Mar 2019

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now available in five AWS regions: N. Virginia (us-east-1), Ohio (us-east-2), Ireland (eu-west-1), Tokyo (ap-northeast-1), and Oregon (us-west-2).

You can now restore an encrypted Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility cluster from an unencrypted snapshot. You can choose any existing Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) key or create a new key to encrypt your new database.

The AWS Toolkit for the Visual Studio Code is now available for download from the Visual Studio Marketplace with support for node.js. Previously, the toolkit was only available on GitHub. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is in developer preview.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, nonrelational database that delivers reliable performance at any scale. Because of the flexible DynamoDB data model, enterprise-ready features, and industry-leading service level agreement, customers are increasingly moving sensitive workloads to DynamoDB such as financial and healthcare data, whose compliance regulations mandate data encryption. DynamoDB encryption at rest is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can now configure your Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility database cluster to automatically copy tags on the cluster to any automated or manual database cluster snapshots that are created from the cluster. This allows you to easily set metadata on your snapshots to match the parent cluster, including access policies.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a multi-master, production instance of IBM Cloud Private for Data into a new virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. A standard deployment takes about 3 hours, and a high availability (HA) deployment takes about 4 hours.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports logical replication. With logical replication, you can replicate data changes from your Aurora PostgreSQL database to other databases using native PostgreSQL replication slots, or data replication tools such as the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). Logical replication is supported with Aurora PostgreSQL versions 2.2.0 and 2.2.1, compatible with PostgreSQL 10.6.

To enable logical replication with Aurora PostgreSQL, set up logical replication slots on your instance and stream changes from the database through these slots. This is enabled by setting the parameter rds.logical_replication to 1; you can set this parameter in just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console. The rds_replication role, assigned to the master user by default, can be used to grant permissions to manipulate and stream data through replication slots. This feature also enables Aurora PostgreSQL to be used as a source for AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). You can learn more about using logical replication with Aurora PostgreSQL in the Aurora documentation.

Aurora combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. For more information, please visit the Amazon Aurora product page, and see the AWS Region Table for complete regional availability.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) has increased the limits for a set of KMS resources, including KMS keys, Aliases, and Grants per KMS key. The limits have been increased from 1,000 to 10,000 for customer-managed CMKs, from 1,100 to 10,000 for Aliases, and from 2,500 to 10,000 for Grants per KMS key in all regions where KMS is available. These limit increases make it easier for you to scale your KMS operations. 

You can now use AWS Firewall Manager to easily configure and manage AWS Shield Advanced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection for all resources in your organization across multiple accounts. With this capability, customers can create Shield Advanced protection policies to automatically discover existing and new resources and consistently apply DDoS protection to all resources, or use Tags to specify a subset of resources. Firewall Manager also provides central visibility into threats detected by Shield Advanced across all applications in your organization.

AWS Firewall Manager is available to all Shield Advanced customers at no additional cost. You only incur charges for AWS Shield Advanced and AWS Config resources created by AWS Firewall Manager. To learn more about Firewall Manager, please visit Firewall Manager documentation.

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards web applications running on AWS. Shield Standard provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency. Shield Advanced provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks, and integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall. To learn more, visit the product detail page here.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now supports Kubernetes version 1.12.6 for all clusters. Additionally, you can now update the version of your Amazon EKS cluster using AWS CloudFormation.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog, has announced an easier way to discover relevant products. With this new feature, you can see products related to the one you are looking at under a “Related Products” section that’s made available on the detail page. Relevant products are provided based on correlations between thousands of products in AWS Marketplace. You can learn more about a related product by clicking into its detail page directly from the page you’re on.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. Starting today, customers can enable the service to work with encrypted data in S3, using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). AWS KMS makes it easy for you to create and manage keys and control the use of encryption across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications. AWS KMS is a secure and resilient service that uses FIPS 140-2 validated hardware security modules to protect your keys. AWS KMS is integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs. The feature can be configured via the AWS Management console or the SDK and supports Amazon Comprehend asynchronous training and inference jobs.

Amazon Comprehend is fully managed and continuously trained by AWS. The service makes it easy to add text analytics to your applications by removing any skills or steps required to build and run NLP models. Get started with Amazon Comprehend by using the console or the API.

Today we are announcing the ability to pick the time at which an Amazon EC2 scheduled event in your account will be implemented, providing you more flexibility when managing your EC2 instances.

After you are notified about a scheduled event, you can pick the time for the event through the AWS Management Console, API, and CLI. This feature is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), EU(Stockholm), South America (São Paulo), China (Beijing), and China (Ningxia) regions.

To learn more about scheduled events and how to pick the time for scheduled events, see the user guide for EC2 Scheduled Events.
 

Amazon Transcribe is a fully-managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports custom pronunciations and display forms, augmenting the capability of the custom vocabulary feature.

You can give Amazon Transcribe more information about how to process speech in your input audio or video file by creating a custom vocabulary. A custom vocabulary is a list of specific words that you want Amazon Transcribe to recognize in your audio input. These are generally domain-specific words and phrases, words that Amazon Transcribe isn't recognizing, or proper nouns.

Now, with the use of characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), you can enhance each custom terminology with corresponding custom pronunciations. Alternatively, you can also use the standard orthography of the language to mimic the way that the word or phrase sounds.

Additionally, you can now designate exactly how a customer terminology should be displayed when it is transcribed (e.g. “Street” as “St.” versus “ST”).

The custom pronunciation and display forms enhancements to custom vocabulary are available in all regions where Amazon Transcribe is available. Try out the new custom vocabulary features via the Amazon Transcribe console or use the Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs. For more information, visit this documentation page.

You can use Amazon DynamoDB backup and restore to create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables and then restore from these backups. DynamoDB backup and restore is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can now easily publish APIs on the API Gateway Serverless Developer Portal supported by Amazon API Gateway. In addition, using the Serverless Developer Portal’s new search functionality, feedback mechanisms, and SDK generation capabilities, you can also increase the discoverability and utility of APIs for your customers.  

Amazon Redshift can now automatically assign an optimal distribution style based on the size of the table data. With the automatic selection of the right distribution style, you get better query performance and storage space utilization across nodes.

This Quick Start automatically deploys Micro Focus PlateSpin Migrate into a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes. The Quick Start includes AWS CloudFormation templates and a deployment guide.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now a HIPAA Eligible Service. If you have a HIPAA Business Associate Addendum (BAA) in place with AWS, you can now start using Amazon AppStream 2.0 to stream desktop applications with data containing protected health information (PHI). If you do not have a BAA in place with AWS or have any other questions about running HIPAA-regulated workloads on AWS, please contact us.

HIPAA Eligibility applies to all AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is available. See the Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services Whitepaper for information and best practices about how to configure AWS HIPAA Eligible Services to store, process, and transmit PHI.

AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure application streaming service that allows you to stream desktop applications to users without rewriting applications. AppStream 2.0 can provide users with instant-on access to the applications they need with a responsive, fluid user experience on the device of their choice. AppStream 2.0 offers pay-as-you-go pricing. Please see Amazon AppStream 2.0 Pricing for more information, and try our sample applications.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is excited to announce the launch of engine version 3.1.3. The latest version offers enhanced data transformation capabilities, supports Parquet file format, and adds a variety of data lake improvements, to make migrations simpler, and more efficient for its customers.

Here are a few highlights from the launch:

1. Data transformation enhancements: With the newly added data transformation capabilities, DMS now offers an improved way to handle table and schema migrations. You can now change schema, table and column names during migration using explicit selections, specify name of the tablespace in which you want the table or table index to be created for an Oracle target, and update the primary key and unique key for a table on any supported target.

2. Support for Parquet file format: DMS now supports Apache Parquet format (.parquet) when migrating data to Amazon S3 (S3), for more compact storage and faster queries. The new format is supported for both full load and change data capture (CDC) 

3. Support for encrypting S3 Objects using AWS KMS Keys: You can create and use custom AWS KMS keys to encrypt your data in S3, when replicating to S3 and Amazon Redshift targets.

4. Support for S3 tagging: You can tag S3 objects to organize your storage better. Tagging can be done by specifying appropriate JSON rules as part of task-table mapping rules.

For the full list, please refer to AWS DMS release notes, which includes detailed information about features and bug fixes for this and previous versions of DMS replication engines. For submitting a new feature request or providing general feedback, please click the feedback button at the bottom-left corner of your DMS console page.

AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now support external deployment controllers for ECS services with the launch of task set management APIs. Task sets are a new primitive to allow controlled management of application revision within a single ECS service. You now have new APIs to manage multiple revisions of your application and transitioning from one revision to another.

AWS Deep Learning Containers (AWS DL Containers) are Docker images pre-installed with deep learning frameworks to make it easy to deploy custom machine learning environments quickly. AWS DL Containers support TensorFlow and Apache MXNet, with PyTorch coming soon.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) to run Windows Server workloads as part of a developer preview. The preview allows you to take advantage of the latest Kubernetes functionality and start validating performance and stability of containerized Windows applications managed by Amazon EKS.

You can now use a new set of open source tools to test your applications locally before deploying to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).  

We are excited to announce Alexa for Business Blueprints, enabling any Alexa for Business customer to create engaging voice experiences for their organization within minutes and without writing a single line of code. Skill Blueprints are so easy to use, people have used them extensively to create Alexa skills for their households. Now anyone at the office can do the same for their workplace by using one of dozens of easy-to-use Skill Blueprints, generating a private skill in minutes. Alexa private skills are voice-powered capabilities that enhance the Alexa experience, while remaining private to members of an Alexa for Business organization. IT administrators can then review and enable those skills for the company’s users and managed Alexa-enabled devices.

Application Load Balancers now support request routing based on standard or custom HTTP headers and methods, query parameters, and source IP addresses. This launch extends the existing support for Host header and path-based routing rules in Application Load Balancers to more fields from HTTP request messages. This richer set of routing criteria enables you to further simplify your application architecture by offloading routing functionality to the load balancer. It can also be used to block unwanted traffic at the load balancer.

AWS customers can now configure and use AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) within their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints, without using public IP addresses or traversing the internet. VPC endpoints for AWS SFTP are powered by AWS PrivateLink, which provides secure, private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services.  

The AWS Storage Gateway service now integrates Tape Gateway with Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class, allowing you to store virtual tapes in the lowest-cost Amazon S3 storage class, reducing the monthly cost to store your long-term data in the cloud by up to 75%. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a new S3 storage class that provides secure, durable object storage for long-term data retention and digital preservation. With this feature, Tape Gateway supports archiving your new virtual tapes directly to S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive, helping you meet your backup, archive, and recovery requirements. 

Amazon Web Services is announcing the general availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, a new Amazon S3 storage class providing secure and durable object storage for long-term retention of data that is accessed rarely in a year. From just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or about $1 per TB-month), S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest cost storage in the cloud, at prices lower than storing and maintaining data in on-premises magnetic tape libraries or archiving data offsite. To get started with S3 Glacier Deep Archive visit: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/.

The AWS Toolkit for the IntelliJ IDEA, an open source plug-in that makes it easier to create, step-through debug, build, and deploy Java applications on AWS, is now Generally Available. The toolkit had previously been in developer preview. The toolkit provides deep support for serverless applications at launch with support across other AWS services planned for the future.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces availability of Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances. These new instances are variants of M5 and R5 instances and feature AMD EPYC processors with an all core turbo clock speed of up to 2.5 GHz as well as NVMe-based SSD block level instance storage physically connected to the host server. M5ad, and R5ad instances provide additional options for customers who are looking to achieve a 10% cost savings on their Amazon EC2 compute environment for a variety of workloads.  

AWS App Mesh is now generally available and supported for production use.  

Amazon Redshift now automatically and elastically scales query processing power to provide consistently fast performance for hundreds of concurrent queries. Concurrency Scaling resources are added to your Redshift cluster transparently in seconds, as concurrency increases, to process queries without wait time. Once workload demand subsides, Amazon Redshift automatically shuts down Concurrency Scaling resources to save you cost. You can continue to use your existing applications and Business Intelligence tools without any changes.

Today, we are excited to announce the new AWS SAP Navigate Track. Businesses of all sizes are running SAP in the cloud to simplify infrastructure management, improve time-to-market, and lower costs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a reliable and secure cloud infrastructure platform that enables businesses to quickly deploy SAP Solutions in the cloud. SAP customers can also use their existing software licenses on the AWS cloud with no additional licensing fees. 

The new AWS SAP Navigate track creates a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to learn the skills and tools to expand their ability to support SAP customers on the AWS cloud. 

Learn more about the AWS Navigate Program, and all the AWS Navigate tracks available on the APN blog. 

Direct Connect gateway enables you to connect between your on-premises networks and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in any commercial AWS Region, except for the AWS China (Beijing) and AWS China (Ningxia) Regions, using AWS Direct Connect connections at any AWS Direct Connect location.

Starting today, you can use Service Control Policies (SCPs) to set permission guardrails with the fine-grained controls used in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. This makes it easier to meet the specific requirements of your organization’s governance rules. The new policy editor in the AWS Organizations console makes it easier to author SCPs by guiding you to add actions, resources, and conditions.  

AWS Event Fork Pipelines is a suite of nested open-source applications based on the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). You can deploy Event Fork Pipelines directly from the AWS Serverless Application Repository (AWS SAR) into your AWS account. AWS Event Fork Pipelines helps you build event-driven serverless applications by providing pipelines for common event handling requirements.

AWS RoboMaker makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale. Today we have added a new feature in our build and bundle tool that decouples the application code and dependency code. This new feature allows developers and system engineers to update their simulation jobs and robots with only the changes in their application code and leave dependency code unchanged, making the update significantly faster (up to 10x). For more details, see this blog post. 

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.

A Global Transaction Identifier (GTID) is a unique identifier created and associated with each transaction committed to a MySQL database. GTIDs are now supported by Amazon Aurora with MySQL 5.7 compatibility, allowing simpler and less error-prone database replication.

AWS IoT Device Management is a service that allows you to onboard, organize, monitor, and remotely manage connected devices at scale. Within AWS IoT Device Management, fleet indexing allows you to index the Registry, Device Shadow, and connection state for every device in your fleet, as well as search for devices based on any combination of these attributes. You can use fleet indexing to query which devices are running a particular version of firmware, or to query which devices are actively connected to AWS IoT.  

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. Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription of audio in the following new languages: German and Korean. These languages expand upon the existing languages already available in Amazon Transcribe: US English, British English, Australian English, US Spanish, Canadian French, French, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail captures changes made to your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics applications and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket you specify. Customers can now get visibility into their Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics application modifications including creation, deletion, and updates.

Beginning today, you can call AWS IoT Core's HTTPS Publish API with certificate-based client authentication on port 443. Previously this combination of protocol and authentication mechanism was only supported on port 8443.  

AWS Storage Gateway added support for Amazon S3 Object Lock to File Gateway, enabling write-once-read-many (WORM) file-based systems to store and access objects in Amazon S3, using Object Lock’s Compliance or Governance modes.

Customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region can now access Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). VPC endpoints let you avoid public IP addresses and allow your traffic to avoid crossing the public internet. VPC endpoints for Amazon SNS are powered by AWS PrivateLink, a highly available, scalable technology that allows you to connect your VPC to supported AWS services.

You can now view additional details for past pipeline executions in AWS CodePipeline. Previously, it was not possible to obtain action-level details for past executions. Now, you can view the full stage and action-level details, including individual action duration, status, and any error(s) which occurred during the pipeline execution. You can also view input and output artifact location details for each action execution.

CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. To get started, visit the CodePipeline console. To learn more about using CodePipeline's detailed execution history, refer to our documentation.

To see where CodePipeline is available, please check out the AWS global region table.

Amazon RDS now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.7.25 and 5.7.24, and MariaDB minor version 10.2.21 in all AWS regions. These new minor versions include functionality improvements and fixes.

Refer the release notes for details:

• MySQL 5.7.25
• MySQL 5.7.24
• MariaDB 10.2.21  

Get started by launching a new Amazon RDS database instance or upgrading your current instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

You can now assign AWS resource tags to crawlers, development endpoints, jobs, and triggers in AWS Glue. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value, both of which you define. You can use tags in AWS Glue to easily organize and identify your resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

You can now use AWS Config to record configuration changes to Amazon API Gateway. Maintaining a configuration change history for API Gateway resources is useful for operational troubleshooting, audit, and compliance use cases.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are now available on Amazon Linux 2, the next generation of Amazon Linux, in addition to Amazon Linux and Ubuntu. In addition, the AWS Deep Learning AMIs now come with MXNet 1.4.0, Chainer 5.3.0, PyTorch 1.0.1, and TensorFlow 1.13.1, which is custom-built directly from source and tuned for high-performance training across Amazon EC2 instances.  

You can now use AWS Service Catalog in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an 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.

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services, and helps you achieve consistent governance and meet your compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services they need.

Learn more about the AWS GovCloud (US).

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis adds dynamic network processing to enhance I/O handling in Redis 5.0.3. By utilizing the extra CPU power available in nodes with four or more vCPUs, ElastiCache transparently delivers up to 83% increase in throughput and up to 47% reduction in latency per node. That is in addition to the significant performance improvements delivered late last year with the introduction of R5 and M5 instances on the service. You can now benefit from the enhanced I/O handling to further boost application performance and reduce costs.

AWS Config now gives you the ability to run advanced queries based on resource configuration properties, making it easier to assess your resource configurations to help you meet compliance, cost, auditing, and security requirements. For example, using this query capability, you can retrieve a list of Amazon EC2 instances of a particular size, Amazon EBS volumes that are not attached to an Amazon EC2 instance, or resources that have encryption disabled.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 z1d instances are available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions.

You can now control access to the Kubernetes API server endpoint managed by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), so that traffic between Kubernetes worker nodes, the Kubectl command line tool, and the EKS-managed Kubernetes API server stays within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This allows you to isolate the Kubernetes control plane and worker nodes within your VPC, providing an additional layer of protection to harden clusters against malicious attack and accidental exposure.

AWS IoT Device Tester, a Windows/Linux/Mac test automation tool for connected devices, is now available for AWS IoT Greengrass 1.8.0. You can download the latest release here.

AWS Direct Connect now enables AWS Partner Network Technology and Consulting Partners supporting AWS Direct Connect (AWS Direct Connect Partners) to support hosted connection capacities greater than 500 Mbps. Approved AWS Direct Connect Partners are able to provision 1, 2, 5 and 10 Gbps capacities.

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a private network connection from your premises to AWS. AWS Direct Connect Partners will help you establish the AWS Direct Connect service between an AWS Direct Connect location and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment. Hosted connections enable AWS Direct Connect Partners to provision connectivity on demand over pre-provisioned network circuits.

Until today, hosted connections only supported capacities from 50 Mbps through 500 Mbps. 1, 2, 5 and 10 Gbps hosted connections will provide customers with higher capacities that were previously only available via dedicated connections. AWS will also be working with partners to enable the additional monitoring of the network link between AWS Direct Connect Partners and AWS for problem identification and resolution.

The new higher capacity hosted connections will be available through select AWS Direct Connect Partners once they are approved by AWS. A list of approved AWS Direct Connect Partners can be found on the AWS Direct Connect partner page.

The renewal command invokes the workflow to renew any AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) certificate which has been generated by ACM. The private certificate can then be exported anywhere: to Amazon EC2 instances, containers, devices, or on-premises servers outside of AWS. The renewal command is for developers who want to test the managed renewal and deployment of their ACM Private CA certificates and validate end-to-end operations. Developers use ACM Private CA certificates to identify resources within an organization and establish secure encrypted communications channels with clients, servers, applications, services, devices, and users.

Amazon Rekognition provides a comprehensive set of face detection, analysis, and recognition features for image and video analysis. Today, we are launching accuracy enhancements to the face analysis features. This is the fifth model update overall since the service launched. Face analysis generates rich metadata about detected faces in the form of gender, age range, emotions, attributes such as ‘Smile’, ‘Eyeglasses’ and ‘Beard’, face pose, face image quality and face landmarks. With this release, we have improved the accuracy of gender identification, emotion detection (for all 7 supported emotions: ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, ‘Surprised’, ‘Disgusted’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Confused’) and attributes such as ‘EyesOpen’. This release is particularly useful for customers who need to search and categorize large photo collections. For example, using face analysis, customers can easily find all photos that contain smiling people, or all photos with men who have beards and are wearing sunglasses.

Now available in preview, Amazon GameLift Realtime Servers help developers quickly create affordable game servers. Building a great multiplayer game experience on traditional commercial solutions has barriers that oftentimes deter game developers from building a multiplayer game. It can be time consuming, costly, and requires expertise that not all game developers may have.

Using new GameLift Realtime Servers, you can provide these multiplayer games with a game server that can be customized with just a few lines of JavaScript, and then scale to millions of players for a fraction of a penny per player per month.

To learn more, visit the Amazon GameLift product page or announcement blog post.

If you are interested in participating in the preview, sign up here.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for AWS RoboMaker. The SLA provides availability guarantees for AWS RoboMaker Simulation.

AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make AWS RoboMaker available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage, as described below, for each AWS region, during any monthly billing cycle (the “Service Commitment”). In the event AWS RoboMaker does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the AWS RoboMaker Service Level Agreement.

This SLA is now available in all regions where AWS RoboMaker is available. For more information on where AWS RoboMaker is available, see the AWS region table. Please visit the AWS RoboMaker product page to learn more.

Amazon Chime Business Calling lets you text or call to over 100 countries, directly from the Amazon Chime desktop, mobile, and web applications. Users place calls by dialing from the on-screen dial pad or by clicking on a Chime contact. Incoming calls will ring on all devices where a user is logged into Amazon Chime, and callers can leave a voicemail if there is no reply. There are no up-front payments or long-term commitments with Business Calling; customers pay for phone numbers, voice minutes, and text messages – with no additional seat fees.

Business Calling is easy to set up, and administrators can assign Business Calling features to individual Chime users as needed. Customers can purchase new telephone numbers, or port their existing numbers from their telecommunications provider.

This feature is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) region with support for United States telephone numbers.

To learn more about Business Calling, visit the Amazon Chime website. To start using Business Calling, log in to the Amazon Chime Console.

Amazon Chime now lets you place inexpensive, secure telephone calls to over 100 countries from your on-premises phone system, using your internet connection or AWS Direct Connect. You can choose to purchase low-cost inbound calling, outbound calling, or both. With Voice Connector, you can reduce your voice calling costs by up to 50% by eliminating fixed telephone network costs, and simplifying your voice network administration by transitioning it to AWS. You can send some or all of your traffic to Voice Connector, which lets you scale your usage up or down based on your business needs. Voice Connector has no upfront fees or long-term commitments, which means you pay only for the voice minutes and phone numbers you use. There is no charge for simultaneous voice conversations or encryption. Dialing into Chime meetings or placing calls to other Voice Connector customers is free of charge.

You can start using Voice Connector today by logging into the Amazon Chime console to purchase telephone numbers and provision Voice Connectors. The service communicates with your on-premises phone system using the industry-standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Calls are encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) for SIP signaling and secure real-time transport protocol (SRTP) for voice media.

Voice Connector is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) region with support for United States telephone numbers.

To learn more about Voice Connector, visit the Amazon Chime website or to start using Voice Connector, log in to the Amazon Chime console.

Starting today, you can use WorkDocs Drive offline capabilities to access content even when you are not connected to the network. In addition you and your users can also find the content you need in both online and offline modes with Smart Search. WorkDocs Smart Search lets you query across content, comments, and document labels in addition to searching for files by name.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the availability of the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification. The new AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty exam was created by AWS experts to help validate individuals who have the in depth skills required to build, deploy and tune data models and leverage AWS services to streamline this process at scale.

About the AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty Exam

The AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty exam is recommended for individuals who perform a Development, Advanced Analytics, or Data Science role and want to validate their ability to build, train, tune, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using the AWS Cloud. We recommend candidates have one or more years of hands-on experience using machine learning (ML) services related to AI/ML.

Next Steps
The exam is available in English and Japanese at testing centers worldwide for 300 USD.

Learn more about this exam
 

AWS IoT Greengrass now offers a new connector for AWS IoT Analytics and supports AWS CloudFormation templates. Now, you can quickly set up connections between your IoT Greengrass cores and AWS IoT Analytics for analysis of complex IoT data, and you can streamline IoT Greengrass deployments for one or more accounts using familiar CloudFormation templates.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Neptune. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Multi-AZ clusters available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle. In the event Neptune does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the SLA.

Amazon Corretto 11, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK 11, is now generally available. Previously Corretto 11 was available as a preview and then as a release candidate.

To learn more about using Amazon Corretto or to download the Corretto 11 please visit the Corretto homepage. You can also review the initial Amazon Corretto blog post for more information.

Starting today, the Amplify Framework includes support for OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant flows in the native (iOS and Android) and React Native libraries. This enables developers to use any OAuth 2.0 compliant Identity Provider to authenticate their end users. Previously, developers had to use third-party libraries to achieve this use case, or write the logic by hand.

In addition, the new native and React Native libraries improve the developer experience for exchanging user tokens for AWS credentials by leveraging Amazon Cognito OAuth2 endpoint. This flow works with OAuth 2.0 Identity Providers, Social Identity Providers (such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and SAML Identity Providers.

This release also provides simplified APIs for developer authenticated identities, device tracking features such as remember and forget device for Amazon Cognito User Pools, and a global sign-out capability for end users to sign-out from all active sessions.

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

Starting today, you can use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate credentials for Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Redshift automatically, in addition to rotating credentials for all database types hosted on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Rotating credentials is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice that helps you meet your security and compliance requirements.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth now supports multiple categories for the bounding box workflow and three new user interface (UI) templates for setting up custom labeling workflows.

AWS Glue Data Catalog is an Apache Hive Metastore compatible catalog. Starting today, customers can configure their AWS Glue jobs and development endpoints to use AWS Glue Data Catalog as an external Apache Hive Metastore. This allows them to directly run Apache Spark SQL queries against the tables stored in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Systems Manager, which provides availability guarantees for AWS Systems Manager.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues are now available in EU (Stockholm) and AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 

We’re excited to announce the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.18, which features over 190 updates to help game developers create, organize, and better manage their content at scale.

You can now assign tags to your AWS Config resources for cost allocation and access control. Tagging is available for AWS Config resources that describe AWS Config rules and multi-account, multi-region Aggregators with AWS Config. You can add, remove or list tags for your AWS Config resources using the available APIs.

Starting today, AWS Elemental MediaConnect is available in six additional regions: US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), EU (London), EU (Paris), and South America (São Paulo). Now using MediaConnect, you can ingest, transport, and process your high-quality video in the AWS Cloud in 14 locations globally.

Today, Amazon QuickSight announced the general availability of ML Insights, a set of out-of-the-box machine learning and natural language features that provide Amazon QuickSight users with business insights beyond visualization.

You can now run Amazon Inspector security assessments on Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors. Inspector assesses your EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities, checks your instance configurations against host hardening best practices, and analyzes your AWS network configurations to determine whether your EC2 instance can be reached from external networks. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a prioritized list of security findings that include guidance to address vulnerabilities and improve insecure configurations.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) region with R5 instances, the next generation of memory-optimized instances. Now you can create Amazon DocumentDB clusters with R5 instances in Europe (Frankfurt) and use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools that you do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB. Enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

You can use Amazon DocumentDB in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Frankfurt). For more information on AWS regions and services, please visit the AWS global region table.

To learn more about Amazon DocumentDB, please see the product page and documentation.  

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

Starting today, AWS WAF is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by defining customizable web security rules. AWS WAF in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region can be deployed on Application Load Balancer or Amazon API Gateway. To learn more visit the detailed page here.

AWS WAF is also available on Amazon CloudFront and in 12 commercial AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul).

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. 

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region.

Starting today, you have access to two new AWS Elemental MediaConvert features. First, you can access more detailed and more frequent transcoding job progress status updates using Amazon CloudWatch. And second, you can use server-side encryption with Amazon S3 to protect the content you generate with MediaConvert at rest.

You can now access AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions using iPad and Android tablets. Simply open Safari or Google Chrome on your iPad or Android tablet and launch an AppStream 2.0 streaming session. Use familiar touch gestures, such as swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom, and long tap to right-click, from within your browser to interact with your streaming applications. Use the new AppStream 2.0 shortcut toolbar to use Windows-specific keyboard shortcuts in your streaming session.

Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL major version 11. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure.

With this release, pgaudit has been updated to 1.3.0, pg_hint_plan to 1.3.2, pglogical to 2.2.1, PLV8 to 2.3.8, PostGIS to 2.5.1, prefix to 1.2.8, and wal2json to hash 9e962ba.

To use the new version, you can create a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.

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

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. This service API is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

1. Support for orafce extension when migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL:  The orafce extension in PostgreSQL implements a subset of Oracle PL/SQL subprograms and packages in PostgreSQL, making the conversion of programmable database objects a straightforward task and migrations to PostgreSQL faster and easier. The orafce extension is supported in both Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible edition and RDS for PostgreSQL. More details about orafce can be found here.
2. SAP ASE as a source support:  You can now convert database objects from an SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database—formerly known as Sybase—using AWS SCT to Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL and MySQL-compatible editions), RDS for MySQL and RDS for PostgreSQL.
3. RDS for MariaDB 10.2 & 10.3 as a target support:  You can now convert database objects from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Db2 LUW to RDS for MariaDB versions 10.2 and 10.3 using AWS SCT. This gives you another option to migrate from commercial databases to an open source database in the cloud.

AD Connector enables you to use identities from your existing self-managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) with compatible AWS applications. AD Connector is a proxy that directs AD requests from AWS applications to your Microsoft AD, without caching information in the AWS cloud services.

AWS IoT Analytics today announced support for single step setup of IoT Analytics resources, which allows you to create your IoT Analytics resources of channel, pipeline, data store, and SQL data set from the IoT Analytics console with just a click of a button, without manually configuring IAM role or permissions.

AWS Config now includes remediation capability with AWS Config rules. This feature gives you the ability to associate and execute remediation actions with AWS Config rules to address noncompliant resources. You can choose from a list of available remediation actions. For example, you can create an AWS Config rule to check that your Amazon S3 buckets do not allow public read access. You can then associate a remediation action to disable public access for noncompliant S3 buckets.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5a and R5a instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney, Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. Both M5a and R5a instances were first introduced in November of 2018 and feature 2.5 GHz AMD EPYC 7000 series processors that are variants of Amazon EC2’s general purpose (M5) and memory optimized (R5) instance families.

Traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools are complex to use, and can take months to implement, test, and deploy. After the ETL jobs are built, maintaining them can be time consuming because data formats and schemas change frequently and new data sources need to be added. Migrating ETL jobs to a fully managed, serverless ETL service like AWS Glue helps lower the operational overhead associated with managing complex ETL jobs. AWS Glue makes it easy to schedule recurring ETL jobs, chain multiple jobs together, or invoke jobs on-demand from other services like AWS Lambda. 

With the latest version of AWS Schema Conversion Tool (Build 624), you can now migrate Oracle ETL jobs to AWS Glue based ETL that will work with your Amazon Redshift data warehouse. You can automatically create an AWS Glue Data Catalog which is an index to the location, schema, and runtime metrics of your data. Once ETL migration is done, you can use SCT Data Extraction Agents to run data migrations from any of our supported data warehouse sources to Amazon Redshift and start modernizing your data stores.

For more details and information on SCT availability, visit our documentation.

Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports Read Replicas with Active Data Guard. Amazon RDS for Oracle makes it easy to create the replicas in the same AWS Region as the primary DB instance by fully managing the configuration of Active Data Guard, and maintaining secure network connections between a primary DB instance and its replicas.

The Read Replicas feature is supported for RDS Oracle customers who are using the Bring Your Own License model with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and have licensed the Active Data Guard Option. This feature allows RDS Oracle customers to offload their read workload from the primary DB Instance, and also supports the scalability of read workloads over a farm of up to five read replicas. The Read Replicas can also render another level of availability by allowing you to promote a given read replica as a new standalone database, in the event of a failure of the primary DB Instance.

A Read Replica is billed as a standard DB Instance and at the same rates. Just like a standard DB instance, the rate per “DB Instance hour” for a read replica is determined by the DB instance class of the read replica.

This feature is supported in all commercial regions where Amazon RDS for Oracle is available, except in the Stockholm and Ningxia regions. To learn more, please visit the In-region Oracle Read Replicas 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 up-to-date pricing and regional availability.
 

Tag-on create is now available for Kinesis Data Firehose. Upon creation, you can tag your Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose from the AWS Management Console or using the AWS APIs. By tagging resources at the time of creation you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation.  

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

You can now use Apache Flink 1.7.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.21.0. Flink 1.7.0 has many new features such as the ability to change the state schema of the streaming application which allows you to change the features captured by the application without restarting it, support for a new connector to write to Kafka 2.0, and an exactly-once S3 file sink for writes to Amazon S3. Flink 1.7.0 also features several streaming SQL improvements such as support for temporal tables that tracks the history of data changes and several new built-in SQL functions to handle complex data types.

Additionally, with this release, you can use the upgraded version of Presto 0.215.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.21.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.21.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can choose Flink and Presto to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.21.0, Flink 1.7.0, and Presto 0.215.

Amazon EMR release 5.21.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the RSS feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS icon at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

You can now access Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems from Amazon EC2 instances running the Amazon Linux or Amazon Linux 2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

AWS License Manager has added support for attaching license configurations to instances running on premises. This new capability further simplifies how customers can use License Manager to centrally manage licenses across their hybrid IT environments.

License Manager integrates with AWS Systems Manager Inventory to support instances on premises. Previously, customers could use AWS License Manager to discover instances running on premises and search inventory of installed operating system and application software. With this new capability, License Manager is now able to track licenses as the state of an on-premises instance changes. Once a license configuration is attached to an on-premises instance, License Manager periodically collects software inventory, updates licensing information, and refreshes its built-in dashboards to report usage.

AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charges 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.

Starting today, AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced are available in four new regions: EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul).

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by defining customizable web security rules. AWS WAF can be deployed on Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, and Amazon API Gateway. To learn more visit the detailed page here.

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards web applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection. There are two tiers of AWS Shield - Standard and Advanced. To learn more visit the detailed page here.

AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced are now available on Amazon CloudFront and 12 AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). AWS Shield Advanced is also available on Amazon Route 53.

You can now publish applications to the AWS Serverless Application Repository using continuous delivery pipelines supported by AWS CodePipeline. Previously, you could only use the AWS SDKs or the console to publish applications or updates to the Serverless Application Repository. You can now deploy this pre-built application that includes an AWS Lambda function that enables you to easily make continuous updates to your application. With it, you no longer need to write any code to publish updates to your applications in the Serverless Application Repository.

AWS IoT Greengrass v1.8.0 is now available. Now you can configure your IoT Greengrass device to send all messages over Port 443, change the user and group IDs associated with IoT Greengrass application Lambdas, and integrate with AWS IoT Lifecycle events.

Starting today, Amazon GameLift, a managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games, allows you to utilize an IAM role you own to securely give Amazon GameLift access to other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon DynamoDB. You now have more flexibility in how your game server process connects to other AWS services.

To learn more about how to get started with IAM roles and Amazon GameLift, take a look at the release notes or visit the Amazon GameLift product page for more information.

Applications in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) can now securely access AWS PrivateLink endpoints across VPC peering connections. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on the AWS network in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse the internet.

AWS announces the availability of preupgrade assistant that makes it easier to migrate to Amazon Linux 2 from Amazon Linux AMI.  

You can now access AWS CodeCommit from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces additional task definition parameters that enable you to define dependencies for container startup and shutdown as well as a per-container start and stop timeout value.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

The Amplify Console now supports instant cache invalidation, which enables you to deploy updates to your single page or static web app instantly—without giving up the performance benefits of content delivery network (CDN) caching. If you missed our re:Invent launch, the Amplify Console provides a complete workflow for developing, continuously deploying, and hosting single page web apps or static sites with serverless backends via a content delivery network, or CDN. A CDN is a network of distributed servers that cache files at edge locations across the world enabling high-performance static hosting.

Previously, updating content on the CDN required manually invalidating the cache and waiting 15-20 minutes for changes to propagate globally. To make frequent updates, developers find workarounds such as setting lower time-to-live (TTLs) on asset headers which enables faster updates, but adversely impacts performance. With this release, Amplify Console users no longer have to make a tradeoff between faster deployments and faster performance. On every commit code to your repository, the Amplify Console builds and deploys changes to the CDN that are viewable immediately in the browser.

Additionally, the Amplify Console supports delta deployments ensuring only assets that are modified during each build are deployed. This feature significantly speeds up deployment times for users with very large sites.

To learn more about this feature, check out our launch blog, or get started immediately here.  
 

Today we are announcing the general availability of the new AWS Direct Connect console to users in all AWS Regions, except China. The redesigned AWS Direct Connect console provides a new user interface and a streamlined user experience.

The White Company is an established U.K. retailer that provides shoppers with high-quality and affordable linens, home accessories, clothing, furniture, and fragrances. Traditionally hosting SAP Hybris Commerce on-premises, The White Company faced scalability and performance issues during peak online shopping times. Working with APN Partner Piksel Retail, The White Company migrated its SAP Hybris deployment to DC2, Piksel’s managed Hybris solution hosted on AWS. By migrating SAP Hybris Commerce to Piksel Retail’s DC2 platform on AWS, The White Company has experienced massive performance improvements, traffic uplifts, and sales increases during the past two Cyber Weekends. 

Learn more about how to take advantage of performance improvements, traffic uplifts, and sales increases  >>

The new Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Console has an updated user interface and is available in five new languages – German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese – increasing the number of languages supported by the Amazon SNS Console to ten.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager to manage large hybrid environments with over 1,000 instances through a new advanced on-premises instance management tier. The new advanced tier also enables advanced functionality, such as using interactive shell access with Systems Manager Session Manager to connect to on-premises instances. Session Manager removes the need to open inbound ports, manage SSH keys, or use bastion hosts.

AWS Step Functions now supports additional access control with tag-based permissions. This allows you to control access based on tags using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies.

Customers using AWS ParallelCluster to set up their High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters can now automatically create a new Amazon FSx for Lustre file system, or specify an existing Amazon FSx for Lustre file system to use, as part of the cluster creation process. With this feature AWS ParallelCluster further reduces the operational overhead of cluster management and simplifies running HPC workloads on AWS.

HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage HPC clusters on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications.

Amazon FSx for Lustre provides high-performance file systems that are optimized for workloads such as HPC, machine learning, analytics, electronic design automation, and media processing. These workloads commonly require data to be presented via a fast and scalable POSIX-compliant file system interface and typically have input data sets that are stored on durable, long-term data stores like Amazon S3. Amazon FSx for Lustre provides sub-millisecond access to your data and allows you to read and write data at speeds of up to hundreds of GBs per second. FSx for Lustre integrates natively with Amazon S3, making it easy for you to process HPC data sets stored in Amazon S3. You can also use Amazon FSx for Lustre as a standalone high-performance file system for workloads you burst to the cloud. By copying on-premises data to an FSx for Lustre file system, you can make that data available for fast processing by compute instances running on AWS.

Learn more about using Amazon FSx for Lustre with AWS ParallelCluster here.

Amazon Athena is now available in the Canada (Central) 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), Canada (Central), 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.

You can now download the Amazon Corretto 11 release candidate. Corretto 11 is the distribution of Amazon Corretto corresponding to OpenJDK 11.

Starting today, you can now add tags to your AWS Elemental MediaPackage resources. MediaPackage tags allow you to categorize your resources in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation for live channels and endpoints. Learn more on the AWS Elemental MediaPackage Documentation Pages.

Amazon QuickSight now supports emailing of dashboards with Row Level Security (RLS) enabled. You can send dashboard snapshots as emails to groups of readers, with each reader receiving customer reports as per the Row Level Security configurations set on the dashboard. See here to learn more. 

The AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency recognizes AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners with solutions that allow organizations to leverage customer data to drive personalized and relevant messaging that captures the attention of the customer and converts them to becoming a buyer.

The AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency Partners support all phases of the digital customer acquisition and retention lifecycle, including content management and marketing automation to engage prospects and customers with the right messaging; effective and secure digital commerce solutions to create seamless buying experiences, and data analytics solutions to support business decisions and retain customers.

All the AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency Partners have undergone a rigorous validation process, including a third-party audit and vetted customer experience.

Learn more about the AWS Digital Customer Experience Competency Partners >>  

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

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is now available in the EU (Paris) region.