Amazon Prime Day 2026 was exclusively for Prime members and ran June 23–26, 2026 with millions of deals across more than 35 categories.

As part of our annual tradition of sharing how AWS powered Prime Day (2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), I want to share the services and chart-topping metrics from AWS that made your amazing shopping experience possible.

Prime Day 2026 – all the numbers
As always, Prime Day was powered by AWS. Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Graviton – During Amazon Prime Day 2026, AWS Graviton powered up to 49% of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon EBS, our high-performance block storage service, peaked at over 24.8 trillion I/O operations, moving over an exabyte of data daily.

AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Fargate – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, representing a 47.7 percent increase from the previous year’s Prime Day average.

Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront delivered over 2.1 trillion HTTP requests during the global week of Prime Day 2026, a 5 percent increase in total requests compared to Prime Day 2025.

Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database, powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day 2026, between June 23 and June 26, 2026, DynamoDB processed over 59 trillion requests. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 192 million requests per second.

Amazon Aurora – On Prime Day, Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for high performance and availability at global scale for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DSQL, processed hundreds of billions of transactions, stored 5,491 terabytes of data, and transferred 1,194 terabytes of data.

Amazon ElastiCache – During Prime Day, Amazon ElastiCache peaked at serving over 2.3 quadrillion daily requests and 2.1 trillion requests in a minute.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a fully managed serverless data streaming service, processed a peak of 988 million records per second during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) – Amazon SNS, a fully managed pub/sub messaging service for application-to-application and application-to-person communication, delivered 5 trillion messages in a single day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – Amazon SQS, a fully managed message queuing service for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, received a peak of 213 million messages per second during Prime Day 2026

AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail processes billions of API activity events per day for governance, compliance, and operational auditing. During Prime Day 2026, that volume surged to 3.6 trillion events in just four days, a 44% increase over Prime Day 2025.

AWS CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch processed over 2.15 quadrillion metric observations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon GuardDuty – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon GuardDuty monitored an average of 14.08 trillion log events per hour, a 59% increase from last year’s Prime Day.

AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) – We ran over 44,000 AWS FIS experiments – more than six times what we conducted in 2025 – to help ensure Amazon.com remains highly available on Prime Day.

Prepare to scale
If you’re preparing for similar business-critical events, product launches, and migrations, I recommend that you take advantage of AWS Countdown Premium. From retail peak seasons to major sporting events, elections, and healthcare enrollment periods, we help you deliver flawless experiences when it matters most. Our experts help you manage your infrastructure to handle massive traffic spikes while maintaining security and performance. We work alongside your team to scale infrastructure, optimize costs during demand surges, strengthen security measures, and monitor real-time demands. To learn more, visit AWS Countdown Premium for business critical events.

I look forward to seeing what other records will be broken next year!

— Channy

The post All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar. This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon Quick, and a reminder that the developers seeing the biggest gains from AI agents aren’t just using better tools — they’re working differently.

Let’s dive in.

Headlines
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest and most capable model to date, and you can now run it on Amazon Bedrock. It brings deeper reasoning and judgment, professional-quality writing and design, and advanced computer and browser use to demanding business workflows. The model supports a context window of up to 1 million input tokens, so you can send it large codebases, long contracts, or extensive document collections and ask it to reconcile competing inputs.

You can call GPT-6 Astra through supported Amazon Bedrock APIs, or configure ChatGPT Work and Codex to use the model on Amazon Bedrock. Alongside the launch, OpenAI is introducing new enterprise plugins for ChatGPT Work that extend Astra’s browser-use capabilities across common business applications. Established AWS controls help you secure workloads, govern access, and audit model invocation activity, and your inference data isn’t used for model training. Read more

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon Quick desktop app is now generally available on macOS and Windows – The Amazon Quick desktop app brings Amazon Quick to your computer, where it can work with local files and stay connected to your calendar, email, and business apps in the background. Conversations, context, and agents stay synchronized across desktop and mobile, so work you start on one surface carries over to the other. With this release, Quick agents also keep running after you close your computer, which means you can start a long-running task before you leave the office, add input from the mobile app on the way home, and review the result when you get there. Existing Quick users can download the desktop app, and the mobile app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Read more
• AWS Lambda now supports a 90-minute function timeout on Lambda Managed Instances – You can now configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a 6x increase from the previous 15-minute limit. That opens the door to data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch jobs that need longer continuous execution, without splitting the work across multiple functions. Synchronous invocations keep the existing 15-minute maximum. The longer timeout also applies to steps inside Lambda durable functions, which can still run for up to a year when invoked asynchronously. Read more
• Amazon EBS Volume Clones now copies volumes across accounts – Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones can now copy a volume into another AWS account and re-encrypt it with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. If you keep production and development in separate accounts, you can share a volume with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and let the target account create a fresh copy in the same Availability Zone, for example, cloning a production database volume into an isolated development account. Cross-account copy works for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. Read more
• Second-generation single-rack AWS Outposts is now generally available – The new single-rack AWS Outposts is a self-contained 42U rack that puts compute, storage, and networking into one compact unit for locations that need low latency, local data processing, or data residency, and don’t have room for a larger footprint. A single rack delivers up to 2,688 vCPU and 100 TB of Amazon EBS storage, and supports the latest x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including general purpose (M7i, M8i), compute-optimized (C7i, C8i), memory-optimized (R7i, R8i), and Outposts accelerated networking instances. You get the same APIs, console, automation, governance, and security controls as multi-rack Outposts and AWS Regions. Read more
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available on v0 by Vercel – You can now describe a search or AI application in natural language inside v0 by Vercel and get a full-stack app backed by Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. v0 provisions a collection, indexes your data, and uses the OpenSearch Serverless endpoint for full-text search and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, without leaving the v0 interface. OpenSearch Serverless scales capacity up and down for you, so you can focus on the application instead of cluster management. You can provision under a new AWS account or link an existing one. Read more
• AWS Transform for .NET modernization is now generally available via CLI – You can trigger an AWS-managed .NET modernization in AWS Transform custom with a single CLI command, then run it interactively or script it into an existing pipeline. The CLI sits alongside the existing AWS Transform for .NET experiences in the web application, Visual Studio IDE, Kiro Power, and MCP agents. Use it to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, optimize performance, and analyze codebases with transformations you can run as-is or customize. The .NET modernization transformation includes 50,000 free agent minutes per month. Read more

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Clare Liguori on frontier engineering – If you already use an AI coding assistant but don’t feel like you’re shipping much faster, start here. Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, published a practitioner’s manifesto on frontier engineering: ten principles, drawn from teams across Amazon, for changing how you build software with AI agents. The argument is direct. Software development has split in two, people who changed how they work with agents, and people who only changed their coding tools. Frontier engineering is not vibe coding. You spend the first weeks writing steering files, refactoring the codebase, and learning to decompose work for agents. Those weeks feel slower. The weeks after feel dramatically faster, because you’re no longer building the software directly — you’re building the agent setup that builds the software.
• A free year of Kiro for students around the world – The Kiro Students program is expanding from 11 universities to 121 new schools across 16 countries. Eligible students get one year of Kiro with 1,000 credits per month and full access to paid features such as premium models and Kiro Web, no credit card and no trial timer. You can work in the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web in a browser, or Kiro Crew. If you’re a student, sign up with your university email.
• The state of AI for security: measuring what matters for trust – Security teams are using AI for triage, threat modeling, incident response, and code review, but a tool that flags everything doesn’t save time. In The state of AI for security, Anshumali Shrivastava and Neha Rungta introduce Deception Benchmark, a new evaluation that tests whether a model can tell a real vulnerability from code that looks risky but is actually safe. The benchmark includes 14,822 samples across 16 languages and more than 70 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories. Under standard prompting, precision landed in the mid-50s, about as likely to be inaccurate as accurate, and none of the 12 models tested kept both false positives and false negatives below 10 percent. The post links to the dataset, whitepaper, and submission workflow for verified scoring.
• Build full-stack AWS applications in minutes with AI-powered scaffolding – Version 1.0 of the Nx Plugin for AWS is an open source toolkit of deterministic generators for APIs, websites, databases, and AI agents, plus the AWS infrastructure to run them. Each generator writes working, deployable code with security, observability, and type-safety already in place, so an AI assistant can assemble the foundation and spend its effort on your application logic. Bingo Industries used it to take a multi-agent operations chatbot from idea to production in less than 3 weeks. The plugin is open source on GitHub. Create a workspace with pnpm create @aws/nx-workspace and point your coding agent at the included MCP server.
• The oldest architecture in computing – On All Things Distributed, Werner Vogels starts from a question customers always ask “Will AI take my job?”, and lands on memory. After spending time with Kiro Crew, he traces a line from Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains to how Crew stores, consolidates, and forgets across markdown files, a vector database, and a key-value index. His conclusion: the brain is the oldest architecture in computing, and the people who think hardest about how it works will build the next tools. Now, go build.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Micah

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick desktop GA, Kiro for students, and more (September 14, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last year, we introduced Volume Clones of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.

Today, we are extending Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes into other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account.

With this new feature, you can use your latest application data to develop, test, and experiment in a secondary environment, while protecting and isolating the information in the production environment. For example, you can create copies of a production environment to refresh test and development environments set up in separate accounts with the desired EBS encryption.

Copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts in action
To create a copy of an EBS volume across accounts, the owners of the volume can first grant the target account access to their volume in AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), which provides a way to share resources across AWS accounts or within an AWS Organization. Then, from the target account, they can locate the volume they have access to create a copy of it.

To get started, choose Share volume for the volume you want to share with the target account in the Amazon EBS console.

Share the volume with other AWS accounts by adding it to existing resource shares, or create a new resource share in the AWS RAM console. For more details, refer to the AWS RAM User Guide.

You can now see confirmation that the volume has been shared in the Volume sharing tab of the volume detail page.

A target account must accept the resource share on the RAM console.

Once they accept the resource share, they can see the volumes in the EBS volume page of the target account. Choose Copy volume for any shared volume.

To share and copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts programmatically, including calling APIs and searching documentation, try the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI coding tool. To learn more, visit the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Things to know
Let me share some important technical details that I think you’ll find useful.

• Encryption: You can share unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with a customer managed key (CMK). Volumes encrypted with the default AWS managed key (AMK) cannot be shared. When copying a shared volume encrypted with a CMK, the CMK must also be shared with the target account. You can specify a different CMK to re-encrypt the copy in the target account.
• Monitoring: You can monitor SharedVolumeCopyInitiated through AWS CloudTrail event in your account. You will also receive events in Amazon EventBridge at the start of the copy operation when the state of the copied volume is initializing, and at the end of the operation when the state of the copied volume changes to completed. You can see the shared volume ID, consuming account ID, and event time.
• Pricing: Once a copy is initiated, you’ll pay a one-time fee based on your volume size, charged to the account where the copy will reside. There’s no cost for sharing EBS volumes through AWS RAM. The copied volume will incur regular EBS volume charges upon creation.
• Availability Zone: The volume copy must be created in the same Availability Zone as the source volume. Use Availability Zone IDs (such as use1-az1) to identify the same physical location across accounts.

Now available
Cross-account volume clones for Amazon EBS are available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region.

Give this feature a try in the Amazon EC2 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EBS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones across AWS accounts appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

I’ve been inspired by all the activities that tech communities around the world have been hosting and participating in throughout the year. Here in the southern hemisphere we’re starting to dream about our upcoming summer breaks and closing out on some of the activities we’ve initiated this year. The tech community in South Africa is participating in Amazon Q Developer coding challenges that my colleagues and I are hosting throughout this month as a fun way to wind down activities for the year. The first one was hosted in Johannesburg last Friday with Durban and Cape Town coming up next.

Last week’s launches
These are the launches from last week that caught my attention:

• Kiro is now available for every developer — Since its launch more than 90 days ago, more than 100,000 developers have joined the waitlist to try Kiro out. The waitlist is gone so if you want to try out this spec-driven approach to coding with AI, sign up now.
• Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager — If you’re using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) at scale operate hundreds of instance types across multiple Availability Zones and accounts, using On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, and Capacity Reservations, you’ll be pleased to learn that EC2 Capacity Manager is now available to provide you a centralized solution to monitor, analyze, and manage capacity usage across all account and AWS Regions from a single interface.
• Amazon EBS Volume Clones — Sometimes you need production data to test a fix in a non-production environment before implementing it in production. Usually you’d take an EBS snapshot of this data and then create a new volume from that snapshot, meanwhile dealing with the operational overhead of this process. Learn about the availability of Amazon EBS Volume Clones, a new capability for you to create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.

Additional updates
I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

Upcoming AWS events
Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities.

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa.

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Kiro waitlist, EBS Volume Clones, EC2 Capacity Manager, and more (October 20, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

As someone that used to work at Sun Microsystems, where ZFS was invented, I’ve always loved working with storage systems that offer instant volume copies for my development and testing needs.

Today, I’m excited to share that AWS is bringing similar capabilities to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with the launch of Amazon EBS Volume Clones, a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.

Many customers need to create copies of their production data to support development and testing activities in a separate nonproduction environment. Until now, this process required taking an EBS snapshot (stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)) and then creating a new volume from that snapshot. Although this approach works, the process creates operational overhead due to multiple steps.

With Amazon EBS Volume Clones, you can now create copies of your EBS volumes with a single API call or console click. The copied volumes are available within seconds and provide immediate access to your data with single-digit millisecond latency. This makes Volume Clones particularly useful for quickly setting up test environments with production data or creating temporary copies of databases for development purposes.

Let me show you how Volume Clones works
For this post, I created a small Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, with an attached volume. I created a file on the root file system with the command echo "Hello CopyVolumes" > hello.txt.

To initiate the copy, I open a browser on the AWS Management Console and I navigate to EC2, Elastic Block Store, Volumes. I select the volume I want to copy.

Note that, at the time of publication of this post, only encrypted volumes can be copied.

On the Actions menu, I choose the Copy Volume option.

Next, I choose the details of the target volume. I can change the Volume type and adjust the Size, IOPS, and Throughput parameters. I choose Copy volume to start the Volume Clone operation.

The copied volume enters the Creating state and becomes available within seconds. I can then attach it to an EC2 instance and start using it immediately.

Data blocks are copied from the source volume and written to the volume copy in the background. The volume remains in the Initializing state until the process is complete. I can monitor its progress with the describe-volume-status API. The initializing operation doesn’t affect the performance of the source volume. I can continue using it normally during the copy process.

I love that the copied volume is available immediately. I don’t need to wait for its initialization to complete. During the initialization phase, my copied volume delivers performance based on the lowest of: a baseline of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s, the source volume’s provisioned performance, or the copied volume’s provisioned performance.

After initialization is completed, the copied volume becomes fully independent of the source volume and delivers its full provisioned performance.

Alternatively, I can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to initiate the copy:

aws ec2 copy-volumes                          
     --source-volume-id vol-1234567890abcdef0 
     --size 500                               
     --volume-type gp3

After the volume copy is created, I attach it to my EC2 instance and mount it. I can check the file I created at start is present.

First, I attach the volume from my laptop, using the attach-volume command:

aws ec2 attach-volume 
         --volume-id 'vol-09b700e3a23a9b4ad' 
         --instance-id 'i-079e6504ad25b029e'   
         --device '/dev/sdb'

Then, I connect to the instance, and I type these commands:

$ sudo lsblk -f
NAME          FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1                                                                              
├─nvme0n1p1   xfs          /     49e26d9d-0a9d-4667-b93e-a23d1de8eacd    6.2G    22% /
└─nvme0n1p128 vfat   FAT16       3105-2F44                               8.6M    14% /boot/efi
nvme1n1                                                                              
├─nvme1n1p1   xfs          /     49e26d9d-0a9d-4667-b93e-a23d1de8eacd                
└─nvme1n1p128 vfat   FAT16       3105-2F44     

$ sudo mount -t xfs /dev/nvme1n1p1 /data

$ df -h
Filesystem        Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs          4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs             924M     0  924M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs             370M  476K  369M   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p1    8.0G  1.8G  6.2G  22% /
tmpfs             924M     0  924M   0% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p128   10M  1.4M  8.7M  14% /boot/efi
tmpfs             185M     0  185M   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/nvme1n1p1    8.0G  1.8G  6.2G  22% /data

$ cat /data/home/ec2-user/hello.txt 
Hello CopyVolumes

Things to know
Volume Clones creates copies within the same Availability Zone as your source volume. You can create copies from encrypted volumes only, and the size of your copy must be equal to or greater than the source volume.

Volume Clones creates crash-consistent copies of your volumes, exactly like snapshots. For application consistency, you need to pause application I/O operations before creating the copy. For example, with PostgreSQL databases, you can use the pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() functions to pause writes and create a consistent copy. At the operating system level on Linux with XFS, you can use the xfs_freeze command to temporarily suspend and resume access to the file system and ensure all cached updates are written to disk.

Although Volume Clones creates point-in-time copies, it complements rather than replaces EBS snapshots for backup purposes. EBS snapshots remain the recommended solution for data backup and protection against AZ-level and volume failures. Snapshots provide incremental backups to Amazon S3 with 11 nines of durability, compared to Volume Clones which maintains EBS volume durability (99.999% for io2, 99.9% for other volume types). Consider using Volume Clones specifically for test and development environment scenarios where you need instant access to volume copies.

Copied volumes exist independently of their source volumes and continue to incur standard EBS volume charges until you delete them. To manage costs effectively, implement governance rules to identify and remove copied volumes that are no longer needed for your development or testing activities.

Pricing and availability
Volume Clones supports all EBS volume types and works with volumes in the same AWS account and Availability Zone. This new capability is available in all AWS commercial Regions, selected Local Zones, and in the AWS GovCloud (US).

For pricing, you’re charged a one-time fee per GiB of data on the source volume at initiation and standard EBS pricing for the new volume.

I find Volume Clones particularly valuable for database workloads and continuous integration (CI) scenarios. For instance, you can quickly create a copy of your production database for testing new features or troubleshooting issues without impacting your production environment or waiting for data to hydrate from Amazon S3.

To get started with Amazon EBS Volume Clones, visit the Amazon EBS section on the console or check out the EBS documentation. I look forward to hearing how you use this capability to improve your development workflows.

— seb

The post Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones: Create instant copies of your EBS volumes appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization, a feature that accelerates the transfer of data from an EBS snapshot, a highly durable backup of volumes stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to a new EBS volume.

With Amazon EBS Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization, you can create fully performant EBS volumes within a predictable amount of time. You can use this feature to speed up the initialization of hundreds of concurrent volumes and instances. You can also use this feature when you need to recover from an existing EBS Snapshot and need your EBS volume to be created and initialized as quickly as possible. You can use this feature to quickly create copies of EBS volumes with EBS Snapshots in a different Availability Zone, AWS Region, or AWS account. Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization for each volume is charged based on the full snapshot size and the specified volume initialization rate.

This new feature expedites the volume initialization process by fetching the data from an EBS Snapshot to an EBS volume at a consistent rate that you specify between 100 MiB/s and 300 MiB/s. You can specify this volume initialization rate at which the snapshot blocks are to be downloaded from Amazon S3 to the volume.

With specifying the volume initialization rate, you can create a fully performant volume in a predictable time, enabling increased operational efficiency and visibility on the expected time of completion. If you run utilities like fio/dd to expedite volume initialization for your workflows like application recovery and volume copy for testing and development, it will remove the operational burden of managing such scripts with the consistency and predictability to your workflows.

Get started with specifying the volume initialization rate
To get started, you can choose the volume initialization rate when you launch your EC2 instance or create your volume from the snapshot.

1. Create a volume in the EC2 launch wizard
When launching new EC2 instances in the launch wizard of EC2 console, you can enter a desired Volume initialization rate in the Storage (volumes) section.

You can also set the volume initialization rate when creating and modifying the EC2 Launch Templates.

In the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), you can add VolumeInitializationRate parameter to the block device mappings when call run-instances command.

aws ec2 run-instances 
    --image-id ami-0abcdef1234567890 
    --instance-type t2.micro 
    --subnet-id subnet-08fc749671b2d077c 
    --security-group-ids sg-0b0384b66d7d692f9 
    --key-name MyKeyPair 
    --block-device-mappings file://mapping.json

Contents of mapping.json. This example adds /dev/sdh an empty EBS volume with a size of 8 GiB.

[
    {
        "DeviceName": "/dev/sdh",
        "Ebs": {
            "VolumeSize": 8
            "VolumeType": "gp3",            
            "VolumeInitializationRate": 300
		 } 
     } 
]

To learn more, visit block device mapping options, which defines the EBS volumes and instance store volumes to attach to the instance at launch.

2. Create a volume from snapshots
When you create a volume from snapshots, you can also choose Create volume in the EC2 console and specify the Volume initialization rate.

Confirm your new volume with the initialization rate.

In the AWS CLI, you can use VolumeInitializationRate parameter and when calling create-volume command.

aws ec2 create-volume --region us-east-1 --cli-input-json '{
    "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1a",
    "VolumeType": "gp3",
    "SnapshotId": "snap-07f411eed12ef613a",
    "VolumeInitializationRate": 300
}'

If the command is run successfully, you will receive the result below.

{
    "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1a",
    "CreateTime": "2025-01-03T21:44:53.000Z",
    "Encrypted": false,
    "Size": 100,
    "SnapshotId": "snap-07f411eed12ef613a",
    "State": "creating",
    "VolumeId": "vol-0ba4ed2a280fab5f9",
    "Iops": 300,
    "Tags": [],
    "VolumeType": "gp2",
    "MultiAttachEnabled": false,
    "VolumeInitializationRate": 300
}

You can also set the volume initialization rate when replacing root volumes of EC2 instances and provisioning EBS volumes using the EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver.

After creation of the volume, EBS will keep track of the hydration progress and publish an Amazon EventBridge notification for EBS to your account when the hydration completes so that they can be certain when their volume is fully performant.

To learn more, visit Create an Amazon EBS volume and Initialize Amazon EBS volumes in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Now available
Amazon EBS Provisioned Rate for Volume Initialization is now available and supported for all EBS volume types today. You will be charged based on the full snapshot size and the specified volume initialization rate. To learn more, visit Amazon EBS Pricing page.

To learn more about Amazon EBS including this feature, take the free digital course on the AWS Skill Builder portal. Course includes use cases, architecture diagrams and demos.

Give this feature a try in the Amazon EC2 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EBS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

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The post Accelerate the transfer of data from an Amazon EBS snapshot to a new EBS volume appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

You can now specify a desired completion duration (15 minutes to 48 hours) when you copy an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshot within or between AWS Regions and/or accounts. This will help you to meet time-based compliance and business requirements for critical workloads. For example:

Testing – Distribute fresh data on a timely basis as part of your Test Data Management (TDM) plan.

Development – Provide your developers with updated snapshot data on a regular and frequent basis.

Disaster Recovery – Ensure that critical snapshots are copied in order to meet a Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Regardless of your use case, this new feature gives you consistent and predictable copies. This does not affect the performance or reliability of standard copies—you can choose the option and timing that works best for each situation.

Creating a Time-Based Snapshot Copy
I can create time-based snapshot copies from the AWS Management Console, CLI (copy-snapshot), or API (CopySnapshot). While working on this post I created two EBS volumes (100 GiB and 1 TiB), filled each one with files, and created snapshots:

To create a time-based snapshot, I select the source as usual and choose Copy snapshot from the Action menu. I enter a description for the copy, choose the us-east-1 AWS Region as the destination, select Enable time-based copy, and (because this is a time-critical snapshot), enter a 15 minute Completion duration:

When I click Copy snapshot, the request will be accepted (and the copy will become Pending) only if my account’s throughput quotas are not already exceeded due to the throughput consumed by other active copies that I am making to the destination region. If the account level throughput quota is already exceeded, the console will display an error.

I can click Launch copy duration calculator to get a better idea of the minimum achievable copy duration for the snapshot. I open the calculator, enter my account’s throughput limit, and choose an evaluation period:

The calculator then uses historical data collected over the course of previous snapshot copies to tell me the minimum achievable completion duration. In this example I copied 1,800,000 MiB in the last 24 hours; with time-based copy and my current account throughput quota of 2000 MiB/second I can copy this much data in 15 minutes.

While the copy is in progress, I can monitor progress using the console or by calling DescribeSnapshots and examining the progress field of the result. I can also use the following Amazon EventBridge events to take actions (if the copy operation crosses regions, the event is sent in the destination region):

copySnapshot – Sent after the copy operation completes.

copyMissedCompletionDuration – Sent if the copy is still pending when the deadline has passed.

Things to Know
And that’s just about all there is to it! Here’s what you need to know about time-based snapshot copies:

CloudWatch Metrics – The SnapshotCopyBytesTransferred metric is emitted in the destination region, and reflect the amount of data transferred between the source and destination region in bytes.

Duration – The duration can range from 15 minutes to 48 hours in 15 minute increments, and is specified on a per-copy basis.

Concurrency – If a snapshot is being copied and I initiate a second copy of the same snapshot to the same destination, the duration for the second one starts when the first one is completed.

Throughput – There is a default per-account limit of 2000 MiB/second between each source and destination pair. If you need additional throughput in order to meet your RPO you can request an increase via the AWS Support Center. Maximum per-snapshot throughput is 500 MiB/second and cannot be increased.

Pricing – Refer to the Amazon EBS Pricing page for complete pricing information.

Regions – Time-based snapshot copies are available in all AWS Regions.

— Jeff;

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