June 2019

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 base images for Standard, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized and Graphics Pro instance families. This launch allows you to bring your applications that are only supported for Windows Server 2016/2019 to AppStream 2.0 or update your existing AppStream 2.0 environments to use the most recent Windows server operating system.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports 19.1 version of Oracle Application Express (APEX) for 11.2, 12.1 and 12.2 versions of Oracle Database. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser.

Amazon SageMaker Neo is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Amazon SageMaker Neo enables developers to train machine learning models once and run them anywhere in the cloud and at the edge. Amazon SageMaker Neo optimizes models to run up to twice as fast, with less than a tenth of the memory footprint, with no loss in accuracy.

Today AWS Elemental MediaConnect added integration with SPEKE for key exchange with conditional access system (CAS) partners. SPEKE, which stands for Secure Packager and Encoder Key Exchange, is an open API specification that streamlines the way CAS systems integrate with MediaConnect. Using this feature, you can now encrypt live video shared using entitlements and fully control permissions for content sent to your distribution partners. This enables you to build complex distribution workflows with more granular and sophisticated conditional rights management, including time-based access, black-outs, and many other rules-based requirements. Visit the documentation pages to learn more.

AWS IoT Events is now available in the EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. This is in addition to the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS regions.

You can now copy your Amazon WorkSpaces Images across AWS Regions. Using the same Image across Regions makes it simpler to manage global deployment of WorkSpaces while improving consistency, compliance, and security of your WorkSpaces.

AWS IoT Greengrass is now available in seven additional regions - Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), US East (Ohio), EU (London), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, extending the footprint to 13 AWS regions.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. You can now centrally and continuously manage the compliance and security of your AWS accounts in the Europe (Stockholm) region.

We are pleased to announce the general availability for the latest release of AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.0.27. This release adds support for Autodesk 3ds Max 2020 and Eddy for Nuke 2.3.0, and includes a new AWS feature, Resource Tracker, in addition to many improvements and bug fixes.  

If you have beginner-level coding experience and want to learn to use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), the new Alexa for Developers digital training course is the right starting point. This free, two-hour online digital course introduces you to the ASK and explains how to use it to build, test, publish, and certify Amazon Alexa skills.

Amazon Athena is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) region. 

AWS Backup is now available in six additional regions across Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas: Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), EU (London), Canada (Central), and US West (Northern California). 

This Quick Start deploys MemSQL, a distributed, highly scalable structured query language (SQL) database, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. This Quick Start is for database administrators, data architects, data scientists, and data analysts. 

Amazon ECS customers now have additional options for controlling API access to ECS resources. With resource-level permissions (RLP) for services and task sets, you can now create IAM policies that allow or deny the ability to create, update, delete, or describe specific services and task sets.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5, M5a, M5d, R5, R5a, and R5d instances will be available in new 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes. The specifications for the new sizes are in the tables below. With these new instance sizes, customers who are currently using either m4.10xlarge, m4.16xlarge, r4.8xlarge, or r4.16xlarge now have an easy upgrade path to the latest generation of instances.  

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region.

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 US-West-1 Region.

AWS is announcing the immediate availability of AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator designed to help startup educational technology (EdTech) companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, to customers in Brazil. Brazil joins the United States as the second country for availability in the Western Hemisphere, and the 34 country globally. AWS EdStart provides eligible EdTech startups AWS promotional credits and access to the same scalable technology used by established companies. 

Data Analytics Fundamentals, which replaces the digital training course Big Data Technology Fundamentals, will teach you the latest on how to seamlessly plan a data analysis solution using the suite of AWS services. In this 3.5-hour, self-paced digital course, you will understand the big picture of data analysis, how to plan data analysis solutions, as well as the data analytic processes involved in those solutions.

You can now use AWS Backup, an automated and centralized backup service, to backup Amazon EFS file systems in the AWS US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) 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.

Amazon EC2 Instance Connect is a simple and secure way to connect to your instances using Secure Shell (SSH). 

AWS Deep Learning (DL) Containers now come with libraries and packages required for model training and inference in Amazon SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables you to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. You can now use DL Containers seamlessly across Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), self-managed Kubernetes on Amazon EC2, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This release of DL Containers also updates Apache MXNet images to 1.4.1 with support for CUDA 10.0.  

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Region.  

Starting today, AWS Security Token Service supports AWS PrivateLink in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, enabling you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Security Token Service entirely within the AWS network. 

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS EU (Stockholm) Region.

You can now use CloudWatch Logs to store, monitor, and analyze CloudWatch Events that are triggered in your environment.  

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

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

AWS License Manager is now available in AWS China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charges. To learn more about this service, visit the product documentation, and FAQ page.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced Procurement System Integration, a new feature that enables enterprises to integrate AWS Marketplace with procurement systems. Builders can now use Coupa, a leader in Business Spend Management, to find, buy, deploy, and manage thousands of curated third-party software listings in AWS Marketplace. When a builder is ready to purchase the software they need, they click subscribe to complete a requisition request directly in Coupa. Once their request is approved, builders are automatically notified that their subscription is ready to deploy. With Procurement System Integration, builders can quickly get the software they need while ensuring the software they deploy meets their organization’s procurement policies. Procurement System Integration also helps procurement teams gain centralized governance and visibility for their approval workflows and purchase order tracking.

We are excited to announce the availability of Encryption by Default for all new EBS volumes created in an account within a region in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. 

We are excited to announce the capability to launch Encrypted EBS backed EC2 instances from unencrypted AMIs in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. 

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, now enables you to use a single AWS Managed Active Directory (AD) with file systems across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) or AWS accounts.

We are excited to announce the availability of Encrypted AMI sharing across accounts in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. 

Amazon CloudWatch now supports Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server, a new capability that enables observability for .NET and SQL Server application stacks. It sets up and analyses important monitors from across your application resources to discover problems with your applications. For the detected issues, it creates CloudWatch Automatic Dashboards to visualize problem details, helping application owners troubleshoot faster and reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

AWS Direct Connect is now live at CDLAN srl Via Caldera 21, Milano. This is the first AWS Direct Connect location in Italy. Customers in Milan can now locally establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. This location can be found in the Management Console. With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region from any of the above locations using global public VIFs and Direct Connect Gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the home region if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region. 

Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority and APN Partners offer hundreds of industry-leading products that are equivalent, identical to, or integrate with existing controls in on-premises environments. The APN Security Navigate track provides a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in cloud security solutions on AWS.

Through this APN Navigate track, APN Partners will be introduced to the AWS approach to security in the cloud, the demand for AWS security services and talent in the current market, common use cases, and best practices for developing a security capability that paves the way for your organization to differentiate and become an AWS Security Competency Partner.

Learn more about the importance of learning security best practices, and how to do that with the APN Navigate Security track here. 

Customers can now replicate the network traffic from an EC2 instance within their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and forward that traffic to security and monitoring appliances for use cases such as content inspection, threat monitoring, and troubleshooting. These appliances can be deployed on an individual Amazon EC2 instance or a fleet of instances behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) listener. Amazon VPC traffic mirroring also supports traffic filtering and packet truncation, allowing customers to extract only traffic they are interested in monitoring.

Amazon EC2 Fleet is a new feature that simplifies the provisioning of Amazon EC2 capacity across different Amazon EC2 instance types, Availability Zones and across On-Demand, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) and Amazon EC2 Spot purchase options. With a single API call, now you can provision capacity across EC2 instance types and across purchase options to achieve desired scale, performance and cost.

You can create an EC2 fleet specification defining target capacity, which EC2 instance types work for you, and how much of your fleet should be filled using On-Demand, RI and Spot purchase options. You can also indicate whether EC2 Fleet should take into account the number of cores and amount of memory on each instance or consider all instances equal when scaling. EC2 Fleet then launches the lowest price combination of instances to meet the target capacity based on these preferences.

Amazon EC2 Fleet is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Visit AWS GovCloud (US) homepage to learn more about these regions. To learn more about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit our documentation.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity available in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Spot Instances are easy to launch, scale and manage through AWS services like Amazon ECS or integrated third parties like Terraform and Jenkins.

Spot Instances can be launched via RunInstances API with a single additional parameter. You can also provision compute capacity across Spot Instances, RIs and On-Demand instances to optimize performance and cost using EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet APIs. Spot Instances launched via these APIs are same as any EC2 instance; they provide the reliability, security, performance, control, and elasticity of Amazon EC2, at low market-driven prices. Spot Instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. To learn more about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit our documentation.

AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon's 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. Visit AWS GovCloud (US) homepage to learn more about these regions.

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of AWS Security Hub, a new security service that provides customers a comprehensive view of both their compliance with the security standards and their high priority AWS security alerts, or findings. Customers simply turn on Amazon Security Hub in the AWS Management Console, and the service immediately begins conducting automated and continuous compliance checks, providing a comprehensive and timely view of a customer’s overall security and compliance status.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, now provides a new option for integrating Windows file systems with your organization’s user and group identities: you can now directly join your Amazon FSx file systems to on-premises or in-cloud self-managed Microsoft Active Directories (ADs).

Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 25 unique items and 4 MB of data per transactional request. Transactions enable developers to simplify their code, and support workflows and business logic that require adding, updating, or deleting multiple items as a single, all-or-nothing operation.

Elastic Load Balancing now supports the UDP protocol on Network Load Balancers, in addition to the already supported TCP protocol. With this launch, you can deploy services that rely on the UDP protocol, such as Authentication and Authorization, Logging, DNS, and IoT, behind a Network Load Balancer, benefiting from its low latency, scale, and reliability.

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

AWS Control Tower is now generally available and supported for production use. AWS Control Tower is a service that is intended for organizations with multiple accounts and teams who are looking for the easiest way to set up their new multi-account AWS environment and govern at scale. With AWS Control Tower, cloud administrators get peace of mind knowing accounts in their organization are compliant with established policies while builders provision new AWS accounts quickly in a few clicks.

Today, Amazon Connect introduces contact flow versioning, making it easy to preview, modify, and publish past versions of a flow with just a few clicks within the contact flow designer. Rolling back between a saved or published version is simple, allowing you to review how a flow evolved and inspect how it was previously configured, enabling experimentation. Previously, customers could only revert to the last saved or published version, limiting their ability to track changes.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports security level options for data transferred between the File Gateway and SMB clients. You can enforce encryption and signing on client requests, or use client-negotiated defaults, helping you meet organizational requirements for security and client compatibility. 

With Service Quotas, you can view and manage your quotas easily and at scale as your AWS workloads grow. Quotas, also referred to as limits, are the maximum number of resources that you can create in an AWS account. AWS implements quotas to provide highly available and reliable service to all customers, and protect you from unintentional spend. Each quota starts with an AWS default value. Based on your needs, you can request to increase quota values for your specific account.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access advisor uses data analysis to help you set permission guardrails confidently by providing service last accessed information for your accounts, organizational units (OUs), and your organization managed by AWS Organizations. Permission guardrails help control which services your developers and applications can access. By analyzing last accessed information, you can determine the services not used by IAM users and roles. You can implement permissions guardrails using service control policies (SCPs) that restrict access to those services.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports t3.medium instances, in addition to the R4 and R5 class instances already available. Using t3.medium instances with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is a cost-effective option for smaller workloads such as test, dev, and QA, while still giving you the option to use larger class instances for production deployments.

T3 instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance, with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and are ideal for database workloads with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in use.

When a workload is operating below the baseline threshold, your T3 instance accumulates CPU credits. Each earned CPU credit provides the instance with the opportunity to burst with the performance of a full CPU core for one minute when needed. Amazon Aurora T3 instances are configured for Unlimited Mode, which means they can burst beyond the baseline over a 24-hour window for an additional charge.

You can easily create a new T3 instance, or modify your existing Aurora database instance to scale to T3, in the Amazon RDS Management Console. Please refer to the Amazon Aurora User Guide for more details, and to find out which Aurora versions are supported. For pricing and regional availability, see Amazon Aurora Pricing.

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. To learn more about Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, please visit our product page.

Customers can now use AWS Storage Gateway to provide hybrid cloud storage through their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. With this feature, the network connection between an on-premises Storage Gateway appliance and AWS can be restricted to private network routes, further securing storage workloads and administration activities. VPC endpoints for Storage Gateway are provided by AWS PrivateLink, a highly available, scalable technology that enables customers to privately connect their VPC to supported AWS services. 

Amazon QuickSight announces the availability of fine-grained access control for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissioned resources (specifically, Amazon S3, Amazon Athena and Amazon RDS/Redshift database discovery. Fine-grained access control allows administrators of an Amazon QuickSight account to control authors’ default access to connected AWS resources and use IAM policies to scope down access permissions so specific authors can only access specific items within the AWS resources. 

You can now enforce a minimum Transport Layer Security (TLS) version and cipher suites through a security policy for connecting to your Amazon API Gateway custom domain, allowing you to further improve security for your customers.  

AWS IoT Greengrass Core 1.9.2 is now available. With this release, AWS IoT Greengrass adds support for the OpenWrt operating system.  

Starting today, Amazon RDS for MariaDB, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon RDS for Oracle support RDS Storage Auto Scaling. RDS Storage Auto Scaling automatically scales storage capacity in response to growing database workloads, with zero downtime.

Certificate authority (CA) administrators can now create a private CA hierarchy, including root and subordinate CAs. A CA hierarchy is a way to organize CAs that provides strong security and restrictive access controls for the most-trusted root CA at the top of the hierarchy, while allowing more permissive access and bulk certificate issuance for subordinate CAs lower in the trust chain. This feature expands ACM Private CA capabilities from a single level hierarchy that required you to operate your root and intermediate CAs, to an AWS-managed solution that provides a full CA hierarchy without the need to maintain external root CAs.

Starting today, you can now use workflows in AWS Glue to author directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of Glue triggers, crawlers and jobs.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports importing of data stored in a Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket into a PostgreSQL table. A new extension aws_s3 has been added to perform the import operation. You can import any data format that is supported by the PostgreSQL COPY command, using the ARN role association method or using Amazon S3 credentials.

Import from Amazon S3 is supported with Aurora PostgreSQL version 2.3, compatible with PostgreSQL 10.7. To learn more, please visit the documentation page.

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. To learn more about Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, please visit our product page.

AWS X-Ray, a distributed tracing system that helps developers analyze and debug multi-tiered applications, is now available in AWS’ new Hong Kong region. 

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) with encrypted queues in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Server-side encryption (SSE) lets you transmit sensitive data in encrypted queues. SSE protects the contents of messages in Amazon SQS queues using keys managed in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). 

Today, AWS Migration Hub is introducing support for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles, a new type of IAM role that allows you to easily delegate permissions to AWS services.

You can now see statistics from recent invocations of your Lambda functions directly in the Lambda monitoring tab. 

Starting today, you can monitor the Lambda functions associated with your Amazon CloudFront distributions directly from your Amazon CloudFront console for an easier monitoring and debugging experience.

This Quick Start helps you deploy a Cohesive Networks VNS3 overlay network on the AWS Cloud in about 15 minutes. It includes AWS CloudFormation templates, which automatically configure the VNS3 environment.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports Kubernetes version 1.13.7 for all clusters. Additionally, you can use ECR PrivateLink and Kubernetes PodSecurityPolicies with your EKS clusters.

Amazon MQ is now available in 14 regions, with the addition of the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and EU (Paris) regions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X1 and X1e instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) region.

AI Powered Speech Analytics for Amazon Connect is a solution that provides customer insights in real time, and helps agents and supervisors better understand and respond to customer needs so they can resolve customer issues and improve the overall customer experience. The solution includes pre-trained AWS artificial intelligence (AI) services that enable customers to transcribe, translate, and analyze each customer interaction in Amazon Connect, and presents this information to assist contact center agents during their conversations.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces seven new Edge locations. Four of the new Edge locations are in North America including Houston, Texas (2) , Hillsboro, Oregon, and Toronto, Ontario. Two locations were added in Europe in Manchester, England, and Zurich, Switzerland while another Edge location was added in Sydney, Australia. The addition of these new Edge locations has doubled our capacity in each city to serve the growing number of viewer requests. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Features webpage.

Amazon Lightsail is happy to announce a partnership with GoDaddy’s Pro Sites product to help WordPress customers easily manage their instances for free. Amazon Lightsail takes out the learning curve of creating a WordPress website at AWS.  

Today we are announcing a price reduction of 30% on P3 1-year Reserved Instances and 10% on the 3-year Reserved Instances in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. In the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, we are reducing P3 1-year Reserved Instances by 40% and 3-year Reserved Instances by 10%. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5 instances will be available in new 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and Bare Metal sizes. These new instances will be powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (based on the Cascade Lake architecture) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz. New Cascade Lake processors enable a new feature called Intel DL Boost which will help speed up typical machine learning operations like convolution, and automatically improve inference performance over a wide range of deep learning workloads. The specifications for the new sizes are in the table below.  

Bluetooth Low Energy support in Amazon FreeRTOS and a new MQTT library are now generally available in Amazon FreeRTOS 201906.00 Major. You can securely connect Amazon FreeRTOS devices using Bluetooth Low Energy to AWS IoT via Android and iOS devices, and use the new MQTT library to create applications that are independent of the connectivity protocol, such as Bluetooth Low Energy or Wi-Fi.  

AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway is now available in AWS GovCloud (US), and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. With this feature, customers can connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) in multiple AWS Regions to their on-premises networks using 1/2/5/10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections.

You can now set endpoint policies on AWS interface endpoints. Amazon VPC endpoint policy is an AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) resource policy that you can attach to an endpoint when you create or modify the endpoint. If you do not attach a policy when you create an endpoint, a default policy gets attached for you to allow full access to the service. The Amazon VPC endpoint policy defines which principal can perform which actions on which resources. An endpoint policy does not override or replace IAM user policies or service-specific policies. It is a separate policy for controlling access from the endpoint to the specified service.

We are excited to release Lumberyard Beta 1.19, which includes over 150 new features, improvements and fixes, so you can create beautiful, dense worlds and iterate faster towards great gameplay – without relying on anyone else.

You can now configure Amazon Neptune to publish audit logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

You can now use the AWS Cloud Map service registry selectors with AWS App Mesh. This new option allows you to define a subset of endpoints (through matching on key and value selectors) that were defined in Cloud Map. You simply change your App Mesh VirtualNode configuration to use Cloud Map, add the selectors for the subset of service endpoints you want the VirtualNode to represent and register your running service (IP addresses and metadata) with the corresponding Cloud Map Service name and Namespace and keys and value metadata. When routing traffic to that Virtual Node, App Mesh will route to the endpoints that match the CloudMap key and value selectors you configured. 

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

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now integrated with AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform which allows customers to describe and provision Amazon MSK resources using code. These services make it easy to provision and configure Amazon MSK clusters in a repeatable, automated, and secure manner. 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to specify AWS Client VPN Endpoint resources. This improvement enables you to use CloudFormation to create AWS Client VPN Endpoints, associate target subnets, create routes and rules —along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision Amplify Console resources, enabling repeatable and reliable web app deployments. CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment and simplifies the roll out across multiple AWS accounts and/or regions with just a couple of clicks.

You can now use a single reader endpoint to connect to your Redis read replicas. Until today, to easily connect to your read replicas you had to manage multiple endpoints at the application level. The new feature allows you to direct all read traffic to your ElastiCache for Redis cluster through a single, cluster-level endpoint.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports z1d instance types. Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance.

You can now use Apache Spark 2.4.2, Apache Flink 1.8.0, Presto 0.219, Hue 4.4.0, JupyterHub 0.9.6, Apache Livy 0.6.0, and Apache MXNet 1.4.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.24.0.

This release also includes three new performance optimizations which you can enable and improve Spark performance by up to 13X: Dynamic partition pruning, Flattening scalar subqueries, and DISTINCT before INTERSECT.

• Dynamic partition pruning allows the Spark engine to dynamically infer relevant partitions at runtime, saving time and compute resources by both reading less data from storage, and processing less records.
• Flatten scalar subqueries helps in situations where multiple different conditions need to be applied to rows from a specific table, and prevents the table from being read multiple times for each condition. This reduces redundant data reads and improves performance.
• DISTINCT before INTERSECT eliminates duplicate values in each input collection prior to computing the intersection, improving performance by reducing the amount of data shuffled between hosts.

You need to enable these optimizations via Spark properties. Please refer to the EMR 5.24.0 release notes to learn more about these features.

Additionally, you can now use CloudFormation templates and specify multiple subnets for different Availability Zones within a VPC when you launch clusters using EMR Instance Fleets. This feature is available from EMR versions 4.8.0 and greater (with the exception of 5.0.x)

Amazon EMR release 5.24.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.24.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.24.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can choose Spark, Flink, Presto, Hue, JupyterHub, Livy, and MXNet to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.24.0, Spark 2.4.2, Flink 1.8.0, Presto 0.219, Hue 4.4.0, JupyterHub 0.9.6, Livy 0.6.0, and MXNet 1.4.0.

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 MQ is now available in 12 regions with the addition of the Canada (Central) region.  

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) makes it easy to manage access to business applications by providing pre-integrated applications such as Salesforce, Google Suite, and Microsoft Office 365. AWS SSO now expands the total pre-integrated applications to 200 by adding applications including Asana, Jamf, and Uptime.com. For full list of pre-integrated applications, see Cloud Applications.

Network Load Balancer, designed to handle millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies, is now available in Asia Pacific (Osaka).  

Starting today, Amazon Rekognition is available in four additional AWS Regions — EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region.

Amazon QuickSight announced the launch of sheets within dashboards. Sheets allow better organization of information within the dashboard, where visuals related to specific subject areas or topics can be organized in separate sheets and distinctly identified through the tab name. As a reader, you can then navigate to a single dashboard to get a comprehensive view of all the insights related to a topic. For more information, see here.  

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS Europe (Paris) region.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports cluster cache management, providing a faster path to full performance if there's a failover. With cluster cache management, you designate a specific reader DB instance in your Aurora PostgreSQL cluster as the failover target. Cluster cache management keeps the data in the designated reader's cache synchronized with the data in the read-write instance's cache. If a failover occurs, the designated reader is promoted to be the new read-write instance, and workloads benefit immediately from the data in its cache.

Without cluster cache management, when a read-write instance fails over to a read-only instance and that instance is promoted to be the new read-write instance, the cache in the newly promoted instance doesn’t have the data that was “hot” in the failed instance’s cache right before it failed. This leads to degraded performance while the “hot” data is read into the new instance’s cache from storage.

You can learn more about Aurora PostgreSQL and cluster cache management on the Aurora PostgreSQL documentation pages. 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.

AWS CodeBuild is now available to customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) 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.

AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon's 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.

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

Customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) 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.

Whether it’s an organization's first cloud project or part of a larger transformation initiative, the migration of Independent Software Vendor (“ISV”) workloads from on-premises data centers to AWS requires significant domain expertise in planning, execution, and optimization. Such migrations require an understanding of workload dependencies, application customizations, and AWS deployment options.

To address this challenge, we’re excited to introduce the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program (WMP). The program helps customers migrate ISV workloads to AWS to achieve business goals and accelerate their cloud journey.

AWS ISV WMP collaborates with AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners and their APN Consulting Partner communities to create a prescriptive and repeatable migration process for their AWS offering, whether its deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bring Your Own License (BYOL), or a Managed Service. The program is open to Select, Advanced, and Premier tier APN Partners and provides technical enablement, migration funding to offset costs, and go-to-market support.

With the goals of streamlining migration and lowering the cost of migrating ISV workloads for the customer, this program aligns APN Partners and AWS to support the success of our customers’ cloud journey. With AWS ISV WMP, APN Partners drive and deliver ISV workload migrations, enhancing their cloud practices and customer success on AWS.

Learn more >> 

Customers using AWS ParallelCluster to set up their High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters can now take advantage of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). AWS ParallelCluster helps you easily configure everything you need to run your application with EFA, including security group with ingress & egress rules, Open MPI, and Libfabric library. 

CloudEndure, an AWS company, now offers CloudEndure Migration to move applications from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure to AWS at no charge. This offer is available to all AWS customers and partners. 

AWS Security Fundamentals (Second Edition) is now available. This introductory digital course features updated, streamlined content to help you better understand security in the cloud for your organization. In this two-hour, self-paced, digital course, the experts at AWS will help you address your security responsibility in the AWS Cloud and the different security-oriented services available. You will learn to identify the security benefits and responsibilities when using the AWS Cloud. You will also learn fundamental AWS Cloud security concepts, including AWS access control, data encryption methods, and how network access to your AWS infrastructure can be secured.

Amazon DynamoDB on-demand capacity mode and transactions are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. On-demand capacity mode is a flexible capacity mode for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without requiring capacity planning. Transactions provide developers atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) operations in DynamoDB so that they can maintain data correctness in applications more easily.

AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. DataSync is an online data transfer service that simplifies, automates, and accelerates copying data between NFS file servers, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon EFS file systems.

The AWS Serverless Application Repository is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region. The addition of the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region increases the availability of the AWS Serverless Application Repository, which offers region support for Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm), South America (São Paulo), US West (N. California, Oregon), and US East (N. Virginia, Ohio). The AWS Serverless Application Repository is available in 17 regions.

Last month, we announced support for tagging Amazon DynamoDB tables when you create them in all standard AWS Regions. Today, we extend tagging support to the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Tags are labels you can attach to AWS resources to make them easier to manage, search, and filter.

Amazon Chime 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 Chime for your HIPAA eligible workloads. 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.

Security and compliance are primary considerations for many of our customers as they begin their cloud journey. Oftentimes, public sector customers face obstacles and challenges using commercially available solutions today do not meet the security and compliance authorizations needed to operate in the public sector.

Introducing the new Authority to Operate (ATO) on AWS Program to help APN Partners running on AWS accelerate the security and compliance authorization process, reducing the time and cost it takes to achieve an ATO from their customers, which is required for production use (such as FedRAMP or CJIS).

Through the ATO on AWS Program, APN Partners receive the resources needed to build, implement, and optimize DevOps, SecOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Continuous Risk Treatment (CRT) strategies and processes for their organization, as well as provide access to managed solutions that minimize the work required to achieve such authorizations.

Learn more on the APN Blog >> 

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. 

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Personalize, a machine learning service that makes it easy for developers to create individualized recommendations for users of their applications. Based on the same technology used at Amazon.com, Amazon Personalize allows developers to easily build sophisticated personalization capabilities into their applications, such as personalized product and content recommendations, tailored search results, and targeted marketing promotions.

You can now add dynamic labels to your Amazon CloudWatch charts that provide richer context on your dashboards, helping you to more quickly identify anomalies in system health and performance. Dynamic labels provide data summaries over the time window represented in the chart and update automatically as the chart is refreshed. For example, adding the average and maximum dynamic labels for a CPU utilization metric across multiple EC2 resources can help you identify anomalies at a glance. The initial set of dynamic labels includes AVG, SUM, MIN, MAX and LAST, with more to follow.

AWS CodeCommit now supports two additional merge strategies for pull requests: squash merges and three-way merges, and a conflict resolution editor in the console that allows developers to manually resolve conflicts at the time of a merge. A pull request is the primary way developers review, comment on, and merge code changes. Collaboratively reviewing code changes in pull requests helps developers maintain high code quality and better understand each other’s code. 

Amazon Comprehend Medical is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (London), and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing service that makes it easy to use machine learning to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text.

AWS Systems Manager, the operational hub for AWS and hybrid cloud deployments, announces the launch of OpsCenter to help you view, investigate, and resolve operational issues related to your environment from a central location. OpsCenter presents operational issues in a standardized view, along with contextually relevant data to help you with the diagnosis and remediation of them. You can associate AWS Systems Manager Automation documents for easier remediation and also specify deduplication logic to filter repetitive operational issues.

AWS Training and Certification has launched Amazon DynamoDB: Building NoSQL Database–Driven Applications, a new self-paced, digital course available exclusively on edX.

You can now assign custom attributes, or tags, to the AWS accounts you manage with AWS Organizations. The ability to attach tags such as owner name, project, business group, cost center, environment, and other values directly to your AWS accounts makes it easier for the people in your organization to get information on particular AWS accounts without having to refer to a separate spreadsheet or other out-of-band method for tracking your AWS accounts.

AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your workloads on AWS. Using AWS Organizations, you can automate account creation, create groups of accounts to reflect your business needs, and apply policies for these groups for governance. You can also simplify billing by setting up a single payment method for all of your AWS accounts.

You can tag and untag AWS accounts using the AWS Organizations console or programmatically via the AWS SDK at no additional cost. For more information, please visit documentation on Tagging in AWS Organizations and read more about AWS Tagging Strategies.

AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Chinese government-approved hardware security modules to protect the security of your keys. The service is designed so that no one, including KMS service operators, can retrieve your plaintext master keys from the service. You control the use and management of these keys used to access encrypted data across AWS services and in your own applications.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports increased ECS task limits for select Amazon EC2 instances when using awsvpc task networking mode. When you use these instance types and opt in to the awsvpcTrunking account setting, additional Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) are available for tasks using awsvpc networking mode on newly launched container instances.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 z1d instances are available in the Europe (London) region. 

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EBS encryption in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by SINNET, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Serverless Image Handler, a solution that combines highly available, trusted AWS services and the open source image processing suite Sharp to enable fast and cost-effective image manipulation on the AWS Cloud. The solution provides a demo user interface for image manipulation that allows you to interact directly with your image handler API endpoint using image files in your account. It also features an image request option that allows you to crop images using the facial recognition capabilities of Amazon Rekognition.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 released three self-guided workshops that help software vendors build online software trials and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for their desktop applications, without rewriting them. This project series provides step-by-step guidance for three projects that demonstrate how you can use AppStream 2.0 for these scenarios. To get started, see AppStream 2.0 ISV Workshops.

Today the AWS Well-Architected Tool has increased the maximum number of characters per notes field from 250 characters to 2,084 characters.  

Starting today, you can now run scripts using Python shell jobs that are compatible with Python 3.6. Previously, Python shell jobs in AWS Glue were compatible only with Python 2.7. You can use Python shell jobs in AWS Glue to run small to medium-sized generic tasks that are often part of an ETL (extract, transform, and load) workflow.  

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

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports running Windows Server 2019 containers. Amazon ECS provides an ECS-Optimized Windows Server Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is based on the EC2 Windows Server 2019 AMI and includes Docker 18.09 and the ECS Agent 1.27.

Starting today, when migrating to Amazon RDS for SQL Server, you can now restore a multi-file native SQL Server backup from S3 to an Amazon RDS SQL Server database instance. 

Host Recovery for Amazon EC2 automatically restarts your instances on a new host in the event of an unexpected hardware failure on a Dedicated Host. Host Recovery reduces the need for manual intervention, minimizing time for recovery and lowering operational burden for instances running on Dedicated Hosts. Additionally, built-in integration with AWS License Manager automates the tracking and management of your licenses in the event of recovery.

There are no additional EC2 charges for using Host Recovery. Standard Dedicated Host charges apply. See Dedicated Host Pricing page for more information. Host Recovery is now generally available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), South America (São Paulo), China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) regions. To learn more and to get started, please visit the Host Recovery documentation. 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to specify Amazon Pinpoint resources. This improvement enables you to use CloudFormation to deploy Amazon Pinpoint resources—along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. You can use CloudFormation templates to specify Amazon Pinpoint projects, segments, campaigns, and communication channels.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region with R5 instances, the next generation of memory-optimized instances.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X1 and X1e instances are available in additional AWS regions:

• X1 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS region.
• X1e instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and US East (Ohio) AWS regions.

Amazon Inspector expands Center for Internet Security's CIS Benchmarks support for Amazon Linux 2. You can now run Inspector CIS assessments on Amazon Linux 2 distributions to check the configuration of your Amazon EC2 instances against the security configuration best practices developed by CIS.

You can now use AWS DataSync for workloads that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance. DataSync is an online data transfer service that simplifies, automates, and accelerates copying data between NFS file servers, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file systems using a purpose-built network protocol to achieve speeds of up to 10x faster than open source tools.

We are excited to announce that Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports self-service updates. This feature allows you to apply service updates at the time of your choosing and track the progress in real-time. You now have the visibility and control on service updates to maintain HIPAA-eligibility, PCI-compliance or FedRAMP-authorization on your ElastiCache for Redis cluster on a schedule that best fits your business needs.

When service updates applicable to your Redis replication group(s) become available, we will notify you via multiple channels including ElastiCache console, Emails, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Personal Health Dashboard (PHD) and Amazon CloudWatch Events.

You can start using self-service updates via the ‘Service Updates’ page in the Amazon ElastiCache console, AWS ElastiCache API and AWS CLI. The self-service updates feature is available in all AWS Regions for Redis replication groups running engine versions 3.2.6 and later. For more information about this feature, see ElastiCache for Redis Service Updates. 

Amazon API Gateway now allows you to define VPC Endpoint policies, enabling you to specify which Private APIs a VPC Endpoint can connect to. Using VPC Endpoint policies, you can achieve more fine-grained security control.  

Amazon Inspector is now available to customers in the Europe (London) region. With the addition of this region, Inspector is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en instances are available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt) AWS regions, and in additional Availability Zones (AZs) in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. I3en global availability now includes the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (Oregon) AWS regions. 

Starting today, you can now connect directly to AWS Glue through an interface endpoint in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instead of connecting over the internet. When you use a VPC interface endpoint, communication between your VPC and AWS Glue is conducted entirely and securely within the AWS network.

This Quick Start deploys Tableau Server in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and configures it to work with Snowflake in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for IT and database professionals who want to understand the infrastructure requirements of these solutions and deploy production workloads for end users in their organizations.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 6.7 and Kibana 6.7. The new version of Elasticsearch and Kibana offers several new features and improvements, including BKD backed geo-shapes datatype, median absolute deviation aggregation, and support for nested fields in composite aggregations