February 2020

AWS License Manager expands its new, simplified bring-your-own-license (BYOL) experience for software licenses, such as Windows and SQL Server, to Asia Pacific (Mumbai), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo) and US West (N. California) regions, in addition to US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for native application mode in the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. Native application mode for streaming provides a familiar experience for AppStream 2.0 users by letting them interact with their remote streaming applications in the same way as they interact with locally installed applications. In addition, users can switch seamlessly between locally installed applications and remote applications that are streamed through AppStream 2.0.

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to launch and run feature-rich and highly performant file systems with just a few clicks, now enables you to create and use file systems in Shared Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). This feature is available on both FSx for Windows File Server and FSx for Lustre.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD and the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. 

You can pass variables to the ‘Set hold flow’ block, ‘Set whisper flow’ block, and ‘Set customer queue flow’ block to programmatically adapt and personalize your customer experience. Historically, businesses built branching logic into their flows to set a customer specific hold, whisper, or queue flow. Now, contact-center administrators can design flows that configure the customer experience in real-time based on the attributes returned from an AWS Lambda function or the input entered by your end-customer, reducing the number of blocks by 40%+. For example, after checking the customer’s language preference, a business could transfer a customer to a queue that relays a personalized message in their preferred language when on hold. 

You can now use AWS Systems Manager through AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse the internet. AWS Systems Manager APIs are now available to use inside your VPC through AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. 

This Quick Start deploys Nubeva Transport Layer Security (TLS) Decrypt on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes. 

Amazon Lightsail now supports resource monitoring, alarming and notifications. With this launch, you can can set up thresholds for each of the monitored metrics for Amazon Lightsail instances, load balancers and databases, and be alerted if the thresholds are exceeded via email and SMS notifications.

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast is applicable in a wide variety of use cases, including energy demand forecasting, workforce and resource planning, cloud infrastructure usage forecasting, inventory planning, product demand forecasting, and financial planning.

AWS X-Ray is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing service that helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using microservices architecture.

AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass is a test automation tool for your IoT devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with the latest framework versions of Tensorflow (1.15.2, 2.0.1, & 2.1.0), PyTorch 1.4.0, and MXNet 1.6.0. Also included on the MXNet Deep Learning Containers are GluonNLP and Horovod. You can launch the new versions of Deep Learning Container on Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), self-managed Kubernetes on Amazon EC2, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a complete list of frameworks and versions supported by the AWS Deep Learning Containers, see release notes.

Starting today, you can bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) to AWS Global Accelerator to advertise public /24 IP address ranges that you own from edge of the AWS global network. BYOIP enables you to front your applications in Global Accelerator with your own IP addresses, including addresses that are whitelisted in client applications, without making any client-facing changes. This allows you to move all or part of your critical and latency-sensitive applications that use hard-coded IP addresses to AWS, with high availability and performance. This also allows you to use your own IP addresses, registered in specific countries, with AWS workloads that are hosted globally, to satisfy regulatory or compliance requirements. Traffic destined to these IP addresses will be intelligently routed to the optimal endpoint by Global Accelerator over the AWS global network. Global Accelerator fails over traffic to the next available endpoint in less than 30 seconds in response to changes in application health or configuration.

Starting today, telephony used in conjunction with Amazon Connect is billed on a per-second basis, after the first minute. This makes your telephony bill more precise resulting in savings of up to 5%.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now continuously stream Apache Kafka broker logs to Amazon Cloudwatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. With access to broker logs, customers can more easily troubleshoot and understand the performance of their applications that use Amazon MSK clusters as a data store. Broker Logs are available for both new and existing clusters and can be enabled from the Amazon MSK Console or AWS CLI. To learn how to setup broker log delivery, see the Amazon MSK broker logs documentation.

The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for the latest generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that enables AWS to innovate faster, further reduce cost for our customers, and deliver added benefits like increased security and new instance types. On December 3rd 2019, we had announced a 36% increase in Amazon EBS-Optimized performance on the EC2 C5/C5d/C5n, M5/M5d/M5n/M5dn, R5/R5d/R5n/R5dn, P3dn, and High Memory instances (6, 9, 12 TB) instances. Today we are excited to extend this performance benefit to additional Amazon EC2 instances including EC2 G4dn, I3en, Inf1, M5a/M5ad, R5a/R5ad, T3/T3a and z1d instances.

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now enables you to retrieve service quota information through Service Quotas. 

Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports Amazon RDS on MariaDB Version 10.3. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature of RDS that helps you quickly assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action. Previously, gathering performance data on a database required configuration and maintenance of monitoring applications and related resources. Correlating performance data took hours without specialized expertise. 

This Quick Start implements Amazon FSx for Windows File Server on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 1.5 hours. This Quick Start is for IT infrastructure architects, administrators, and DevOps professionals who are planning to implement Microsoft Windows file systems on AWS. 

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB 10.3 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. MariaDB 10.3 offers improved Oracle compatibility, support for querying historical states of the database, features that increase flexibility for developers and DBAs, and improved manageability.

AWS Service Catalog is new available to customers in the AWS Bahrain and Hong Kong regions. AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. Enterprises can centrally curate and share IT services with teams to achieve consistent governance and meet compliance requirements. Users can self-service discover and deploy only the approved IT services they need. 

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service that you can use to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Starting today, you can instruct Amazon Transcribe to automatically remove sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) from your transcription results. Amazon Transcribe uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to accurately identify and remove PII. PII removed includes social security number, credit card/bank account information and contact information such as name, email address, phone number and mailing address. PII redaction enables contact centers to review and share transcripts to improve the customer service experience, coach agents, and discover new business opportunities while maintaining their standards for handling PII. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Stockholm, Paris, and Mumbai Regions. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures.

AWS IoT Greengrass now offers a new option for installing the AWS IoT Greengrass Core software using Advanced Package Tool (APT) package management. 

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification validates the ability to design and deploy well-architected solutions on AWS that meet customer requirements.  

You can now use AWS Step Functions to log workflow execution history to CloudWatch Logs, which make it faster and easier to monitor event-driven, serverless workflows. You can select different levels of logging, and also have the ability to exclude the logging of a workflow’s payload.  

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now enables you to add new columns to existing tables. 

You can now assign AWS resource tags to Spot Fleet requests on creation to more easily identify their purpose. For example, you can use tags to identify all Spot Fleet requests used by a particular department, project, or application. 

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor metrics and logs related to AWS Chatbot. You can see metrics and create alarms for the events going to Slack and Amazon Chime via AWS Chatbot, such as the number of processed events, delivery failures, throttled events, and others. You can see details of events and troubleshoot failures by enabling Amazon CloudWatch Logs for your AWS Chatbot configurations. Using logs, you can see the raw event as well as the details of unsuccessful deliveries, throttling, and other failures that will help you troubleshoot AWS Chatbot configurations. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre—a service that makes it simple and cost effective to launch and run the world’s most popular high-performance file system, Lustre—is launching several enhancements that make it even easier to use a Lustre file system for any workload where storage speed matters: The ability to launch persistent file systems that are durable and highly available, increased throughput for non-durable scratch file systems, and enhanced encryption capabilities.

Today, AWS is launching the Activate Founders package, a new set of benefits specifically designed for bootstrapped startups. The package is being offered as part of the AWS Activate program and is open to founders and startups who have not yet raised any venture capital, seed, or angel funding and have no affiliation with any accelerators or incubators. Successful applicants can receive up to $1,000 in AWS Activate Credits, which are valid for two years, and one year of technical support.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now publishes notifications to the AWS Personal Health Dashboard and AWS Health API when EC2 instances fail to launch in one of your Auto Scaling groups due to a missing launch template or security group. This gives you actionable feedback to review and update the Auto Scaling group.

Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports reading AWS Secrets Manager secrets with a specific version or from a key within a JSON object for tasks using the EC2 launch type. This gives you more granular control to reference sensitive information such as database credentials, tokens, or configuration variables for your applications on Amazon ECS. Previously, you could only load the latest version of a secret and could not read secrets from JSON objects directly. Now, you can now load a secret by specifying a particular version instead of the latest version by default. Additionally, you can now load a secret from a specific key within a JSON object.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the January 2020 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2 and 12.1, and January 2020 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2, 18c and 19c.

AWS Security Hub has added 7 new external partner integrations bringing its total 54 integrations, including 48 external partner integrations and 6 AWS service integrations. Security Hub now supports integrations with Cloud Custodian (cloud compliance and remediation), FireEye Helix (Security Information Event Management, or SIEM), Forcepoint CASB (cloud access security broker), Forcepoint DLP (data loss prevention), Forcepoint NGFW (next-generation firewall), Rackspace Cloud Native Security (Managed Security Service Provider, or MSSP), and Vectra.ai Cognito (network anomaly detection). The Forcepoint and Vectra.ai integrations send findings from their respective product to Security Hub using the AWS Security Finding Format. FireEye receives findings from Security Hub, and Rackspace is a managed security service provider (MSSP) that leverages Security Hub to gather security and compliance information about their customers’ accounts. Setting up the integration only requires deployment of a AWS CloudFormation template or similar script. To learn more, visit the Integration pages in the Security Hub console and click on the "Configuration" link for the partner to learn more about the integration and how to set it up.  

Amazon RDS for MariaDB has been updated to support release 10.3.20 of the MariaDB database. This release includes a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

Today AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enabled you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. For example, using the new control, you can now grant your IAM principals the ability to launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, but only through AWS CloudFormation, without granting direct access to EC2.

Amazon CloudFront customers in China can now get detailed information about their CloudFront usage and activity by using CloudFront Reports in the AWS Management Console. Customers in China can use the CloudFront Cache Statistics Report to see total requests, the percentage of viewer requests by result type, bytes transferred, HTTP status codes, and the percentage of GET requests that did not finish downloading. The CloudFront Popular Objects Report shows the 50 most popular objects and statistics about those objects. The CloudFront Top Referrers Report shows the top 25 referrers and the number of requests from each referrer. The CloudFront Usage Report shows the number of requests and data transferred by protocol or destination. The CloudFront Viewers Report shows the breakdown of viewers by devices, browsers, operating systems, and locations. These reports are available to all CloudFront customers at no additional cost. To get started with CloudFront in China, go to Amazon CloudFront. For documentation, see CloudFront Reports in the Console in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

AWS Lambda now participates in Compute Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that allows customers to save money on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and now on AWS Lambda in exchange for making a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (e.g. $10/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term.

Amazon RDS on VMware enhances custom AZ status to include a new state: Disconnected.

Today we’re excited to release Lumberyard Beta 1.23, featuring over 40 stability and performance improvements. Some highlights include the addition of cloth physics, EMotion FX improvements, and ease of use updates to the slice system. Let’s take a closer look:

The SMS channel in Amazon Pinpoint is now U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible. You can now use Amazon Pinpoint to send SMS messages that contain protected health information (PHI).

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now enables you to optimize the price of throughput for predictable workloads by using provisioned capacity mode.  

You can now develop AWS Lambda functions using Ruby 2.7. This is the latest release of Ruby and supports new features like pattern matching, argument forwarding and numbered arguments. Lambda functions written in Ruby 2.7 run on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. To learn more about the Ruby programming model and how to create AWS Lambda functions in Ruby 2.7, please click here. 

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) PROTECTED Reference Architecture on the AWS Cloud in about an hour. It is for users who want to create cloud-based workloads that use AWS controls that meet the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Information Security Manual (ISM) requirements for sensitive government data handling at the PROTECTED classification level.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you enable and disable target tracking, step, and simple scaling policies. You can temporarily disable individual scaling policies during events such as maintenance windows. Once you’re ready, you can simply enable the scaling policies again to re-activate them, eliminating the need to delete and re-create the policies from scratch.

Starting today, you can now launch Z1d instance types when using Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the following AWS Regions:

North America

• US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and US West (N. California).

Europe, Middle East and Africa

• EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (London).

Asia Pacific

• Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).
  

Amazon Neptune now allows you to stop and start database clusters. This makes it easy and affordable to use database clusters for development and test purposes where the database is not required to be running all of the time. 

Amazon Neptune now enforces SSL connections to your database. You have the option to disable SSL in regions, such as US East (N. Virginia) or Europe (London), where both SSL and non-SSL connections are supported.

AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS now supports FreeRTOS 202002.00. The latest version of AWS IoT Device Tester supports custom code signing for OTA (Over-the-air) update qualification tests, managed policy, and device setup check for serial ports.

You can now receive notifications about pull request approval events in AWS CodeCommit. You can create notification rules to receive notifications about events when a pull request is approved, rejected, and when a pull request approval rule is overridden. You can also modify existing notification rules to include these events. 

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is increasing the rate at which you can pull container images, and introducing simplified quotas (also called limits) for image APIs. Image pull quotas are now between five to ten times higher than before, enabling you to increase the rate at which you use ECR to deploy container images without worrying about API throttling. 

Customers can now sign-on to Amazon Redshift cluster with Microsoft Azure Active Directory(AD) identities. This allows customers who use Azure AD to be able to sign-on to Redshift without duplicating these identities in Redshift. 

You can now add tags, simple labels consisting of a user-defined key and an optional value, to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gateway endpoints, interface endpoints (AWS PrivateLink), and endpoint services (AWS PrivateLink) directly while creating the resource. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation.

You can now view and monitor the number of concurrent executions of your AWS Lambda functions by version and alias. 

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast is applicable in a wide variety of use cases, including energy demand forecasting, workforce planning, cloud infrastructure usage forecasting, inventory planning, traffic forecasting, and financial planning.

You can use Amazon DynamoDB backup and restore to create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables and then restore from those backups. Starting today, you also can restore table backups as new tables in other AWS Regions.  

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing customers to manage all Firewall Manager policy types and resources with CloudFormation stack templates. AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service which allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organization. With Firewall Manager, you can manage AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, or VPC security groups across your entire AWS Organization. Firewall Manager ensures that all security rules are consistently enforced, even as new accounts or applications are created.

Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based image and video analysis service that can identify objects, people, text, scenes, as well as support content moderation by detecting unsafe content. Starting today, you can detect text in videos and get back the detection confidence, location bounding box as well as the timestamp for each text detection. In addition, text detection in both images and videos now provides convenient options to filter out words by regions of interest (ROIs), word bounding box size, and word confidence score.  

iOS users can now use Amazon API Gateway, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service features on the Console mobile app. In addition, we have expanded Amazon CloudWatch capabilities to include logs. 

AWS Security Hub now supports automated security checks aligned to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 3.2.1 requirements. Security Hub’s PCI DSS standard includes 32 automated rules designed to help you with your ongoing PCI DSS security activities by conducting continuous checks against 32 PCI DSS requirements across 14 AWS services. These 32 security checks are in addition to Security Hub’s existing 43 automated security checks for the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark. Security Hub’s documentation provides details on how Security Hub’s PCI DSS checks map to specific PCI DSS requirements.  

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports joining DB instances to an AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory residing in a different AWS account or VPC. This makes it easier and cost-effective for you to deploy your directory-aware database workloads by reducing the manual configuration to domain join your DB instances and, the need to deploy directories in each account and VPC. Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances can now seamlessly join to a directory from any AWS account and any Amazon VPC within an AWS Region.

Today we are announcing general availability of Multi-Attach on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. You can now enable Multi-Attach on Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS io1 volumes to allow a single volume to be concurrently attached to up to sixteen AWS Nitro System-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within the same Availability Zone. Each attached instance has full read and write permission to the shared volume. For applications that manage storage consistency from multiple writers, Multi-Attach makes it easier to achieve higher application availability.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) and AD Connector now communicate more securely with self-managed Active Directory when using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). With support for client-side LDAP signing and client-side secure LDAP (LDAPS), customers using AWS Directory Service-enabled applications like Amazon WorkSpaces and AWS Single Sign-On can now better protect their organization’s identity data and meet security requirements.

Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.6 is now available for use by Kubernetes clusters running on AWS.

AWS Shield Advanced now uses the health of your applications to improve responsiveness and accuracy in attack detection and mitigation. You can now define a health check in Amazon Route 53 and then associate it with a resource that is protected by Shield Advanced through the console or API. You can apply health-based detection to all resource types that Shield Advanced supports: Elastic IP, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, or Amazon Route 53. 

AWS Config now supports Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships changed over time.

You can now enable Amazon EC2 Hibernation for On-Demand and Reserved Instances through AWS CloudFormation, a service that allows you to easily provision and update a collection of AWS resources in an orderly and predictable fashion. Launching EC2 instances with Hibernation enabled has become easier than ever as now you just need to add a single “HibernationOptions” property with “Configured: true” parameter within the AWS::EC2::Instance resource in your CloudFormation template. With this new feature, you can easily make Hibernation a part of your EC2 instance setup through CloudFormation, provided your EC2 instance meets the Hibernation Prerequisites.  

Amazon ECS Optimized Linux 2 Amazon Machine Images(AMI) now come with the AWS System Manager (SSM) Agent pre-installed. The SSM Agent makes it possible for Systems Manager to update, manage, and configure EC2 instances in a customer’s ECS cluster. ECS customers that used to manually install the SSM agent into thier ECS optimized AMI will now get these features out of the box.

We are excited to introduce the new Amazon WorkSpaces client for Windows and Mac. The client contains new enhancements including the ability to create personalized labels for registration codes, a new more intuitive UI, and includes the latest updates to the PCoIP protocol.

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now enables you to set a patch release cutoff date to automatically approve only the patches released before the date. For example, if you specify February 7, 2020 as the cutoff date, Patch Manager will not automatically apply patches showing a release date of February 8, 2020 or later. 

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the China (Ningxia) Region.  

AWS Data Exchange now provides automated email notifications for subscription request updates. Starting today, customers are automatically notified via email when a subscription request is received or when its status is changed. For example, data subscribers are now automatically notified when a pending subscription request is approved by the data provider. Similarly, data providers are now automatically notified when a new subscription request is received.  

You can now configure notification rules for AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy in two additional AWS regions: Hong Kong and Bahrain. You can create notification rules to receive notifications about events in repositories, build projects, and deployments.

You can now provision up to 30 brokers within a Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) cluster without a limit increase, making it easier for customers with high traffic or storage requirements to expand or provision new clusters on demand. You can request a limit increase in the AWS Support Center if you need more than 30 brokers within a cluster.  

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle OLAP - a multidimensional analytic engine embedded in the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Oracle OLAP option provides SQL access to advanced analytics, and cube-organized materialized views to enhance the performance of business intelligence solutions.  

AWS App Mesh is now available in three additional AWS Regions: Europe (Stockholm), South America (São Paulo) and Middle East (Bahrain). 

AWS AppConfig customers can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision AppConfig resources. AWS AppConfig makes it easy for customers to quickly roll out application configurations across applications hosted on EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda, mobile apps, IoT devices, and on-premise servers in a validated, controlled and monitored way. 

AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces new automation features to streamline deployments of resources to multiple accounts and regions through AWS Organizations. With this launch, you can use StackSets to centrally manage deployments to the accounts in one or more organizational units (OUs) or all of the accounts in your organization. You will also be able to enable automatic deployments to any new accounts added to your organization or OUs. The permissions needed to deploy across accounts will automatically be taken care of by the StackSets service.  

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. Starting today, Amazon Comprehend is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions.

Amazon Cognito User Pools now enables customers to configure case sensitivity settings for user aliases, including native username, email alias and preferred username alias. With this update, new user pools will be set to case insensitive by default and customers can change the configuration to case sensitive in the console before a user pool is created. Existing user pools will remain as case sensitive. When creating a user pool through Cognito APIs, the user pool will be case sensitive by default. We will change the default setting for the API in the future after a customer notification campaign.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility is now available with machine learning capabilities, an option to export data into Amazon S3, and compatibility with updated PostgreSQL versions.

Amazon RDS for Oracle enables you to use the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 for the Secure Socket Layer (SSL). FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. government standard that defines cryptographic module security requirements.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 11.6, 10.11, 9.6.16, and 9.5.20. This release contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes for db.m5 and db.r5 instance classes. With support for these new instance sizes, customers who are currently using m4.10xlarge, m4.16xlarge, r4.8xlarge, or r4.16xlarge now have an easy upgrade path to the latest generation of instances.  

We’re excited to announce updated versions of two of our digital courses, AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Amazon Connect (Technical) and AWS Technical Professional. These digital courses were designed, respectively, to help APN Partners understand how to discuss the technical advantages of creating a cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect, and also to gain a basic technical understanding of AWS services.

Amazon EC2 adds Hibernation support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system in addition to Amazon Linux, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Windows Server 2012, 2012R2, 2016 and 2019.  

You can now run your python applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk using Python 3.7 on Amazon Linux 2 beta platform. The Python 3.7 on Amazon Linux 2 beta platform comes with several improvements and major new features including support for Pipfile and Gunicorn. For a complete list of Python 3.7 features, visit the official Python 3.7 release announcement.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers fine-grained access control, which adds multiple capabilities to give you tighter control over your data. New features include the ability to use roles to define granular permissions for indices, documents, or fields and to extend Kibana with read-only views and secure multi-tenant support.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) now supports the AWS Serverless Lens, which provides best practices for reviewing serverless workloads.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en Instances are Now Available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region. In addition, we’ve expanded the availability of C5 Instance sizes in Asia Pacific (Seoul) and GovCloud (US-East) AWS Regions. c5.12xlarge, c5.24xlarge, and c5.metal sizes are now available in GovCloud (US-East) AWS Region, and C5.metal is now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect now supports up to 50 outputs per flow, more than double the previous limit of 20 outputs. This change provides better fan-out capabilities for your live video content and lets you build more sophisticated workflows to support syndication opportunities. 

The Multi-Region Asynchronous Object Replication Solution automatically provisions and configures all the AWS services necessary to set up a multi-region replication configuration with Amazon S3 buckets. For example, you can create objects in Oregon, rename them in Singapore, and delete them in Dublin, and the changes are replicated to all other regions. This solution is designed for workloads that can tolerate lost events and variations in replication speed.

Amazon EventBridge now provides additional content filtering options for builders designing event-driven architectures. With event pattern content filtering, you can write complex rules that only trigger under conditions you specify. This helps reduce the amount of custom code needed in downstream services by handling content filtering at the event bus using a declarative approach. 

Amazon EC2 is transitioning On-Demand Instance limits from the current instance count-based limits to new vCPU-based limits to simplify the limit management experience for AWS customers. Usage toward the vCPU-based limit is measured in terms of number of vCPUs (virtual central processing units) for the Amazon EC2 Instance Types launched. 

AWS Managed Services (AMS) announces support for 8 additional AWS services. With this release, the total number of services supported by AMS has increased to 69, including AWS Transfer for SFTP, a much requested service. In addition to running AWS services within secure and operated AMS managed accounts, you can self provision and configure these services directly in the AWS Console or the APIs. These services fall into the second pricing tier for AMS that is lower for certain groups of AWS services where more of the day-to-day operations is handled by the service itself; 12% for AMS Plus and 18% for AMS Premium.  

Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience. AWS is pleased to announce that Amazon Personalize now supports ten times more item attributes. Previously, you could use up to five item attributes while building an ML model in Amazon Personalize. This limit is now 50 attributes. You can now use more information about your items, for example, category, brand, price, duration, size, author, year of release etc., to increase the relevance of recommendations.

You can now enable AWS X-Ray for your APIs in AWS AppSync, making it easier to trace and analyze user requests as they travel through the APIs to the backend data sources.

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Poly-integrated Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP) in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for users who have already configured an Amazon Connect instance in their AWS account and want to enable support for Poly, which provides headset button call control. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy robotics applications, now supports creating simulation jobs in batch with a single API call. The new support for batch simulations allows developers to easily create multiple simulation jobs for use cases like automated regression testing and reinforcement learning model training. The batch API also provides a queueing capability so that a developer can now submit more simulation jobs than is possible with the existing concurrent job execution limit. The batch API will queue up all the submitted jobs and execute them in batches based on the concurrent execution limit.

Amazon Lex now supports Alphanumeric slot type allowing you to easily define slots such as flight confirmation code that contain combination of letters and numbers. Up until now, you had to create a custom slot type with a large range of sample values. By using the Alphanumeric slot type you can quickly set up a slot to capture alphanumeric information. Further, you can extend this slot type to restrict the user input to a fixed format by specifying a regular expression. 

Use the new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to better understand your DAX clusters’ performance. Determine more easily whether you need to scale up your cluster because you’re reaching peak utilization, or if you can scale down because your cache is underutilized. 

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon RDS Data API for Aurora Serverless from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet. You can now submit your SQL statements to Amazon RDS Data API without requiring an Internet Gateway in your VPC. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications, securely on the Amazon network. Amazon RDS Data API customers can now use private IP connectivity and security groups to meet their specific compliance requirements.  

Updates to your containers orchestrated by Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) can now be performed using canary or linear deployment strategies by using AWS CodeDeploy.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Filesystem (EFS) in AWS CodeBuild build jobs. This can be achieved by specifying the EFS file system Id in your CodeBuild Project. 

You can now use the DescribeImages API to determine the billing product information associated with an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). By making it easier to obtain the platform details and billing information of AMIs, this release reduces the chances of erroneously launching instances from incorrect AMIs, and assists with inventory planning and reporting. Starting today, this capability is available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions from API and CLI. Visit our documentation page to learn more.

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

This Quick Start automatically deploys Provectus Streaming Data Platform in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 20 minutes. This Quick Start is for users who are interested in enabling real-time analytics and want to explore capabilities of a streaming-first data platform.

Amazon DynamoDB global tables are now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), EU (Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo) Regions. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to a DynamoDB table for fast read and write performance. You also can use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability and disaster recovery.

Amazon Elastic Container Service now enables customers to tag Task Sets when deploying an ECS service that uses the EXTERNAL deployment controller type. This will enable ECS customers to improve visibility into workloads, easily search and identify containerized applications, implement programmatic infrastructure management actions, and define fine-grained resource-level permissions.

AWS Security Hub today released updates and additions to AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF) that enable integrated Security Hub partners to send richer, more detailed findings to Security Hub.  

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports SQL-level metrics on Amazon RDS for MariaDB so you can identify high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries in seconds. 

In just a few clicks, you can now quickly re-execute a previous command using AWS Systems Manager Run Command. Run Command provides safe, secure remote management of your compute nodes at-scale and with safety controls. You can now re-execute a previous command exactly as before by using the new rerun command feature, or first make a few edits by using the new copy-to-new command feature. Simply select the desired command from your command history and click either rerun or copy-to-new, in both cases saving valuable time and effort by automatically copying all of the parameters and controls from the selected command into the new command.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 18 regions, with the addition of the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions.  

You can now capture and aggregate your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs at shorter intervals of up to 1 minute, giving you quicker visibility into your network traffic flows. With a 1-minute configuration, your VPC flow logs arrive in an expedited manner and provide more granular visibility into the sequence of events in a flow, thereby enabling you to accurately investigate and rapidly respond to security incidents, or troubleshoot connectivity issues faster.

AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Ground Station is pleased to announce the availability of Cross Region Data Delivery, enabling customers to deliver satellite data received through AWS Ground Station into the AWS Region of their choice.

Amazon Cognito User Pools now supports logging for all of the actions listed on the User Pool Actions page as events in CloudTrail log files, making it easier for developers to record all actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service. The enhanced CloudTrail logging improves governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing capabilities. Hosted UI and Federation calls are currently not included in CloudTrail logging events. Developers can create a trail and enable continuous delivery of Cognito API calls captured as CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket. Without configuring a trail, developers can still view the most recent events in the CloudTrail console in the Event history. This feature is available now in Amazon Cognito User Pools at no additional cost.  

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. With this launch, Amazon EFS is now available in all standard AWS Regions.

We are excited to announce AWS Client VPN for desktop, an application which runs on Mac and Windows devices and provides access to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and on premise networks through AWS Client VPN endpoints. 

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports SQL-level metrics on Amazon RDS for MySQL databases so you can identify high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries in seconds.

Amazon QuickSight launches a full screen narrative editor that supports easy creation and editing of auto-narratives on QuickSight. With auto-narratives, you can add natural language summaries derived from your data. You can embed these widgets throughout your dashboard to highlight key insights and callouts. The enhanced editor now makes it easy to build these narratives with the support for full screen mode. The editor also provides a preview built on-the-fly making it easier to see the end result as you craft the narrative. Additionally, the editor also supports inserting static and dynamic URLs within narratives allowing you to create URLs based on custom computed functions that are part of the URL parameters. See here to learn more about the full screen editor.

Starting today, Redshift will be billed in one-second increments for on-demand clusters. Pricing is still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are now calculated down to the second and show usage in decimal form.  

The AWS Storage Gateway service now includes the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor as a deployment option for all gateway types. If you use KVM hypervisor-based on-premises infrastructure, you can now deploy Storage Gateway in your environment to access virtually unlimited cloud storage.

AWS Cloud9 now supports the ability to tag Cloud9 development environments through both the console and the AWS API. Further documentation about tags is available here.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an application that draws upon best practices learned from AWS’ aggregated operational history of serving millions of AWS customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance, and closing security gaps.

Starting today, Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) is available in all AWS commercial regions excluding China and AWS GovCloud regions. Additionally, the limits for FSR-enabled snapshots per region are increased from 5 to 50.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, and offers over 60 publicly available voices in 29 languages. AWS is excited to announce a new feature in Amazon Polly called Brand Voice, a feature where customers can engage the Amazon Polly team to build custom high-quality Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices that represent the customer’s brand persona. Polly’s Brand Voices are created for the exclusive use of the customer, allowing them to differentiate themselves by incorporating a unique vocal identity into the products and services that they offer to their end users.

AWS RoboMaker announces the support for sudo access inside robot and simulation applications at runtime. Customers now have additional flexibility to modify their robot and simulation application environment at runtime so as to align with the environment they have on their robot. With sudo access, customers can install custom software, make changes to the root filesystem, update file permissions, and troubleshoot issues.  

Amazon Translate – a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality, and affordable language translation in fifty-four languages and seventeen regions – has been added to the list of AWS Services in Scope for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline. Amazon Translate is also included on the list of AWS Services in Scope for the FedRAMP Moderate baseline. Additional information and resources regarding FedRAMP and AWS are available here.

AWS Config now supports multi-account, multi-region data aggregation capability in AWS GovCloud (US). This feature enables you to aggregate resource configuration and Config rule compliance data into a single account and Region, which reduces the time and overhead needed to gather an enterprise-wide view of your resource inventory and compliance status for governance. The data aggregation capability is also integrated with AWS Organizations, so you can centrally retrieve this data for any account within your organization.