Jan 2018

AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the Amazon API Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application. Now, you can use new resource types to write CloudFormation templates that are optimized for defining serverless applications with only a few lines of text. 

Amazon EC2 customers can now utilize up to five times higher bandwidth when sending or receiving network traffic between an instance and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) within the same region. They can also utilize higher bandwidth for traffic between instances in different Availability Zones.  

Amazon Connect customers can now use federated single sign-on (SSO) using SAML 2.0 to access Amazon Connect. This allows contact center agents and managers to access Amazon Connect with their existing corporate credentials. As an administrator, you can enforce password policies, and use your existing SAML 2.0 user directory to control access to Amazon Connect, based on location, the device they are using, or their role. 

You can now use Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy models for applications in the AWS Cloud that are subject to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. PCI DSS is a proprietary information security standard administered by the PCI Security Standards Council and applies to all entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data and/or sensitive authentication data including merchants, processors, acquirers, issuers, and service providers.

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

Amazon Connect is now available in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to four. The expansion into a new AWS Region provides you more options to provision your Amazon Connect cloud contact center with the other AWS services you use. 

Amazon EC2 Spot can now hibernate EBS-backed Amazon EC2 C5 and M5 instances in the event of an interruption. Spot instances can fulfill your request by resuming instances from a hibernated state when capacity is available. Hibernate is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, with your application starting up right where it left off.

AWS CodeBuild now supports GitHub Enterprise as the source control provider. This enables GitHub Enterprise customers to use CodeBuild’s managed build service to automatically build pull requests and commits. CodeBuild also supports access to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud resources as an existing feature, so enterprise customers can use CodeBuild without being exposed to the public internet.

NOTE: This Quick Start is no longer available. See the Quick Start home page for our latest Quick Start catalog.

This Quick Start reference deployment automatically deploys the Informatica Data Lake Management solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. 

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are a quick and easy way to get started with machine learning. The AMIs with Source Code now come with TensorFlow 1.5.0-rc1 which supports NVidia CUDA 9 and cuDNN 7 drivers that take advantage of the V100 Volta GPUs powering the EC2 P3 instances. The Conda-based Deep Learning AMIs now come with the latest framework versions of Caffe, Keras 2.1.3, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.3.1, and Theano 1.0. The Conda-based AMIs also include TensorBoard for monitoring and debugging a TensorFlow model, and TensorFlow Serving to export TensorFlow models and create a server running a gRPC service for serving the model. Apache MXNet users can now benefit from the MXNet Model Server to quickly deploy an HTTP-based inference API for their models.

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. This increases the number of AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 available to six. This expansion into two new AWS Regions enables you to deploy AppStream 2.0 closer to your users, providing them with a more responsive experience.

AWS Step Functions is now available in two additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Canada (Central). Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed systems, serverless applications, and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.

Starting today, you can view your amortized reservation costs in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Reports, as well as monitor those costs via AWS Budgets. This makes it easier to understand and control the comprehensive costs of workloads covered by your Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB reservations. 

Starting today, you can use Amazon Chime with video conferencing systems that support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for high quality online meetings. With this update, you can join Amazon Chime meetings using your existing video teleconferencing (VTC) systems that support either SIP or H.323 without the need to purchase new equipment.

Amazon EC2 Spot instances receive a two-minute warning when these instances are about to be reclaimed by Amazon EC2. Starting today, the two-minute warning for Spot instances is available via Amazon CloudWatch Events CLI and will continue to be available by accessing the Instance Metadata service.

You can now import snapshots of encrypted instances of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL into Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, allowing you to maintain encryption of your data while moving it from Amazon RDS into Amazon Aurora. 

You can now create an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL read replica for an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance, allowing you to continuously replicate to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. This helps you minimize downtime when migrating a live workload from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, by keeping the instances in sync until you're ready to move your applications and users to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Starting today, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) supports AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to use KMS APIs inside of your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and route data between your VPC and KMS entirely within the AWS network. 

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 9.6.6, 9.5.10, 9.4.15, and 9.3.20. This release fixes three PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

This new Quick Start automatically deploys TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS) into a customizable environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for shared storage. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Docker version 17.09.01-ce. The Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) now includes the ECS Agent 1.16.2 as well as Docker version 17.09.01-ce. 

Amazon Athena uses Presto, an open source distributed query engine, to run SQL queries against data in Amazon S3. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries you run. We are happy to announce that we have transparently updated Athena's underlying engine to a version based on Presto 0.172.  

You can now use Amazon SageMaker’s BlazingText implementation of the Word2Vec algorithm to generate word embeddings from a large number of documents. Word embeddings represent each unique word in the entire collection of text documents as a vector of numbers. Words that are similar will have similar vectors – that is, they will be close in the low-dimensional space of the embeddings – while words that are less similar will be further apart. This algorithm is used in a variety of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, such as semantic similarity, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and question-answering. Word2Vec has also recently been used successfully in tasks like recommendation and segmentation, where similar embeddings may denote that, by example, two movies tend to be watched by similar users at similar times. Amazon SageMaker’s BlazingText implementation has been engineered with speed and scale in mind to produce embeddings extremely fast using either GPU or CPU hardware.

You can now publish logs from your RDS for MySQL and MariaDB databases to CloudWatch Logs. Supported logs include general log, slow query log, audit log, and error log. Publishing these logs to CloudWatch Logs allows you to maintain continuous visibility into database activity, query performance, and errors in your RDS for MySQL and MariaDB databases. For example, you can set up CloudWatch Alarms to notify you on frequent restarts which are recorded in the error log. Similarly, alarms for events recorded in general or audit logs can be created to alert on unwanted changes made to your databases. You may also create alarms to monitor the slow query log and enable timely detection of long-running queries. 

Amazon API Gateway is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. 

M5 Instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 General Purpose compute instances, were introduced in November 2017 to offer a balance of compute, memory, storage and networking resources for a broad range of customer workloads.  

C5 Instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake), were introduced in November 2017. C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customer’s workloads. 

To help make it easier for game developers to consistently track, analyze, and archive gameplay data on the AWS Cloud, AWS offers the Gaming Analytics Pipeline, a solution that automatically provisions and configures the services necessary to consume and analyze gameplay telemetry in minutes. 

You can now encrypt your Amazon SageMaker storage volumes used for Training and Hosting with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). 

Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is available to nine. This expansion into a new AWS Region allows you to provision WorkSpaces closer to your users and data in the cloud, providing a more responsive experience. You can quickly add or remove WorkSpaces to meet changing demand, without the added cost and complexity of on-premises VDI infrastructure.

Today, we are introducing volume-based tiered pricing for Vended logs in CloudWatch Logs, effective January 1, 2018. Vended logs are logs that are natively published by AWS services on behalf of the customer. VPC Flow logs is the first Vended log type that will benefit from this tiered model. However, more AWS Service log types will be added to Vended Logs in the future. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs now support OpenGL 4.3. To activate OpenGL 4.3 support for existing Elastic GPUs, simply stop and start your instances, and a new driver will be automatically installed in your instance to support OpenGL 4.3. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code using Go. Lambda lets you run code without provisioning and managing servers. You simply upload your Go executable artifact as a ZIP file through the AWS CLI or Lambda console and select the go1.x runtime. With Lambda, you can use Go's native tools to build and package your code. Read our documentation for more details. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code in C# using the .NET Core 2.0. Lambda lets you run code without provisioning and managing servers. You can use any of the .NET Core 2.0 libraries or frameworks when authoring your functions in Lambda. Read our documentation for more details.

AWS Glue now supports the Scala programming language, in addition to Python, to give you choice and flexibility when writing your AWS Glue ETL scripts. 

AWS Glue now provides customers more control over ETL jobs by supporting additional trigger conditions. 

This new Quick Start automatically creates a secure deployment of IBM WebSphere Liberty into a customizable environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 40 minutes.  

Amazon Inspector has released an enhancement to the Inspector Agent that will allow it to perform assessments for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks, and AWS Security Best Practices on supported operating systems, regardless of the kernel version installed. Prior to this release, the Inspector Agent was dependent on an internal kernel module that supported specific Linux OS kernel versions. The Inspector Agent could not be installed or used to run any security assessments for supported Linux operating systems that were using non-default, older, or custom kernels. With this update, you can use any kernel and run those assessments. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS Read Replicas for MySQL and MariaDB now support Multi-AZ deployments. Combining Read Replicas with Multi-AZ enables you to build a resilient disaster recovery strategy and simplify your database engine upgrade process. 

You can now log your Amazon SageMaker API calls with AWS CloudTrail.  

AWS Shield Advanced and AWS WAF have expanded their regional footprint to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and EU (Frankfurt) Regions, making them available in 7 AWS Regions.

AWS Batch now supports AWS CloudTrail audit calls to Batch APIs. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With AWS CloudTrail, customers can now audit calls to AWS Batch APIs, making it easier to ensure compliance with internal policies and regulatory standards.

Now, you can use the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console in Korean. The IAM console is also available in English, French, Japanese, and Chinese. 

AWS X-Ray SDK for Ruby enables developers to record and emit information from within their applications to the AWS X-Ray service. You can get started in minutes using the repository on Github.  

Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications. Rekognition Image API allows you to detect objects, scenes, faces and inappropriate content; extract text; recognize celebrities; and search and compare faces, in images. Rekognition Video API for the AWS US-East (Ohio) region allows you to track people; detect objects, scenes, activities and inappropriate content; recognize celebrities; and search faces, in videos stored in Amazon S3. 

You can now use the DeepAR forecasting algorithm for model training in Amazon SageMaker. 

Amazon CloudFront announces six new Edge Locations that are now part of its global network. These six new Edge Locations are located in the following cities:

Perth, Australia; Chennai, India; Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; Los Angeles, California; and two additional Edge Locations in Tokyo, Japan.

Starting today, you can launch MariaDB version 10.2 instances on Amazon RDS. You can also easily upgrade your existing Amazon RDS for MariaDB database instances from version 10.1 to 10.2.11.