Mar 2018

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. To more easily enable the voicing of longer text input, Amazon Polly has doubled its character limit for the SynthesizeSpeech API operation. The maximum length of input text can be up to 3000 billed characters, or 6000 total characters including non-billed SSML tags.

Amazon CloudWatch Vended logs now support Route 53 logs. Vended logs are logs that are natively published by AWS services on behalf of our customers.  

Amazon Connect federated single sign-on using SAML 2.0 is now generally available. This allows contact center agents and managers to access Amazon Connect using 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 your agents’ location, the device they are using, and their role.

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. Once this is done, agents and managers can sign in to Amazon Connect through your identity provider portal with a single click, and without a separate username and password for Amazon Connect. To learn more, see Configure SAML for Identity Management in Amazon Connect.  

You can use federated single sign-on using SAML 2.0 in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered, and there are no additional Amazon Connect charges for using SAML 2.0. To learn more about Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.

The Amazon Connect outbound contact API for automating calls to customers is now generally available. You can schedule automated calls for appointment reminders, like doctor appointments and payment due notifications. You can also trigger automated notification calls in response to events, like notifying a customer about credit card fraud on their account. In addition, you can use the outbound contact API to initiate calls from other applications, such as CRM systems, using specific contact flows to inform customers about important information, such as when a service outage occurs. To learn more, see the outbound contact API documentation.  

You can use the Amazon Connect outbound contact API in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. There is no additional charge for using the outbound contact API, but standard pricing for service usage and associated telephony rates do apply. Please see Amazon Connect Pricing for more information. To learn more about Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.

Amazon Chime now provides admins with usage reports in the Amazon Chime console. These reports provide visibility into how users are using Amazon Chime, as well as information about their experience with the service.

With this update, you can view data such as the total number of registered and active users, meetings and meeting feedback responses, and message activity. You can click through to learn which meetings occurred, the meeting duration, and the attendee list for each meeting. You can view reporting data by navigating to the Amazon Chime admin console and choosing Reports and Dashboard.

Amazon Chime is a secure, real-time communications service that simplifies video conferencing, online meetings, calls and chat. Amazon Chime offers pay-as-you-go pricing, with no upfront payments, and no infrastructure to deploy. You can try Amazon Chime for free for 30 days by visiting the Amazon Chime download page.

Please visit our website for more information on Amazon Chime:

· Product Page

· Documentation

· Start a Free Trial Today

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the Red Hat OpenShift Quick Start reference deployment.  

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Events to react to resource configuration and compliance change notifications from AWS Config. AWS Config records configuration changes to your AWS resources and evaluates those changes with respect to best practices and internal guidelines according to AWS Config rules. With this launch, you can now use the native capabilities of CloudWatch Events to filter the notifications coming from AWS Config. CloudWatch Events can then trigger specific actions, such as a running an AWS Lambda function, an AWS Systems Manager command, or terminating an Amazon EC2 instance.

AWS Systems Manager now allows you to select and deploy patches automatically for instances running CentOS Linux version 6.5 and higher.

You can now use launch templates with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet in your AWS CloudFormation templates. Launch templates are a new capability for templatizing your EC2 instance launch requests. 

AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video processing service, is now available in two pricing tiers that differ based on the encoding capabilities they include. The existing Professional tier offers a full suite of professional video processing features designed for broadcast and multiscreen delivery of high-quality video outputs. The Professional tier includes creation of MPEG-2, AVC, HEVC, and Apple ProRes outputs, dual-pass and high-quality encoding, and other advanced features, with rates starting at $0.0120/minute. The new lower cost Basic tier is intended for simple web distribution use cases. The Basic tier supports outputs using the AVC codec and single-pass transcoding, with rates starting at $0.0075/minute.

You can now use Resource Groups Tagging API to centrally manage tags and search resources for 13 additional AWS services. The API enables five operations that allow you to programmatically tag and untag resources, list unique tag keys and values, and list resources with a specific tag across 41 AWS services. For a list of supported AWS Services, see Resource Groups Tagging API documentation.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 10.3, 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, and 9.3.22. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in current and previous minor releases by PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

With this update, we have also added support for the ‘amcheck’ extension -to verify the logical consistency of the structure of indexes - in PostgreSQL version 10.3; pg_hint_plan extension upgraded to 1.2.2 in PostgreSQL 9.6.8; PLV8 extension has been updated to version 2.1.0 in PostgreSQL version 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, and 9.3.22.

To use the new versions, you can create a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or upgrade an existing instance using point-and-click upgrades. An upgrade operation involves a short period of unavailability for your database instance. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for regional availability.

Alexa for Business now lets you create address books that make it easier for users to place phone calls from shared Echo devices. With Alexa for Business, you can place Echo devices in common areas like conference rooms, shared workspaces, or hotel rooms. These are called shared Echo devices, and you can make phone calls from these devices. With this feature, you can create address books and assign them to specific shared Echo devices, which lets users ask Alexa to make phone calls by name rather than by speaking phone numbers. IT can add frequently accessed phone numbers to address books, such as an IT helpdesk, or the facilities team, and make it easier for users to access these services. 

Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, enables you to increase user logon performance by changing your AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory’s default site name.

AWS IoT Core is pleased to announce increased default service limits for all customers in all regions. Customers will now be granted 10,000 inbound and 20,000 outbound publish requests per second, increased from 3,000 and 6,000 respectively. In addition, customers will now be granted 500 connect requests per second, up from 300. The full list of AWS IoT Core limits can be found on the AWS Service Limits page. Customers needing further limit increases can request them by creating a Service Limit Increase request from the Support Center in the AWS Console.  

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) has added new Amazon CloudWatch Events to notify customers when volume creation or deletion is accomplished. Instead of having to continuously poll describe-volume API to determine whether the volume has been created or deleted after issuing the command, customers can use these events to track the volume state. 

Starting today, AWS WAF and Shield Advanced are also available in the US East (Ohio) Region, extending the footprint to 8 AWS Regions and all 114 Amazon CloudFront edge locations.

Starting today, AWS Organizations enables you to use the console to view and control which AWS services have trusted access to your organization. AWS services for which you enable trusted access can now access your organization information and perform actions in multiple AWS accounts within your organization.

Customers can now use AWS Storage Gateway to migrate, store and access data in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region from on-premises or AWS GovCloud (US) environments. Storage Gateway connects applications to AWS storage, enabling hybrid cloud architectures used for data migration, processing and analytics, file services, backup, and disaster recovery. With Storage Gateway, you can shift from buying storage or backup hardware to using AWS storage services, reducing physical infrastructure and management.

Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is available to ten. This expansion into a new AWS Region allows you to provision WorkSpaces closer to your users and data. And you can better meet data sovereignty requirements without the cost and complexity of building on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). You can quickly add or remove WorkSpaces to meet the need of your dynamic workforce and still provide a more responsive experience to end users.

Amazon GuardDuty, a managed threat detection service, is now available in the Europe (Paris) region. You can now extend your continuous security monitoring and threat detection to the EU (Paris) region.

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the AWS Germany (Frankfurt) Region. This expansion increases the number of AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is available to seven. Deploying AppStream 2.0 in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience and may help you meet your local data compliance obligations.

AWS CodeBuild, a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy, is now available in the South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (Paris) Regions. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers.

You can now take advantage of new features in Amazon SageMaker designed to speed up your training and help you customize your models for both linear regression and binary classification using the Linear Learner algorithm. 

Now, AWS Security Token Service (STS) enables you to have longer federated access to your AWS resources by increasing the maximum CLI/API session duration to up to 12 hours for an IAM role.

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instance types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

R4 instances are the latest generation of Memory Optimized instances, featuring all previous-generation sizes plus a new 16xlarge instance size. R4 instances are optimized for memory-intensive and latency-sensitive database workloads, including data analytics, in-memory databases, and high-performance production workloads. They offer15.25 to 488 GiB of DDR4 memory and 2 to 64 vCPUs. R4 instances feature Enhanced Networking and support up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and 14 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to storage.

T2 instances offer low-cost burstable CPU performance. The db.t2.xlarge instance offers 16 GiB of memory and 4 vCPU, while the db.t2.2xlarge instance offers 32 GiB of memory and 8 vCPU. These instances are recommended for workloads that require consistent baseline CPU performance with occasional need to burst to higher CPU performance, such as database workloads in development and test environments. 

M4 instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and network resources. The db.m4.16xlarge instance offers 256 GiB of memory and 64 vCPUs. M4 instances feature Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) based Enhanced Networking and support up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and 10 Gbps of dedicated throughput to the storage.

You can create a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or upgrade an existing instance using point-and-click upgrades. An upgrade operation involves a short period of unavailability for your database instance. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for regional availability.

You can now use AWS Glue in two additional AWS regions, Asia Pacific (Sydney) and EU (Frankfurt).

Amazon DynamoDB enhances its backup and restore capabilities by adding point-in-time recovery (PITR). PITR provides continuous backups of your DynamoDB table data and it helps protect against accidental writes or deletes. With PITR, you do not have to worry about creating, maintaining, or scheduling backups.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with advanced optimizations tailored for TensorFlow 1.6 to deliver high-performance training across Amazon EC2 instance families.  

AWS Fargate Platform Version 1.1.0 is now available. This update adds support for Amazon ECS task metadata endpoints, container health checks, and ECS service discovery.

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

Amazon RDS M4 instances have a good balance of compute, memory, and network resources, and have superior performance and generally lower prices than M3 instances. To learn more about the benefits of the M4 instance type for Amazon RDS, visit the DB Instance Classes documentation.

You can create new M4 database instances with just a few clicks using the "Launch DB Instance" wizard in the AWS Management Console. To migrate an existing instance, ensure the instance is running a database engine version supported on M4, and then use the “Modify DB Instance” option.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now includes integrated service discovery that makes it easy for your containerized services to discover and connect with each other.

Amazon Web Services now offers Amazon Machine Images (AMI) with .NET Core on Amazon Linux 2 and Ubuntu. These AMIs are packaged and pre-configured with .NET Core 2.0, PowerShell Core 6.0, and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) enabling you to quickly and easily deploy and run .NET Core applications on Amazon EC2.

Starting today, you can protect multiple resources, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon EC2 instances, at the same time using the AWS Shield Advanced console. With this new capability, you can enable advanced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protections for your entire environment quickly.

Network Load Balancer, designed to handle millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Network Load Balancer is optimized to handle volatile traffic patterns while using a single static IP address per Availability Zone. It operates at connection level (Layer 4), routing connections to Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses based on IP protocol data. It also preserves the client-side source IP, allowing applications to see the IP address of the client that can then be used by applications for further processing. 

AWS Cloud9 now supports local debugging for Python-based AWS Lambda functions. This enables you to set breakpoints and step through your code, helping you quickly iterate on your code within the IDE before deploying to Lambda.

You can now simplify Active Directory (AD) logon names for your users by adding an alternate user principal name (UPN) suffix in your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD.

Real-Time Web Analytics with Kinesis Data Analytics is a solution that can help you more easily track website activity. This solution automatically provisions the services necessary to track and visualize website clickstream data in real-time. The Real-Time Web Analytics with Kinesis Data Analytics solution is designed to provide a framework for analyzing and visualizing metrics in real-time, allowing you to focus on adding new metrics rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.

AWS CodePipeline can now execute pipelines in response to push-based triggers from Amazon S3. Previously, if you were using S3 as a source action, CodePipeline checked periodically to see if there was a change. Now, S3 will send an Amazon CloudWatch Event when a change is made to your S3 object that triggers a pipeline execution in CodePipeline.  

Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice. The new SSML Breath feature mimics the sound of inhalation and/or exhalation during normal speech. With the SSML Breath tag, you can now insert appropriate breath sounds to make the Amazon Polly generated speech sound even more natural, as if the text is being narrated by a human speaker.

Release 9.6.6 of the PostgreSQL database fixes three PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities and contains additional bug fixes and improvements. Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility has been updated to version 1.1 in support of this new PostgreSQL release.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video processing service, is now available in five new regions worldwide: US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London) and South America (São Paulo). AWS Elemental MediaConvert allows video providers with any size content library to easily and reliably transcode on-demand content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery. The service functions independently or as part of AWS Media Services, a family of services that form the foundation of cloud-based workflows and offer you the capabilities you need to create, package, and deliver video. 

AWS IoT Framework for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) helps you integrate AWS IoT and AWS Greengrass into the AGL software stack. The framework consists of AWS Greengrass Core and an AWS IoT binding service built using the AGL Application Framework and AWS IoT Device SDK.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage is a video origination and just-in-time packaging service that allows video distributors to securely and reliably deliver streaming content at scale. This service functions independently or as part of AWS Media Services, a family of services that form the foundation of cloud-based video workflows and offer you the capabilities you need to create, package, and deliver video.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB Server minor versions 10.0.34, 10.1.31 and 10.2.12 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

You can now use the Docker shm-size and tmpfs parameters in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions.

Starting today, you can access your Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations programmatically via the AWS Cost Explorer API. RI purchase recommendations are calculated based on your past usage and indicate opportunities for potential cost savings. To tailor your recommendations, you can adjust the RI parameters (e.g., return only recommendations for partial upfront convertible RIs with a one-year term) and the historical time period of usage over which your recommendations are calculated (e.g., last 60 days). Once you have identified the optimal mix of RIs to address your business needs, you can access to the Amazon EC2 RI Purchase Console or use the AWS SDK to take action on your insights and purchase Reserved Instances.

Starting today, Lambda@Edge enables you to further customize the delivery of content stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, by allowing you to access additional whitelisted headers, including custom headers, within origin-facing events. For example, you can configure Amazon CloudFront to cache and forward a country header to your S3 origin, and then use Lambda@Edge to dynamically redirect viewers to country-specific versions of your website, based on the viewer’s location. CloudFront also caches the responses to further improve the performance on subsequent requests to your website.

Until now, you could configure Amazon CloudFront with an S3 origin to forward and to cache objects based on only three headers: Access-Control-Request-Headers, Access-Control-Request-Method, and Origin. This limited the ability to leverage the full potential of Lambda@Edge, as you could only use cookies and query strings when you wanted to customize the delivery of content stored in S3 buckets. However, with this launch, you can now configure CloudFront with an S3 origin to cache and forward several additional headers, such as CloudFront-Viewer-Country or CloudFront-Is-*-Viewer, and then use Lambda@Edge to customize content based on these headers and deliver at low latencies to your viewers. To see all the supported headers, click here.

There is no additional fee for the new capability. To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page. For more information on how to use this new feature, see the following resources:

• Examples showing personalization of content based on viewer location and viewer device type.
• Example showing content-based dynamic origin selection using headers.  

AWS Config now supports a new API to fetch the current configuration information for one or more resources that are being recorded in your AWS account. Previously you could retrieve the current resource configuration along with the historical configuration information for one resource at a time. Now you can obtain your current resource configurations for multiple resources using the new API. You can still obtain the historical information for individual resource configurations using the existing API.

Today we’re announcing that the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provides customers with more assurance around the secure use and management of their keys. Customers now get assurance that keys are created and used by hardware security modules (HSMs) in KMS that meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2 requirements. Customers can also choose to make requests of KMS using API endpoints that terminate TLS sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module.

AWS Training and Certification has teamed up with edX and Udemy to give learners more flexibility for building AWS Cloud skills online.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Docker and EC2 instance types – P3, X1, C5, M5 in additional regions and Ruby 2.5 in all regions.

Amazon SageMaker now includes support for ml.p3.2xlarge instances for data exploration and pre-processing in your Jupyter notebooks. Amazon SageMaker ml.p3.2xlarge instances are powered by an NVIDIA Volta GPU, which delivers up to 125 trillion single-precision floating-point operations per second, to enable you to execute faster in-notebook training.  

Starting today, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics supports real-time hotspot detection, which allows you to automatically detect regions of high density in your data, like a high concentration of vehicles on a highway indicating traffic bottlenecks, surging rideshare requests in a certain area indicating a popular event, or higher sales of products within a category indicating feature similarity. Detecting hotspots like these can help you gain actionable insights quickly and react to changing customer and business needs promptly.  

You can now use Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. NAT Gateway is a highly available AWS managed service that makes it easy to connect to the Internet from instances within a private subnet in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Previously, you needed to launch a NAT instance to enable NAT for instances in a private subnet. 

Starting today, AWS Elemental MediaTailor supports the Video Player-Ad Interface Definition (VPAID) standard. VPAID allows video publishers to serve highly interactive video ads and collect viewing metrics from their monetized streams. You can now use AWS Elemental MediaTailor to serve a combination of server-side stitched linear ads, using the VAST standard, and client-side inserted interactive ads, using the VPAID standard, in the same stream.

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in two additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and South America (Sao Paulo).

Amazon Redshift increases the number of tables you can create to 20,000 for 8xlarge cluster node types. Doubling the number of tables gives you more control and granularity for organizing data in your cluster.

Today we are releasing support for using GraphQL subscriptions with the AWS AppSync Android SDK. Complex Object capabilities, which allow GraphQL operations using content stored in Amazon S3 using an Amazon DynamoDB link are also now supported as part of this release. These features provide customers capabilities to have real-time data streamed to their applications from data sources such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elasticsearch service, or AWS Lambda.

AWS CloudTrail makes it easier to search CloudTrail log files using the power of Amazon Athena. Previously, you had to manually create a CloudTrail table using the Athena console or AWS CLI and ensure you had the proper configuration and data definitions to match the CloudTrail log format. Now, from within the CloudTrail console event history page, you simply enter the Amazon S3 bucket where your CloudTrail logs are stored, and CloudTrail will automatically create the Athena table for you. Once the table is created, you’ll be able to jump directly to the Athena console query editor and immediately begin running queries.

Starting today, you can now use Amazon CloudFront to negotiate HTTPS connections to origins using Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). ECDSA uses smaller keys that are faster, yet, just as secure, as the older RSA algorithm. The smaller keys will also increase the number of TLS handshakes that your origins can process per second, thereby saving compute cycles and reducing your cost of cryptography. To enable ECDSA, simply configure your origin server to use and prefer an ECDSA certificate. There is no additional fee for using this feature. To learn more about how ECDSA works on CloudFront, see the blog post and the CloudFront Developer Guide.

 

The AWS Quick Start team and solutions architects, in collaboration with AWS partners, are pleased to announce three new Amazon Connect integrations: 

We’re excited to announce the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.13. With over 220 improvements, fixes, and new features, this release helps game teams create cloud-connected games with less engineering resources. Some highlights include:

You can now customize the configuration of your Amazon SageMaker notebook instance, and choose to disconnect your notebook instance from the internet.

The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in 12 regions. With the addition of the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Region, you have a new option for database placement, availability, and scalability.

Beginning today, you can use a new Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming API to update the health status of service instances manually. After you register a service instance with a new custom health check configuration, you can call the new API to mark the service instance healthy and start routing traffic to it. Alternatively, you can set the health status to "unhealthy," and Route 53 will stop routing traffic to this service instance.

The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in 11 regions. With the addition of the EU (London) AWS Region, you have a new option for database placement, availability, and scalability.

Starting today, Amazon Elasticsearch Service supports Elasticsearch 6.2 and Kibana 6.2. Elasticsearch 6.2 offers several enhancements over the Elasticsearch 6.0 stack, including a new ranking evaluation API, index splitting API, Vega interactive visualizations, and composite aggregations with paging.

You now have more options to configure and deploy REST APIs using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM). You can now configure logging, metrics, CORS, and regional endpoints for Amazon API Gateway resources in your AWS SAM template. You can also configure APIs that support binary data and you can define method settings like throttling limits and CacheTTL. Visit the release notes for more details on these new features.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the US West (Northern California) region.

Starting today, you can use the Reserved Instance (RI) Coverage report in AWS Cost Explorer to better understand and manage your Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache reservations, in addition to your Amazon EC2 RIs. The RI Coverage report allows you to visualize the percentage of running instance hours that are covered by RIs against a user-defined coverage threshold and over a timeline that you define. You can view RI coverage at a high level (e.g., across all running hours) or dive into a detailed view by filtering on account, instance type, region, tags, and more. You can also access additional coverage-related information such as the number of On-Demand hours used, the node type, and the region in which it was used. From there, you can use this information to optimize your RI purchasing strategy (e.g., by identifying instance hours that are consistently running at on-demand rates and purchase matching RIs).

Amazon Inspector now supports security assessments on Amazon Linux 2 for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run security assessments, simply install the Amazon Inspector Agent on the desired Amazon EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Inspector console, and run your assessment. 

This new Quick Start, built in collaboration with Teradici, deploys a highly available architecture for cloud video editing on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes. Deploying on AWS yields a high-performing environment for transforming videos. Video editing involves large files and requires powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) workstations. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides durable, scalable object storage.  

Starting today, M5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and EU (Frankfurt) Regions. 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 customers' workloads.

Starting today, C5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore), EU (Frankfurt), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. 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, Nitro Hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customers' workloads. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the Seunjeon plugin, a popular open-source Korean language text analyzer, which makes it easy for developers to implement full-text search on Korean documents. The plugin internally uses a Korean language dictionary and is capable of recognizing compound words and separating them into terms based on context. Developers can now use this plugin to perform Korean text analysis operations such as tokenizing (separating a string into words), stemming (converting the text to its root form), removing stop words (frequent, low-value terms), and matching based on synonyms.

Inter-Region Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Peering, which provides a simple and cost-effective way to share resources between regions or replicate data for geographic redundancy, is now available in the AWS EU (Frankfurt) Region. 

Amazon Chime is introducing new, frustration-free pricing to make it easier to buy and use Amazon Chime. With this new approach to pricing, you only pay for users that host meetings, on the days they host them, while attendees remain free. Usage fees are $3.00 per user per day, with a cap of $15.00 per user per month. In addition, we are reducing the number of plans from three to two by discontinuing the Plus plan. Screen sharing and user management fees will be included with the Basic plan, which remains free. With these changes, we are simplifying our pricing, and making it easier to save money while providing access to Amazon Chime Pro features to more of your users.

Amazon SNS message filtering now supports both numeric and string matching. Specifically, string matching operators allow for exact, prefix, and “anything-but” comparisons, while numeric matching operators allow for exact and range comparisons. You can leverage this new set of operators to further simplify pub/sub messaging architectures by offloading to SNS message filtering logic from subscribers, as well as routing logic from publishers.

Earlier this month, we announced that you can now opt in to receive longer format resource IDs before the permanent switch to longer IDs after June 2018. Today, we are publishing AMIs with longer IDs for you to use to test your systems. These are secondary versions of existing AMIs to be used for testing purposes only:

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.5.59, 5.6.39 and 5.7.21 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MySQL database engine.

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, provision, and operate cloud resources on AWS, now allows customers to customize the look and feel of the console. Customers can brand their AWS Service Catalog console to match their internal applications, making the user experience more seamless when moving from internal applications such as single sign-on and navigation portals to AWS Service Catalog.  

You can now use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to directly query scalar JSON and Ion data types stored in external tables in Amazon S3 - without loading or transforming the data.  

Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, enables you to manage administrative permissions in your managed directory more easily. You can now grant administrative permissions to users from your existing Microsoft Active Directory (AD) by adding these users to the new AWS delegated AD security groups in AWS Managed Microsoft AD.

The AWS Solutions team has updated Video on Demand on AWS, a solution that automatically provisions the services necessary to build a scalable, distributed video-on-demand workflow on AWS. The solution now leverages the broadcast-grade features of AWS Elemental MediaConvert to provide H.265 (HEVC) and H.264 (AVC) compression, two-pass encoding, and up to 4K resolution outputs. The solution is easy to deploy and provides an example architecture you can use to build a global consumer video workflow on AWS. You can customize the architecture to meet your specific needs.

Today, we are excited to announce that customers can deploy Gluon models to their AWS DeepLens device. Gluon, is an open source deep learning interface which allows developers of all skill levels to prototype, build, train and deploy sophisticated machine learning models for the cloud, devices at the edge and mobile apps. 

Education pricing is now available for Amazon WorkSpaces. With this release, qualifying education institutions can save up to 14% per month by leveraging license discounts from Microsoft. This equates to a savings of $3.52 per user per month or $0.03 per user per hour if you qualify, based on Microsoft Licensing Terms and Documentation.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports Docker container health checks. This gives you more control over monitoring the health of your tasks and improves the ability of the ECS service scheduler to ensure your services are healthy. 

The AWS Storage Gateway service expanded the set of CloudWatch Events for File Gateway to help automate hybrid cloud workflows, and now supports "Requester Pays" Amazon S3 buckets.

Today, AWS added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. A third AZ provides customers with sensitive data and regulatory compliance requirements, additional flexibility to architect scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available applications in AWS GovCloud (US). It also allows customers to take full advantage of advanced new AWS services.

New minor versions of Microsoft SQL Server are available, offering performance and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports them for Microsoft SQL Server 2017, 2016, 2014 2012, and 2008 R2 for Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions on Windows operating systems.

Thinkbox Deadline now supports Cinema4D for Linux and OSX, in addition to Windows OS. This new feature makes it possible to spin up Linux instances with Cinema4D, helping to make your rendering workloads more cost-effective. You can submit jobs from the Deadline monitor or from within Cinema 4D by installing the integrated submission script, or you can submit jobs from the Monitor. To submit from within Cinema 4D, select “Python -> Plugins -> Submit To Deadline”. For Cinema 4D versions R15 and earlier, select “Plugins -> Submit To Deadline.”. To use Cinema4D for Linux with Deadline, please download Deadline 10.0.12.1 or later.

 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now updates your access policies within seconds. Access policies are used to control the IAM users or roles, and IP addresses that are authorized to access your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains. 

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to create, govern, and manage a catalog of IT services, is announcing AutoTags. AutoTags are tags that identify the portfolio, product, and user that launched a product, and are automatically applied by AWS Service Catalog to provisioned resources.

NOTE: This Quick Start is no longer available. See https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/ for our latest Quick Start catalog.

AWS Systems Manager now supports InSpec by Chef, an open source framework that helps you perform configuration compliance as code. 

The MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in 14 regions. With the addition of the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region, you have a new option for database placement, availability, and scalability.

Amazon Connect is now compliant with SOC (System & Organization Control) measures. SOC Reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives. AWS maintains SOC compliance through extensive third-party audits of AWS controls. These audits ensure that the appropriate safeguards and procedures are in place to protect against security risks that may affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer and company data. The results of these third-party audits are made available on the AWS SOC Compliance site, where auditors can view the published reports to get more information about the controls established to support AWS operations and compliance.