August 2020

Amazon CloudFront now supports real-time log delivery of CloudFront access logs. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that enables you to distribute content to viewers with low latency and high availability. The real-time logs contain detailed information about viewer requests that CloudFront receives. These logs are delivered to your Kinesis Data Streams in real time making it easy for you to monitor the performance of your content delivery and respond quickly to operational events.

You now have an option to modify instance types and weights for a running EC2 Fleet or Spot Fleet (referred to further as fleet). You can replace an entire launch template configuration specifying new instance types, weights, and other parameters without deleting and re-creating a fleet. 

Today, we are announcing first-class support for RxJava as of Amplify Android 1.3.0. RxJava is a Java VM implementation of Reactive Extensions. RxJava is widely used by Android developers as a means to simplify asynchronous programming. Amplify Android is part of the open source Amplify Framework. Amplify makes it easy for developers to build Android apps with AWS-powered functionality, such as auth, data modeling, storage, and analytics. 

AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and compute capabilities for the Storage Optimized device are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is a secure, rugged device that brings AWS computing and storage capabilities, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS IAM to your edge environments for machine learning, data analytics, processing, and local storage. You can use Snowball Edge devices in environments with intermittent connectivity (like manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (like military or maritime operations). These devices may also be rack mounted and clustered together to build larger installations.  

Serverless IoT Platform Accelerator is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Onica, a Rackspace Technology Company and an AWS IoT and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. The Serverless IoT Platform Accelerator solves common problems in implementation around data ingestion, storage, and monitoring of IoT devices. With this accelerator, customers can gain intelligence from their IoT data within minutes of deploying the cloud-native platform. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers IoT device connectivity, customized app features, data visualization, notifications, and device controls in a user-friendly interface, which leads to device data insights.

AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region.

Amazon WorkSpaces adds support for AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add, edit, or delete AWS tags from your WorkSpaces along with your other AWS resources. AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate the tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. AWS Tag Editor allows you to search for AWS resources that you want to tag across multiple services and apply common tags for those resources. 

EMR Notebooks is a service that provides a fully managed, Jupyter-based notebook to data scientists and engineers who write ad-hoc jobs and experiment with them. Now you can orchestrate EMR Notebooks in a non-interactive manner to run ETL workloads especially in production. Before this feature, executing notebooks required the Jupyter User Interface access through the AWS Management Console.  

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add, edit, or delete AWS tags from your image builders, fleets, and stacks along with your other AWS resources. AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. AWS Tag Editor allows to you search for AWS resources that you want to tag across multiple services and apply common tags for those resources. 

Amazon now supports the latest Java Feature Release JDK 15 by introducing Amazon Corretto 15 RC (Release Candidate). Corretto 15 is available on Linux, Windows and macOS. Download Corretto 15 RC directly here.

AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is a secure, rugged device that brings AWS computing and storage capabilities, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS IAM to your edge environments for machine learning, data analytics, processing, and local storage. You can use Snowball Edge devices in environments with intermittent connectivity (like manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (like military or maritime operations). These devices may also be rack mounted and clustered together to build larger installations.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the General Availability of Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based Operating System (OS) purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket includes only the software needed to run containers and comes with a transactional update mechanism. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling improved security and lower operational costs for containerized applications. AWS-provided Bottlerocket images are available for Amazon EKS (GA) and Amazon ECS (Preview). Bottlerocket is developed as an open source project on GitHub.

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

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an Amazon GameLift FleetIQ update that enables game developers to add low-cost, low-latency GameLift servers to their existing on-premises or cloud-based server capacities. GameLift is an AWS managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated servers for multiplayer games, and it is trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world, including Ubisoft, Gameloft, and N3TWORK. With this update, developers can launch low-cost GameLift servers into their AWS accounts and register the servers with their existing game server management systems to incrementally migrate live games, burst in-game events, or deploy containerized games onto AWS. To learn more about the GameLift FleetIQ update, visit our blog.

Amazon EC2 can now hibernate EBS-backed Amazon EC2 M5a and R5a instances. You can now hibernate your newly launched instances running on M5a and R5a instance types. Hibernation provides you the convenience of pausing your workloads and resuming them from the saved state later. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, your application will start right where it left off.

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) in the Europe (Milan) AWS Region. Amazon MSK clusters in Milan can be created using kafka.t3.small brokers or brokers from the kafka.m5 family.

Amazon Lex now provides the express testing capability on the AWS Management Console to expedite the chatbot building process. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With the express testing capability, you can start testing basic interaction elements such as the conversation flow, prompts, responses, and fulfillment logic soon after you initiate the build process without having to wait for the entire build to finish.  

You can now initiate Internet Key Exchange (IKE) negotiations for your VPN connections from AWS. This feature is available for new and existing Site-to-Site VPN connections and can be accessed through the AWS Management console, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections offer IPSec tunnels which use the IKE protocol to establish a tunnel. With this feature, AWS VPN endpoints will send the initial IKE message to your Customer Gateway (CGW). AWS endpoints will initiate when new VPNs are created or if the tunnel goes down. For more information, please see the documentation.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now allows you to create WebM DASH outputs using VP8 or VP9 video. You can use segmented content in a WebM container to support dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). The ability to create WebM DASH outputs using the VP8 and VP9 codecs provides more options for preparing content for VOD delivery. For more information about VP8 and VP9 support in MediaConvert, please see our announcement here.

You can now join your Amazon EC2 for Linux instances to a domain configured with AWS Directory Service seamlessly. The new capability automates the previously manual approach for integrating Linux-based EC2 instances to your  AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD), or to an existing on-premises Active Directory (AD) using AD Connector. This makes it easier for you to launch and manage your Amazon EC2 for Linux instances, reducing deployment time and administration effort.

Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, now can be accessed programmatically. The Amazon AppFlow APIs and SDK enable developers to set up flows between source and destinations supported by Amazon AppFlow, create connector profiles and execute flows programmatically. Using the Amazon AppFlow APIs and the SDK, developers can incorporate Amazon AppFlow directly into their DevOps pipelines for data integrations. Amazon AppFlow API users will be charged at same pricing dimensions and rates as Amazon AppFlow. For pricing, please refer to the Amazon AppFlow pricing page. 

Today, we are announcing the availability of Route 53 Resolver Query Logging, which lets you log the DNS queries that originate in your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). With query logging enabled, you can see which domain names have been queried, the AWS resources from which the queries originated—including source IP and instance ID—and the responses that were received.

AWS X-Ray now supports using tags to manage access for creating, updating, and deleting X-Ray Groups and Sampling Rules.

AWS IoT Core now enables customers to use Custom Authentication to authenticate and authorize messages from IoT devices on MQTT connections. In addition, customers using HTTP or WebSockets to connect to AWS IoT Core can now customize which headers or query parameters they use to pass device credentials to their Authorizers. For example, customers can now pass credentials via the Authorization header or access_token query parameter commonly used in OAuth implementations.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports external authentication of database users using Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.  

Today we are announcing the launch of a second Local Zone in Los Angeles (LA), California. You can now design your applications to run in both Local Zones in LA to achieve high availability and even greater fault-tolerance. Both Local Zones in LA are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between them. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports trace flag 692 as a startup parameter using DB parameter groups. Enabling this trace flag disables fast inserts while bulk loading data into heap or clustered indexes.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now has launched an open-source Extended Client Library for Java that enables you to publish and deliver messages with payloads up to 2GB. Previously, message payloads were supported up to 256KB. Using the Extended Client Library, you can store the message payloads larger than 256KB in an S3 bucket and use SNS to publish and deliver a reference to the payload location.  

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in just a few clicks, now supports Amazon EventBridge as a destination.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2019 CU5 for Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions on the Windows operating systems. You can now leverage SQL Server 2019 features such as accelerated database recovery (ADR), Intelligent Query Processing (IQP), intelligent performance features, and resumable index rebuilds on your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances. 

The AWS App Mesh controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh directly using Kubernetes. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

With CloudWatch Logs integration in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, developers working in VS Code can now interact with CloudWatch log groups in an AWS Region that are available to the active credentials profile. After listing and filtering the CloudWatch log streams for a selected log group, they can view a stream's most recent 10,000 lines/1 MB of log data, with the option of loading older data or new event that occurred after the initial loading. The interface for the log stream editor also allows you to download log data to files stored on your local machine.

New Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS volume, io2, features higher durability of 99.999%, and supports provisioning 500 IOPS for every provisioned GB. This means that with io2, customers get 100x better volume durability and a 10x higher IOPS to storage ratio – all at the same price as io1. io2 is ideal for performance intensive, business critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 that will benefit from higher uptime.

CloudTrail Insights now helps you correlate user identities, user agents, and error codes associated with unusual levels of API activity. Now, you can identify the IAM users and roles with the highest levels of API activity during both periods of anomalous activity, and normal activity. This capability helps you analyze and act on anomalies without manually searching through a large number of CloudTrail events.

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management (CM), a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef Automate and Puppet Enterprise, now has updated their AWS CloudFormation support for OpsWorks resources, including supporting all AWS CLI and SDK operations, as well as opening up the implementation to allow for community feedback and contributions. 

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to AWS GovCloud (US-East), EU (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). StackSets allows you to centrally manage deployments of resources to multiple accounts and regions in a single operation enabling you to easily deploy a baseline level of functionality to your accounts before they are actively used. StackSets is also integrated with AWS Organizations so you can take advantage of automatic deployments whenever an account enters an Organization.

Starting November 1, 2020, the price of sending SMS messages to India will be updated from $0.00223 to $0.00278 per message. This price increase is driven by Indian regulatory and carrier changes affecting all SMS messages sent to India.

We are pleased to announce the first blockchain course from AWS Training and Certification. This new course, Introduction to Blockchain, is a free, on-demand, 60-minute digital course for both technical and non-technical learners.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for MongoDB 4.0 as a source in AWS DMS v 3.4.1. Using DMS, you can now perform live migrations from MongoDB 4.0 clusters to any AWS DMS supported target including Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) with minimal downtime. For full list of supported AWS DMS targets, see targets for data migration.  

AWS Transfer Family now supports using email addresses as usernames for your file transfer clients by adding support for at symbol (@) and period (dot) in usernames. In addition, the service now supports username length of up to 100 characters from the previously supported limit of 32 characters. 

Today, we are happy to announce the general availability of AWS SDK for .NET v3.5. This release transitions support for all non-Framework versions of the SDK to .NET Standard 2.0+. Unity, Xamarin, and UWP users can now utilize the .NET Standard 2.0 distribution to gain access to the same services and AWS vended libraries as .NET Core users. Read our blog post for details.

Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Provisioned Concurrency is a feature that provides customers greater control over performance of their serverless applications at any scale. Functions using Provisioned Concurrency execute with consistent start-up latency making them ideal for building interactive mobile or web backends, latency sensitive microservices, and synchronously invoked APIs. Read more about Provisioned Concurrency in the AWS Lambda documentation.

Amazon EKS now supports containerized applications that require access to EC2 instance metadata using the IMDSv2 format.

We’ve introduced the following 5 fields to the instance metadata service: region, placement group name, partition number, host ID, and availability zone-ID. You can use these fields after launch or while your instance is running to understand your instance location. This is useful for populating the region for your AWS environment. Additionally, these fields help you identify your instance placement information within an availability zone.  

Earlier this year, we launched VPC Prefix List, a feature that allows you to group multiple CIDR blocks into a single object, and use it as a reference to simplify network configuration. Today, we are adding Prefix Lists support to AWS Transit Gateway, making it easier for you to manage Transit Gateway route tables.

Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, allows you to select from available popular third-party agents to install and manage on your instances. With this launch, you can select to install the pre-built Dynatrace OneAgent directly from Distributor without having to create or maintain any software packages. AWS will continue to seek opportunities to offer many other popular security and monitoring agents.  

ThreatAlert® ATO Acceleration is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from stackArmor, an AWS Security Competency Partner. ThreatAlert® ATO Acceleration provides FedRAMP, FISMA, ITAR, HIPAA, DFARS & CMMC compliance acceleration on AWS & AWS GovCloud. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that includes rapid solution enablement using a Discover, Design, and Deployment sprints methodology; end-to-end integration of security services including log configuration, agent deployment, and setup of alerts and dashboards for critical and auditable events; documentation; and control statements as well as ongoing solution support.

AWS Firewall Manager now supports security groups on Application Load Balancers and Classic Load Balancers, allowing you to centrally configure and audit security groups associated with these resource types, across multiple accounts in your organization. Firewall Manager today supports security groups associated with EC2 instances and Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs). With this launch, you can now utilize Firewall Manager’s capabilities to also centrally manage security groups associated with Application Load Balancers and Classic Load Balancers. You can audit security groups associated with these resource types to ensure they are only accessing IP CIDRs or ports mandated by your organization. You can use pre-packaged audit rules provided by Firewall Manager, or customize your own audit rules to check for non-compliance. For example, you can audit existing security group rules on Application Load Balancers to ensure they are only accessing the CloudFront IPs you have listed. Similarly, you can also define a Firewall Manager policy to specify security groups with a baseline set of inbound and outbound rules that you want associated with your load balancers. Only requests that comply with the inbound rules can reach your load balancers, and the load balancers will only distribute requests that meet the outbound rules. Furthermore, with Firewall Manager, you can auto-remediate any non-compliant rules and get a detailed list of violations on your Firewall Manager console.

Amazon is extending long-term support (LTS) for Amazon Corretto 8 from June 2023 to May 2026 and for Amazon Corretto 11 from August 2024 to September 2027. Long-term support (LTS) for Corretto includes security updates and specific performance enhancements released at least quarterly. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney) regions. Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances for a broad spectrum of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, CPU-based machine learning inference, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches.

Amazon Transcribe now supports speaker labeling for streaming transcription. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to convert speech-to-text. In live audio transcription, each stream of audio may contain multiple speakers. Now you can conveniently turn on the ability to label speakers, thus helping to identify who is saying what in the output transcript.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports encryption in-transit, encryption at-rest, and Redis authentication tokens to protect your data with additional security controls in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. 

You can now use additional encryption, integrity, and key exchange algorithms for your VPN connections. These advanced algorithms provide higher security to protect your data, higher performance for faster transfer rates, and help meet compliance requirements. These algorithms are available as tunnel options for new and existing VPN connections and can be accessed through the AWS Management console, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). These algorithms listed below provide customers with more flexibility to choose configurations that best suit their security, performance, and compliance requirements. 

We are pleased to announce the launch of six free new digital courses to help developers quickly ramp up contact centers using Amazon Connect. These advanced on-demand courses are designed for developers and technical professionals at customer and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner organizations who work with contact center technologies.

Today we are introducing three courses created specifically for our APN Partner community! The first, AWS Solutions Training for Partners: IoT on AWS (Business), is a four-hour classroom course designed for account managers, business owners, and pre-sales representatives at AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner organizations. This intermediate-level course provides an overview of current market trends and AWS products and services for the Internet of Things (IoT). Partners will learn how to describe the AWS IoT value proposition, identify and qualify IoT opportunities, handle customer objections, discuss pricing considerations, and help accelerate IoT adoption. Enroll today!

You can now configure your Amazon Connect contact-center to automatically resolve to the best sounding version of a Polly Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice. Instead of manually updating the settings within every ‘Set voice’ block, administrators can configure their contact-center once and every TTS prompt would auto-resolve to the best available voice, saving time and effort. For example, businesses could have their contact-centers resolve to Joanna conversational without updating a single flow. To get started, select the best available voice toggle from within the Amazon Connect console. 

With this update, you can now view Amazon CloudWatch graphs to monitor the health and performance of your AWS resources from OpsCenter, a feature of Systems Manager, without navigating across multiple consoles. OpsCenter enables you to view, investigate, and resolve operational items, also known as OpsItems, for AWS resources.

Amazon Chime introduces Amazon Voice Focus, deep learning based noise suppression to reduce unwanted noise from meetings. 

AWS Launch Wizard now allows customers to more easily deploy SQL Server Always On workloads in two new AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain). AWS Launch Wizard offers a guided way to size, configure, and deploy AWS resources for SQL Always On applications with an easy to use wizard. It provides resource recommendations and is integrated with AWS compute, storage, management, logging, monitoring, and security services to orchestrate SQL Server deployments taking AWS Best Practices into consideration. AWS Launch Wizard frees up resources from undifferentiated infrastructure build activities so AWS customers can focus their resources on activities with higher added-value. 

The open source Amplify Framework, a suite of libraries and tools for mobile and front-end web developers, now offers support for Flutter developers. Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google for developing applications for Android and iOS from a single codebase. Today’s Amplify Flutter Developer Preview provides libraries and a CLI toolchain that enable Flutter developers to build scalable and secure cloud-powered applications. You can use libraries with backends created using the Amplify CLI or with existing AWS backends.

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 South America (Sao Paulo) 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. 

Amazon Textract is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents and goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Customers can now create Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs that route requests to AWS AppConfig, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon SQS, and AWS Step Functions. With these new integrations, customers can easily create APIs and webhooks for their business logic hosted in these AWS services. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) and Tape Retention Lock on Tape Gateway virtual tapes, providing you data protection features to meet regulatory compliance. 

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now gives you control over who you can watch your live streams. When you want to gate your content, you can use the playback authorization feature to restrict your streams by channel and viewer. Playback authorization manages access to video playlists.

You can now centrally discover, plan, and track your migrations into any commercial AWS region from the Migration Hub in the EU (Ireland) & EU (London) Regions. 

The AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) is a new tool that lets you define and use AWS service resources directly from Kubernetes. With ACK, you can take advantage of AWS managed services for your Kubernetes applications without needing to define resources outside of the cluster or run services that provide supporting capabilities like databases or message queues within the cluster. 

Amazon Personalize now makes it easier to create personalized recommendations for fast-changing catalogs of books, movies, music, news articles, and more, improving recommendations by up to 50% (measured by click-through rate) with just a few clicks in the AWS console. Without needing to change any application code, Amazon Personalize enables customers to include completely new products and fresh content in their usual recommendations, so that the best new products and content is discovered, clicked, purchased, or consumed by end-users an order of magnitude more quickly than other recommendation systems.  

You can now use Service Quotas in EU (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) regions to view and manage your service quotas at scale as your AWS workloads grow.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) customers can now add or remove email addresses in bulk from their account-level suppression list. The account-level suppression list prevents you from sending email to addresses that previously produced a bounce or complaint event. When you configure the account-level suppression list, you specify whether addresses should be added to the list when they result in hard bounces, when they result in complaints, or both. Previously, you were only able to manually add or remove individual email addresses from the account-level suppression list, which was a time consuming process, especially for customers who were onboarding to the Amazon SES account-level suppression list.  

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, is now generally available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.  

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams announces two new API features that simplify applications that consume data from Kinesis Data streams. The first feature is an optional filtering field in the ListShards API that enables you to set filtering criteria for the shards that you want to list from a data stream. For example, you can now use a timestamp filter to list shards with data at a certain time point. The second feature is a new field called ChildShards in the GetRecords and the SubscribeToShards APIs that enables you to discover child shards of a closed shard (without having to use the ListShards API to list all closed and open shards). Applications consuming data from Kinesis Data Streams can use this new field to efficiently transition reading from a closed shard to reading from its child shard. This is a common use case encountered by consuming applications when a shard is closed due to stream scaling operations.  

AWS DataSync now supports filtering for the ListTasks and ListLocations API calls, enabling you to easily retrieve configuration of data transfer tasks, using filters such as the source or destination for the data transfer. With this new capability, you can automate the set up and monitoring of workloads that involve hundreds of DataSync tasks. 

AWS RoboMaker is introducing WorldForge, a capability that streamlines testing and training robots in simulation by making it faster, simpler, and less expensive to create a multitude of virtual 3D worlds. Building virtual worlds is required to test and train robotics applications in simulation, and before RoboMaker WorldForge, the process could require months of time and substantial expense for robotics companies. You can now easily create simulation worlds in RoboMaker WorldForge and use them in RoboMaker simulation run for testing.

AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser. Cloud9 is excited to offer enhanced VPC support for customers using the Cloud9 IDE. This release adds support for creating Cloud9 environments in a private subnet with no ingress and optionally no egress.

AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions enable customers using contact center solutions to leverage off-the-shelf functionality powered by machine learning like text-to-speech, translation, enterprise search, chatbots, business intelligence, and language comprehension. AWS CCI solutions allow customers to gain greater efficiencies and deliver increasingly tailored customer experiences within their existing contact center platform—with no machine learning expertise required. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers can now run production workloads using Arm-based instances including the recently launched Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) pods running on AWS Fargate can now mount Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file systems. AWS Fargate will use the EFS CSI driver to automatically mount an EFS file system requested by a pod running on Fargate, without the need for manual driver installation. This enables persistent, regional, shared storage to be used by pods running on AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine which allows customers to deploy and manage containerized applications without having to manage any of the underlying infrastructure.

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) makes it easy to build the workflows required for human review of machine learning predictions such as predictions from Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, or Amazon SageMaker. You now have the capability to delete HumanTaskUI using Amazon A2I. A HumanTaskUI resource defines the HTML template used to render the worker UI and tools for human review tasks. You can start using this feature by visiting the Worker task templates section on the Amazon A2I console, choose the worker template you would like to delete and click on the delete button. You can also use DeleteHumanTaskUI API to delete the task UI resources. After you delete a task UI, the task UI no longer appears on the Worker task templates section on the Amazon Augmented AI console. After deleting, if you use the task UI name as input to the API operations DescribeHumanTaskUi or DeleteHumanTaskUi, Amazon A2I will return a ResourceNotFound error. Any existing human loops will not be impacted, but you will no longer be able to start new human loops for deleted human task UI. To delete human loops or Flow definition, read more here.   

Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Classic Load Balancer (CLB) now support HTTP Desync Mitigation Mode, a new feature that protects your application from issues due to HTTP Desync. Modern day web applications are typically built with a chain of proxies that ensure fast and reliable communication between clients and servers. While these proxies follow a standard mechanism to parse RFC 7230 compliant HTTP/1.1 requests, they may have differences in interpretation while parsing non-compliant requests. These differences in interpretation can cause Desync where different proxies in the chain may disagree on request boundaries and therefore may not process the same request. This could leave behind arbitrary messages that may be prepended to the next request in the queue and smuggled to the backend. Ultimately, request smuggling can make applications vulnerable to request queue or cache poisoning, which could lead to credential hijacking or execution of unauthorized commands. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports using launch templates to customize EC2 instance settings for nodes managed by EKS. When combined, managed node groups with launch templates make it simple to add and update nodes in your cluster, while adhering to any level of specialized security or compliance requirements.

Amazon Connect enables customers to easily copy and paste blocks within and between flows. Now, administrators can select, cut, copy, and paste a complete flow or multiple blocks within or across flows. Any configured settings, layout arrangements, and connections are persisted, reducing errors and saving time when duplicating functionality or editing.  

Today, we are announcing the release of Amplify iOS 1.1. This new release adds built-in support for Combine, a framework by Apple which makes it much easier for Swift developers to make asynchronous API calls. Amplify iOS is part of the open source Amplify Framework and makes it easy for developers to build iOS apps with AWS-powered functionality, such as Auth, Data, Storage, and Analytics.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports sharing a Private CA with any AWS account or within your organization. Customers manage a Private CA in a central account and use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share the CA with other accounts or organizations where SSL/TLS certificates will be issued. This eliminates the need to provision duplicate resources in every account in a multi-account environment, reducing the cost and complexity of managing those resources in every account.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports enabling monitoring for resources provisioned via CloudFormation templates. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers easily setup monitoring and enhanced observability for AWS resources. Now this same easy setup can be done via simple JSON or YAML commands added to your CloudFormation template that automatically add CloudWatch Application Insights monitoring to the resources and applications you deploy as part of the provisioning process. 

AWS Site-to-Site VPN now supports IPv6 traffic for VPN connections to AWS Transit Gateway. With this launch, you can now use IPv6 addressing for traffic between your customer gateway device and your resources in AWS. If you use IPv6 addresses for your resources in Amazon Virtual Private Clouds and on-premises data center or office sites, you can now communicate securely between them using AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections.  

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics from text. No ML expertise required. You can use Custom Entity Recognition to identify terms that are specific to your domain. For example, you can instantly extract product names, financial entities or any term relevant to you from unstructured text documents. Starting today, Amazon Comprehend is adding support for the following five new languages to Custom Entity Recognition: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.  

AWS Transfer Family now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints in US and Canada commercial AWS Regions to protect sensitive information. These endpoints terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions using a FIPS 140-2 compliant cryptographic software module, making it easier for you to use Transfer Family for regulated workloads.  

Customers can now connect to meetings from the Amazon Chime app or Amazon Chime SDK in Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS Regions. Additionally, Amazon Chime SDK customers can connect to meetings in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Regions. 

You can now control whether contact center agents hear early media audio, such as busy signals, failure to connect errors, or other informational messages when making outbound calls. Previously Amazon Connect played standard ring back sounds during the call connection for agents even when phone companies could not complete calls and potential retries were attempted. Now, with a simple click in the AWS console, you can enable early media audio in Amazon Connect, and your agents can hear if the state of a dialed number is invalid, has been changed or disconnected, is busy, or another issue prevented completing the call. For example, agents can now terminate a call attempt more quickly based on a busy signal or update their records for contacts that changed or disconnected their phone number. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) today launched the new Amazon ECS Optimized Inferentia Amazon Machine Image (AMI), a new Amazon Linux 2 based AMI for the Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances on ECS. This makes it easy for customers to run Inferentia based containers on ECS using the ECS Optimized Inferentia AMI which comes pre-baked with all the necessary AWS Neuron packages. 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now allows you to scale your Redis Clusters up to 500 nodes. Redis (cluster mode enabled) configuration allows you to partition your data across multiple shards and offers better scalability, performance, and availability. With this announcement, you can double your cluster size from 250 nodes to 500 nodes, thereby supporting larger memory storage capacity of up to 340 TB of memory and improved throughput per cluster. You can choose to configure a 500-node cluster that ranges between 83 shards (one master and five replicas per shard) and 500 shards (single master and no replicas). 

Starting today, you can enable the native desktop experience for your Amazon AppStream 2.0 fleets. Previously, AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions only showed the windows of the applications that were launched. With this launch, you can enable Desktop View on your fleet, which provides the same desktop experience your users are used to with the existing non-persistent capabilities AppStream 2.0 provides. You can enable the Desktop View when you create a new fleet, or update a stopped fleet. To get started, see Create a Fleet in the Amazon AppStream 2.0 Administration Guide. 

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from virtually any document. One advantage of services like Textract is that customers benefit from continuous improvement over time. Today, we are pleased to announce one such quality enhancement to our table recognition feature. The new model detects rows and columns of large tables that span an entire page more accurately. Overall table detection and extraction of data/text within tables has also been improved.

AWS License Manager now allows customers to enforce assignment rules when they bring their own licenses to EC2 Dedicated Hosts. Software licenses such as Windows Server and SQL Server often require customers to keep the licenses assigned to dedicated hardware for a specified period. Customers can now manage such assignment rules using AWS License Manager by specifying the period for which the license should remain assigned to EC2 Dedicated Hosts. 

Amazon Connect now returns agent to previous status (e.g. Available, Offline, Custom status) after hanging up an outbound call and completing after contact work from the Contact Control Panel (CCP). Previously, agent status was automatically set to Available even if agent had been in a Custom or Offline state before making the outbound call. 

Today, AWS Copilot CLI for Amazon Elastic Container Service launched version 0.3.0. Starting with this release, you can configure details about an AWS Copilot environment such as a pre-existing VPC, subnets, and CIDR ranges, allowing you to use infrastructure created outside of AWS Copilot. Additionally, you can now configure how AWS Copilot builds your services with overrides, such as arguments to use in a Dockerfile and the ability to set a context for a Dockerfile. Finally, you can now run one-time tasks or batch jobs with the new task run command; this is useful for containers that do not always need to be running or restarted such as running a script or querying a database.

Customers can now get deeper insight into how Amazon API Gateway processes requests thanks to new access logging variables. These new access logging variables allow customers to see a step-by-step breakdown of an API call’s phases, latencies, and status codes. 

AWS Step Functions announces enhancements to Amazon States Language, making it easier for you to build workflows. Customers now have more flexibility within their state machine definition and allow for more dynamic behaviour within their workflow application with enhanced Choice and Task states.

Customer AI is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Peak, an AWS Retail and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Customer AI helps with acquisition and retention, allowing companies to target and acquire ideal customers to grow revenues, increase profits, and drive a higher ROI from marketing campaigns. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in activities that include AI opportunity identification, data analysis, business case creation to operationalize AI and custom configuration of a Customer AI System.

Customer AI is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Peak, an AWS Retail and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Customer AI helps with acquisition and retention, allowing companies to target and acquire ideal customers to grow revenues, increase profits, and drive a higher ROI from marketing campaigns. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in activities that include AI opportunity identification, data analysis, business case creation to operationalize AI and custom configuration of a Customer AI System.

Amazon Braket is a fully managed quantum computing service that helps researchers and developers explore potential applications and evaluate current quantum computing technologies. Amazon Braket provides a development environment to design quantum algorithms, test them on simulated quantum computers, and run them on different types of quantum computing hardware.

Starting today, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of Support cases across your AWS accounts, to help you get better visibility into the operational health of your AWS environment. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. AWS Support provides tools and technology, people, and programs designed to proactively fix issues and help you optimize performance, lower costs, and innovate faster.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows customers to more easily deploy SAP workloads in four new AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan). With this release, customers can now deploy SAP using Launch Wizard in 20 regions including US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm and Milan), South America (Sao Paulo), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney), Middle East (Bahrain), and Africa (Cape Town). AWS Launch Wizard is also available in AWS GovCloud (US), AWS Regions 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 has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances in US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Tokyo). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which Amazon custom-designed to provide customers with the lowest cost-per-inference in the cloud and lower barriers for everyday developers to use machine learning at scale.  

(Note: This post was updated February 23, 2021 for clarity on functionality)

Starting today, new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5ad instances featuring 2nd generation AMD EPYC™ processors running at frequencies up to 3.3 GHz are generally available. Amazon EC2 C5ad instances are variants of the recently launched C5a instances and are equipped with local NVMe-based SSD block level storage physically connected to the host server. C5ad instances provide high performance processing at 10% lower cost over comparable instances. These instances are ideal for applications that need temporary storage of data, such as batch and log processing and applications that need caches and scratch files. These instances are also a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage, such as video encoding, image manipulation and other forms of media processing. With the option of NVMe-based SSD instance storage, C5a customers now have additional storage choices for their most compute-intensive workloads.

Amazon QuickSight now supports folders for organization and sharing. Personal folders allow admins and authors to organize and manage content within their user accounts. Authors and admins can create personal folders and add dashboards, analyses and data sets in them. Personal folders are private to each author/admin and do not affect permissions of assets stored within. Shared folders allow admins and authors to simplify sharing and permissions management over 1000s of dashboards, analyses and data sets, while providing readers with a hierarchical discovery model for information within the team/organization. Shared folders must first be created by QuickSight Admins, who can then grant access to authors and readers. Assets placed in a shared folder will be shared with users at the permission level (owner or viewer) that users have to the folder. Personal and Shared folders are accessible to users from QuickSight's new home page. This new home page has direct links to favorites and recently accessed items, folders and provides sections specific to dashboards, analyses and data sets, with choice of a new responsive thumbnail view or a list view. Read more about folders in this AWS Big Data blog post.

You can now use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute UDP traffic to container-based applications running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Network Load Balancers are fully-managed load balancers that operate at the connection level (Layer-4) and are capable of handling millions of requests at ultra-low latency. Until now, you could use Network Load Balancers on Amazon EKS only with the TCP protocol. With this new integration, you can run workloads such as DNS, IoT, real-time media, and syslog using UDP protocol, allowing high throughput at ultra low latency through the Network Load Balancer.

The Improving Forecast Accuracy with Machine Learning is an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated pipeline for generating, testing, and comparing Amazon Forecast models and forecasts allowing developers and data scientists to reduce either the overhead costs of developing new forecasts or the time required to optimize existing ones.

CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor your REST APIs, URLs, and website content every minute, 24x7, and alerts you when your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. CloudWatch Synthetics enables you to continually verify your customer experience even when there is no customer traffic on your applications. This lets you discover issues before your customers do and react quickly to fix them.

AWS Transfer Family now offers pre-defined security policies to control cryptographic algorithms used for communication between your end users’ file transfer clients and AWS Transfer Family server endpoints, helping you meet your organization’s requirements for security and compatibility.  

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using custom runtimes on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. You can read more about the custom runtimes in the AWS Lambda documentation. 

You can now develop AWS Lambda functions using Java 8 (Corretto). Amazon Corretto 8 is a no-cost, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK 8 that comes with long-term support. Lambda functions written in Java 8 (Corretto) run on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. You can read more about the Java programming model in the AWS Lambda documentation. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, today announced new Hard Disk Drive (HDD) storage options that make it even more cost effective to power any compute workload with a fast, shared file system. When creating shared file systems for compute workloads, you can now choose between existing SSD storage options and two new HDD storage options, each offering different levels of performance. The HDD options reduce storage costs by up to 80% for throughput-intensive workloads that don’t require the sub-millisecond latencies of SSD storage, including genome analysis, financial simulations, and seismic data processing.

On Aug 12th, 2020, AWS IoT Device Defender launched Audit Finding Suppression. The new capability allows you to choose which audit findings you want to see and turn off non-compliant findings for specific resources - this can be either because you are working towards fixing related issues or because the resources are known to be non-compliant, such as test or broken devices. In addition, you can configure audit finding suppressions for a defined period of time or indefinitely.  

Amazon ElastiCache now allows you to assign permissions to specific resources in AWS IAM policies. You can now assign an IAM principal permissions to specific ElastiCache resource or resources. Prior to this release, Amazon ElastiCache did not support resource level permissions; customers could only assign permissions to all resources for a given action. With this release you can be fine-grained in your IAM policies and allow access to specific ElastiCache resources. For example, you can allow administrators in your organization to create production ElastiCache clusters and restrict other principals from modifying those specific clusters. This provides you with the flexibility to meet your enterprise security and compliance standards.

Amazon Cognito User Pools now enables customers to choose how long their access and refresh tokens should be valid. Access tokens can be configured to expire in as little as five minutes or as long as 24 hours. Refresh tokens can be configured to expire in as little as one hour or as long as ten years. These customizations enable Amazon Cognito customers to balance the security and usability of each application they develop. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using Go on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. You can read more about the Go programming model in the AWS Lambda documentation.

Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to install and manage a popular third party agent. With this launch, you can select a pre-built agent directly from Distributor without having to create or maintain any software packages. The Trend Micro Cloud One agent is the first agent offered. AWS will continue to seek opportunities to offer many other popular security and monitoring agents.

Starting today, you can stop and restart your workflows in AWS Glue giving you more control over the orchestration of your Glue ETL workloads. Additionally, you can specify the maximum number of concurrent runs for your Glue workflow.

Amazon Neptune now allows you to visualize your graph using the Neptune Workbench. Graphs store relationships, and customers find it easy to visualize the nodes, edges, and properties to navigate their graphs or see patterns. Developers writing Gremlin or SPARQL queries can now view their query results and visually select nodes or properties in the Workbench.

Amazon EC2 G4 instances which provide industry’s most cost-effective GPU platform for deploying machine learning models in production and graphics-intensive applications are now available in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS regions, bringing the total number of available regions to 22. 

Amazon S3 Access Points now support the Copy API, allowing customers to copy data to and from access points within an AWS Region. S3 Access Points simplify managing data access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3, such as usage and transaction logs for analytics, and post-processing. S3 Access Points are unique hostnames that you can create to enforce distinct and precise permissions and network controls for any request made through the access point.

We’re excited to announce the launch of AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation, a reference implementation that includes a library of automated security response and remediation actions to common security findings. The AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation solution makes it easier for customers to resolve common security findings and improve their security posture in AWS.

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and EU (Frankfurt) regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. 

Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to generate accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience for inventory planning, workforce planning, energy demand forecasting and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting. This technology has been developed from over 20 years of forecasting at Amazon.com. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service, so there are no servers to provision, and no machine learning models to build, train, or deploy. 

AWS Storage Gateway expands international availability of the AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance to several AWS Regions in Asia Pacific, South America, and Canada, and streamlines ordering through the AWS Console. The hardware appliance is now available for shipping to more international destinations in addition to the US and Europe. The ordering process is now streamlined to comply with corporate procurement policies for purchasing IT equipment. Customers can now request sales quotes and submit purchase orders directly on the AWS Console. 

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next-generation, memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R5 nodes for high-performance applications. R5 nodes are based on the AWS Nitro System and feature enhanced networking based on the Elastic Network Adapter. Memory-optimized R5 nodes offer memory size flexibility from 16 to 768 GiB. 

The Multi-Region Infrastructure Deployment solution make it easier to set up a multi-region architectures, supports controlled updates and maintain consistency of workloads. The solution automatically provisions and configures AWS CodePipeline to automate the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for validating and deploy AWS CloudFormation templates into a primary and secondary region.  

We’re excited to announce a new digital course, Configure and Deploy AWS PrivateLink. This hour-long course teaches network engineers, systems administrators, and cloud architects how to configure and deploy AWS PrivateLink using the AWS Management Console. The course includes presentations and a video demonstration.

You can now use AWS CodeDeploy to deploy applications to your virtual private cloud (VPC) through VPC endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink. With this feature, you can use CodeDeploy to deploy your critical, internal applications without using an Internet gateway, public IP addresses, or a VPN connection. AWS PrivateLink provides secure connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet or leave the Amazon network.

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions for the chatbot. The solution makes use of AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, to implement the machine learning logic of the chatbot and Amazon Polly to turn text responses into lifelike speech.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce v5.0 now provides CTI Flows which allows customers to build agent interactions with a drag and drop UI within Salesforce Lightning or Classic. CTI Flows consist of process blocks that enable you to easily design agent workflows within our Salesforce integration. This version supports screen-pop of accounts, cases or contacts from Amazon Connect voice or chat contacts, handle call disposition and activity management, and enable outbound calling such as click-to-call. In addition to CTI Flows, this release includes improvements for security profiles, Amazon Connect chat interactions, and Amazon Connect Salesforce Serverless updates for Salesforce queries and AWS Secrets Manager.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5a instances have expanded availability to include AWS Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), US West (N. California) and Canada (Central) Regions. In addition, 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes of Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances are now available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics in text. Amazon Comprehend now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so customers can securely initiate API calls to Amazon Comprehend from within your VPC and without using public IPs. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network, while significantly simplifying your internal network architecture. You no longer need to use an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices, or firewall proxies to connect to Amazon Comprehend.  

AWS Fargate for AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is now included in Compute Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that allows customers to save money in exchange for making a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term. These plans automatically apply to usage across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate, and now Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate. Existing Savings Plans will automatically apply to EKS on Fargate usage from August 1, 2020.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs customers can now use the AWS::EC2::FlowLog resource to create custom format VPC flow logs with enriched metadata fields and publish them to either CloudWatch Logs or S3, capture VPC flow logs at shorter aggregation intervals of up to 1-minute for quicker and more granular network visibility, and tag existing or new VPC flow log subscriptions, all directly through AWS CloudFormation.

IoT Foundations is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via consulting engagement from Trek10, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner with the AWS DevOps, AWS IoT Consulting and AWS SaaS Consulting Competencies. IoT Foundations is intended for those that want to create and connect devices to an AWS IoT infrastructure. Devices can be conceptual, pre-production, or ready to go to market – regardless of the device stage, IoT Foundations can scale and provide benefits. 

AWS Glue version 2.0 featuring 10x faster Spark ETL job start times, is now generally available. With Glue version 2.0, job startup is faster and more consistent. In addition, AWS Glue version 2.0 Spark jobs will be billed in 1-second increments with a 1-minute minimum rather than a 10 minute minimum. As a result, customers can now run micro-batch, deadline sensitive, and interactive workloads more cost effectively. Customers can run micro-batch jobs to quickly load data lakes, data warehouses, and databases and enable real-time analytics. With faster job start times, customers can run SLA driven data pipelines more reliably. Faster job start times also enable interactive data exploration and experimentation. 

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for local printer redirection with the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With local printer redirection, AppStream 2.0 users can redirect print jobs from their streaming application to a printer that is connected to their local computer. No printer driver needs to be installed on the AppStream 2.0 streaming instance to enable users to print documents during their streaming sessions.  

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced the availability of additional network metrics for containers using the EC2 launch type in either bridge or awsvpc networking modes. You can now measure the rate of network traffic to and from your containers in both ECS Container Insights in Amazon CloudWatch or the ECS task metadata endpoint. This lets you measure bytes transmitted or received per second to see whether your containers are processing requests from the internet or other applications. Additionally on the task metadata endpoint, you can measure packets received, transmitted, or lost for containers using awsvpc mode and EC2 launch type.

Customers can use wildcard custom domain names to easily create multiple URLs that route to one Amazon API Gateway HTTP API. This update extends API Gateway’s current support for wildcard custom domain names to include HTTP APIs. 

You can now govern the virtual private cloud (VPC) settings for your Lambda functions using IAM condition keys. Using these condition keys, you can enforce that users only deploy functions that are connected to a VPC. VPC-enabled functions send all traffic through your VPC and abide by your VPC’s network controls. You can use these network controls to define where your functions can connect. You can also restrict access to network locations, including the public internet.

Amazon CloudFront announces a new Regional Edge Cache located in AWS’ Europe (Ireland) Region. As part of this launch, a small number of CloudFront Edge locations that sent their origin requests through the Regional Edge Cache in the London Region will now go through the Ireland Region. Because of their proximity to Ireland, or more direct connections to Ireland, these Edge locations will see as much as a 62% reduction in latency fetching content from the Ireland Regional Edge Cache than the London Regional Edge Cache. 

Amazon EC2 is now available through VPC endpoints in the Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) regions, allowing you to access Amazon EC2 from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is now available in AWS Africa (Cape Town) and AWS Europe (Milan) Regions. 

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Today, we are launching natural language understanding improvements and confidence scores on Amazon Lex. We continuously improve the service based on customer feedback and advances in research. The natural language understanding improvements enable better intent classification accuracy. Confidence scores indicate the likelihood of a certain intent and can be used to enhance conversation design.

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in the Europe (Milan) AWS Region. 

VPC-In-A-Box℠ is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Foghorn, an AWS DevOps and AWS Security Competency Partner. VPC-In-A-Box℠ demystifies, simplifies, and accelerates Amazon VPC creation, configuration, and optimization, to seamlessly connect to AWS Availability Zones within AWS Regions around the world. Customers that request this consulting offer will take part in a three-step engagement that delivers a custom Amazon VPC configuration.

Amazon Neptune is now available in South America (São Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Regions. You can now create Neptune clusters using R5 and T3 instance types in these regions for your graph applications.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Custom Language Models (CLM) for Amazon Transcribe. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Unlike the Custom Vocabulary feature, which enhances speech recognition for a discrete list of out-of-lexicon terms, CLM allows you to leverage pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine tailored for your transcription use case. Amazon Transcribe customers who operate in domains as diverse as law, finance, hospitality, insurance, and media all stand to benefit.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on Verizon’s 5G Network in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area, beginning in San Jose today and extending to the rest of the Bay Area in the coming weeks. Wavelength embeds AWS compute and storage services at the edge of communications service providers’ 5G networks while providing seamless access to cloud services running in an AWS Region. AWS Wavelength minimizes the latency and network hops required to connect to an application hosted in AWS from 5G devices. Developers can now deploy use cases that require ultra-low latency, such as inference at the edge, connected cars, smart cities and factories, Internet of Things (IoT), and interactive live video and game streaming.

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

Amazon Neptune announced a new engine release that introduces an alternative query engine (DFE) in lab mode that can significantly speed up query execution by improving the resource utilization of database instances. DFE runs both SPARQL and Gremlin queries, and supports a wide variety of plan types, including left-deep, bushy, and hybrid plans. 

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs for Snapshots are available in the Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) Regions. Using Amazon EBS direct APIs, customers can create snapshots of their block storage data, regardless of where it resides, including data on-premises. This enables customers to achieve business continuity in AWS at a lower cost and use the existing Fast Snapshot Restore feature to quickly recover this data into Amazon EBS volumes for use cases like disaster recovery. 

Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to generate accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience for inventory planning, workforce planning, energy demand forecasting and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting. This technology has been perfected from over 20 years of forecasting development at Amazon.com. 

We’re excited to announce that customers will be able to create up to 1,000 Active Jobs per AWS account per connected region. The prior limit was 100 active continuous jobs and 100 active snapshot jobs per AWS account. This new limit will apply to the total number of Jobs created - including both, continuous and snapshot jobs. The new limit applies to all commercial AWS regions where AWS IoT Device Management is available. The higher limits are reflected in your account automatically and you do not have to take any action. If your account has an approved limit that is higher than this new limit, you will continue to have the higher limit.

Knowledge Work Automator is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer from Pariveda which helps customers reduce the manual labor associated with knowledge work by using AI to automate repetitive tasks. Vast amounts of unstructured data must be sifted through in several industries: in Healthcare, for patient notes, in manufacturing for engineering drawings, in legal for case documents, and in financial services for tax documents. Bringing that dark data into the light creates efficiencies which can help save money across the organization.

Fog360 Security is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer, delivered via a consulting engagement from Foghorn, an AWS DevOps and AWS Security Competency Partner. Fog360 Security is a comprehensive security analysis and visualization service that updates and automates a previously complex and manual process. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that provides design intent, design reality and design the fix strategies for your organization.

Today we’re releasing a new way to interact with AWS Lambda data sources via GraphQL and AppSync: Direct Lambda Resolvers. With Direct Lambda Resolvers you can now build flexible GraphQL resolvers in the runtime of your choice, without VTL.

Now you can leverage new default mesh retry policy and connection pool configuration that simplifies building applications resilient to connection errors and improves application scalability. 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.

Genomics Tertiary Analysis and Machine Learning Using Amazon SageMaker is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that creates a scalable environment in AWS to develop machine learning models using genomics data, generate predictions, and evaluate model performance.

The AWS CodeDeploy Agent now has improved memory efficiency for Amazon Linux 2 (AL2), Ubuntu, and RHEL7 and added support for Ubuntu 19.10 and Ubuntu 20.04. Additionally, stability issues on Windows Server 2019 related to Disk Cleanup have been fixed. With this release AWS CodeDeploy has included AL2 and Windows Server 2019 as officially supported operating systems, making it easier to update AL2 and Windows Server 2019 applications hosted on Amazon EC2 and on-premises instances.

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.

You can now include Amazon SageMaker Processing in your machine learning workflows created using AWS Step Functions, allowing you to build data processing and compute steps into your machine learning workflows without leaving the SageMaker service.

The Live Streaming on AWS solution demonstrates how to ingest, transcode, and deliver live streaming video with high availability and at scale. Built with AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaPackage, this solution is designed to provide high levels of resilience by using a standard MediaLive channel with dual inputs and outputs as well as redundant inputs for MediaPackage. This solution provides multiple output formats for playback which are delivered through Amazon CloudFront for global distribution. 

Starting today, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now offers PrivateLink endpoints. ACM Private CA support for AWS PrivateLink enables you to use ACM Private CA APIs inside of your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and route data between your VPC and Private CA entirely within the AWS network.

You can specify up to fifteen EC2 instance types in Amazon EMR instance fleets using the capacity-optimized allocation strategy to diversify your Spot instance requests and get steep discounts. Previously, Instance Fleets allowed only a maximum of five instance types.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.7 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This release contains bug fixes and improvements from the PostgreSQL community.

AWS Data Exchange now enables data providers to publish additional data sets to their existing products. Starting today, data providers who want to structure their data across multiple data sets or who want to enrich their products with additional data can now publish additional data sets to their products using the AWS Data Exchange console or programmatically using the AWS Marketplace Catalog API. Once a data set is added to a product, all new subscriptions will have access to the data set and existing subscribers will receive a CloudWatch Event notifying them of the availability of the new data set.

You can now view and manage your quotas (also referred to as limits) using Service Quotas for AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Service Quotas consolidates the default values and your account specific applied values for Fargate On-Demand and Fargate Spot resource count quotas in one single location. In addition, AWS Fargate now supports Amazon CloudWatch Usage Metrics, making it easier to get better visibility into the Fargate resource utilization in your account and proactively manage your quotas. With the CloudWatch Usage Metrics and Service Quotas integration, you can easily monitor Fargate resource usage against quotas and configure alarms to warn about usage approaching a service quota.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced CloudFormation support for adding Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) volumes to ECS tasks. Customers can automate the creation and management of tasks using EFS volumes through infrastructure as code.  

We are making a change to how we present Elastic Load Balancing charges in your AWS bill and Cost and Usage Reports to make it easier for you to understand your monthly Elastic Load Balancing spend. These changes will be effective in all AWS regions beginning August 2020.  

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE DCV version 2020.1 with the following new features:

• Support for printer redirection on DCV Windows server and client
• DCV Linux server support for Amazon EC2 6th generation Arm-based Graviton2 instances such as M6g/C6g/R6g
• Support for RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 on Linux server
• Stylus support with pressure sensitivity on MacOS and Linux native clients
• Hardware accelerated decoding and rendering support on MacOS native client
• Surround sound 5.1 support on Linux server and Linux native client

Customers of EC2 Image Builder can now develop and troubleshoot components to customize and test Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on their laptops or development & test servers.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) administrators can now view and manage their EKS quotas through AWS Service Quotas.