June 2020

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to deploy patches automatically to instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8, 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2; CentOS 7.8, 8.0, and 8.1; and Oracle Linux 7.5, 7.7 and 7.8. This support provides more patching options for your mixed Linux environments. 

Amazon RDS Proxy, a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), is now generally available with MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. RDS Proxy makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure.

Starting today, customers can build and deploy Amazon Lex bots in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region.

Starting today, you can use the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript to build audio calling and video calling applications designed for the mobile web. With JavaScript SDK support on Google Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS, you can engage your customers on their mobile devices without requiring a download. When downloading an app is preferred, you can build native mobile apps using the Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android. 

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 QuickSight now includes Histogram as a new chart type. Histogram allows you to categorize/bin data points within defined ranges of a metric and visualize the distribution of specific metrics. QuickSight supports this categorization by interval size or number of bins. For example, for retail businesses, you can visually categorize products based on the range of customer satisfaction scores to analyze improvements over time. Learn here about Histograms.

We’re happy to share that version 1.8 of AWS SDK for C++ is now generally available. AWS SDK for C++ provides platform portability, including Windows, OSX, Linux, and mobile. To learn more, visit the AWS SDK for C++ site. Contribute to or engage on GitHub to help influence the features to be included in the GA candidate.

You can set a contact flow after an agent disconnects from a customer call by transferring them to an automated flow. Previously, contact-center administrators did not have a native way to configure the customer experience when an agent hung up; including conducting a post-call survey, placing a customer back into a queue, or scheduling a queued call back. Now, you can define your customer interaction when an agent disconnects by adding the ‘Set disconnect flow’ block to your contact flow.

QuickSight users can now visualize their Lake Formation–protected Athena data, natively using the benefits that come with Lake Formation, including table and column-level access controls. Athena is already a popular choice for storing data because of its serverless model, and Lake Formation makes it even easier to manage access and permissions as part of a data lake. With QuickSight’s Lake Formation integration, that ease of management now extends all the way through your analytics layer, keeping all your access-management centralized. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems using the default bursting throughput mode now have a minimum throughput of 1 MiB/s. All EFS bursting mode file systems (regardless of size) can drive 100 MiB/s of throughput, and file systems with more than 1TiB of Standard class storage can drive 100 MiB/s per TB when burst credits are available. This change increases the minimum throughput from 50KiB/s per GiB of Standard class storage to a fixed minimum of 1 MiB/s for file systems with less than 20 GiB of Standard class storage, when burst credits are exhausted.

You can now automate the installation and update schedule for the AWS CodeDeploy agent through integration with AWS Systems Manager Distributor. With this integration, you can use the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI, to install the agent on demand, or create an update schedule for target instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and on-premises servers.

AWS CodeBuild now monitors your machines’ resource utilization on your behalf for each build and reports metrics through Amazon CloudWatch. You can now use CloudWatch’s graphed metrics to troubleshoot builds or determine if you are using the right CodeBuild instance type.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are isolated AWS Regions designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, assisting customers who have United States federal, state, or local government compliance requirements. 

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an applications’ most expensive lines of code. Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon CodeGuru to all AWS customers. 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to create your own Prefix Lists that can be easily audited and applied across all your accounts to have a consistent security posture and routing behavior. A Prefix List is a collection of CIDR blocks that can be used to configure VPC security groups and route tables and shared with other AWS accounts using Resource Access Manager (RAM).

Kernel Live Patching enables customers to patch security vulnerabilities and bugs in the Linux kernel without reboots or disruptions to running applications. As a result, Amazon Linux 2 customers benefit from improved service availability and a better security posture. This feature is now generally available to all Amazon Linux 2 customers, free of charge.

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

Amazon Athena has added support for Partition Projection, a new functionality that you can use to speed up query processing of highly partitioned tables and automate partition management.

You can now create Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters using kafka.m5.8xlarge and kafka.m5.16xlarge brokers. These new broker types give customers additional options to optimize the cost and performance of high volume streaming workloads on Amazon MSK. All Amazon MSK features apply to clusters with kafka.m5.8xlarge and kafka.m5.16xlarge brokers, including two and three availability zone deployments, encryption in transit and at rest, and each cluster is paired with a highly available, fully managed Apache ZooKeeper cluster at no additional cost.

You can now create Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters that span three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) in the South America (São Paulo) and Canada (Central) AWS regions. When Apache Kafka topics are replicated across three AZs, customers maximize fault tolerance and Apache Kafka availability.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for drawing tablets. Drawing tablets, also known as pen tablets, are computer input devices that let users draw with a stylus (pen). With AppStream 2.0, your users can now connect a drawing tablet, such as a Wacom drawing tablet, to their local computer and use it with their streaming applications. AppStream 2.0 supports all of the core capabilities of drawing tablets, including pressure sensitivity.  

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that you can use to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access the Amazon Transcribe real-time streaming API from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA eligible Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access the Amazon Transcribe Medical real-time streaming API from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network.

AWS CodePipeline announces integration with AWS AppConfig to enable AWS customers to deliver features and updates safely, rapidly and reliably to their applications. AWS customers can now deploy application configurations using AppConfig in a validated, controlled and monitored way and automate orchestration of these deployments across deploy stages with AWS CodePipeline.  

Amazon RDS for MySQL has been updated to support release 5.6.48 and release 5.7.30 of the MySQL database. These releases include a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

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

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrators can now view and manage their IAM quotas through AWS Service Quotas.  

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (ML) feature that enables customers to quickly train their own custom models for detecting business-specific objects and scenes from images - no ML experience is required. For example, customers train a custom model to find their company logos in social media posts, identify their products on store shelves, or classify unique machine parts in an assembly line. Starting today, Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels now allows customers to train object detection projects for a single object (label).  

AWS CodeBuild now supports the bash and CMD shell environments for executing commands and scripts. The bash shell is available for machines hosting versions of Amazon Linux or Ubuntu, and the CMD shell is available on machines hosting versions of Microsoft Windows Server.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon EMR now offers a “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy for provisioning Spot Instances in an Amazon EMR cluster. The “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy automatically makes the most efficient use of available spare capacity while still taking advantage of the steep discounts offered by Spot Instances. By offering the possibility of fewer interruptions, the capacity-optimized strategy can lower the overall cost of your workload. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) now offers support for cross-cluster search in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, enabling you to perform searches, aggregations, and visualizations across multiple Amazon ES domains with a single query or from a single Kibana interface. With this feature, you can separate heterogeneous workloads into multiple domains, which provides better resource isolation, and the ability to tune each domain for their specific workloads which can improve availability and reduce costs.

You can now manage users of the Amazon API Gateway Serverless Developer Portal directly from the portal’s admin interface. In addition, API consumers can quickly find APIs with improved search and more easily build APIs by exporting OpenAPI definitions for published APIs.

AWS Fargate is now available in the Europe (Milan) Region.  

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that makes it easy and cost-effective to launch and run the world’s most popular high-performance file system, now enables you to take highly-durable backups of your file systems. This capability makes it easy to further protect your file system data and to meet business and regulatory compliance requirements. 

AWS Backup now supports cross-account management, enabling AWS customers to manage and monitor backups across their AWS accounts with AWS Organizations.  

Amazon Honeycode, which is available in beta, is a fully managed service that allows customers to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications – with no programming required. Customers who need applications to track and manage things like process approvals, event scheduling, customer relationship management, user surveys, to-do lists, and content and inventory tracking no longer need to do so by error-prone methods like emailing spreadsheets or documents, or hiring and waiting for developers to build costly custom applications.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Management Console now supports specifying a custom capacity provider strategy when you run tasks manually using the Run Task functionality. This capability has been available through the AWS CLI, SDK, and API, but is now available through the Management Console as well. For use with manually running tasks, a custom capacity provider strategy consists of one or more capacity providers with an optional base and weight specified for each provider, giving you control over how your tasks are distributed across one or more capacity providers.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. 

AWS CodeCommit now supports emoji reactions to comments on pull requests and commits. With this launch, a developer can quickly react to a comment by clicking on the emoji icon in the comment to see a list of supported emojis. They can then choose an emoji from the list that represents their feedback about the comment. CodeCommit records the selected emoji as a reaction to that comment. The list of supported emojis includes popular reactions such as thumbs-up and thumbs-down, smiley face, heart, and ship-it.

Starting today, AWS Organizations is now available in the China regions. AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your workloads on AWS. Whether you are a growing startup or large enterprise, you can use AWS Organizations to programmatically create AWS accounts, organize them in a hierarchy that reflects your current business needs, categorize them using tags, and simplify billing by setting up a single payment method for all of your accounts. You can access AWS Organizations through the AWS console, and via AWS APIs and CLI. AWS Organizations is available to all AWS customers at no additional charge.

You can now run .NET Core applications on AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the new .NET Core Elastic Beanstalk platform built on top of Amazon Linux 2 Operating System. The .NET Core on Amazon Linux 2 platform version comes with nginx as a reverse proxy server and supports .NET Core 3.1 and .NET Core 2.1 frameworks. See Release Notes for additional details. Learn more about using the .NET Core on Linux platform from this blog post.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at customer datacenters and on-premises locations in Brazil, India, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, and Thailand, and supported in three additional Regions: AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region, Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, and South America (São Paulo) Region.  

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Canada (Central) Regions. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the launch of Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (DMA). Amazon DMA is a solution that helps customers migrate away from traditional commercial databases at fixed prices. At launch, we offer Amazon DMA to customers interested in migrating from Oracle or SQL Server to Amazon Aurora, or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL or PostgreSQL. Amazon DMA helps customers reduce the risk of budget overruns and delays that frequently affect traditional migrations by using automated tooling and AWS database migration experts. Over time, Amazon DMA will expand to include additional source and target databases, data warehouses, and analytics systems. Amazon DMA complements migration offerings from APN partners to offer customers the flexibility to choose the appropriate implementation solution.

Amazon Redshift RA3 nodes are now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. 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 Aurora Serverless is now available with MySQL 5.7 compatibility. MySQL 5.7-compatible Aurora offers enhancements such as JSON support, spatial indexes, and generated columns, and is up to 5X faster than MySQL 5.7.

AWS Backup is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers with stringent U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

With this release, Amplify Console adds new pattern-based branch deployment features allowing developers to automatically create and delete custom sub-domains every time a branch is added or removed from a Git repository. This enables developers to access new feature branches at familiar URLs (e.g. feature.mydomain.com) without logging in to the console to set up new sub-domains. Additionally, deleting a branch from the Git repository will automatically delete the branch along with the custom sub-domain in the Amplify Console. 

You can now use AWS Config to manage the compliance of resources from the CloudFormation Registry. With the AWS CloudFormation Registry, you can automate the management of private or third-party application resources alongside AWS ones. With AWS Config, you can assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your application resources. 

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. Starting today, Amazon DocumentDB offers sixteen additional in Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the EU (Stockholm) Region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table. 

AWS announces the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights, a fully integrated, interactive, and pay-as-you-go log analytics service for CloudWatch in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region. CloudWatch Logs Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your logs instantly, allowing you to troubleshoot operational problems with ease. With Logs Insights, you only pay for the queries you run. Logs Insights scales with your log volume and query complexity giving you answers in seconds. In addition, you can publish log-based metrics, create alarms, and correlate logs and metrics together in CloudWatch Dashboards for complete operational visibility.  

Modern marketers look to data to understand their customers to deliver the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. These marketers require messaging tools that can execute across multiple channels at scale and analytics tools to gain insights from customer engagement. 

Amazon Rekognition Video is a machine learning (ML) based service that can analyze videos to detect objects, people, faces, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Starting today, you can automate four common media analysis tasks - detection of black frames, end credits, shot changes, and color bars using fully managed, ML-powered APIs from Amazon Rekognition Video.

Amazon SQS makes it easier to manage lists of queues by allowing callers to iterate through the results of ListQueues and ListDeadLetterSourceQueues APIs using a multi-page format. You can check the status of your request and receive the results in multiple pages by setting the MaxResults parameter to a value between 1 and 1000. You can receive up to a maximum of 1000 results in a single page. If there are more than 1000 results to display, you will receive a Next Token. Use the Next Token to receive the next set of results until the Next Token is null. This enables you to get all the results from your list request in multiple pages. We recommend you to use paginated lists instead of getting all the results in a single request. Furthermore, you can continue filtering your results of list requests using QueueNamePrefix.

You can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) First-in, First-out (FIFO) queues in the EU (Milano) region. FIFO queues are designed to ensure that the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved and that each message is processed exactly once. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that makes it easy to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function improves scalability and reliability. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.

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

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now publishes Elastic Load Balancer(ELB) lifecycle events for services attached to multiple load balancer target groups. ECS will emit service events when tasks are successfully registered or de-registered in target groups or in case of errors in the registration process. This enables you to track the progress of attaching your service to multiple target group and easily troubleshoot errors through events in the ECS service event stream as part of the update and describe service API responses as well as in the ECS Management Console. This functionality has already been available for services attached to a single target group but is now available for services attached to multiple target groups as well.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of AWS DeepComposer Chartbusters, a monthly challenge where developers use AWS DeepComposer to create original compositions and compete to top the charts and win prizes. AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to get started with machine learning and generative AI techniques. The first AWS DeepComposer Chartbuster challenge titled “Bach to the Future” launches today and ends on July 16th, 2020. To participate in the challenge, developers will first need to use the autoregressive CNN algorithm, a new generative AI algorithm available in the AWS DeepComposer console to create compositions in the style of Bach. Next, they will need to submit the compositions to SoundCloud using AWS DeepComposer to be added to a custom playlist. AWS will announce the top 10 ranked compositions from the “Bach to the Future” challenge on July 21st, 2020 in an AWS ML blog post.  

The Multi-Region Application Architecture solution helps demonstrate a fault-tolerant application with easy failover to a backup region. This solution leverages Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Cross-Region replication and Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables to asynchronously replicate application data between the primary and secondary AWS Region. A sample photo sharing web application is also deployed in each region to serve as a visual demonstration of the solution’s back-end layers and to verify that regional failover is working. 

We’ve recently added AWS Solutions Constructs to the AWS Solutions Library. AWS Solutions Constructs are pre-built, multi-service architecture patterns that allow customers to quickly assemble well-architected applications using familiar programming tools. 

PostgreSQL 13 Beta 1 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 13 on Amazon RDS.  

You can now tag your AWS Cloud Map namespaces and services through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS CloudFormation or the AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDK). AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Using AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, or any other cloud resource. Your application can then discover the location and metadata of cloud resources associated with these custom names via AWS SDK or by making authenticated API calls. 

Amazon Redshift adds materialized view support for external tables. With this enhancement, you can create materialized views in Amazon Redshift that reference external data sources such as Amazon S3 via Spectrum, or data in Aurora or RDS PostgreSQL via federated queries.  

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports forensic watermarking using NexGuard. This feature enables you to watermark content for both mezzanine and OTT streaming contexts in order to enable content leak forensic workflows. You have access to an added layer of security and traceability for valuable pre-release and early release content, and a simple way for watermarking during video transcoding and OTT content preparation. NexGuard forensic watermarking in MediaConvert for pre-release content, including the recently announced NexGuard ClipMark for short form content as well as NexGuard Streaming for on-demand OTT content, enables full watermark automation when processing in AWS.

An Amazon Aurora Global Database now supports forwarding of write requests from a secondary region to the primary region, to simplify the development of your application code. 

AWS Training and Certification has launched Migrating to the AWS Cloud, a self-paced digital course available on edX. This course helps you build skills by providing foundational knowledge on migrating to the AWS Cloud using AWS products and services.

You can now use the AWS Elemental MediaLive schedule feature to prepare a MediaLive channel input prior to switching to it. In the context of live video streaming, this functionality is also known as an ‘input cue’. Preparation of an input in advance of a switch helps reduce the latency of the scheduled switch action. For example, you may need to switch to an input for a postgame press conference that could start at any time. If the MediaLive schedule feature is used to prepare the input, you can switch to it with only a few seconds of latency.

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices within their contact-center. These new voices deliver groundbreaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. The new neural voices are available in eight US English, three UK English, one Spanish, and one Portuguese voice.

To provide enhanced performance and scalability, Amazon RDS on VMware adds support for read replicas for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. You can create read replicas of a source DB instance to serve high-volume application read traffic, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. A read replica can also be promoted to become a standalone DB instance if the source DB instance fails.  

Starting June 20, 2020, Amazon Pinpoint customers who send SMS with an alphanumeric sender ID to Indian recipients must register their use case. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recently updated the regulations on commercial SMS sending. Senders who have a local presence in India are required to register their use cases through the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system. When you successfully register your use case, you can use an alphabetic sender ID to deliver your transactional messages or numeric sender ID to deliver your promotional messages to recipients who have Indian phone numbers. Messages that you send using a registered sender ID are billed at the standard rates. For current message sending rates, see the Amazon Pinpoint Pricing page.

Starting today, you can use the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript to develop applications that automatically adapt to changing conditions to optimize the video experience for each meeting attendee. From the JavaScript SDK, you can now enable the simulcast feature, supported by the underlying WebRTC library. Once enabled, each client joining an Amazon Chime SDK meeting will automatically display the highest quality video available for its unique situation by considering network conditions and the total number and types of video streams being shared in the meeting. 

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon Fraud Detector from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between Amazon VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications, securely on the Amazon network. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities such as online payment fraud and the creation of fake accounts. 

Starting today, users can experience a new, optimized user interface when they access Amazon WorkDocs from the WorkDocs iOS mobile application. This new user interface enhances accessibility, supports easier collaboration, and improves file and folder discoverability.  

Today, AWS announces Systems Manager Explorer availability to customers in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.  

Today, the Amazon Builders’ Library published a new article titled, Automating Safe, Hands-off Deployments to help readers understand how Amazon approaches software deployments. AWS Principal Engineer Clare Liguori dives deep into the strategies used at Amazon to continuously deploy software into production while balancing safety and speed. 

You can now configure timeouts on your AWS App Mesh virtual nodes and individual routes. Configuring timeouts will allow you to add resiliency to your system with no changes to your services. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports monitoring for Microsoft SQL Server High Availability (HA) workloads enabling customers to easily set up metrics, logs, and alarms for their SQL Server HA workloads, and monitor the health of these database nodes. Customers can now use CloudWatch Application Insights to configure important counters such as Mirrored Write Transaction/sec, Recovery Queue Length, and Transaction Delay, and Windows Event Logs on CloudWatch, and get automated insights whenever a fail-over event or a problem, such as a restricted access to query target database, is detected with such workloads.

AWS App Mesh controller for Kubernetes provides a way to integrate AWS App Mesh with Kubernetes. It offers a Kubernetes-native experience to creating and updating the mesh. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

Beginning today, you can identify which Private Hosted Zones are associated with your VPCs by calling the new ListHostedZonesByVPC API action. This API action gives you better visibility into the associations between Private Hosted Zones and VPCs across your organization. For example, you can now easily identify all Private Hosted Zones associated with your VPC, even if those Private Hosted Zones were created by other AWS accounts. 

You can now use the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API and Amazon RDS Query editor for Amazon Aurora Serverless with PostgreSQL compatibility in the EU (Frankfurt) region.

Today, we launched the detailed Cost Management view in the AWS Console Mobile Application. The new feature allows you to see your detailed costs on-the-go with your mobile device. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) customers can now receive event notifications when the delivery of an email is delayed because of a temporary issue. Previously, if the delivery of an email was temporarily delayed (for example, if the recipient’s inbox was full, or if there was a temporary problem with the receiving email server), Amazon SES would send an event notification after SES’ retry attempts failed.

AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

AWS DataSync now supports transferring files to and from AWS Snowcone, the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, ruggedized, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. The DataSync agent comes pre-installed on the device to transfer data online to and from Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. 

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the management of diagnostic data with the Oracle Automatic Diagnostic Repository Command Interpreter (ADRCI) utility. If you have a support request, you can use the Amazon RDS package rdsadmin.rdsadmin_adrci_util to create the packages for specific incidents or problems to deliver them to Oracle Support. 

While building a WebSocket API with Amazon API Gateway, you can now send back Sec-WebSocket-Protocol field as part of the response from $connect route. This means clients can now request specific subprotocols while connecting to your WebSocket API.  

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

Amazon Lex now supports a built-in search intent making it easier to query an Amazon Kendra index. Previously, you had to write Lambda function code and configure it in Amazon Lex bot to extract information from Amazon Kendra. Starting today, you can add a search intent to your Amazon Lex bot to get the answers you’re looking for, whether that is an FAQ, an answer in a document, or a link to an entire document. You configure the AMAZON.KendraSearchIntent with the index details and the answers are surfaced as request attributes in the Lex response. The integration is simplified so you can deliver natural language answers from Amazon Kendra seamlessly in your Amazon Lex conversations. 

Amazon Corretto, a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK, is now in preview for Alpine Linux.  

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 12.3, 11.8, 10.13, 9.6.18, and 9.5.22. This release contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.  

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now supports CloudFormation templates for automating SSL/TLS certificate issuance for DNS-validated certificates with domains managed in Route 53, issuance of private certificates from an ACM Private Certificate Authority, and configuration of certificate transparency (CT) logging.

AWS Lambda customers can now enable functions to access Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Customers can easily share data across function invocations, read large reference data files, and write function output to a persistent and shared data store.

You can now use AWS DataSync to transfer data into and out of 2 additional AWS Regions: Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town). 

With this release, Amplify Console makes it easy to deploy projects managed in monorepos. A monorepo is a single repository containing source code for multiple web or mobile apps that share common assets. Amplify Console now automatically detects build settings for monorepos by allowing developers to pick a root directory for their app when connecting their repository. Once the app is built and deployed, new builds are triggered only if commits contain changes within the app root directory. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) capacity providers now support delete functionality. You can delete capacity providers once they are no longer in use using either the AWS Management Console or the new DeleteCapacityProvider API.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), consulting partners, and data providers from United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Norway, and Switzerland are now eligible to sell software and data products in AWS Marketplace and AWS Data Exchange. These offerings add to the global catalog of 7,000+ software and data products from 1,500+ ISVs and data providers in AWS Marketplace and AWS Data Exchange. Customers around the world can now discover and subscribe to an even greater breadth of software and data products to innovate faster and achieve their business goals.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, and today we are excited to announce the general availability of another child US English voice - Kevin. Kevin’s voice was developed using the latest Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology, and imitates the voice of a male child. Amazon Polly offers 14 neural voices across 4 languages - US English (en-US), British English (en-GB), Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), and US Spanish (es-US). NTTS voices are supported in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney).  

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you automatically update the instances in your Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) to release new application versions or make infrastructure changes. Traditionally, customers had to write custom scripts and build systems to update ASG configurations with new AMIs. With the new Instance Refresh feature, customers can now trigger configuration updates such as moving to new AMIs and changing instance types. You can roll out these updates to the ASG by replacing instances all at once or gradually.

AWS announces the launch of AWS AppConfig hosted configurations, a new feature that simplifies on-boarding to AWS AppConfig to enable customers to deploy configurations in seconds. AWS AppConfig makes it easy for AWS customers to quickly roll out application configurations across applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, containers, AWS Lambda, mobile apps, IoT devices, and on-premises servers in a validated, controlled and monitored way. 

Amazon EMR now persists the YARN timeline server and Tez user interface (UI) along with the event and container logs outside the cluster. You can now debug and monitor your YARN applications independent of the cluster’s life cycle by logging directly into the web interfaces using the EMR console. The YARN timeline server and Tez UI are open-source applications that provide metrics and visual tools for active and terminated clusters. 

You can now use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to run containers on Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances. With EKS and the AWS Neuron Kubernetes device plugin, it’s easy combine multiple Inferentia devices in your cluster to run high performance and cost-effective inference workloads at scale.  

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

Starting today, FreeRTOS offers support for new over-the-air update (OTA) job configurations. Using the job rollout configuration, you can now add all of your IoT devices to the same OTA update job, and update these devices in phases. Using job abort and job execution timeout configurations, you have better control over your OTA update process. Get started by logging into the AWS IoT console, and learn more about the OTA feature here.

Today, AWS Service Catalog is releasing delegated administrator portfolio sharing, which enables administrators to more easily distribute and manage AWS services across multiple AWS accounts. Service Catalog administrators can now share services from multiple member accounts within their AWS Organization.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow, formerly known as the AWS Service Catalog Connector. The AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow enables integration features for AWS Service Catalog, AWS Config, and AWS Systems Manager within ServiceNow. This simplifies cloud provisioning and resource management for ServiceNow administrators, and also makes it easier for ServiceNow users to request AWS products, which can be any IT service that administrators want to make available for deployment on AWS.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Building Containerized Applications on AWS, a self-paced digital course available on Coursera. Using video lectures, hands-on exercise guides, demonstrations, and quizzes, the course explains what containers are, as well as the differences between containers and virtual machines. It also covers how to use AWS services to build and deploy microservices-based applications and which AWS services to use to simplify container management.

The digital training course Architecting Serverless Solutions now offers hands-on learning with optional labs. You will now be able to learn how to benefit from new features such as Provisioned Concurrency, AWS Lambda Destinations, and error handling for streams.  

Amazon CloudFront now provides you even more control over the connection behaviors between CloudFront and your origin. You can now configure the number of connection attempts CloudFront will make to your origin and the origin connection timeout for each attempt. In addition, the CloudFront origin response timeout range has been expanded and you can now change the value from 1 to 60 seconds, where previously the minimum value was 4 seconds. These two new configurations can be individually set for any type of origin within your CloudFront distribution and can also be used to further enhance the responsiveness and availability of your multi-origin application when coupled with CloudFront Origin Failover.

Starting today, the compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6g instances and the memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6g instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors are generally available. Amazon EC2 C6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over x86-based Amazon EC2 C5 instances for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. Amazon EC2 R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over x86-based Amazon EC2 R5 instances for memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability. 

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. With Amazon FSx, customers can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. 

EC2 Image Builder is now integrated with AWS PrivateLink which enables customers to privately access EC2 Image Builder from Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications, securely on the Amazon network.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth now supports 3D Point Cloud Labeling Workflows so it’s easy to build highly accurate training datasets for three dimensional (3D) data. 

AWS CodeArtifact is a fully managed software artifact repository service that makes it easy for organizations of any size to securely store, publish, and share packages used in their software development process. CodeArtifact eliminates the need for you to set up, operate, and scale the infrastructure required for artifact management so you can focus on software development. With CodeArtifact, you only pay for what you use and there are no license fees or upfront commitments.

AWS Backup adds Amazon Aurora database cluster snapshots as its latest protected resource. Starting today, you can use AWS Backup to manage Amazon Aurora database cluster snapshots. AWS Backup can centrally configure backup policies, monitor backup activity, copy a snapshot within and across AWS regions, except for China regions, where snapshots can only be copied from one China region to another. 

Amazon Pinpoint journeys gives marketing teams the flexibility they need to automate multi-step customer campaigns. Today, Amazon Pinpoint journeys expanded its capabilities to support notifications across SMS, Push, and custom channels. This helps marketers more effectively send the right message, to the right customer, over the best channel. Additionally, Amazon Pinpoint journeys now supports the ability to target a customer across devices using a single unified ID, rather than multiple points of contact (e.g., email address, phone numbers). This enables expanded multi-channel use cases. For example, you could send your customer a push notification when they download your application and after a defined period of time, follow-up with an email dependent on whether they opened the original push notification.

Support for IMDSv2
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports IMDSv2, an on-instance component to securely access instance metadata. IMDSv2 comes with many enhancements, including support for session-oriented requests. Learn more about the IMDSV2 enhancements in this blog post. For an overview, see the Release Notes. To learn about configuring the instance metadata service in your Elastic Beanstalk environments, see IMDS in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

AWS Transfer Family adds support for using end users’ Source IP addresses as a factor for authorization, enabling you to apply an additional layer of security when authorizing access over Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS), or FTP.  

Today, we are pleased to announce that AWS Compute Optimizer now supports exporting recommendations to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

You can now monitor your Amazon ElastiCache for Redis fleet with 18 additional engine and node-level CloudWatch metrics. These metrics are based on the Redis INFO command and are published either as-is or are calculated further to provide you with more actionable insights to manage your Amazon ElastiCache fleet.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports SQL Workbench and SQL CLI to run queries on Elasticsearch indexes with the conventional and familiar database language. SQL Workbench, a popular open source visual tool used to manage database environments, is now integrated in Kibana to view the results of SQL queries executed on Elasticsearch indexes. SQL CLI provides the flexibility to run ad-hoc or predefined queries from client applications written in different programming languages.

We’re excited to offer our first foundational business course for new alliance teams and sales professionals at APN Technology Partner organizations. AWS Solutions Training for Partners: APN Technology Partners Co-Selling with AWS – Business will provide partners with a fundamental understanding of what it means to co-sell with AWS and how to be prepared to engage with the AWS sales organization.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5n instances are available in the AWS Europe (London) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions. In addition, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, R5dn instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Alexa for Business is now available on Lifesize meeting rooms systems. Lifesize meeting room systems with Alexa built-in enables Lifesize customers into a wide range of productivity-enhancing, voice-activated commands without requiring additional hardware. Users get a touch-free way to interact with Lifesize room systems and can save time by leveraging Alexa to check into rooms, join meetings, and call contacts. With the Lifesize directory integration, users can easily leverage name-based calling to reach any contact, room system, or meetings within their organization.  

AWS Shield Advanced now allows proactive engagement from the DDoS Response Team (DRT) when a DDoS event is detected. When you turn on proactive engagement, the DRT will directly contact you if an Amazon Route 53 health check associated with your protected resource becomes unhealthy during an event that's detected by Shield Advanced. This allows you to engage with experts more quickly when the availability of your application might be affected by a suspected attack. You can receive proactive engagement for network-layer and transport-layer events on Elastic IP addresses and Global Accelerator accelerators, and for web request floods on CloudFront distributions and Application Load Balancers.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster auto scaling is now available in seven additional regions: Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), China (Beijing), operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights launched several new features to enhance observability for customers’ applications. Starting today, CloudWatch Application Insights expands monitoring support for two databases, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server - MySQL and Amazon DynamoDB. This enables customers to easily configure monitors for these databases on CloudWatch and detect common errors such as slow queries, transaction conflicts, and replication latency.

Amazon Personalize uses machine learning technology perfected from over 20 years of recommender systems development at Amazon.com. With Amazon Personalize you are can personalize recommendations for products, videos, music, ebooks, ads, marketing emails, and more, for your users, without any prior machine learning experience.

You can now restrict direct access to AWS Elemental MediaPackage by securing requests for VOD content using CDN authorization. With CDN authorization, content requests require a specific HTTP origin header and authorization code. MediaPackage verifies this code before it serves any content. For instructions on how to configure CDN authorization for live endpoints, please refer to the documentation pages.

You can now filter queue metrics by channel within contact flows for a single queue. With the launch of chat, queue metrics blended both voice and chat contacts. Now you can filter queue metrics by contact type when configuring the 'Get queue metrics' block. For example, based on the number of contacts in a blended queue, the contact flow designer can calculate the effective hold time to manage the duration a customer spends waiting.

You can now write the results of an Amazon Redshift query to an external table in Amazon S3 either in text or Apache Parquet formats. The external table metadata will be automatically updated and can be stored in AWS Glue, AWS Lake Formation, or your Hive Metastore data catalog. This enables you to easily share your data in the data lake and have it immediately available for analysis with Amazon Redshift Spectrum and other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker. Amazon Redshift Spectrum enables you to power a lake house architecture to directly query and join data across your data warehouse and data lake.

Following the April 24, 2020 announcement of the availability of PostgreSQL 11 support with Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility in all commercial AWS Regions, we have expanded availability to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure.

Amazon EC2 has the cloud’s broadest and most capable portfolio of hardware-accelerated instances featuring GPUs, FPGAs, and our own custom ML inference chip, AWS Inferentia. G4dn instances offer the best price/performance for GPU based ML inference, training less-complex ML models, graphics applications others that need access to NVIDIA libraries such as CUDA, CuDNN and NVENC.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has added support for AWS PrivateLink in three additional regions: Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain).

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) is an AWS service that makes it easy to build the workflows required for human review of ML predictions (such as predictions from Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Translate or Amazon Comprehend). Amazon A2I provides you the option to work with human reviewers or “workers” inside your own organization through a private workforce, Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce of over 500,000 independent contractors, or vendor-managed workforces pre-screened by AWS for quality and security procedures. Starting today, for your private workforce, Amazon A2I provides additional metadata for each worker that reviews your data, enabling you to uniquely identify them and implement quality control for your workforce.  

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility has added support for managing the recovery point objective (RPO) in an Aurora PostgreSQL Global Database configuration.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility to support PostgreSQL minor versions 11.7, 10.12, and 9.6.17. These releases contains bug fixes and improvements from the PostgreSQL community, as well as bug fixes and improvements specific to Aurora PostgreSQL.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports T3.large instances, in addition to the T3.medium and R5 class instances already available. Using T3.large instances with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is a cost-effective option for smaller workloads such as test, dev, and QA, while still giving you the option to use larger class instances for production deployments.

Amazon Aurora Serverless with PostgreSQL compatibility is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) region. 

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers the ability to encode WebM outputs using VP8 or VP9 video with Vorbis or Opus audio. This addition gives you greater choice when selecting a format for distributing video for browser-based and mobile device playback.

Starting today, new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5a instances featuring 2nd generation AMD EPYC™ processors running at frequencies up to 3.3 GHz are generally available. C5a instances are variants of Amazon EC2’s compute-optimized (C5) instance family and provide high performance at 10% lower cost over comparable instances. C5a instances deliver leading x86 price-performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads including batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analysis, and web applications.

EMR Notebooks is a managed service that provides a full-managed, Jupyter-based notebook to data scientists. A Jupyter kernel provides programming language support in Jupyter. EMR IPython is the default kernel. Additional kernels include R, Julia, and many more. Today we are announcing a new feature that allows data scientists, analysts, and engineers to install and execute custom kernels on the EMR cluster directly from the EMR Notebook. Before this feature, installing custom kernels on a cluster required a multi-step installation process.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers anomaly detection, which uses machine learning to detect anomalies on real-time streaming data and identifies issues as they evolve so you can mitigate them immediately. This new feature is built on Random Cut Forests (RCF), a proven algorithm for real-time streaming, and is domain agnostic, making it a great choice for a wide range of log analytics applications.

You can now run your applications on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the new generation of Tomcat Elastic Beanstalk platforms built on top of Amazon Linux 2 Operating System.

Resource Import now supports CloudFormation Registry types, so you can import resource types in the Registry, including non-AWS and private ones. Resource Import allows you to bring existing infrastructure and application resources into CloudFormation, regardless of how they were created or managed previously.

AWS CloudEndure Migration Factory Solution is an AWS Solutions Implementation that helps migrate a large number of servers with CloudEndure Migration in a simplified and expedited way at scale. The solution automates many of the manual, time-consuming tasks that enterprises commonly face in migrating servers from on-premise to the cloud; for example, checking prerequisites on the source machine, installing/uninstalling software on the source and target machine. Thousands of servers have been migrated to AWS using this solution. When customers deploy the solution, its AWS CloudFormation template automatically provisions and configures the necessary AWS services, starting with Amazon Elastic Container Service to build a web interface and an Amazon S3 bucket to contain the frontend code. 

AWS Config now supports nine new managed rules, which are predefined rules that can help you evaluate whether your AWS resource configurations comply with common best practices. 

AWS Config now offers a new conformance pack template that is intended to help you verify your compliance with NIST CSF operational best practices.

AWS Auto Scaling with scaling plans and predictive scaling (for Amazon EC2) is now available in 7 additional AWS Regions. Using AWS Auto Scaling, customers can configure predictive scaling to automatically scale their Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups in advance of impending traffic changes. Customers can also use AWS Auto Scaling to manage scaling configuration for multiple resources with a single scaling plan for services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora.

Amazon QuickSight is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. New users can sign up for QuickSight with Asia Pacific (Mumbai) as their home region, making SPICE capacity available in region and ensuring proximity to AWS and on-premises data sources. Existing QuickSight users can switch to Asia Pacific (Mumbai) via the region switcher in the User Interface to provision SPICE capacity, and to enable faster and cheaper connectivity to data sources in this region.

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish resilient network connectivity from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than connections over the public internet.

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

Amazon RDS for MySQL has been updated to support release 8.0.19 of the MySQL database. This release includes a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

Semiconductor manufacturers like Infineon can now use AWS IoT Core Multi-Account Registration to pre-configure silicon components like secure elements with X.509 certificates and private keys, ensuring devices built using these components are pre-qualified to connect to AWS IoT by default. AWS IoT customers can then use these qualified devices together with AWS IoT Multi-Account Registration to simplify device registration and easily move devices between multiple AWS accounts in the same Region.  

To help you identify unused S3 permissions, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) extended service last accessed information to include S3 management actions and reports the last time a user or role used an S3 action. This granular access information helps you analyze access, identify unused S3 actions, and remove them confidently.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) now offers support for cross-cluster search, enabling you to perform searches, aggregations, and visualizations across multiple Amazon ES domains with a single query or from a single Kibana interface. With this feature, you can separate heterogeneous workloads into multiple domains, which provides better resource isolation, and the ability to tune each domain for their specific workloads which can improve availability and reduce costs. 

AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to learn machine learning. Get hands-on, literally, with a musical keyboard and the latest machine learning techniques to expand your ML skills. AWS DeepComposer includes tutorials, sample code, and training data that can be used to build generative AI models, all without having to write a single line of code. Generative AI is one of the exciting recent advancements in artificial intelligence techniques because of its ability to create something new. Until now, developers interested in growing skills in this area haven’t had an easy way to get started. With AWS DeepComposer, developers, regardless of their background in ML, can get started with generative AI techniques to learn how to train and optimize the models to create original music.  

Starting today, you can view AWS Systems Manager Explorer’s operational data across multiple accounts and Regions from a delegated administrator account in your organization, in addition to the master account in AWS Organizations. This helps you improve security and flexibility by providing the ability to dedicate a separate operations account for viewing operations data and investigating issues across your organization.

Today, we announced the public preview of Amazon SageMaker Components for Kubeflow Pipelines. Machine learning (ML) developers using Kubeflow Pipelines can convert their existing pipeline steps to run on SageMaker with the SageMaker Components. For instance, ML teams can use SageMaker for managed training on Spot instances which will automatically set up model checkpoints to S3 so that you can pause and resume training from the last saved state. Other SageMaker features that are supported in Kubeflow Pipelines are built-in algorithms, managed distributed training, and hyperparameter tuning. In addition, SageMaker can change instance types with one parameter swap, replacing the complicated autoscaling config in Kubernetes.

Amazon Redshift now processes queries 2x faster when they need to be compiled. This improvement gives you better query performance when you create a new Redshift cluster, onboard a new workload on an existing cluster, or after a software update of an existing cluster. These query performance improvements are available at no extra charge to you, and no action is needed to enable it on your clusters.  

You can now restrict the amount of disk space used by a schema in Amazon Redshift. With the CREATE and ALTER SCHEMA statement, administrators can set quotas on the maximum amount of storage consumed by schemas. 

Today, Amazon Athena has released a new feature that allows you to connect Athena to your Apache Hive Metastore. 

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. With Amazon FSx, customers can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups. 

AWS Data Migration Service (DMS) now supports migrating graph data from relational sources to Amazon Neptune. The AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) enables you to migrate data from one data source to another. Using relational databases as source and Neptune as destination allows customers to copy their connected data into Neptune for graph queries.  

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to increase the storage capacity and to change the throughput capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to grow your file storage and to scale up or down the available performance as needed to meet evolving storage needs over time. 

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that quickly and easily extracts text and data from forms and tables in scanned documents, can now be used for workloads that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance, and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) compliance. This launch builds upon the existing portfolio of AWS machine learning services that are SOC and ISO compliant, including Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Connect. The AWS compliance program continues to enable our global customer base to maintain confidence in our secured control environments with a focus on information security, confidentiality, and availability.

Amazon DynamoDB support for empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes in DynamoDB tables is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Empty value support gives you greater flexibility to use attributes for a broader set of use cases without having to transform such attributes before sending them to DynamoDB. List, Map, and Set data types also support empty String and Binary values.