July 2016

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports identity federation, which enables external identities, such as users in your corporate directory, to sign in to the AWS Management Console via single sign-on (SSO). Now with a small configuration change, your AWS administrators can allow your federated users to work in the AWS Management Console for up to 12 hours, instead of having to reauthenticate every 60 minutes. In addition, administrators can now revoke active federated user sessions. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, now supports routing to your on-premises DNS servers, conditional forwarders and hosts that use public Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Through the link to your VPC, you can now create trusts and domain join hosts with on-premises computers that have public IP addresses. This provides you more flexibility in how you integrate Microsoft AD with your on-premises environment. 

This feature makes it easy for developers to add user sign-up, sign-in, and enhanced security functionality to their mobile and web apps. With User Pools, you get a simple, fully managed service for creating and maintaining your own user directory that can scale to hundreds of millions of users. You benefit from the security and privacy best practices of AWS, and retain full control of your user data. This feature is now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and EU (Ireland).

Today, we are announcing DNS resolution support for a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering connection. You can now enable resolution of public DNS hostnames to private IP addresses when queried from the peered VPC. This functionality is also supported cross-account so the two VPCs can be in different accounts. This feature simplifies DNS setup for VPC peering connections.

You can now view the commit history of an AWS CodeCommit repository from the CodeCommit console. This helps you more easily understand the changes made to a repository, who made the changes, and when the changes were made.

Today, we are enhancing the AWS Application Discovery Service to collect information about on-premises VMware environments without requiring on-host agent installation, making it easier and faster for enterprises to assess their environment. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Elasticsearch version 2.3. Amazon Elasticsearch Service makes it easy to run Elasticsearch, which is a popular tool for real-time analytics use cases such as log analytics and application monitoring. Elasticsearch 2.3 offers many new features, including support for pipeline aggregations, improved geo-point fields, and support for data compression. Elasticsearch version 2.3 also offers many benefits over version 1.5, including improved performance, memory management and resiliency, and security enhancements. Starting today, customers can choose between Elasticsearch version 1.5 or 2.3 when creating an Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Native Backup/Restore using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can now take database level backups as SQL Server backup files (.bak) and store them in your Amazon S3 bucket. SQL Server full backups are commonly used to migrate or move databases among different SQL Server instances, whether in the cloud or on-premises, for data ingestion, disaster recovery and other backup purposes. You can export a full backup of your on-premises database, store it in S3 and then use the custom stored procedures offered by RDS to restore that backup to an existing RDS instance. You will also be able to backup an RDS database into S3 and restore the backup file later onto an on-premises or RDS database. Storing and transferring backup files into and out of AWS through S3 affords customers an added layer of protection for disaster recovery and gives customers a peace of mind that their data can be moved around easily. On RDS, you can encrypt your backup files across SQL Server Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions.

A new pricing model for our Developer Support plan has been launched, reducing the entry cost from $49 per month to $29 per month, while providing the same level of customer service and support. As of July 26th, 2016 all new AWS accounts subscribing to Developer Support will receive the new pricing, set at the greater of $29 or 3% of monthly AWS spend. 

Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) now publishes your CloudWatch metrics in the Amazon ML console, making it even easier to use and access these graphs. Currently, Amazon ML publishes metrics to CloudWatch, enabling you to monitor the performance of your models in production. As part of the ML model report, you can view recent CloudWatch metrics related to the model. Now with a single click from the Amazon ML console, you can directly to go the view of metrics for that model in CloudWatch to get further detail.

AWS IoT now supports Thing Types in the Thing Registry. Thing Types allow you to effectively manage your catalogue of devices by defining common characteristics for devices that belong to the same device category. In addition, a Thing associated with a Thing Type can now have up to 50 attributes including 3 searchable attributes.

To learn more about the Thing Registry and Thing Types visit the AWS IoT site or AWS developer documentation.  

We are pleased to announce the expansion of the Snowball service to EU (Frankfurt) region. With this launch, AWS Import/Export Snowball is now available in the eight regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (India), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS GovCloud (US). 

AWS Lambda is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. 

AWS Config is a fully managed service that continuously records configurations changes to your resources in AWS and notifies you when your resources change. With AWS Config Rules, you can define guidelines for provisioning and configuring AWS resources and then continuously monitor compliance with those guidelines. 

In October 2015, we announced that you can bring your existing Windows 7 Desktop licenses to Amazon WorkSpaces, a program we call Bring Your Own License (BYOL). Today we are pleased to announce that we are adding Windows 10 Desktop licenses to the BYOL program, allowing you to use the Windows 10 Desktop operating system on your Amazon WorkSpaces running on hardware that is dedicated to you. Just like when you bring your own Windows 7 Desktop licenses, this option entitles you to a discount of $4 per month per WorkSpace, and also allows you to use a single Windows 10 Desktop golden image on-premises and for your Amazon WorkSpaces.

To take advantage of this option, your organization must meet the licensing requirements set by Microsoft, and you must commit to running at least 200 WorkSpaces in a given AWS region each month.

To learn more about this option and the eligibility requirements, please see the Amazon WorkSpaces FAQ page.  

Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) automatic service scaling is now available in five additional regions: US West (N. California), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).

Amazon EC2 Run Command now supports event-driven notifications. You can now monitor the status of your commands either at fleet or instance level, and receive real-time updates. These notifications are supported by Amazon EC2 Run Command or through AWS CloudWatch Events. 

Amazon EC2 Run Command is now available in China (Beijing) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions. AWS customers in these regions can now automate administrative tasks such as executing Linux Shell scripts and commands, running Windows PowerShell commands, installing software or patches, and more across instances. Furthermore, customers can now perform these tasks on instances or virtual machines across any location, enabling hybrid cloud and cross cloud management.

AWS Config continuously records configurations changes to resources in your AWS account and notifies you of these changes through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). Config rules check these resources for compliance with desired configurations you specify. 

We’ve made four of our most popular Technical Bootcamps from AWS re:Invent and Summits part of our broader AWS Training portfolio so you can attend a class convenient to you.

• Taking AWS Operations to Next Level teaches you how to leverage AWS CloudFormation, Chef, and AWS SDKs to automate provisioning and configuration of AWS infrastructure resources and applications. We also cover how to work with AWS Service Catalog. This course is designed for solutions architects and SysOps administrators.
• Securing Next-Gen Applications at Cloud Scale teaches you how to use a DevSecOps approach to design and build robust security controls at cloud scale for next-generation workloads. We cover design considerations of operating high-assurance workloads on the AWS platform. Labs teach you governance, configuration management, trust-decision automation, audit artifact generation, and native integration of tasks into custom software workloads. This course is for security engineers, developers, solutions architects, and other technical security practitioners.
• Running Container-Enabled Microservices on AWS teaches you how to manage and scale container-enabled applications by using Amazon ECS. Labs teach you to use Amazon ECS to handle long-running services, build and deploy container images, link services together, and scale capacity to meet demand. This course is for developers, solutions architects, and system administrators.
• Building a Recommendation Engine on AWS teaches you to build a real-time analytics and geospatial search application using Amazon ES, Amazon DynamoDB, DynamoDB Streams, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3. We discuss a real-world location-aware social application that displays information generated from a model created with Amazon Machine Learning. We also cover best practices for processing and analyzing data, such as the lambda data processing pattern and automating development process, using Swagger, Grunt, and the AWS SDK. This course is for developers, solutions architects, and data scientists.

 

You can find upcoming classes in our Global Class Schedule or learn more at AWS Training.

You now have the ability to quickly and easily delete multiple objects through the Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) console. Interactively select and/or deselect multiple objects, either individually or in bulk, to delete these objects via the Amazon ML console. For instance, once a model is trained to meet your business requirements, you can search, select, and delete the datasources, models, and evaluations produced during the iterative process of model development.

For more information on using this new feature to select and delete multiple objects through the console, visit the Amazon ML documentation.

Starting today you can create a new Amazon Aurora database from an existing MySQL backup. This can be done by creating a backup of your MySQL database using the Percona XtraBackup tool and uploading the file(s) to an Amazon S3 bucket. You can then create a new Aurora cluster from the backup file(s) in Amazon S3, directly through the RDS console.

You can now provision AWS IoT resources using AWS CloudFormation. Visit our documentation to learn more.

AWS Device Farm Remote Access is now generally available. Gesture, swipe, and interact with mobile devices in real time, directly from your web browser. You can use AWS Device Farm Remote Access for manual tasks like debugging new functionality, running manual tests, and reproducing customer issues. Note: New device types will be coming on-line on a daily basis. We use market data and customer feedback to continuously update the fleet.

To learn more see the documentation or visit the AWS Device Farm site.

CloudWatch Events is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create WAV outputs with PCM audio. The WAV format primarily stores raw and uncompressed audio and is ideal for use in editing workflows and for archival. You can try out this format by using the newly available system presets.

To learn more, please consult the Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide.

AWS Mobile Hub now allows you to set the AWS region where you would like your project’s AWS resources to be provisioned. These include – US East (N Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Sydney). Simply login to the AWS Mobile Hub console, create a new project and set the region you would like your resources for that project to be created in. Mobile Hub then uses this setting to provision AWS resources as you enable features like Cloud Logic, NoSQL database and User Data Storage in that region. Additionally, if a particular AWS service needed by a feature is not available in a region that you have provisioned, Mobile Hub will provision services in the nearest region where that AWS service is available.

Start today by visiting AWS Mobile Hub console.

We are pleased to announce that AWS Schema Conversion Tool now supports conversions from Oracle Data Warehouse and Teradata to Amazon Redshift. SCT actively analyzes the application and custom database code in the source data warehouse platform in order to provide optimized DDL statements with appropriate sort and distribution keys for Amazon Redshift.

AWS Database Migration Service now supports continuous data replication. Customers have the option of enabling Multi-AZ which provides a replication stream that is fault tolerant through redundant replication servers. Continuous replication, when combined with DMS’ ability to migrate data between database engines, results in an exponential growth of potential use cases. 

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now allows you to specify an IAM role that can be used by the containers in an ECS task.

We are pleased to announce that you can now add cost allocation tags to your AWS Directory Service directories. Tags make it easier for you to allocate costs and optimize spending by categorizing and grouping AWS resources. For example, you can use tags to group resources by administrator, application name, cost center, or a specific project. 

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is now included in the set of services that are compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS 3.2) Merchant Level 1, the highest level of compliance for service providers.

PCI DSS compliance is a requirement for any business that stores, processes, or transmits credit card data. AWS WAF's PCI compliance now makes it easier for retail e-commerce, travel booking, ticket sale, or in-app purchase applications to integrate AWS WAF as a part of their architecture and adhere to PCI DSS. Customers who need to adhere to PCI compliance, can now use AWS WAF to protect their web applications from common web exploits like SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting, or content abuse like bots and scrappers, or attacks that consume excessive resources (like HTTPS floods).

You can now use Docker Compose version 2 YAML files with the Amazon EC2 Container Service CLI (Amazon ECS CLI) to create an Amazon ECS service. 

This new Quick Start builds a modular Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment on the AWS Cloud to provide a virtual networking foundation for your AWS deployments. 

We are proud to announce the availability of the AWS IoT SDK for Java and the AWS IoT SDK for Python for AWS IoT. 

Starting today, you can integrate with AWS Service Catalog user actions using the API and CLI. Previously, you could integrate with AWS Service Catalog only through the AWS Management Console. Now you can automate call patterns or integrate with your private console. The AWS Service Catalog API and console now support AWS CloudTrail logging.

AWS CloudTrail allows you to look up API calls and notable events that contain relevant details such as the user identity and source IP address of the API caller, and the AWS resources impacted by the API call. With the new capability, you can also access the configuration details of impacted resources and history of changes in AWS Config.  

AWS Config now allows you to delete the configuration recorder using the AWS SDK or CLI.  

AWS IoT is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS region. 

You can now add manual approval actions to different stages of your pipelines in AWS CodePipeline. This allows someone with the proper permissions to approve a code change before it can progress further down your pipeline. Manual approvals make it easier for your team to manage and review code changes before they are deployed. 

We are happy to announce that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with legal entities in countries participating in the European Union (EU) can now register, list, and sell products on AWS Marketplace, bringing a broad new selection to AWS’s worldwide customers.