June 2018

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code in C# using the .NET Core 2.1 runtime which will soon be the Long Term Support (LTS) version of .NET Core. You can use any of the new runtime features such as the more performant HTTP client implementation and types for representing contiguous regions of arbitrary memory. For more details, read the Lambda documentation. 

Amazon MQ now supports four new M5 broker instances that enable you to scale your brokers to meet higher throughput requirements.  

Today, Amazon Macie is introducing support for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles to setup Amazon Macie with the delegated permissions needed to access resources in other services on your behalf. Service-linked roles also help you meet monitoring and auditing requirements because all actions performed on your behalf by Amazon Macie will appear in your AWS CloudTrail logs.

You can now enable access logs for your Application Load Balancer (ALB) to help analyze traffic patterns and troubleshoot issues from within the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console. Access logs capture detailed information about requests sent to your ALB. These logs contain information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. Access logging is an optional feature that is disabled by default. To enable ALB access logs for your Elastic Beanstalk environment, select the feature to enable access logs and specify the S3 bucket where the logs will be stored from within the configuration-load balancer page in the Elastic Beanstalk console. To learn more, refer to Configuring an Application Load Balancer in Elastic Beanstalk.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is now HIPAA-eligible. If you have an executed Business Associate Addendum (BAA) with AWS, you can use Amazon EKS to manage processing encrypted Protected Health Information (PHI) in Docker containers deployed onto a cluster of Amazon EC2 compute instances.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe API calls are recorded with AWS CloudTrail. Also, now you can monitor API call logs in real-time using Amazon CloudWatch Events. With CloudTrail and CloudWatch Events, you can simplify security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting your transcription applications, as well as better monitor application health and performance.

Amazon DynamoDB backup and restore is now available in the EU (Paris) Region. With on-demand backup and restore, you can create full backups of your DynamoDB tables for data archiving and retention, helping you meet your corporate and governmental regulatory requirements. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) provides continuous backups of your DynamoDB table data, protecting you against accidental writes or deletes. When you enable PITR on your DynamoDB table, you can recover that table from backup at any point in time from the moment you enable it to a maximum of the 35 preceding days.

You can enable backup and restore for your DynamoDB table data with a single click in the AWS Management Console, a simple API call, or with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). You can back up tables with no impact on performance and availability to your production applications.

DynamoDB backup and restore is now available in 15 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo).

To learn more about DynamoDB backup and restore, see Backup and Restore. For backup and restore pricing, see Amazon DynamoDB Pricing.

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the SAP HANA Quick Start that supports Multi-AZ, single-node configurations with high availability. 

You can now access Amazon CloudWatch from within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using AWS PrivateLink. This allows you to privately connect to CloudWatch Metrics, Logs, and Events, securely on the AWS network.

AWS Step Functions is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). AWS Step Functions makes it easier 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.

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon SQS as an event source. This allows you to build serverless applications with Lambda using message queues as the event source. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is not just for migrations. It can also replicate data continuously between databases, using Change Data Capture (CDC) to capture changes in the transaction log. With the new Native CDC Start Points, you can precisely control the replication start point, using the native Log Sequence Numbers defined by the database, such as SCN for Oracle or LSN in SQL Server.

Starting today, Elastic Volumes extends support to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) magnetic (standard) volume type. You can now dynamically increase capacity or change the type of magnetic (standard) volumes with no downtime or performance impact using a simple API call or a few console clicks. You can streamline and automate changes using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda.

Amazon MQ is now available in seven regions with the addition of the US West (N. California) region. Previously launched regions include US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. 

Amazon Inspector now shows you which instances or security checks are not evaluated in an assessment run and provides guidance to fix those issues. Assessment runs can fail to execute or might complete with errors for multiple reasons. With this launch, you can view the reasons and get guidance so you can pinpoint the issues, resolve them, and successfully execute assessment runs.  

AWS Amplify library announces a new service integration which enables conversational bots in JavaScript apps by utilizing the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa.

Amazon SageMaker is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS region. Amazon SageMaker is a fully-managed platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale.

Amazon SageMaker inference calls are now supported on AWS PrivateLink, keeping them secure from the internet. Customers can initiate inference calls to their machine learning models hosted on Amazon SageMaker inside their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), without going over the internet.

AWS Cost Explorer provides you with Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations based on your total cross-account Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS usage. Starting today, linked accounts can also access custom RI purchase recommendations for specific linked accounts directly via AWS Cost Explorer.

Starting today, AWS Secrets Manager allows you to access secrets such as database credentials and API keys across AWS accounts securely, by attaching resource-based policies to secrets. AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that enables you to rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets throughout their lifecycle.

AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway are now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

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.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. Starting today, customers have the option to analyze a collection of documents stored in an Amazon S3 bucket using the new asynchronous job service. This is in addition to the single and multiple document synchronous calls to the REST API already available, giving you a variety of options that best fit your applications’ needs.

AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway are now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers a Linux desktop based on Amazon Linux 2. With this launch, Amazon WorkSpaces customers have the flexibility to choose either a Windows 7, Windows 10, or Amazon Linux 2 desktop. Customers can easily provision Amazon Workspaces for a growing range of use cases that now includes Linux developer desktops, kiosks like point of sale devices, and economical general-purpose desktops.

Now, you can enable microsecond read performance for Amazon DynamoDB tables in your applications written in the Go programming language by using the new Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for Go.

DAX enables you to accelerate reads from DynamoDB tables by up to 10x, taking the time required for reads from milliseconds to microseconds, even at millions of requests per second. DAX manages cache invalidation and data population on your behalf. It also works with existing DynamoDB API calls so that developers can use DAX without making changes to existing application logic.

DAX is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions.

To download the new DAX SDK for Go client, see the DAX resources page.
 

Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming is now available in the AWS US West (N. California) region.

Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming simplifies the management of DNS names and health checks for microservices that run on top of AWS when microservices scale up and down. You can call the Auto Naming APIs to create a service, and then register instances of a service with a single API call. Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming will automatically populate the DNS records and optionally create a health check for the service endpoint. When a new service instance is registered, you can access it by making a simple DNS query for the service name.

Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming API powers Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service discovery functionality and enables unified service discovery for services managed by Amazon ECS and Kubernetes.

You can use Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming APIs in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions. For more information on AWS regions and services, please visit the AWS global region table.

To learn more about Amazon Route 53 Auto Naming, please see our documentation and product page.

Amazon Linux 2 is now generally available and comes with 5 years of long term support (LTS). It incorporates feedback received for two LTS candidate builds that were released on December 13, 2017 and April 9, 2018 respectively. Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation Amazon Linux operating system that provides an updated Linux Kernel (4.14) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), systemd support, a newer compiler (GCC 7.3), an updated C runtime (Glibc 2.26), modern tooling (Binutils 2.29.1), and the latest software packages through the extras mechanisms.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) service discovery is now available in the AWS US West (N. California) region.

You can now set up rules to match and natively route events to Amazon SQS standard queues in AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more about using Amazon CloudWatch Events targets, please visit the documentation here. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports .NET Core 2.1. This is supported on all Windows Server configurations that support .NET Core and available in all corresponding regions.

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots with Amazon Connect in the US West (Oregon) AWS region. Using Amazon Lex, a service that allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots, you can turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. Callers to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot and perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment, without needing to speak to an agent.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas for PostgreSQL can now be deployed in a Multi-AZ configuration.

Amazon RDS offers Multi-AZ deployments and Read Replicas to support availability, scalability, and disaster recovery requirements for production databases. Now, with the ability to deploy Read Replicas in a Multi-AZ configuration, you can have more resilient Read Replicas, improved DR strategy, and a simplified engine upgrade process with high availability.

For many read-heavy workloads, including analytics and OLTP, serving read requests is considered business critical. Having a standby Read Replica in a Multi-AZ configuration ensures high availability for the Read Replica. In the event of the Read Replica host failure or even an AZ failure, the Multi-AZ standby is activated automatically, and the read requests are served from the new server.

In the event of source production database failure, a Read Replica with Multi-AZ can be promoted to become the new production database, and the new production database is instantly highly available, as it is already configured with Multi-AZ.

During the database upgrade process, a Read Replica in a Multi-AZ configuration can be first upgraded to a new database engine version, and then promoted to a production database instance. Since that instance is configured with Multi-AZ, it already has high availability to serve your mission critical application requirements.

For more information, see the Amazon RDS User Guide.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, is now available in AWS China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. AWS Managed Microsoft AD enables you to use a highly available managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.

Today, Amazon Macie released new administrative APIs that are now part of the AWS SDK. The new Macie APIs enable you to automate your IT management workflows, such as associating Amazon S3 resources with Amazon Macie. When new Amazon S3 buckets are created, you can now programmatically associate them with Macie for data discovery, classification, and ongoing data access monitoring.

Amazon QuickSight Authors can now replace datasets in an analysis with a single click. This allows Authors to create analyses and publish dashboards using test data sets from spreadsheets or sample databases, and then easily replace these data sets as necessary. More details here.

Now, Amazon Cloud Directory makes it easier for you to develop applications faster with the Managed Schema. Instead of defining and setting up your own schema, you can now use the Managed Schema to create a directory and start creating and retrieving objects immediately.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are now available in AWS GovCloud (US), an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Glassfish 4.1.2 and 5.0, available as pre-configured Docker Platforms. Glassfish 4.1.2 provides a major bug-fix update over Glassfish 4.1.0. The updated Glassfish platforms are available in all regions where Elastic Beanstalk is available.

Starting today, you can create and co-author Microsoft Office files in real time in the Amazon WorkDocs web application using collaborative editing powered by Hancom Thinkfree Office Online. Users can now create new documents, worksheets, and presentations, share with co-workers, and have them make changes to files directly from a web browser. Users can also collaboratively edit Microsoft Office files from the WorkDocs web application using Hancom Thinkfree Office Online. 

Amazon Sumerian is now available in six new AWS regions: North America (Montreal), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and EU (Paris). This expands the number of AWS regions where Sumerian is available to 15. Please visit the AWS region table for more information.  

(Updated) Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle offers a new capability called Optimize CPUs. It provides two ways to enhance the value of your Oracle Database licenses: you can specify a custom number of cores when launching new instances, and you can disable Intel Hyper-Threading (HT) Technology.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention, and a paid long-term data retention option.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X1e instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.

Amazon SageMaker now comes pre-configured to run PyTorch, adding to the existing integrated TensorFlow, Apache MXNet and Chainer deep learning frameworks that are currently available. Additionally, the pre-configured TensorFlow containers in Amazon SageMaker now support versions 1.7 and 1.8.

The AWS Cost & Usage Report contains the most granular set of AWS cost and usage data available, including metadata about AWS services, pricing, reservations, and more.

AWS CloudFormation now supports the creation of Amazon AWS PrivateLink resources including interface type Virtual Private Cloud endpoints, endpoint services, and endpoint connection notifications. To learn more please visit CloudFormation documentation.

AWS PrivateLink allows customers to securely and privately access services hosted on AWS from their Virtual Private Cloud and from on-premises. AWS PrivateLink also allows customers and partners to share services with other accounts and Virtual Private Cloud networks in an easy and scalable way.

AWS PrivateLink is available in AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (London), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo) Regions.

Learn more about AWS PrivateLink here. Learn more about Virtual Private Clouds and endpoints here.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL minor versions 10.3, 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, and 9.3.22 in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in current and previous minor releases by the 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 has been upgraded to 1.2.2 in PostgreSQL 9.6.8; and 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.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Neural machine translation is a form of language translation automation that uses deep learning models to deliver more accurate translation than traditional statistical and rule-based translation algorithms. This service API is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, Amazon’s isolated cloud region built for sensitive data and regulated workloads. 

The AWS Storage Gateway service added the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to File Gateway, enabling file-based applications developed for Microsoft Windows to easily store and access objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). With File Gateway, applications can now store files as objects in Amazon S3 using SMB versions 2 and 3, as well as Network File System (NFS) versions 3 and 4.1. You can control access to File Gateway SMB file shares and objects using your corporate Active Directory (AD) domains, or you can use authenticated guest access. File Gateway caches your most recently used data locally, providing on-premises applications with low-latency access. File Gateway simplifies moving data to Amazon S3, supporting hybrid object-based workloads, such as machine learning and big data analytics, as well as backup and data archival in Amazon S3.

You can now use Amazon Inspector to run security assessments on regulated workloads and sensitive data hosted on Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. Amazon Inspector is formally approved by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB) as an approved vulnerability scanning tool for AWS services built on EC2.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog with thousands of software listings from popular software vendors, has announced that customers can now find, buy, and deploy SaaS and API products in AWS Marketplace for AWS GovCloud (US). Public Sector, Government, Education, and other regulated customers can now purchase only the software they need with flexible payment options, including hourly, monthly, annual, and multi-year contracts. 

The Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Producer SDK is now available as a Gstreamer-plugin, and as Docker-images for Ubuntu, MacOS, and Raspberry Pi devices to help you stream video into AWS in minutes.

Starting today, you can use AWS Firewall Manager to easily roll out AWS WAF rules for all your Application Load Balancers in the Europe (Ireland) region across your accounts in AWS Organizations.

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

Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. Today, AWS announced the release of a DynamoDB service level agreement (SLA), which promises a stronger availability commitment with no scheduled downtime. AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make DynamoDB available for each AWS Region, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.99% (the “Service Commitment”) and as described on Amazon DynamoDB Service Level Agreement. If all of your DynamoDB tables in the applicable AWS region are part of Global Tables, the availability promise will be at least 99.999%.

This SLA is now available in all DynamoDB Regions, and the Global Tables SLA is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. See Amazon DynamoDB Service Level Agreement for more details about our monthly uptime percentage commitment and service credits. You can learn more about DynamoDB and get started today.

Amazon Connect now gives you more options to dynamically route calls to the queue with the shortest wait time for your customers, or to a queue with idle agents to increase agent utilization, using new contact attributes for systems metrics. A contact attribute in Amazon Connect is data about a customer interaction and can be referenced in a contact flow to customize or personalize the experience. You can use these new attributes to determine where to route a particular call based on the queue thresholds you define.

We’re excited to announce the launch of seven Exam Readiness courses to help you prepare for AWS Certification. Built by AWS, these courses are designed to help you prepare for Solutions Architect, Developer, DevOps Engineer, Big Data, and Advanced Networking exams.

Starting today, Amazon Pinpoint users can use the Phone Number Validate feature to improve the delivery rates of SMS messages they send using Amazon Pinpoint. Phone Number Validate corrects errors that often occur when end users enter their phone numbers on web-based forms. For example, if end users omit their country codes, or if they include an unnecessary leading digit (required for domestic calls in some countries), Phone Number Validate will automatically correct the phone number by applying country-specific formatting rules.

Amazon GuardDuty has enhanced AWS CloudTrail log analysis thereby reducing the cost to customers. Cost reductions will vary by customer based on their volume of AWS CloudTrail logs. In particular, customers with high-volumes of global CloudTrail events will see the greatest net positive impact.

Amazon Aurora combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, so you can host sensitive Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and all types of regulated workloads and export-controlled data.

You can now use JupyterHub on Amazon EMR with EMR release 5.14.0. JupyterHub is a multi-user Jupyter notebook server that serves each user with their own Jupyter notebook interface. It allows multiple users to concurrently use their Jupyter notebooks, create and execute code and perform exploratory data analysis. JupyterHub on EMR is integrated with the Spark framework allowing you to perform interactive Spark queries on EMR clusters using Scala, PySpark, Spark R and Spark SQL kernels. You can also run Python jobs locally and take advantage of the many popular data-science libraries that are pre-installed in your notebook. Now, with EMR release 5.14.0, EMRFS, Amazon EMR’s connector for S3, supports auditing of users who ran queries that accessed data in S3 through EMRFS. This feature is turned on by default and will pass on user and group information to audit logs like CloudTrail, providing you with comprehensive request tracking. Besides auditing, EMRFS provides features like consistent view, S3 server-side and client-side encryption, and fine-grained authorization to S3.

You can launch JupyterHub by selecting “JupyterHub” from the list of applications to be installed when you configure and launch your cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about the EMR release 5.14.0, JupyterHub and EMRFS.

Amazon EMR release 5.14.0 is available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

Today, we are excited to announce some important new capabilities for AWS DeepLens in addition to the ability to buy now on amazon.com.

Starting today, Amazon GameLift emits 18 new metrics that will give you deeper insight into what is happening with your Queue placements. These new metrics track information such as how often your lowest latency regions and lowest priced fleets are selected by Amazon GameLift Queues. With this data, you can optimize to lower latency for players on a global scale and reduce your server hosting costs. 

Amazon Cognito's new advanced security features for risk-based adaptive authentication and compromised credentials protection are now generally available to secure user accounts across your web and mobile apps.

When Amazon Cognito detects unusual sign-in activity, such as sign-in attempts from new locations and devices, it assigns a risk score to the activity and lets you choose to either prompt users for additional verification or block the sign-in request. Your users can be notified of suspicious sign in attempts and prompted to secure their accounts. You can also view a history of sign in attempts and their risk scores.

With compromised credential protection, Amazon Cognito detects when users enter credentials that have been exposed elsewhere. If users attempt to use compromised credentials, Amazon Cognito prompts them to choose another password.

The advanced security features are now available in all AWS regions with Amazon Cognito User Pools, including Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), US West (Oregon), US East (Northern Virginia) and US East (Ohio).

To learn more, see the Amazon Cognito Developer Guide.  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, today announced support for Redis 4.0.10. Now you can take advantage of the new caching improvements and better memory management capabilities in Redis 4.0 and improve performance and memory usage of your in-memory data processing workloads.

Starting today, AWS CloudTrail’s event history will automatically log all read and write management events for supported AWS services. Event history lets you view, filter, and download your recent AWS account activity. This new release allows you to gain additional visibility into your account actions taken over the past 90 days without setting up a trail.

AWS Landing Zone is a solution that helps customers more quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. With the large number of design choices, setting up a multi-account environment can take a significant amount of time, involve the configuration of multiple accounts and services, and require a deep understanding of AWS services. This solution can help save time by automating the set-up of an environment for running secure and scalable workloads while implementing an initial security baseline through the creation of core accounts and resources.

Amazon Rekognition Video Analysis and FIPS 140-2 compliant endpoints are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.

You can now set default application settings for your users. This includes application connection profiles, browser settings, and plugins. For example you can set the default connection profiles for your users' SQL clients so they always have the exact settings they need, without having to configure their application.

Your users can now configure their streaming sessions to use regional settings. They can set the time zone, locale, and input method used by their applications in their streaming sessions. Each user's settings persist across all future sessions in the same AWS Region.

You can now create Private APIs in Amazon API Gateway. Private APIs can only be accessed from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using VPC Endpoints. 

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math now supports the ability to perform bulk transformations of metrics in a single expression. You can now also calculate a metrics rate of change over time. This makes it easier for you to perform calculations across multiple metrics for real-time analysis.

Details: Since launching Amazon CloudFront in November 2008, we’ve been continuously expanding our infrastructure footprint around the world to improve availability and performance for content delivery. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new Edge locations: one in Johannesburg, South Africa, and one in Bangalore, India. The Edge location in Johannesburg is Amazon CloudFront’s first PoP on the African continent. The addition of these two locations brings CloudFront’s global network to 119 points of presence in 58 cities, across 26 countries.

Amazon CloudFront’s expansion into South Africa further improves availability and performance of content delivery to viewers in the region. We expect that customers who use Amazon CloudFront to reach viewers in South Africa will see performance improvements of as much as 75% from reductions in latency for their content. The new Bangalore PoP is expected to increase CloudFront capacity in India by up to 25%.

In addition to reducing latency, these Edge locations also bring the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront, such as Lambda@Edge, Field Level Encryption, and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, as well as seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These new Edge locations in Johannesburg and Bangalore are built to the same high standards as our other CloudFront Edge locations around the world, including infrastructure and processes that are all compliant with PCI, DSS, HIPAA, and ISO to ensure secure delivery of the most sensitive data.

Information about pricing for CloudFront, including pricing for the new South Africa Edge locations, can be found on the pricing page.

Starting today you can provision Amazon MQ message brokers using AWS CloudFormation. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ. AWS CloudFormation automates the process of creating and managing Amazon MQ message brokers. 

AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. CloudHSM offers you the flexibility to integrate with your applications using industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11 and Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE). CloudHSM is also standards-compliant and enables you to export all of your keys to most other commercially-available HSMs. It is a fully-managed service that automates time-consuming administrative tasks for you, such as hardware provisioning, software patching, high-availability, and backups. CloudHSM also enables you to scale quickly by adding and removing HSM capacity on-demand, with no up-front costs.

With this launch, AWS CloudHSM is now available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

To learn more, see AWS CloudHSM.

 

Starting today, you can use AWS Cost Explorer to quickly identify the savings associated with your Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache reservations.

The AWS Solutions team has updated the AWS Limit Monitor, a solution that automatically provisions the services necessary to proactively track resource usage and send notifications as you approach limits. The solution now allows you to customize the service limits you want to check. The solution also includes an optional configuration to send notifications to an existing Slack channel.  

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. We are excited to announce the availability of Kinesis Data Firehose in Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

This Quick Start deploys an Auto Scaling group of Check Point CloudGuard Security Gateways to protect a web service.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now has a new daemon scheduling strategy that allows you to automatically run a daemon task on every one of a selected set of instances in your ECS cluster.

The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in 14 regions. With the addition of the US West (N. California) AWS Region, you have a new option for database placement, availability, and scalability.

Starting today, Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to add additional, optional attributes on Typed Links. Previously, Cloud Directory had the capability to add attributes to Typed Links, with a constraint that these attributes were mandatory. Now, some attributes can be optional.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5 instances are 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 customers' workloads.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5 instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. 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.  

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog, which lists over 4,200 software listings from popular software vendors, has released a streamlined website workflow. This new workflow makes it easy for you to see how you procure, configure, and fulfill Amazon Machine Image (AMI) software products.

The Amazon Elastic Container Service Command Line Interface (Amazon ECS CLI) now supports the Docker Compose version 3 file format for deploying Docker containers to Amazon ECS.

Amazon Sumerian is now available in three new AWS regions: US West (Northern California), South America (Sao Paulo) and EU (Frankfurt). This expands the number of AWS regions where Amazon Sumerian is available to 9. Please visit the AWS region table for more information.

This Quick Start builds a highly available user VPN solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10-15 minutes. It deploys the Aviatrix Controller, Aviatrix gateways, authentication services, and log analytics. 

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come pre-installed and fully configured with Horovod, a popular open source distributed training framework to scale TensorFlow training on multiple GPUs.

Application Load Balancers now support two new security policies: ELBSecurityPolicy-FS-2018-06 and ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-Ext-2018-06.

ELBSecurityPolicy-FS-2018-06 implements ciphers that ensure Forward Secrecy. Customers now have a policy that prevents out-of-band decryption if someone records the traffic and later compromises the server’s private key.

ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-Ext-2018-06 gives customers the option of only using the latest TLS 1.2 protocol with the same set of ciphers as available with default ELBSecurityPolicy-2016-08. With cipher parity, this new policy also provides an easy migration path to TLS 1.2-only from TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.0.

ELBSecurityPolicy-FS-2018-06 and ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-Ext-2018-06 are available today for all existing and new Application Load Balancers in all AWS public regions. You can get started using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDK. To learn more, see HTTPS Listeners for Your Application Load Balancer.

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 you run. You can now create Views and run queries against those Views. Views simplify how you query data by abstracting away the underlying tables and columns. Views are not materialized and the query that defines the View is run every time the View is referenced. Click here to learn more about Views.

Amazon Polly now offers a choice of a second female French voice, Léa, in addition to the current female voice, Celine. Amazon Polly also has a French male voice, Mathieu. Léa is a warm and natural-sounding voice with Parisian accent. Listen to the spoken introduction from Lea.   

AWS Config, a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources is introducing a new tiered pricing model for AWS Config Rules, effective immediately.

AWS WAF adds two new features to help customers write more specific rules to protect their web applications and APIs: (a) enhanced pattern matching against Query String arguments and (b) support for non-octet CIDR boundaries.

With enhanced pattern matching against Query String arguments, customers can now configure AWS WAF to parse the query string in the URI and run pattern matches on the value of a specific query argument or values of all query arguments. Previously, customers could match a string (or use a regex) against the full query string without differentiating individual name-value pairs. With this enhancement, customers can write WAF rules for application vulnerabilities embedded in the query string and benefit from more targeted look-ups and more granular detections thus reducing false positives on query argument names. For example, in the URL https:// example.com/page?name1=value1&name2=value2, customers can now write a string match condition to match the value “value1” for the query argument “name1” as well as a size constraint condition(s) on one or more of the name-value pairs in the query string.

Support for non-octet CIDR boundaries allows customers to use more granular subnet boundaries by configuring any subnet mask between /16 and /32 for IPv4 addresses. Previously, AWS WAF’s IP match condition supported only /8, /16, /24 and /32 subnets for IPv4. Now, customers can write AWS WAF rules to match on CIDRs such as 10.21.3.44/31, 10.21.3.40/29, 10.21.3.45/17, and so on. This allows for better aggregation of IPs into fewer entries in the IP lists which currently support 10,000 CIDR entries per list. We will also continue to support the existing IPv6 CIDR boundaries, which are: /128 /64 /56 /48 /32 and /24.

There is no additional charge for either of these new features. For more details visit the AWS WAF page on the AWS Website.

Server Fleet Management at Scale is a solution that can help you more easily automate your fleet of servers. This solution automatically provisions the services necessary to maintain a consistent configuration of your Amazon EC2 or on-premises instances. The solution can also automate maintenance and deployment tasks, and automatically apply patches, updates, and configuration changes across any resource group.

Today, AWS Shield Advanced announced a new onboarding wizard to help you set up your resources for protection and enable faster DDoS incident response by providing emergency contacts and giving the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT) IAM permissions.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is now generally available and supported for production use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain the Kubernetes management infrastructure.

You can now COPY Apache Parquet and Apache ORC file formats from Amazon S3 to your Amazon Redshift cluster. Apache Parquet and ORC are columnar data formats that allow users to store their data more efficiently and cost-effectively. With this update, Redshift now supports COPY from six file formats: AVRO, CSV, JSON, Parquet, ORC and TXT.