2017

The AWS Customer Agreement was updated on June 28, 2017.

In this update we are improving the terms of the AWS Customer Agreement related to intellectual property rights. These changes include offering uncapped IP infringement protection and removing the patent non-assert clause. AWS customers do not need to take any action to get the benefit of the updates to the online AWS Customer Agreement. The updates took effect on June 28, 2017, and apply to all customers who use the Services under the online AWS Customer Agreement. AWS Customer Agreement.  

Amazon RDS for Oracle now offers Oracle Standard Edition Two (SE2) as a License Included option in the AWS GovCloud Region. You can also move existing Oracle SE and Oracle SE1 instances to Oracle SE2.

A Client Request Token will now be assigned to each event triggered by a given stack operation performed in the CloudFormation management console. You can easily identify and track the stack operations using the assigned Client Request Token.

You can now create read-replica Apache HBase clusters pointed to the same underlying HBase tables in Amazon S3 on Amazon EMR release 5.7.0. Apache HBase is a distributed, non-relational database built for random, strictly consistent realtime access for tables with billions of rows and millions of columns. By using read-replicas, you can increase availability by creating HBase clusters in different Amazon EC2 Availability Zones that read from the same dataset in Amazon S3.

You can now launch G3 instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Accelerated Compute Instances. G3 instances make it easy to procure a powerful combination of GPU, CPU, and host memory for workloads such as 3D rendering, 3D visualizations, graphics-intensive remote workstations, video encoding, and virtual reality applications.

Amazon RDS now offers SQL Server Enterprise Edition License Included in all AWS commercial regions (non-governmental regions) and on additional instance types, R3 and M4, with a minimum of 4 vCPUs.

The Classic Load Balancers now support four new metrics in CloudWatch. The metrics allow you to infer your bill if you used the Application Load Balancer for the same traffic profile instead of the Classic Load Balancer. This makes it easy for you to migrate from Classic to the Application Load Balancer.

You can now use the AWS IoT console in English, Simplified Chinese, French, and Japanese. The AWS IoT console is the primary tool for interacting with and monitoring AWS IoT. This includes connecting your devices, diving into thing details, finding key resources, and testing with the MQTT client.

We are excited to announce that Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports AWS CodePipeline as a target. Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager now supports cross-platform documents, and now you can use multiple steps of the same type in the same document.

You can now provision AWS Database Migration Service resources using AWS CloudFormation, a service that gives you an easy way to provision and update resources in an orderly and predictable fashion. AWS CloudFormation can save you time, money and frustration during database migrations.

Auto Scaling now supports a new type of scaling policy called target tracking scaling policies that you can use to set up dynamic scaling for your application in just a few simple steps. Adding Auto Scaling to your application is one way to maximize the benefits of AWS. Auto Scaling helps you build systems that respond to changes in demand by automatically launching or terminating Amazon EC2 instances based on conditions that you define. This dynamic scaling helps to improve application availability and reduce costs. For example, you can use Auto Scaling to automatically launch EC2 instances for your Auto Scaling group when demand increases to help maintain performance, and terminate instances when demand drops to save money.

We are pleased to announce that Elastic Load Balancing now supports a new CloudWatch metric called RequestCountPerTarget for Application Load Balancers. The RequestCountPerTarget metric value indicates the average number of requests received by each target in a target group associated with an Application Load Balancer during a specified time period.

The AWS Device Farm Jenkins plugin provides developers with a mechanism for integrating the Device Farm testing service into continuous integration workflows, enabling build, test, and deployment on real devices, which is critical to delivering high quality applications that delight customers. The plugin is now compatible with the latest version of Jenkins.

The AWS Device Farm service now supports Appium version 1.6.5. This latest version now includes: complete support of W3C specification’s capability handling; latest Android SDK directory support; faster screenshot capture on Android 5.0 and higher devices; running tests with iOS 10.3.x and Android 7.x devices; setting the url in native context for opening deep links in iOS.

We are pleased to announce that Amazon Cognito is now HIPAA eligible, has been added to the AWS Business Associate Agreement (BAA), and is PCI compliant. With HIPAA eligibility, Protected Health Information (PHI) can now be used with Amazon Cognito. Our PCI compliance means that merchants and other service providers now have access to an identity platform that has been verified to conform to PCI standards. 

Patch Manager, part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, can now patch Amazon Linux, RHEL, and Ubuntu distributions on your managed instances.

Starting today, RDS for Oracle supports HugePages for large database instances. The use of HugePages improves performance of large databases by reducing CPU time spent on memory management and decreasing the size of page tables.

When S3 Analytics was released in Nov 2016, it gave customers the ability to analyze storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage class. Customers could also manually export the data to an S3 bucket to analyze using the business intelligence tool of their choice and gather deeper insights on usage and growth patterns. This helped customers reduce storage costs while optimizing performance based on usage patterns.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the South America (São Paulo) Region. 

Starting today, you can increase the redundancy and performance of your directory managed by AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, by deploying additional domain controllers.

Today, AWS WAF released a new security whitepaper: Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities. This whitepaper describes how you can use AWS WAF, a web application firewall, to address the top application security flaws as named by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Using AWS WAF, you can write rules to match patterns of exploitation attempts in HTTP/S requests and block requests from reaching your web servers. This whitepaper discusses manifestations of these security vulnerabilities, AWS WAF–based mitigation strategies, and other AWS services or solutions that can help address these threats.

AWS Config now supports tracking changes to AWS CloudFormation stacks. A CloudFormation stack is a collection of AWS resources that you can manage as a single unit. With this release, you can now deep dive into the historical configuration of your CloudFormation stacks and review all changes that occurred to them. For example, you can now determine how your stack policies were changed or what updates were made to the resources within the stack. You can also receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications when those changes occur. In addition, you can run a new managed Config rule to check whether your CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an Amazon SNS topic.

You can now encrypt data in your Amazon Kinesis streams using server-side encryption and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys. Server-side encryption makes it easy to meet strict data management requirements by encrypting your data at rest within Kinesis Streams.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in 30 minutes or less, into a configuration of your choice.

We are excited to announce the availability of APIs and CloudFormation support for Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards. You can use the new dashboard APIs or CloudFormation templates to dynamically build and maintain dashboards to monitor your infrastructure and applications.

Starting today, you can use AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, to help enforce password policies that meet your security standards. AWS has added five password policies to your AWS Microsoft AD directory, and you can configure and manage these policies to enforce different security requirements for different user groups.

You can now provision the following AWS resources using CloudFormation.

• AWS::ApiGateway::DomainName
  • Use the AWS::ApiGateway::DomainName resource to specify a custom, friendly URL for your API that's deployed to Amazon API Gateway.
• AWS::EC2::EgressOnlyInternetGateway
  • Create an egress-only Internet gateway for your VPC with the AWS::EC2::EgressOnlyInternetGateway resource.
• AWS::EMR::InstanceFleetConfig
  • Configure a spot instance fleet for an Amazon EMR cluster using the InstanceFleetConfig resource.

AWS Config now supports pre-built and custom rules in South America (Sao Paulo) and Canada (Central) regions.

Today, we made it easier for you to follow AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices by adding additional information in the Users section of the IAM console. This new information in the IAM user table helps you monitor user activity in your AWS account and identify access keys and passwords that should be rotated regularly. It also enables you to better audit users’ MFA device usage, and gives you better visibility into users’ group memberships. This information is available in all AWS regions today.

Starting today, you can now use email flow rules to filter inbound email traffic for your Amazon WorkMail organizations. This helps you reduce email from unwanted senders, route suspicious mail to junk folders, and make sure important messages are successfully delivered.

We are excited to announce that CloudWatch Events now allows different AWS accounts to share events with each other. You can now collect all your events from different AWS accounts to a single account. These events can be EC2 events, AWS API call events, AWS health events, and more. Please see the list of supported events here.  

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition customers can use Federated Single Sign-On (SSO) using SAML 2.0 to access QuickSight. This allows users to sign in to their Identity Provider portals with existing credentials and then access QuickSight with a single click, without having to enter any QuickSight-specific account names or passwords. With Federated SSO and QuickSight’s permissions-based just-in-time user provisioning capabilities, AWS administrators can use existing identity management mechanisms to enable QuickSight access for thousands of users with a few clicks. 

Amazon Connect now allows you to use Amazon Lex chatbots with your contact flows. With Amazon Lex chatbots, you can add self-service, natural language voice conversations to your contact center customer interactions.

The Amazon Lex speech recognition engine has now been trained on telephony audio (8 kHz) to provide increased speech recognition accuracy for conversations over the phone. Amazon Lex enables your users to interact with your application via natural conversation using the same deep learning technology as Amazon Alexa to fulfill most common requests. Amazon Lex chatbots maintain context and manage the dialogue, dynamically adjusting the responses based on the conversation. 

AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline are Now Available in US West (San Francisco), EU (London), and Canada (Central) Regions. 

CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools. 

Amazon GameLift now emits logs that help you debug fleet creation. Logs give you greater visibility into build extraction, installation, and runtime configuration validation that help you debug issues seen during fleet creation. After your fleet is created, you can still continue debugging instances of your game server using Amazon GameLift’s server logs and remote instance functionality. 

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager can now send inventory data to Amazon S3 buckets, enabling data queries and visualization across multiple accounts and regions. 

The AWS Database Migration Service makes it easy for you to migrate production databases to AWS with minimal downtime. You can keep your applications running while you are migrating your database and the AWS Database Migration Service ensures that data changes to the source database that occur during and after the migration are continuously replicated to the target. Migration tasks can be setup in minutes in the AWS Management Console. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from all widely used database platforms, such as Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. The service supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to PostgreSQL, PostgreSQL to MySQL, or even to Amazon Redshift and Amazon DynamoDB. The AWS Database Migration service can be used to perform one-time migrations, or can maintain continuous replication between databases without a customer having to install or configure any complex software. 

You can now easily develop, build, and deploy cross-platform .NET Core applications with AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeStar. 

AWS Direct Connect is announcing general availability of Amazon CloudWatch monitoring for customers’ physical connections to all AWS Regions worldwide except China. AWS Direct Connect customers can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metrics to monitor their physical connections, and use Amazon CloudWatch Alarms to notify them of changes in their physical AWS Direct Connect connection and to trigger actions with the help of Amazon SNS topics. 

Today we announced the availability of Amazon WorkSpaces Power bundles. These new bundles offer a workstation class, cloud-based virtual desktop designed to meet the needs of power desktop users, such as developers and analysts. Developers can use the WorkSpaces Power bundle to run integrated developer environments (IDE) in the cloud, using applications like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, and Eclipse. With WorkSpaces Power bundles, your development environment is always running, and you can access it from the device of your choice. Analysts can use WorkSpaces Power bundles to run simulations and statistical analysis, using applications like MatLab, GNU Octave, and Stata. When you’re performing analysis on datasets stored on AWS, WorkSpaces Power bundles provide a fast, low-latency user experience because your WorkSpace sits close to your data.

AWS Service Catalog, the recommended tool for managing your approved software and infrastructure products on AWS, has announced a new feature called TagOptions Library to give customers, especially large enterprises, a better way to govern their AWS footprint. 

AWS CloudTrail, a service that continuously monitors and logs your AWS account activity, now allows Amazon CloudWatch Events APIs to be viewed in the CloudTrail console API Activity History page. Previously, CloudWatch Events API actions were available in the S3 bucket log files. Now, you can look up these actions using the API Activity History page, CLI, or the CloudTrail API. This launch also includes additional APIs for the API Activity History page for Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Kinesis, AWS CloudHSM, and AWS Storage Gateway. You can use the API Activity History page to search for create, modify, and delete event activity from these services using a set of predefined filters. For read-only API activity, go to your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Please visit AWS CloudTrail product page for more information. 

The Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) RunTask and StartTask APIs now support three additional parameters in task definitions: cpu, memory, and memoryReservation. These additional override parameters make it easier to manage containers through the ECS API. 

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and resource requirements of jobs submitted to job queues. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters, allowing you to instead focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads which run on Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances. 

Amazon Connect now supports seven new languages, including Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese. This update provides you with a localized view when accessing the Amazon Connect management console, as well as your Amazon Connect contact center instances. 

Amazon Connect is a simple to use, self-service, cloud-based contact center offering you can use to deliver more engaging customer service experiences. The self-service graphical interface makes it easy to design contact flows, manage agent utilization, and track performance metrics. Setting up a cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect requires just a few clicks in the Amazon Connect console, allowing your agents to take calls within minutes.

Amazon Connect, a simple to use, cloud-based contact center service, now provides a real-time performance dashboard so that you can quickly monitor the overall health of your contact center. The dashboard provides visibility into important information, which helps you deliver a better customer support experience, and improve the utilization of your agents. 

Amazon RDS now supports encryption at rest for db.t2.small and db.t2.medium database instances. This support is available for the MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server database engines, and can use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) or the engines’ Transparent Data Encryption technologies if available. 

AWS Direct Connect now has two new locations in LG U+ Pyeong-Chon Mega Center, Seoul, South Korea, and Menara AIMS, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia supporting the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions respectively. Customers in these cities can now establish a dedicated network connection from their premise to AWS. 

AWS Greengrass is software that lets you run local compute, messaging, data and state synchronization for connected devices in a secure way. With AWS Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet. Using AWS Lambda, Greengrass ensures your IoT devices can respond quickly to local events, operate with intermittent connections, and minimize the cost of transmitting IoT data to the cloud. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Windows Server 2016 (Full) and Windows Server 2016 (Server Core) running IIS 10.0.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a modern enterprise data warehouse (EDW) environment based on Amazon Redshift, with the analytics and data visualization capabilities of Tableau Server, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

AWS Storage Gateway has expanded file gateway to run on Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 and 2012, in addition to the VMware and Amazon EC2 options previously available.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager now supports parameter hierarchy, tagging, and notifications, available through the Parameter Store capability.

Starting today, you can view the history of your pipeline executions in AWS CodePipeline. This enables you to easily manage and understand your day-to-day software release workflow by giving you visibility into the history of your pipeline activities.

AWS CodeBuild now provides notifications when your software builds change their state (start, succeed, or fail). This makes it easy for you to track the status of your builds eliminating the need to set up API polls. Now, you can integrate the notifications with Amazon Simple Notification Service and Amazon Cloud Watch enabling you to easily monitor, log, and set alarms for these notifications. Learn how to configure CodeBuild notifications by visiting here.

Amazon Athena is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

With the latest release customers can now use Amazon Athena in the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

To learn more, please visit the Amazon Athena page.

We are making a change to how we present CloudWatch charges in your AWS bill and Cost and Usage Reports, to make it easy for you to understand your monthly CloudWatch spend. These changes will be effective in all AWS Commercial regions beginning July 2017.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server now allows you to launch M4 instances in the South America (São Paulo) region. Amazon RDS is a managed database service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

AWS Lambda is now available in the Canada (Central) Region.

Amazon API Gateway is now available in the Canada (Central) Region.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Route 53 now supports multivalue answers in response to DNS queries. While not a substitute for a load balancer, the ability to return multiple health-checkable IP addresses in response to DNS queries is a way to use DNS to improve availability and load balancing.

If you want to route traffic approximately randomly to multiple resources, such as web servers, you can create one multivalue answer record for each resource and, optionally, associate an Amazon Route 53 health check with each record. For example, suppose you manage an HTTP web service with a dozen web servers that each have their own IP address. No one web server could handle all of the traffic, but if you create a dozen multivalue answer records, Amazon Route 53 responds to DNS queries with up to eight healthy records in response to each DNS query. Amazon Route 53 gives different answers to different DNS resolvers. If a web server becomes unavailable after a resolver caches a response, client software can try another IP address in the response.

You can create multivalue answer records programmatically, using the Amazon Route 53 API, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. At launch, you can also create multivalue answer records using the traffic flow feature in the Amazon Route 53 console. To learn more, see the Amazon Route 53 documentation.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring you to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Now you can simply focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced Rate-based Rules for AWS WAF. This new rule type protects customer websites and APIs from threats such as web-layer DDoS attacks, brute force login attempts and bad bots. Rate Based Rules are automatically triggered when web requests from a client exceed a certain configurable threshold.

AWS Budgets lets you set custom AWS cost and usage budgets and receive notifications if your budget thresholds are breached. You can set budgets to monitor your total monthly costs or use the available filtering dimensions to track the costs associated with a specific linked account, usage associated with an AWS service, costs by one or more tagged groups, and more. Starting today, your linked accounts will also have access to AWS Budgets. 

Amazon WorkSpaces now provides you additional options to manage which client devices can access your WorkSpaces. This new feature allows you to limit WorkSpaces access to trusted devices only. You can manage access to your WorkSpaces from macOS and Microsoft Windows PCs using your digital certificates. You can also allow or block access for iOS, Android, Chrome OS, and zero clients, as well as the WorkSpaces Web Access client. With these new capabilities, you can further improve your security posture.

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) can now export data from a wider range of commercial data warehouses. You can convert and extract data from legacy versions of Teradata (version 13 and above) and Oracle Data Warehouse (version 10g and above) for direct import into Amazon Redshift, without first performing an in-place upgrade.

We are excited to announce that Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon Kinesis Firehose as a target. Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic.

Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in the AWS EU (Frankfurt) region. This increases the number of available regions to twelve, giving you another option for database placement, availability and scalability.

Customers are now able to use three Availability Zones (AZs) in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. We launched the third AZ in response to continued growth in the use of AWS in Germany and to provide customers with additional flexibility to architect applications across multiple AZs in Germany for high availability and fault tolerance. This launch brings AWS's global AZ total to 43 AZs within 16 geographic Regions around the world.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now provides built-in user management and web portals for users. These features allow you to easily onboard your users from within the AppStream 2.0 management console, without having to create a custom identity solution or use SAML 2.0 federation. In just a few clicks, you can create and manage users, grant them access to applications, and send them welcome e-mails with login information. The users you create within AppStream 2.0 can then use a web portal to log in and choose the applications they want to use.

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and resource requirements of jobs submitted to job queues. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters, allowing you to instead focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads which run on Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances. 

AWS has expanded its HIPAA Compliance Program to include Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Amazon SNS to build HIPAA-compliant applications and publish messages to healthcare systems that contain protected health information (PHI). Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. With Amazon SNS, you can use topics to decouple message publishers from subscribers and fanout messages to multiple recipients. Information about HIPAA eligible services on AWS can be found at our HIPAA Compliance page. 

You can now configure Amazon CloudWatch Events as an event source for your AWS Lambda functions using the Lambda console. CloudWatch Events delivers a near real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources. You can create CloudWatch Events rules to match incoming system events, and route these events to your Lambda functions for processing. 

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) First-in, First-out (FIFO) queues in the US East (N. Virginia) region. FIFO queues are designed to ensure that the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved and that each message is processed exactly once. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function improves scalability and reliability. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager now supports instances running SUSE Linux.

AWS CodeStar is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail, enabling you to access the log of AWS CodeStar API calls through AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail records API calls for your account and delivers log files to your Amazon S3 bucket. CloudTrail logs can be used to enable security analysis, track changes to your AWS resources, and aid in compliance auditing. Integrating CodeStar and CloudTrail lets you determine which requests were made to the CodeStar APIs, the source IP address from which each request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and more. You can turn on CloudTrail from the AWS Management Console in two clicks. To learn more about CloudTrail, visit the CloudTrail user guide.

AWS X-Ray now supports visualizing client and server latency distributions for services in your application. You can visually isolate performance outliers, identify trends, and understand patterns impacting your application performance.

Starting today, when you create a new DynamoDB table using the AWS Management Console, the table will have Auto Scaling enabled by default. DynamoDB Auto Scaling automatically adjusts read and write throughput capacity, in response to dynamically changing request volumes, with zero downtime.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) and AWS World Wide Public Sector Partner Program is thrilled to announce the addition of the AWS Education Competency to the Competency program. The AWS Competency Program is designed to highlight APN Partners who have demonstrated industry expertise and readily implemented solutions that align with AWS architectural best practices.

You can now use the AWS Deep Learning AMIs with Apache MXNet v0.10 and TensorFlow v1.1 for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu in US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Sydney). The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are also available in the following public AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).

Starting today, you can copy Amazon RDS Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) encrypted database snapshots across AWS Regions. This includes databases encrypted with Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), Microsoft SQL Server TDE, and snapshots created from SQL Server Multi-AZ instances.

Starting today AWS Mobile Hub has added a new feature making it easier for GitHub community developers to directly deploy AWS cloud resources from GitHub with a click of a button and build cloud-enabled mobile, web or hybrid applications.

Amazon Aurora now provides an easy, cost-effective way to create database clones. Cloning is useful for a number of purposes including application development, testing, database updates, and running analytical queries, all without impacting the production environment.

Amazon Rekognition is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

AWS Trusted Advisor now helps you better secure your data by alerting you whenever it detects a public snapshot of your Amazon EBS or Amazon RDS data.

For example, if an Amazon EBS volume snapshot is made public, AWS Trusted Advisor will identify that public snapshot and provide you with an alert so that you can investigate whether it was done intentionally.

These new checks are available to all AWS customers at no additional charge. Business and Enterprise support customers can use these new checks to enable automated actions via Trusted Advisor's integration with CloudWatch Events.

For more information about AWS Trusted Advisor, visit Trusted Advisor Best Practices (Checks).

Starting today Amazon Pinpoint adds SMS Text and Email Messaging support in addition to Mobile Push Notifications, providing developers, product managers and marketers with multi-channel messaging capabilities to drive user engagement in their applications. Pinpoint also enables backend services and applications to message users directly and provides advanced user and app analytics to understand user behavior and messaging performance.

Amazon Athena is now available in the Europe (Ireland) region.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

With the latest release customers can now use Amazon Athena in the following regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). To learn more, please visit the Amazon Athena page.

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

You can now use Amazon Rekognition to detect and recognize hundreds of thousands of individuals who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in their field, from movies, television, politics, business, and sports. The Celebrity Recognition feature allows you to index and quickly search digital image libraries for celebrities based on your particular interest. Just as with other Amazon Rekognition APIs, the RecognizeCelebrities API is integrated with Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda, to process hundreds of millions of images per day, whether it be on-demand, in batch, or in near real-time. The RecognizeCelebrities API provides the name and unique identifier of the celebrity, along with a confidence score, and a link to additional information, for example, the celebrity's IMDB link.

AWS Config rules are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) First-in, First-out (FIFO) queues in the EU (Ireland) region. FIFO queues are designed to ensure that the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved and that each message is processed exactly once. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function improves scalability and reliability. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.

AWS Marketplace, which lists over 3,800 software listings from popular software vendors across 35 product categories, has announced that SaaS sellers can now log metering records using AWS CloudTrail in all regions. CloudTrail is a service that enables operational auditing of your AWS account along with governance, compliance, and risk auditing. AWS Marketplace now delivers all SaaS Marketplace Metering Service metering records to CloudTrail to help sellers with their operational auditing. Sellers can use CloudTrail logs to help test new SaaS applications, while onboarding to AWS Marketplace, or to confirm that records have been received by the Marketplace Metering Service.

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now supports the ability to run tasks on a regular, scheduled basis and in response to CloudWatch Events. This makes it easier to launch and stop container services that you need to run only at certain times.

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. With this release, features such as Partitioning, Compression and Always Encrypted, which were previously available only in the Enterprise Edition, are available across all SQL Server Editions offered in Amazon RDS.

The AWS IoT Button for developers is now available in Europe. Starting today, the button can be ordered in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain from the local Amazon retail websites. The AWS IoT Button is a Wi-Fi device that can be used to test, pilot and deploy innovative ideas without the need for development of additional hardware, firmware or networking protocols. A wide variety of use cases can be addressed using the AWS IoT button including home automation, ordering, feedback, notification, integration with third party APIs and many others.

Starting now, AWS Greengrass is available to all customers. AWS Greengrass is software that lets you run local compute, messaging, data and state synchronization for connected devices in a secure way. With AWS Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet. Using AWS Lambda, Greengrass ensures your IoT devices can respond quickly to local events, operate with intermittent connections, and minimize the cost of transmitting IoT data to the cloud.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is thrilled to announce the launch of the new AWS Storage Competency for Consulting Partners. The AWS Competency Program is designed to highlight APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas and categories.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is thrilled to announce the launch of the new Security Competency for Consulting Partners. The AWS Competency Program is designed to highlight APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas and categories.

CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.

You can now create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Spot fleet directly from the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) console. Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 compute capacity, allowing operating cost reductions of 50-90% compared to EC2 On-Demand instances.

Amazon Inspector is now available in the US West (Northern California) region.

You can now customize the default responses returned by Amazon API Gateway for API requests that are not successfully forwarded to your integration backend. You can modify each part of the response generated by API Gateway, such as HTTP status code, header, or response body.

Amazon API Gateway has raised the default limit on requests made to your API to 10,000 requests per second (RPS) from 1,000 RPS. The burst limit has been raised to 5,000 requests across all APIs in your account from the original limit of 2,000 requests. API Gateway throttles requests to your API to prevent it from being overwhelmed by too many requests. To raise the default limit, contact AWS Support.

You can now provision the following AWS resources using CloudFormation.

Starting today AWS Mobile Hub has added new features making it easier for JavaScript developers to build cloud-enabled mobile web or hybrid apps for both testing and production environments.

Amazon API Gateway is now available in the South America (São Paulo) region.

AWS Lambda is now available in the South America (São Paulo) region.

You can now use Apache MXNet v0.10 and TensorFlow v1.1 with the AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu. Apache MXNet announced version 0.10, available at http://mxnet.io, with significant improvements to documentation and tutorials including updated installation guides for running MXNet on various operating systems and environments, such as NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2. In addition, current tutorials have been augmented with definitions for basic concepts around foundational development components. API documentation is now more comprehensive, with accompanying samples. Python PIP install packages are now available for the v0.10 release, making it easy to install MXNet on Mac OSX or Linux CPU or GPU environments. These packages also include Intel’s Math Kernel Library (MKL) support for acceleration of math routines on Intel CPUs.

Earlier this year, Amazon DynamoDB released Time-to-Live (TTL), which automatically deletes expired items from your tables, at no additional cost. TTL eliminates the complexity and cost of scanning tables and deleting items that you don't want to retain, saving you money on provisioned throughput and storage.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks now supports custom tagging for AWS resources, improving the ability to organize your resources and report on AWS cost allocation. Previously, you had to manually add and maintain custom tags on all OpsWorks managed resources. Now you can leverage OpsWorks for tag management. After you apply tags to a stack or layer, OpsWorks propagates the tags down to Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Elastic Block Store resources. This makes it easy to break down costs on an environment, application, or software component level. You can apply tags through the OpsWorks console, the CLI, SDK, or API.

Amazon WorkDocs has added a set of APIs to the WorkDocs Administrative SDK. These new APIs allow you to programmatically access and update metadata, tags, and collaborative comments. With these APIs, you can integrate WorkDocs into your applications, use compliance tools such as data loss prevention with WorkDocs, and easily migrate content into WorkDocs.

You can now use new versions of Apache Spark (2.1.1), Apache HBase (1.3.1), Apache Flink (1.2.1), and Apache Mahout (0.13.0) on Amazon EMR release 5.6.0. Each of these updated versions contains bug fixes and minor improvements. Also, Mahout 0.13.0 now supports Spark 2.x. Additionally, you can now enable in-transit data encryption using SSL/TLS for Presto when using an Amazon EMR security configuration. 

AWS IoT customers can now route messages from devices directly to Salesforce IoT Cloud with a new AWS IoT Rules Engine Action.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by volunteers and available for use under an open license. Anyone can use OSM to provide maps, directions, and geographic context to users around the world. In the 12 years of OSM’s existence, editors have created and modified several billion features (physical things on the ground like roads or buildings). As new users join the open mapping community, more and more valuable data is being added to OpenStreetMap, requiring increasingly powerful tools, interfaces, and approaches to explore it.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support minor versions 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11 and 9.3.16 in the AWS GovCloud Region.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers a Free Tier for first time Workspaces customers, designed to allow hands-on experience of the service at no cost. The Free Tier offer provides two Standard bundle WorkSpaces for up to 40 hours of combined use per month, for two calendar months, from the time you create your first WorkSpace.

AWS Certificate Manager is a new service in the AWS GovCloud (US) region that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. AWS Certificate Manager removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates. With AWS Certificate Manager, you can quickly request a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancers or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle certificate renewals. SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free. You pay only for the AWS resources you create to run your application.

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight customers can leverage Amazon Redshift Spectrum to visualize and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data in their Amazon S3 “data lake” – without having to load or transform any data. In addition, customers can now visualize combined data sets that include frequently accessed data stored in Amazon Redshift and bulk data sets stored cost-effectively in Amazon S3 using the same SQL syntax of Amazon Redshift. 

You can now use the SELECT INTO OUTFILE S3 SQL statement to query data from an Amazon Aurora database cluster and save it directly into text files in an Amazon S3 bucket. This means you no longer need the two-step process of bringing the data to the SQL client and then copying it from the client to Amazon S3. It’s an easy way to export data selectively to Amazon Redshift or any other application.

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) Quick Start. This release supports the deployment of up to four RD Gateway instances in an Auto Scaling group on the AWS Cloud. The update also includes portability enhancements to make it easier to customize the Quick Start for your specific scenario. 

AWS has expanded its HIPAA Compliance Program to include Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield as HIPAA eligible Services. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Amazon CloudFront to accelerate the delivery of protected health information (PHI), Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster transfers of PHI to and from Amazon S3, AWS WAF to protect your web applications from common web exploits, and AWS Shield to safeguard your web applications running on AWS from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Information on HIPAA eligible services on AWS can be found at our HIPAA Compliance page.

AWS Config now supports tracking of Amazon CloudWatch alarm configurations. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use CloudWatch to access up-to-the-minute statistics, collect metrics, and set alarms for your metric data to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment. With this integration, you can now use Config to view the historical configuration of your CloudWatch alarms and review all changes that occurred to them. For example, you can now determine why CloudWatch alarms did not get triggered and receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications when your alarm configurations change. 

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in EU (Frankfurt) and GovCloud (US) regions. AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations. 

Today we launched the public beta of new features for Amazon Cognito User Pools that enable web and mobile app developers to easily add a sign in user experience and integrate SAML-based identity providers (IdPs). Now Amazon Cognito provides built-in user forms for sign up and sign in along with OAuth2 support. You can customize the built-in user experience and add it to your app with just a few lines of code. Your users can sign-in with your own user directory provided by Cognito User Pools or through corporate IdPs such as Microsoft Active Directory through SAML 2.0 federation.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) has introduced AWS X-Ray support. You can now configure the X-Ray tracing mode for your Lambda functions within your SAM template. X-Ray helps you analyze and debug distributed applications. With X-Ray, you can identify the root cause of performance issues and errors in your Lambda functions. Learn more in our documentation.

Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server now allows you to easily stop and start your database instances. This makes it easy and affordable to use databases for development and test purposes, where the database is not required to be running all of the time. 

Your analytics and search applications can now benefit from support for Elasticsearch 5.3 and Kibana 5.3 in Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Elasticsearch is a popular search and analytics engine for log analytics, full text search, application monitoring, and more. Amazon Elasticsearch Service delivers Elasticsearch’s easy-to-use APIs and real-time capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security required by production workloads. 

AWS Batch is now available in the US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions. 

AWS Direct Connect now has three new locations in the Digital Realty ATL1 and ATL2, Atlanta facility, Cologix COL2 Columbus, OH facility, and Allied 250 Front St W, Toronto, Canada facility supporting the US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio) and Canada (Central) AWS Regions respectively. Customers in these cities can now establish a dedicated network connection from their premise to AWS. 

Starting today, you can create and search relationships across hierarchies in Amazon Cloud Directory by using typed links. With typed links, you can build directories that can be searched across hierarchies more efficiently by filtering your queries based on relationship type. Typed links also enable you to model different types of relationships between objects in different hierarchies and to use relationships to prevent objects from being deleted accidentally.

Amazon Lightsail is now available in four Asia Pacific Regions – Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, and Sydney. 

Introducing two new AWS Certification Specialty exams and our new AWS Certification Benefits Program. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 P2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now allows you to control network traffic between your streaming instances and the resources in your VPC by using security groups. Security groups provide granular, network-level access controls to streaming instances, and you can use them to manage users’ access to databases, license servers, file shares, or application servers from the streamed applications they use. 

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight customers can use Federated Single Sign-On (SSO) using SAML 2.0 to access QuickSight. This allows users to sign in to their Identity Provider portals with existing credentials and then access QuickSight with a single click, without having to enter any QuickSight-specific account names or passwords.

Today, we added three new features to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy summaries to make it easier for you to understand and troubleshoot your IAM policies. Policy summaries now include the resources defined in the policy to make it easier for you to see the list of resources to which the policy controls access. You can also see which services and actions are not granted by a policy. This allows you to view the remaining actions available for a service with limited access to help you find actions you may want to include in the policy. Finally, you can now see unrecognized services and actions in policy summaries, which makes it easier for you to identify potential typos in your policies. To learn more about these new features in policy summaries, see the blog post and IAM documentation.

CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.

Amazon WorkDocs now allows you to lock files for editing, and unlock them when you’ve finished making changes. Locking a file ensures that your edits are not overwritten by others, and it eliminates the need to coordinate between users when making changes. This makes it easier to use Amazon WorkDocs for collaborative editing.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Linux kernel huge pages for increased database scalability. The use of huge pages results in smaller page tables and less CPU time spent on memory management, increasing the performance of large database instances. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports multiple page sizes for PostgreSQL versions 9.4.11 and later, 9.5.6 and later, and 9.6.2 and later.

The Oracle April 2017 Patch Set Updates (PSU) are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about the Oracle PSUs supported on Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS patch update documentation.

Amazon Inspector is pleased to announce expanded support for security assessments on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS 6, and CentOS 7 within Amazon EC2. Amazon Inspector now supports security assessments for these operating systems on versions 6.2 through 6.9, 7.2, and 7.3. You can now run assessments for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Amazon Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis on these supported versions. To run security assessments, simply install the Amazon Inspector AWS Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Amazon Inspector console, and run your assessment.

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) server-side encryption (SSE) integrated with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) in the US East (N. Virginia) region. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices – at any scale. You can use Amazon SQS to take advantage of the scale, cost, and operational benefits of a managed messaging service. The addition of server-side encryption allows you to transmit sensitive data with the increased security of using encrypted queues. 

We are excited to announce a new edge location for Amazon CloudFront in Seattle, Washington. Each new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application.

For tape gateway users, you can now retrieve archived virtual tapes into your Virtual Tape Library (VTL) in as little as 3-5 hours. Prior to this launch, tape retrieval could take up to 24 hours. This faster access can help you speed up recovery of archived data. Additionally, to help you manage your virtual tapes, we have enhanced the tape gateway console and API to show the date and time a tape was created, and the amount of data written to each virtual tape.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. 

AWS Direct Connect now has two new locations in Interxion, Marseille, France and Equinix, Warsaw, Poland supporting the EU (Ireland) and EU (Frankfurt) AWS Regions respectively. Customers in these cities can now establish a dedicated network connection from their premise to AWS.

Today we are announcing that Amazon EBS now supports cost allocation tags for EBS snapshots within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboard. Using cost allocation tags, you can now classify snapshot costs to match the needs of your business for better transparency and visibility. You can use this feature to allocate snapshot costs to internal teams or to provide accurate reports for customer billing. With this additional information, you can better manage your snapshot costs.

Today, the Resource Groups Tagging API introduced a pagination parameter to the GetResources action that makes it easier for you to manage lists of resources returned by your queries. Using this parameter, you can list resources that are associated with specific tags or resource types, and limit result sets to a specific number per page. Previously, you could list resources only by the number of tags. With this release, you also can return all resources that meet your query criteria in a single call using the updated AWS CLI.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports application deployment on Amazon EC2 F1 instances. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code. To learn more about F1, visit Amazon EC2 F1 Instances. 

This new Quick Start automatically deploys GitHub Enterprise on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, to provide a configurable infrastructure for your coding and deployment tasks. 

You can now run queries on Amazon Athena via the REST API using the AWS SDK available in Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, and C++. Please visit the API reference and CLI guide to learn more. To help you get started, you can use new code samples that illustrate running & stopping a query, creating, listing and deleting saved queries, and listing your query execution history. With the current release, you can now run queries via the console, JDBC driver or using the API. We have also updated the JDBC driver to support the new APIs. 

You now have the choice of a second female German voice, Vicki, in addition to the German male voice Hans, and female voice Marlene. Vicki is a high-quality, TTS voice of a similar fluency and naturalness as the German voice of Alexa, able to fluently and intelligibly pronounce Anglicisms frequently used in German texts, including fully inflected version.

With the addition of this new female German voice, there are now a total of 48 voices in Amazon Polly’s Text-to-Speech portfolio. All 48 Amazon Polly voices are accessible worldwide from the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). 

AWS Lambda is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of CloudWatch Events in our AWS GovCloud (US) region. With this new region, CloudWatch Events is now operating at sixteen AWS regions worldwide, bringing the total number of AWS Availability Zones to forty two. You can learn more about our growing global infrastructure footprint at our Global Infrastructure page.

You can now use Nouvola as a test action in your software release pipelines modeled in AWS CodePipeline. This lets you automate performance and release testing for your applications so issues are caught earlier and code is tested against real-world traffic scenarios before it’s released to production. Nouvola offers real-world performance and load testing for web, mobile, API and IoT applications so you can release better code faster.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys HashiCorp Nomad, which is a distributed cluster manager and scheduler for deploying applications, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now provides users with persistent storage, backed by Amazon S3. Users can access a home folder on their streaming instance, and save content in this folder for use between streaming sessions. Users can also download and upload files in the home folder directly from a web browser, when connected to a streaming session. All files are stored in an S3 bucket, which is automatically created in your AWS account.

AWS Training and Certification can help you get more out of the AWS Cloud. And now, the AWS Training and Certification Portal allows you to access and manage your training and certification activities, progress, and benefits – all in one place. Previously, you had to rely on multiple websites to find and manage training and certification offerings. Now you have a central place where you can find and enroll in AWS Training, register for AWS Certification exams, track your learning progress, and access benefits based on the AWS Certifications you have achieved. This makes it easier for you to build your AWS Cloud skills and advance toward earning AWS Certification. 

Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Lightsail in 5 additional AWS Regions in Europe, US East, and US West – Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Ohio, and Oregon. 

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation adds stack creation and deletion, sleep, image copy, and tagging action-types.  

Today, we made it easier for you to run Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server Always On availability groups in the AWS Cloud. With AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, you can now migrate additional Windows workloads such as SharePoint and SQL Server Always On availability groups without the complexity of building and maintaining your own Active Directory (AD) infrastructure. Using the AD security features announced recently, you can provide single sign-on (SSO) to Microsoft SharePoint by using AWS Microsoft AD, and improve the security of SQL Server Always On availability groups.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor all of your Amazon GameLift resources and react to emergent issues in real-time. With CloudWatch, you can create at-a-glance dashboards to better understand player behavior and game performance. You can also create custom alarms to help identify issues before they impact your players. Amazon GameLift metrics are automatically available in CloudWatch as long as your fleet is active. 

You can now choose how AWS CodeDeploy handles files on an instance that were not part of the previous deployment. Previously, CodeDeploy would fail the deployment when it detected a discrepancy between the files present at a target location and those in the last successful deployment. Now, you can choose how CodeDeploy responds (e.g., fail the deployment, retain the content, or overwrite the content) when encountering such files for each deployment.

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the MongoDB Quick Start to support MongoDB versions 3.2 and 3.4. This update also includes enhancements to the networking infrastructure for the MongoDB deployment through the use of bastion hosts and managed NAT gateways. 

AWS X-Ray’s integration with AWS Lambda is now generally available for all customers. You can use AWS X-Ray to trace requests made to your serverless applications built using AWS Lambda. This enables you to gain insights into the performance of serverless applications, allowing you to pinpoint the root cause of issues so that you can address them. 

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is now available in the China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet. 

Today we are announcing the general availability of the new Amazon S3 console to all users in all regions. The new Amazon S3 console provides a new user interface, a streamlined user experience, and introduces user interface support for two new S3 features – object-level tagging and storage analytics. Many S3 users having been experiencing the new Amazon S3 console by opting-in as part of our original launch of the new Amazon S3 console at re:invent 2016. Now all S3 users get this experience without any additional work. 

AWS Direct Connect now has two new locations in Philadelphia and Newark supporting the US East (Northern Virginia) AWS Region. Customers in these cities can now establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. 

You can now define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to provide control over which Auto Scaling resources users can access, and the actions that they are permitted to perform on these resources. Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define. You can use Auto Scaling to help ensure that you are running your desired number of Amazon EC2 instances. With resource-level permissions, you can enable different users within an organization, such as application developers and IT specialists, to access and modify Launch Configurations and Auto Scaling groups with appropriately configured permissions. 

Today we are announcing the availability of CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections. Each VPN connection now collects and publishes a variety of tunnel metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. These metrics will allow you to monitor tunnel health, activity, and create automated actions. 

AWS CodeDeploy is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) region. CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and instances running on-premises. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications. You can use AWS CodeDeploy to automate software deployments, eliminating the need for error-prone manual operations, and the service scales with your infrastructure so you can easily deploy to one instance or thousands.

Starting today you can provision AWS WAF on Application Load Balancer resources using AWS CloudFormation.

Today, we made it easier in AWS Organizations for you to retrieve and view the email addresses of member accounts in your organization. You can use email addresses as another way to identify individual accounts in your organization.

We are pleased to announce that Elastic Load Balancing now provides an API that can be used to access service limits for Application Load Balancers and Classic Load Balancers. Prior to the availability of this API, customers needed to contact AWS Support or use Trusted Advisor in order to check their existing service limits for load balancers.

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) can now extract data from a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse for direct import into Amazon Redshift. This follows the recently announced capability to convert SQL Server data warehouse schemas.

Starting today, customers running Amazon WorkSpaces in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS region can use AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps to purchase pre-packaged applications on a monthly subscription basis.

Today, we enabled additional Active Directory (AD) features in AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, that make it easier to migrate more .NET applications to the AWS Cloud. You can now improve the security of .NET applications by using group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA) and Kerberos constrained delegation (KCD) enabled features. With gMSA, you can narrow permissions to your account, thereby reducing risks by not using built-in user accounts with full server control. gMSA makes it easier to manage .NET applications by creating and rotating the account password automatically, and a single account can be used by one or more application servers.

Amazon WorkMail now supports the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol for sending email, which allows you to use an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) capable email client to send email through WorkMail. Previously, you could use an IMAP email client to access your WorkMail email, but to send email, you still needed to configure an SMTP end point using a service like Amazon Simple Email Service. With this new feature, you can use your IMAP email client to access and send email through Amazon WorkMail directly. 

AWS CloudTrail now enables you to send S3 data events recorded by CloudTrail to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for search, alerting, or additional analysis. CloudTrail data events allow you to record detailed S3 object-level API activity, such as the AWS account of the caller, IP address of the API call, and time of the API call. Previously, only management events could be delivered to CloudWatch Logs. Now, both management events and object-level Amazon S3 data events can be delivered to CloudWatch Logs. For example, you can now create alarms and receive notifications when you create, modify, or delete a file in your S3 bucket.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

AWS X-Ray is now available in the Europe (London) and Canada (Central) regions.

We are excited to announce new edge locations for Amazon CloudFront in Tokyo, Japan and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Each new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application.

USAspending.gov data is now available for anyone to access via Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). USAspending.gov is a government website launched in 2007 to provide access to the federal spending data mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. USAspending.gov includes data on all spending by the federal government, including contracts, grants, loans, employee salaries, and more. This data can be used by researchers, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in analyzing how federal tax dollars are spent. Learn more about how to access the data on the USAspending.gov on AWS landing page and on Jeff Barr's blog.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), and EU (London) regions.

AWS and Ionic, one of the leading open source frameworks for building mobile applications using standard web technologies (JavaScript, Angular, CSS), have introduced a sample application on GitHub that shows how to quickly and easily build AWS backend services for Ionic applications.

Amazon Chime has added two new capabilities to simplify end user management. First, you can now claim your corporate domain to use with Amazon Chime, which means that any user that signs up for Amazon Chime using an email address in your corporate domain is automatically added to your Amazon Chime account. Second, you can now configure Amazon Chime to use your Microsoft Active Directory (AD) for user management and authentication. This allows you to manage your users individually or in groups, easily assign Amazon Chime subscriptions to specific users or groups in your organization, and to apply the password policies you’ve already set to Amazon Chime. End users don’t need to manually create an Amazon Chime account, and they can log in using their existing corporate credentials.

We are announcing today a limit increase to the number of CIDR or IP Address entries customers can have within an IPSet condition in an AWS WAF Rule. We have increased the limit from 1,000 to 10,000 entries per condition. Customers who want even larger lists of IP addresses can create multiple rules. With this limit increase customers can now import larger IP reputational lists and customer who have multiple IPSet rules can now consolidate them into fewer rules. As you know, IPSet Rules are used to specify which web requests customers want to allow or block based on the IP addresses that the requests originate from.

You can now log all your API calls to AWS WAF on Application Load Balancer (ALB) through AWS CloudTrail, the AWS service that records API calls for your account and delivers log files to your Amazon S3 bucket. CloudTrail logs can be used to enable security analysis, track changes to your AWS resources, and aid in compliance auditing. Integrating AWS WAF and CloudTrail lets you determine which requests were made to the AWS WAF API, the source IP address from which each request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and more.

Today, we added two new connectors for Presto and Apache Spark. Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against datasets ranging from gigabytes to petabytes. Like Presto, Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed processing system commonly used for big data workloads. Amazon QuickSight customers can now connect to Presto and Spark (with LDAP authentication enabled) running on Amazon EMR 5.5.0 or above, or self-hosted clusters on EC2 and analyze their big data at interactive speed. Customers can choose to directly query against the Presto and Spark engines, or ingest their data into SPICE for faster visualization.

Amazon Cognito is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support minor versions 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11 and 9.3.16. Highlights include fixes to prevent data corruption issues in index builds and in certain write-ahead-log replay situations, support for the pg_hint_plan, log_fdw and pg_freespacemap extensions, and many other bug fixes and improvements.

AWS Lambda’s default concurrent execution limit has been raised to 1,000 concurrent function executions. Lambda uses a default safety throttle for the number of concurrent executions across all functions in a given region per account. Concurrent executions refers to the number of executions of your function code that are happening at any given time.

You can now use Caffe2 with the AWS Deep Learning AMI for Amazon Linux, available on the AWS Marketplace. The addition of Caffe2, a project led by Facebook, allows developers another choice of deep learning frameworks on the AWS platform. To learn more about Caffe2, visit the GitHub repository.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports lifecycle management of your application versions on the AWS Management Console. Application version lifecycle management allows you to auto-delete the undeployed application versions based on application version count or application version age. Previously, you could only configure application version lifecycle policy through the APIs, SDKs, EB CLI, and AWS CLI. Now, you can set the lifecycle settings through the AWS Management Console.

Today, AWS made the AWS Directory Service console available in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. The availability of the Directory Service console in five languages—it was already available in English and French—reduces the need to have bilingual staff that can administer Directory Service directories.

AWS EdStart, a program that helps startup educational technology (EdTech) companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available. The AWS EdStart program helps EdTech startups by providing AWS promotional credits and access to the same scalable technology used by established companies.

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

The AWS Storage Gateway service seamlessly enables hybrid cloud storage between on-premises environments and the AWS Cloud. It combines a multi-protocol storage appliance with highly efficient network connectivity to deliver local performance with virtually unlimited scale. You can use it in remote offices and datacenters for hybrid cloud workloads involving migration, bursting, and storage tiering, as well as to connect Amazon EC2-hosted applications to data in Amazon S3.

AWS CodeDeploy now integrates with Elastic Load Balancing and provides greater control on managing your deployments across EC2 instances.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, to help configure and manage high-availability SQL Server clusters.

AWS has expanded its HIPAA Compliance Program to include Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices – at any scale. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Amazon SQS to build HIPAA-compliant applications and store and transmit messages between healthcare systems, including messages containing protected health information (PHI). Information about HIPAA eligible services on AWS can be found at our HIPAA Compliance page.

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight customers can log user actions within their QuickSight accounts using AWS CloudTrail for governance, compliance and auditing purposes. With this feature, customers can continuously log, monitor and retain events associated with Amazon QuickSight, and answer questions on Who, When and What with regards to data access in QuickSight, to comply with corporate policies.

CloudFormation updated support for new resources:

• AWS::Cognito::IdentityPool
  • Create an Amazon Cognito identity pool.
• AWS::Cognito::IdentityPoolRoleAttachment
  • Manage the role configuration for an Amazon Cognito identity pool.
• AWS::Cognito::UserPool
  • Create an Amazon Cognito user pool.
• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolClient
  • Create an Amazon Cognito user pool client.
• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolGroup
  • Create a user group in an Amazon Cognito user pool.
• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolUser
  • Create an Amazon Cognito user pool user.
• AWS::Cognito::UserPoolUserToGroupAttachment
  • Attach a user to an Amazon Cognito user pool group.

Starting today you can provision Amazon Cognito resources using AWS CloudFormation.

You can now use upgraded versions of Presto (0.170), Apache Zeppelin (0.7.1), and Hue (3.12.0) on Amazon EMR release 5.5.0. Presto 0.170 includes support for LDAP authentication and various improvements and bug fixes. Hue 3.12.0 adds new features to the SQL editor, timeline and pivot graphing for visualization, and email notifications for Apache Oozie workflow completion. Additionally, we incorporated several improvements for Apache Flink and resiliency for Apache Spark, and we backported a bug fix for Spark 2.1.0 integration in Oozie.

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to exchange sensitive data between applications using server-side encryption (SSE) integrated with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices – at any scale. You can use Amazon SQS to take advantage of the scale, cost, and operational benefits of a managed messaging service. The addition of server-side encryption allows you to transmit sensitive data with the increased security of using encrypted queues.

AWS Config now supports pre-built and custom rules in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region.

Starting today you can import and export AWS Mobile Hub projects with their associated AWS resources. This feature will allow developers to export, import and share their project configurations in an easily editable text file format (YAML). They can duplicate projects in the same AWS account or across accounts, for easier team collaboration and sharing. Each import of an exported project creates an identical isolated stack of AWS resources that provides a separate, independent, consistent development and testing environment.

We are excited to announce the availability of Hardware Multi-Factor Authentication (HW MFA) in AWS GovCloud (US). The GovCloud-specific tokens are distributed by SurePassID, a third-party digital security company, and implement the OATH TOTP standard. Hardware MFA provides an extra level of security for GovCloud accounts, by prompting users for a token-based authentication code in addition to their username and password, before they can sign in. The MFA token keys are stored in GovCloud with the separate Identity and Access Management (IAM) stack to ensure logical isolation from other regions during authentication.  Tokens are available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Today, Amazon Inspector has announced availability of assessment reports for all security assessments. Starting today, you will have the ability to view and download assessment reports, which document the details of what was tested as part of the assessment run, and the specific results for each rules package assessed. The report contains an executive summary of the assessment, the list of instances targeted, the rules packages tested, the rules that generated findings, details of findings, and optionally the list of rules that passed without any findings. Assessment reports can be viewed and downloaded from the “Assessment Runs” tab of the Inspector console. Reports are available in html and pdf format, and are also available through the Inspector API and CLI.

We’re excited to announce the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.9, the biggest release yet for Amazon’s free AAA game engine. This release is a direct result of customer feedback, with over 473 improvements, fixes, and features. Some highlights include:

• A new Player Account Cloud Gem that provides a customizable, stand-alone solution for player authentication and management. In as little as 30 minutes, an engineer can build and launch a player account system in their game—a task that would typically take 2-3 engineers several months to accomplish.
• A new Component Entity system that helps developers create complex, working entities faster and with minimal effort. This update includes automatic exposure of component features to designers, a new warning system for missing or mistaken configurations, usability improvements to the Entity Inspector, and more.
• New GPU features and emitter types for the particle editor, so you can fill game worlds with visually stunning effects. New emitter types include point, sphere, circle, box, and beam.
• Much more, including a new one-step, express installation process, support for both Z-up and Y-up world coordinates in the FBX importer, improved search functionality for the Asset Browser, Component Entity and Lua support for the UI Editor and Twitch Metastream, and support for versioned Gems. 

The Amazon WorkDocs iOS app now supports file sharing between the WorkDocs app and other apps on your iPhone or iPad, provided they also support file sharing across apps. You can send files from the app you’re using to your WorkDocs app so you can store them in your WorkDocs account. You can save photos from your Camera Roll into WorkDocs, making it easy to capture and store whiteboard content and handwritten notes. Using the share button in the WorkDocs app, you can send files to other apps on your device, which allows you to open files for editing using applications like Microsoft Word and Apple Keynote (and save the changes back to WorkDocs), send files stored in WorkDocs using email and other popular messaging apps, and save email attachments directly to WorkDocs.

Starting today, Amazon RDS enables you to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage database access for Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instances and Amazon Aurora DB clusters. Database administrators can now associate database users with IAM users and roles. By using IAM, you can manage user access to all AWS resources from a single location, avoiding issues caused by permissions that are out of sync on different AWS resources.

You can now send messages to and receive messages from Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) FIFO (first-in-first-out) queues with applications that use the Java Message Service (JMS). Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables reliable communication between distributed software components and microservices at any scale. Amazon SQS FIFO queues, the newest queue type, are designed to ensure that the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved, and that each message is processed exactly once.  

We are excited to announce a new edge location for Amazon CloudFront in Atlanta, Georgia. Each new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application. This is our third edge location in the Atlanta area, bringing the total number of CloudFront locations to 85 (including 74 points of presence and 11 regional edge cache locations). To see a full list of all Amazon CloudFront locations, please visit our website here. Meet with the CloudFront team at one of our upcoming webinars.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys a Microsoft SQL Server 2014 environment that receives its storage and data management capabilities from a NetApp ONTAP Cloud system running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now allows you to enable Internet access for your image builder and fleet instances without the need for advanced network configuration. Providing Internet access to your instances allows your applications to access online resources such as application updates and licensing services, and your users to access documents, tutorials, and other information from the Internet.

You can use the new Amazon Redshift query monitoring rules feature to set metrics-based performance boundaries for workload management (WLM) queues, and specify what action to take when a query goes beyond those boundaries. For example, for a queue that’s dedicated to short running queries, you might create a rule that aborts queries that run for more than 60 seconds. To track poorly designed queries, you might have another rule that logs queries that contain nested loops. We also provide pre-defined rule templates in the Amazon Redshift management console to get you started.

Starting today, the AWS Price List API can return product and pricing information for specific AWS services and regions. Previously, the API returned product and pricing information for a service for all AWS regions at once. You can now create more precise requests that return product and pricing information for the AWS service and region of interest.

For example, using this API you can get the product and pricing information for Amazon S3 in the us-east-1 region:
https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonS3/current/us-east-1/index.json or https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonS3/current/us-east-1/index.csv

You can now attach or replace an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to your existing Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS GovCloud region. 

The AWS Service Delivery Program helps AWS customers find qualified APN Partners that have demonstrated the ability to provide expertise in a specific service or skill area. AWS Service Catalog partners help create catalogs of IT services that are approved by the customer’s organization for use on AWS. With AWS Service Catalog, customers and partners can centrally manage commonly deployed IT services to help achieve consistent governance and meet compliance requirements while enabling users to self-provision approved services.

Amazon Lex is now generally available for all customers. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into your application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to developers, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language conversational bots.

Amazon Rekognition can now detect explicit and suggestive adult content in images, enabling you to protect users from inappropriate content. Beyond flagging an image based on presence of adult content, Image Moderation also returns a hierarchical list of labels with confidence scores. These labels indicate specific categories of adult content, thus providing more granular control to developers to filter and manage large volumes of user generated content (UGC).

Today we announced the general availability of Amazon Redshift Spectrum, a new feature that allows you to run SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” — without having to load or transform any data. Redshift Spectrum applies sophisticated query optimization, scaling processing across thousands of nodes so results are fast – even with large data sets and complex queries.

You can now add a whispered speech effect in your Text-to-Speech output with Amazon Polly, and synchronize speech with visual animation using Speech Marks. To create voices with a whispered effect, you simply use the SSML tag “whispered” to mark the text input to be spoken in a hushed or whispered voice. This tag can be applied to any of the 47 voices in Amazon Polly’s Text-to-Speech portfolio. Visit the Amazon Polly documentation for more information on how to use the new “whispered” SSML tag.

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) added support for service-linked roles, a new type of role that gives you an easier and more secure way to delegate permissions to AWS services. You can start by using service-linked roles with Amazon Lex, a service that enables you to build conversational interfaces in any application using voice and text.

Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like. You can offer AFIs you develop on the AWS Marketplace for other customers to purchase.

Amazon EC2 F1 instances are now available in two different instance sizes that include up to eight FPGAs per instance. F1 instances include the latest 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA with local 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCI-e x16 connection to the instance. For F1.16xlarge instances, the dedicated PCI-e fabric lets the FPGAs share the same memory space and communicate with each other across the fabric at up to 12 GBps in each direction. The FPGAs within the F1.16xlarge share access to a 400 Gbps bidirectional ring for low-latency, high bandwidth communication.

F1 instances are available now with the following specifications:

Today, AWS is announcing a new feature that enables customers to copy AWS Marketplace products directly into AWS Service Catalog. This simplifies the process by which customers can organize and control access to software they have procured or fulfilled through AWS Marketplace.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Now you can focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale. You do not need to modify application logic, since DAX is compatible with existing DynamoDB API calls. You can enable DAX with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS SDK. Just as with DynamoDB, you only pay for the capacity you provision.

AWS CodeStar enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS.

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In November 2016, we announced a limited preview of the PostgreSQL-compatible version. Since then, we’ve received valuable feedback from early adopters.

You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace requests made to your serverless applications built using AWS Lambda. This enables you to gain insights into the performance of serverless applications, allowing you to pinpoint the root cause of issues so that you can address them. This feature is available now in Preview.

AWS Mobile Hub integration with Amazon Lex previously announced in preview is now generally available (GA).

AWS X-Ray is now available for all customers. AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

AWS Marketplace, which lists over 3,800 software listings from popular software vendors across 35 product categories, has announced that customers can now contract for one, two, or three year terms for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Application Programming Interface (API) products directly through AWS Marketplace with SaaS Contracts. With this feature, buyers use a shopping-cart like experience to determine the size (number of units) and duration (length of time) for their contract. For example, they can enter how many users they want and can choose if they want to make a multi-year commitment. Buyers also have the ability to increase the size of their contract at any time, and can upgrade from a monthly term to a one, two, or three year term when needed. With the launch of SaaS Contracts on AWS Marketplace, customers can choose from more products than ever before- and sellers can offer better discounts for longer commitments.

AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Schema Conversion Tool continue to simplify the migration of relational databases, NoSQL databases and data warehouses to the cloud. You can now convert your schemas, extract your data and migrate it from additional data warehouses to Amazon Redshift, a data warehouse designed for the cloud from the ground up.

You can now use Caffe2 with the AWS Deep Learning AMI for Ubuntu, available on the AWS Marketplace. The addition of Caffe2, a project led by Facebook, allows developers another choice of deep learning frameworks on the AWS platform. To learn more about Caffe2, you can check out the GitHub repository.

You can now add tags to your AWS Lambda functions. Using tags, you can now add metadata to each of your functions. Each tag consists of a key and value. You can use these tags to allocate costs from your AWS bill to individual functions. There is no additional charge for tagging your Lambda functions. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using Python 3.6. This feature will become available in all AWS Lambda regions within 24 hours.

We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 P2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and US East (Ohio) Regions. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, now supports Microsoft Remote Desktop Licensing Manager (RD Licensing). With the new release you can now enable RD Licensing in your AWS Microsoft AD domain. This reduces the effort to deploy and manage infrastructure for Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Services in the AWS Cloud. 

Amazon GameLift Local is a client-side debugging tool that emulates a subset of the Amazon GameLift API on your local development machine. With Amazon GameLift Local, you can verify code changes in seconds, without incurring any usage charges. Amazon GameLift Local is available for Windows and Linux desktops and does not require a network connection to use. 

AWS CloudTrail now allows you to add data events, management events, and activity filters during the CloudTrail configuration setup in the console. With data events logging, you can record all API actions on Amazon S3 objects and receive detailed information, such as the S3 object level API activity, AWS account of the caller, and time of the API call. With management events logging, you can record operations that occur on your AWS accounts and resources, such as administrative actions to create, delete, and modify EC2 instances or user access activities. Activity filters allow you to specify read-only, write-only, or read/write account activity collection for management and data events. 

Amazon QuickSight is now available in US East (Ohio). New users can sign up for QuickSight with US East (Ohio) as their home region, making SPICE capacity available in the region and ensuring proximity to AWS and on-premises data sources. Existing QuickSight users can switch to US East (Ohio) via the region switcher in the User Interface to provision SPICE capacity, and to enable faster and cheaper connectivity to data sources in the region. With this launch, QuickSight is now available in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions.

AWS Config now has a redesigned experience for discovering and setting up AWS-managed Config rules. You can now search managed rules by name, label, or description. This allows you to quickly filter rules based on services and rule descriptions. For example, you can type "EC2" in the search field to display all rules that apply to your Amazon EC2 resources. 

AWS Batch now supports customer provided AMIs. Previously, Managed Compute Environments launched instances of the ECS Optimized AMI. Now, when creating Managed Compute Environments, you can choose the specific AMI used by specifying the imageId. This makes it possible to change your EBS configuration, automatically mount EFS filesystems for shared storage among jobs, use local instance storage for scratch space, or configure drivers for GPU-accelerated jobs. 

For a limited time, get 1000 device minutes as part of your one-time free trial on AWS Device Farm, four times more than the usual 250. Furthermore, get 3 months for the price of 1 on your first device slot purchase, giving you additional time to set-up, tune, integrate, and ramp your testing efforts into your release cycle at a lower introductory cost.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now provides built-in support for search templates using Mustache on all Elasticsearch 5 domains. Mustache is an open-source logic-less templating engine. You can now use Mustache to build search templates, which make it easy to dynamically generate your Elasticsearch queries. Search templates can help reduce errors and save time when constructing queries. Mustache is now enabled by default on all Amazon Elasticsearch Service 5.1 domains. 

You can now configure Amazon API Gateway to automatically perform basic request validation for your APIs. This reduces the burden of needing to check for required parameters in requests made to your API and instead allows you to focus on application-specific validation efforts. Previously, you needed to manually implement basic validation of input data in your API backends, making it more likely to introduce conflicts between your validation logic and API models. 

We are pleased to announce that Amazon ElastiCache now supports Memcached version 1.4.34. You can now launch new clusters with Memcached 1.4.34, as well as upgrade existing ones to the new version. Compared to version 1.4.33 (previous version supported by ElastiCache for Memcached), this version includes bug fixes for improved metadata dump, logging and LRU crawler and miscellaneous enhancements. 

Today, we made it easier for you to organize your AWS accounts in AWS Organizations by using a new tree view and additional UI improvements. The new tree view enables you to browse the accounts and organizational units (OUs) in your organization and apply service control policies (SCPs) from the Organizations console. For example, you can use the tree view to see the hierarchy of OUs in your organization. You can then select a specific OU to see all its AWS accounts and then apply an SCP to those accounts. 

AWS Database Migration Service has expanded its functionality to support migration of NoSQL databases. This gives you significant new migration options in addition to its existing relational database and data warehouse migration capabilities.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys an Alfresco Content Services cluster on the AWS Cloud. It replaces the Quick Start for Alfresco One with Alfresco Content Services 5.2 and adds Amazon Aurora support. 

AWS OpsWorks Stacks now supports integration with Amazon CloudWatch Logs. With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your logs, in near real-time, for specific phrases, values or metrics. Previously, you had to manually install and configure the CloudWatch Logs agents directly on your Amazon EC2 instances. Now, you can leverage the built-in integration with CloudWatch Logs to simplify multi-instance log monitoring. For example, you can now monitor your Rails logs for exceptions across your instances. After you enable CloudWatch Logs in OpsWorks Stacks, the logs will be automatically sent to CloudWatch Logs where you can set up filters to extract metrics, and generate alarms based on those metrics. To learn more about this feature, visit our documentation.

For more information on AWS OpsWorks Stacks:

• Product Page
• Documentation

AWS CodePipeline  will now enable customers to experiment at a lower cost. Customers can create new pipelines without incurring any charges on that pipeline for the first thirty calendar days. After that period, the new pipelines will be charged at the existing rate of $1 per active pipeline per month. The new pricing is available in all regions in which CodePipeline is available.

You can now create and edit AWS CloudFormation templates in CloudFormation Designer using YAML. CloudFormation Designer allows you to create and modify CloudFormation templates using a drag-and-drop interface which automatically updates the underlying template. Previously, you could only create or edit your CloudFormation templates in JSON. Now, you can create and edit templates in both JSON and YAML using the integrated editor. You can also convert JSON templates to YAML and vice-versa. Visit here to learn more.

You can now create charts to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), export data from analyses as CSV files, define custom ranges when importing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and create aggregate filters for SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine) data sets. In Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition we’ve added support for AD Connector, providing another option for on-premises Active Directory connectivity. For more information, see the latest AWS Big Data Blog post on QuickSight.

We are excited to announce a 17% price reduction for Amazon Kinesis Firehose from $0.035 per GB to $0.029 per GB of data ingested. We have also introduced a tiered pricing plan to further reduce prices by an additional 26% to as low as $0.020 per GB of data ingested when your data volume reaches certain tier. With these two changes, you can now save up to 43% in costs when loading streaming data using Amazon Kinesis Firehose. For more information, see our pricing page.

Amazon Aurora can now execute one of the most common Data Definition Language (DDL) operations – an ALTER command to add a nullable column at the end of a table – nearly instantaneously. This capability, called fast DDL, is available in lab mode. Fast DDL doesn’t require a table copy and does not materially impact other DML statements. Since it doesn’t consume temporary storage for a table copy, it makes DDL statements practical even for large tables on small instance types. Take a look under the hood for how we accomplish this.

You can now use Amazon Athena to query encrypted data stored in Amazon S3. You can query data that’s encrypted using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Encryption Keys, Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) – Managed Keys, and Client-Side Encryption with keys managed by KMS. Amazon Athena also integrates with KMS and provides you an option to encrypt your result sets. To use this feature via the JDBC driver, you will need to download the latest version of the driver. The new JDBC driver has improved performance, support for cancelling queries and several bug fixes.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service has increased the maximum number of instances supported in a single domain to 100, which increases the maximum storage capacity per domain to 150 TB on select instance types. This allows you to store and analyze up to five times more data for large analytic workloads and to horizontally scale search applications to meet the most demanding performance needs. To request an increase beyond the default per domain limit of 20 instances, simply submit a service limit increase request.

We are pleased to announce support for Host-based routing on the Application Load Balancer. Host-based routing allows you to route a request based on host field in the HTTP header. To enable you to route to multiple services or containers using domain and path, we are also increasing the numbers of rules you can create on your Application Load Balancers to 75.

This latest Quick Start from AWS automatically deploys Confluent Platform into a highly available, secure AWS Cloud environment in a few simple steps, in about 15 minutes.

We are happy to announce that ElastiCache for Redis now allows customer-triggered automatic failover. In clusters that have one or more read-replicas with Multi-AZ enabled, you can trigger a failover by manually failing the primary. This will initiate automatic failover, which will promote a read replica to primary, and replace the failed primary as a new read replica in place of the one promoted. Triggering auto failover can help with testing how your application responds to a failure of an ElastiCache primary.

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the Quick Start reference deployment for Linux bastion hosts.

The Amazon EC2 Container Service Command Line Interface (ECS CLI) has been updated to version 0.5.0. This update includes support for managing images in the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR), support for existing ELB/ALBs using the CreateService command, as well as supporting the use of R4 EC2 instance types for container clusters.

AWS updated the AWS Customer Agreement on March 31, 2017.

We’re constantly looking for ways to make using AWS better for our customers. As part of this process, we updated our AWS Customer Agreement on March 31, 2017 to simplify the language, ensure it reflects our latest services and features, and further clarify how customers can use our services.

By continuing to use AWS Services, you agree to the updated terms and conditions in the AWS Customer Agreement.  

We are excited to announce that Amazon Pinpoint now supports Kinesis events streams to stream app and campaign analytics events via Kinesis streams or Kinesis Firehose streams and monetization dashboards to view monetization events sent from your mobile app.

Today, we made available the new Resource Groups Tagging API, which makes it easier for you to use tags to centrally organize, discover, allocate costs, and control access to AWS resources. The API’s five operations enable you to programmatically tag and untag resources, list resources with a specific tag, and list unique tag keys across multiple AWS services. With this new API, you can now programmatically use AWS resource group and Tag Editor functionality. This makes it easier for you to implement automated tools to manage, search, and filter tags and resources across AWS services.

We are pleased to announce that starting today you can configure the read and keep-alive idle timeout values used by Amazon CloudFront when communicating with custom origins. You can increase or lower either of these values based on the needs of your applications. 

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Amazon Cloud Directory in the EU (London) Region. This allows your end users and applications to benefit from infrastructure located closer to them in London. Cloud Directory is now available in 7 regions worldwide. 

Amazon Inspector has added support for Proxy environments and CloudWatch metrics. With support for Proxy environments, you can now use Amazon Inspector to scan instances behind a Proxy for vulnerabilities. Support for Amazon CloudWatch metrics allows you to automatically populate your Amazon Inspector assessment metrics in CloudWatch. Using either the CloudWatch console or API, you can now view metrics on the number of assessments run, agents targeted, and findings generated.  

Today, Amazon CloudWatch is excited to announce that CloudWatch Alarms now has two new settings to configure alarms on metrics with sparse data or with low sample counts. With the first setting, you have the option to treat missing metric data as good (alarm threshold not breached), bad (alarm threshold breached), maintain the alarm state or use the current default treatment. For example, you can use the treat missing data as good setting for alarms on HTTPCode_ELB_5XX_Count metric. This will ensure that you get alerted only when there are consecutive ELB server errors and not when the errors are sporadic.

AWS has published a new Quick Start that automatically deploys Enterprise Information Catalog from Informatica into a highly available, secure AWS Cloud environment in a few simple steps.

AWS Storage Gateway has updated file gateway to add additional NFS mount options to your file share, and enable scanning for added and deleted objects in your mounted Amazon S3 bucket. 

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), code running on AWS Lambda, or any Web application. Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Amazon API Gateway is also available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Europe (London) AWS regions. Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon API Gateway.

We are thrilled to announce new AWS Direct Connect locations. The new locations are Munich, Germany, Berlin, Germany, Prague, Czech Republic, and Zurich, Switzerland.

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

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) has added Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as a migration target. Amazon S3 is object storage with a simple web interface to store and retrieve any amount of data. Together, the two products give you the ability to extract information from any database supported by DMS and write it to Amazon S3 in a format that can be used by almost any application.

You can now simplify your AWS CloudFormation template authoring by inserting references to existing CloudFormation templates using Include Transform. Transforms are declarative statements within CloudFormation templates that instruct CloudFormation how to process your template. Include Transform instructs CloudFormation on where in the main template to inject CloudFormation templates snippets stored in S3 buckets. For example, you can maintain your commonly used resource definitions as template snippets and use Include Transform to retrieve and include them into your main template to create or update stacks. Visit here to learn more.

AWS Batch now supports Job Retries. Previously jobs would be marked as failed, if they experienced an error or the EC2 instance they were executing on failed. Now, you can define a retry strategy for a job as part of the Job Definition or when submitting a Job. By default, all jobs are attempted once and are marked as failed if they do not succeed. The retry strategy allows you to set a number of attempts for a job, which will result in a job being retried if it does not succeed. You can define up to 10 attempts for a job.

Read more about how to configure and use Job Retries in the AWS Batch documentation. Please visit our product page for more information on AWS Batch.

You can now tag your Amazon EC2 Instances and Amazon EBS Volumes upon creation. You can do this from the EC2 Instance launch wizard or through the RunInstances or CreateVolume APIs. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation. In addition, you can now set resource-level permissions on the CreateVolume, CreateTags, DeleteTags, and the RunInstances APIs. This allows you to implement stronger security policies by giving you more granular control over who has access to these APIs. You can also enforce the use of tagging and control which tag keys and values are set on your resources. 

Amazon Connect is a simple to use, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for you to deliver better customer service at lower cost. This new service from Amazon Web Services is based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations. Setting up a cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect is as easy as a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, and agents can begin taking calls within minutes. 

AWS has published a new Quick Start that automatically deploys Confluence Data Center into a highly available, secure AWS Cloud environment in less than 30 minutes.

NICE is pleased to announce the general availability of EnginFrame 2017, our powerful and easy to use web front-end for accessing Technical and Scientific Applications on-premises and in the cloud.

AWS has expanded its HIPAA compliance program to include AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). You can now use AWS Database Migration Service to move data between your HIPAA-compliant applications, including protected health information (PHI) under an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS. DMS can be used both to migrate data between databases and for ongoing replication workloads to databases or data warehouses. 

Today, we made it easier for you to understand the permissions your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies grant with policy summaries in the IAM console. Instead of reading JSON policy documents, you can scan a table that summarizes the services, actions, resources, and conditions defined in each policy. This summary enables you to quickly understand the permissions defined in each IAM policy. You can find this summary on the policy detail page or the Permissions tab on an individual IAM user’s page. To learn more about policy summaries, see the blog post, Move Over JSON – Policy Summaries Make Understanding IAM Policies Easier, and the IAM documentation, Understanding Policy Summaries in the AWS Management Console.

You can now get an Amazon SNS notification when new Amazon ECS-optimized AMI releases are available.

You can now view AWS Lambda function policies from the AWS Lambda console. Previously, you needed to use the AWS CLI or SDK to see which services and accounts have permissions to invoke your Lambda functions. You can view Lambda function policies from the Triggers tab of any function.

The Amazon WorkDocs Administrative SDK provides API-based administrator level access to WorkDocs site resources. With the Administrative SDK, software vendors and IT organizations can set up their applications to work with WorkDocs. As a result, WorkDocs now allows you to use third party applications for content management, content migration, virus-scanning, data loss prevention (DLP), and eDiscovery. 

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports Fleet Auto Scaling to help you optimize your streaming costs.

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using Node.js v6.10.

We are excited to announce that Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports input transformation of events before sending the events to targets. Using this the new feature, you can extract multiple key-value pairs from their event JSONs and transform the data to fit your needs. For example, you can transform AWS console login event JSON to a human readable message and attach it to an SNS topic for email notifications. Another use case for input transformer is to simplify nested event JSONs before sending to event targets such as SQS. The input transformer is a new addition to the existing list of three input configuration features - matched event, part of matched event, and a constant. You can use the input transformation through the console and PutTargets API in all AWS regions where CloudWatch Events is available.

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the Asia (Tokyo, Singapore), EU (Frankfurt) and Australia (Sydney) Regions.

The Oracle January 2017 Patch Set Updates (PSU) are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about Oracle PSUs supported on RDS, visit the RDS patch update documentation.

The AWS Cryptography team has released the AWS Encryption SDK for Python. This new SDK joins the Java version launched in 2016 to make encryption easier for developers while minimizing errors that could lower the security of their applications. Developers using encryption often face two problems: a. how to correctly generate and use a key to encrypt data, and b. how to protect the key after it’s been used. The AWS Encryption SDK addresses the first problem by transparently implementing the low-level details using the cryptographic provider available in a developer’s environment. The SDK addresses the second problem by providing intuitive interfaces to let developers choose how they want to protect their encryption keys after use. By using the AWS Encryption SDK, developers can focus on the core of the application they’re building instead of the complexities of encryption. We’ve provided ready-to-use samples in the SDK for AWS customers who use AWS CloudHSM or AWS Key Management Service, however the open source SDK can be extended to support other key providers.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

The Amazon CloudWatch Events service now supports AWS Step Functions state machines as event targets. Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. Now, you can also send the matching events to an AWS Step Functions state machine to start a workflow responding to the event of interest, such as managing copies of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots upon snapshot completion.

Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon EC2 Run Command as an event target. This allows you to route system events that describe changes in your AWS environment to Run Command for processing. Run Command, a part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, provides a simple way of remotely executing common administrative tasks like running scripts, installing software, and managing patches. Now, you can perform ad-hoc actions through Run Command on your instances based on changes in your AWS environments. For example, you can now collect instance logs when instances in an Auto Scaling group are terminated by creating a CloudWatch Events rule with Auto Scaling as the source and Run Command as the target. To learn more, see the CloudWatch Events documentation here.

AWS Device Farm now enables you to choose Appium 1.6.3 when scheduling your tests.

Amazon EMR now supports a variety of new Amazon EC2 Spot instance management features with instance fleets. Instead of specifying a specific Amazon EC2 instance type for an Amazon EMR instance group or Amazon EC2 availability zone for your Amazon EMR cluster, you can now provide a list of possible choices and allow Amazon EMR to automatically select an optimal combination. When creating clusters with instance fleets, Amazon EMR can now automatically provision Spot capacity across a variety of instance types, select optimal Amazon EC2 availability zones, and blend Spot and On-Demand capacity to minimize overall cost.

Today, we are introducing RI Coverage Reports in AWS Cost Explorer to help you identify instance hours that are not covered by RIs, highlighting opportunities for savings.

We are excited to announce availability of Amazon Elasticsearch Service in the Europe (London) and Canada (Central) regions. With the addition of these two regions, Amazon Elasticsearch Service is now available in 14 regions globally: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions. 

AWS Marketplace is pleased to announce the availability of a new Tax Calculation Service (TCS) for software vendors. If you are a software vendor that sells products on AWS Marketplace, you can now choose to enroll your paid product listings in TCS for automatic U.S. sales tax calculation on all of your AWS Marketplace transactions. For products enrolled in TCS, AWS Marketplace calculates and collects U.S. sales & use tax on software purchases based on settings and input provided by you.  AWS Marketplace disburses collected taxes to you along with a detailed tax report to help you meet your tax obligations. This feature is available to any AWS Marketplace software vendor who determines that they have obligations to pay U.S. sales tax.

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the Magento Quick Start reference deployment.

You can now use upgraded versions of Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, CNTK, and Caffe, on the AWS Deep Learning AMI v1.2 for Ubuntu, including Keras, available in the AWS Marketplace. The Deep Learning AMI v1.2 for Ubuntu is designed to continue to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for deep learning applications running on Amazon EC2. The latest MXNet release (v0.9.3), included with this AMI v1.2, adds several enhancements including a faster new image processing API that enables parallel processing, improved multi GPU performance, and support for new operators. This AMI includes the following framework versions: Apache MXNet: v0.9.3; Tensorflow v1.0.0; Caffe release: rc5; Theano: rel 0.8.2; Keras: 1.2.2; CNTK: v2.0 beta12.0; and Torch: master branch. The Deep Learning AMI includes Jupyter notebooks with Python 2.7 and Python 3.4 kernels, Matplotlib, Scikit-image, CppLint, Pylint, pandas, Graphviz, Bokeh Python packages, Boto and Boto 3 and the AWS CLI. The DL AMI also comes packaged with Anaconda 2 and Anaconda 3 Data Science platform. You can start using the Deep Learning AMI release v1.2 in the AWS Marketplace, today. 

AWS Step Functions now gives you more flexibility in how AWS Lambda function error messages are handled in your workflow so you can improve the resiliency of serverless applications. Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. With Step Functions, you can create state machines to orchestrate multiple Lambda functions and build multi-step serverless applications. 

We are pleased to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Zurich, our first edge location in Switzerland.

Amazon WorkDocs now provides an Activity Feed so that you can easily track all activities related to your files and folders, and stay connected to what’s going on. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon ElastiCache now supports enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing. In October 2016, we launched support for Redis Cluster with Redis 3.2.4. In addition to scaling your Redis workloads across up to 15 shards with 3.5TiB of data, it also allowed creating cluster-level backups, which contain snapshots of each of the cluster’s shards. With this launch, we are adding the capability to restore a backup into a Redis Cluster with a different number of shards and slot distribution, allowing you to resize your Redis workload. ElastiCache will parse the Redis key space across the backup’s individual snapshots, and redistribute the keys in the new Cluster according to the requested number of shards and hash slots. Your new cluster can be either larger or smaller in size, as long as the data fits in the selected configuration.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of CloudWatch Events in our Canada (Central) region. The Canada (Central) region provides you with a new option for end users and applications benefiting from infrastructure located in Canada. With this new region, CloudWatch Events is now operating fifteen regions worldwide, bringing the total number of AWS Availability Zones to 40. You can learn more about our growing global infrastructure footprint at our Global Infrastructure page: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/. 

Today, we are announcing enhancements to Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) that make them more flexible and easy to use, helping you get the most out of your RI discount.

AWS has expanded its HIPAA compliance program to include AWS Direct Connect as a HIPAA Eligible Service. With the addition of Direct Connect, if you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS you can now transfer large amounts of data, including Protected Health Information (PHI), into and out of AWS in a cost-effective manner designed for your security. AWS Direct Connect offers several benefits for customers: it lowers bandwidth costs out of AWS (which is valuable for applications that have bulk data transfer requirements), it offers more consistent network performance over Internet-based connections for applications that require real-time data feeds, and it provides an alternative means to connect to the AWS cloud for customers who may have security or compliance policies that prevent VPN connectivity to the cloud.

Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in the AWS US West (N. California) region. This increases the number of available regions to eleven, giving you another option for database placement, availability and scalability.

Starting today, you can launch t2.small instances when using Amazon Aurora. The on-demand pricing for t2.small is half that of t2.medium, which was previously announced in November 2016. T2 instances are a cost-effective option for development/test environments and light production workloads. You can run your database on r3 class instances for larger-scale production deployment.

Amazon WorkDocs now offers additional commenting and feedback capabilities, enabling richer and more meaningful collaboration and making it easier for users to centrally organize feedback in one place.

Today, we introduced the ListObjectParentPaths API for Amazon Cloud Directory. With this new API, you can query faster for all parent paths of an object across multiple dimensions, enabling you to get data with a single call.

Amazon Cognito is now available in the EU (London) region.

AWS Trusted Advisor now provides checks for ten new Service Limits for various AWS services including Amazon RDS, AWS IAM, and AWS CloudFormation. Trusted Advisor Service Limit Checks provide visibility to your current level of AWS service utilization and service limits. Trusted Advisor now also provides a new check for Amazon Aurora DB Availability which checks that your Aurora DB cluster has both private and public instances to help you ensure that your deployments are fault-tolerant. Finally, Trusted Advisor now provides new checks for EC2 Windows for the EC2Config Agent and the EC2 Windows PV Driver version which helps to ensure your EC2 Windows instances have the latest versions installed.

Amazon EC2Rescue is a convenient, straightforward, GUI-based troubleshooting tool that can be run on your Amazon EC2 Windows Server instances to troubleshoot operating system-level issues and collect advanced logs and configuration files for further analysis. EC2Rescue provides capabilities that help you simplify and expedite the troubleshooting of EC2 Windows instances. You can use EC2Rescue in either Current Instance or Offline Instance Modes to perform a variety of diagnostic and troubleshooting tasks. EC2Rescue is available now. For more information on EC2Rescue visit our documentation page.

You can now configure custom domains for your APIs on Amazon API Gateway using SSL/TLS certificates provisioned and managed by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Now, you can request a certificate from ACM and associate it with your API in minutes using the API Gateway Console, APIs, and CLI/SDKs. Previously, you needed to procure and upload your own SSL certificates to API Gateway in order to configure a custom domain for your APIs.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) can now automatically warm up your new dedicated IP addresses before you can send a high volume of emails. Dedicated IP addresses are Amazon SES IP addresses that are reserved exclusively for your email sending. 

You can now use upgraded versions of Apache HBase (1.3.0), Presto (0.166), Apache Zeppelin (0.7.0), Apache Phoenix (4.9.0), and Apache Flink (1.2.0) on Amazon EMR release 5.4.0. These new versions of supported applications have various improvements and bug fixes. Additionally, you can now create Amazon EMR clusters with R4 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances. Amazon EMR has also expanded support for M4 (General Purpose) and C4 (Compute Optimized) instances to AWS GovCloud.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Prague, our first edge location in Czech Republic.  

Today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, simplified on-premises user sign-in to the AWS Management Console. Now, you can enable your users to access and manage AWS resources by signing in to the AWS Management Console with their on-premises Active Directory (AD) credentials. This enables you to reuse your on-premises AD security policies such as password expiration and account lockout while still controlling access to the AWS Management Console and AWS resources. 

You can now use upgraded versions of Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, CNTK, and Caffe, on the AWS Deep Learning AMI v2.0 for Amazon Linux, including Keras, available in the AWS Marketplace.

We’ve updated our Big Data on AWS instructor-led training course. This 3-day course introduces cloud-based big data solutions such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, and now Amazon Athena. The course teaches you how to create big data environments, how to process data, and how to leverage best practices to design big data environments for security and cost-effectiveness.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your Amazon AppStream 2.0 fleets. With CloudWatch metrics for AppStream 2.0, you can easily view the size and utilization of your fleet resources, and you can set alarms so that you can be notified when there is insufficient capacity to support your users, and react to changes in your fleet.

You can now invoke AWS CodeBuild during the ‘Test Action’ of your software release pipelines modeled in AWS CodePipeline. This capability enables you to easily run a variety of tests against your code, such as unit tests, static code analysis and integration tests.

AWS Step Functions is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) region.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) continues to make migrations easier by adding the ability to reload data for an individual table. When a database table is migrated as part of a larger migration task, you can choose to reload it while the migration is already running, without having to reload all tables in the task. This adds a new level of flexibility so you can complete a migration quicker than ever before. DMS can move data between heterogeneous database engines, giving you the freedom to migrate your databases unchanged to AWS or to replace expensive, restrictive commercial databases with cloud-enabled, cost-effective ones.

We are thrilled to announce new AWS Direct Connect location. The new locations is at Interxion Vienna (supporting AWS Frankfurt region).

Amazon Aurora now supports the sharing of encrypted snapshots between AWS accounts. This follows our recent announcement of encrypted database replication and snapshot copy across regions, and extends the Aurora security model to separate accounts that have shared encryption keys. The owner of the other account can copy the snapshot or restore a database instance from it.

We are pleased to announce new Amazon Aurora capabilities for global database deployment. Replication across AWS regions now supports encrypted databases, so you can scale read operations to a location close to your users, build a disaster recovery architecture that spans the globe, and easily migrate data from one region to another, all the while maintaining full encryption at rest and in transit.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the Canada (Central) Region.

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

AWS has published a new Quick Start in partnership with Heptio that automatically deploys a Kubernetes cluster on the AWS Cloud in about 10 minutes.

The AWS Health APIs and the AWS Personal Health Dashboard give you a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources. The service provides relevant and timely information to help you manage AWS events in progress, and provides proactive notifications to help you plan for scheduled activities. You can use CloudWatch Events to detect and react to changes in the status of AWS Health events. Then, based on rules you create, CloudWatch Events invokes one or more target actions when an event matches the values you specify in a rule.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now offers dedicated short codes (5-, 6- digit phone numbers) in the US. If you are delivering notifications to telephone numbers in the US, you can now use a specific, customer-assigned SMS short code to send large marketing campaigns, Application-to-Person (A2P) messages like order updates and appointment reminders, and two-factor authentication text messages.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports NFS version 4 lock upgrading and downgrading functionality. This new capability extends support in Amazon EFS for the NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.0 protocols by allowing you to run applications that upgrade a read lock atomically to a write lock and downgrade a write lock atomically to a read lock. One example is SQLite, a popular library that’s embedded into many applications and programming language tools like Python and PHP.

We are excited to announce support for 1G and 10G Link Aggregation Groups (LAG). Customers in AWS GovCloud (US), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions can start using LAG to link existing connections on the same AWS device, or request new connections. Customers who wish to purchase multiple ports, but treat them like a single managed connection can now use our LAG feature to do just this. In addition to ordering and managing bundles, customers can now see when their ports fall on the same router so customers can manage your network availability.

AWS Organizations offers policy-based management for multiple AWS accounts and is now generally available for all customers. With Organizations, you can create groups of accounts and then apply policies to those groups. Organizations enables you to centrally manage policies across multiple accounts, without requiring custom scripts and manual processes.

Amazon DynamoDB Time-to-Live (TTL) enables you to automatically delete expired items from your tables, at no additional cost. Now, you no longer need to deal with the complexity and cost of manually scanning your tables and deleting the items that you don’t want to retain. Instead, you can simply specify an attribute containing the timestamp when each item in your table should expire and DynamoDB will delete the items for you automatically. You can also view and archive items deleted via TTL using DynamoDB Streams.

You can now use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to enforce encrypted connections between your client applications and your Amazon RDS DB instances running Microsoft SQL Server. SSL support is available in all AWS regions for all supported SQL Server editions. To see the supported editions and versions of Microsoft SQL Server, please visit our documentation page.

Today, we are introducing a new EC2 Spot Advisor Console to guide customers in using Spot for common applications, and Health Checks for Spot fleet.

We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Amazon CloudFront. With the addition of the Philadelphia edge location, there are now a total of 24 edge locations in the US and 71 worldwide. To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge locations, please see our edge location list here. 

Amazon EC2 I3 instances are the latest generation of Storage Optimized High-I/O instances, designed for the most demanding High I/O workloads, featuring low-latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based SSDs. I3 instances are ideal for workloads like transactional processing systems, relational and NoSQL databases, data warehousing applications, analytics workloads and Elasticsearch workloads. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the EU (London) Region. 

You can now monitor and track the time that records spend in Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB streams before being processed by your AWS Lambda functions. Using the new IteratorAge metric, you can easily detect delays in stream processing and create alarms that help you efficiently monitor your stream-based operation’s health and performance. The IteratorAge metric is now available as a default metric which is free of charge. It is viewable in the Lambda console’s monitoring tab. 

We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.8, which includes 234 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports creation and management of custom platforms to provide you with greater control over your Elastic Beanstalk instance and environment configurations. 

Developers can now use Amazon GameLift with their preferred game engine. Whether it’s Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, or custom C# and C++ game engines, developers can leverage Amazon GameLift as a simple, fast, cost-effective tool for hosting dedicated game servers. The Amazon GameLift SDK download contains C# and C++ support and a prebuilt Unreal Engine plugin that accelerates and simplifies integration into Unreal Engine game servers. 

AWS Config Rules now supports seven new managed rules, which are predefined rules that AWS Config uses to evaluate whether your AWS resources comply with common best practices. 

AWS Config Rules is now available in the Europe (London) AWS region.

You now have the ability to automatically update SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine) datasets in Amazon QuickSight based on a schedule. You can specify the Time Zone, the Time of Day, the Frequency (Daily, Weekly, or Monthly), and the Starting Date for your SPICE dataset refresh. This capability eliminates the manual process of updating SPICE datasets and allows you to easily share dashboards with up-to-date information. Scheduled refresh is now available in Amazon QuickSight for all supported AWS, cloud and on-premises data sources, for both new and existing datasets in all regions. For more information, see the AWS Big Data Blog post on Scheduled Refresh.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports M4, C4, and R4 instance types. M4 and R4 instances provide improved compute performance at lower prices than the previous generation of M3 and R3 instances. With the C4 instance type, you can benefit from better cost effectiveness for workloads that have high indexing requirements. Additionally, on the newly supported instances, Amazon Elasticsearch Service offers increased EBS volume size up to 1.5 TB per node. The increased volume size allows you to store up to 30 TB in a single Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain using EBS-backed data nodes, which is triple the previous limit. For Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes, we have also increased the maximum to 16,000 IOPS to support the most demanding workloads. This release also offers operational enhancements that reduce the time required for performing cluster updates and snapshots, typically by more than 50%.

Customers can now use Amazon Athena to query data stored in Apache AVRO. AVRO is a data serialization system with support for rich data structures, schemas and binary data format. Click here to learn more about using AVRO with Athena. We also added support for the OpenCSV Serde, which allows you to process CSV files with customized separator, quote and escape characters. 

Today, AWS Marketplace released new feature enhancements to the Seller Self-Service Listings feature, a web-based interface that lets AWS Marketplace software vendors manage their product listings through the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). Starting today, software vendors that have product listings in AWS Marketplace can use Self-Service Listings to make changes to their Amazon Machine Image (AMI)-based product listings, including updating product metadata, uploading new versions, making changes to instance types and pricing, and more. In addition, Self-Service Listings allows vendors to create new AMI-based or SaaS Subscriptions product listings.

Amazon CloudWatch introduces Alarms on Dashboards, a new feature that enables customers to bring metrics and alarms together on a dashboard. This new feature can help you stay better informed about important changes in your AWS resources and metrics with more informative dashboards that integrate alarm conditions.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) has introduced several new updates to improve your serverless application development. AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified syntax for defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application. It is available under Apache 2.0.

We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) can now extract data from Teradata and Oracle data warehouses for direct import into Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte scale data warehouse that was designed for the cloud from the ground up. AWS SCT will run an analysis of your data warehouse, automate the schema conversion, apply the schema to the Amazon Redshift target and extract your warehouse data, regardless of volume. You can use Amazon S3 or Amazon Snowball to move your exports to the cloud, where Amazon Redshift can natively import the data for use.

AWS Marketplace Metering Service is now available in the US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), and EU (London) regions. AWS Marketplace Metering Service enables customers to purchase software from select AWS Marketplace vendors that price by the usage within an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), rather than a flat hourly, monthly, or annual fee for running the AMI. These pricing dimensions better enable customers to pay for only what they need when running software projects. As with other AWS Marketplace products, usage is aggregated at the end of the month, along with other AWS products, and charged as part of an existing AWS bill.

AWS Config now provides ready-to-use AWS CloudFormation templates for all managed rules and supports a new test mode to check the functionality of custom Config rules.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data. Starting today, you can tag KMS keys to better organize how keys are used, and to track your KMS costs in the cost allocation report more easily. You can tag a key at the time of key creation or after the key is created.

Amazon API Gateway now integrates with AWS Step Functions, allowing you to call Step Functions with APIs that you create to simplify and customize interfaces to your applications. Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices as a series of steps in a visual workflow. You create state machines in the Step Functions Console or through the Step Functions API to specify and execute the steps of your application at scale. API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” to Step Functions. You can use an API to start Step Functions state machines that coordinate the components of a distributed backend application, such as a web application that tags and resizes uploaded photos, or verifies new users upon registration. You can also integrate human activity tasks in the steps of your application, such as an approval request and response, and make serverless asynchronous calls to APIs of services you use in your application.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports federated sign-in using SAML 2.0. Users can sign in to AppStream 2.0 using their existing credentials, and start streaming applications. As an administrator, you can use your existing user directory to control end-user access to applications available via AppStream 2.0. You can quickly add or remove access for users or groups, restrict access based on user locations, and enable multi-factor authentication. You can enable federated access and controls via any SAML 2.0 compliant identity provider such as Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, Okta, Ping Identity, and Shibboleth.

Today we are introducing the Elastic Volumes feature for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). This new capability allows you to modify configurations of live volumes with a simple API call or a few console clicks. Elastic Volumes makes it easy to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of any new or existing current generation volume with no downtime or performance impact. You can streamline and automate changes using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda. With Amazon EBS you can provision the capacity and performance you need today with the confidence that you can make modifications in the future as your business needs change.

Amazon Chime is now available to all customers. Amazon Chime is a modern, fully-managed communications service from AWS that makes it easy for you to communicate with people inside and outside your organization using voice, video, and chat. With Amazon Chime, online meetings are easier and more efficient, crystal clear audio and high definition video keep you focused on the discussion, and the service is designed to work seamlessly across desktops and mobile devices. Because Amazon Chime is a managed service that runs on AWS, it doesn’t require you to deploy or maintain complex infrastructure and software. And you benefit from the security that comes with a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. 

You can improve the security of your sign in to AWS services, such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight, by enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) when using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as Microsoft AD. Enabling MFA helps improve the security of your applications because users must enter a one-time passcode (OTP) in addition to their Active Directory (AD) user name and password. AWS Microsoft AD supports both virtual and hardware MFA OTP tokens.

We are excited to announce support for 1G and 10G Link Aggregation Groups (LAG). Customers in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions can start using LAG to link existing connections on the same AWS device, or request new connections. Users who wish to purchase multiple ports, but treat them like a single managed connection can now use our LAG feature to do just this. In addition to ordering and managing bundles, you can now see when your ports fall on the same router so you can manage your network availability.

Update, March 2017

This Quick Start is currently being revised. While we’re working on the update, see the Quick Start for NIST-based Assurance Frameworks for similar architecture and functionality, or contact us at compliance-accelerator@amazon.com.

The AWS CloudTrail console now allows you to separately add data events and management events logging options, making it easy to customize your CloudTrail configuration. With data events logging, you can record all API actions on Amazon S3 Objects and receive detailed information such as the S3 object level API activity, AWS account of the caller, IAM user role of the caller, time of the API call, IP address of the API, and other details. With management events logging, you can record operations that occur on your AWS accounts and resources, such as administrative actions to create, delete, and modify EC2 instances or IAM activities.

Starting today you can provision AWS Step Functions resources using AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning and management on AWS. You can create templates for the service or application architectures you want, and have AWS CloudFormation use those templates for quick and reliable provisioning of the services or applications.

The Amazon Redshift UNLOAD command now supports Amazon S3 server-side encryption using an AWS KMS key. The UNLOAD command unloads the results of a query to one or more files on Amazon S3. You can let Amazon Redshift automatically encrypt your data files using Amazon S3 server-side encryption, or you can specify a symmetric encryption key that you manage. With this release, you can use Amazon S3 server-side encryption with a key managed by AWS KMS. In addition, the COPY command loads Amazon S3 server-side encrypted data files without requiring you to provide the key. For more information, see COPY and UNLOAD in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.

You can now easily run deep learning in the cloud at any scale on Ubuntu version 14.04 using the Deep Learning AMI hosted on the AWS Marketplace. In addition to the Amazon Linux version, the 64-bit AMI offers an Ubuntu image designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for deep learning applications running on Amazon EC2. It includes popular deep learning frameworks such as MXNet, Caffe, Tensorflow, Theano, Keras, CNTK, and Torch, as well as packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. It also includes the Anaconda Data Science Platform for Python2 and Python3. The AWS Deep Learning AMI is provided at no additional cost beyond the Amazon EC2 hours used.

To learn more, read the details in the blog post and begin using the Deep Learning AMI for Ubuntu on the AWS Marketplace, today!

You can now create Service Catalog Products using YAML-formatted AWS CloudFormation templates (YAML Version 1.1) in addition to JSON-formatted templates. This allows template creators to choose the format they feel most comfortable working in to describe AWS infrastructure. YAML-formatted CloudFormation templates follow the same anatomy as existing JSON-formatted templates.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys a distributed (clustered) Splunk Enterprise environment on the AWS Cloud in 10-30 minutes.

You can now estimate the age range for each face detected in an image with Amazon Rekognition. Along with other facial attributes and features such as gender or emotion, Amazon Rekognition now provides an age range to the facial analysis APIs. You can use this feature to better assess demographics or group your image collection with age ranges.

Amazon WorkSpaces now allows you to integrate with your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory using an interforest trust with the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also called AWS Microsoft AD. By establishing a single interforest trust relationship, you can assign Amazon WorkSpaces for users in any of your on-premises domains. AWS Microsoft AD automatically discovers and routes authentication requests to the correct domain controller, which means that your users can use their existing Microsoft Active Directory credentials to log in to their WorkSpaces, without having to specify their domain name.

You can now attach or replace an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to your existing Amazon EC2 instance. IAM roles enable your applications running on EC2 to use temporary security credentials that AWS creates, distributes, and rotates automatically. Using temporary credentials reduces the risk of long-term key compromise. To enable IAM roles for your existing EC2 instances, follow the example described in the AWS Security Blog post.

You can now limit the maximum number of device minutes that your AWS Device Farm test runs can use by setting a timeout on each device. You can also request that your maximum timeout be extended beyond the default of 60 minutes, allowing you to run longer workloads on real Android and iOS devices in the AWS Cloud. If execution exceeds your timeout, execution on that device will be forcibly stopped, and partial results will be available if possible.

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in the AWS US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations. 

AWS Storage Gateway is today adding two new features to file gateway: support for running the gateway virtual machine (VM) in Amazon EC2, and limiting the NFS clients that can connect to a file share.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a Tableau Server standalone or cluster environment on the AWS Cloud in an hour or less. The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Tableau Software, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.

Lambda@Edge (in preview today) allows you to run Lambda functions at the AWS Edge locations in response to CloudFront events, without provisioning or managing servers.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Vienna, our first edge location in Austria.

We are pleased to announce support for three new pre-defined security policies ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-1-2017-01, ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-2017-01 and a default security policy, ELBSecurityPolicy-2016-08 for the Application Load Balancer to support your TLS workloads. The new policies give you the flexibility to pick the TLS ciphers and protocols for your workloads on the Application Load Balancer.

AWS Lambda is now available in the Europe (London) region. 

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), code running on AWS Lambda, or any Web application. Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Starting today, all new Amazon WorkSpaces will use general purpose SSD Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes at no additional cost. SSD EBS volumes provide superior I/O performance when compared to magnetic volumes, which results in improved application start times, boot times and a better user experience when running applications sensitive to disk latency. 

For customers in the AWS Free Tier, Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers a choice of instance types between t2.micro.elasticsearch and t2.small.elasticsearch instances. With this release, the service provides customers in the AWS Free Tier, free usage of up to 750 hours per month of a single-AZ t2.micro.elasticsearch or t2.small.elasticsearch instance and 10GB per month of optional EBS storage (Magnetic or General Purpose). If you exceed the free tier limits, you will be charged the Amazon Elasticsearch Service rates for the additional resources you use. See offer terms for more details.

The Amazon CloudWatch Events service is now available in the Europe (London) region.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk extends support to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). You can now create and mount Amazon EFS file systems from within Elastic Beanstalk environments. Using the Elastic Beanstalk extensions for Amazon EFS, you can more easily deploy and scale applications that require shared, scalable, and highly available persistent storage.

Your analytics and search applications can now benefit from Amazon Elasticsearch Service’s support for Elasticsearch 5 and Kibana 5. Elasticsearch is a popular search and analytics engine for log analytics, full text search, application monitoring, and more. Amazon Elasticsearch Service delivers Elasticsearch’s easy-to-use APIs and real-time capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security required by production workloads.

Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) now supports Docker Image Manifest V2, Schema 2 providing the ability to assign multiple tags per image, store Windows container images, and use the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format. Visit the specification page to learn more about Manifest V2 Schema 2. 

You can now use upgraded versions of Apache Spark (2.1.0), Apache Hive (2.1.1), Apache Flink (1.1.4), Hue (3.11.0), and Apache Oozie (4.3.0) on Amazon EMR release 5.3.0. Apache Spark 2.1.0 resolves over 1,200 tickets, including better SparkR support for machine learning algorithms, improvements to Structured Streaming, and performance enhancements for Spark SQL. Hue 3.11.0 adds improvements to the SQL editor with a new autocompleter and a more advanced results grid. Flink 1.1.4, Hive 2.1.1, and Oozie 4.3.0 all have various improvements and bug fixes.

April 2017 -- This Quick Start has been updated for Alfresco Content Services version 5.2 and now provides Amazon Aurora support. For more information, see the Quick Start for Alfresco Content Services.

AWS CloudTrail, a service that continuously monitors and logs your AWS account activity, now allows AWS Managed Services, AWS CodeCommit, and Amazon GameLift to be viewed in the API Activity History. These services were previously available in the S3 bucket log files and are now visible using the CloudTrail console API Activity History page. This allows you to search for create, modify, and delete event activity from these services using a set of predefined filters. For read-only API activity, go to your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Please visit AWS CloudTrail product page for more information.

 

For more information on CloudTrail:

• Product Page
• Supported Services
• Documentation
• Release Notes

Our latest Quick Start automatically deploys Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) version 7.5.5 for Cloud Services on the AWS Cloud. The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Symantec, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.

Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to build flexible cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions. With Cloud Directory, you can create directories for a variety of use cases, such as organizational charts, course catalogs, and device registries. While traditional directory solutions, such as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) and other LDAP-based directories, limit you to a single hierarchy, Cloud Directory offers you the flexibility to create directories with hierarchies that span multiple dimensions. For example, you can create an organizational chart that can be navigated through separate hierarchies for reporting structure, location, and cost center.

Amazon Redshift Workload Management (WLM) enables you to flexibly manage priorities within workloads so that short, fast-running queries don't get stuck in queues behind long-running queries. Today we are announcing an improved WLM experience in the Amazon Redshift console. The new features include in-line validations, simpler error messages, and more so you can easily create WLM queues and manage workloads. For more information, see Workload Management in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.

In December 2016 we added support for Outbound Network Access from Amazon RDS for Oracle instances. This change enabled your database to communicate with external servers and send emails using the utl_smtp package. Name resolution during outbound network access always used Amazon’s DNS service in your VPC. Today we are adding support for custom DNS servers.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region.

AWS customers can now directly access more than 150 free and paid desktop apps using a new integrated AWS Marketplace experience. AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps enables customers to discover and subscribe to Microsoft Windows-based applications using the familiar AWS Marketplace website, without having to first log in to the Amazon WorkSpaces console.

You can now use blue/green deployments with AWS CodeDeploy. Now, you can choose from two deployment types when using CodeDeploy. The existing deployment type supported by CodeDeploy is now known as an in-place deployment.

We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Munich, Germany for Amazon CloudFront. The Munich location is our third location in Germany (joining Frankfurt and Berlin), and our 7th edge location in Germany bringing the total number of worldwide edge locations to 69. To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge locations, please see our edge location list here.

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, register and attend a monthly office hour session that includes Q&A with Amazon CloudFront Engineers and Product Managers.

We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.7, which includes 403 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch.

EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now offer native support for the IPv6 protocol worldwide. Last month, IPv6 in VPC was launched in the US East (Ohio) region. We now support IPv6 in all AWS regions, except regions in China.

We are pleased to announce that Application Load Balancers now support native Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With this ability, clients can now connect to the Application Load Balancer in a dual-stack mode via either IPv4 or IPv6.

You can now use Docker 1.12 on your Amazon ECS container instances. Read our documentation to learn how to use the latest Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.

AWS CloudTrail now enables you to receive alerts if you misconfigure any resources required to deliver CloudTrail logs. Using Personal Health Dashboard, you get a view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources, and the CloudTrail integration adds proactive notifications of any misconfigurations that affect your CloudTrail service. These AWS Personal Health Dashboard notifications provide you with relevant and timely information to help you diagnose the issues and take immediate action to restore your CloudTrail functionality. For example, you will now be able to receive alerts of misconfigured Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket policies that prevent delivery of your CloudTrail logs and troubleshoot SNS notification failures due to SNS topic policy misconfigurations. Please visit AWS Personal Health Dashboard and AWS CloudTrail product pages for more information.

For more information on CloudTrail:

• Product Page
• Documentation
• Release Notes

Amazon ECS now supports a state for container instances that can be used to drain a container instance in preparation for maintenance or cluster scale down. The draining state prevents new tasks from being started on the container instance and notifies the service scheduler to move tasks that are running on the instance to other instances in the cluster.

You can now view code changes made between a commit and a parent commit from the AWS CodeCommit console. The change includes a list of files modified between commits, and a color-coded rendering of the specific code changes made to each file. You can view your code changes side by side (Split view) or inline (Unified view). CodeCommit also lets you hide or show whitespace changes.

Starting today, you can easily create cross-region read replicas for your Amazon RDS for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL database instances encrypted at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Previously, you could create cross-region read replicas for unencrypted database instances only, and the only option for creating copies of encrypted database instances was to copy encrypted DB snapshots to the target region. Now, you can create cross-region read replicas for your encrypted database instances in just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.

Amazon Redshift now supports Zstandard (ZSTD) column compression encoding, which delivers better data compression thereby reducing the amount of storage and I/O needed. With the addition of ZSTD, Amazon Redshift now offers seven compression encodings to choose from depending on your dataset.

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the US East (Ohio) AWS region.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) today announced that Amazon EC2 Spot Instances now support dedicated tenancy. Customers can now use Spot instances to run high scale workloads in a single-tenant manner on physically isolated hardware within a VPC. Using dedicated Spot instances, customers can satisfy security, privacy, or other compliance requirements for their high scale workloads while saving up to 90% off On-Demand pricing.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure application streaming service that allows you to stream your desktop applications from AWS to any device running a web browser, without rewriting them. Available today, Image Builder makes it easy to import your applications to AppStream 2.0 so that you can publish them for users to access. You can import, install, and test your applications on an image builder instance, and then create images that are used on your streaming instances. You can add any application that installs and executes on the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, without any modification or customization.

You can now add tags to your Amazon DynamoDB tables for improved usage categorization and more granular cost reporting. Tags are simple, user-customizable key and value pairs that are supported by many AWS services. For example, you can tag DynamoDB tables for your different development environments — development, staging, and production — to see your spend for each. 

Amazon EC2 R4 instances are now available in the following regions: Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), and EU (London). 

You’ve always been able to migrate an Amazon RDS for MySQL database to Amazon Aurora by taking a snapshot and restoring it into an Aurora cluster. But how does the Aurora database catch up to updates that happened since the snapshot was taken? This used to require setting up replication manually between the two databases. Starting today, it can be handled through a simple AWS Management Console interface. The console will take a snapshot, restore it and replicate the remaining changes all in one step, making migration to Amazon Aurora easier than ever. To learn more, please see Jeff Barr's blog.

The updated Amazon WorkDocs sync client makes it easier to free up storage space on your PC or Mac. Now you can stop syncing content that has been shared with you by simply deleting the relevant files or folders in your Amazon WorkDocs “Shared with me” folder on your computer. This action updates your Selective Sync settings automatically, and removes the content from your computer. Content is not deleted from your Amazon WorkDocs account; you can still access this content at any time using the Amazon WorkDocs web client and your other computers, and you can re-enable sync using the Amazon WorkDocs Selective Sync settings. In addition, the Amazon WorkDocs sync client performance has been improved, and now offers faster sync using less CPU and memory.

We are pleased to announce we have added Arcserve Backup to the AWS Storage Gateway compatibility list. You can backup and archive from Arcserve Backup r17 using the Storage Gateway virtual tape library (VTL) to scalable, cost-effective, secure Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.

You can now use the AWS CloudFormation console to list stacks that are importing output values from another stack. Output values are used in cross-stack references, which let you import and export values between stacks without the need for hard-coding resource IDs in stack templates or passing input parameters. Visit here to learn more.

This Quick Start deploys a standardized AWS environment for workloads classified as United Kingdom (UK) OFFICIAL. The Quick Start supports guidance and controls that help public sector organizations manage risks and ensure security when handling information assets classified as UK-OFFICIAL.

AWS CloudTrail now supports filtering on the Event Source attribute when looking up events in your API activity history. This allows you to narrow your search results by the specific AWS services you are interested in. For example, you can now filter results to only show IAM activities such as role creation and policy application by filtering on iam.amazonaws.com in the Event Source attribute. 

Amazon CloudWatch Logs has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the FedRAMP High Baseline within the AWS GovCloud (US) region. This enables government customers to utilize Amazon CloudWatch Logs to process the government’s most sensitive unclassified data. 

Starting today, you can audit your Amazon Aurora database cluster with minimal impact to performance. Auditing allows you to log a customer-specified spectrum of events and publish these logs in a way that can be consumed either manually or using another application. This will help you with log analysis, auditing user actions, setting up alarms for security-related events, and more.

AWS CodeCommit is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail, enabling you to more easily track changes made to your CodeCommit repositories through API calls or Git operations. CloudTrail captures these changes and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket you specify. Learn more in our documentation. 

Amazon Relational Database Service has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the FedRAMP High Baseline within the AWS GovCloud (US) region for the Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL services.

Elastic IP Migration enables you to migrate unassociated Elastic IP Addresses in EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC and back if needed. This allows you to retain the same public Internet facing Elastic IP Addresses after migrating your workload into a VPC. 

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations on AWS to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS resources. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services, and helps you to achieve consistent governance and meet your compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services that they need.

AWS Service Catalog is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, and London) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo) Regions. For more information, see the AWS Service Catalog product page.

AWS Batch is now available for all customers. AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and features, such as Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances.

There is no additional charge for AWS Batch. You only pay for the AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances) you create to store and run your batch jobs. AWS Batch is available in the US East (N. Virginia) region.

To learn more, please visit the AWS Batch Product Page.

Amazon Inspector is pleased to announce support for security assessments on Ubuntu 16.04 within Amazon EC2. You can now run assessments for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Amazon Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run vulnerability assessments for Ubuntu 16.04, simply install the Amazon Inspector AWS Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Amazon Inspector console, and run your assessment.