Jul 2018

Amazon Connect now enables you to automatically transfer calls from one queue to another in your contact flow. This lets you minimize call wait times in your contact center, adjust to changing call patterns dynamically, or to assign calls to more qualified agents. You can use metrics, such as agent availability or the number of calls in the queue, to determine which queue to route the call to.

Starting today, AWS Config supports AWS PrivateLink, which enables you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Config without exposing your VPC subnets to the Internet.

You can now monitor and troubleshoot your Amazon MQ message brokers in near-real time by publishing logs from your Amazon MQ brokers to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.  

The AWS IoT Rules Engine can now trigger workflows built with AWS Step Functions using Step Functions action. With the addition of Step Functions action, the Rules Engine now supports 15 action types.

Starting today, AWS Security Token Service supports AWS PrivateLink in the US West (Oregon) region, enabling you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Security Token Service entirely within the AWS network.

Starting today, the Amazon Chime web application supports video conferencing in the Google Chrome browser. When meeting in person isn’t possible, the high-quality audio and video available in Chime meetings optimizes communication and engagement with your meeting attendees. With this update, attendees can join your meetings using their browser and access the same high-quality video available in Chime’s downloadable clients. Additionally, because the web application is available across platforms, video conferencing is now available for your contacts on Linux and ChromeOS.

As a meeting attendee, you can start or stop your own video using in-application controls. You can also view up to to 16 video tiles in your Chime meeting window for participants sharing their video. Video tile layout is optimized depending on the number of tiles, the size of your window, and the presence of shared content. To learn more about the Amazon Chime web application, please visit the Amazon Chime Documentation page.

Amazon Chime is a secure, real-time, communications service that simplifies video conferencing, online meetings, calls, and chat. With Chime, there are no upfront payments, and there is no infrastructure to deploy. You can try Chime for free for 30 days just by getting started. For more information on our trial, visit the Amazon Chime trial page.

Data streaming applications can now utilize AWS PrivateLink and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), and South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Regions.

Amazon WorkSpaces now supports a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to help streamline user login workflows. With this release, customers automatically generate a simple, custom link for users to access their WorkSpaces that includes login information. This link can include login information such as the WorkSpace registration code, user name, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) credentials. With this capability, you can develop custom on-boarding and login workflows for users that eliminate the need for users to manually enter login information.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports Microsoft OneDrive for Business as a user storage option. You can integrate your OneDrive for Business account with AppStream 2.0, and your users can link their OneDrive for Business accounts to access their files in AppStream 2.0 like they would on a Mac, PC, or Chromebook. To learn more about using Microsoft OneDrive for Business with AppStream 2.0, read our blog post Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for OneDrive for Business.

Amazon EC2 C5/C5d and M5/M5d instances are built on the Nitro system, a collection of AWS-built hardware and software components that enable high performance, high availability, high security, and bare metal capabilities to eliminate virtualization overhead. With the latest set of enhancements to the Nitro system, we have increased the maximum EBS-optimized instance bandwidth to 14Gbps, up from 9Gbps and 10Gbps for C5/C5d and M5/M5d respectively. We have also increased the maximum EBS-optimized instance IOPS for Nitro systems to 80,000 IOPS, up from 64,000 IOPS and 65,000 IOPS for C5/C5d and M5/M5d respectively. In addition we have increased the EBS-optimized instance burst performance on the large, xlarge and 2xlarge C5/C5d and M5/M5d instances to 3.5Gbps, up from 2.25 Gbps and 2.12 Gbps respectively.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now lets you enable Elasticsearch error logs, providing you valuable information for troubleshooting your search and indexing operations quickly and easily. These logs are published to the Amazon CloudWatch Logs service and can be turned on or off at will. You only need to pay for the CloudWatch charges that you incur based on your usage. No additional Amazon Elasticsearch Service fees apply.

Amazon Connect now provides a new user management API that lets you automate creation and deletion of user accounts, changes to user configurations, and updates to security settings, based on your business needs. You can also use the API to make changes to routing profiles assigned to users, which lets you easily move agents to busier queues during periods of high call volume.  To learn more see the API documentation.

Starting today, you can add Amazon Lex bots from any region where Amazon Lex is available to any Amazon Connect instance. This means you can use Amazon Lex bots with your Amazon Connect instances in the EU (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions. Previously, you could only use Amazon Lex bots created in the same region as your Amazon Connect instance.

AWS CloudHSM now allows you to copy backups of your CloudHSM Cluster from one region to another for disaster recovery purposes. You can use the copied backup to create a clone of the original cluster in the new region. This simplifies the development of globally distributed or cross-region redundant workloads.

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. 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.

AWS CloudHSM backups can only be copied across commercial regions. Users in the AWS GovCloud (US) region cannot copy backups into or out of the region. There is no cost for copying your backup across regions, or for creating a cluster from the copy in the new region. HSM instances are billed on an hourly basis. You can learn more about copying CloudHSM backups across regions here. You can learn how to synchronize keys between cloned clusters here.  

You can now get a detailed view of your Amazon Redshift cluster performance with the Workload Execution Breakdown graph on the console Database Performance page or the QueryRuntimeBreakdown metric via Cloudwatch. You can use these new metrics to optimize cluster performance to provide higher throughput and faster results. 

We’re excited to announce the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.15. With over 270 improvements, fixes, and new features, we’re focusing on how Lumberyard’s integration with AWS enables game developers of all sizes to connect their games and accelerate game development. Some highlights include: 

Now, you can use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) r4 instance types in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. r4 instance types are the latest generation of DAX nodes and are designed to support production applications and workloads.

DAX provides you a fully-managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that is capable of accelerating reads from Amazon DynamoDB tables by up to 10x, even at millions of requests per second. You can use DAX without making changes to your existing application logic and using your current DynamoDB API calls. DAX manages cache invalidation and data population on your behalf.

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.

For DAX r4 instance type pricing in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, see DAX Pricing.

Amazon EC2 Fleet simplifies the provisioning of EC2 capacity across different instance types, Availability Zones (AZs) and across On-Demand, Reserved Instances (RIs) and Spot purchase models, optimizing scale, performance and cost. Allocation strategies lets you determine how EC2 Fleet should select from instances and AZs you have specified to fulfill the desired capacity. Until today, you had the option of selecting the single cheapest Instance Pool for Spot and On-Demand, or diversifying Spot Instances across multiple instance types and AZs in an EC2 Fleet.

Starting today, you can use Prioritized List to specifically determine the order in which EC2 Fleet attempts to fulfill your On-Demand capacity. EC2 Fleet will attempt to launch all capacity using the instance with the highest priority first, and if all your capacity cannot be fulfilled using your highest priority instance then EC2 Fleet will attempt launching capacity using the second priority instance type. You can define a priority for all instances you specify in your EC2 Fleet.

Starting today you can also balance desired cost and availability in the context of applications by directing EC2 Fleet to evenly deploy Spot capacity across the N lowest priced Instance Pools. For example if you are running batch processing, you may prefer to set N to just 2 to maximize savings while attempting to ensure your queue always has compute capacity. However, if you are running a web service you may set N to 10 to minimize the impact of any Spot Instance Pool becoming temporarily unavailable.

These new allocation strategies are also available in Spot Fleet. To learn more Prioritized List in EC2 Fleet visit this page, and to learn more about and Lowest*N strategy visit this page. Visit this blog to learn more about EC2 Fleet.

AWS Greengrass now allows you to deploy executables written in C, C++ and any other language that supports importing of C libraries. Executable code has the benefits of greater legacy support as customers can more easily re-use code that is already written in C or C++, minimal resource footprint as no language interpreter is required, and an absolute minimum of compute latency for very high-performance use cases such as computer vision or algorithmic trading. Starting today, your executable code acts much like an AWS Lambda function, can be invoked by events or invoke other Lambdas, and can take advantage of other Greengrass functionality such as Local Resource Access. You can mix and match executable code together with Lambda functions written in interpreted languages such as Python or Node.js.

The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin version 1.1 is now available.

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. In addition, customers can start using the AWS Batch console to run jobs on August 1st.

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store now enables you to retrieve secrets managed in AWS Secrets Manager. With this launch, you can use a single set of APIs for retrieving your parameters managed in Parameter Store as well as secrets managed in Secrets Manager. For more details on retrieving Secrets Manager secrets using Parameter Store, visit our documentation here.

Amazon Redshift is now available on two different release cycles - Current Maintenance Track and Trailing Maintenance Track. With the Current Maintenance Track you will get the most up-to-date certified release version with the latest features, security updates, and performance enhancements. With the Trailing Maintenance Track you will be on the previous certified release. 

Amazon Redshift announces Advisor, a new feature that provides automated recommendations to help you optimize database performance and decrease operating costs. Advisor is available via the Amazon Redshift console at no charge.

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS, now supports CloudFormation Change Sets. This also includes CloudFormation Transforms, which provides capability for the Serverless Application Model (SAM).

Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 10.4, 9.6.9, 9.5.13, 9.4.18, and 9.3.23. 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 added support for PostgreSQL 10 native logical replication which uses the publish and subscribe model, allowing fine-grained replication between RDS for PostgreSQL instances or between a PostgreSQL database that is deployed outside of RDS (including self-managed on EC2, on-premises, etc.) and an RDS for PostgreSQL instance, and vice versa. Additionally, the pg_repack extension has been updated to 1.4.3 in PostgreSQL 10.4, 9.6.9; and the PL/v8 extension has been updated to version 2.1.2 in PostgreSQL 10.4, 9.6.9, 9.5.13, 9.4.17, and 9.3.23.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for regional availability.

You can now configure an Elastic Beanstalk environment to ignore application HTTP 4xx responses in enhanced health monitoring. It helps in avoiding impact to Elastic Beanstalk environment health because of client-side errors.

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

The Serverless Bot Framework is a solution that helps AWS customers implement chatbots in other languages without having to develop their own backend platforms that support language analysis and abstraction, and knowledge training. The solution integrates with managed services such as AWS Lambda, to apply machine learning algorithms, and Amazon Polly, to turn text into lifelike speech.

The solution deploys an Amazon API Gateway endpoint where customers can send requests, AWS Lambda functions that apply machine learning algorithms, Amazon Polly to turn text into lifelike speech, an Amazon DynamoDB table to store conversation logs and interaction context, and Amazon S3 buckets to store configuration files. The solution also includes a sample web application that you can use as a reference framework to create your own application that fits your business need. For more information, see the solution webpage.

The AWS Solutions team communicates AWS architectural best practices and develops standardized, automated solutions for the platform. Our offerings currently live on the AWS Answers webpage, where customers can browse common questions by category to find answers in the form of succinct Solution Briefs or comprehensive Solutions, which are AWS-vetted, automated, turnkey reference implementations that address specific business needs.

Application Load Balancer now supports two new actions: redirect and fixed-response. You can configure these actions as part of the content-based routing rules, enabling you to offload this functionality to the load balancer. This simplifies deployments while benefiting from the scale, the availability, and the reliability of Elastic Load Balancing.

With redirect actions, the load balancer can redirect incoming requests from one URL to another URL. This includes the capability to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS requests, which allows you to meet your compliance goal of secure browsing, achieve better search ranking and high SSL/TLS score for your site. You can also use redirects to send users to a different web site such as redirecting from an old version of an application to a new version.

With fixed-response actions, you can control which client requests are served by your applications. This enables you to respond to incoming requests with HTTP error response codes and custom error messages from the load balancer itself, without forwarding the request to the application.

By using both redirect and fixed-response actions in your Application Load Balancer, you can improve the customer experience and the security of your user requests. To learn more about these features, visit the Elastic Load Balancing demo page.

Redirect and fixed-response actions are available for your Application Load Balancer in all AWS regions. To learn more, visit the Elastic Load Balancing documentation page.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a content personalization and monetization service that lets you serve video with targeted ads to viewers while maintaining broadcast quality-of-service in multiscreen video applications.

Amazon RDS now provides automated recommendations for your database resources. Amazon RDS recommendations provide best practice guidance for customers by analyzing configuration and usage metrics from database instances. The resulting recommendations are presented in the AWS Console in an easy-to-use interface.  

Now, you can use Amazon DynamoDB global tables to replicate table data to three additional Asia Pacific AWS Regions. Global tables is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions.

Global tables builds upon the global footprint of DynamoDB to provide you a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database. It enables you to replicate table updates automatically across the AWS Regions you select. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to Amazon DynamoDB tables for fast read and write performance. You can also use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability.

With this launch, DynamoDB global tables is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), and US East (N. Virginia) Regions.

For global tables pricing in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Sydney), see Global Tables Pricing.

Amazon EC2 R5 instances offer Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors with a sustained all core frequency of up to 3.1 GHz, with up to 50% more vCPUs and 60% more memory over R4 instances. R5 instances deliver 5% additional memory per vCPU and a 10% price per GiB improvement over R4 instances. R5 instances are ideally suited for applications such as high-performance databases, distributed in-memory caches, in-memory databases, and big data analytics.

Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance. z1d instances feature a custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor that can run all cores at up to 4.0 GHz sustained. z1d instances include up to 1.8TB of local instance storage and are available in 6 sizes with up to 48 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory. Support for a z1d bare metal instance size will be available soon.

AWS Deep Learning AMIs now come pre-installed with Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), an open source format for neural network computational graph supported by popular deep learning frameworks, including Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Chainer, and Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK). ONNX gives developers the flexibility to migrate between frameworks. For example, developers can use PyTorch for prototyping, building and training their models, and then use ONNX to migrate their models to MXNet to leverage its scalability for inference. To learn more about using ONNX, see our blog post and tutorials.  

AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management are now HIPAA Eligible Services and have been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA).

Starting today, you can view and edit files stored in Amazon WorkDocs using the Files app in iOS 11. Much like macOS Finder, the Files app gives you an easy way to browse, open, edit, move, rename, upload, create folders, share, and download files stored in WorkDocs with your iOS device. Files can be on your iOS device, or on AWS stored in Amazon WorkDocs. With Amazon WorkDocs iOS files integration, you can add files stored in Amazon WorkDocs to the Files app and access them from a single location on all of your iOS devices. You can also edit files from the Files app directly in an associated application and changes will automatically be saved in Amazon WorkDocs. The new Files app file management experience makes it easy for customers to access their content in Amazon WorkDocs from any iOS device.

The Amazon WorkDocs iOS application should be installed on your device for iOS files integration to work. To get started, in the Files app in your iOS device Tap Locations and Edit. Slide to turn on WorkDocs. Tap Done. Tap WorkDocs and browse your files in the Files app. The Files app on iPhone and iPad makes it easy for you to access content from your device along with all your cloud-based file services, including WorkDocs in one place.

The feature is offered to customers at no additional cost for all Amazon WorkDocs users and is available in all AWS regions WorkDocs is in. To learn more about Amazon WorkDocs, or to start your 30-day trial, please visit Amazon WorkDocs.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports launching T2 Unlimited EC2 instances directly from the Amazon ECS console during cluster creation.

Starting today, copies of Amazon RDS database snapshots between AWS Regions for encrypted databases are incremental, allowing copies to complete faster and use less storage. Cross-region database snapshots can be used to create a robust disaster recovery for your RDS database instances. Previously, RDS snapshots of encrypted databases resulted in a full copy and required more snapshot storage. Incremental snapshots only capture the changes after your most recent backup was created. Now, you can copy incremental encrypted snapshots across Regions just like with unencrypted snapshots.

To copy your encrypted snapshot to a different AWS Region, simply select the destination region during the Copy Snapshot operation on the AWS Management Console or via the AWS Command Line Interface. You do not need to do anything differently to gain the benefits of incremental copies.

Data transfer and backup storage pricing is available on the RDS Pricing page.

For more details on copying a database snapshot across regions, please refer to the documentation on copying a DB snapshot in RDS. 

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces nine new Edge locations, adding to our presence in major cities globally. Five new Edge locations are being added in North America: Los Angeles, California; San Jose, California; Newark, New Jersey; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; and Miami, Florida. Three new Edge locations are being added in Europe, with two in London, England and one in Frankfurt, Germany. And in Asia, one Edge location is being added in Tokyo, Japan, our ninth in the city.

With this release, CloudFront will increase its request processing capacity by 40%, on average, in the five North American cities and the two cities in Europe.

These additional Edge locations will add to CloudFront's existing global presence and will enhance delivery, performance, and scale for our customers. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Details webpage.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our two newest edge locations for Amazon Route 53 in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. Today’s launch represents the first physical presence of Route 53 on the African continent. The addition of these two locations brings the global network of Route 53 to 53 cities across 26 countries and six continents.

The expansion of Amazon Route 53 into South Africa further improves availability and performance for customers and end users in the region. We expect that two these new edge locations will help clients see improvements of as much as 75% in DNS query latency.

For more information and to get started with Amazon Route 53, visit the product page.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with a custom build of TensorFlow 1.9 optimized for high performance training, the latest Apache MXNet 1.2 that includes several performance and usability improvements, the new Keras 2-MXNet backend with high performance multi-GPU training support, and the new MXBoard tool for improved debugging and visualization of MXNet training models.  

AWS CodeBuild now helps you monitor your builds with Amazon CloudWatch. Previously, you could use the console or API to view your build's results. Now, you can set a CloudWatch Alarm to notify you if a build fails or is unexpectedly slow. Additionally, CodeBuild now provides a dashboard that displays the performance of past builds to help you troubleshoot and spot trends.

You can now upgrade your Amazon Redshift DC1 Reserved Instances to DC2 Reserved Instances for the remainder of your DC1 reserved term, and get up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. DC2 nodes are designed for demanding data warehousing workloads that require low latency and high throughput.

 

AWS Fargate is now available in three new AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and EU (Frankfurt).

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that lets you run containers  in production without deploying or managing servers. Fargate lets you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.

For a full list of AWS Regions where Fargate is available, please visit our Region table.
 

Now, you can use the updated Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDKs in more types of applications to help you accelerate reads from Amazon DynamoDB tables by up to 10x, even at millions of requests per second. With DAX, you can use a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for your DynamoDB tables without making any changes to your application code.

Updated DAX SDK clients are now available for .NET, Java, Go, and Python. With the updated DAX SDK for .NET, web developers can now use DAX in Microsoft ASP.NET web applications. Additionally, Java developers can now use Apache Maven to manage and build applications that use the DAX SDK for Java. The updated DAX SDKs for Go and Python include several enhancements to improve error handling and reliability.

With DAX, developers have the choice of using SDK clients for Java, JavaScript, .NET, Python, and Go.

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 updated DAX SDK clients, see the DAX resources page.

 

You can now choose AWS Device Farm as a test provider in your software release pipelines modeled in AWS CodePipeline. This lets you create or select Device Farm projects in the test stage of your pipelines.

AWS Free Tier enables you to gain free, hands-on experience with the AWS platform, products, and services. AWS Budgets further provides Free Tier usage alerts that notify you when are forecasted to exceed your Free Tier usage limits.

You can now use AWS CloudTrail to log Amazon MQ API calls. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.

This Quick Start builds a highly available, secure Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) Egress Filtering service on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes. It automatically deploys an Aviatrix Controller for enabling Egress Filtering in a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC). You can connect to VPCs in the AWS Cloud with enhanced security, and access your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, applications, and services.  

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) AWS Region. With the addition of this region, Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in 4 AWS Regions globally: US (Northern Virginia), US (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt). 

AWS Elemental MediaStore is a video origination and storage service that offers the high performance, predictable low latency, and immediate consistency required for live streaming media combined with the security and durability AWS offers across its services. MediaStore offers an inexpensive method for pass-through and low-latency segmented video content delivery, with pay-as-you-go pricing.

AWS Systems Manager now supports taking action for Automation step failure by allowing branching to another step within the Automation Document. This feature allows customers to perform graceful exits, send notifications, and a variety of clean up actions when an automation step fails. For example, when an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) update automation step fails midway, the customer can now call for automation to take a snapshot, close the EC2 instance, notify admin, and exit gracefully. Previously, there were only two choices, “Continue” and “Abort” upon failure of a step.

AWS Systems Manager, a unified experience to view operational data from multiple AWS services to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources, now allows streaming of Run Command output to Amazon CloudWatch logs, allowing you to track command execution in near real-time.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Pipe Input Mode for the built-in TensorFlow containers. Pipe Input Mode enables data to stream directly from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to the TensorFlow container on the training instance, using the TensorFlow dataset construct.

AWS Amplify JavaScript library announced support for Ionic 4, the upcoming version of Ionic Framework. Mobile developers can now quickly add cloud functionality into their Ionic 4 apps using AWS Amplify's UI components, and utilize an extensive collection of features including authorization, user storage, analytics, and chatbots.

Amazon SageMaker now supports fully-managed high-throughput batch transform jobs for non-real time inferencing. Existing machine learning models developed on Amazon SageMaker can work seamlessly with this new capability without any changes.

Amazon S3 now provides increased performance to support at least 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data, which can save significant processing time for no additional charge. Each S3 prefix can support these request rates, making it simple to increase performance significantly.

Starting today, Amazon Comprehend supports Syntax analysis —enabling customers to analyze text using tokenization and Parts of Speech (PoS). The Amazon Comprehend Syntax API allows customers to identify word boundaries and labels like nouns and adjectives within the text.  

Today, AWS AppSync has released a new flow for provisioning a GraphQL endpoint. Customers can now model logical types and automatically create resolvers along with Amazon DynamoDB tables without needing to first write a GraphQL schema. The process includes a new query and filtering system that allows logical comparisons (greater than, contains, etc.) against fields in a schema without requiring any coding from the developer.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to use your own publicly-routable IP addresses with AWS resources such as EC2 instances, Network Load Balancers, and NAT Gateways. After you bring your IPs to AWS, AWS will advertise your public IP addresses on the Internet. You will continue to have access to Amazon IP addresses and can choose to use your own IP addresses, Amazon’s IP addresses, or both with your AWS resources.

Your applications might use trusted IP addresses that are whitelisted by your partners and customers. With Bring Your Own IP, you can move these applications to AWS without requiring your partners and customers to change their IP address whitelists. Bring Your Own IP is also useful for applications such as commercial email services that rely on IP address reputation to allow traffic from your endpoints to reach intended recipients.

Bring Your Own IP is available for preview in the US West (Oregon) region. You can request access to this feature by completing this request form.

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. You can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files. Coming soon, Amazon Transcribe will support a feature called channel synthesis to better handle audio where each speaker records on a different channel. For example, a stereo track with the interviewer is stored in the left and the interviewee on the right.

Amazon Transcribe is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Canada (Central) Regions. 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. You can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files. 

Amazon Polly is a service that turns texts into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled applications. Starting today, you can put up to 100,000 characters in an input text using the new asynchronous synthesis task and store the output files in S3. This greatly simplifies the process of voicing long form content like news articles and documents.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns texts into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled applications. Today, Amazon Polly is releasing a new feature, time-driven prosody, which automatically adjusts the speech rate based on a maximum allotted amount of time you define. 

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Starting today, Amazon Translate is adding the following six new languages that are highly requested by customers: Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Turkish. These languages expand upon the existing six languages already available in Amazon Translate: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Customers in industries such as mining, energy, military, retail, and manufacturing use Snowball Edge to collect data in remote locations and ship these devices and data back to AWS with a standard freight carrier. These devices can also perform simple local pre-processing tasks using AWS Greengrass, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon S3.

The Amazon Kinesis Video Streams’ HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) capability enables developers to playback their ingested video streams using the industry-standard, HTTP-based media streaming protocol. As devices stream their video into Kinesis Video Streams, developers can use the fully-managed HLS capability to playback live and recorded video from their streams.

Starting today, Amazon API Gateway has increased the number of APIs and the request rate limit for creating and importing regional and private APIs. These limit increase enable you to better develop, deploy, and scale your API Gateway APIs.

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS, now supports the ability for you to use AWS CloudFormation to create Service Catalog resources.

Amazon Linux 2 and Ubuntu AMIs with .NET Core now support .NET Core 2.1. These AMIs come pre-configured with .NET Core 2.1 (with Long Term Support), PowerShell Core 6.0, and the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). This enables you to quickly and easily deploy and run .NET Core applications on Amazon EC2.

Amazon SageMaker announces several enhancements to the built-in DeepAR, BlazingText, and Linear Learner algorithms. Chainer 4.1 is now supported on the pre-configured containers within Amazon SageMaker.

AWS Glue now provides additional Apache Spark metrics for better debugging and profiling of ETL jobs. Customers can easily track runtime metrics such as bytes read and written, memory usage and CPU load of the driver and executors, and data shuffles among executors from the Glue Console.

You can now configure your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics applications to enrich a source data stream with an Amazon S3 object in the AWS Management console.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant service.

Amazon SageMaker now supports the k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) and Object Detection algorithms to address additional identification, classification, and regression use cases in machine learning. This addition expands the list of built-in algorithms for SageMaker to 15.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog, which lists over 4,200 software listings from popular independent software vendors, has announced AWS Marketplace Migration Mapping Assistant, which helps you accelerate your migration to AWS by finding matching products from your existing inventory of on-premises applications.

11 new AWS Public Datasets are now available for researchers and developers interested in life sciences, finance, environmental science, astronomy, voice recognition, and geographic information systems.

Amazon API Gateway now supports overriding request/response parameters and response status without modifying backend API code.

Today we are announcing Provisioned Throughput for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). 

This Quick Start deploys McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in less than one hour, using services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). The Quick Start also uses AWS best practices for common scalability, high availability, and security requirements.

You can now use Hue 4.2.0 and Apache Oozie 5.0.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.15.0. Hue 4.2.0 adds several new features and updates, including a SQL syntax checker, an improved search UX with the ability to search through tables, columns, and saved queries, and several other UX improvements. Oozie 5.0.0 features an improved DAG visualization of workflows, integration with YARN Application Master to submit and manage jobs, and other performance improvements. Additionally, you can now use the upgraded version of Apache Hive (2.3.3), Apache HBase (1.4.4), and Apache ZooKeeper (3.4.12). These releases contain various bug fixes and stability improvements.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.15.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.15.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can select Hue, Oozie, Hive, HBase, and ZooKeeper to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.15.0, Hue 4.2.0, Oozie 5.0.0, Hive 2.3.3, HBase 1.4.4, and ZooKeeper 3.4.12.

Amazon EMR release 5.15.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

 

Now, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) makes it easier for you to delegate IAM permissions management to trusted employees by using IAM permissions boundaries. With this new capability, you can help your organization scale and move workloads to AWS faster.

Today, AWS Migration Hub makes it even easier to manage multiple migrations in one central location with the addition of RiverMeadow Server Migration SaaS. RiverMeadow is designed and built specifically for enterprise AWS customer migrations. This migration tool doesn’t require an agent and it performs live workload migrations, without impacting the source production environment.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) for EBS Snapshots provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. You can define backup and retention schedules for EBS snapshots by creating lifecycle policies based on tags. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to create and manage your backups.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces four new Edge locations: Cape Town, South Africa; Denver, Colorado; Frankfurt, Germany; and Taipei, Taiwan. Cape Town is our second Edge location in South Africa, the first being Johannesburg, launched in June 2018. Customers delivering content in South Africa are already seeing up to 75% latency improvements on average. The addition of a new Edge location in Denver, Colorado doubles our capacity in Denver. The new Edge location in Frankfurt is the seventh in the city, while the new Edge location in Taipei is the third in the city. The addition of these locations continues to expand CloudFront's global footprint and capacity, allowing us to deliver better performance and scale for our customers.

A full list of CloudFront’s global infrastructure can be seen on the CloudFront Details webpage.

Starting today, AWS Secrets Manager supports AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Secrets Manager entirely within the AWS network.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility has been updated to version 1.2 in support of Release 9.6.8 of the PostgreSQL database. This release includes a number of reliability and performance improvements, along with a number of bug fixes.

Amazon SageMaker is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. 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.

Starting today, you can access custom Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations for your Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to viewing RI purchase recommendations for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS reservations.

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. You can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files. Starting today, you can designate your own S3 buckets to store transcription outputs rather than S3 buckets maintained by the Amazon Transcribe service. This allows you to maintain finer-grained control of your data across your entire transcription workflow.

Amazon API Gateway usage plans now allow you to throttle requests for individual methods at different rates by configuring method level throttling.

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

AWS Step Functions is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai). 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.

The AWS Systems Manager Agent is now installed by default on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, in the 2018.07 version and later, and in all 18.04 LTS AMIs.

The AWS Solutions team has updated the Data Lake Solution, an automated reference implementation that deploys a highly available, cost-effective data lake architecture on the AWS Cloud along with a user-friendly console for searching and requesting datasets. The solution now leverages AWS Glue and Amazon Athena to transform and analyze uploaded datasets with searchable metadata.

Build scripts for the optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) worker nodes are now available on GitHub.com.

Since we made Amazon EC2 F1 instances generally available last year, we have seen exciting adoption by customers, partners and the developer and research community. Customers are using F1 for accelerating a diverse set of applications such as genomic processing, data analytics, security, image and video processing and machine learning.

Today we are announcing new features and updated capabilities that allow developers to create more performant and feature-rich hardware accelerators using Amazon EC2 F1 instances.

For software developers looking to harness the power of FPGAs and build custom hardware accelerations, we have upgraded the Amazon FPGA software defined development flow with a new FPGA Developer AMI version. The new development tools now support up to 60 kernels (compared to 16 in previous versions) enabling more compute for C /C++ based accelerators.

In addition, based on customer feedback, the direct memory access (DMA) performance has been improved by 5x, allowing the FPGA acceleration engine to stream data to/from the CPU at high speed and increase application performance.

To help offload the non-differentiated tasks of building an FPGA application such as transferring data to/from the host CPU and accessing onboard DRAM from the FPGA, we provide an Amazon FPGA Shell that provides pre-configured, pre-tested, and secure I/O components. With this release we are making the new Amazon FPGA v1.4 Shell reconfigurable, allowing developers to have future-proof designs. Simply put, this means that developers can decide if they'd like to upgrade Shell versions as they become available, compared to previous Shells that were mandatory upgrades. We also added a new capability that allows developers to retain data in the FPGA attached DRAM while swapping Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs) at runtime, which effectively decreases load times of certain AFIs, as there is no need to move data to/from the host into the FPGA DRAM when a new AFI is loaded.

Developers can also take advantage of the growing marketplace of F1 instances based offerings from AWS Partners and other developers, ranging from video encoding to data analytics. All of these new features and upgrades are available for F1 instances in 4 AWS regions - US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.

For a complete list of new feature and upgrades, please click here.

You can now crawl your Amazon DynamoDB tables, extract associated metadata, and add it to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can also create Glue ETL jobs to read, transform, and load data from DynamoDB tables into services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for downstream analytics. To learn more, please visit our documentation. 

Amazon SageMaker now supports resource tags for more efficient access control. Tags can be attached to resources such as notebook instances, training jobs, models, endpoint configurations, and endpoints within SageMaker.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to grant permissions to an administrative user to access and manage AWS Organizations master account resources. Previously, AWS SSO only allowed users to access Organizations member account resources. Now, users can sign in to the AWS SSO user portal with their corporate credentials and access resources in their assigned accounts, regardless if the account is a master or member account.

You can now publish logs from your Amazon RDS for Oracle databases to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Supported logs include alert log, trace log, audit log, and listener log.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now meets the criteria for PCI compliance in AMER, EMEA, and APAC. ECR PCI DSS compliance in China is pending approval. You can now use ECR to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images that are subject to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. In addition to Amazon ECR, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) also already meets the criteria for PCI compliance in AMER, EMEA, and APAC.

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.

Amazon ECR is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images. Amazon ECR is integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), simplifying your development to production workflow. Amazon ECR eliminates the need to operate your own container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure. Amazon ECR hosts your images in a secure, highly available, and scalable architecture allowing you to reliably deploy containers for your applications. For more information, visit the Amazon ECR product page.  

Visit the AWS global region table for a full list of AWS Regions where Amazon ECR is available.

To learn more about PCI DSS certification, visit the PCI DSS Compliance site.
 

Starting today, Application Auto Scaling can be used to add scaling to any services that you build on AWS.

You can now activate Amazon GuardDuty across multiple accounts and regions as well as link those accounts back to a master account by using AWS CloudFormation StackSets. Your security team can now automate the provisioning of GuardDuty across hundreds of accounts.

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.

You can now tag EC2 Dedicated Hosts using the AWS API or CLI. A tag is a label that you can assign to EC2 Dedicated Hosts and they enable you to categorize your Hosts in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. This helps you quickly identify specific Dedicated Hosts based on the tags assigned to it.

Click here to learn more about you can start tagging Dedicated Hosts. 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now certified as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant. You can now use the latest version of ElastiCache for Redis for low latency and high throughput in-memory processing of sensitive payment card data for use cases such as payment processing, mobile wallet, and payment fraud prevention.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with the latest deep learning framework support for Chainer 4.2, Keras 2.2 as well as the Apache MXNet Model Server 0.3. This release also includes upgrades of the NVIDIA stack in the AMIs including the latest NVIDIA GPU driver 390.46, CUDA 8.0 and 9.0, as well as cuDNN 7.1.4 and NCCL 2.2.13.  

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports setting lifecycle policy rules for all images, without requiring a tag value. This makes it easier to set rules to automate container image cleanup in your Amazon ECR repositories.

Starting today, Tag-On Create for Amazon EC2 & Amazon EBS is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements for vetted government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

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

This capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial regions, and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. You can get started from EC2 Instance launch wizard, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell. To learn more about tagging your Amazon resources, visit the EC2 User Guide. 

 

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.0.35, 10.1.34, and 10.2.15 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

AWS Fargate is now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that lets you run containers in production without deploying or managing servers. Fargate lets you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.

Visit the AWS global region table for a full list of AWS Regions where AWS Fargate is available. To learn more about using Fargate, visit the documentation page.

VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB enables you to have all network traffic between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Amazon DynamoDB stay within the AWS cloud instead of traversing the public internet.

DynamoDB offers data protection and security using TLS endpoints for encryption-in-transit, a client-side encryption library, and fine-grained access control using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing control at the item and attribute level. VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB further improves privacy and security, especially for applications with strict compliance and audit requirements, or that handle sensitive data.

If you’re connecting to DynamoDB from a VPC, here are four reasons that make using VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB a no-brainer. First, while normal charges apply for NAT gateway access, there is no additional cost for using VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB. Second, with VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB, you do not need an Internet gateway or NAT gateway. This ensures your VPC remains closed and isolated from the public Internet. Third, VPC endpoints offer simplified network configuration that removes the need for you to set up and maintain firewalls to keep you VPC secure from network attacks. Fourth, you can use IAM policies to allow DynamoDB access through VPC endpoints only from your corporate network, and only from specific applications.

VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). To learn more about Amazon VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB, read the blog post and the VPCE for DynamoDB Developer Guide. 

Amazon Connect now allows you to dynamically set your caller ID phone number for outbound calls so recipients of the calls may recognize the number and use the number you specify to return calls. This is useful when you have multiple telephone numbers used to make outbound calls, but want to consistently display the same phone number as the caller ID for calls made from your contact center. You can also display a phone number for a specific line of business or for customers based on their account type.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports adding tags to queues, presets, and job templates. Tags can be added using the API or the MediaConvert console, and are automatically removed upon deletion. Tags on AWS resources let you categorize resources by purpose, owner, environment, or other criteria, and create business-relevant tag groupings to organize your resources.

Starting today, Launch Templates for Amazon EC2 Instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements for vetted government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Launch Templates in this region streamline and simplify the launch process for Auto Scaling, and On-Demand instances. They help reduce the number of steps required to create an instance and, because they capture all the launch parameters within one resource, they make it easy to reproduce instance launches. Launch Templates are also designed to help you better manage costs, improve security, and minimize deployment errors because it allows you to easily implement standards and best practices.

This capability is available at no additional cost in AWS commercial regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. To get started, read our Launch Templates documentation.