October 2020

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source. 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 Cognito User Pools now enables you to manage quotas for commonly used operation categories, such as user creation and user authentication, as well as view quotas and usage levels in the AWS Service Quotas dashboard or in CloudWatch metrics. This update makes it simple to view your quota usage of and request rate increases for multiple APIs in the same category. For example, you now can now see the aggregated limit for a single “UserCreation” category, which includes SignUp, AdminCreateUser, ConfirmSignUp, and AdminConfirmSignUp. You can check whether the existing quotas can meet your operations needs in Service Quotas console or CloudWatch metrics. You can refer to this documentation to learn how the API operations are mapped to the new categories.

Application developers building real-time audio, video, and screen sharing applications can now collect client metrics from meetings events available from the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript. Developers can help end users troubleshoot their application without requiring them to send in client logs. And by streaming metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, developers can analyze meeting health trends or deep dive on problematic meetings or devices.  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. With this launch, AWS DMS now supports parallel full load with the range segmentation option when using Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MongoDB as a source. You can accelerate the migration of large collections by splitting them into segments and loading and unloading the segments in-parallel in the same migration task. This feature could improve the migration performance by up to 3x.

Application Load Balancer (ALB) now supports gRPC protocol. With this release, you can use ALB to route and load balance your gRPC traffic between microservices or between gRPC enabled clients and services. This will allow customers to seamlessly introduce gRPC traffic management in their architectures without changing any of the underlying infrastructure on their clients or services.

Amazon Kendra, a highly accurate intelligent search service powered by machine learning is now a U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible service. Customers can now use Amazon Kendra to manage healthcare and life science workloads that contain protected health information (PHI).

Virtusa Desktop-as-a-Service (vDaaS) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Virtusa, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency Partner. vDaaS provides employees access to their digital workspace and secure data anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a full life cycle of services to aid in your digital workplace transformation.

Starting today, c5d.12xlarge, c5d.24xlarge and c5d.metal instance sizes are available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. Additionally, m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal and r5d.metal instance sizes are available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. 

AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS) adds support for application monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights. With the integration of AWS SMS with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, you can start monitoring applications in Amazon CloudWatch as soon as the application migration is complete in AWS SMS.  

We have recently introduced notifications regarding Site-to-Site VPN Connections. AWS will now send a notification via the Personal Health Dashboard (PHD) if your VPN is operating without the recommended dual tunnel configuration for redundancy (Single Tunnel Notification), or if your VPN has experienced a momentary loss of redundancy due to a tunnel endpoint replacement (Tunnel Replacement Notification).  

Amazon API Gateway now supports disabling the default, auto-generated REST API endpoint. The default REST API endpoint in API Gateway looks like https://{restapi_id}.execute-api.{region}.amazonaws.com. This feature is intended for customers who use custom domain names for REST APIs and want to ensure that all traffic to their API only goes through the custom domain name and not the default endpoint. This feature was already available for HTTP APIs. Now, it is available for REST APIs too. 

Starting today, customers can use Jira Service Desk as a single place to track operational items from AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. Jira Service Desk users can now view, investigate, and resolve operational items related to their AWS resources, while using their existing workflows in Jira. Additionally, they can use AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks from Jira Service Desk to remediate known issues. AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter enables operators to track and resolve operational items related to AWS resources in a central place, helping reduce time to issue resolution. 

Starting today, Jira Service Desk users can view EC2 specific parameters from AWS accounts associated with version 1.7 of the AWS Service Management Connector for Jira Service Desk, simplifying the provisioning of compute resources. End users can now view parameters such as Availability Zones, Instance IDs, Key Pairs, and Security Groups directly in Jira Service Desk during provisioning, eliminating the need to find this information in other consoles or have them coded directly into CloudFormation templates.  

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables customers to manage their own contact lists and offers enhanced subscription management capabilities. 

AWS Service Catalog now provides simplified provisioning of cloud resources with a one-page launch process and a new console experience. With this new feature, end-users can more easily and quickly provision products with fewer errors.

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

Amazon Neptune now supports Apache TinkerPop 3.4.8 in the latest engine release, 1.0.4.0, improving the development experience for Gremlin users.

AWS Nitro Enclaves is a new EC2 capability that enables customers to create isolated compute environments (enclaves) to further protect and securely process highly sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), healthcare, financial, and intellectual property data within their Amazon EC2 instances. Nitro Enclaves helps customers reduce the attack surface area for their most sensitive data processing applications.

ACM for Nitro Enclaves is an enclave application that allows you to use public and private SSL/TLS certificates with your web applications and servers running on Amazon EC2 instances with AWS Nitro Enclaves. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet as well as resources on private networks. Nitro Enclaves is an EC2 capability that enables creation of isolated compute environments to protect and securely process highly sensitive data, such as SSL/TLS private keys.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the first technical course designed specifically for APN Technology Partners! AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Migrating Your Application to AWS (Technical) explains the technical fundamentals and best practices for migrating your application from on-premises deployments to a single-tenant, highly available AWS Cloud solution.

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 China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 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 Elasticsearch Service now natively supports using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to offer single sign-on (SSO) for Kibana. SAML authentication for Kibana enables users to integrate directly with third-party identity providers (IDP) such as Okta, Ping Identity, OneLogin, Auth0, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and Azure Active Directory. With this feature, your users can leverage their existing usernames and passwords to log in to Kibana, and roles from your IDP can be used for controlling privileges in Elasticsearch and Kibana, including what operations they can perform and what data they can search and visualize.  

AWS Activate provides startups, including both smaller, early stage companies and more advanced digital businesses, with free tools and resources to quickly get started on AWS. Today we are excited to announce the general availability of the new AWS Activate Console. The Activate Console is full of personalized tools and resources designed to support startups through every stage of their journey, from their initial idea, to building a MVP, to securing their first customer, to scaling their business on AWS and beyond.

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

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 7.8 and its corresponding version of Kibana. This minor release includes bug fixes and enhancements. 

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

Customers can now share AMIs from Image Builder pipelines with AWS accounts in multiple AWS regions, using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that enables you to automatically extract text and data, including from tables and forms within scanned documents and images. As a managed service, Textract delivers continuous improvements over time. Today, we are pleased to announce that we delivered enhancements to the underlying machine learning models resulting in a decrease of 20% in average latency when calling both the synchronous and asynchronous APIs. These improvements apply to the DetectDocumentText API and AnalyzeDocument APIs. 

NoSQL Workbench support for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is now generally available. You can design and visualize Amazon Keyspaces data models more easily by using NoSQL Workbench, which has a point-and-click interface for creating nonrelational data models. 

Amazon Neptune now enforces a minimum version of TLS v1.2 and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) client connections to Neptune in all AWS Regions where Neptune is available with the latest engine release, 1.0.4.0.

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) feature that allows customers to find objects and scenes in images unique to their business needs with a simple inference API. Customers can create a custom ML model simply by uploading labeled images. No ML expertise is required.  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Global Datastore, which provides fully managed, fast, reliable and secure cross-region replication, is now available in an additional 6 regions. With expanded region support, Global Datastore is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Paris), Canada Central (Montreal), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.  

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce two new courses for Game Tech: Using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ for Game Servers and Game Server Hosting with Amazon EC2. These digital courses are designed for game developers who want to host their game servers on AWS. Each course will help you make a decision about using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to deliver the desired player experience while meeting your business needs.

This new digital course, Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools, teaches you how to improve application reliability and security by integrating and automating testing into your AWS DevOps pipelines. This advanced course is designed for DevOps engineers and developers who have significant experience with DevOps methodology and practices.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage now offers you the ability to publish both live ingress and egress logs as CloudWatch Logs. This feature allows you to easily build custom monitoring dashboards with CloudWatch Logs Insights or third-party data processing and monitoring tools. Analyzing these logs and correlating them with encoders or content distribution network (CDN) logs can help identify problems such as slow ingest uploads on the encoder side or cache hit ratio drops on the CDN side. For instructions on how to configure access logging, please refer to the documentation page and corresponding API documentation.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can automatically index and search content that is contained in Confluence repositories using Kendra's new built-in Confluence Server connector.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink for data plane APIs (PUT and GET APIs). You can securely send and receive data from within your VPC, without crossing the public internet and without using public IPs. You can do so by creating a VPC endpoint for the AWS IoT SiteWise service to establish a private connection between your VPC and AWS IoT SiteWise. For more information, please visit the AWS IoT SiteWise and interface VPC endpoints page in our developer guide.

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now includes common vulnerability identifiers (CVE ID) in the description of missing patches identified in your fleet, across multiple Linux platforms. CVE IDs help you identify security notices applicable to vulnerabilities within your fleet and recommended patches. You can use Amazon Inspector to conduct a detailed scan for CVE in your fleet.

AWS Auto Scaling with scaling plans and predictive scaling (for Amazon EC2) is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) and AWS Europe (Milan) regions. AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. With a simple, powerful user interface, you can build scaling plans in minutes across resources including Amazon EC2 instances and Spot Fleets, Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon DynamoDB tables and indexes, and Amazon Aurora Replicas.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks to explore datasets and build models. Starting today, you can launch SageMaker Studio Notebooks with your own images.

You can now create Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL read replicas for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This helps minimize downtime when migrating live workloads from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL, keeping instances in sync until you're ready to move your applications and users to Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL.

Today Amazon announced quarterly updates for Amazon Corretto 8, Amazon Corretto 11, and Amazon Corretto 15. This release also includes Corretto 8 support for TLS1.3, Corretto 11 ARM64 updates and Corretto 11 general availability of the Shenandoah GC (Garbage Collector). Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate capacity providers is now supported in AWS CloudFormation, which makes it easier to manage and run Amazon ECS tasks across Fargate and Fargate Spot. You can now use CloudFormation to automate the management of Fargate capacity providers, associate them with ECS clusters, and specify capacity provider strategies at the cluster and service level by using a CloudFormation template. 

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now allows you to import custom dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics into Amazon S3. You can specify the custom dimensions and metrics that you want to import while mapping source fields to the destination fields during flow set up and AppFlow will transfer records, including these dimensions and metrics, during flow execution.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports Lambda user-defined functions (UDFs) enabling you to use an AWS Lambda function as a UDF in Amazon Redshift. This functionality enables you to write custom extensions for your SQL query to achieve tighter integration with other services or third-party products. For example, you can write Lambda UDFs to enable external tokenization of data by integrating with vendors like Protegrity, or access other services such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon SageMaker in your Redshift query.

AWS Shield now provides global and per-account event summaries to all AWS customers. These summaries provide you an overview of all events detected by AWS Shield, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other volumetric anomalies, for each of your accounts and for all events detected and mitigated on AWS. 

Amazon RDS for MySQL has been updated to support release 8.0.21 of the MySQL database. This release includes a number of bug fixes as well as functionality improvements.

The ALB Ingress Controller is now the AWS Load Balancer Controller, and includes support for both Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers. The new controller enables you to simplify operations and save costs by sharing an Application Load Balancer across multiple applications in your Kubernetes cluster, as well as using a Network Load Balancer to target pods running on AWS Fargate.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) clusters running in standard AWS regions are now compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate baseline.  

When using Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to your customers, you now have the option of selecting the origination number to use. Origination numbers are the phone numbers that Amazon SNS will use to send your SMS message, such as short codes and long codes.

Today, the AWS Copilot CLI for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) launched version 0.5.0. Starting with this release, you can deploy applications or jobs that need to run only on a particular schedule. AWS Copilot has built in timeouts and retries to provide more flexibility for how your scheduled jobs run. AWS Copilot will also deploy all the required infrastructure and settings, while you just provide the application and the schedule to be run. This allows you to focus on development instead of manually setting up rules and infrastructure to ensure your scheduled jobs run when needed.

In August 2020, Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) launched a feature to share Certificate Authorities (CA) between AWS accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). With today’s launch, App Mesh customers will be able to use a certificate authority shared with their AWS account while configuring TLS between services in their mesh.  

You can now use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) FIFO topics, in combination with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queues, to build applications that require messages to be sent and processed in a strict sequence and without duplicates. SNS FIFO is intended for customer use cases where it is critical to maintain the consistency in processing messages across multiple independent services in a strictly ordered manner. Example use cases include bank transaction logging, stock tickers, flight trackers, news broadcasting, inventory management, vote tabulation, and price updates.

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 enables options to tune for high-availability of your applications. App Mesh has now increased the default limits for a set of resources - virtual nodes, and virtual gateways. These limit increases make it easier for you to manage larger applications with App Mesh.

Amazon Redshift now allows you to schedule your SQL queries for executions in recurring schedules and enables you to build event-driven applications by integrating with Amazon EventBridge. You can now schedule time sensitive or long running queries, loading or unloading your data, or refreshing your materialized views on a regular schedule.

You can now export Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora snapshots to Amazon S3 as Apache Parquet format in additional regions. Parquet is an efficient open columnar storage format for analytics and is up to 2x faster to export and consumes up to 6x less storage in Amazon S3, compared to other text formats. You can analyze the exported data with other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of Oracle Data Guard physical standby DB instances which run in mount mode. It fully manages the configuration of Oracle Data Guard, and asynchronously replicates data over secured network connections between a primary DB instance and its physical standby mounted DB replicas. Amazon RDS for Oracle Data Guard mounted DB replicas require Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) but not Oracle Active Data Guard.  

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds a new instance size to the General Purpose instance family. This new instance size, stream.standard.small, offers 1 vCPU and 2 GiB of memory. It is ideally suited for streaming lightweight, non-graphics applications such as browsers for secure web browsing and bastion host administration tools, and applications that are not resource intensive. To use the new instance size, create a new AppStream 2.0 fleet or modify your existing fleet by using the AppStream 2.0 console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI.  

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, allowing you to build workflows that queries data on your S3 data lake. AWS Step Functions support built-in error handling, parameter passing, recommended security settings, and state management, reducing the amount of code you have to write and maintain.

Amazon SageMaker is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS regions. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models. 

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.13 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.12. 

AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas - template size, resources, parameters, mappings, and outputs. The maximum size of a template that can be passed in an S3 Object is now 1MB (previously 450KB). The new per template limits for the maximum number of resources is 500 (previously 200), parameters is 200 (previously 60), mappings is 200 (previously 100), and outputs is 200 (previously 60).

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can leverage Kendra’s intelligent search capabilities across a broader range of content repositories by using Kendra’s custom data source feature.  

Amazon CloudFront announces that you can now manage public keys used for signed URLs and signed cookies through Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) based user permission, without requiring the AWS root account. With the IAM user permissions based public key management, you get more flexibility and API access to manage your public keys.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, adds additional storage volume metrics to provide further insights to your storage performance and health along with the new ability to monitor your API Gateway functions. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps enterprise customers easily setup application monitoring and enhanced observability for AWS resources. The new Elastic Block Store (EBS) metrics provide further details on storage volumes. The integration with the API Gateway service provides insights to the various API commands run through the gateway. 

Amazon QLDB Go Driver is now generally available, providing Go developers a simply way to access QLDB. The Go Driver offers an abstraction layer on top of the AWS SDK to handle QLDB sessions, streamline PartiQL statements, and handle ION data.

Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now enables you to customize the shell environment by specifying the commands to run at the start of a session. Using this feature, you can tailor the shell experience to the needs of your users or your organization, by adding customizations such as changing the default shell interpreter, displaying the hostname, or configuring command shortcuts.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

With today’s Amplify CLI release, you gain the ability to import existing Amazon Cognito resources into your Amplify project. Just run the “amplify import auth” command and Amplify CLI will automatically configure all your Amplify-provisioned resources (GraphQL APIs, S3 buckets and more) to be authenticated with your designated existing Cognito User Pool or Identity Pool.  

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some key features include native APIs to manage client quotas (KIP-546) and explicit rebalance triggering to enable advanced consumer usecases (KIP-568). For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.0.

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. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

AWS Global Accelerator announces the ability to override the destination ports used to route traffic to an application endpoint. This allows you to map a list of external destination ports — that your users send traffic to — to a list of internal destination ports that you want an application endpoint to receive traffic on. By default, an accelerator routes user traffic to endpoints in AWS Regions using the protocol and port ranges that you specify when you create a listener. For example, if you define a listener that accepts TCP traffic on ports 80 and 443, the accelerator routes traffic to those ports on an endpoint.  

Jira Software Data Center Implementation is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Cprime, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Jira Software Data Center Implementation provides Jira Software Data Center, a software development tool used by agile teams. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a customized configuration and deployment of the Jira products on AWS Quick Start as well as cost optimization and training.

You can now hibernate newly-launched EBS-backed Amazon EC2 I3, M5ad, and R5ad instances. Hibernation provides you with the convenience of pausing your workloads and resuming them later from the saved state. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid — your application will start right from where it left off. By using hibernation, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster without modifying your existing applications.  

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in 3 additional AWS Regions including US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), and Europe (Stockholm). This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES. 

Today, we are announcing the availability in preview of AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, a secure, production-ready, AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. Part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenTelemetry provides open source APIs, libraries, and agents to collect distributed traces and metrics for application monitoring. With AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, you can instrument your applications just once to send correlated metrics and traces to multiple monitoring solutions. Use auto-instrumentation agents to collect traces without changing your code. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry also collects metadata from your AWS resources and managed services, so you can correlate application performance data with underlying infrastructure data, reducing the mean time to problem resolution. Use AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to instrument your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on EC2, and AWS Fargate, as well as on-premises.

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

You can now add connection time metrics to your reporting in Amazon Connect. This enables you to understand the time from when Connect sends a contact to an agent to when they accept and are connected to the phone call or chat. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the US West (California) AWS region.

AWS Backup is now available in 2 additional Regions: Cape Town (CPT) and Milan (MXP).

You can now filter automation executions by resource groups in Systems Manager Automation. This allows you to group and view the automation executions specific to your applications or environments.  

Amazon CloudFront announces Origin Shield, a centralized caching layer that helps increase your cache hit ratio to reduce the load on your origin. Origin Shield also decreases your origin operating costs by collapsing requests across regions so as few as one request goes to your origin per object. You can also use Lambda@Edge with Origin Shield to enable advanced serverless logic like dynamic origin load balancing. Customers using Origin Shield for live streaming, image handling, or multi-CDN workloads have reported up to a 57% reduction in their origin’s load.

Amazon Redshift now allows users to modify the compression encoding of existing columns with a single statement. This new capability makes it easier to maintain the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization.  

AWS Batch now allows users to configure retry strategies based on defined exit codes. Customers can now determine whether their AWS Batch jobs retry based on specified events such as infrastructure failure or application failure. This allows customers to tightly control the actions taken on job failure - resulting in lower costs and faster throughput by retrying only when necessary.

AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink. With this feature you can manage and invoke Lambda functions from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing your traffic to the public internet. PrivateLink provides private connectivity between your VPCs and AWS services, like Lambda, on the private AWS network.

Port forwarding sessions created using Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now support multiple simultaneous connections over the session. This improvement reduces the rendering latency and improves load times for applications that load data using multiple concurrent connections, when delivering such applications over a port forwarding session.

You can now process multiple Amazon Kinesis data streams with a single Kinesis Client Library (KCL) based consumer application. Previously, each KCL based application processes a single Kinesis data stream. With this new capability, you can update the list of streams at runtime for multi-stream processing in a scalable KCL application without redeploying the application. This reduces operational overhead of maintaining multiple KCL applications.

AWS IQ is a professional services marketplace that connects AWS customers with AWS Certified freelancers and consulting firms with deep AWS expertise. IQ allows you to connect with experts within minutes, easily grant access to your AWS account and pay through your AWS bill when work is complete. 

Amazon Connect now enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices (NTTS) within their contact center across four new regions. These new voices deliver improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. You can now use 14 NTTS voices in the London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo regions, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to use the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS DataSync now offers a simplified agent setup using the agent’s local console. This enables you to set up your agent faster, and test network connectivity between your on-premises storage and AWS within minutes. 

You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers.  

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Canada (Central) 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. 

Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source. Users can now extend the data set with new recommendations for assessment and use the extended data set to scan their project for incompatibilities. Users can also review and offer suggestions on exiting data sets. Users can actively participate in the development process and bring their experience and expert knowledge to the tool. They can review open issues in GitHub, comment on any of the issues that they are familiar with, make suggestions, ask questions, or open new issues if they like to start a new conversation. Source code for compatibility analysis component, assessment APIs and the data set used for the assessment are released under Apache 2.0 license 

Amazon QuickSight now supports filter controls that you can place beside visuals on dashboards, allowing readers to quickly slice and dice data in the context of its visual representation. You can create these filter controls from existing or new filters with a single click, and configure them to support different operations, such as filtering specific dates, relative dates, or date ranges, setting upper and lower thresholds for numeric values, adding drop-downs with single-select or multi-select options, and more. On-sheet filter controls can be used in dashboards within Amazon QuickSight, or in dashboards embedded within apps. See blog here for more details.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 M6g instances to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads. Amazon EC2 M6g instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are custom designed by AWS utilizing 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores. Amazon EMR provides up to 35% lower cost and up to 15% improved performance for Spark workloads on Graviton2-based instances versus previous generation instances. In addition, the combination of EMR runtime for Apache Spark and EC2 M6g instances offer up to 76% lower total cost and 3.6 times improved performance compared to running open source Apache Spark on previous generation instances.

AWS Outposts support for AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) lets customers share access to Outposts resources – EC2 instances, EBS volumes, subnets, and local gateways (LGWs) – across multiple accounts within an organization. With this new capability, you can enable distributed teams and business units within your organization to configure VPCs, launch and run EC2 instances, and create EBS volumes.

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now makes it easier for you to create patch compliance reports by providing a catalog of all patches released for Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2. You can now view a list of all released patches for Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2 even if those patches are not applicable to your fleet based on your patch rules. Further, you can view additional details such as severity, release date, and vulnerability identifier (CVE-ID) for patches in the catalog.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to deploy and configure AWS Backint Agent, an SAP-certified backup and restore application for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances. While creating a deployment with AWS Launch Wizard, you will have the option to enable backups with Backint Agent by selecting the Amazon S3 bucket where the backups will be stored and the encryption keys to use. Additionally, you can configure backups to local volumes for ad-hoc backups if needed.

AWS Systems Manager now lets you easily search for runbooks and other Systems Manager documents, such as Run Command and Distributor packages, by specifying a part of the name as the search keyword. This feature enables easy discovery of runbooks when you have a large number of runbooks in your account or when you do not remember the exact name of a runbook.  

Amazon Rekognition is a deep-learning-based image and video analysis service that can identify objects, text, scenes, as well as support content moderation by detecting inappropriate content. Starting today, Amazon Rekognition can analyze images to detect if persons in the images are wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as face covers (face masks), hand covers (gloves), and head covers (helmets or hard hats).

AWS Glue crawlers now support Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MongoDB collections. You can now use AWS Glue crawlers to infer schema of Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MongoDB collections and create or update a table in the Glue Data Catalog. A configuration option allows you to specify if you want the crawler to crawl the entire data set or select a sample of the data to reduce crawl time.

The storage space allocated to your Amazon Aurora database cluster will now dynamically decrease when you delete data from the cluster. The storage space already automatically increases up to a maximum size of 128 tebibytes (TiB), and will now automatically decrease when data is deleted. You only pay for the storage you use. Starting September 21, 2020, dynamic resizing for storage space is being enabled region by region for Aurora MySQL versions 1.23 and 2.09, and Aurora PostgreSQL versions 10.13 and 11.8, and is expected to be enabled across all Aurora regions by end of November 2020.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL will concurrently upgrade all of your in-region read replicas along with the upgrade of your primary database instance during major version upgrades of PostgreSQL. 

We are excited to announce the launch of a new three-day classroom course, Running Containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which teaches practical, in-depth skills for managing containers.

AWS Purchase Order Management gives you the ability to define and manage your purchase orders (“POs”) for AWS services in a way that meets your business needs. You can manage your PO information from your AWS Billing Console, configure multiple POs, and define the rules of how POs map to your AWS invoices. You can also track your PO status and balance, and set up email notifications to proactively validate your POs. 

Streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue can now read data encoded in the Apache Avro format. Previously, streaming ETL jobs could read data in the JSON, CSV, Parquet, and XML formats. With the addition of Avro, streaming ETL jobs now support all the same formats as batch AWS Glue jobs.

Amazon Connect real-time metric dashboards now allow you to drill down into queue and routing profile data in one click. For example, if a queue has a long wait time, call center managers can create a table in one click to view agents in that queue. With this table, they can quickly identify agents in an error status and work with them to resolve the issue.

AWS Graviton2-based database instances are now generally available for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Support for Amazon Aurora is coming soon.

Starting today, you can define the action you want to take in your account when a budget exceeds its threshold (actual or forecasted amounts). This level of control will allow you to reduce unintentional overspending in your account. You can choose among three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy, Service Control policy (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). For example, you can choose to apply a custom “Deny EC2 Run Instances” IAM policy to a user, group, or role in your account once your monthly budget for EC2 has been exceeded. With the same budget threshold, you can configure a second action that targets specific EC2 instances within a particular region.

AWS End of Support Migration Program (EMP) for Windows Server provides the tooling to migrate your legacy applications from Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2 to newer, supported versions on AWS, without any refactoring.  

To coincide with our new AWS Budgets Actions launch, we are reducing the price for budget-days from $.02 to free. Before this reduction, customers received 62 free budget-days per month before paying $.02 per budget-day for all active budgets within a regular account or consolidated billing family. Customers who simply want to monitor their cost, usage, RI or Savings Plans coverage and utilization can now do so free of charge.

Jira Service Desk Data Center Implementation is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Cprime, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Jira Service Desk Data Center Implementation provides Jira Service Desk Data Center IT service management software with high availability and performance at scale. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a customized configuration and deployment of the Jira products on AWS Quick Start as well as cost optimization and training.

Amazon launches CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension, to help you create canaries more easily. The Recorder records your click and type actions on a website and automatically generates a script that you can use to create a canary that follows the same user click and type actions.

Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshift now supports the ability to query across databases in a Redshift cluster. With cross-database queries, you can seamlessly query data from any database in the cluster, regardless of which database you are connected to. Cross-database queries can eliminate data copies and simplify your data organization to support multiple business groups on the same cluster. Support for cross-database queries is available on Amazon Redshift RA3 instance types.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now supports archive rules that allow you to retroactively mark existing findings as intended. Archive rules automatically archive new findings for public and cross-account access that meet the criteria you define. Now, you can apply the rules retroactively to mark existing findings as intended. For example, you can create a rule to archive all findings for a specific S3 bucket that you regularly grant read access to. This lets you focus on remediating findings that help you reduce broad access.  

Customers using container services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), or self-managed Kubernetes can now send their container logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using the Fluent Bit log router. Fluent Bit allows customers to route container logs to various AWS and partner monitoring solutions including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Kinesis, Datadog, Splunk, and now Amazon S3.

Infosys Data Testing Workbench is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Infosys, an AWS Data & Analytics and AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Infosys Data Testing Workbench offers end-to-end automation of web-based data testing. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a detailed statement of work based on identified use cases, deployment of the solution, and training.

Streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue can now ingest data from Apache Kafka clusters that you manage yourself. Previously, AWS Glue supported reading specifically from Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK). With this update, AWS Glue allows you to perform streaming ETL on data from Apache Kafka whether it is deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

AWS Elemental MediaLive Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) now supports MPEG-2 encoding. Broadcasters can now use the AWS cloud to perform MPEG-2 encoding to feed legacy devices with limited codec support, without needing to perform expensive upgrades of their customer’s or partner’s decoding devices. Now that MediaLive Statmux supports MPEG-2, and previously supported the AVC and HEVC codecs, broadcasters can now use MediaLive Statmux to reach the vast majority of devices that connect them to their customers.

Amazon Aurora now supports Database Activity Streams in the South America (Sao Paulo), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), and Europe (Milan) regions. Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility provides a near real-time stream of database activities in your relational database. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

This free new digital training curriculum contains modules that explain the benefits of and process for moving from self-managed databases to fully-managed database solutions in the cloud. The four-hour fundamental curriculum includes eight self-paced courses with video demonstrations and is designed for data platform engineers, database developers, and solutions architects.

Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Highlights of the Kubernetes 1.18 release include Topology Manager reaching beta status, a new beta of Server-side Apply, and a new IngressClass resource for the Ingress specification which makes it simpler to customize Ingress configuration. Additionally, you can now configure the behavior of horizontal pod autoscaling. Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.18 in the Kubernetes project release notes. 

Amazon Rekognition content moderation is a deep learning-based service that can detect inappropriate, unwanted, or offensive images and videos, making it easier to find and remove such content at scale. Amazon Rekognition provides a detailed taxonomy of moderation categories such as 'Explicit Nudity', 'Suggestive', ‘Violence’, and 'Visually Disturbing'. Starting today, customers can detect 6 new categories - 'Drugs', ‘Tobacco’, ‘Alcohol’, ‘Gambling’, ‘Rude Gestures’, and ‘Hate Symbols’. In addition, customers also get improved detection rates for already supported categories. Using Amazon Rekognition moderation APIs, social media, broadcast media, advertising, and e-commerce customers can create a better user experience, provide brand safety assurances to advertisers, or comply with local and global regulations. 

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, working closely with customers, has introduced an enhanced user interface to make setting up and managing your enterprise application monitoring even more straight forward. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps enterprise customers easily setup application monitoring and enhanced observability for AWS resources. The user interface improvements streamline the steps for doing this in a more intuitive and consistent approach. 

Starting today, you can use easily restore a new Amazon RDS for MySQL database instance from a backup of your existing MySQL 8.0 database, whether it’s running on Amazon EC2 or outside of AWS. This is done by using Percona XtraBackup to create a backup of your existing MySQL database, uploading the resulting files to an Amazon S3 bucket, and then creating a new Amazon RDS DB instance through the RDS Console or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that you can use to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access the Amazon Transcribe batch API from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs or requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network. With this launch, AWS PrivateLink is now supported for both Batch and Streaming APIs.  

Amazon EMR now allows you to leverage AWS Lake Formation for defining and enforcing fine-grained access control policies for Apache Spark applications. Previously, this feature was in beta.  

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chat bot to improve engagement with customers who speak US Spanish. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments.  

We are excited to announce efficiency improvements for Amazon Personalize that decrease the time required to train models by up to 40% and reduce the latency for generating real-time recommendations by up to 30%. Amazon Personalize enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning (ML) technology used by Amazon.com for real-time personalized recommendations – no ML expertise required. Amazon Personalize provisions the necessary infrastructure and manages the entire ML pipeline, including processing the data, identifying features, using the best algorithms, and training, optimizing, and hosting the models.

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) feature that allows customers to find objects and scenes in images, unique to their business needs, with a simple inference API. Customers can create a custom ML model simply by uploading labeled images. No ML expertise is required.  

You can now discover endpoints registered in AWS Cloud Map with optional parameters that filter the returned results only when there is a matching custom attribute. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Using AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon S3 buckets, or any other cloud resource. Your application can then discover the location and metadata of cloud resources associated with these custom names via AWS SDK or by making authenticated API calls.

Amazon EventBridge now supports Dead Letter Queues (DLQs), which make event-driven applications more resilient and durable by storing your events in queues when the events can't be delivered, or the target is unavailable.

Thirty-two new or updated datasets from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the First Street Foundation, Ookla, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories. 

AWS Lake Formation now supports cross account database sharing. You can now create cross account data lakes to access data across your organization and eliminate data silos.

Customers can now assess their EC2 workloads running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10, and Windows Server 2019 for CVEs and external network accessibility using Inspector. Amazon Inspector is available in the following 14 regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).  

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now allows you to Force Stop a running application and reset its status to Ready, giving you more control over your applications. In addition, you can check if your application is scaling up or down through the new ‘Autoscaling' application status.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) AWS region. Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps, giving you complete access, control, and visibility required to build, train, and deploy models. Within the unified SageMaker Studio visual interface, you can perform all ML development activities including notebooks, experiment management, automatic model creation, debugging, and model drift detection. 

AWS CodeArtifact now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to create and manage CodeArtifact repositories with CloudFormation.

Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights, now available in preview, enables you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions. With this preview, you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions that provide visibility into issues such as memory leaks or performance changes caused by new function versions.

Streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue can now automatically detect the schema of incoming records and gracefully handle schema changes on a per-record basis. Previously, you needed to specify the schema of incoming data using the AWS Glue Data Catalog and update ETL scripts to handle schema changes. The AWS Glue job can now do both for you, saving time on reworking code and increasing the flexibility of your ETL jobs.

Amazon ElastiCache is announcing the launch of ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached on Graviton2 M6g and R6g instance families. Customers choose Amazon ElastiCache for workloads that require ultra-low latency and high throughput, and can now enjoy up to a 45% price/performance improvement over previous generation instances. Graviton2 instances are now the default choice for ElastiCache customers.  

Amazon EMR now supports a spread placement group strategy for clusters with multiple master nodes. You can now launch master nodes across separate underlying hardware to reduce the risk of simultaneous failures that might occur when instances share the same racks. Earlier, master nodes were placed within the same subnet without any placement strategies. 

AWS Compute Optimizer now analyzes additional Amazon EBS metrics to generate enhanced EC2 instance type recommendations. Enhanced recommendations are now available for Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer Rightsizing Recommendations customers.

Starting today, you can create multilevel hierarchies with AWS Cost Categories to group your cost and usage information based on your business needs. Cost Category is added as a new dimension, in addition to Tag, Account, Service, and Charge Type. Furthermore, you can now track whether your most recent cost category updates have been applied to your cost and usage data via a new “status” attribute on your Cost Categories dashboard. 

Whisper flows, which allow information to be passed to an agent or customer while being connected on a call, are now available in Amazon Connect chat. For example, you can display text showing the customer’s name and membership status to an agent, inform a customer that the chat is being recorded for quality assurance purposes, or provision access to a customer relationship management system for the agent accepting the contact. Whisper flows allow you to create personalized, one-sided interactions, which only an agent or end-customer will see, by adding the ‘set whisper flow’ block to your Amazon Connect contact flow. 

Amazon ElastiCache is now available on AWS Outposts. AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. You can deploy Amazon ElastiCache on Outposts to set up, operate, and use cache on-premises, just as you would in the cloud. Amazon ElastiCache provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity for caching in Outposts, while automating time-consuming administration tasks including infrastructure provisioning, cluster setup, patching, and backups, freeing you to focus on your applications.

You can now use AWS Lambda with extensions for your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance. Today, you can use extensions for the following tools: AppDynamics, Check Point, Datadog, Dynatrace, Epsagon, HashiCorp, Lumigo, New Relic, Thundra, Splunk, AWS AppConfig, and Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights.

AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in the Sydney and Singapore AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 6 AWS Regions. 

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports the new version of Chef Automate for its fully managed service. Customers benefit from receiving the update automatically during the weekly system maintenance window scheduled individually by each customer.

AWS Security Hub has improved how we display details for security standards, which are collections of automated security checks based on industry and regulatory frameworks like the Center for Internet Security's (CIS) AWS Foundational Benchmarks, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and AWS's own Foundational Security Best Practices. We have implemented a new tabular view that makes it easier to understand your security posture relative to the security checks you have enabled in Security Hub. We have removed the legacy cards view for standards, so you will now see a visual summary of all your security checks and a count of how many checks have passed or failed. The controls table will show you at a glance the count of failed, unknown, passed, and disabled controls in the standard. Because the controls are grouped by status, you can more easily focus on failed controls. You can filter and search the controls to pinpoint specific resource types and can also sort using any of the table columns. You can now see the security score for a standard in the standard's page alongside its controls.

Apache Flink Kinesis Consumer now supports Enhanced Fan Out (EFO) and the HTTP/2 data retrieval API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. EFO allows Amazon Kinesis Data Streams consumers to scale by offering each consumer a dedicated read throughput up to 2MB/second. The HTTP/2 data retrieval API reduces latency of data delivery from producers to consumers to 70 milliseconds or better. In combination, these two features allow you to build low latency Apache Flink applications that utilize dedicated throughput from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. With this launch, AWS DMS now supports Amazon S3 folder partitions based on transaction commit dates when using Amazon S3 as a target. Using date-based folder partitioning, you can write data from a single source table to a time-hierarchy folder structure in Amazon S3. By partitioning the S3 folder, you can better manage your S3 objects, limit the size of each S3 folder, and optimize data lake queries or other subsequent operations.

Starting today, customers can choose to further protect their recommendation data generated by AWS Compute Optimizer by exporting to S3 buckets encrypted with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Master Keys (CMKs).  

Today we are announcing a price reduction of up to 18% on all ml.p3 and ml.p2 instances in Amazon SageMaker, making them an even more cost-effective solution to meet your machine learning needs. The new price reductions will be effective Oct 1st 2020 and will apply to ml.p3 and ml.p2 instances for SageMaker Studio Notebooks, On-Demand Notebooks, Processing, Training, Real-Time Inference, and Batch Transform.

AWS Training and Certification has launched AWS Cloud for Technical Professionals, a new self-paced digital course available exclusively on Trailhead, the Salesforce learning platform. Recommended for technical learners who are new to the AWS Cloud or are interested in building their AWS Cloud skills, this course covers AWS fundamental concepts such as Regions, Availability Zones, and Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports Nielsen SID/TIC watermarking for mezzanine and OTT content delivery. This feature enables the application of Nielsen watermarks to encoded audio streams that can be detected by metering equipment to track the number of viewers, type of viewing equipment, and consumption methods. Once content is encoded with SID/TIC unique identifiers, the job record and log is packaged and saved for easy transfer to Nielsen where the content is registered. Registered content can be metered across different device types and consumption methods through Nielsen analysis, enabling you to track your viewership and content impact.

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler now supports resource tagging for profiling groups, making it easy for AWS customers to manage their resources effectively as their utilization of AWS services begins to scale.  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports Redis 6. This release brings several new and important features to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

Customers can now connect PingFederate to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using PingFederate to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Ping Identity experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in. AWS SSO and PingFederate use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers support for InSync FrameFormer frame rate conversion. With this feature, you can use InSync FrameFormer technology to perform broadcast-quality, motion-compensated frame rate conversions between international broadcast frame rates or between broadcast and film frame rates. This allows you to create high-quality video output files even when complex frame rate conversions are required.

AWS Client VPN is now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) Region. This increases global coverage of AWS Client VPN, which offers region support in Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Stockholm), North America (N. Virginia, Northern California, Ohio, Oregon). With this launch, AWS Client VPN is now available in a total of 15 Regions. 

You can now control access to AWS Batch resources based on tag values. 

Starting today, you can now switch the color theme of your WorkDocs iOS application for a darker appearance. With Dark Mode, the appearance of the app is inverted so that instead of black text on white background, you see white text on a black background. The design reduces the light emitted by your device’s screen while maintaining the minimum color contrast ratios required for readability. Dark mode is not only a user preference and personalization feature but also a supplemental accessibility setting that may improve visibility and reduce eye strain while even preserving battery life.  

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) CSI driver now supports creating volumes on worker nodes running in AWS Outposts subnets.  

You can now manage access to Contact Trace Records (CTRs), Call Recordings, and Chat Transcripts in the Contact Search page of your Amazon Connect instance using agent hierarchies. Agent hierarchy is an Amazon Connect feature that allows administrators to group users together. Now they can use these groups to control access to results in the contact search experience. For example, administrators can grant supervisors the permission to view the contacts handled by only the agents in their hierarchy, and no others. This feature provides you with the flexibility to help meet your enterprise security and compliance standards.

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

You can now run multi-container applications in AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the Docker platform built on top of Amazon Linux 2 Operating System. The Elastic Beanstalk Docker on Amazon Linux 2 platform now supports docker-compose.yml format to define and run multiple containers. For more information about Docker on Amazon Linux 2 platform, see the Elastic Beanstalk developer guide.  

Today, the Amazon Builders’ Library published a new article titled, Avoiding overload in distributed systems by putting the smaller service in control. AWS Senior Principal Engineer Joe Magerramov dives deep into the strategies for avoiding the larger service from overloading the smaller one by putting the smaller service in control of the pace of interactions.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks for exploring datasets and building models. Starting today, you can choose to launch SageMaker Studio in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for fine-grained control on network access and internet connectivity of SageMaker Studio Notebooks. You can choose to completely disable public internet access for notebooks to add an additional layer of security.  

Distributed Load Testing on AWS helps you easily simulate thousands of users connecting to your application so that you can better understand your application performance under load. The solution launches and configures containers on AWS Fargate to generate a specified number of transactions per second without having to provision servers. 

Amazon Lumberyard 1.26 Beta is now available for download, bringing you a range of updates including major improvements to Dynamic Terrain and Landscape Canvas, the general availability (GA) of the PhysX Gem (now with joint support and samples), a full preview release of the new Lumberyard UI (“UI 2.0”), usability improvements to the White Box Tool, updated GameLift support, and new tutorial guides to help you get started with 1.26. 

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to mobile users can now host their application in the US East (Ohio), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Paris), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to one phone number, or multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. Customers can send SMS text messages directly to mobile phone numbers in more than 200 countries.

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

When using CloudWatch Synthetics, you can now get a snapshot of the canary health with a prebuilt monitoring dashboard. The new monitoring dashboard provides canary data trends over time for latency, availability, and error counts. The dashboard also provides expected latency based on historical data of the previous canary runs. This helps you spot anomalies sooner which in turn allows you to respond faster to ensure a better end user experience.  

Amazon DynamoDB global tables are now available in the Europe (Milan) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to a DynamoDB table for fast read and write performance. You also can use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability and disaster recovery.

The redesigned AWS Architecture Center helps you find the information you need to design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud applications, right from the start. The Architecture Center aggregates best practices, reference architecture deployments, reference architecture diagrams, and more, making it easier for you to discover what’s most important. The new Architecture Center also provides new ways for you to share feedback by voting on proposed guidance, requesting content, and more.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now supports the option of upserting records in destinations, in addition to already supported option of inserting records. This feature is now available when Salesforce is selected as the destination. The upsert operation updates existing records in Salesforce if they exist; otherwise, it inserts the data as new records. Customers can now insert, or upsert up to 500 MB of data in Salesforce in a single flow run.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now allows you to select additional time-stamp fields as the criteria for determining incremental data in schedule triggered flows. In a given flow run, AppFlow supports the ability to transfer only records that have changed since the previous successful flow run. Previously, the criteria for determining if a record has changed was not configurable. Now, you can choose any suitable source field, such as created date and modified date, as the criteria for determining which records have changed.

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chat bot to improve engagement with customers who speak Australian English. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. Pre-defined resources (‘slots’), such as regional names and cities, are localized to the Australian English dialect to improve accuracy when capturing information, so customers can say things like “Book a hotel in Perth” and the Amazon Lex bot will recognize the city.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports a configurable Kubernetes service IP address range. This enables customers with clusters running in a peered or direct connected network environment to ensure that their pods can communicate with external applications on networks outside the cluster.  

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chat bot to improve engagement with customers who speak British English. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. Pre-defined resources (‘slots’), such as regional names and cities, are localized to the British English dialect to improve accuracy when capturing information, so customers can say things like “Book a hotel in London” and the Amazon Lex bot will recognize the city.  

Today, AWS and Grafana Labs launched an AWS X-Ray data source plugin. You can use the latest release of Grafana (version 7.2.0 or later) to help visualize your AWS X-Ray traces directly in your Grafana dashboards in order to triage performance issues.

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS region. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. 

AWS has repositioned Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to emphasize our continued support for Apache Flink.

You can now use an Amazon Honeycode app template that helps you build an automated employee onboarding process for your team or organization. Amazon Honeycode is a fully managed service that allows customers to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications for team productivity scenarios – with no programming required. The new template is intended for Honeycode builders who are seeking more app examples and want to study best practices for building apps. 

You now can design and visualize Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) data models more easily by using NoSQL Workbench. NoSQL Workbench now provides you a point-and-click interface to create nonrelational data models for Amazon Keyspaces, a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service. 

AWS Lake Formation now supports Active Directory and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) identity providers such as OKTA and Auth0 for Amazon Athena. You can now easily manage data access for Amazon Athena users with fine grained privileges using existing identity management tools.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports running containers on AWS Fargate in ten additional AWS regions: US West (Northern California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions. 

Amazon Personalize enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, using the same machine learning technology as used by Amazon.com, without requiring any prior machine learning experience. Using Amazon Personalize, you can generate personalized recommendations for your users through a simple API interface. Amazon Personalize now makes it easier to manage your growing item and user catalogs with new APIs for incrementally adding items and users in the datasets that you use in Personalize to create personalized recommendations. 

Amazon Redshift introduces support for natively storing and processing HyperLogLog (HLL) sketches. HyperLogLog is a novel algorithm that efficiently estimates the approximate number of distinct values in a data set. HLL sketch is a construct that encapsulates the information about the distinct values in the data set. You can use HLL sketches to achieve significant performance benefits for queries that compute approximate cardinality over large data sets, with an average relative error between 0.01–0.6%. 

Amazon S3 Object Ownership is a new S3 feature that enables bucket owners to automatically assume ownership of objects that are uploaded to their buckets by other AWS Accounts. This helps you to standardize ownership of new objects in your bucket, and to share and manage access to these objects at scale via resource-based policies such as a bucket policy or an access point policy. Whether your S3 bucket receives data from other AWS accounts, or stores output from AWS services like AWS CloudTrail, S3 Object Ownership simplifies the work of creating and maintaining shared data sets on Amazon S3.  

AWS Transfer Family now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US) 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.  

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports two subscription filters per log group, enabling you to deliver a real-time feed of log events from CloudWatch Logs to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, or AWS Lambda for custom processing, analysis, or delivery to other systems.  

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) launches a new master class and AWS Labs to get you started using the service and hone your skills with best practices. The new Amazon MSK Master Class, created by Stephane Maarek, AWS Hero, gives you six hours of hands-on learning in the most comprehensive content available for Amazon MSK. New AWS Labs take you through getting started, a use case example of ingesting and analyzing real-time clickstream data, and best practices for migrating your self-managed Apache Kafka cluster to Amazon MSK. By completing the class and labs, you will learn how to apply your knowledge to your own use cases.  

You can now run Kubernetes pods as part of your Amazon EKS Kubernetes clusters in the two AWS Local Zones in Los Angeles. With Amazon EKS and Local Zones, you can run latency-sensitive Kubernetes 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 EKS clusters running in AWS US West (Oregon) parent region.  

AWS Batch now supports new parameters when specifying AWS Batch job definitions, including custom logging configurations, swap space, and shared memory. AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., GPU, CPU, or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that you use to run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems.  

AWS Config now offers 15 additional sample conformance pack templates that can help you verify your cloud infrastructure’s compliance with one or more frameworks for configuration best practices. With conformance packs, you can package a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be deployed together as a single entity across an entire organization. This is particularly useful if you need to quickly establish a common baseline for resource configuration policies and best practices across multiple accounts in your organization in a scalable and efficient way.  

AWS Security Hub is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon). The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to the security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800 series and requires cloud service providers to receive an independent security assessment conducted by a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) to ensure that authorizations are compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). We are also now approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in those regions.

AWS Secrets Manager has been authorized by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) under DoD’s Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (DoD CC SRG) at Impact Levels (IL) 4 and IL 5 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. With this authorization, DoD Mission Owners can now use Secrets Manager to support unclassified National Security Systems (NSS) and mission critical information.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the waiters feature in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x . The waiters feature is an abstraction that enables you to validate that AWS resources, such as DynamoDB tables or Amazon S3 buckets, are in a specified state before performing operations on those resources. When interacting with AWS APIs that are asynchronous, such as DynamoDB CreateTable, customers often need to wait for that particular resource to become available in order to perform further actions on it. The waiter utility provides a simple API that polls a resource until a desired state is reached or until it is determined that the resource will never enter into the desired state.

The AWS Snowball service is now available in the AWS Europe (Milan) Region. AWS Snowball, a part of the AWS Snow Family, is an edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device that comes in two options. Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices provide 80 TB of Amazon S3 object storage and optional compute with 40 vCPUs. They are well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices provide 52 vCPUs, 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage, 42 TB of HDD storage, 256 GB of RAM, and an optional GPU for use cases like advanced machine learning and full motion video analysis in disconnected environments. You can use these devices for data collection, machine learning and processing, and storage in environments with intermittent connectivity (like manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (like military or maritime operations) before shipping the devices back to AWS. These devices may also be rack mounted and clustered together to build larger temporary installations.

AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author, and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code, a free code editor built on open source. You can now use the editor to author runbooks faster and be more productive by starting with pre-built templates, auto-completing the code with snippets, and validating the runbook for syntax errors in real time. Once built, you can publish the runbooks from the editor to the cloud with a single click.  

AWS DeepRacer allows you to get hands-on with machine learning (ML) through a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, a 3D racing simulator on the AWS DeepRacer console, a global racing league, and hundreds of customer-initiated community races.

AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection now supports CloudFormation Registry resource types, so you can detect unmanaged configuration changes on additional AWS resources, as well as third-party or private ones.  

In 2019 we launched Amazon EC2’s vCPU-based limits for On-Demand Instances to simplify the limit management experience for EC2 customers. Now, we have also made the same improvements for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. We have migrated the account limit for Spot Instances from being instance based to a vCPU based limit experience. Starting today, you will be able to manage Spot limits from the Amazon EC2 console and the Service Quotas console.

AWS Marketplace Independent Software Vendors are now able to create new or update existing product listings to control product availability to specific countries. Since launch in 2012, AWS Marketplace products have been available globally. Some Independent Software Vendors need to control where their software can be purchased for tax, compliance, support, or marketing purposes. With the launch of Geo-Fencing, Independent Software Vendors now have the flexibility to create and surface their product offerings in line with their business needs across geographies.

AWS CloudFormation announces the general availability (GA) of AWS CloudFormation Guard (cfn-guard), which enhances the preview release of cfn-guard (June 2020) with new features. Cfn-guard is an open-source command line interface (CLI) that checks CloudFormation templates for policy compliance using a simple, policy-as-code, declarative language.  

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 19 regions, with the addition of the Europe (Milan) region.

Starting today AWS Transit Gateway supports internet protocol (IP) multicast in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can now enable AWS WAF integration for your GraphQL APIs in AWS AppSync, making it easier to protect your APIs against common web exploits.

It’s now faster and easier for you to share your Amazon WorkSpaces images across your AWS accounts. With this release, you can share your Amazon WorkSpaces image in one AWS account with another account with a few simple clicks. This helps you simplify and accelerate deployment of Amazon WorkSpaces while improving consistency, compliance, and security of your Amazon WorkSpaces. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now has a developer preview module in the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which implements an extendable service construct. Instead of writing JSON task definitions for your services by hand, you can model and provision ECS resources using familiar programming languages. The new ECS service construct for CDK supports extensions that automatically add additional capabilities such as App Mesh or FireLens to your containerized services.

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) feature that allows customers to find objects and scenes in images, unique to their business needs, with a simple inference API. Customers can create a custom ML model simply by uploading labeled images. No ML expertise is required.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now creates machine learning models up to 40% faster with up to 200% higher accuracy, even with small and imbalanced datasets. SageMaker Autopilot is a fully managed service that makes it easy to quickly and automatically create machine learning models, without requiring any prior ML or programming experience.