March 2020

AWS Storage Gateway, now enables logging of end-user operations on files and folders for SMB file shares when using File Gateway. Logging allows you to comply with internal security policies, meet external compliance requirements, such as PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO27001, GDPR, and HIPAA, troubleshoot access errors, and analyze usage trends of your data.

We are excited to announce the launch of The Machine Learning Pipeline on AWS, a new four-day, instructor-led classroom course.

AWS Firewall Manager now supports new version of AWS WAF including AWS Managed Rules (AMR). Firewall Manager is a security management tool to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources including WAF, AWS Shield and VPC security groups.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code now supports AWS Step Functions, making it easier to create and visualize state machine based workflows without leaving your code editor. 

Today, we announce the AWS Service Management Connector for Jira Service Desk, formerly known as the AWS Service Catalog Connector. The AWS Service Management Connector for Jira Service Desk enables AWS Service Catalog, AWS Config, and AWS Systems Manager integration features on Jira projects. This capability simplifies cloud provisioning and resource management for Jira Service Desk administrators, and makes it easier for Jira Service Desk users to request AWS products, which can be any IT service that administrators want to make available for deployment on AWS and third-party resources.

You can now develop AWS Lambda functions using .NET Core 3.1. This is the latest LTS release of .NET Core. It has new features like partial class support for razor components, support for shared queues, unwrapping of exceptions, and parameters passing to top-level components. Lambda functions written in .NET Core 3.1 run on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. You can read the .NET Core programming model in the AWS Lambda documentation to learn more about writing functions in .NET Core 3.1.  

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Detective, a new service that makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from your AWS resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build interactive visualizations that enable you to conduct faster and more efficient security investigations. 

Now, you can use Amazon CloudWatch to build dashboards and alarms for key metrics related to the ingest and delivery health of your live streams using AWS Elemental MediaStore as the origin. These metrics include request and response rates, server processing time, and latency across different percentiles. By using object grouping, you can declare a set of folders or paths as a single object group. The metrics within this object group are aggregated, and provide a channel-level view within your container. In addition to CloudWatch metrics, you can also leverage access logging provided by CloudWatch Logs.

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network. 

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports major version 12. PostgreSQL 12 includes better management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, nondeterministic collations that support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that computes values with an expression, and many additional features. 

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now enables you to label and categorize resources by using tags. 

Today, AWS added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the AWS Canada (Central) Region to support the high demand of our growing Canadian customer base. 

With a single click, customers can now enable AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer for all their accounts centrally managed through AWS Organizations. This enables security teams and administrators to uncover unintended access to resources from outside their AWS organization within minutes. Customers can proactively address whether any resource policies across any of their accounts violate their security and governance practices by allowing unintended access.

Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes are now available in the Europe (Paris), Canada (Central), and Brazil (São Paulo) regions. RA3 nodes enable you to scale and pay for compute and storage independently allowing you to size your cluster based only on your compute needs. 

Amazon Chime now supports up to 250 attendees for any meeting hosted by a user with Amazon Chime Pro permissions. IT administrators don't need to do anything special to let their users host larger meetings and there is no additional host fee for the increased meeting size. Amazon Chime Pro users can host meetings with up to 250 attendees without advanced scheduling or additional permissions, and the new meeting capacity is retroactive so existing meetings don't need to be updated or rescheduled to support the larger attendee limit. 

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) now enables you to replicate ongoing changes from any DMS supported sources such as Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible), Oracle, and SQL Server to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka clusters.

AWS App Mesh now supports sharing a Mesh with multiple AWS accounts.  

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

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

AWS Managed Services (AMS) now supports several AWS big data tools, including Amazon Sagemaker, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon CloudSearch as Self-provisioned services (previously known as enabled or compatible services). With the support of these three new AWS services, you can deploy machine learning models, query large volumes of data and quickly deploy data lakes, all natively within AMS Managed Landing Zones.  

This Amazon Web Services (AWS) Quick Start deploys AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) Automation Framework on the AWS Cloud in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for users who currently do one of the following: 

• Separate AWS DMS migration tasks into full-load and change-data-capture (CDC) phases
• Require a fully automated code deployment framework that is repeatable and customizable

AWS Service Catalog administrators can now view and manage their Service Catalog service quotas through AWS Service Quotas.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy and intuitive to store, query, and index JSON data.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server announces a hard disk drive (HDD) storage option that provides highly available and durable file storage at a price of 1.3 cents per GB-month (in the US-East, N. Virginia Region). For customers who require file systems that span multiple Availability Zones, HDD storage is available at 2.5 cents per GB-month. Combined with Amazon FSx’s support for data deduplication, you can achieve an effective cost of less than 1 cent per GB-month.

Amazon Redshift Advisor now recommends sort keys for frequently queried tables. With the ALTER TABLE command, you can add and change sort keys of existing Redshift tables without having to re-create the tables and without impacting concurrent read or write queries. 

AWS has updated its service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon EKS to 99.95% for Amazon EKS clusters.

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

AWS Solutions Library has recently added AWS Solutions Consulting Offers for customers who want help deploying, managing, and integrating vetted architecture on their behalf. AWS Solutions Consulting Offers are prescribed consulting engagements accompanied by a defined technology application, delivered by AWS Competency Partners.  

Amazon Managed Blockchain now has support to publish Hyperledger Fabric peer node, chaincode, and certificate authority (CA) logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. You can use these logs to troubleshoot during chaincode development and maintain visibility into network activity and errors. CloudWatch Logs enables you to monitor, store and access log files from all your applications and AWS services in a single, highly scalable service. Additionally, you can set up and take actions on Amazon CloudWatch alarms triggered from logging events.

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the South America (São Paulo) and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.  

You can now centrally discover, plan, and track your migrations into any commercial AWS region from the Migration Hub in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.

AWS Outposts is now supported in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility.

AWS Systems Manager now provides more operations data for AWS Resource Groups. You can now monitor your operational health, track resource configuration changes, track operational issues, and audit account activity for your resource groups, all from the Systems Manager console.  

Customers can now receive Savings Plan recommendations at the member (linked) account level in addition to the existing AWS organization-level recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer.

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you automate the creation and management of resources by using AWS CloudFormation.

We’ve updated our instructor-led classroom course DevOps Engineering on AWS to incorporate the latest thinking, best practices, and concepts on DevOps. Available virtually or in person, this three-day course teaches you how to use DevOps to improve your organization’s ability to develop, deliver, and maintain applications and services at high velocity on AWS. This course is taught by expert AWS instructors using a mix of presentations, discussion, and hands-on labs.

Voicemail for Amazon Connect offers users an add-on voicemail solution that they can associate with their Amazon Connect instance. Customers start by deploying an AWS CloudFormation template to set up the architecture with necessary AWS services to provide Amazon Connect agents with voicemail features such as voicemail recordings and transcripts. The solution offers a visual interface for managers and administrators to configure the voicemail settings for the entire Amazon Connect instance and for each agent.

AWS Resource Groups now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing customers to create resource groups and organize resources with CloudFormation stack templates. AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. Customers can organize resources by applications, projects, or stages like development, staging, and production.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with the latest framework versions of TensorFlow 2.1.0 & 1.15.2, PyTorch 1.4.0, and MXNet 1.6.0 . The release includes the addition of Amazon SageMaker Python SDK in the containers, and updates to the Amazon SageMaker Experiments package. Amazon SageMaker Experiments is a feature in Amazon SageMaker that lets you organize, track, compare, and evaluate machine learning (ML) experiments and model versions. The TensorFlow 2.1.0 python3 training containers now also include SageMaker Debugger, which allow data scientists to save and inspect the model tensors during training jobs.

Application developers can now use the Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android to add audio calling, video calling, and screen sharing features to their mobile applications. Like the previously released Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript, the mobile SDKs can be used to connect to Amazon Chime SDK meeting resources managed in customers’ AWS accounts and provide methods to manage local audio and video devices and bind media streams to native UI elements.

AWS Data Exchange released multiple enhancements that make it easier for both data providers and subscribers to use the AWS Data Exchange console and interact with data sets. We re-organized the main navigation enabling you to find and easily access frequently used pages with fewer clicks. As a data provider, you can now see the data sets and revisions as they appear to your subscribers. To do so, choose any data set from one of your listed products in the ADX console. As an existing subscriber, you can now use the new “Entitled data sets” page for quickly finding and accessing all of your entitled data sets in a specific AWS region based on your active subscriptions.  

You can now track ‘Bring-your-own-license’ (BYOL) usage by your Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle database instances with AWS License Manager. You can leverage License Manager to centrally track usage of your Oracle database licenses based on your license agreement terms and thus reduce the risk of non-compliance, misreporting, and additional costs due to licensing overages.

Today, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager added support for AWS CloudFormation with templates for building global networks across the cloud and on-premises. This improvement enables you to automate the creation of global networks, register transit gateways, associate customer gateways, and define your on-premises resources within global network such as devices, sites, and links in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.  

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy and intuitive to store, query, and index JSON data.  

Today, AWS Global Accelerator introduces TCP termination at the edge, a feature that automatically increases performance for workloads such as API calls, file uploads, or Voice over IP calls. With this feature, customers can get up to a 40% improvement for traffic throughput within the United States, and up to 60% for traffic across continents.

With a single click, customers can now enable AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer for all their accounts centrally managed through AWS Organizations. This enables security teams and administrators to uncover unintended access to resources from outside their AWS organization within minutes. Customers can proactively address whether any resource policies across any of their accounts violate their security and governance practices by allowing unintended access.

Starting today, you can use the UpdateShardCount API in Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to scale up to 10,000 shards for a single data stream. You can use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to capture, store, and analyze terabytes of data per hour from clickstreams, financial transactions, social media feeds, and more. The UpdateShardCount API enables you to rapidly scale the capacity of data streams up or down to handle changes in data volumes without any disruption to the producing or the consuming applications.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) now lets you attach IAM resource policies to your VPC endpoints. VPC Endpoint policies can help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements by granularly controlling access to Amazon EC2 APIs.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch cross-account cross-region dashboards in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Cross-account cross-region dashboards enable you to create high level operational dashboards, with one click drill downs into more specific dashboards in different AWS accounts, without having to log in and out of different accounts or switch AWS Regions. The ability to visualize, aggregate, and summarize performance and operational data across accounts and Regions helps reduce mean time to resolution.

Amazon CloudWatch now supports AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This allows you to privately connect to CloudWatch Metrics and Logs, securely on the AWS network. 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 Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (AWS Site-to-Site VPN) now supports digital certificates for Internet Key Exchange (IKE) authentication for VPN connections to an AWS Transit Gateway. This enables you to take advantage of the added security and flexibility that digital certificates offer, for all Site-to-Site VPN connections.  

Amazon CloudWatch now supports up to five times the number of metrics per graph and dashboard than before -- up to 500 metrics per graph (from 100) and 2500 metrics per dashboard (from 500). This allows you to visualize the health and performance of applications that use many individual resources like microservices, containers, or stream-based applications, making it even easier to correlate and identify anomalies at a glance, and reduce time to act.  

You can now create Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB database instances with up to 64TB of storage when using R5 instance types. Previously, R5 instances supported 16TB of storage. The new storage limit is available when using the Provisioned IOPS (IO1) and General Purpose (GP2) storage types.

Amazon QuickSight now supports adding images to dashboards through the Insights editor. With this ability, you can now insert images, logos hosted and accessible via public URL (or intranet URL) to be rendered in within the insights narrative. These images can be resized as needed, conditionally show the image when placed within the IF block, and also hyperlink the image to a dynamic URL. See here for details.

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to mobile users can now host their application in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to a phone number, or can send a message to multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. Customers can send SMS text messages directly to mobile phone numbers in more than 200 countries.

You can now retrieve more metric data from Amazon CloudWatch, faster. The quota for the bulk metric retrieval service GetMetricData has increased from 100 to 500 metrics per request. Additionally, the datapoints per second (DPS) quota for retrieving data more than 3 hours old has been increased from 90,000 to 396,000.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Graphics g4dn instances based on the EC2 G4 family. EC2 g4dn instances deliver the industry’s most cost-effective and versatile GPU instance for running graphics-intensive applications on AWS. g4dn provides the latest generation NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, AWS custom Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, up to 100 Gbps of networking throughput, and up to 1.8 TB of local NVMe storage. These instances are ideal for streaming graphics-intensive applications that rely on NVIDIA GPU libraries such as CUDA.  

Amazon ECS Service Discovery is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Europe (Stockholm), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

Starting today, Amazon EBS crash-consistent snapshot ability is available in Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now take crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes in an EC2 instance with a single API call. Backup data across multiple volumes is in sync and the restore of EBS volumes is accurate. Since snapshots are automatically taken across multiple EBS volumes, you no longer need to stop your instance or coordinate between volumes to ensure crash-consistency.  

Starting today, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) for EBS Snapshots is available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. Amazon DLM provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to create and manage your EBS volume backups.  

Amazon EC2 can now hibernate EBS-backed Amazon EC2 T2 instances. You can now hibernate your newly launched instances running on T2 instance types. Hibernation provides you the convenience of pausing and resuming your workloads. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, your application will start right where it left off.

Today, AWS Systems Manager introduces the ability to manage Linux instances running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and on-premises using Chef. This new feature enables you to combine the power of Chef recipes with the control and safety benefits provided by Systems Manager. 

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network. 

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, is now available in preview in 18 AWS Regions. 

Amazon GuardDuty is reducing the price of threat detection by adding an additional volume discount tier and further optimizing its CloudTrail analysis. Effective March 1, 2020, GuardDuty pricing for VPC Flow Log and DNS Log analysis now includes a new top discount tier of $0.15 per GB, representing a 40% reduction from the existing top discount tier of $0.25 per GB. This top discount tier is applicable to customers that generate more than 10,000 gigabyte (GB) per month in VPC Flow Log and DNS log analysis. The new pricing is now the following for US East (N. Virginia):  

You can now use Amazon Elastic Inference to accelerate inference and reduce inference costs for PyTorch models in Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS. Enhanced PyTorch libraries for EI are available automatically in Amazon SageMaker, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, and AWS Deep Learning Containers, so you can deploy your PyTorch models in production with minimal code changes. Elastic Inference supports TorchScript compiled models on PyTorch. In order to use Elastic Inference with PyTorch, you must convert your PyTorch models into TorchScript and use the Elastic Inference API for inference. Today, PyTorch joins TensorFlow and Apache MXNet as a deep learning framework that is supported by Elastic Inference.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers the ability to encode video using the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) codec. AV1 is an open video coding format designed for internet delivery and developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). A key benefit of AV1 is higher compression efficiency compared to the AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265) codecs. With AV1, you can deliver high-quality SD and HD video to mobile and other devices over congested or bandwidth-constrained networks at bitrates unachievable with traditional codecs. For details on AV1 pricing, please visit the MediaConvert pricing page.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports updating Placement Strategy and Constraints for existing ECS services (in Preview). ECS customers can now update the placement strategies and constraints for their ECS services without having to recreate a service with the desired changes. This flexibility and control in managing the placement of service tasks helps customers save cost and reduce potential service downtime. 

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you manage access to your keyspaces and tables by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and federated identities. 

You can now tag your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs. A tag is a simple label consisting of a user-defined key and an optional value that can be used to easily manage, categorize and search for your VPC flow log subscriptions based on purpose, owner, or other such criteria.  

We are excited to announce the launch of Customizations for AWS Control Tower, a new reference implementation that makes it easy for customers to apply custom templates and policies to their AWS Control Tower landing zone.  

You now can update your global tables from version 2017.11.29 to the latest version of global tables (2019.11.21) with a few clicks in the DynamoDB Console. By upgrading the version of your global tables, you can increase the availability of your DynamoDB tables easily by extending your existing tables into additional AWS Regions, with no table rebuilds required. There is no additional cost for this update, and you will benefit from improved replicated write efficiencies after you update to the latest version of global tables.  

When using Amazon S3 Batch Operations you can now assign tags to jobs to label and manage access to create and edit permissions. S3 Batch Operations is an S3 feature that lets you perform repetitive or bulk actions like copying objects or running AWS Lambda functions across millions of objects with a single request. You provide the list of objects, and S3 Batch Operations handles the repetitive work, including managing retries and displaying progress.  

Customers can now use AWS App Mesh to encrypt traffic between services of their application without any changes to their application code. App Mesh works with ACM or with a customer managed certificate to negotiate TLS encrypted sessions between Envoy proxies of mesh services.  

Amazon Forecast is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney, Bombay) and EU (Frankfurt) regions. 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, product demand forecasting, inventory planning, workforce planning and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting.

Amazon Connect now supports claiming toll free and direct inward dial phone numbers in twelve new countries in the EU Central (Frankfurt) and EU West (London) regions. This enables you to provide local telephony support to end-customers in Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovenia, and Turkey.

Global Datastore is a new feature of Amazon ElastiCache for Redis that provides fully managed, fast, reliable and secure cross-region replication. You can now write to your ElastiCache for Redis cluster in one region and have the data available for read in two other cross-region replica clusters, thereby enabling low-latency reads and disaster recovery across regions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 x1e.32xlarge instance size is available in South America (Sao Paulo) AWS region. 

Amazon DynamoDB on-demand capacity mode is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) Region. On-demand is a flexible capacity mode for DynamoDB that is capable of serving thousands of requests per second without requiring capacity planning. DynamoDB on-demand offers simple pay-per-request pricing for read and write requests so that you only pay for what you use, making it easy to balance cost and performance. 

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Anomaly Detection applies machine-learning algorithms to continuously analyze system and application metrics, determine a normal baseline, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention. You can use Anomaly Detection to isolate and troubleshoot unexpected changes in your metric behavior.  

Amazon Athena now enables customers to create and update Athena Workgroups using the AWS CloudFormation AWS::Athena::Workgroup resource.

Amazon Personalize Optimizer Using Amazon Pinpoint Events is a solution that enables customers to create integrations between Amazon Personalize campaigns and Amazon Pinpoint projects. Customers can connect an Amazon Personalize campaign with an Amazon Pinpoint project directly from the Amazon Pinpoint console, then use this solution to build and maintain an automated data pipeline between Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Personalize. The solution automatically provisions and configures the necessary AWS services to train and publish models quickly by defining the frequency and the type of data used to retrain the models. The result, more personalized recommendations are delivered over time.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Cluster Auto Scaling became available in the AWS Govcloud (US) Regions. With ECS Cluster Auto Scaling, your ECS clusters using Amazon EC2 Instances can automatically scale as needed to meet the resource demands of all tasks and services in your cluster, including scaling to and from zero. Managed scaling with ECS Cluster Auto Scaling improves the reliability, scalability, and cost of running containerized workloads on ECS.  

AWS Batch now supports FSx for Lustre’s new options, a persistent storage and a second-generation scratch storage, both announced on Februrary 24.  

Amazon Athena now publishes Amazon CloudWatch Events for query state transitions. When a query transitions between states -- for example, from Running to a terminal state such as Succeeded or Cancelled -- Athena publishes a query state change event to CloudWatch Events. The event contains information about the query state transition.

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. We have added a new Severity.Label field that is intended to replace the Severity.Normalized field. Severity.Label allows for informational, low, medium, high, and critical values, and each finding provider will select the appropriate value for their finding. If a finding is missing the Severity.Label field, Security Hub will automatically populate it based on the existing Severity.Normalized field. We are also updating how we track the status of the investigation into a finding. The existing WorkflowState field is deprecated. We have added a new Workflow object to contain information about the investigation workflow. It currently contains a single field, Status, which replaces the deprecated WorkflowState. Next, we have added new fields to the AwsS3Bucket resource details and added a new AwsS3Object resource type and corresponding details object. Finally, we added the following new resource types. These resource types do not yet have a corresponding details objects: AwsApiGatewayMethod, AwsApiGatewayRestApi, AwsAppStreamFleet, AwsCertificateManagerCertificate, AwsCloudFormationStack, AwsCloudWatchAlarm, AwsCodeCommitRepository, AwsCodeDeployApplication, AwsCodeDeployDeploymentGroup, AwsCodePipelinePipeline, AwsCognitoIdentityPool, AwsCognitoUserPool, AwsEcsService, AwsEcsTaskDefinition, AwsEfsFileSystem, AwsEksCluster, AwsElastiCacheCacheCluster, AwsElbLoadBalancer, AwsEmrCluster, AwsKinesisStream, and AwsLogsLogGroup.

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network. 

AWS AppConfig now supports Amazon S3 as a source to store and retrieve application configurations. This option enables AWS customers who use S3 to store application configurations to on-board seamlessly with AWS AppConfig by specifying the URI of the configuration stored in their S3 bucket.

Amazon API Gateway announced the general availability of HTTP APIs, enabling customers to easily build high performance RESTful APIs that offer up to 71% cost savings and 60% latency reduction compared to REST APIs available from API Gateway. As part of this launch, customers will be able to take advantage of several new features including the ability the route requests to private AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), including new support for AWS ALB, and IP-based services registered in AWS CloudMap. 

Starting today, Amazon Redshift supports materialized views functionality. Materialized views provide significantly faster query performance for repeated and predictable analytical workloads such as dashboarding, queries from business intelligence (BI) tools, and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data processing. 

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the Middle East (Bahrain) Region.

You can now run your container applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk using Docker on Amazon Linux 2 beta platform. The Docker on Amazon Linux 2 beta platform comes with several enhancements in the compiler tool chain, and the Amazon Linux 2 operating system.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 7.4 and its corresponding version of Kibana. This minor release includes bug fixes and enhancements. 

You can now assign tags to Amazon Lex bots, aliases and channel associations. Tags allow you to categorize your resources in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation in your organization. You can also use tags to control creation, modification or deletion of tagged resources. 

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region.  

Amazon Redshift now supports the ability to pause and resume a cluster, allowing customers to easily suspend on-demand billing while the cluster is not being used. For example, a cluster used for development can now have compute billing suspended when not in use. While the cluster is paused, you are only charged for the cluster’s storage. This adds significant flexibility in managing operating costs for your Amazon Redshift clusters.

You can now use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose 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. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose APIs are now available to use inside your VPC through AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.  

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

Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS EU (Paris) region. You can create Neptune clusters using r5 instance types. This increases the number of available regions for Neptune to 18, giving you more options for database placement, availability, and scalability.

AWS App Mesh is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. 

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. 

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers tone mapping technology to perform HDR to SDR color space conversion. With this processing, you can create both HDR and SDR outputs from a single HDR master video, without having parallel mezzanine workflows.  

AWS Certification is excited to announce the new AWS Certified Database - Specialty certification. It is the first certification to validate expertise in recommending, designing, and maintaining the optimal AWS database solution to improve performance, reduce costs, and enable innovation. You can now schedule the AWS Certified Database - Specialty exam at testing centers worldwide for 300 USD. A practice exam is also available for 40 USD.

We’re excited to announce a new learning path that organizes all AWS Training Game Tech courses into one place. Whether you’re an architect, game developer, data engineer, or data analyst, the learning path provides structured guidance on where to begin and next steps to gain Game Tech expertise.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports Amazon RDS on MySQL Version 8.0. 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.  

You can now privately share applications stored in the AWS Serverless Application Repository (SAR) with all AWS accounts within an AWS Organization using a single AWS Organization ID. You can also define separate resource-based policy statements directly from the console, and select the actions permitted under each statement. This update allows you to quickly share serverless applications across organizations simply and at scale.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports Kubernetes version 1.15 for all clusters.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Amazon ECR is a fully managed container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage and deploy container images. AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the public preview of Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost. Currently, Bottlerocket is supported for use with Amazon EKS. Amazon ECS will also be supported soon.

Amazon Aurora Global Database is now available for the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora. Aurora Global Database is designed for applications with a global footprint, allowing a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS Regions with as many as five secondary Regions, with fast replication to enable low-latency global reads and fast disaster recovery from region-wide outages.

Using Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policies, you can now schedule automated backups for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes every 1 hour (in addition to the currently supported 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 12 or 24 hours). 

AWS Config now supports Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) 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.

CloudFormation Drift Detection and Resource Import are now available in seven additional AWS regions: EU (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), China (Ningxia), China (Beijing), and AWS GovCloud (US).  

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are available on Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Amazon Linux 2, and Amazon Linux with TensorFlow (1.15.2 & 2.1.0), PyTorch 1.4.0, MXNet 1.6.0. The PyTorch EI environment has been updated to 1.3.1.

Amazon VPC Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway now supports adding tags at the time of resource creation, and tag-based access control. You can define fine-grained access controls for NAT gateways using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize, search, and identify resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

Amazon RDS for MySQL has been updated to support release 5.6.46, release 5.7.28, and release 8.0.17 of the MySQL database. These releases include a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth now supports multi-label image and text classification. Ground Truth helps you build highly accurate training datasets by using your own or third-party human labelers. It provides labelers with built-in workflows and user interfaces for common labeling tasks. Built-in workflows are provided for image and text classification, for assigning class labels to an image or a text selection, along with workflows for other computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. 

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to mobile users can now host their application in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to a phone number, or can send a message to multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. Customers can send SMS text messages directly to mobile phone numbers in more than 200 countries.

Starting today, customers can easily enable AWS Local Zones themselves from the new “Settings” section of the EC2 Console or ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. Once enabled, customers can create and manage resources in Local Zones using the same APIs and Management Console they use for Availability Zones in AWS Regions today.

Today, AWS Chatbot added support for AWS CloudFormation with templates for creating Slack channel configurations. With AWS CloudFormation, you can automate creation of AWS Chatbot configurations and related resources, such as IAM roles and SNS topics. AWS CloudFormation also reduces the potential for manual error, increases efficiency, and ensures consistent configurations over time. Learn more about using AWS Chatbot with AWS CloudFormation in AWS Chatbot documentation. 

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network. 

You can now identify and block requests to your web applications from VPN, Tor nodes, proxies, and data centers by using the new Anonymous IP List for AWS Managed Rules. This new managed rule group helps you block users who attempt to hide their identity or evade geographic restrictions. The managed rule group can also help block malicious traffic that originates from bots behind these anonymous networks. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to run simulations at cloud scale, now supports GUI streaming for robot and simulation applications. This new capability allows developers to stream their own GUI enabled tools from the AWS RoboMaker console. For example, a developer can stream the interface of a mobile application that configures and controls the robot when their simulation job is running. Developers can take advantage of this new capability by simply bundling their own GUI enabled tools as part of their robot and/or simulation applications and then enabling GUI streaming for the applications.  

AWS Config now supports multi-account, multi-region data aggregation and advanced query in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. This feature enables you to aggregate & query resource configuration and AWS 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. The data aggregation capability is also integrated with AWS Organizations, so you can centrally retrieve this data for any account within your organization.

Android users can now monitor and access their AWS resources through the new AWS Console Mobile application.  

Starting today, you can upgrade your Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility database cluster from major version 9.6 to 10 with just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.

With this release, Amplify Console has made it’s fully managed hosting and continuous deployment service available from the Amplify CLI. The managed hosting offers benefits such as instantly available CDN, instant cache invalidation on code commit, atomic deployments, and easy custom domain setup. CLI users get the additional benefit of storing the Amplify Console resources as infrastructure as code CloudFormation templates so they can replicate their Amplify Console hosting configuration (e.g. redirects, password protection rules) in different accounts or regions.

You can now use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys to provide envelope encryption of Kubernetes secrets stored in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Implementing envelope encryption is considered a security best practice for applications that store sensitive data and is part of a defense in depth security strategy.

AWS Backup is now available in AWS China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.  

Amazon Redshift now supports access control at a column-level for data in Redshift. Customers can use column-level grant and revoke statements to help them meet their security and compliance needs. 

AWS Control Tower is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, in addition to US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).

AWS CodeCommit, a fully-managed source control service, released a new Git remote helper that supports customers using CodeCommit with multiple accounts, or with short-lived credentials. This remote helper, git-remote-codecommit, uses the profile information configured for the AWS CLI. It also introduces a new protocol (codecommit://) that enables a URL pattern that uniquely identifies CodeCommit repositories.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint launched a new feature that helps customers to personalize their email, SMS and push messaging templates using dynamic message variables. Customers can add dynamic message variables as placeholders within their templates and then populate them with content specific to each user. Content can come from either user attributes stored in Pinpoint or a machine learning model created with Amazon Personalize. Customers wanting to deliver relevant product recommendations or targeted marketing promotions can now use machine learning to select the right content for each of their users.

With Amazon CloudWatch composite alarms, you can now combine multiple alarms to reduce alarm noise and focus on critical operational issues. You can easily combine multiple alarms together into alarm hierarchies that only trigger once when multiple alarms fire at the same time. This helps you stay focused on finding the root cause of operational issues to reduce system and application downtime.

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. 

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) today introduced three new enhancements that help you see and proactively manage API usage when pushing and pulling container images. First, you now get up-to-the minute API metrics in Amazon CloudWatch Usage Metrics for the number of times you push and pull images, giving you the operational visibility you need. Second, you can now view approved account-level API quotas (also known as limits) using AWS Service Quotas, making it easier to see and request quota increases from the same place. Third, these new API metrics are automatically tracked against your quotas so you can trend and alarm as usage approaches limits, helping you manage utilization and identify anomalous activity. 

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is now generally available. NoSQL Workbench is a client-side application, available for Windows and macOS, that helps developers build scalable, high-performance data models, and simplifies query development and testing.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to automate recurring index management activities. In the past you had to use additional tools to manage the data lifecycle inside Elasticsearch. For example, customers often setup daily indexes for their operational logs, roll them over nightly, and after 30 days delete the oldest index. With Index State Management, you can now create a policy that will automate these operations based on index age, size, and other conditions, all from within your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search which can enhance search by similarity use cases like product recommendations, fraud detection, and image, video and semantic document retrieval. Built using the lightweight and efficient Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB), k-NN enables high scale, low latency nearest neighbor search on billions of documents across thousands of dimensions with the same ease as running any regular Elasticsearch query.  

We are excited to announce the launch of Media Essentials for IT Business Decision Makers, a two-day classroom course built by the experts at AWS. This course covers the media and cloud fundamentals that can empower you to develop a cloud migration strategy for media workflows.

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

AWS Secrets Manager now supports larger secret size of up to 64 Kb, making it easier for customers to manage secrets such as certificates with a long chain of trust. Secrets Manager also supports higher request rates for the GetSecretValue API operation of up to 2000 requests per second. These increased service quotas will be applied to your accounts automatically. No further action required on your end. 

Amazon SQS is now available through VPC endpoints in the Middle East (Bahrain) region, allowing you to access Amazon SQS within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.

Amazon FSx for Lustre CSI Driver version 0.3 is now available for use by Kubernetes clusters running on AWS. 

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports external authentication of database users using Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory.

Amazon Neptune has refreshed the console experience, which simplifies managing a cluster and its instances as well as navigating through the properties.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has added support for aws:CalledVia, a new condition key, for use with all services that make requests using your credentials. With this release, Amazon Athena has added support for the CalledVia key. 

Starting today, you can now use Node.js 12.x and Python 3.8 to develop functions in Lambda@Edge. Both these runtimes come in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Python 3.7.

AWS Control Tower now supports single-step account provisioning through the Control Tower console. This feature allows master account administrators to provision new accounts from within the Control Tower console.  

AWS now supports China based customers, who use services in US commercial regions, to pay their invoices from Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS Inc.”) in Chinese Yuan through Bank Redirect payment method.

AWS Config launched advanced query last year, which makes it easy to query the resource configuration properties of your AWS resources for audit, compliance, or operational troubleshooting using simple SQL-like queries. With today’s launch, you can now use advanced query with configuration aggregators, enabling you to run the same queries across accounts and Regions. This provides you an easy mechanism to query your entire AWS footprint from a central account and get relevant information about your resources. For example, using this query capability, you can retrieve a list of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances of a particular size, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that are not attached to an Amazon EC2 instance, or resources that have encryption disabled. This capability works across accounts, Regions, and organizations in AWS Organizations. 

Tracking patients health status is imperative for a healthcare provider. Being able to place this information on a longitudinal timeline is also vital for other healthcare aspects such as research, medical coding and claims adjudication , population health, and pharmacovigilance to name a few.