Oct 2014

AWS Support Center is the hub for managing your Support cases. The newly designed Support Center is moving to the AWS Management Console, providing both federated access support and an improved case management experience. The new Support Center location is https://console.aws.amazon.com/support.

You can now use the 2014.09 Amazon Linux AMI with AWS Elastic Beanstalk across all our supported platforms. For more information on the new features in the 2014.09 Amazon Linux AMI, please see our release notes. We encourage you to migrate to these updated platforms. For instructions on how to migrate, click here.

AWS Systems Manager for SCVMM lets you administer your AWS resources using SCVMM. Now you can monitor and manage your EC2 for Windows instances in the AWS Cloud, as well as on-premises virtual machines—from the SCVMM console.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk has just updated the CLI. We have expanded the range of commands that you can now use (e.g., ‘eb scale’) and added additional functionality allowing you greater control over your Elastic Beanstalk environments. We have also updated the commands so it more closely resembles the Elastic Beanstalk API.

You can now use Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL with Amazon EMR to interactively explore data stored in HDFS and Amazon S3.

You can now use custom images to create images based on existing, running, WorkSpaces. The new functionality allows you to create images specially tailored to your users from running WorkSpaces and use them to launch cloud based desktops. This makes it possible to quickly build templates with software used in your organization and launch WorkSpaces for all your users. An easier to manage experience for administrators, this new functionality also makes it possible to create a more relevant experience for end users.

You can now use Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL with Amazon EMR to interactively explore data stored in HDFS and Amazon S3.

You can now choose how your applications are deployed to Elastic Beanstalk environments. You can select whether to deploy an application to all EC2 instances in your environment at once or roll the deployment through all the instances. You can set the number of instances to incrementally update as a percentage of the entire fleet or as a fixed number. This feature enables you to make an update without having to take all your instances offline.

You can now record and log API calls to Amazon Elastic Transcoder through AWS CloudTrail. These logs will be delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify.

We are delighted to announce Multi-AZ for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with Automatic Failover capability. Until now, failing over to a read replica in the event of a primary node loss required manual intervention. Starting today, when you enable Multi-AZ, ElastiCache will detect the failure, select a read replica, and promote it to become the new primary. This will enable higher availability of your ElastiCache for Redis environment.

AWS is excited to announce the immediate availability of the new EU (Frankfurt) infrastructure region. The Frankfurt region joins Ireland as AWS’ second European location, and provides customers with a new option for end users and applications benefiting from infrastructure located in continental Europe.

We are making Amazon Cognito even more flexible by enabling app developers to make use of identities from any identity provider that supports OpenID Connect (OIDC). OIDC is an open standard that enables app developers to leverage additional identity providers for authentication. This way they can focus on developing their app rather than dealing with user names and passwords. Today’s launch adds OIDC identities to the variety of identities that Cognito already supports – public provider identities (Login with Amazon, Facebook, and Google), guest user identities, and developer authenticated identities.

AWS Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your AWS resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the AWS Cloud. Connecting to an on-premises directory is easy and once this connection is established, all users can access AWS resources and applications with their existing corporate credentials. You can also launch managed, Samba-based directories in a matter of minutes, simplifying the deployment and management of Windows workloads in the AWS Cloud.

The Amazon Kinesis team has released the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) for Python developers. The Kinesis Client Library enables developers to build Amazon Kinesis Applications for reading and processing data from an Amazon Kinesis stream. Amazon Kinesis Client Library (KCL) handles complex issues such as adapting to changes in stream volume, load-balancing streaming data, coordinating distributed services, and processing data with fault-tolerance.

You can now send a wider variety of data to Amazon CloudWatch Logs from your Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server. You can send any event log, Event Tracing (ETW) log, Performance Counters (PCW) data, or text-based log for inclusion in your CloudWatch metrics.

If you are a Maven user, adding the AWS Mobile SDK for Android in your Android project is now as simple as adding few lines to your pom.xml. You no longer need to download the entire AWS Mobile SDK for Android zip file and include the JAR files in your project manually. You can specify the services you want to use in your app in your project’s pom.xml file, and Maven will handle the rest.

You can now view detailed Cache Statistics Reports and the list of your most Popular Objects delivered by Amazon CloudFront. These reports are available by visiting the Amazon CloudFront Reports & Analytics dashboard in the AWS Management Console. These new reports complement the Usage Charts that are already available to track trends in your usage and the near real-time operational metrics available via CloudWatch that were released last week.

The Amazon Kinesis team has released an update to the Amazon Kinesis Storm Spout. The Amazon Kinesis Storm Spout enables developers to use Amazon Kinesis with Storm, an open source, distributed real-time computation system. This update to the Spout supports Ack/Fail semantics. Specifically, the spout will now re-emit failed messages up to the customer configured retry limit. This makes it easier to build reliable data processing applications with Storm using Kinesis streams. This builds on the core functionality of the spout that fetches data from the Amazon Kinesis stream and emits it as tuples that Storm topologies can process. Developers can add the Spout to their existing Storm topologies, and leverage Amazon Kinesis as a reliable, scalable, stream capture, storage, and replay service that powers their Storm processing applications.

To help you identify at a glance when your users last signed in, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) console now displays the date and time when an IAM user or root account last signed in to the AWS Management Console, the AWS forums, the AWS Support Center, or AWS Marketplace. This builds on the credential lifecycle management features for managing your IAM users’ passwords that we released in July 2014. "Last sign in" information complements what you get from AWS CloudTrail, so that you get both an at-a-glance view in the IAM console or credential reports, in addition to the more comprehensive event logs in CloudTrail.

We are excited to announce two new features for Amazon CloudSearch: support for custom tokenization dictionaries for Japanese and integration with Amazon CloudTrail. These new features are available immediately for all new and current CloudSearch domains based on the 2013-01-01 API version.

You can now launch new RDS DB instances running Oracle 11.2.0.4v2 and upgrade existing Amazon RDS for Oracle DB instances with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.The new RDS Oracle Database version includes the July 2014 Oracle Patch Set Update (PSU) 11.2.0.4.3, improvements in handling XA transactions, better Oracle LogMiner support, and other benefits.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers support for zero clients. When used with Amazon WorkSpaces, PCoIP zero clients are a secure and easy to manage alternative to a standard PC, and an efficient means of delivering applications to end users. Zero clients are a low cost solution that offer increased flexibility for companies considering alternative devices for their users.

You can use zero clients in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkSpaces is available. To get started, you will need to run the PCoIP Connection Manager in a Virtual Private Cloud. To learn more, read the PCoIP zero client admin guide.

This new Quick Start Reference Deployment outlines architectural considerations and steps for deploying Cloudera’s Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) on the Amazon Web Services cloud. This reference deployment will assist you in building an EDH cluster on AWS by integrating Cloudera Director with an automated deployment initiated by an AWS CloudFormation template.

The version 3 of the AWS SDK for PHP is now in developer preview.

The new version comes with significant performance improvements and a number of new features, which we hope will help developers code more efficiently and create exciting new applications. These features include

We've made improvements to the AWS sign-in page for users who federate to the AWS Management Console using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create outputs for adaptive streaming, compatible with version 4 of the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. This expands on version 3 capabilities by adding support for byte-range requests, late-binding audio, and I-frame only playback.

You can now monitor, alarm and receive notifications on the operational performance of your Amazon CloudFront distributions using Amazon CloudWatch, giving you more visibility into the overall health of your web application. CloudFront now automatically publishes six operational metrics, each at 1-minute granularity, into Amazon CloudWatch. You can then use CloudWatch to set alarms on any abnormal patterns in your CloudFront traffic.

You can now launch DB Instances that use General Purpose (SSD) storage, a new SSD-backed storage option for Amazon RDS. This new storage option is designed to offer more cost-effective performance than previous choices for a variety of database workloads.

Today we are adding native JSON support to Amazon DynamoDB. You can now write JSON documents directly into DynamoDB tables. We have also increased the maximum item size to 400KB, allowing you to store large JSON documents and nested objects in one transaction. These new features are available now and you can start using them today in the US East (Nothern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. It will be available soon in other AWS Regions.

You can configure CloudFront to forward cookies to your origin and cache your objects based on cookie values in viewer requests. Previously, you could specify a whitelist of cookie names, but you had to specify exact names. Starting today, you can use wildcard characters in the whitelisted cookie names that you want Amazon CloudFront to forward to your origin server. This feature makes it easy to set multiple cookies to forward to the origin server at the same time. For example, several applications, including Drupal and WordPress, alter cookie names with a hash to identify logged in users, so SESS (for session-ID) becomes SESS<MD5 hash>. In this example, you can now whitelist *wordpress*, or *SESS* values as valid cookie names, and CloudFront will forward any cookie containing “wordpress” or “SESS”.

If you are not familiar with the AWS Management Portal for vCenter, you can install it as a plug-in within VMware vCenter and use it to manage AWS infrastructure using vCenter. The AWS Management Portal for vCenter includes support for Amazon EC2 and VM Import. Using the portal, you can migrate your existing VMware VMs to Amazon EC2, launch new EC2 instances, create VPCs and Subnets, and manage your EC2 instances. The portal interface is simple to use and is designed to make it easy for users with VMware experience to get started with AWS. There is no cost to use the portal, aside from the cost of the underlying AWS services consumed.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder now has the ability to create and deliver videos that use the Smooth Streaming format with Amazon Elastic Transcoder and Amazon CloudFront. Smooth Streaming is an adaptive media protocol that delivers your media assets as small fragments over HTTP that can be consumed by platforms and devices such as Xbox, Windows Phone and browsers that use Microsoft Silverlight players. This means that you can now reach Smooth Streaming devices with the same easy workflows Elastic Transcoder already supports for iOS devices that use the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol common on Apple devices.