Twenty years ago today, Jeff Barr wrote a blog post that launched the Amazon EC2 Beta. That single post introduced resizable Linux virtual servers in the cloud, billed by the hour, with one instance type (m1.small) in one Region (US East). It was minimal yet useful, and it changed how the world thinks about computing infrastructure.

In 2021, Jeff covered the fifteen years of EC2 with the backstory and memorable EC2 launches. Over the last five years, AWS has continued to push the boundaries of what cloud computing can deliver, building custom silicon for general-purpose and AI workloads and expanding EC2 into new form factors and deployment models that our customers in 2006 could not have imagined.

The 20 years in brief
In his 15th anniversary post, Jeff chose important milestones of EC2 that established the foundational building blocks that customers still rely on today. Amazon Elastic Block Store (2008) provided persistent block storage. Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch (2009) made applications scalable and highly available. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (2009) gave customers logically isolated networks. AWS Nitro System (2017) enabled faster innovation and enhanced security. AWS Graviton processors (2018) were designed for cost-sensitive scale-out workloads.

Over 20 years, EC2 grew from one to over 1,200 instance types to meet customer needs across general-purpose, compute-, memory-, and storage-optimized, accelerated computing, and high-performance computing families. These instances expanded from one AWS Region to 39 Regions globally. AWS also extended EC2 beyond the Region boundary with AWS Outposts (2018) running EC2 instances locally, AWS Local Zones (2019) place globally, and AWS Wavelength (2019) inside global 5G telecommunications carrier networks.

While I hate to play favorites, I want to choose some of my favorite EC2 launches of the past five years:

• AWS Inferentia for ML inference at scale (2019): We introduced purpose-built ML inference instances (inf1) with AWS Inferentia chips. Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances became generally available in April 2023 for large-scale generative AI inference workloads. Together with the Inferentia family, AWS Trainium instances now give customers a full stack of AWS-designed silicon optimized for every phase of the AI lifecycle both inference and training.
• EC2 Mac instances (2020): The first Mac instances (mac1) were built on Apple Mac mini with Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) on the AWS Nitro System. Mac M1 (mac2) instances launched in July 2022 as the first Arm-based macOS instances on EC2. M2 Pro Mac instances followed in 2023, M4 and M4 Pro Mac instances in 2025, M3 Ultra Mac instances and M4 Max Mac instances in 2026, giving Apple developers a complete range of cloud-based build and test environments for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS apps.
• AWS Trainium for full-stack AI workloads at scale (2021): In November 2021, we previewed Trn1 instances with AWS Trainium accelerators optimized for high-performance deep learning training. In December 2024, Trn2 instances powered by AWS Trainium2 launched, with Trn2 UltraServers linking 64 Trainium2 accelerators via NeuronLink for training trillion-parameter foundation models. At AWS re:Invent 2025, Trn3 UltraServers powered by AWS Trainium3 deliver the best token economics for next-generation agentic, reasoning, and video generation applications. A single Trn3 UltraServer interconnects up to 144 Trainium3 chips to train and serve the largest frontier models. Now, AWS Trainium3 delivers the leading price-performance for high-performance AI training and inference at scale.
• EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML (2023): This new EC2 usage model further democratizes ML democratizes ML by making it easy to access GPU instances to train and deploy ML and generative AI models. You reserve the GPU capacity you need (initially P5 instances) for a future date and only for the duration you require. In November 2024, EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML added supported for provisioning in a matter of minutes and extending up to six months. Now, EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML supports P6-B300, P6-B200, P5e, P5en, P4d, P4de, Trn1, Trn2, and Trn3 instances in addition to P5.
• AWS Graviton5 (2025): Building on eight years of Graviton innovation since 2018, we previewed Graviton5 chips in AWS re:Invent 2025 and launched M9g and M9gd instances powered by Graviton5 and built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System. C9g and C9gd followed in June 2026. Now, Graviton5 features 192 cores, a 5x larger cache, and up to 33% lower inter-core latency, making it well suited for the growing demands of agentic AI workloads such as real-time reasoning, code generation, and multi-step task orchestration that require continuous, high-throughput CPU compute at scale.
• AWS Nitro Isolation Engine (2026): Customers wanted to see, not just hear from us, proof of workload isolation in the Nitro Hypervisor. The Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component inside the Nitro Hypervisor, harnessing formal verification to provide mathematical assurance that customer workloads are isolated from each other and AWS operators, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. This feature is also based on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System which has continued to evolve since our introduction in 2017.

The foundation underneath it all
Despite two decades of innovation, the fundamental value proposition of Amazon EC2 has not changed. Customers use it to get secure, resizable compute capacity in minutes, pay only for what they consume, and scale on demand without long-term commitments. That same flexibility now extends to AI workloads at a scale no one anticipated in 2006.

EC2 remains the foundational compute layer of AWS. Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, Amazon SageMaker AI, and Amazon Bedrock ultimately run on EC2 capacity. Every architectural pattern customers have built over the past twenty years, from simple web servers to trillion-parameter foundation model training clusters, starts with a decision to launch an instance.

We made strong foundational decisions in 2006, and we left room for the service to grow. Twenty years later, that strategy of creating services that are minimal-yet-useful, launching quickly, and iterating rapidly in response to your feedback continues to guide how we build. The next twenty years of cloud computing will demand capabilities we have not yet imagined. Amazon EC2 will continue to be the foundation where your workloads run.

To learn more about Amazon EC2, visit the Amazon EC2 product page or check out what’s new with EC2.

— Channy

The post Happy 20th Birthday, Amazon EC2 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, we had the AWS Summit Amsterdam, one of the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) events that offers you the opportunity to learn from technical and industry leaders, and meet AWS experts and like-minded professionals. In particular, most AWS Summits have Developer and Community Lounges in their exhibition halls.

A photo taken by Thembile Martis in AWS Summit Amsterdam 2025

Here, you can experience generative AI services for developers or participate in developer sessions prepared by the AWS community. You can also take a turn at the prize wheel, where you can receive special gifts after signing up for AWS Builder ID to use Amazon Q Developer, AWS Skill Builder, AWS re:Post, and AWS Community for developers.

Check your schedule and join an AWS Summit in a city near you: Bangkok (April 29), London (April 30), Poland (May 5), Bengaluru (May 7–8), Hong Kong (May 8), Seoul (May 14–15), Dubai (May 21), Tel Aviv (May 28), Singapore (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), Sydney (June 4-5), Hamburg (June 5), Washington, D.C, (June 10–11), Madrid (June 11), Milan (June 18), Shanghai (June 19–20), Mumbai (June 19), and Tokyo (June 25–26).

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

• GitLab Duo with Amazon Q – GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is generally available for Self-Managed Ultimate customers, embedding advanced agent capabilities for software development. It also supports Java modernization, enhanced quality assurance, and code review optimization directly in GitLab’s enterprise DevSecOps platform. To learn more, read the DevOps blog post or visit the Amazon Q Developer integrations page to learn more.
• Amazon Q Developer in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region – Amazon Q Developer Pro tier customers can now use and configure Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and in the integrated development environment (IDE) to store data in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region. It performs inference in European Union (EU) Regions giving them more choice over where their data resides and transits. To learn more, read the blog post.
• New 223 AWS Config rules in AWS Control Tower – AWS Control Tower supports an additional 223 managed Config rules in Control Catalog for various use cases such as security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can now search, discover, enable and manage these additional rules directly from AWS Control Tower and govern more use cases for your multi-account environment. To learn more, visit the AWS Control Tower User Guide.
• Amazon CloudFront Anycast Static IPs support for apex domains – You can easily use your root domain (for example, example.com) with CloudFront. This new feature simplifies DNS management by providing only three static IP addresses instead of the previous 21, making it easier to configure and manage apex domains with CloudFront distributions. To learn more, visit the CloudFront Developer Guide for detailed documentation and implementation guidance.
• AWS Lambda@Edge advanced logging controls – This feature improves how Lamgda function logs are captured, processed, and consumed at the edge. This enhancement provides you with more control over your logging data, making it easier to monitor application behavior and quickly resolve issues. To learn more, read the Compute blog post, the Lambda Developer Guide, or the CloudFront Developer Guide.
• New AWS Wavelength Zone in Dakar, Senegal – With this first Wavelength Zone in sub-Saharan Africa in a partnership with Sonatel, an affiliate of Orange, independent software vendors (ISVs), enterprises, and developers can now use AWS infrastructure and services to support applications with data residency, low latency, and resiliency requirements. AWS Wavelength is available in 31 cities across the globe in a partnership with seven telecommunication companies. To learn more, visit AWS Wavelength and get started today.

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 news items that you might find interesting:

From community.aws
Here are my personal favorites posts from community.aws:

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:

• AWS re:Inforce – Mark your calendars for AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity. You can subscribe for event updates now!
• AWS Partners Events – You’ll find a variety of AWS Partner events that will inspire and educate you, whether you are just getting started on your cloud journey or you are looking to solve new business challenges.
• AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Istanbul, Turkey (April 25), Prague, Czech Republic (April 25), Yerevan, Armenia (May 24), Zurich, Switzerland (May 25), and Bengaluru, India (May 25).

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

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

— Channy

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

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The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Upcoming AWS Summits, Amazon Q Developer, Amazon CloudFront updates, and more (April 21, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.