May 2019

AWS CodeCommit, a fully-managed source control service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. CodeCommit makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories.  

Today we released the AWS Competency Partner Spotlight, featuring qualified APN Technology and Consulting Partners who have deep expertise and proven customer success in specific areas like Machine Learning, Financial Services, Oralce, and more. 

The AWS Competency Program highlights APN Partners who bring the right expertise for specific business needs by quickly narrowing the search among the tens of thousands of Partners in the APN. AWS Competency Partners are equipped to solve business problems in a complex IT environment.

AWS Competency offerings follow AWS best practices for building the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure for industry applications.

This APN Spotlight provides success stories for AWS Customers to learn more about APN Partner solutions or technology offerings that can help meet business goals. 

See the AWS Competency Partner Spotlight >> 

Avis Budget Group is a global provider of transportation solutions. Its Avis and Budget brands have more than 11,000 rental locations in approximately 180 countries around the world. Its Zipcar brand, a leading car sharing network, has more than one million members in over 500 cities and towns.

Avis Budget Group sought to become an API-driven company to reinvent the rental car experience, digitize its business, and develop new business models. The company needed help managing and using its data effectively while also scaling globally.

After deciding to build on AWS, Avis Budget Group chose to work with Slalom to complete a successful PoC on AWS and move forward with a pilot project at Newark airport. Using machine learning (ML), the pilot focused on building a practical on-site solution that could address the over- and under-utilization of cars in real-time using an optimization engine built in Amazon SageMaker. Avis Budget Group plans to roll out the optimization engine to all of its North American locations by December of 2020. The company’s speed of development has improved substantially since building on AWS and working with Slalom. Through the PoC, Avis Budget Group found that moving the needle even a small amount on some of its objectives, such as optimizing car mileage, translates into big benefits for the business and for its customers.

Read the Case Study to Learn More >> 

Amazon MSK, an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka’s (Kafka) infrastructure and operations is now generally available. Amazon MSK makes it easy for developers and DevOps managers to build and run production applications on Kafka without needing significant Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper operational expertise.

Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility provides a near real-time data stream of the database activity in your relational database to help you monitor activity. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL 5.6 can now be accessed using the built-in Data API enabling you to access Aurora Serverless with web services-based applications, including AWS Lambda, AWS AppSync, and AWS Cloud9 

You can now control access to CloudFormation stacks and resources based on tag values.

Starting today, the Amplify CLI (part of the open source Amplify Framework) includes support for adding an AWS Lambda function to your AWS AppSync API using the GraphQL Transformer and the new @function directive. The GraphQL Transformer, included in the Amplify CLI, provides a simple to use interface that helps developers quickly create scalable web and mobile backends on AWS. 

Hibernating your Amazon EC2 Instances is now easier then ever. You can now enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Encryption by Default, to ensure all new EBS volumes created in your account are encrypted. To enable Hibernation, you no longer have to create an encrypted copy of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) before launching an instance. Alternatively, you can also now specify encryption intent at launch (with unencrypted AMI or snapshot) and enable hibernation at the same time (see link).  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis announces improved maintenance update procedures for auto failover enabled clusters. You can now benefit from improved availability during patching, updates and other maintenance related activities that involve planned node replacements. For Redis Cluster configurations that are set up to use Redis Cluster clients, the planned node replacements will now complete while the cluster serves incoming write requests. For non-Redis Cluster configurations, you may notice a brief write interruption, of up to a few seconds, associated with DNS update. 

AWS IoT Events is now generally available and supported for production use.  Customers already using IoT Events include BAI Communications, Moixa, and Ecofit. Launch partners include Deloitte, JIG-SAW, Brains Technology, and Onica.

You can now create IoT Analytics Channel and Data Stores in an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS Account. This lets you easily integrate your IoT Analytics data with your existing data lake, manage the lifecycle of the data according to your S3 bucket policies, and use the data with a downstream application for further processing or presentation to end-users. Previously, your IoT Analytics data could only be used with an S3 bucket managed by the IoT Analytics service. With this feature, and the recently added support for sending IoT Analytics data set content to your Amazon S3 bucket, you now have the flexibility to use S3 buckets in your AWS account for both your IoT Analytics data and materialized views of it.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US government’s principal agency for cancer research and training. NCI coordinates the National Cancer Program, supporting research, training, health information dissemination, and programs that research the causes, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer, rehabilitation from cancer, and the care of cancer patients and their families.

NCI faced several data backup challenges. For a research organization with 9,000 staff, securing and backing up data contained on endpoints—desktops and laptops—were essential. The large staff traveled frequently, often working in multiple locations, and data loss was a significant issue. That loss occurred through a combination of failing machines; lost, stolen, or dropped devices; and user failure to back up data.

Using Druva inSync, NCI has transformed its approach to data loss and recovery by drastically reduced user data loss, automated backup and recovery managed mostly by end users, speedier response to FOIA and forensics requests, freed up IT team to focus on mission-critical tasks, and enabled digital transformation

AWS IoT Things Graph is a fully managed service that makes it easier and faster to build IoT applications by visually connecting different devices and web services with little to no code. IoT applications are being built today using a variety of devices and web services to automate tasks for a rapidly expanding range of use cases like smart homes, manufacturing, and energy management. With AWS IoT Things Graph, customers can focus on the logic and functionality of their smart home or industrial IoT applications instead of dealing with the low-level details of integrating devices and services.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL minor version 10.7. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in the 10.7 minor release by the PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

To use the new version, you can create an Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You can also create an Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility 10.7 read replica using an RDS for PostgreSQL 10.7 master instance, and then fail over your connections and applications to Aurora when ready. Learn more about migrating to Aurora PostgreSQL 10.7 in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon Aurora combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides up to three times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database, together with increased scalability, durability, and security.

Many traditional simulations take too long to complete and weaken a car manufacturer’s ability to successfully engineer for optimal aerodynamic performance and flow physics while also designing for style. To address this challenge, Volkswagen Group Research decided to explore new computational technologies to shorten its simulation and development cycles.

Volkswagen Group Research turned to Altair to trial the use of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver using NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically by using Altair’s ultraFluidX solution. Altair conducted a comprehensive Proof of Concept (PoC) for Volkswagen Group Research, conducting two Design of Experiments (DoE) cycles, consisting of 100 simulation runs each to be turned around within five business days.

Following the successful PoC, the CAE Methods team at Volkswagen Group Research gained confidence in the capabilities of running ultraFluidX on AWS. The PoC resulted in not only high-quality CFD results produced by ultraFluidX, but also impressive robustness, degree of automation, and turnaround time demonstrated by the solution. The team was able to run 200 car shape variants in a time frame that would typically correspond to only a few runs with its current operational tools.

Following a successful PoC, Altair estimates Volkswagen could save up to 70 percent of its current hardware cost using ultraFluidX.

See the story to learn more >>

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Textract, which has been in preview since re:invent 2018. Amazon Textract is a managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and structured data from virtually any document. Customers use Amazon Textract to quickly automate document workflows, processing millions of document pages in a few hours.

You can now take crash-consistent snapshots of multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes attached to an EC2 instance with a single API call. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate the multi-volume snapshot management via creating lifecycle policies.

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud9 integrated development environment (IDE) in the AWS Cloud in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for organizations that want to provide developers with a flexible and powerful cloud-based IDE that allows them to run and debug code from a browser, while seamlessly sharing their development environment with their team. 

You can now use Amazon Route 53 private Domain Name System (DNS) and health checks for public endpoints in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. This AWS Region is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

You can now use AWS DataSync to automatically, efficiently, and securely copy files between two Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) resources, including file systems in different AWS Regions and ones owned by different AWS accounts.  Using DataSync to copy data between EFS file systems, you can perform one-time migrations, periodic ingest for distributed workloads, or automate replication for data protection and recovery, at speeds up to 10 times faster than open-source tools.

Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning is a solution that automates the detection of potentially fraudulent activity, and flags that activity for review. The solution is easy to deploy and contains an example dataset of credit card transactions. But, you can modify the solution to use your own dataset.

You can now use telephony metadata from phone calls to obtain additional information about the source of the caller. Today, a caller can hide or mask the identity of their phone number by pressing special codes such *67 before dialing a contact center. Telephony metadata provides additional information from telephony carriers that help identify the source of the call.

Previously the only telephony metadata available in Amazon Connect was the Caller-ID field displayed as the source number. Now, you can compare the Caller-ID information with additional telephony metadata to decide on how to route the caller. For example, if a caller is masking their phone number, they can be routed to a contact flow that provides greater security or an agent that specializes in authentication.

To learn more, see Telephony Call Metadata Attributes in the Amazon Connect User Guide. Telephony Call Metadata is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. There is no additional charge, beyond standard pricing for service usage, and associated telephony rates. To learn more about Amazon Connect, please visit the Amazon Connect website.

Amazon Chime Voice Connector now supports inbound calling to United States toll-free telephone numbers. Customers with on-premises phone systems can reduce their inbound toll-free calling costs up to 50% with this Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking service delivered from AWS. 

Today we are announcing the availability of License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server version 1903 for Amazon EC2, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest version of Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. Windows Server 1903 adds features that are best suited for use cases that involve building modern container-based Windows applications, such as enhanced Kubernetes support.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.

Today, we released a major update to the Amazon Pinpoint Deliverability dashboard. The Deliverability dashboard helps you understand and solve issues that could impact the delivery of your emails. With the Deliverability dashboard, you can increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and create a better email experience for your users.

AWS Glue now provides continuous logs to track real-time progress of executing Apache Spark stages in ETL jobs . You can access different log streams for Apache Spark driver and executors in Amazon CloudWatch and filter out highly verbose Apache Spark log messages making it easier to monitor and debug your ETL jobs. 

Tape Gateway, a member of the AWS Storage Gateway service family, adds capability to move your virtual tapes archived in Amazon S3 Glacier to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class, enabling you to further reduce the monthly cost to store 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.  

New SQL support enables you to query your domain using the familiar SQL syntax without compromising on Elasticsearch’s full-text search and scoring capabilities. With SQL support, you can query your data using aggregations, group by, and where clauses to investigate your data.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe supports transcription in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in all regions where the service is available.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validated endpoints in the Canada (Central) Region, making it easier for you to use DynamoDB for regulated workloads. These endpoints terminate TLS sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module. For more information, see Regions and Endpoints.

AWS Step Functions now enables access to metadata about workflow executions so that you can easily identify related resources. For example, your workflow can retrieve its execution ID or a timestamp indicating when a task started. This makes it easier to correlate logs for faster debugging and to measure workflow performance data. Your workflows pass metadata to tasks by referencing a context object available with each workflow execution.  

AWS Certification helps build your credibility and confidence by validating your cloud expertise with an industry-recognized credential. We’re excited to announce the launch of two new and two updated Exam Readiness courses. These courses are designed to help you prepare for the updated AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional exams, as well as the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder - Specialty and AWS Certified Security - Specialty exams.

This Quick Start builds a data lake environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 15 minutes by deploying SnapLogic components and AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Redshift.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Audit! SQL Server Audit lets you create server audits, which can contain server audit specifications for server level events, and database audit specifications for database level events. 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the deployment of solutions that use AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) servers. You can now also upload and associate an RSA host key with your AWS SFTP server.  

Starting today, Amazon Connect pricing for US Inbound Direct Inward Dial (DID) has decreased from $0.0030 to $0.0022 per minute, and US Outbound has decreased from $0.0065 to $0.0048 per minute.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, self-service, cloud contact center service you can use to deliver more engaging customer service experiences. The self-service graphical interface makes it easy to design contact flows, manage agent utilization, and track performance metrics. You can create an Amazon Connect cloud contact center with just a few clicks in the Amazon Connect console, allowing your agents to be up and ready to take calls within minutes.

For a list of regions where Amazon Connect is available, see the AWS Region table. First time Amazon Connect customers can try the service by using the AWS Free Tier. Visit the Amazon Connect website to learn more about Amazon Connect.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a modular, highly available environment for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 25 minutes.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotic applications, now supports over-the-air (OTA) deployment job cancellation in fleet management. This new feature allows developers and system engineers to easily limit the impact of a problematic application update by cancelling a running deployment job.  

The AWS Encryption SDK for C is now available to encrypt and decrypt your data in C and C++ applications. You can also use it as the foundation for bindings in other languages. The AWS Encryption SDK for C is highly performant and fully interoperable with the Java, Python, and CLI implementations.

Amazon Athena is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) region.

AWS IoT Device Tester v1.2, a Windows/Linux/Mac test automation tool for connected devices, is now available for Amazon FreeRTOS 1.4.8. You can download the latest release here.

This Quick Start deploys the Ribbon Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes.

AWS Step Functions now supports callback patterns. Callback patterns automate workflows for applications with human activities and custom integrations with third-party services. You create callback patterns in minutes with less code to write and maintain, run without servers and infrastructure to manage, and scale reliably. 

You can now use Amazon Elasticsearch Service in applications that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Amazon Elasticsearch Service is now SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant, allowing you to get deep insight into the security processes and controls that protect customer data. SOC compliance reports are often leveraged across diverse industries, such as technology, healthcare, banking, and financial services, and used for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) efforts.

You can now make an initial commit when you create an AWS CodeCommit repository in your AWS CloudFormation stack.  

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision and automate your AWS Backup tasks. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2017 which enables you to improve availability and durability of your SQL Server deployments by automatically replicating databases between two AWS Availability Zones (AZ). This feature is now available for SQL Server 2017 latest minor version (14.00.3049.1.v1) for the Enterprise Edition database engine. Previously, in November 2018, we announced support for this feature for SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.

Amazon API Gateway now offers tag-based access control using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, allowing you to set more fine-grained access controls for all API Gateway resources. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can define on API Gateway resources to categorize them by purpose, owner, or other criteria. 

Amazon DynamoDB now applies adaptive capacity in real time in response to changing application traffic patterns, which helps you maintain uninterrupted performance indefinitely, even for imbalanced workloads. In addition, instant adaptive capacity helps you provision read and write throughput more efficiently instead of overprovisioning to accommodate uneven data access patterns. Instant adaptive capacity is on by default at no additional cost for all DynamoDB tables and global secondary indexes.

You can now enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Encryption by Default, ensuring that all new EBS volumes created in your account are encrypted. Encryption by Default opt-in settings are specific to individual AWS regions in your account. With increasingly strict regulations on data, this feature makes it easier for you to encrypt data on EBS so that you achieve your compliance and security goals. 

Metric filters in CloudWatch Logs allow you to turn log data into numerical CloudWatch metrics that you can graph or set an alarm on. With metric filters, you can, for example, create CloudWatch metrics that count the number of errors in your logs, or that represent a latency value from your web servers. You can then visualize those metrics in CloudWatch Dashboards or use them to define alarm thresholds in CloudWatch Alarms.

Amazon GuardDuty is now a Service Organization Control (SOC) compliant service. This compliance certification applies to all AWS Regions where Amazon GuardDuty is available. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 P3dn instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS region. P3dn instances were first introduced in December of 2018 and feature eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs with 32GB of GPU memory each, 100 Gbps networking, 96 Intel Skylake-based vCPUs, and 768 GB of system memory that expands the P3 portfolio on the top end for faster distributed machine learning (ML) training workloads.

Starting today, Amazon bare metal instances are available in additional AWS regions:

• M5 bare metal instances are now available in the Canada (Central) region.
  
• M5d bare metal instances are now available in the US West (N. California), Canada (Central), and Europe (London) regions.
• R5 bare metal instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (London) regions.
• R5d bare metal instances are now available in the US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), and Europe (Dublin and London) regions.
  

This Quick Start automatically deploys an Aviatrix Controller to enable Aviatrix Orchestrator for AWS Transit Gateway on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of AWS Ground Station, a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, uplink, downlink, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Ground stations are facilities that use antennas to provide communications between the earth and your satellite.  

When using AWS DataSync, you now have the option of configuring file path and object key filters to control the data copied between your NFS servers, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon EFS file systems. Filters enable you to specify the files, folders, or objects in the source location that you want your DataSync task to copy. With filters you can easily split a single file system between multiple storage destinations, exclude copying temporary files and folders, or copy only a subset of files from your source location.

Today, AWS Marketplace added a feature for Amazon Machine Image (AMI) products that allow customers to purchase contract terms for 1+ years and helps them to secure the best price for their commitment. This feature is available through Seller Private Offers and makes it possible for customers to negotiate contract terms, price, and spread their payments over the duration of their contract. Once a customer subscribes to an AMI product, they can track details on usage, completed, and upcoming payments through their monthly bill from AWS.

As customers associate more domains to Amazon WorkLink, we've learned that it is common for their domains to use authorization flows from different identity providers. To enable access to even more content, Amazon WorkLink now allows customers to add website authorization flows from multiple identity providers in their account.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. 

Starting today, you can specify variable budget targets for each month and/or quarter for up to one year in the future when creating or editing your budgets.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports up to a maximum of 100 databases per database instance. The Microsoft system databases, such as master and model, don’t count toward this limit. 

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Recommendations feature now analyzes your Amazon Aurora configuration, usage, and performance data, and provides automated best practice guidance. In addition, Amazon RDS Recommendations suggests database parameter changes for all RDS engines.

Today, we are excited to introduce the Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery Partner Program. This program identifies and endorses partners who have demonstrated their ability to help customers create and publish interactive dashboards and drive insights from their data throughout their organizations.

Amazon QuickSight Partners have end-to-end experience in building out back end data solutions (native AWS and others), securely connecting to your data in VPCs and on-premises, setting up federated authentication/SSO and AD integration, building interactive dashboards, and embedding analytics into your applications with the QuickSight SDK and APIs.

Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery Partners have undergone a rigorous validation process and have vetted customer experience, and are ready to help you transform your data into meaningful insights.

Work with an Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery Partner >>
 

Two Marvell development boards, the MW320 AWS IoT Starter Kit and MW322 AWS IoT Starter Kit, are now qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits using development kits available from Marvell.

Hibernating your Amazon EC2 Instances just got easier. In a single run-instances API call, you can now launch encrypted Amazon EBS-backed EC2 instances from an unencrypted AMI and also enable Hibernation at the same time. You no longer have to create an encrypted copy of your Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as an additional step before launching the instance.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5n instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and AWS GovCloud (US-East) Regions. C5n instances, first introduced in November of 2018, are variants of C5 instances with significantly higher network performance across all instance sizes, ranging from 25 Gbps of peak bandwidth on smaller instance sizes to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth on the largest instance size. In addition, C5n instances also feature 33% higher memory footprint compared to C5 instances. C5n instances are ideal for applications that can take advantage of improved network throughput and packet rate performance.

Alexa for Business now enables customers to remotely manage Wi-Fi settings for their shared Echo devices directly from the Alexa for Business management console. A network profile simplifies the process of creating, managing and assigning network configurations for your shared Echo devices and contains network settings including the SSID, network security type, network credentials, and description. When you make a change to the network profile, the changes are applied to all shared devices associated with that profile. Enterprise customers that rotate their network credentials - WPA2-PSK passwords or WPA2-Enterprise Wi-Fi certificates on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly) can now use network profiles to update the network information for their shared Echo devices without having to manually set them up again.

To get started, visit the Alexa for Business management console and select Create Network Profiles under Configurations → Network Profiles. You can now create and assign the newly created network profile to already setup devices or select the Network Profile while setting up devices using the Device Setup tool. This capability is currently available for the all Echo shared devices managed by Alexa for Business. To learn more about this feature and how-to create and manage Network Profiles in Alexa for Business please see our documentation.

Alexa for Business enables organizations to use Alexa at their workplace. Alexa helps workers be more productive as they move throughout their day at home and at work. Alexa for Business includes the tools and controls that allows administrators to deploy and manage shared Alexa devices, skills, and users at scale. Alexa for Business is currently available in the U.S. only. To learn more about Alexa for Business, please visit here.

Effective August 1^st, 2019, AWS Config rules will switch to a new pay-per-use pricing model, lowering the bill for almost all existing AWS Config rules customers. AWS Config helps you assess and maintain compliance over your AWS resource configurations. You can use AWS Config rules to view compliance history and trends, identify configuration drift, and remediate configurations that fall out of compliance. Today, AWS Config rules are priced based on the number of active AWS Config rules you have in your account. An active rule is defined as a rule that records a compliance result against at least one resource during the month. In the new pricing model, you will be charged based on your monthly AWS Config rule evaluations. A rule evaluation is recorded every time you compare your resource configuration against the rule. This better aligns with your actual usage of AWS Config rules as your charges are based on the frequency and the number of resources evaluated. The new pricing delivers value by supporting volume usage, giving you more control of the AWS Config rule cost in your account. Tiered pricing makes it more affordable than ever to implement configuration compliance within your AWS environment, for as little as $0.0005 per rule evaluation. This new pricing is designed to provide almost all of the current AWS Config rules customers with a significant reduction in their AWS Config rules bill.

You can now receive detailed reports about how your users are using Amazon AppStream 2.0, including which applications they are launching.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, now in preview, to monitor, isolate, and diagnose your containerized applications and microservices environments. With this preview, DevOps and Systems Engineers have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of their Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) and Kubernetes clusters by pod, node, namespace, and services.

You can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets for applications that are subject to System and Organizational Controls (SOC) compliance requirements. This is in addition to compliance with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements announced in 2018.

Starting today, you can create Amazon RDS for MariaDB, Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, database instances with up to 64 TiB of storage and provisioned I/O performance of up to 80,000 IOPS.

Effective May 17th, pricing for AWS Elemental MediaPackage live channel ingest, and origination and packaging has been reduced across all AWS regions.

AWS Client VPN is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. AWS Client VPN is already available in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. Support for other AWS Regions is coming soon.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to create AWS Elemental MediaStore containers and policies (such as access control, CORS, and lifecycles) for those containers. This improvement enables you to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy MediaStore resources in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

Starting today, you can package, encrypt, and originate on demand video using AWS Elemental MediaPackage. The same just-in-time packaging features that you use for live channels are now available for video on demand (VOD) content. This means you can package file-based video and live video to multiple distribution formats and protect content with multiple digital rights management (DRM) standards to make video available on a wide range of playback devices.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. You can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools that you do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.  

Amazon GuardDuty adds two new threat detections. These 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. With 25 added since launch, Amazon GuardDuty now supports 54 active finding types.  

Amazon Redshift now supports SQL stored procedures to make migration to Amazon Redshift easier. Stored procedures are used to encapsulate logic for data transformation, data validation, and business-specific logic. By combining multiple SQL steps into a stored procedure, you can reduce round trips between your applications and the database.

You can now use Amazon Neptune in applications that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully-managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 announced the idle disconnect timeout feature. With this feature, you can automatically disconnect an idle user after a configurable period of time, ensuring your streaming instances are being actively used. Your user will receive a notification informing them if they are about to be disconnected due to inactivity. If your user reconnects before the separately configurable disconnect timeout period has elapsed, they will be reconnected to the same streaming session they previously had. If your user reconnects after the disconnect timeout has elapsed, or the separately configurable max session duration has elapsed, they will start a new streaming session. To configure the idle disconnect timeout feature for your fleets, see our documentation.

The idle disconnect timeout 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.
 

Today, AWS added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region to support the high demand of our growing Korean customer base.

You can now use cost allocation tags to manage your Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) costs. Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs that let you categorize SNS topics to easily identify their purpose and track associated costs. For example, you may use tags to identify the Amazon SNS topics for a particular department, project, or application.

You can now use Amazon FSx for Lustre with applications that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Amazon FSx for Lustre provides a high-performance file system that is integrated with Amazon S3 and optimized for data processing workloads like machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video processing, financial modeling, and electronic design automation (EDA).

You can now use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server with applications that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a service that provides fully-managed native Microsoft Windows file systems.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the April 2019 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2 and 12.1, and April 2019 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2.

You can now enforce password policies in your Amazon RDS for MySQL databases using the MySQL validate_password plugin. This improves the security of your databases by defining minimum password length, required characters, and other rules.

This Quick Start automatically deploys Micro Focus Operations Orchestration (OO) into a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 20 minutes.

You can now send IoT Analytics data set content results, which are materialized views of your IoT Analytics data, to an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS account. This lets you easily use it with a downstream application for further processing or presentation to end-users. For example, you can automatically create a Glue Table containing a representation of your data set content results and its schema and run queries with Amazon Athena. Also, since the data set content results are saved in your Amazon S3 bucket, you can apply your own S3 permissions and manage them according to your governance policies.

Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partners help companies improve customer experience and outcomes through Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact center service. Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partners, deliver customer success by choosing the best approach for the design and implementation of contact center solutions that are optimized for cost, reliability, security, performance, and scalability.

Amazon Connect can help you realize significant capital and operational savings for your contact center team. It provides you the opportunity to focus away from high availability operations, and instead, focus on continuous innovation in your contact center to drive greater customer experience.

The Amazon Connect Service Delivery Program identifies and endorses APN Partners globally with customer experience and a deep understanding of Amazon Connect.

Learn more about the Amazon Connect Partners >>

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations are now available in the AWS GlovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East) Regions. On-Demand Capacity Reservations are also available in all commercial AWS Regions.  

Today, AWS added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region to accommodate a growing number of customers and increasing usage of the Region. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today. 

AWS Cloud9 is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) Region. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.  

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager is available in 4 additional regions - US West (N. California), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul), extending the footprint to 11 AWS Regions and all the 169 Amazon CloudFront edge locations.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis adds support for the latest Redis open source version 5.0.4. This is a bug fix release with various improvements in stability and memory management.

For the full list of improvements in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 5.0.4 click here. Redis 5.0.4 support is available in all AWS regions.

To get started on ElastiCache for Redis cluster with engine version 5.0.4 log on to AWS Management Console.  

The AWS Developer Tools console, the unified interface for many AWS Developer Tools services, now provides a way to quickly search for your resources, such as repositories, build projects, deployment applications, and pipelines. This makes it easier to view and find resources without navigating through individual service consoles to find what you're looking for. 

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe supports transcription in Hindi and Indian-accented English in all regions where the service is available. 

AWS License Manager is now available in the US West (N. California), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), and EU (Stockholm) regions. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using Node.js v10. In addition to the leveraging new features in Node.js v10 such as the performance improvements in the V8 6.6 engine, Lambda functions written in Node.js 10 run on the latest generation of Amazon Linux, Amazon Linux 2.

AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service that simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources. With today’s launch, AWS AppSync now supports configuring more than one authorization type simultaneously for GraphQL APIs.

You can configure a single GraphQL API to deliver private and public data. You can also configure a single GraphQL API to deliver private data using more than one authorization type. For example, you can configure your GraphQL API to authorize some schema fields using OpenID Connect (OIDC), while authorizing other schema fields through Amazon Cognito User Pools and/or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

AWS AppSync supports configuring additional authorization types while retaining the authorization settings of your existing GraphQL APIs. To ensure that there are no behavioral changes in your existing GraphQL APIs, we have set your current authorization settings as the default. You can add additional authorization types using the AWS AppSync Console, CLI, and CloudFormation templates. We have also updated the AWS AppSync client SDKs for Android, iOS, and JavaScript and the Amplify CLI to support multiple authorization types.

To learn more, see the release blog post and the AWS AppSync web page.

AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that helps you secure your fleet of IoT devices. AWS IoT Device Defender continuously monitors security metrics gathered from devices, the cloud, and AWS IoT Core for deviations from what you have defined as appropriate behavior for each device. If something doesn’t look right, AWS IoT Device Defender sends out an alert so you can take action to remediate the issue.

Now, AWS IoT Device Defender also supports the identification of unusual behavior for devices that are not registered with AWS IoT Core registry. To use this new feature, you first attach a security profile targeted at unregistered devices. AWS IoT Device Defender can then detect anomalies in cloud metrics for unregistered devices such as the number of authorization failures, connection attempts, disconnects, message size, number of messages sent or messages received, and source IP. Customers can now also monitor device side metrics for unregistered devices like bytes in/out, packets in/out, number of listening TCP/UDP ports and destination IPs the device is connecting.

For more information on how to get started, refer to the AWS IoT Device Defender Developer Guide.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues are now available in the AWS China Beijing (BJS) Region (operated by SINNET), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), GovCloud (US-East), and GovCloud (US-West). 

AWS CodeBuild is now available to customers in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service in the cloud. CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. For more information, visit the CodeBuild product page.

To learn more about AWS CodeBuild, visit our documentation. To see all regions where AWS CodeBuild is available, see the AWS region table.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and Amazon Linux 2 now come with newer versions of the following deep learning frameworks: PyTorch 1.1 and Chainer 5.4. PyTorch 1.1 brings native TensorBoard support for model visualization and debugging, improvements to just-in-time (JIT) compiler, and better support for model parallelism in distributed training. This release also upgrades the NVIDIA driver to 418.40.04, Horovod to 0.16.1, and adds support for CUDA 10 in Apache MXNet environments.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. Starting today, Amazon Comprehend training and inference batch jobs now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With VPC support, your batch jobs and the AWS resources they access, such as the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets can be made private within your network and not connected to the internet. This enhancement also enables you to monitor all network traffic in and out of your batch jobs, using VPC Flow Logs.

Amazon Comprehend batch jobs support for VPC is now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Comprehend is available. For additional information, please visit the documentation. 

Amazon DynamoDB transactions are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) Region. Transactions provide developers atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) operations in DynamoDB so that they can maintain data correctness in applications more easily.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance issues on Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), now supports Amazon Aurora Global Database for the MySQL-compatible edition. Aurora Global Database allows a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions, with fast replication to enable low-latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. In addtion to supporting Aurora Global Database, Performance Insights supports RDS for Oracle, RDS for MySQL, RDS for MariaDB, RDS for PostgreSQL, Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL. For specific versions supported, visit the documentation.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth now supports automated email notifications for manual data labeling, for both private labelers and labelers from approved vendors.

You can now use AWS Migration Hub to generate right-sized EC2 instances for running on-premises workloads in AWS.

Migration Hub provides a single place to discover your existing servers, plan migrations, and track the status of each application migration. This new feature analyzes data collected from each on-premises server, including server specification, CPU, and memory utilization, to recommend the least expensive EC2 instance required to run the on-premises workload. You can also fine-tune recommendations by specifying preferences for AWS purchasing option, AWS Region, EC2 instance type exclusions, and CPU/RAM utilization metric (average, peak, or percentile). The EC2 instance recommendations feature simplifies the migration process by eliminating the manual effort required to calculate right-sized EC2 instances when forecasting costs or planning migrations.

To get started, you need to ensure that on-premises server details are available in Migration Hub. To do this, you can either import existing server inventory information from a source such as a Content Management Database (CMDB), or use AWS Application Discovery Service to collect data directly from your environment. You can then export the right-sized EC2 instance recommendations from the Migration Hub, along with the associated instance prices.

Right-sizing your compute resources is one dimension of understanding your total cost of ownership (TCO). Use the EC2 instance recommendation feature of Migration Hub when you want an understanding of your projected EC2 costs. We also offer a more detailed assessment, including optimizations for Microsoft licensing and storage costs, using TSO Logic, an Amazon Web Services Company. Contact AWS Sales or an AWS Partner to learn more about this detailed assessment.

You can learn more about AWS Migration Hub and the EC2 instance recommendations feature here, or by reading the documentation.  

Amazon Chime now lets you use custom chat bots in your chat rooms. Utilize the power of Amazon Lex, AWS Lambda, and other AWS services to build custom conversational interfaces that streamline collaborative workflows, enabling users to complete common tasks involving multiple tools without switching context. The bots you create may enable users to query for information from your internal knowledge stores, automate tasks, receive notifications for critical issues, create support tickets, or perform any number of tasks you make available.

Adding bots to your enterprise Chime account is as simple as providing a bot name and an HTTPS endpoint or by integrating directly with AWS Lambda. Once added to your Chime account, room administrators can add your bot using the bot's assigned email address, and room members interact with the bot through @ mentions.

For a list of regions where Amazon Chime is available, see the AWS Region Table. To get started on your first chat bot integration, read our guide. To learn more about Amazon Chime, visit the Amazon Chime website.

The Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) command line interface (CLI) now includes a sub-command for generating the authentication token required for connecting to their Kubernetes cluster using the command line.

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

 

Updated On: November 4, 2019  

This Quick Start has been modified to deploy IBM InfoSphere DataStage on a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster. To learn more about the underlying OpenShift architecture and components on which IBM InfoSphere DataStage Quick Start is based, see the Red Hat OpenShift on AWS Quick Start.

This Quick Start automatically deploys IBM InfoSphere DataStage on a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster into a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 2 hours.

AWS released the latest FreeRTOS kernel that includes additional preconfigured example projects for Armv8-M microcontrollers. The preconfigured examples demonstrate the FreeRTOS Armv8-M port on Arm Cortex-M33, and now also on Arm Cortex-M23, hardware from Nuvoton, NXP, and STMicroelectronics.

You can now add tags to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) gateway endpoints, interface endpoints (AWS PrivateLink), and endpoint services (AWS PrivateLink). A tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value that can be used search, filter, and organize your VPC endpoints and endpoint services. You can also use tags to clearly organize the charges for the resources you utilize, as presented at Using Cost Allocation Tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management user guide.

AWS Security Token Service (STS) now enables you to specify IAM managed policies as session policies to create fine-grained session permissions when a user assumes a role in AWS to create a session. With this launch, you have up to 10 full-sized policies to choose from that enable you to define more fine-grained session permissions.

You can now launch an EMR cluster with three master nodes and support high availability for HBase clusters on EMR. This is in addition to the support for high availability mode for YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, Spark, Hive, and Ganglia. Amazon EMR automatically fails over to a standby master node if the primary master node fails or if critical processes such as Resource Manager or Name Node crash. Since the master node is no longer a potential single point of failure with this feature, you can run your long-lived EMR clusters without interruption. In the event of a failover, Amazon EMR automatically replaces the failed master node with a new master node with the same configuration and boot-strap actions.

Please visit Plan and Configure Master nodes to learn more about this feature.

This feature is now available from EMR release 5.23.0 in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

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

Thanks

Vignesh

Starting today, you can use Amazon CloudWatch metrics and logs to get data and actionable insights from emails flowing through your Amazon WorkMail organization. Using CloudWatch metrics emitted by Amazon WorkMail, you will have an overview about the number of emails that are sent, received, or bounced. If CloudWatch logging is enabled, Amazon WorkMail publishes detailed CloudWatch log events about each email sent or received in your organization. You can then use CloudWatch Logs Insights to explore and analyze a wide range of information, such as delivery failure reasons, domains sending the most spam, or the number of emails bounced due to a misconfigured email flow rule. 

You can now launch and run Kubernetes clusters managed by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) into AWS VPCs with public (non-RFC1918) IP addresses.

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Agilisium Conversational BI Bot on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 25 minutes. It provisions a web interface to interact with the BI bot by using AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Lex, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Cognito.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL minor version 9.6.11. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in the 9.6.11 minor release by the PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

To use the new version, you can create an Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You can also create an Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility 9.6.11 read replica using an RDS for PostgreSQL 9.6.11 master instance, and then fail over your connections and applications to Aurora when ready. Learn more about migrating to Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6.11 in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon Aurora combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides up to three times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database, together with increased scalability, durability, and security.

You can now launch an encrypted Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) backed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance from any unencrypted Amazon Machine Image (AMI), such as an AWS community or marketplace AMI with a single API call.

You can now specify a list of tables from your AWS Glue Data Catalog as sources in the crawler configuration. Previously, crawlers were only able to take data paths as sources, scan your data, and create new tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

You can now share Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) encrypted with Customer-Managed Customer Master Keys (CMKs) across accounts with a single API call. Additionally, you can also launch instances from shared encrypted AMIs in a single step.

You can now launch R5 instance types when using Amazon Neptune. Amazon EC2 R5 instances are the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances and offer superior performance at lower cost compared to previous-generation instances.

This Quick Start deploys New Relic Infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in 20-30 minutes. This Quick Start is for those who want to use AWS and its products and services to launch Amazon Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and monitor the infrastructure by using New Relic Infrastructure.

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. 

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the Europe (Stockholm) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads. 

Starting today, Amazon Neptune instances are billed in one-second increments. With on-demand pricing and no up-front commitment required, Neptune’s per-second billing provides additional granularity, so you only pay for capacity you use. Partial instance hours are billed in one-second increments, with a 10-minute minimum charge following a billable status change such as creating, modifying, or deleting an instance.

AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service that simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources.

With today’s launch, AWS AppSync enables you to better understand the performance of your GraphQL requests and usage characteristics of your GraphQL schema fields. You can easily identify resolvers with large latencies that may be the root cause of a performance issue. You can also identify the most and least frequently used fields in your schema and assess the impact of deprecating GraphQL fields.

AWS AppSync now emits log events in a fully structured JSON format. This enables seamless integration with log analytics services such as Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and other log analytics solutions. We have also added new fields to log events to increase your visibility into the performance and health of your GraphQL operations.

To learn more, see the release blog and the AWS AppSync web page.

 

Starting today, Amazon DocumentDB instances are billed in one-second increments. With on-demand pricing and no up-front commitment required, Amazon DocumentDB’s per-second billing provides additional granularity, so you only pay for capacity you use. Partial instance hours are billed in one-second increments, with a 10-minute minimum charge following a billable status change such as creating, modifying, or deleting an instance. Per-second billing applies to all existing and new instances in all regions in which Amazon DocumentDB is available. Please visit the Amazon DocumentDB pricing page for more information.

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

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5d, M5, M5d, R5, and R5d instances are available in additional AWS regions:

• C5d, M5d (including bare metal), R5 bare metal, and R5d instances (including bare metal) are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) region.
  
• M5d and R5d bare metal instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region.
• M5 and M5d bare metal instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.
• R5 and R5d bare metal instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

The AWS Storage Gateway service added support for Access Control Lists (ACLs) to Server Message Block (SMB) shares on the File Gateway, helping enforce data security standards when using the gateway for storing and accessing data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). With this launch, you can apply Windows permissions and ownerships for up to 10 Access Control Entries (ACE), enabling you to provide fine grained access controls on individual files and folders in your gateway’s file share. Each ACE specifies Windows permissions and ownership for an Active Directory (AD) user or group. File Gateway offers SMB and Network File System (NFS) based access for on-premises applications to objects in Amazon S3. Through its local caching, optimized data transfer capabilities, and Amazon CloudWatch Events integrations, File Gateway enables automated hybrid cloud workflows, content distribution, backup, and data archival in Amazon S3.  

AWS Step Functions now supports workflow execution events, which make it faster and easier to build and monitor event-driven, serverless workflows. Execution event notifications can be automatically delivered when a workflow starts or completes through CloudWatch Events, reaching targets like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, Amazon Kinesis, or AWS Step Functions for automated response to the event.

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

The adoption of cloud technologies and AWS in particular is accelerating globally. More and more, customers across the globe are turning to the cloud and looking to take advantage of AWS to meet their business needs. Whatever your needs, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the right place to start your cloud adoption journey. The AWS Partner Network (APN) has the services and solutions to help customers of all sizes to Build – Market – Sell their solutions and services to grow their business.

Today, we are excited to announce an new APN Navigate Foundations path to provide you an introduction to the APN and sheds light on how you can build, market, differentiate, sell and grow your business by becoming an APN Partner. The APN Navigate Foundations path provides you a prescriptive path to define your partner journey and walks you through all the benefits, requirements, tools, and knowledge you will need to advance your journey with APN.  

If you are new to APN, build your foundational blocks by having two (2) individuals from your organization go through the Business Professional Accreditation and two (2) individuals go through the Technical Professional Accreditation. These trainings will help you gain knowledge of the AWS business solutions and services.

If you are a business that already has a specific expertise or are further along in your APN journey, you can deepen your knowledge and validate your expertise with an APN Navigate Specialization tracks that suit your business area. For more information visit the APN Navigate Website.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance issues on Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), now supports additional counter metrics on Amazon RDS for Oracle in addition to RDS for MySQL, RDS for MariaDB, RDS for PostgreSQL, Aurora MySQL and Aurora PostgreSQL. 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 and analyze performance.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions with R5 instances, the next generation of memory optimized instances.

Amazon DocumentDB is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. You can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools that you do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and 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, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul). For more information on AWS regions and services, please visit the AWS global region table.

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

This Quick Start deploys an opportunistic Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) mesh that sets up dynamic IPsec tunnels between Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. 

AWS Certificate Manager (AWS) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East) Regions. The release to the US GovCloud supports customers who need private certificate infrastructures to support US government compliance requirements. 

You can now assign AWS resource tags to applications in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value, both of which you define. You can use tags in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to easily organize and identify your resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

AWS Secrets Manager enables you to store, distribute, and rotate secrets such as database credentials and API keys through their lifecycle. Now, you can use Secrets Manager client-side caching libraries in Python, .NET, and Go to use these secrets in your applications easily.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in five additional AWS regions including Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and EU (London). Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in ten AWS regions.  

The new AWS Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow supports AWS CloudFormation StackSets and ChangeSets. StackSets enables provisioning of AWS Service Catalog products across AWS accounts and regions from the ServiceNow platform. ChangeSets enables ServiceNow users to see the planned changes to their resources prior to provisioning or updating a Service Catalog provisioned product. AWS Service Catalog is used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and distribute approved applications on AWS.

The AWS Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow allows you to expose your existing AWS Service Catalog configuration, including curated products, portfolios, constraints, and tagging, to your ServiceNow administrators and users. ServiceNow administrators can use the connector to view AWS Service Catalog portfolios and products, and enable ServiceNow users to self-service view and provision these products. The AWS-supplied connector is available in the ServiceNow Store for the Kingston (K), London (L), and Madrid (M) versions of ServiceNow.

Learn more about AWS Service Catalog.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of storage-optimized Amazon EC2 I3en instances, the largest Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based SSD storage instance in the cloud. I3en instances offer up to 60 TB of low latency NVMe SSD instance storage and up to 50% lower cost per GB over I3 instances. These instances are designed for data-intensive workloads such as relational and NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, search engines, and data warehouses that require high random I/O access to large amounts of data residing on instance storage. I3en instances also provide up to 100 Gbps of networking bandwidth, up to 96 vCPUs, and up to 768 GiB of memory. In addition, customers can enable Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on I3en for low and consistent network latency. I3en instances are powered by AWS-custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Skylake) processors with 3.1 GHz sustained all core turbo performance.

I3en instances come in seven instance sizes, with storage options from 1.25 to 60 TB. I3en instances deliver up to 2 million random IOPS at 4 KB block sizes and up to 16 GB/s of total disk throughput at 128 KB block sizes. These instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) AWS regions.

Amazon EC2 I3en instances are offered as On-Demand, Reserved, or Spot Instances. For pricing, visit the EC2 pricing page. For details and to get started visit the Amazon EC2 I3en page, AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs.

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate now supports Chef Automate 2, which is an upgrade that makes it much easier to explore the state of your infrastructure and has an even greater emphasis on compliance features than its predecessor. Chef Automate has been re-architectured using a Go-based microservice architecture and includes an enhanced web UI providing a streaming event feed, trend graphs and a rich query language.

Using Chef Automate 2, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate empowers you to uphold configuration compliance of any resource in your infrastructure. It comes with 149 prepared compliance profiles including Center for Information Security (CIS) profiles for 45 AWS resources. It also introduces a compliance profile for Secure Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIG), which is a security technical implementation guide developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

You are not limited to verify configuration compliance of AWS resources only. Through API integration with Chef InSpec, you can use AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate to test and manage resource compliance in heterogeneous environments. From the unified Chef Automate dashboard, you can analyze infrastructure and compliance automation data spanning on-premise, AWS and other cloud environments.

In regard to configuration options, Chef Automate 2 brings preservation during backup and restore of any customization you perform of your Chef Automate settings, e.g. LDAP and SAML configuration. You can configure a data retention period which enables automatic removal of nodes that are not checking in anymore. An action that used to be manual.

As of today, all newly created OpsWorks servers will automatically get AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate with Chef Automate 2. Existing customers already up and running with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate will within the next months be offered a migration path. From the OpsWorks console, it will be possible through a button-click to upgrade any existing Chef Automate server to Automate 2.

Should you be new to OpsWorks for Chef Automate and curious to experience it, it is easy to get started. By following this Getting Started walk-through, you can within 15 minutes be up and running with your first compliance profile and your first compliance check.

Details: CloudFront announces 11 new Edge locations around the world, including its first Edge location in Salt Lake City, Utah. The additions come in the following cities:

United States

• Salt Lake City, Utah (New city within the CloudFront network)
• Boston, Massachusetts
• Seattle, Washington
• Phoenix, Arizona

Japan

• Tokyo

India

• Hyderabad x2
• Bangalore x2
• Delhi x2

The launch of these six new Edge locations in India effectively doubles CloudFront’s capacity within the region. Every new CloudFront Edge location continues to enhance the overall performance of serving your web applications to your users. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Features webpage.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to select and apply Microsoft application patches automatically across your Amazon EC2 or on-premises instances. This brings Microsoft application patching to the same AWS Systems Manager solution that you use today to patch Microsoft Windows, saving time and simplifying your patch processes to manage both Microsoft operating system and application patching from one location.

Reservations, sometimes referred to as Reserved Instances, offer a discounted hourly rate (sometimes up to 75%) compared to On-Demand resource usage, in exchange for committing to a one– or three-year term of service usage. Purchasing reservations to cover your AWS usage can translate into significant savings.

This Quick Start deploys CloudBees Core on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, to provide a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution that’s based on Jenkins and integrated with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS).

AWS Training and Certification is launching the newly refreshed AWS Business Professional digital course for APN Partners on Tuesday, May 7. This new course provides valuable information about core AWS Services, an introduction to the cloud journey as part of the customer engagement and go-to-market process as well as customer enablement content. In addition, APN Partners will learn about the most up-to-date AWS Partner Network key programs and resources. Upon completion of the course modules and passing the course assessment, APN Partners will earn their AWS Business Professional Accreditation. Learn more here.

This course was introduced one week after we launched our updated AWS Partner Training and Certification site. The new site offers many enhancements, including Regional Course Schedules and Partner Learning Path tool that features paths that include the new AWS Business Professional digital course. Learn more here.

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) repositories in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Europe (Stockholm) and AWS GovCloud (US). Repository tagging makes it easier for you to organize, manage, search, and allocate costs.

Amazon ElastiCache now offers R5 nodes, the next generation memory and performance optimized nodes to maximize network performance and CPU utilization in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region. R5 nodes feature the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers nearly all of the compute and memory resources to the guest VMs.

Amazon Cognito has launched a new API – AdminSetUserPassword – for the Cognito User Pool service that provides a way for administrators to set temporary or permanent passwords for their end users. This functionality is available for end users even when their verified phone or email are unavailable.

Amazon Translate is a fully managed neural-network based machine translation service that delivers high-quality, real-time, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate now supports Hindi, Farsi, Malay, and Norwegian. 

Performance Insights, a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance issues on Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), is now generally available on Amazon Aurora MySQL 5.7 on release 2.04.2 and higher.  Performance Insights offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.

This Quick Start automatically deploys SAP S/4HANA in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in 1.5-2.5 hours. This Quick Start is for SAP architects, system administrators, and IT technical professionals who are responsible for architecture design and the deployment of S/4HANA workloads on AWS. 

The Amplify Console now supports incoming webhooks so developers can trigger builds in the Amplify Console without requiring code commits. Developers using tools such as Contentful or GraphCMS can trigger a new build on every content update. Other use cases include triggering daily or weekly builds using tools such as Zapier. To get started, visit our documentation or read our blog post on using Contentful to trigger builds in the Amplify Console.

This Quick Start deploys Spotinst Ocean for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes. This Quick Start is for users who want to scale Amazon EKS clusters efficiently while optimizing for performance and cost by leveraging a variety of instance types and sizes running as Spot Instances.

Amazon SageMaker now includes enhancements to the built-in Object2Vec algorithm making it faster to train deep learning models. You can access the new features as hyperparameters from the Amazon SageMaker console or using the Amazon SageMaker Python API.

You can now use the Splunk log driver to ship container logs from AWS Fargate tasks to a Splunk endpoint. By specifying the endpoint and other log configuration while authoring task definitions, you can ingest logs generated by containers running in Fargate to Splunk. Learn more in the API Configuration documentation.

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

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 11,2, 10.7, 9.6.12, 9.5.16, and 9.4.21. This release contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.

With this release, a new extension pgTAP, a suite of database functions that make it easy to write unit tests in psql script, is added and supported with PostgreSQL version 11.2.

Further to our previous announcement about support for Amazon S3 Import for PostgreSQL version 11.1, this release adds Amazon S3 Import support with PostgreSQL 11.2, 10.7 and later versions.

We previously announced support for Multi Major Version Upgrades to PostgreSQL 11. This release adds support for Multi Major Version Upgrades to PostgreSQL 10.7 and PostgreSQL 11.2. Please refer to the major version upgrade documentation on details around the PostgreSQL versions that are supported as source and target versions and also any limitations associated with the upgrade process.

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

Customers in the EU (Stockholm) Region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) region.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the activity of your Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

You can now modify the configuration of applications running on EMR clusters including Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Hue without re-starting the cluster. EMR Application Reconfiguration allows you to modify applications on the fly without needing to shut- down or recreate the cluster. Amazon EMR will apply your new configurations and gracefully restart the reconfigured application. Configurations can be applied through the Console, SDK, or CLI. Please visit Configuring Applications to learn more about this feature.

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

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

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports using the Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Amazon Machine Image (AMI) optimized for ECS, and also the Amazon EC2 A1 instance family, directly from the Amazon ECS console during cluster creation.

The Amazon EKS Deep Learning Benchmark Utility is a new automated tool for machine learning benchmarking on Kubernetes clusters. The tool is built and open sourced by the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) team.

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, the feature is available for the MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora in 14 AWS regions. 

Continuing our collaboration with edX, we are excited to announce AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things. This new intermediate-level course is available exclusively on edX and provides skills in building and deploying IoT solutions for commercial or consumer applications. Using videos and hands-on exercises, a variety of AWS services are explored, including IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon FreeRTOS, and AWS DeepLens.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe becomes available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Amazon Transcribe enables organizations to increase the accessibility and discoverability of their audio and video content, serving a breadth of use cases. For instance, contact centers may transcribe recorded calls for downstream analysis to better understand key call drivers. Or a media house may want to generate automatic transcriptions for the purpose of subtitling video. Amazon Transcribe is available in both batch mode and real-time (streaming), while supporting a variety of languages.

Amazon Transcribe is now available in the following AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), EU (Frankfurt), US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and GovCloud (US-West).

To learn more, visit the Amazon Transcribe documentation page.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East), Amazon’s community isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Built from actual Microsoft Active Directory (AD), AWS Managed Microsoft AD makes it easy to migrate AD-aware applications while reducing the work of managing AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use your Microsoft AD credentials to connect to RDS for SQL Server instances and to sign in to AWS applications and services such as Amazon WorkSpaces. You have the flexibility to keep your identities in your existing Microsoft AD or create and manage identities in your AWS managed directory.

AD Connector is a proxy that enables AWS applications such as Amazon WorkSpaces to use use your existing on-premises AD identities without requiring AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use AD Connector to join Amazon EC2 instances to your on-premises AD domain and manage these instances using your existing group policy objects.

Please see all AWS Regions where AWS Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector are available. To learn more, see AWS Directory Service.