Feb 2019

AWS has enhanced the license counting methods available in AWS License Manager by adding support for two new scenarios. First, License Manager can now track licenses that are based on number of instances. This is useful for tracking licenses for software such as load balancers and firewalls. Second, License Manager now integrates with Optimize CPU capability to track the custom number of vCPUs that are in use on an instance. This enables customers to continue to save on vCPU-based licensing costs while benefitting from the centralized license tracking provided by the License Manager.

AWS License Manager makes it easier to manage licenses in AWS and on premises servers from software vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM. It is offered at no additional charge and is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (London). To learn more, visit the product documentation, and AWS License Manager FAQ page.

You can now use Customer Voice Stream with Amazon Connect in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region. With the customer voice stream feature, your customer audio is automatically sent to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, where it can be accessed by the integrations that you allow. For example, you could integrate customer voice stream with real-time text transcription and sentiment analysis for immediate feedback on call quality, or use this feature with a 3rd party voice biometric product to authenticate the caller automatically without having to enter a password or confirm personal information.

You can now use the Resource Groups Tagging API to centrally manage tags and search resources for 10 additional AWS Services: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, AWS DataSync, AWS Elastic Container Registry, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon FSx, Amazon MQ, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Route53 Resolver, and AWS Step Functions.

February 28, 2019: Amazon ElastiCache for Redis adds support for Redis 5.0.3. Redis 5.0.3 is a maintenance release which includes several bug fixes and minor enhancements. You can now stay current with the most up to date version of Redis and benefit from recently introduced capabilities such as Redis Streams (made available with the launch of Redis 5.0 on ElastiCache in November 2018).

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.

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 Quick Start automatically deploys Portworx PX-Enterprise on Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in 20-30 minutes.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Today, Amazon DocumentDB added support for new aggregation string operators ($concat, $substr, $substrBytes, $substrCP, $strcasecmp), an array aggregation operator ($size), an aggregation group accumulator operator ($push), and aggregation stages ($redact and $indexStats) that allow you to compose powerful aggregations over your documents. Additionally, Amazon DocumentDB now supports positional array operators ($[] and $[<identifier>]) for updating elements in an array and hint() for selecting an index.

To use the new features, you can create a new Amazon DocumentDB cluster with just a few clicks in the Amazon DocumentDB Management Console or you can upgrade your existing cluster.

For more information, see the AWS Database Blog: New Amazon DocumentDB feature for aggregations, array, and indexing

AWS Systems Manager, which uses State Manager to report on and enforce your desired state configuration, now allows the use of documents shared across accounts. With document sharing, you save time when creating and updating documents while ensuring more consistency across accounts. 

You can now select any AWS Lambda function available in your AWS account from within the Amazon Connect contact flow editor. AWS Lambda functions are used in contact flows to customize the caller experience by pulling data from an external database, such as a CRM system containing customer information or a database containing order history. Previously, to add AWS Lambda functions into your contact flow, you had to grant permissions to execute AWS Lambda from Amazon Connect using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and then open the AWS Lambda console to copy over the function ARN. Now, you can do both using drop-downs in the UI.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database that by default encrypts all your data at rest to help enhance the security of your DynamoDB data. You can use the default encryption, the AWS owned customer master key (CMK), or the AWS managed CMK to encrypt all your data. DynamoDB now has added support to enable you to switch encryption keys, between the AWS owned CMK and AWS managed CMK, without having to make any code or application modifications to encrypt your data.

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see AWS Region Table.

Amazon MQ is now available in 11 regions with the addition of the Europe (London) region.  

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, supports t2 and t3 instance types.  Support for t2 and t3 instance classes is available on RDS for PostgreSQL and Oracle, selected t3 and t2 instance classes on RDS for MySQL and t3 instance classes on Aurora PostgreSQL. For details on the supported versions, see Performance Insights documentation for Aurora and RDS.

RISC-V support is now available in the FreeRTOS kernel, a feature enabling embedded developers to create IoT applications on the officially supported FreeRTOS kernel for microcontrollers that use the free, open, and extensible RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).

Starting today, Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for Oracle supports integration with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for data ingress and egress capabilities. This feature allows RDS Oracle customers to easily, efficiently and securely transfer data between their RDS Oracle DB Instances and Amazon S3. 

Previously, data transfers from an RDS Oracle DB Instance required an additional DB Instance and a networking link between the two DB Instances. With Amazon S3 Integration, you can now use the RDS Oracle DB instance to transfer files to or from Amazon S3 using new RDS Oracle procedures.

With Amazon S3 Integration, you can perform data ingress with Oracle Data Pump to migrate workloads into your RDS Oracle DB Instance. After exporting your data from your source instance, you upload your Data Pump files to your Amazon S3 bucket. You can then copy the files from your S3 bucket to the RDS Oracle host and finally use the DBMS_DATAPUMP package to import your data into the target RDS Oracle DB Instance.  

With Amazon S3 Integration, you can also perform data egress out of your RDS Oracle DB instance. First, back up the data locally on the RDS Oracle host. This local backup can either be an Oracle RMAN backup or Oracle Data Pump export of the database. Once these files are created locally, you can copy the files to the S3 bucket. Optionally, you can move these backups from Amazon S3 to Amazon S3 Glacier for long term storage that complements your automated backup strategy. By using this method, you can satisfy regulatory requirements for storing database backups in an off-site location and, at the same time, cost effectively support your long-term retention policies.

Amazon S3 Integration supports both Oracle Data Pump and Oracle RMAN for data egress. Amazon S3 Integration also allows Oracle Data Pump for data ingress. Data is encrypted at rest using Amazon S3 server-side encryption, which can use Amazon S3 provided keys or your own encryption keys provided via AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Data is encrypted in transit as well.

Amazon S3 Integration for RDS Oracle is free and is supported in all commercial regions where Amazon RDS for Oracle is available. To learn more, please visit the Integrating Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon S3 documentation page.

Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for Oracle Pricing for regional availability.
 

You can now generate access logs for AWS Elemental MediaStore containers. These logs are available in Amazon CloudWatch and provide detailed visibility into requests made to any object stored in the container. This can help with troubleshooting and enables in-depth analysis by feeding logs into analytics systems or log processing tools. Logs record PutObject, GetObject, DescribeObject, DeleteObject, and ListItems requests. Learn how to enable access logs here.

We are excited to announce new enhancements to the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) program.

The ACE Program encompasses both engagements that originate from APN Partners via submission through the APN Customer Engagements platform in APN Partner Central and leads and opportunity referrals resulting from AWS activities. This program provides the resources, tools, and sales and technical support to ensure that APN Partners are supported in driving successful engagements with AWS customers. We launched two new features in to the ACE Program: an Improved User Experience and ACE Opportunity Referrals. 

ACE Opportunity Referrals: Eligible APN Partners now have visibility into opportunities sourced by AWS and a mechanism to manage and track those engagements throughout the opportunity life cycle through ACE Opportunity Referrals.

Improved User Experience: The old “Opportunities” tab is now labeled “My Customers”. This new interface allows for custom options on features that were originally non-editable (e.g., display columns on dashboard) as well as new enhancements that can be utilized to align with the AWS Sales team and to manage your pipeline of customer engagements on AWS.

New ACE User Guide: Learn how you can leverage the ACE Platform to manage your pipeline of AWS customers, including allowing for joint collaboration with AWS on such customer engagements. This ACE Platform User Guide walks you through how to use the ACE platform and helps equip you with the skills necessary to drive successful customer engagements on AWS. Download the guide >>

Learn more about these new features on the APN Blog. 

The MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora has added support for R5 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instances.

The MySQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora has added support for T3 instances, the next generation of burstable general-purpose instances.

You can now configure Amazon Aurora Serverless (MySQL-compatible edition) to publish general logs, slow query logs, audit logs, and error logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

You can now add Tags to Athena Workgroups. Athena Workgroup is a new resource type that can be used to separate query execution and query history between Users, Teams, or Applications running under the same AWS account. With the latest release, you can assign metadata to Athena Workgroups in the form of tags. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value that can make it easier to manage, search for, and filter Workgroups. Tagging Workgroups allows you to allocate costs, get detailed billing reports across Workgroups as well as define IAM permissions on Workgroups based on these tags. Learn more

 

 

Starting today, Amazon WorkLink supports access to internal corporate websites on Android mobile phones. With this update, your employees can use their Android phones to access internal corporate websites in Chrome as efficiently as they access any other website, without the hassle of connecting to their corporate network. Employees can simply type the URL in Chrome or click on a link in their email. Amazon WorkLink handles the authentication, and delivers the internal web content as vector graphics on their phones. Employees experience fast navigation and fluid responses to common actions such as scrolling, zooming, or typing, and internal content is never stored or cached by the phone browser.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse the internet.

You can now order and use the AWS Storage Gateway hardware appliance in Europe, expand an appliance’s usable capacity to 12 TB, and choose to use a 10 Gigabit fiber optic network card instead of a copper network card. The expanded storage provides a larger local cache for low-latency access to data stored in AWS. The fiber optic network card provides an additional datacenter deployment option.

Two Cypress development boards, CYW943907AEVAL1F and CYW954907AEVAL1F, are now qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits using development kits available from Cypress.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully-managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, now allows you to access your file systems from on premises via an AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN connection. Additionally, it now allows you to access your file systems from multiple Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), AWS accounts, and AWS Regions via VPC Peering or AWS Transit Gateway. 

AWS Server Migration Service now offers support for importing and migrating applications discovered by AWS Migration Hub. This new feature allows you to quickly migrate applications identified during discovery phase, eliminating the need to recreate groupings, and as a result, reduce the time to migrate and lower the risk of errors in the migration process. You can discover servers and create application groupings using the Migration Hub console, CLI, or CSV import, and use those groupings as-is within the Server Migration Service to perform application migration.

You can now launch R5 instance types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Amazon EC2 R5 instances are the next generation of Amazon EC2 memory optimized instances. R5 instances are based on the Amazon EC2 Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your database instance.

AWS RoboMaker makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale. Today we have added support for nine new languages in the RoboMaker Console, including French, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. In addition, RoboMaker is now integrated with tagging and AWS CloudFormation for easy resource management and creation. You can now use tags to allocate cost and control access for RoboMaker resources such as robot applications, simulation applications, simulation jobs, robots, and fleets. You can now also use CloudFormation to easily create RoboMaker resources such as robot applications, simulation applications, robots, and fleets.

AWS RoboMaker is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions. To get started, run a sample simulation job in the RoboMaker console or explore the RoboMaker webpage.  

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports video rotation and ad marker insertion.

You can now launch T3 instance types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Amazon EC2 T3 instances are the next generation burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage for any period of time, whenever and however long required.

AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add tags to – or edit or delete tags of – multiple AWS resources at once. With Tag Editor, you can search for the resources that you want to tag, and then manage tags for the resources in your search results. Starting today, AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor is available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.

Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policies, you can now schedule automated backups for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes every 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 hours (in addition to the currently supported 12 or 24 hours).

You can now use AWS Shield Advanced to get enhanced DDoS protection for even more resources. You can now protect up to a default limit of 1000 resources of each supported resource type: Amazon CloudFront distributions, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, Amazon Route 53 hosted zones, Elastic IP addresses and AWS Global Accelerator accelerators. 

You can now run your Windows applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk using a host of new features with Windows Server platform v2. These new features include managed updates, a range of new deployment policies, and enhanced health monitoring and reporting. Previously, Elastic Beanstalk offered Windows Server platforms with only basic health and limited deployment policies.

AWS CodeBuild now allows you to cache artifacts locally on the build host for cheaper and faster reuse. Previously, you could only use Amazon S3 as the cache to store your artifacts between builds. Though S3 caching allows the reuse of artifacts, it comes with a network cost and latency due to the associated file transfer.

The new Quick Start for the Atlassian Standard Infrastructure (ASI) builds a highly available, secure virtual private cloud (VPC) that is customized to host Atlassian Data Center products such as Jira, Bitbucket Data Center, and Confluence Data Center on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. 

You can now programmatically create commits that contain changes to multiple files using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or the AWS SDKs. In addition to adding and changing files in AWS CodeCommit through the AWS Management Console or a Git client, some customers prefer to use APIs to manipulate the repository, such as creating an initial commit with the files needed to start a project. Previously, in order to change multiple files in a single commit programmatically, you had to install and configure a Git client. Now you can use the AWS CLI or SDKs to perform this common task without having to install any third-party software.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. You can create DAX clusters using Amazon EC2 R4 and T2 instance types in the Region for applications that require microsecond latency. Additionally, you now can launch DAX clusters using R4 instance types in the US West (N. California) Region. R4 is a Memory Optimized Amazon EC2 instance, well-suited for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads such as DAX. T2 instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance and can be more cost-effective for test and development workloads or production applications that require smaller caches.

Amazon EC2 Fleet simplifies the provisioning of EC2 capacity across different instance types, Availability Zones (AZs), and purchase options to optimize for scale, performance, and cost. Allocation strategies let you determine how EC2 Fleet should select from the instance types and AZs you have specified to fulfill the desired capacity.

Now you can request to increase the limits for the target capacity for your AWS account in a selected region. By default, there is a soft limit of 10,000 units per single EC2 Fleet and 100,000 units for target capacity across all Fleets in a region. If you need more than the default limits, you can complete the AWS Support Center create case form to request a limit increase. For *Limit type*, choose *EC2 Fleet*, indicate the Fleet limit increase you need for Target Fleet Capacity per Fleet or Target Fleet Capacity per Region or both. You can also request a limit increase for Spot Fleet target capacity using the same steps.

To learn more about increasing the target capacity limits for EC2 Fleet, visit this page and to learn more about increasing the target capacity limits for Spot Fleet, visit this page. Visit this blog to learn more about EC2 Fleet.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, now supports additional counter metrics on Amazon RDS for MySQL, RDS for PostgreSQL, and Aurora MySQL-compatible edition in addition to Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible edition. With counter metrics, you can customize the Performance Insights dashboard to include up to 10 additional graphs that show a selection from dozens of operating system and database performance metrics. Counter metrics provide additional information that can be correlated with the database load chart to help identify performance issues and analyze performance.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to model and provision Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java applications using version 2 of the Kinesis Data Analytics API. This improvement enables you to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy Kinesis Data Analytics applications in a safe and repeatable manner.  

AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that helps you keep your connected devices secure. Using AWS IoT Device Defender, you can continuously monitor security metrics from devices and AWS IoT Core for deviations in what you have defined as appropriate behavior for each device. You receive an alert whenever devices violate custom-defined behavior, so you can take action to remediate the issue.

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system resources as they are created. Previously, you could add tags to your file system resources once they were created.

You can now use the AWS Well-Architected Tool to also perform architectural reviews for hybrid cloud workloads as well as workloads which are fully deployed on-premises.

When you define your workload, you now have the option to select both the AWS and the non-AWS Region(s) in which your workload is deployed. This allows you to document whether your workload is fully deployed on AWS, is partially deployed on AWS or running completely on-premises. You can then continue with the Well-Architected review as before.

To learn more, visit the Documentation and the Product page. 

We've updated our Professional-level AWS Certification exams to reflect new features, services, and best practices. AWS releases a growing number of new features and services each year, so we periodically update and restructure our exams to be sure we are validating the latest skills.

The updated AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam validates advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. It now covers five domains: design for organization complexity, design for new solutions, migration planning, cost control, and continuous improvements for existing solutions. The exam is recommended for solutions architects with two or more years of hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS.

The updated AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam validates technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed applications systems on the AWS platform. It now covers six domains: SDLC automation; configuration management and infrastructure as code; monitoring and logging; policies and standards automation; incident and event response; and high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. The exam is recommended for DevOps engineers with two or more years of experience provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments.

We now only recommend, rather than require, that candidates have an Associate-level certification before taking Professional-level exams. See our updated exam guides to learn more about each exam and find resources to help you prepare. Professional-level exams are currently available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese for 300 USD. Register today! 

Amazon Connect offers three new options when transferring a call to a 3rd party phone number from a contact flow. First, you can now send DTMF touchtones to the recipient of the transferred call. Second, you can now programmatically select which caller ID to display. Third, you can continue to engage with the customer when the transfer to the 3rd party ends, by returning the customer to Amazon Connect and resuming the contact flow from which the call was transferred, instead of hanging up the call.

You can now use Amazon Athena Workgroups - A new resource type that can be used to separate query execution and query history between Users, Teams, or Applications running under the same AWS account. Because Workgroups act as resources, you can use resource-based policies to control access to a Workgroup. For example, if you have two teams or different applications using Athena, you can limit access by assigning them to different Workgroups. You can also separate ad hoc usage from scheduled reports by assigning them to different Workgroups. Queries running in one Workgroup are not visible to users or applications running in a different Workgroup. You can also temporarily disable Workgroups, preventing users from running queries, or permanently delete them. Fine-Grained Access Control for Tables and Databases defined in the Glue Data Catalog can further restrict access to specific databases and tables.  

AWS IoT Device Tester, a Windows/Linux/Mac test automation tool for connected devices, is now available for Amazon FreeRTOS v1.4.5 and v1.4.6. You can download the latest release here.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a Kubernetes cluster that uses Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), enabling you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications running on Kubernetes on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The deployment takes about 25 minutes. 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to quickly deploy solutions that use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to quickly deploy solutions that use Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is now API compatible with the DynamoDB transactions SDKs for Python and .NET. As a result, you can integrate your DynamoDB applications written in Python and .NET with DAX without making changes to your existing application logic.

AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. AWS SFTP enables you to easily move file transfer workloads to AWS, eliminating the need for you to build and operate Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) infrastructure.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 10.6. This release contains fixes to PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in the current release from the PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

The Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes version 1.3.2 is included by default in all new Amazon EKS clusters. For instructions updating an existing cluster's CNI to v1.3.2, please visit the EKS documentation describing CNI updates.

Amazon Corretto 11, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK 11, is now available for use in preview. Previously, only Corretto 8, corresponding to OpenJDK 8, was available. Corretto 8 is generally available.

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, expanding the number of AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is available to eight. Deploying AppStream 2.0 in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience and may help you meet your local data compliance obligations. With this launch, you can deploy general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized streaming instances to meet the needs of your users. Only non-graphics instance types are available at this time. 

Amazon Route 53 Resolver for hybrid cloud is now available in the US West (N. California), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (London), Canada (Central), and EU (Paris) AWS Regions.

Amazon Rekognition Video is a deep learning-based video analysis service that can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect unsafe content. Content Moderation for Amazon Rekognition Video can identify various types of explicit and suggestive content, as well as timestamps for where such content appears during the video. Amazon Rekognition Video now comes with an enhanced moderation model that reduces false positive rates by 40% on average without any reduction in detection rates for truly unsafe content. Lower false positive rates imply lower volumes of flagged videos to be further reviewed by human moderators, leading to higher efficiency and more cost savings. Moreover, Amazon Rekognition provides a hierarchical set of moderation labels that can be used to create business rules to handle different geographic and demographic requirements. For more details on supported labels, please see this page. No machine learning experience is required to get started. 

AWS Solutions are technical reference implementations built and vetted by AWS Architects and AWS Partners, designed to help customers solve the common problems faced by their peers around the world. AWS Solutions are built to be operationally effective, performant, reliable, secure, cost effective, and be Well-Architected. Every AWS Solution comes with a detailed architecture diagram, a deployment guide, and instructions for both manual and automated deployment. You can use the architecture diagrams and deployment guide provided with each AWS Solution as a guide to build your own application, or use one of the provided automated deployment methods (such as a CloudFormation Template) to deploy automatically into your AWS Account. We offer AWS Solutions covering a wide range of technology and industry topics, such as how to collect and process connected vehicle data with AWS, simulate fleets of IoT devices, how to automate common cloud operational practices, and how to dynamically manipulate image files in real-time. 

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now available in three AWS regions: N. Virginia (us-east-1), Ohio (us-east-2) and Ireland (eu-west-1). Customers also have the option to create new clusters with Apache Kafka version 2.1.0 or 1.1.1.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (London), and Europe (Paris) AWS regions.

Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) is a new storage class for Amazon EFS that is cost-optimized for files that are accessed less frequently.

AWS has unveiled its newly redesigned AWS Certification digital badges. Digital badges are awarded to customers who successfully pass an AWS Certification exam and are just one of the many benefits available to help you showcase your AWS Certified status with colleagues and employers. Digital badges can be shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media outlets, as well as used in email signatures to showcase your achievements.

AWS Certified individuals are now able to download new badges in their AWS Certification Account.

 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose today announced support for custom Amazon S3 prefixes allowing customers more flexibility when configuring S3 paths for data delivery. This new capability enables customers to simplify and accelerate ETL (Extract Transform Load) workflows and to enable data partitions for faster query performance.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Today, Amazon DocumentDB added support for auditing of database events. With auditing enabled, Amazon DocumentDB will record Data Definition Language (DDL), authentication, authorization, and user management events to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to analyze, monitor, and archive your Amazon DocumentDB auditing events. For more information, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide/event-auditing.html

Amazon DocumentDB is generally available and you can use Amazon DocumentDB in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland).

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports 18.1 and 18.2 versions of Oracle Application Express (APEX) for the Oracle Database versions 11.2, 12.1 and 12.2. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser.

For more details on supported APEX versions and how to add or modify APEX options for your RDS Oracle database, please refer to the Amazon RDS for Oracle Documentation.

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

This Quick Start automatically deploys the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform into a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 40 minutes. The Quick Start includes AWS CloudFormation templates and a deployment guide.

The Amplify CLI, part of the Amplify Framework, now supports multiple environments and teams by offering a Git style workflow for creating and switching between environments for your Amplify project. When you work on a project within a team, you can create isolated backends per developer or alternatively share backends across developers, including to those outside your organization.

New support for IAM roles and MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) enables customers to use an IAM role, with or without MFA enabled, and access AWS resources managed by the Amplify Framework. This helps enforce AWS security best practices and controls across your organization.

Custom resolvers for AWS AppSync enable you to write resolver logic and attach data sources such as Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains, or HTTP endpoint that were provisioned independently of the Amplify GraphQL Transformer. This can be completely achieved without needing to go to the AppSync console or deploy your own CloudFormation stacks with a separate deployment process.

Customers can now add more than 150 models as a part of the GraphQL Transformer schema, up from 15 models in the previous version of the Amplify Framework. Custom resolvers can be defined directly from the local Amplify project and pushed up using this new functionality.

To learn more about Amplify Framework, please visit our documentation. For more details about these features, refer to our blog post.

The AWS Managed Service Program (MSP) Program highlights APN Consulting Partners who are skilled at cloud infrastructure, application migration, and deliver value to customers by offering proactive monitoring, automation, and management of their customer’s environment.

Today, the AWS MSP Program launched the MSP Validation Checklist v4.0. This new checklist includes new requirements and performance-based renewal in order to enhance the customer and partner experience.

Learn more about these requirements on the APN Blog.
 

Amazon WorkMail now provides automatic DNS configuration for Route 53 domains, allowing customers to perform 1-click insertion of all Amazon WorkMail-related DNS records to their Route 53 hosted zone when setting up a custom domain.

When WorkMail administrators add a domain in Amazon WorkMail, they need to confirm that they own the domain and add mail-specific DNS records to route email properly. Previously, it was a manual process involving copy-pasting multiple records to their DNS provider. Now, if the domain is managed by Route53, WorkMail provides the option to automatically insert all WorkMail-related DNS records to the domain's hosted zone. This saves time and reduces the risk of error with manual configuration for WorkMail administrators. Customers who do not manage their domains in Route 53 or have more advanced DNS settings will follow the same procedure as before to setup their domains.

This feature is available today for Amazon WorkMail domains hosted by Route53 and available in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkMail is offered. For more information see Working with Domains. To learn more about Amazon WorkMail, or to start your trial, please visit Amazon WorkMail.

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

The AWS Management Console now makes it easier to use multiple AWS accounts.

You can switch from one AWS account (or role) to another with just one click. You no longer have to sign out from one account, before signing in to another. This saves you time and effort. You can access up to five AWS accounts this way.

This improvement is available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. To get started, login to the AWS Management Console, click into your account settings on the top menu, and select "Switch Role."

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the January 2019 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2 and 12.1. Oracle PSU contains critical security updates and other important updates. Beginning with Oracle Database version 12.2.0.1, Amazon RDS for Oracle supports Release Updates (RU) in place of the PSU. To learn more about the Oracle PSUs supported on Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS patch update documentation.

 

Amazon RDS for Oracle makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Oracle Database deployments in the cloud. See the Amazon RDS for Oracle Database Pricing page for complete regional availability information.

Amazon GuardDuty has added three new threat detections. Two of the detections are new penetration testing detections and the third a policy violation detection. These three new detections represent the latest in a continuously growing library of fully managed threat detections available for customers who enable Amazon GuardDuty in their AWS accounts.

Starting today you can use AWS CloudFormation templates to create, update, and delete AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise servers in an orderly and predictable fashion. AWS OpsWorks is a fully managed configuration management service that hosts and scales Chef Automate and Puppet Enterprise servers.

AWS AppSync is a serverless backend for web, mobile, and enterprise applications that supports real-time data synchronization, and offline capabilities at enterprise scale. AWS AppSync simplifies data access, manipulation, and synchronization across multiple data sources, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, and any HTTP data source. It is powered by GraphQL, an open standard allowing applications to request, change and subscribe to the exact data they need in a single network request.

With today's launch, AWS AppSync is now available in 11 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), and EU (London).

To learn more, see the AWS AppSync webpage.
 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to build WebSocket APIs in Amazon API Gateway. AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment across all regions and accounts, simplifying how you build applications in the cloud.  

AWS Fargate now has support for AWS PrivateLink. PrivateLink allows you to privately connect your Amazon VPC to AWS services including Amazon ECR. When you create PrivateLink endpoints for ECR, Fargate can pull container images without needing to traverse the public internet.

PrivateLink endpoints are easy to configure. They provide reliable connectivity to Fargate without requiring an Amazon Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway. With PrivateLink endpoints, you can protect your Fargate tasks from internet traffic, and reduce the exposure to threats.

To learn more about how Fargate support PrivateLink, read our documentation. Fargate integration with PrivateLink is available in all regions where Fargate is available. To learn more about where Fargate is available, visit the AWS region table.

Amazon Transcribe is now available in the AWS South America (Sao Paulo) Region. 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 Athena is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region.

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

With the latest release, Amazon Athena is now available in US East (Northern Virginia, & Ohio), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US-West), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, & London), and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul, & Mumbai) regions.

To learn more, please visit the Amazon Athena page.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. The real-time transcription service now supports US Spanish, which expands upon the existing language support for US English.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) FIFO (First-In, First-Out) queues are now available in 9 additional AWS regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability. If you have configured dedicated master nodes while using multi-AZ deployment, they are automatically placed into three AZs to ensure that your cluster can elect a new master even in the rare event of an AZ disruption. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a high-performance file system for machine learning, high performance computing, analytics, and other data processing workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 with new options for writing results back to S3 and up to 2x faster data transfer speeds between FSx for Lustre and S3.

We are excited to announce that AWS Site-to-Site VPN now supports Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) for tunnel setup. Starting today, new VPN connections will be able to use IKEv2 or IKEv1 to negotiate a VPN session. This allows customers to use the newer and stronger protocol to establish their VPN.

To take advantage of this feature today, you will need to create a new VPN connection. You can control the IKE version to use by updating your customer gateway device's configuration and the AWS side endpoint will negotiate the session using the same protocol. This feature is not available for AWS Classic VPN. We will add IKEv2 support for existing AWS VPN connections soon.

For more information about AWS Site-to-Site VPN, see the web site and documentation.

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces six new Edge locations which add incremental capacity to our network in their respective regions. Five of the new Edge locations are in North America: Atlanta (2), Chicago, Dallas, and Houston. This new capacity increases CloudFront’s request processing capacity by up to 50%, on average, in these areas. The sixth new Edge location is located in Paris, France. As always, every new CloudFront Edge location enhances the delivery and performance of your web applications to your customers. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Features webpage.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) message filtering now supports blacklisting of multiple string values, using the anything-but operator. This makes it easier to set criteria for filtering messages.

AWS X-Ray SDK for .NET Core is now generally available enabling .NET developers to get an end to end view of requests as they travel through their applications. 

AWS Cost Explorer allows you to visualize and monitor your reservations both at a high level (e.g., cost savings associated with all Amazon EC2 reservations) or for highly-specific requests (e.g., reservation utilization associated with all regional Amazon EC2 reservations owned by a particular linked account). Starting today, you can access information about the normalized units associated with your reservations in AWS Cost Explorer, making it easier to understand how your reservations (including Size Flexible RIs) are applied to your instance usage.

Today Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced enhanced support for running machine learning and high performance computing applications on EC2 GPU instances. ECS task definitions now allow you to designate a number of GPUs to assign to particular containers, which ECS will pin accordingly for workload isolation and optimal performance.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 announced session scripts. With this feature, you can implement custom scripts that execute before a user's session starts and after their session ends. These scripts simplify common scenarios for admins. You can easily customize a session based on user identity, configure applications before a session starts, collect logs, and perform cleanup tasks after a session ends. You can also use session scripts to upload usage data from the streaming session to S3 and use tools like Amazon Athena to analyze the data. For an example of using session scripts for usage insights, see Capture usage insights about your streaming environment with AppStream 2.0 session scripts on the Desktop and Application Streaming blog. To get started building your own session scripts, see Use Session Scripts to Manage Your AppStream 2.0 Users' Streaming Experience Session.

The session scripts feature is available today at no additional charge in all AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is offered. AppStream 2.0 offers pay-as-you-go pricing. Please see Amazon AppStream 2.0 Pricing for more information, and try our sample applications.

We have extended our recertification period so customers can now recertify every three years instead of two, by taking the latest version of the full-length exam, rather than a standalone recertification exam. AWS Certified individuals now have access to a 50% discount voucher that they can apply to this or any other exam. These vouchers will be available in the AWS Certification Account by February 28, 2019. As of March 3, 2019, we will no longer offer standalone recertification exams.

You can now download the source code for the AWS Glue Data Catalog client for Apache Hive Metastore. This client runs on any Amazon EMR cluster with Apache Hive 2.x that uses the AWS Glue Data Catalog as an external Hive Metastore.

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

Starting today, Inter-Region Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Peering can now be setup between the AWS US Govcloud (US) Regions: AWS GovCloud (US-Gov-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-Gov-East).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to release a major update to the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) on AWS Quick Start. This Quick Start automatically deploys AD DS on the AWS Cloud and now includes Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and AWS Systems Manager Automation documents.

Starting today, you can use AWS Batch with workloads running on Amazon EC2 A1 and G3s instances. AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

Now supporting Amazon EC2 A1 instances, which deliver significant cost savings and are ideally suited for scale-out and Arm-based workloads that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem, AWS Batch allows customers to run their batch jobs at low cost with the convenience of a fully managed services. A1 instances deliver cost savings for customer workloads that can run Arm instructions and fit within the available A1 memory footprint.

AWS Batch now also supports G3s instances, giving customers additional flexibility when running rendering workloads through Batch’s managed scaling and scheduling service. G3s instances are ideal for rendering workloads for visual effects (VFX) and virtual workstations for design & engineering applications.

To learn more, visit our AWS Batch Getting Started Guide.

You can now use a local version of AWS Step Functions to develop and test your workflows.

DynamoDB local, the downloadable version of Amazon DynamoDB, now supports transactional APIs, on-demand capacity mode, and as many as 20 global secondary indexes per table. In addition, DynamoDB local now tracks and can return the capacity units consumed by your queries.

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition) is now available and includes refreshed content, new videos, and animated infographics for an improved learner experience. This free, self-paced digital training course is recommended for those who are new to the AWS Cloud or are looking to build their AWS Cloud skills. It provides an overview of cloud concepts, AWS services, security, architecture, pricing, and support. It’s also recommended for learners who are preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

Learners who are already registered for, or who are in the process of taking, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials are encouraged to complete it by March 31, 2019. After this date, this version of the course will no longer be available, and all registered and in-progress learners must then take the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (Second Edition) course. Both courses will help you prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

If you’ve already completed the course, check out our extensive course library of hundreds of free, on-demand self-paced courses at aws.training.
 

Today, Amazon WorkMail announced that you can use AWS Lambda function to take actions on inbound email. This lets you process emails as they are received, and perform actions such as perform analytics, create audit trails, or even gain insights into communication patterns, such as sentiment, within your organization. Lambda functions give you the flexibility needed to configure WorkMail for your environment.

To get started, first create a Lambda function using the AWS Lambda console. Then, go to the Amazon WorkMail console to select the Lambda action in your organization's inbound mail flow rules settings. In the console, you can select whether the rule applies to all users, or you can select specific users for the rule. Once you've configured the trigger rule, WorkMail will pass the recipients and subject text to your Lambda function when an email is received, and will then execute your function to perform the required actions.

AWS Lambda for WorkMail is available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkMail is offered. See Configuring AWS Lambda on WorkMail to try it now. To learn more about Amazon WorkMail, or to start your trial, please visit Amazon WorkMail.