September 2020

You can now take all AWS Certification exams from home or any private space with online proctoring when you schedule with either test delivery provider, Pearson VUE or PSI. Online proctoring is available anywhere AWS Certification offers testing. For candidates in mainland China and South Korea, online proctored exams are available only via PSI.

Amazon S3 on Outposts delivers object storage to your on-premises AWS Outposts environment to meet local data processing and data residency needs. Using the S3 APIs and features, S3 on Outposts makes it easy to store, secure, tag, retrieve, report on, and control access to the data on your Outpost. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.  

Starting today, if you have live, 24x7 video distribution workflows, you can take advantage of discounted outbound data transfer pricing using AWS Elemental MediaConnect. With discounted outbound bandwidth, you can reduce outbound data transfer costs by as much as 70% based on current pricing. With a 12-month commitment to MediaConnect, you reserve outbound bandwidth in 50, 150, 500, and 1500 Mbps tiers in any region where MediaConnect is supported. Reserved outbound bandwidth covers traffic sent by MediaConnect to the internet. You are billed hourly for the reservation and any excess usage is billed at on-demand rates. For more information, see the MediaConnect pricing webpage.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the AWS Centralized WAF and VPC Security Group Management solution, a reference implementation that makes it easier to centrally configure, manage, and audit firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations. The solution uses AWS Firewall Manager to automatically deploy a set of Managed Rules for AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and audit checks for VPC security groups across all your AWS accounts from a single place. The solution also gives Shield Advanced customers the option to deploy DDoS protections across accounts.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can now use the self-service AWS Marketplace Management Portal to authorize their preferred consulting partners to resell their software to AWS Marketplace buyers. This launch enables ISVs and consulting partners to work together more efficiently to create a Consulting Partner Private Offer (CPPO), which allows customers to purchase software solutions in AWS Marketplace directly from consulting partners. ISVs and consulting partners can simplify their operations and accelerate deliver to their customers.

Amazon Connect has reduced five outbound telephony rates in Asia Pacific, including Australia by 50%. Starting September 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use contact center service, decreased the following outbound telephony rates: 

AWS Transfer Family is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed support for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS), and FTP directly into and out of Amazon S3.  

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now automatically expand storage of a MSK cluster, making it easier for you to continuously right-size the storage provisioned. Using Application Auto Scaling policies you set and control both the target cluster storage utilization threshold and a maximum storage limit. These policies will automatically trigger cluster-wide storage expansion by a required amount when the storage utilization threshold is exceeded. Automatic storage expansion is offered at no additional cost and can be used in all AWS regions where MSK is available excluding AWS Europe (Milan).

We are pleased to announce the preview release of AWS Common Runtime (CRT) HTTP Client - a new HTTP client supported in the AWS SDK for 2.x. AWS CRT HTTP Client is an asynchronous, non-blocking HTTP client built on top of the Java bindings of the AWS Common Runtime. Customers can choose to use the CRT HTTP client to benefit from features such as improved startup time, connection health checks, and post-quantum TLS support.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations are now available in the AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles (LA), California. With On-Demand Capacity Reservations support for AWS Local Zones, customers can now reserve capacity for their Amazon EC2 instances for any duration.  

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS Africa (Cape Town) regions. This regional expansion extends the availability of ACM PrivateCA across the globe, increasing the number of regions to 22, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Timestream is a new time series database for IoT, edge, and operational applications that can scale to process trillions of time series events per day up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases, and at as low as 1/10th the cost. Amazon Timestream saves customers effort and expense by keeping recent data in memory and moving historical data to a cost-optimized storage tier based upon user-defined policies. Its purpose-built query processing engine gives customers the ability to access and combine recent and historical data transparently across tiers with a single query, without needing to specify explicitly in the query whether the data resides in the in-memory or cost-optimized tier. 

AWS IoT Core now supports a new IoT rule action to stream time-series data from devices connected to AWS IoT Core directly to your Amazon Timestream database, without writing a single line of code.

The AWS Digital Workplace Competency supports users looking for AWS Partners with deep specialization and expertise in supporting remote workers and business continuity with end-to-end digital workplace solutions in the cloud. AWS Digital Workplace Competency ISV Partners can help reduce security risks and meet compliance requirements, while freeing end users from the office and enabling them to work securely on any device, from anywhere, at any time.

You can now use your GitHub Enterprise Server source repository to build, test, and deploy code changes using AWS CodePipeline.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.5.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.5.1 includes several bug fixes and new features, including encryption in-transit support for Apache ZooKeeper and admin clients (KIP-515). For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.5.0 and 2.5.1.

Starting today, AWS Resource Groups is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 

AWS CodePipeline Source Actions for AWS CodeCommit, GitHub.com, GitHub Enterprise Server, and Bitbucket.org now support cloning of your git repositories. With the new feature, when you create a connection to an external source provider in the Source Action, CodePipeline will clone the git repository to fetch the commit history and metadata.

AWS Client VPN is a managed, scalable, virtual private network service that enables users to securely access both AWS resources and on-premises networks. By enabling Client-to-Client connectivity in either the AWS Console or through the AWS CLI, a VPN client can establish a secure connection to another VPN client.

We’re excited to announce Amazon SageMaker now supports Apache Spark as a pre-built big data processing container. You can now use this container with Amazon SageMaker Processing and take advantage of a fully managed Spark environment for data processing or feature engineering workloads.

On September 30th, 2020, Amazon Pinpoint announced that customers can now trigger journeys based on an event generated by a user or endpoint. Journeys are multi-step campaigns that can be executed across channels like SMS, email, or push. Previously, journeys could only be triggered from a segment of your customers who shared the same attributes. Triggering a journey based on an application event, like adding a product to a cart or browsing to a specific page, enables organizations to create a more customized experience for users and improves the chance of them completing a high-value action.

Amazon QLDB launches index improvements to create indexes on non-empty tables. QLDB Indexes accelerate data retrieval and previously, all indexes needed to be created at the time of table creation. As customer data volumes grow, new data access patterns are required to meet business and performance requirements. Now, customers can utilize QLDB's index improvements to build new indexes on their existing tables, providing greater flexibility.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with Alcide, Blue Hexagon, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, and RSA Archer. Vectra AI’s Cognito integration with Security Hub is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). This brings the total number of AWS and partner product integrations available in Security Hub to 55. Further, KPMG is now certified as Security Hub’s first consulting partner. To learn more, visit the Integration pages in the Security Hub console and click on the "Configuration" link for the partner to learn more about the integration and how to set it up.  

Amazon Textract is a fully managed machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from virtually any document. Amazon Textract offers you both synchronous and asynchronous APIs to choose based on the fit for each use case. With the asynchronous APIs, you can retrieve the extracted information using the GetDocumentTextDetection or the GetDocumentAnalysis APIs. Today, we are introducing an additional option to direct the Textract output to your own Amazon S3 buckets. With this new option, you can specify the Amazon S3 bucket name, and also a prefix to be added to the output file. You can still choose to use the Get APIs if you prefer. This new Amazon S3 output option provides you with greater flexibility to integrate Amazon Textract into your broader technical architectures. 

Customers now can use D-Wave’s Advantage system on the Amazon Braket quantum computing service. The new Advantage quantum processing unit (QPU) has more than 5000 qubits with 15-way connectivity to enable researchers and developers to explore larger, more complex quantum optimization problems.

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry now adds support for JSON Schema, allowing customers to validate, annotate, and manipulate JSON documents conforming to JSON Schema Draft 4 specification. You now have access to more specifications when creating schemas and can use JSON Schema to create strongly typed events. You can also implement use cases such as client-side validation using a JSON Schema validator before publishing events on the EventBridge bus. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) integrates with AWS Systems Manager to simplify management of Amazon EFS clients. You can now use AWS Systems Manager to automate the tasks required to install the latest version of the Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils) package on your Amazon EC2 instances maintaining compliance and security by ensuring that the Amazon EFS client is kept up to date. Additionally, you can orchestrate file system mounts to multiple instances using a single command and improve visibility by monitoring the file system mount status using CloudWatch Logs. You do not need to login to your Amazon EC2 instances to manage your Amazon EFS clients.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog with 8000+ software listings and data products, has announced general availability of AWS Marketplace Discovery API. This launch enables independent software vendors (ISVs) and data providers to curate and surface a set of third-party software and data products on their web properties through integration with the AWS Marketplace catalog.  

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), consulting partners, and data providers from Japan are now eligible to sell software and data products in AWS Marketplace and AWS Data Exchange. These offerings add to the global catalog of 8,000+ software and data products from 1,600+ ISVs, consulting partners, 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 CloudFront announces its first edge locations in two new countries: Mexico and New Zealand. In Mexico, our two new edge locations in Querétaro will provide viewers as much as a 30% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s North America geographic region. In New Zealand, our two new edge locations in Auckland will provide viewers as much as a 50% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s Australia geographic region. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure.

With AWS Launch Wizard, you can now easily deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups on Ubuntu Server, making it easier for you to run SQL Server workloads on free Linux-based operating systems, without the need to buy Windows Server licenses.

Amazon Connect has reduced telephony costs for North America instances calling Canada by 63% and receiving calls from United Kingdom and Germany up to 60%.  

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the Europe (Milan) Region. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. With CodeBuild, you are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the AWS US West (Northern California) Region. This new high availability option leverages the SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology.

Announcing availability of APN Navigate’s newest specialization track for all AWS Partners, APN Navigate for Storage. Build or further your organization’s specialization in AWS storage solutions, offering a complete range of services to store, access, govern, and analyze data to reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate innovation.

With the recent most release of the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains, customers can connect to Amazon RDS or Redshift with only a few clicks. Using the AWS Toolkits for JetBrains, you can use both IAM or credentials in Secrets Manager to connect to Amazon Redshift or RDS databases. You no longer need to have long-lived database credentials, or copy-paste auth tokens from the AWS CLI; credentials are generated by the Toolkit as they are needed instead of being saved to disk.  

Amazon ElastiCache is now available in the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones. You can now run latency-sensitive ElastiCache workloads local to end-users and resources in Local Zones.  

AWS Launch Wizard now allows customers to deploy SAP workloads using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 8.1. 

Starting today, you can receive anomaly detection alert notifications with root cause analysis, so you can proactively take actions and minimize unintentional spend. 

Today, the AWS Copilot CLI for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) launched version 0.4.0. Starting with this release, you can enable autoscaling for services based on average CPU and memory utilization and provide a maximum and minimum number of tasks. AWS Copilot will also retain the service’s desired count after autoscaling occurred, so that if a deployment starts, your service will remain scaled out or in based on resource utilization.  

Starting today, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports the pglogical extension. pglogical is an open source PostgreSQL extension that helps customers replicate data between independent Aurora PostgreSQL databases while maintaining consistent read-write access and a mix of private and common data in each database. Amazon Aurora pglogical uses logical replication to copy data changes between independent Aurora PostgreSQL databases, optionally resolving conflicts based on standard algorithms. Customers can enable pglogical from within their Aurora PostgreSQL instances, and pay only for the additional clusters and cross-region traffic needed, with no upfront costs or software purchases required. Fully integrated, pglogical requires no triggers or external programs. This alternative to physical replication is a highly efficient method of replicating data using a publish/subscribe model for selective replication.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that enables customers to automatically extract text and data, including from tables and forms within scanned documents and images. As a fully managed service, Textract delivers continuous improvement over time. Today, we are pleased to announce a few quality enhancements to both our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature and the forms recognition feature. The new OCR model detects the degree symbol (°) and the currency symbols of Chinese Yuan (CNY ¥), Japanese Yen (JPY ¥), Indian Rupee (₹), British Pound (£), and the US Dollar ($) more precisely than before.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers the latest T3 (general-purpose) instances which offer superior performance and larger storage capacity compared to the previous generations. The T3 instances also support our recently launched features like encryption at rest and in-flight, role based access control, HTTP compression, custom dictionary, SQL, alerting, anomaly detection, and cross-cluster search.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics enhances its debugging capability by embedding AWS X-Ray traces to help you trace ‘ canary runs’ and determine the root cause of the failure. When a canary has tracing enabled, traces are sent for calls made by the canary. Canaries with tracing enabled appear on the service map in both CloudWatch ServiceLens and in AWS X-Ray, even when they don't send requests to other services or applications that have tracing enabled.

AWS Training and Certification has launched four new courses for our AWS Partner community! First, AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Security Governance at Scale (Technical) teaches solutions architects and technical teams about cloud security best practices for establishing continuous governance and management at scale. Partners will be able to help their customers scale with agility and innovation while providing visibility, control, and governance. Enroll today!

For the second time in 2020, Amazon Connect is announcing outbound telephony cost decreases across six countries in Europe. Starting September 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use contact center service, decreased the following outbound telephony rates in the EU Central (Frankfurt) and EU West (London) regions for the following six countries: 

You can now run Amazon Elastic Container Service tasks in the two AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles. With Amazon ECS/EC2 on Local Zones, you can run latency-sensitive applications closer to end-users in Los Angeles. Once you have opted in for using AWS Local Zones, you can create a VPC and subnet in the local zone to deploy EC2 resources into it and attach them to your ECS clusters in AWS US West (Oregon) parent region.  

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today, we are excited to announce native support for media files in AMR, AMR-WB, Ogg and WebM format by Amazon Transcribe. Previously, you were required to convert these file formats into supported formats like WAV, FLAC, MP3 or MP4 which added extra costs and scaling challenges for large workloads. You can now directly submit media files in AMR, AMR-WB, Ogg, and WebM format to Transcribe APIs. Amazon Transcribe supports OPUS encoded audio for files in Ogg and WebM format.  

Amazon Corretto 15 is now generally available. This version supports the latest Java feature release JDK 15 and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 15 here.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore), and South America (São Paulo). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud.  

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 12.4, 11.9, 10.14, 9.6.19, and 9.5.23. This release contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.  

Starting today, you can queue purchases of Savings Plans by specifying a time of your choosing in the future to execute those purchases.

You can now use Amazon Redshift to run read queries against tables in your Amazon S3 data lake with open source Apache Hudi or Delta Lake. Amazon Redshift Spectrum, a feature of Amazon Redshift, enables you to query your S3 data lake directly from your Redshift cluster without first loading the data into it, minimizing time to insight.

You can now create Amazon Aurora database clusters with up to 128TB of storage. The new storage limit is available for both the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions of Amazon Aurora. Previously, Aurora database instances supported 64TB of storage.

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the Europe (Milan) region. 

You can use Amazon DynamoDB backup and restore to create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables—and then restore from those backups. You also can restore DynamoDB table backups as new tables in other AWS Regions. Starting today, you can restore table backups as new tables in the Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions. 

AWS Training and Certification has launched a new course with three programming language options: Building Modern Java Applications on AWS, Building Modern Node.js Applications on AWS, and Building Modern Python Applications on AWS.

AWS Glue Studio is a new visual interface for AWS Glue that makes it easy for extract-transform-and-load (ETL) developers to author, run, and monitor AWS Glue ETL jobs. You can now use a simple visual interface to compose jobs that move and transform data and run them on AWS Glue. You can then use AWS Glue Studio’s job run dashboard to monitor ETL execution and ensure that your jobs are operating as intended.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the Africa (Cape Town) region. This is now the seventh region within the AWS Global Infrastructure Network and the second region in the Southern hemisphere to offer AWS Ground Station.  

AWS Security Hub has released 14 new automated security controls for the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard related to AWS EC2 (EC2.7 and EC2.8), Amazon EMR (EMR.1), AWS KMS (KMS.1 and KMS.2), Amazon RDS (RDS.4, RDS.5, RDS.6, RDS.7, and RDS.8), Amazon S3 (S3.6), and AWS Secrets Manager (SecretsManager.1 and SecretsManager.2). Security Hub now supports 90 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.  

AWS Backup now supports application-consistent backups of Microsoft workloads running on EC2, via Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). Customers can create, manage, and restore consistent backups of their Microsoft Windows Server instances and Microsoft applications (including SQL Server, Active Directory and Exchange Server) directly from the AWS Backup console. 

AWS Graviton2-based database instances in preview for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now support more database versions. Graviton2 M6g and R6g database instances deliver better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based database instances. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. With this launch, Graviton2 is now supported on RDS MySQL versions 8.0.17, 8.0.19, and 8.0.20 and RDS PostgreSQL 12.3, and 12.4. Support for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for MariaDB is coming soon.

Today we are announcing the availability of two new CloudWatch metrics for capacity monitoring on AWS Outposts. The new metrics are UsedInstanceType_Count and AvailableInstanceType_Count. These new metrics provide insight into the number of instance types that are currently in use and available on Outposts. These metrics are available along with the other CloudWatch capacity monitoring metrics for Outposts on the AWS management console and CLI.

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 Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Starting today, you can build an Amazon Lex bot in US Spanish. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions.

With this new release of the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains, customers can use federated credentials, MFA and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to connect their IDEs to AWS. Using AWS SSO, your organization's users can sign in to Active Directory, a built-in AWS SSO directory, or another external identity provider (IdP) connected to AWS SSO and get mapped to an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Regardless of which IdP you use, AWS SSO abstracts those distinctions away, and they all work with the AWS Toolkit. For example, you can connect Microsoft Azure AD/Okta as explained in this post.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5a instances, featuring AMD EPYC^TM 2nd generation 7002 Series processors, are available in AWS South America (Sao Paulo) region. 

Today, we are announcing the availability of three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Atlanta, New York City, and Washington DC. With this launch, AWS now offers 5 Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G network. Wavelength Zones were previously announced in Boston and San Francisco Bay Area.  

Amazon WorkSpaces released a self-guided workshop that helps customers use AWS services to build and deploy the End User Computing dashboard. You can provide the dashboard to your help desk staff so that they can send the registration code email to a user, or stop, start, restart, and restore a user’s WorkSpace without having to access the WorkSpaces console. To get started, see Create End User Computing Dashboard in the Hands-On Tutorials for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), increases the default service quotas (also commonly known as limits) for On-Demand and Spot resource counts. You can now launch up to 500 concurrent ECS tasks and EKS pods running on Fargate On-Demand and 500 concurrent ECS tasks running on Fargate Spot, up from 100 and 250 respectively. These are default quotas for an account in a given AWS Region, but you can always raise these values by requesting a service quota increase.

Today, we launched usability improvements for the AWS Management Console’s navigation header and footer. The improvements include a refreshed and responsive navigation header and footer, an easier way to add or remove services to your favorites list in the navigation header, and an increase in the number of services you see in the “Recently visited” section, from 5 to 15. Depending on your browser support, you can also access the navigation menu items using a keyboard.

You can now train Custom Named Entity Recognition and Custom Classification models in Amazon Comprehend using training datasets from Amazon Sagemaker GroundTruth. You can use Comprehend’s Custom Named Entity Recognition to identify terms that are specific to your industry or organization. For example, you can instantly extract product names, financial entities or any term relevant to you from text data. Similarly, you can use Comprehend’s Custom Classification to assign categories relevant to your use case to text data.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 released a self-guided workshop that enables customers to use AWS services to build and deploy the End User Computing dashboard. You can provide the dashboard to your help desk staff so that they can view details for your AppStream 2.0 fleets, monitor autoscaling activities, and manage user streaming sessions without having to access the AppStream 2.0 console. To get started, see Create End User Computing Dashboard in the Hands-On Tutorials for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Perspective is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps you build detailed architecture diagrams of your workloads from live data in your account, that you can customize and share.  

You can now view all Amazon EC2 instances across all your accounts that are non-compliant with your configured patch rules in a single dashboard via AWS Security Hub. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now enables you to automatically send patch compliance findings generated by your patch rules to AWS Security Hub. This gives you the ability to centrally monitor your patch compliance along with other security findings in a single view. Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts and aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes your security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Patch Manager is a feature of AWS Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager enables visibility and control of your cloud and on-premises infrastructure.  

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) version 3.0 logs agent start and update events, and you can make these events trigger actions via alarms in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, in SSM Agent version 3.0, you can elect to have SSM Agent self-upgrade when the previously installed version of the agent is deprecated. 

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now authenticate Apache Kafka clients using usernames and passwords for new clusters, secured by AWS Secrets Manager. Username and password authentication uses SASL/SCRAM (Simple Authentication and Security Layer/Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism), a popular authentication mechanism supported by Apache Kafka. By storing credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, you can reduce the overhead of maintaining a traditional Apache Kafka authentication system, including: auditing, updating, and rotating client credentials. You can also centrally and securely manage credentials for multiple clusters directly from the AWS Management console. SASL/SCRAM authentication can be used in all AWS regions where MSK is available.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the CloudFormation Registry to include the StackSets resource type. StackSets is a CloudFormation feature that allows you to centrally manage deployment of cloud resources to multiple AWS accounts and regions in a single operation. You can now model, provision, and manage your stack sets resources alongside other AWS resources through CloudFormation in a predictable and reliable way.

Newer patches 2.5.4 / 2.6.1 / 3.2.4 / 3.3.1 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation. You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation.

AWS Secrets Manager has been assessed for Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report (OSPAR). This assessment demonstrates that AWS Secrets Manager has a system of controls in place that meet the Association of Banks in Singapore’s (ABS) Guidelines on Control Objectives and Procedures for Outsourced Service Providers. Secrets Manager’s alignment with the ABS guidelines demonstrates to customers AWS’s commitment to meet the security expectations for cloud service providers set by the financial services industry in Singapore. This support for OSPAR is in addition to compliance with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) announced by AWS Secrets Manager previously.  

Amazon AppFlow now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring Amazon AppFlow resources such as Connector profile and Amazon AppFlow Flow along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. 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. The Amazon AppFlow APIs and SDK give developers programmatic access to Amazon AppFlow functionality, enabling developers to set up flows between source and destinations supported by Amazon AppFlow, create connector profiles and execute flows programmatically.  

Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now Open Source and included with Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). AL2 users can install the CloudWatch Agent using the yum package manager. You can also access the CloudWatch Agent source code and contribute to its development in GitHub.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is now available in the AWS US West (N. California) Region. 

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, Amazon Kendra customers can use custom tags to target specific FAQs, based on the search context.

AWS IoT Greengrass 1.11 is now available. With this release, IoT Greengrass introduces multiple new features including System Health Telemetry, enhancements to Stream Manager, and support for Python 3.8.

On September 17, 2020, Amazon Pinpoint announced that customers can now store up to 250 attributes across users and endpoints, which is an increase from 40. Attributes are parts of a customer record stored within Amazon Pinpoint that can be used to execute channel marketing through email, push or SMS. Attributes are key pieces of data used for targeting specific criteria, such as sending an email to all customers with a car model older than 2015. Attributes can also be used to customize a message template by adding personal preferences such as name or preferred coffee order. The limit was also extended for endpoint imports through the Amazon Pinpoint console, as well as through the ImportJob and UpdateEndpoint APIs. 

Host Recovery automatically recovers instances in the event of unexpected failures (hardware failures, power or network outages etc.) on EC2 Dedicated Hosts making your instances more resilient. You can enable Host Recovery for your EC2 Dedicated Hosts using AWS Management Console, CLI or API. Additionally, the built-in integration of EC2 Dedicated Hosts with AWS License Manager helps automatically track licenses in the event of host recovery.

CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.  

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on SQL Server 2016 (13.0058220.21.v1 and above), giving you the ability to host the report server web portal on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. There is no additional cost to install SSRS directly on your Amazon RDS DB instance.

You can now identify and mask personally identifiable information (PII) from text documents using Amazon Comprehend. Amazon Comprehend uses machine learning to detect PII information that can be used to identify any individual such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses. You can use Amazon Comprehend’s PII API synchronously and asynchronously to detect PII and mask it from text documents. 

Amazon API Gateway now supports mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication. Customers can now enable mTLS on custom domain names for regional REST and HTTP APIs at no additional cost. Mutual TLS enhances the security of your API and helps protect your data from attacks such as client spoofing or man-in-the middle attacks.  

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now expands support for Channel Identification to streaming audio transcription. With Channel Identification, you can process live audio from multiple channels, and produce a single transcript of the conversation with channel labels. 

You can now programmatically list all prompts in your instance, enabling you to automate recurring processes that are manual. For example, you can identify the prompts that need to be rerecorded with a new voice actor or replicated in a new language, or automatically resolve prompt ARNs between your development, staging, and production environments, saving time and minimizing errors. To learn more, see the API reference guide.

You can now provide multiple creation and retention schedules for your EBS Snapshots within a single Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policy. Multiple schedule support enables you to create Daily, Weekly and Monthly snapshots for your target volumes from the same DLM policy, reducing the setup time and making it easier to manage DLM policies. 

You can now create, describe, update, and publish contact flows via API. Contact-center administrators can now programmatically configure and test their contact flows, accelerating the time and effort to deploy changes and minimizing avoidable errors. With these flow APIs, you can automate the progression of contact flows between your development, staging, and production environments. To learn more, see the API reference guide.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. 

Amazon Connect now provides an API to manage routing profiles in an instance. Using this API, you can programmatically create new routing profiles or update existing routing profiles to adapt to changing traffic patterns in your contact center. For example, you can automatically adjust queue priorities when there are spikes in contact volumes to prioritize contacts with the longest wait times first, and revert to your previous queue priorities when traffic returns to normal. To learn more, see the API reference guide.

Amazon Detective is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) & Europe (Milan) regions. You can now easily analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities in these regions. 

Amazon Detective now analyzes IAM role sessions so that you can visualize and understand the actions that users and apps have performed using assumed roles. With this new capability, Detective enables you to answer questions such as “which federated user invoked APIs that are associated with a security finding?”, “what API calls did a user invoke across a chain of role assumptions?”, “What API activity did an EC2 instance perform?” and “which of my users use this cross-account role?”, all without manually analyzing CloudTrail logs. By providing answers to these questions, Detective assists security analysts in diagnosing issues and understanding their root cause.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers a detailed audit log of all Elasticsearch requests. Audit Logs allows customers to record a trail of all user actions, helping meet compliance regulations, improving the overall security posture and providing evidence for security investigations. 

AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202009.00 is now available with refactored MQTT, JSON, and AWS IoT Device Shadow libraries optimized for memory usage and modularity, and it includes dependent libraries added via GitHub submoduling. The refactored libraries have gone through code quality checks including for GNU Complexity, MISRA coding standard, Coverity static analysis, and C Bounded Model Checker (CBMC) automated reasoning tool to ensure memory safety and functional correctness proof. This release also includes updates to C-SDK versioning. For more details on the updated versioning and 202009.00 release, see README and Changelog.

You can now view AWS Step Functions workflows in your AWS Lambda console, making it easier to orchestrate Lambda functions into business critical applications.

Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is now available with MySQL 5.7 compatibility. Parallel Query provides faster analytical queries over your transactional data, speeding up your queries by up to 2 orders of magnitude, while maintaining high throughput for your core transactional workload.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports restoring SQL Server native backups onto DB instances that have read replicas configured. Previously, the read replica would need to be removed before restoring the native backup file onto your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance. SQL Server backup files stored in your Amazon S3 bucket can now be restored directly on DB instances with read replicas.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the Europe (Milan) AWS region.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5a instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. Amazon EC2 C5a instances were launched in June 2020. C5a instances feature 2nd generation AMD EPYC™ 7002 series processors running at frequencies up to 3.3 GHz, and are variants of the Amazon EC2 compute optimized (C5) family of instances.

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager is available in the Africa (Cape Town) and EU (Milan) Regions, increasing the total to 20 AWS Regions and all Amazon CloudFront edge locations. At this time, Firewall Manager does not include support for centralized management of VPC Security Groups in the Africa (Cape Town) and EU (Milan) Regions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5a instances, featuring AMD EPYC™ 2nd generation 7002 Series (Rome) processors, are available in AWS Govcloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in US West (Northern California) region. Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are built utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. They 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. AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors, with 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory. AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to the first-generation AWS Graviton processors.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Database - Specialty and Exam Readiness: AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty, two new one-day, advanced-level instructor-led training courses. Built by AWS experts, these courses are designed for candidates preparing to take the AWS Certified Database - Specialty or AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty exams.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 c5.12xlarge, c5.24xlarge, and c5.metal instance sizes are available in the Middle East (Bahrain) and the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Local Region. In addition, c5.24xlarge and c5.metal instance sizes are also available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. These C5 instance sizes are powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz.

You can now use AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) identity-based policies to enforce encryption of data at rest for your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system resources. Using an IAM condition key, you can prevent users from creating EFS file systems that aren’t encrypted. Central security administrators can also define service control policies (SCPs) inside AWS Organizations to enforce EFS encryption for all AWS accounts in their organization.

Data Science Acceleration with Troodon Analytics Hub is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Vertical Trail, an AWS Data & Analytics Competency Partner. Data Science Acceleration with Troodon Analytics Hub includes everything you need to get an effective data science environment up and running. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers immersion workshops, design, customizations, and deployment of your custom Troodon Analytics Hub on AWS.  

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the EU (Ireland) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. 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 IQ is a professional services marketplace that connects AWS customers with AWS Certified freelancers and consulting firms with deep AWS expertise. IQ experts can now easily share their public profiles via a custom, short URL. Public profiles showcase an expert’s AWS Certifications and professional experience. 

Today we are excited to announce AWS Cloud Digital Interface (CDI), a network technology for reliably transporting uncompressed live video between applications. AWS CDI uses advanced, high-performance features available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types that support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). Using AWS CDI, you can send video reliably between applications with network latency as low as 8 milliseconds, which is less than one frame of video in duration. In addition, AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports AWS CDI inputs, enabling higher-quality and lower latency inputs for live cloud transcoding. Please visit the MediaLive pricing page for detailed pricing when using an AWS CDI input for video ingest into MediaLive.

You can now use tags to manage your Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) resources in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message-oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work.

AWS Backup now provides customers a more seamless way to manage their backups, by automatically copying tags from their nested EBS volumes to their EC2 backups. For customers using tags to manage their AWS resources, AWS Backup will enable them to more effectively search for source resources or conduct billing for their backups. See AWS Tagging Strategies for tagging best practices.

AWS Budgets allows you to monitor your cloud costs and usage, as well as utilization and coverage for your purchased Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. You can receive notifications when costs and usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted thresholds, and/or when your utilization or coverage falls under your target thresholds.

Today, we are announcing the availability of Route 53 Resolver Query Logging in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, Amazon's Regions designed to host sensitive data, regulated workloads, and address the most stringent U.S. government security and compliance requirements. Route 53 Resolver Query Logging 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.  

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs for Snapshots are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) 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.

With v2.0.0 of the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Producer for Apache Flink, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now enables Apache Flink applications to send data directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The new version adds support for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Assume Role credentials provider, includes bug fixes, and updates the AWS SDK and other dependencies.  

Amazon Redshift launched native spatial data processing support in November 2019, with a polymorphic data type GEOMETRY, and more than 40 SQL spatial functions. This capability enables you to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries. Now, Amazon Redshift supports over 30 new spatial functions such as validation, simplification of geometries, new spatial relationships like "Crosses" and "ContainsProperly". Furthermore, Amazon Redshift enhanced the spatial functionality with multiple capabilities such as ODBC/JDBC support for GEOMETRY data, support for importing spatial data in Shapefile format, and spatial join performance improvements. 

Confluence Data Center Implementation is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Cprime, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Confluence Data Center Implementation delivers the Confluence Data Center on AWS Quick Start giving you high availability, performance at scale, and disaster recovery for uninterrupted access to Confluence for all your teams. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a customized configuration and deployment of the Confluence Data Center on AWS Quick Start as well as cost optimization and training.

As part of the ongoing collaboration between AWS and Docker, we are excited to announce the newest features that allows developers to use Docker Compose and Docker Desktop to deploy applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate from either Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) or Docker Hub. This release extends the functionality of deploying and managing containers in AWS from a local development environment running Docker.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can easily manage Amazon Kendra resources using AWS CloudFormation.  

AWS Systems Manager Explorer now supports new service customizations to help you easily discover and personalize operational data sources based on their business needs. 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. 

HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength can now be used to process Protected Health Information. If you have an executed Business Associate Addendum (BAA) with AWS, you can use HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength to process encrypted Protected Health Information (PHI). For more information, please visit our page on HIPAA compliance. If you plan to process, store, or transmit PHI and do not have an executed BAA from AWS, please contact us for more information.

Amazon Personalize is now available in Europe (Frankfurt). Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience.

Available on Coursera, the new Real-World Product Management series is a collection of four digital courses developed by Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) and sponsored by AWS. Designed for current or aspiring PMs, this series dives into product-management skills desired by top employers.  

AWS Certification and Training now offers the digital course, Getting Started with .NET on AWS, which helps you learn how to develop, deploy, manage, and secure .NET applications on AWS. Available on demand, this free introductory course is designed for experienced .NET developers who are new to the AWS Cloud.  

The AWS Outposts Ready Program, part of the AWS Service Ready Program, help customers find integrated storage, networking, security, and industry-specific solutions that are validated by AWS experts to integrate with AWS Outposts deployments. AWS customers use AWS Outposts to benefit from the same AWS hardware infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to build and run their applications on premises and in the cloud for a truly consistent hybrid experience. With AWS Outposts, customers can run AWS services locally on their Outpost, including EC2, EBS, ECS, EKS, and RDS, and also have full access to services available in the Region. Customers using specific tools and applications want to know which AWS Technology Partner products will help them to simplify and protect their AWS Outposts deployment, or accelerate access to insights on AWS Outposts.

AWS Organizations added new capabilities to its existing support for tagging AWS accounts in your organization. Now you can attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to Organizational Units (OUs), the organization’s root and policies thus enabling you to easily identify, classify, or categorize resources in your organization. You can also tag these resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to ensure that all your AWS Organizations resources are always tagged.  

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today we are excited to announce automatic language identification in Amazon Transcribe. Until now, you were required to manually identify the dominant language in audio recordings in order to use Transcribe APIs. You can now simply provide the audio files and Transcribe will detect the dominant language from the speech signal and generate transcriptions in the identified language.  

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports Hyperledger Fabric version 1.4 for new networks. In addition to stability improvements and bug fixes, this version improves Node.js and Java client SDKs for easier chaincode development and deployment, enhances private data collections to make the feature more stable and easier to use, supports Java chaincode, and has additional metrics to monitor network activity. Customers can also now select CouchDB as their state database, enabling them to perform richer state data queries from chaincode using JSON storage and query formats. To learn more about these features, please see the Private Data Collections, Java chaincode, CouchDB, and Peer node metrics sections in the Amazon Managed Blockchain Management Guide.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Apache Beam Java SDK version 2.23. Apache Beam is an open-source, unified model for defining streaming and batch data processing applications that can be executed across multiple execution engines. This release allows you to build Apache Beam streaming applications in Java and run them using Apache Flink 1.8 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, Apache Spark running on-premises, and other execution engines supported by Apache.

You can now use Amazon CloudFront to serve Brotli compressed content to your end users. Brotli is a widely supported lossless compression algorithm that often provides a better compression ratio than Gzip. The smaller file sizes improve application performance by delivering your content faster to viewers. CloudFront's Brotli edge compression delivers up to 24% smaller file sizes as compared to Gzip.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports British English. Starting today, you can build a conversational interface in British English and deploy it across a variety of use cases such as interactive voice response systems, self-service chatbots, and application bots.

Amplify JavaScript is part of the open source Amplify Framework, a suite of libraries, UI components, and tools for front-end web and mobile developers. When using Amplify JavaScript to build web applications, you can now incorporate server-side rendering (SSR) with frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js. Next.js and Nuxt.js enable developers to use SSR, as well as static site generation and client-side rendering, to build fast, modern sites. These frameworks have grown in popularity as developers take advantage of their great developer experience and features like API routes, incremental static regeneration, code splitting, and SEO-friendliness.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, now offers customers the flexibility to choose json, comma-separated values (CSV), or parquet as the file format when transferring data from a source application to Amazon S3. This feature is supported for all source applications except Google Analytics, and Amplitude at this time. These options enable customers to easily integrate data ingested through AppFlow into their analytics pipelines without having to perform additional data format translation steps.  

AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports PartitionIndex on tables. As you continually add partitions to tables, the number of partitions can grow significantly over time causing query times to increase. With PartitionIndexes, you can reduce the overall data transfers and processing, and reduce query processing time.  

Starting today, the latest generation of burstable, general purpose Amazon EC2 T4g instances are available. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications. A free trial of T4g is also available now for the t4g.micro instance size. All new and existing AWS customers can utilize the free trial that automatically deducts 750 hours of t4g.micro usage from their AWS bill each month until Dec 31st, 2020. 

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

Infosys Cloud Data Validation Solution is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Infosys, an AWS Data & Analytics Competency Partner. Infosys Cloud Data Validation Solution automates the validation of data regularization and accuracy to strengthen your quality assurance processes by achieving complete data coverage during the testing phase and identifying anomalies earlier in the data life cycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an initial meeting with key stakeholders to identify quality assurance opportunities, a detailed statement of work that includes scope or use case of data validation, and deployment of the solution.

AWS Step Functions now supports tracing end-to-end workflows with AWS X-Ray, giving you full visibility across state machine executions and making it easier to analyze and debug your distributed applications.

You can now share your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards with users who do not have direct access to your AWS account. Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs of data from your AWS resources and custom metrics and logs, so that you can quickly monitor operational status and identify issues at a glance. With this new capability you can share dashboards across teams, with stakeholders, and with people external to your organization. You can even display dashboards on big screens in team areas, or embed them in Wikis and other webpages. 

AWS CloudWatch Synthetics makes it easy to proactively monitor critical graphical user interface (GUI) workflows and broken or ‘dead’ links in your web application. Starting today, you can individually debug each step of the GUI workflow and hone in on a specific broken or ‘dead’ link when you are alerted that something does not behave as expected. Screenshots and latencies for each step of the workflow helps identify if the failure was because of issues related to the web application or its underlying infrastructure.

Amazon S3 now provides bucket owner condition, allowing you to validate the AWS Account ID of the owner of an S3 bucket. Bucket owner condition helps you to easily verify that the S3 buckets that you interact with are owned by expected AWS Accounts. 

Amazon Pinpoint is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (London), and Canada (Central) regions. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can increase customer engagement by sending marketing campaigns and transactional messages across multiple channels: email, SMS, and push notifications. 

FreeRTOS kernel v10.4.0 is now available for download. The new version brings numerous new features such as improved direct to task notification capabilities, improved memory protection unit (MPU) support, and a new Linux port.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports more time zones including South Africa Standard Time, Sri Lanka Standard Time, and UTC+13. This feature enables our customers to match their DB instance time zone to their chosen time zone.

Amazon Redshift can now be accessed using the built-in Data API, making it easy to build web-services based applications and integrating with services, including AWS Lambda, AWS AppSync, and AWS Cloud9. Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++ so you can focus on building applications versus managing infrastructure.

AWS announces the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights, a fully integrated, interactive, and pay-as-you-go log analytics service for CloudWatch in AWS GovCloud (US-East) 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.  

Amazon Redshift now supports up to 100K tables in a single cluster for clusters with DC2.8XL, DS2.8XL, RA3.4XL, and RA3.16XL node types. This feature is intended for customers with workloads that require a large number of tables to run with Amazon Redshift without having to split the tables across clusters or storing them in Amazon S3.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of two new courses for Media Services: AWS Elemental MediaLive Primer and AWS Elemental MediaConvert Primer. These 60-minute digital courses are designed for new and experienced media operators who are responsible for the day-to-day operations and monitoring of video workflows. Both courses will help you learn more about the operational elements of AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaConvert.  

You can now associate an existing Application Load Balancer when you create an AWS Elastic Beanstalk application environment. This capability enables you to share your existing Application Load Balancer and allow it to serve traffic for multiple applications running on Elastic Beanstalk within the same Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. 

Starting today, web developers can use the Amazon Chime SDK React Component Library to simplify implementation of common user experiences, for example device selection and local video preview, in their real-time voice, video, and screen sharing web applications. By building with higher-level components, developers can focus on customizing their application while reducing investments in complex client implementations requiring careful configuration of audio and video parameters. 

PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 13 on Amazon RDS.  

Amazon WorkSpaces now allows you to use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) as your Amazon WorkSpaces registration code. When your end users log in to WorkSpaces, you can then redirect them across Amazon WorkSpaces Regions based on your Domain Name System (DNS) policies for the FQDN. Amazon WorkSpaces cross-Region redirection works with both public domain names and domain names in private DNS zones. The new feature is designed for customers who deploy WorkSpaces in multiple Regions to achieve regional resiliency and high availability. 

Amazon Detective is now available in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions. You can now easily analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities in these regions. 

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) adds new account assignment APIs and AWS CloudFormation support to automate access across AWS Organizations accounts. You can also use the APIs to retrieve permissions programmatically for audit and governance purposes. The new release enables you to automate control of the AWS SSO central permissions, making it easier to manage access at scale across all your AWS accounts.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers can now leverage EC2 security groups to secure applications with varying network security requirements on shared cluster compute resources.

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) can now send SMS text messages from the US West (N. California) region to mobile users. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to a phone number, or can send a message to multiple phone numbers at once via Amazon SNS topics. Customers can send SMS text messages to more than 200 countries.

AWS IoT Device Defender is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region, an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, assisting customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports AWS Graviton2-based database instances in Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney) regions in preview. Graviton2 M6g and R6g database instances deliver better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based database instances. You can launch these database instances in preview when using Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. For more details including database engine versions supported, refer to the documentation.

We are excited to introduce Paginators in the latest release of AWS SDK for .NET v3.5. Many AWS operations return paginated results when the response object is too large to return in a single response. Using Paginators will help you navigate through paginated responses from services. If you are using .NET Core, you can now take advantage of IAsyncEnumerable interface that was introduced to .NET with .NET Core 3.1 to make it easy to navigate through responses asynchronously.  

AWS Service Catalog now supports the use of administrator-provided names for product discovery, provisioning, and searches on running products. With this new feature, administrators can define their taxonomy for product naming and versioning, and this taxonomy is accessible to builders and administrators for use within their code and scripts. Referencing by name helps builders innovate faster, and provides a consistent product discovery and provisioning experience across accounts and regions.  

You can now initiate on-demand scanning for patch compliance in accordance with your patch rules, remediate when patches are out of compliance within seconds using AWS Systems Managers Patch Manager, and track the progress in real time. You can patch your instances using pre-defined concurrency and error threshold configurations offered by Patch Manager. This new feature enables you to update your patch compliance on-demand without waiting for the next maintenance window by initiating patching with 2 clicks.

In addition to the previously supported OIDC/OAuth2 authorization option, customers can now secure Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs using two new authorization options: Lambda authorizers and IAM authorizers. These new options enable customers to make flexible authorization decisions by providing an AWS Lambda function, or leveraging AWS IAM policies to control access to their APIs without writing any code.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now offers MSK version 2.4.1.1, a bug fix release of Apache Kafka version 2.4.1, addressing a critical bug (KAFKA-9752) that causes consumer groups to perpetually rebalance. MSK recommends that all customers who use or plan to use Apache Kafka version 2.4.1 instead use or upgrade their clusters to MSK version 2.4.1.1. After September 23, 2020, Apache Kafka version 2.4.1 will no longer be offered for new MSK clusters.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to create and manage EKS Fargate profiles using AWS CloudFormation. This makes it easy to template and configure EKS clusters to use AWS Fargate in a single step, or to add Fargate support to existing EKS clusters managed via CloudFormation.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to create and manage EKS Fargate profiles using AWS CloudFormation. This makes it easy to template and configure EKS clusters to use AWS Fargate in a single step, or to add Fargate support to existing EKS clusters managed via CloudFormation.

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. 

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Migration to AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Syntax, an AWS Oracle Competency Partner. Syntax provides expertise to precisely map, architect, design, plan, and migrate JDE EnterpriseOne environments onto AWS. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a complete end-to-end migration plan. Inclusive to the plan are cloud infrastructure and middle-ware provisioning, full migration strategy, systems and technology testing/recertification, user acceptance testing, reporting, resource optimization, go-live assessments, systems and technology validation, user validation, and risk mitigation recommendations.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor Prometheus metrics from Amazon Elastic Containers (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and Kubernetes clusters, now publicly available. With this new feature, DevOps teams can automatically discover services for containerized workloads such as AWS App Mesh and Java/JMX. They can also expose custom metrics on those services, and ingest the Prometheus metrics in CloudWatch. By curating the collection and aggregation of Prometheus metrics, CloudWatch users can monitor, troubleshoot, and alarm on application performance degradation and failures faster while reducing the number of monitoring tools required. 

Amazon EC2 is now available through VPC endpoints in three availability zones in South America (Sao Paulo) and Canada (Central), and four Availability Zones in US West (Oregon), allowing you to access Amazon EC2 from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.

You can now use AWS Glue in the Europe (Milan) AWS region.  

Data-Lake-as-a-Service is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Cloudwick, an AWS Data & Analytics, AWS DevOps, and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Data-Lake-as-a-Service is a consulting engagement that enables organizations to quickly implement business use cases. The offer relies on Cloudwick's Amorphic solution, which accelerates enterprise data lake adoption with no IT required. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an initial discovery call, a discovery workshop, statement of work presentation, and deployment of the Amorphic solution. 

Application Load Balancer (ALB) now support AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so customers can securely initiate API calls to Amazon CodeGuru Profiler from within their VPC, without crossing the public internet and without using public IPs.

We are delighted to announce that Amazon Lex now supports Australian English. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Australian English, you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that accurately understands the Australian dialect. You can also respond to users with natural sounding Amazon Polly Australian voices to provide a fully localized conversational experience.

CloudWatch Embedded Metric Format enables you to ingest complex high-cardinality application data in the form of logs and easily generate actionable metrics from them. It has traditionally been hard to generate actionable custom metrics from your ephemeral resources such as Lambda functions, and containers. By sending your logs in the Embedded Metric Format, you can now easily create custom metrics without having to instrument or maintain separate code, while gaining powerful analytical capabilities on your log data.  

Supply AI is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Peak, an AWS Retail and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Supply AI helps businesses fulfill demand at the lowest cost by leveraging data from across the value chain to automatically understand the fulfillment requirements of individual products. It allows retailers to optimize their warehouses and increase logistics efficiency. 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 the Supply AI system. 

Demand AI is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Peak, an AWS Retail and AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Demand AI makes it possible to predict demand in granular detail at scale, enabling retailers to make smarter buying decisions, optimize stock, and execute the perfect pricing strategy. 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 the Demand AI system.

Rubix IoT Fleet Management is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from TensorIoT, an AWS IoT, AWS Machine Learning, and AWS Industrial Software Competency Partner. Rubix IoT Fleet Management provides a streamlined management system for IoT devices, as well as a single pane of glass for operational metrics and alerting. Customers that request this Consulting Offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an initial workshop, dashboard design, and hardware evaluation as well as deployment and configuration.  

Newer patches 3.2.3/2.5.3/1.7.3 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. These patches include critically important stability, reliability and security fixes which will improve the operation of your Aurora PostgreSQL instances and workloads. We strongly encourage you to update to the latest patch at your earliest convenience. We advise customers take manual snapshots before upgrading. For detailed release notes visit our version update. To upgrade visit our technical documentation.

Amazon Lightsail now offers a variety of new OS-only instance blueprints, including Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 20, Windows Server 2019, and Debian 10. Lightsail provides a curated selection of blueprints that specify the operating system and software that is preinstalled on your instance bundle when it's created. With this launch, Lightsail now offers a wider variety of OS blueprints to choose from, making it even easier to build applications on your preferred OS with just a few clicks.  

Starting today, developers using the Amazon Chime SDK can help their application end-users test their device before they try to join a meeting. New meeting readiness checker APIs in the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript can help verify access to audio and video devices and confirm that users can reach the Amazon Chime service from their network. Results can be presented back to end users with easy-to-understand pass/fail statuses that expose the root cause of any issues. Application developers can use the meeting readiness checker to ensure a consistent customer experience and reduce their support burdens.

Today, AWS X-Ray launches in preview X-Ray Insights, which uses anomaly detection to create actionable insights about any anomalies in an application. With X-Ray Insights, you can proactively identify issues signaled by increases in the fault rate of an application.

Today, AWS X-Ray is launching the Java auto-instrumentation agent, enabling customers to collect trace data without having to modify existing Java-based applications. With the launch of the auto-instrumentation agent, you can trace Java web-and servlet-based applications with minimal configuration change and no code change.  

AWS Launch Wizard now allows customers to deploy SAP workloads using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5.

Today we are making it easier to create, prototype and test GraphQL queries directly in the AWS AppSync GraphQL Console.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use confidence scores in Amazon Kendra to improve the search experience and show the most relevant results for user queries. 

Amazon CloudFront now supports TLSv1.3 for improved performance and security. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that enables you to securely distribute content to viewers with low latency and high availability. Amazon CloudFront supports HTTPS using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and secure communication between your viewer clients and CloudFront. TLSv1.3 is the latest version of TLS.

Starting today, provisioning your WorkDocs site to all of your directory users is made easy. When provisioning your WorkDocs site, all directory users are provided a valid WorkDocs account, enabling each directory user to sign in and begin using full WorkDocs functionality as a Managed User without you having to manually activate each user. A Managed User has 1 TB of personal storage and can save files and collaborate with others on a WorkDocs site.  

You can now subscribe to Microsoft Office Professional Plus from AWS on Bring Your Own Windows License (BYOL) WorkSpaces. The new offering makes it easier for customers to use the Office suite of applications on Amazon WorkSpaces. 

AWS Step Functions now supports payload sizes up to 256KB. Previously, the limit was 32,768 characters. Now, you can pass larger payloads in your standard and express workflows, allowing Step Functions to seamlessly coordinate multiple services like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS that already support larger payloads. 

Starting today, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports the RDKit extension. The RDKit extension allows cheminformatics to deal with manipulation of chemical structures, fingerprinting search functions and molecular structure matching. Using PostgreSQL as a datastore, you can interact with several built-in functions to compare, manipulate and identify molecular structures via standard SQL.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports Advanced Video Coding (AVC) for ultra-high definition (UHD) outputs. This allows you to incorporate an AVC UHD output in your adaptive bitrate (ABR) stacks for live channels; for example, you can create an ABR stack with one AVC output with a UHD resolution of 3840x2160, along with 1440p, 1080p, and 720p HD resolution outputs in a single output group.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asian Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (London) Regions. You can now synthesize over 14 NTTS voices in these Regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.8, 10.13 and 9.6.18 in all regions. This release contains bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community, and improved TLS support from PostgreSQL 12.

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

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). For a full list of the Regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table. 

Today, we are reducing the price of AWS IoT Events. AWS IoT Events is a fully managed service that makes it easy to detect and respond to changes indicated by IoT sensors and applications. For example, you can use AWS IoT Events to detect malfunctioning machinery, a stuck conveyor belt, or a slowdown in production output. When an event is detected, AWS IoT Events automatically triggers actions or alerts so that you can resolve issues quickly, reduce maintenance costs, and increase operational efficiency.  

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to deploy patches automatically to instances running any current versions of Ubuntu. Until now, Patch Manager supported current versions of Ubuntu up to 18.04. With this release, Patch Manager now supports Ubuntu’s latest version - Ubuntu 20.04.  

With this Amplify CLI release, you can now assign tags to Amplify-generated AWS resources (such as AppSync, S3 etc.). Tags are key-value pairs that allow you to categorize your resources in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation in your organization. 

On August 31st, AWS Solutions announced the launch of a new solution, Discovering Hot Topics using Machine Learning. This Solution helps brand-conscious customers understand the contextualization of the hottest topics being actively discussed. This solution ingests large-scale customer feedback and performs real-time analytics using machine learning to separate signal from the noise that goes beyond the basic aggregation of sentiment analysis. This allows organizations to deepen the understanding of their customers opinions, identify new opportunities, and react quickly to change. 

Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Textract from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet. Amazon Textract is a fully managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents and goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR), to identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without leaving the AWS network.

We’re pleased to announce a free new digital course from AWS Training and Certification: Amazon FSx for Lustre Primer. This course explains how to get started with Amazon FSx for Lustre, a fully managed file system service for machine learning, high performance computing, and other workloads.

The AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon Kinesis is an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data. This solution helps you solve for several real-time streaming use cases like capturing high volume application logs, analyzing clickstream data, continuously delivering to a data lake to name a few. To provide flexibility to adapt to different use cases and business needs, this solution offers two deployment options. Developers can use this solution to test new service combinations as the basis for their production environment, or to improve an existing application they have already implemented.

AWS Storage Gateway increases performance for reading data from Amazon S3 for File Gateway, providing you 4x faster access to data managed through the gateway.  

Starting today, AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced are available in two new regions: Africa (Cape Town) and EU (Milan).