Systems Manager migration workflow can make this process a little bit easier. However, it still takes a bit more than clicking a button. And with only a few days left, you'll need to get onto it quick.

The All Builders Welcome Grant is an AWS program to support underrepresented technologists to attend re:Invent by paying for their conference, registration, airfare and accommodation. People from all walks of life are part of the tech sector, but not everyone gets the same opportunities to succeed. This grant program is about removing the financial barriers to attending one of the best learning and networking opportunities in the cloud industry. If you've faced barriers or disadvantages in your career due to discrimination and are just getting started in your tech career, this may be a fantastic opportunity for you. Applications are open for a few more days until midnight on Monday the 15th of August, US Pacific Time, with more information in the links in the description.

We'd really love to see you at re:Invent, so drop by and see us if you get a chance to attend. That's it for the news this week, we hope you've enjoyed it. If you like our content, check out our free plan on our website with rotating courses every month. Until next time, go forth and learn all the things, and as always keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus!