November 2020

We are excited to introduce three free digital courses to help you learn how to order, configure, deploy, manage, and return AWS Snowcone edge computing and storage devices. Designed for storage engineers, cloud architects, and migration engineers, these introductory and intermediate courses include reading modules, video demonstrations, and quizzes. The time required to complete each course ranges between 50 and 90 minutes.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for macOS are generally available. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

Change Calendar, a capability of Systems Manager, now publishes an event to Amazon EventBridge when it changes state from open to closed and vice versa. You can use the published state change event to automatically start actions such as disabling promotions through your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, managing access to your fleet, or updating the system configurations. Change Calendar allows you to create blocked days on your calendar in order to prevent changes from being made to your application during important business events such as public marketing promotions, when you expect high demand on your resources.

The Amazon Chime SDK makes it easier for developers to add VoIP audio, PSTN audio, video, and content sharing to their applications. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK also enables developers to connect communities of users with secure, scalable, and persistent messaging.

Porting Assistant for .NET can now support customers to migrate their legacy .NET framework applications to newly released .NET 5. .NET 5 is a major release with a broad set of features and improvements. With this updated release of Porting Assistant for .NET customers can analyze and port their .NET framework applications to either new release of .NET 5 or .NET Core 3.1.

AWS Transfer Family customers using Amazon API Gateway to integrate their own identity management systems to authenticate end users can now use AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to easily apply additional layers of access controls. You can also protect your file transfer endpoints against exploits such as bots and port scanners. 

We’re excited to announce that you can now measure the accuracy of forecasts for individual items in Amazon Forecast, allowing you to better understand your forecasting model's performance for the items that most impact your business. Improving forecast accuracy for specific items—such as those with higher prices or higher costs—is often more important than optimizing for all items. With this launch, you can now view accuracy for individual items and export forecasts generated during training. This information allows you to better interpret results by easily comparing performance against observed historical demand, aggregating accuracy metrics across custom sets of SKUs or time periods, or visualizing results without needing to hold out a separate validation dataset. From there, you can tailor your experiments to further optimize accuracy for items significant for your needs. 

Centricity Secure Workplace for Government is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from CloudHesive, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency and an Authority to Operate on AWS (ATO) Partner. Centricity Secure Workplace for Government brings a virtual desktop solution that helps customers meet their security control sets and operational needs. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers identification of customer requirements and controls, solution testing and deployment, and training and ongoing managed services.

Ubertas Consulting Foundations for AWS Well-Architected is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Ubertas Consulting, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Ubertas Consulting Foundations for AWS Well-Architected offers a consulting engagement to build out a robust, best-practice-driven AWS environment. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers implementation, knowledge transfer, and operational guidance in assisting you to launch your application workloads into a secure, resilient AWS environment.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) capacity providers now support update functionality. You can update the parameters of a capacity provider using either the AWS Management Console or the new UpdateCapacityProvider API.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS) now supports specifying a custom instance warm-up time, making scaling more responsive.

PostgreSQL 13 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test PostgreSQL 13 on Amazon RDS.  

With AWS IoT Analytics you can now configure notification for data sets that receive late data and refresh the results of the data sets with late data. Late data is data that arrives after an initial result is generated for the data set. You can configure late data notification for a data set by simply setting a time window within which late data is expected to arrive. AWS IoT Analytics sends late data notifications via Amazon CloudWatch Events when it receives late data for the data set. For more information, please visit the late data notification page in the AWS IoT Analytics user guide.

Today, we are excited to announce additional capabilities with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. You can now use Code Maintainability detector to identify smells early, balance between speed and technical debt, and coordinate software development and maintenance efficiently.

AWS Batch now supports natively launching Amazon Linux 2 as your AMI when creating an AWS Batch compute environment through a single parameter. Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, you get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux ecosystem.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ground Station announces a new antenna location in Hawaii, USA. This is now the eighth Ground Station location connected to the AWS Global Network.  

AWS has open-sourced Amazon Neptune’s Jupyter Notebook components for querying and visualizing graphs as a Python package under the Apache 2.0 license. The graph notebook is a Python library for Jupyter Notebooks that can run on local desktops and be used with databases that support either the RDF/SPARQL open standard or the open-source Apache TinkerPop graphs. You can use graph notebook to visualize nodes, edges, and properties along your graph to analyze relationships and graph patterns in your data.

AWS CloudHSM automatically takes a backup of your HSM cluster once a day and whenever an HSM is added to or removed from your cluster. Until today, however, customers were responsible for deleting old backups. Deleting out of date backups is important to prevent inactive users and expired login credentials from being used to access sensitive data on the HSM.  

Setting up monitoring for your enterprise applications got even easier with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights new ability to automatically detect applications and setup monitoring based on the detected applications. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers easily setup monitoring and enhanced observability for their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature automatically populates the applications detected into the setup process for a simple and efficient configuration of application monitoring 

You can now define your infrastructure and applications in AWS CloudFormation with reusable building blocks called modules. A module encapsulates one or more resources and their respective configurations for reuse across your organization.  

Today, we are excited to announce the addition of German and Latin American Spanish language support to Amazon Lex. 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.  

AWS App2Container (A2C) is a command-line tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications. A2C analyzes and builds an inventory of all applications running in virtual machines, on-premises or in the cloud. You simply select the application you want to containerize, and A2C packages the application artifact and identified dependencies into container images, configures the network ports, and generates the ECS task and Kubernetes pod definitions. 

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions.  

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now provides convenient IDE functionality to interact with SQS queues and search through CloudWatch Logs.  

Amazon EventBridge now provides Server-Side Encryption (SSE) using AWS Owned Keys for protection of sensitive data. SSE is enabled by default and lets you transmit sensitive data more securely with EventBridge.

Location-Based Notifications Using Amazon Pinpoint is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps you easily add a new geographic dimension to personalized and targeted messaging for end users. Personalized customer engagements can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. This solution reduces that heavy-lifting by configuring and provisioning a reference architecture. The solution leverages Amazon Pinpoint and AWS AppSync APIs to enable near real-time notifications based on an end-users' location. It quickly registers locations and adds a geofence markup for geographic boundaries around any point of interest. These geofences can be used for more personalized engagements via the solution APIs pushing timely notifications to end-users when they enter or exits a geofence (for example, your business, a restaurant, or any other venue).

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 launch Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Korean language support for Transcribe streaming. To deliver streaming transcriptions with low latency for these languages, we are also announcing availability of Amazon Transcribe streaming in the South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions. Now you can transcribe live media content in these languages with ease.  

Amazon Cognito is now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) and US West (N. California) Regions. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

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

Amazon Translate is a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate now adds support to the following more languages and variants - Armenian, Catalan, Gujarati, Haitian, Icelandic, Kannada, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Macedonian, Maltese, Mongolian, Sinhala, Telugu, Uzbek, and Welsh. 

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA-eligible automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe Medical can transcribe speech for medical specialties under the broader Primary Care umbrella such as internal medicine, family medicine, obstetrics-gynecology (OB-GYN), and pediatrics. Starting today, the service expands streaming transcription support for five new medical specialties covering cardiology, oncology, neurology, radiology, and urology. 

Customers can now explicitly specify which qubits are going to be used when they use Amazon Braket to run a quantum circuit on quantum computers from Rigetti. This allows researchers and advanced users to optimize their circuit design based on the latest device calibration data to get more accurate results.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports canary scripts in Python programming language with the Selenium open source web automation testing framework. This gives you more choice in the programming language and framework to use when creating canaries in CloudWatch Synthetics.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 7.9 and its corresponding version of Kibana. This minor release includes bug fixes and enhancements. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain) AWS Region. This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in the Middle East where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from IBM Spectrum Protect to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.6 or later, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 12, Service Pack 2 or later, and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service has introduced several security enhancements to the fine-grained access control feature that include a revamped and improved security workflow in Kibana, and integration with Open Distro for Elasticsearch Alerting and Anomaly Detection features. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from IBM Spectrum Protect to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.6 or later, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 12, Service Pack 2 or later, and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Customers can now deploy compute-intensive applications such as machine learning inferencing, multimedia processing, scientific simulations, HPC, and financial modeling that leverage Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to meet their performance requirements on AWS Lambda.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to create fine-grained permissions for your workforce in AWS using attributes, such as cost center and department, defined in your AWS SSO identity source. Your administrators can now implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) with AWS SSO to centrally manage access to your AWS accounts and simplify permissions management at scale.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Gantt charts, a new visualization in Kibana. Users can now embed Gantt charts into dashboards to enable visualization of events, steps and tasks as horizontal bars. The length of the bars shows the amount of time associated with an event, step or a task. Gantt charts are used to represent a series of events that contain a parent-child relationship. This can be particularly useful in trace analytics, telemetry, and monitoring use cases, in which the users need to understand the overall interaction between traces or events. Gantt charts help users manage their resources by getting an overview of the events or tasks and understanding the relationships between them. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, now enables you to increase the storage capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to easily respond to your evolving storage needs by increasing file system size in a matter of minutes. 

Errors in Spark applications commonly arise from inefficient Spark scripts, distributed in-memory execution of large-scale transformations, and dataset abnormalities. AWS Glue workload partitioning is the newest offering from AWS Glue to address these issues and improve the reliability of Spark applications and consistency of run-time. Workload partitioning enables you to specify how much data to process in each job-run and, using AWS Glue job bookmarks, track how much of the data AWS Glue processed.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, now enables you to increase the storage capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to easily respond to your evolving storage needs by increasing file system size in a matter of minutes. 

AWS Secrets Manager now supports higher request rates for the GetSecretValue API operation of up to 5000 requests per second. This increased API limit will be applied to your accounts automatically. No further action required on your end.  

Amazon Pinpoint Preference Center is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps Amazon Pinpoint customers quickly deploy a ready-to-use mobile-optimized preference center allowing end users to manage their communication preferences and attributes. Previously, customers had no mechanism to collect end user preferences. As a result, they would develop their own preference centers or work to extract preference data from other systems, which resulted in costly custom development. Reducing the heavy-lifting, this solution allows Amazon Pinpoint customers to send highly targeted communications to their end users based on their preferred channel and interests.

AWS Config lets you assess, audit, and evaluate how your AWS resources are configured, and helps you determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. You can use AWS Config aggregators to collect your configuration and compliance data from the below sources, and aggregate that data into a single account and AWS Region to get a centralized view of your resource inventory and compliance.

1. Multiple accounts and multiple AWS Regions.
2. A single account and multiple AWS Regions.
3. An organization in AWS Organizations and all the accounts in the organization that have AWS Config enabled.

AWS Step Functions now supports the synchronous executions of Express Workflows, allowing you to easily build web-based applications and orchestrate high-volume, short-duration microservices.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers support for Remote Reindex, enabling you to migrate data from a remote cluster into Amazon Elasticsearch Service. With this feature, you can simply copy data from one cluster to another, making it easier to migrate from legacy versions of Elasticsearch. Remote Reindex also supports migrating indexes from self-managed Elasticsearch onto Amazon Elasticsearch Service, providing a simple mechanism to onboard onto the service.

AWS now offers Amazon Comprehend Events, which extracts real world events and the associated arguments from text documents. For example, consider a news article that announces that Amazon acquired WholeFoods Market. Comprehend Events will identify the event as an ‘acquisition’ and detect the acquirer (Amazon), acquiree (WholeFoods Market), the deal amount and the date and time of the deal. Customers can use Comprehend Events to understand relationships from natural language text documents between entities such as organizations, people, and dates to build applications such as analytics on financial data and knowledge graphs. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers anomaly detection for high cardinality datasets. This new feature enables you to sift through thousands of metrics from millions of events to accurately pinpoint individual entities with abnormal patterns. By leveraging machine learning, Amazon Elasticsearch Service now provides reliable and actionable insights to drastically reduce the time to isolate and remediate issues. High cardinality anomaly detection can be invaluable for a number of operational, security and business use cases like identifying hosts with high CPU and memory consumption, finding services with most error rates, isolating suspicious users or IP addresses accessing sensitive information, or detecting outliers in sales by region. 

You can now create richer customer experiences and resolve issues faster by using interactive messages in Amazon Connect Chat. Interactive messages enable you to send prompts and pre-configured response options, eliminating the need for a customer to manually type in their reply. For example, customers can choose a recent order they need help with or select their preferred appointment time from a list of options simply by clicking on it.  Powered by Amazon Lex, interactive messages allow you to create personalized, self-service experiences for your customers using the same chatbots that you’re already using for Amazon Connect Voice and Chat. Interactive messages help to increase chatbot accuracy, reduce customer friction, and increase self-service rates. If a contact is escalated from a chatbot to an agent, the agent can see the prompt and the customer’s reply, ensuring that the full context of the conversation is available to the agent without the customer having to repeat themselves.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Piped Processing Language (PPL), a new feature that enables users to explore, discover and find data stored in Amazon ES, using a set of commands delimited by pipes (|). PPL extends Elasticsearch to support a standard set of commands that is easy for system developers, DevOps engineers, support engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers who are proficient with Linux or Unix to learn. PPL enables these users to begin extracting insights from their log, monitoring and observability data on day one.

AWS Lambda now allows customers using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as an event source to define a wait period, called MaximumBatchingWindowInSeconds, to allow messages to accumulate in their SQS queue before invoking a Lambda function. In addition to Batch Size, this is a second option to send records in batches, to reduce the number of Lambda invokes. This option is ideal for workloads that are not time-sensitive, and can choose to wait to optimize cost.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports the ability to add the recently launched P4d instances on Amazon ECS clusters in all regions where P4d instances are available. P4d instances offer up to 60% lower cost to train compared to previous generation instances with 2.5X more deep learning performance using the latest NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. These instances also offer 8 TB of local NVMe storage. P4d instances are currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. To learn more about P4d instances, please visit the P4d product page and news blog.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports an additional dimension to identify the source of high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries faster. The new Performance Insights dimension is available on Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB. 

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports additional dimensions to identify the source of high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries faster. The new Performance Insights dimensions are available on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. 

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 Ogg opus and FLAC encoded audio in Amazon Transcribe for streaming transcription. Previously, you were required to transcode audio streams with these encodings to PCM encoding which added extra costs and scaling challenges for large workloads.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS) now offers more responsive scaling when using EC2 Auto Scaling groups (ASGs) that span across Availability Zones (AZs) and instance types.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced a new self-service experience in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP) that enables AWS Marketplace Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to add new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) versions, restrict versions, and update product information on their AMI software listings quickly and easily. AWS Marketplace is consistently improving the way that sellers can keep their AMI products up-to-date. With this release, AWS Marketplace has automated the steps to publish changes to the thousands of AMI product listings in AWS Marketplace, enabling ISVs to rapidly update and adjust their listings on their own.  

Amazon Managed Workflows is a new managed orchestration service for Apache Airflow that makes it easier to set up and operate end-to-end data pipelines in the cloud at scale. Apache Airflow is an open source tool used to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor sequences of processes and tasks referred to as “workflows”.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports the Microsoft Business Intelligence suite on SQL Server 2019. You can now run SQL Server Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services on DB instances using the latest major version. 

AWS Storage Gateway has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization, approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB), for the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. FedRAMP compliance enables you to use AWS Storage Gateway to store and manage your critical workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region’s authorization boundary with data up to the high impact level.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) as a target. Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your application's needs. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) with minimal downtime.

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 AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. You can now synthesize over 15 NTTS voices, 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.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) administrators can now require users to self-enroll multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices during sign-in. For your users without a registered MFA device, you can require them to complete a self-guided MFA enrollment process following a successful password authentication. This allows administrators to secure their organization’s AWS environments with MFA without having to individually enroll and distribute authentication devices to users.

Starting today, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) customers can discover a curated collection of third-party software built for Amazon S3 from within the S3 Management Console. Customers can choose from free or paid software products across SaaS, AMI, CFT, and Container product types, spanning across a wide range of popular categories including Storage, Back-up and Recovery, Data Integration and Analytics, Observability and Monitoring, Security and Threat Detection, and Permissions. 

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now supports import of all standard and custom tables from ServiceNow into Amazon S3. 

AWS CodeArtifact now supports NuGet packages for .NET development.

AWS Client VPN is now available in the Paris, Milan, Cape Town, Bahrain, and Hong Kong Regions. This increases global coverage of AWS Client VPN and brings the total number of available Regions to twenty.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports monitoring multiple APIs in a single canary and viewing detailed HTTP request reports by using the new minor runtime version, syn-nodejs-2.2. This gives you flexibility to test multiple HTTP requests together and individually monitor metrics of each request. 

The AWS Snowball service is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. AWS Snowball, a member 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 Security Hub is now integrated with AWS Organizations to simplify security posture management across all of your existing and future AWS accounts in an organization. With this launch, new and existing Security Hub customers can delegate any account in their organization as the Security Hub administrator and centrally view security findings from up to 5,000 AWS accounts. The integration with AWS Organizations allows you to automatically enable Security Hub and its automated security checks in any existing and newly created accounts in the organization. You can also now see AWS account names alongside account IDs in the Security Hub console. Customers using Security Hub’s existing multi-account management feature can transition to this new AWS Organizations-enabled multi-account management without any disruption to existing Security Hub usage. This feature is available today in all Security Hub supported AWS regions except in the AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. To learn more, see the Security Hub User Guide for account management.  

AWS License Manager allows administrators to create customized licensing rules in license configurations to emulate the terms of their vendor agreements. Administrators can use License Manager to enforce these rules by attaching license configurations to their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Administrators can now attach license configurations to their AMIs to make the enforcement effective across all their AWS accounts. License Manager evaluates licensing rules at the time of instance launch from AMIs to prevent overages and notify administrators in an event of any licensing rule violation. License Manager also allows administrators to track instance launches from AMIs shared with them from other AWS accounts. Administrators thus gain control and visibility of their licenses used across all AWS accounts and reduce the risk of non-compliance, misreporting, and additional costs due to licensing overages. 

Starting today, EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet (further referred to as Fleet) are integrated with Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) to notify you about important Fleet events, state changes, and errors. This allows you to automate actions in response to Fleet state changes as well as monitor the state of your Fleet from a central place without a need to continuously poll Fleet APIs. Amazon EventBridge enables you to collect monitoring data from AWS resources and applications, and allows you to build loosely coupled and distributed event-driven architectures. 

AWS Systems Manager now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint policies, which allow you to configure access to the Systems Manager API. When you create Amazon VPC endpoints for Systems Manager, you can attach AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource policies that restrict user access to Systems Manager API operations, when these operations are accessed via the Amazon VPC endpoint. For example, you can limit certain users to only be able to list Systems Manager Run Command invocations but not to send any command invocations. You can also restrict specific users’ ability to start a Systems Manager Session Manager session.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you attach multiple network interfaces when launching EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. Previously, customers had to write custom scripts and run lifecycle hooks to attach multiple network interfaces. You can now define multiple network interfaces in a launch template and your Auto Scaling group will automatically attach them to instances as they launch. 

Amazon SageMaker Studio is now available in thirteen more AWS regions, bringing its total available regions to twenty-two. 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.

You now can use PartiQL (a SQL-compatible query language)—in addition to already-available DynamoDB operations—to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB. PartiQL makes it easier to interact with DynamoDB and run queries in the AWS Management Console. Because PartiQL is supported for all DynamoDB data-plane operations, it can help improve the productivity of developers by enabling them to use a familiar, structured query language to perform these operations. 

With Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Amazon DynamoDB, you can capture item-level changes in your DynamoDB tables as a Kinesis data stream. You can enable streaming to a Kinesis data stream on your table with a single click in the DynamoDB console, or via the AWS API or AWS CLI.  

You now can restore Amazon DynamoDB tables even faster when recovering from data loss or corruption. The increased efficiency of restores and their ability to better accommodate workloads with imbalanced write patterns reduce table restore times across base tables of all sizes and data distributions. To accelerate the speed of restores for tables with secondary indexes, you can exclude some or all secondary indexes from being created with the restored tables. 

You can now ensure that only trusted and verified code is deployed in your AWS Lambda functions. With Code Signing for Lambda, administrators can configure Lambda functions to only accept signed code on deployment. When developers deploy signed code to such functions, Lambda checks the signatures to ensure the code is not altered or tampered. Additionally, Lambda ensures the code is signed by trusted developers before accepting the deployment.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD.  

AWS announces the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, a fully managed, integrated, and pay-as-you-go container monitoring and analytics service for CloudWatch in AWS GovCloud (US). CloudWatch Container Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your container metrics, Prometheus metrics, application logs, and performance events through automated dashboards in the CloudWatch console. These dashboards summarize the performance and availability of clusters, nodes or EC2 instances, services, tasks, pods, and containers running on Amazon Elastic Containers (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and Kubernetes.  

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Amazon DynamoDB. Estimate the cost of DynamoDB workloads before you build them, including the cost of features such as on-demand capacity mode, backup and restore, DynamoDB Streams, and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).

AWS Copilot CLI for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now generally available with v1.0.0. The AWS Copilot CLI makes it easy to build, release, and operate production-ready containerized applications on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. AWS Copilot incorporates AWS’s best practices, from infrastructure-as-code to continuous delivery, and makes them available to customers from the comfort of their terminal. With AWS Copilot, you can focus on building your applications instead of setting up infrastructure.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now offers consumer lag metrics for new Amazon MSK clusters by default, making it easier for you to track whether your applications are consuming the latest data available in your Apache Kafka cluster. Consumer lag metrics quantify the difference between the latest data written to Apache Kafka topics in Amazon MSK and the data read by your applications. Monitoring consumer lag metrics allows application developers to identify slow or stuck consumers that are not keeping up with the latest data available in an Apache Kafka topic so they can take remedial actions such as scaling or rebooting those consumers.

Amazon Translate is a fully managed, neural machine translation service that delivers high quality and affordable language translation in seventy-one languages. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Active Custom Translation (ACT). ACT gives you greater control and enables you to customize the machine translation output to your needs and preferences. For example, you can influence whether the machine translation output should be “How are you?” or “How do you do?” To use ACT, simply provide translation examples called parallel data (PD) along with your batch translation job request and Amazon Translate will use these examples to customize the translation output during runtime.

AWS has launched three industries and three additional knowledge domains for the AWS Architecture Center. The Architecture Center now features best practices, reference architecture diagrams, reference architecture deployments, and more content, organized around Financial Services, Game Tech, and Travel & Hospitality.

Starting today, you can access additional call attributes in your contact flow to build integrations that can authenticate incoming phone calls more accurately, reduce handle times, and enable greater personalization. Additional call attributes from telephony carriers, such as the geographic location of the voice equipment where the call originated, type of phone devices such as a landline or mobile, the number of network segments the call traversed, and other call origination information can be used to improve fraud detection and determine call treatment. For example, you can route trusted incoming calls to your typical agents while routing phone calls with potential fraud signals through a different contact flow to a specialized agent. You can also send phone calls originating outside the country to call center agents that have multilingual skills.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights today announces the ability to easily add monitoring for Java applications for your enterprise applications. CloudWatch Application Insights is a simple to use capability that with just a few clicks guides customers through setting up monitoring and enhanced observability for enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature monitors metrics emitted by Java along with pertinent application related metrics.

Amazon EventBridge announces improvements to event bus resource policies that make it easier to build applications that work across accounts. With this change, you can now send events to, and create rules on event buses in another account while relying on the event bus resource policy to manage your permissions. 

Today, we are excited to announce additional capabilities with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. You can now add tags to associated repositories to better identify, organize, and manage your AWS resources.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports ingestion of data that is up to 7 days old (extended from 15 mins). Late data may be ingested in to AWS IoT SiteWise using the AWS IoT SiteWise connector (which runs on your edge devices), AWS IoT Core or the BatchPutAssetPropertyValue API directly. This would enable you to transmit any accumulated data to AWS IoT SiteWise when recovering from intermittent connectivity issues. To get the most out of this feature, please upgrade to version 8 (latest) of IoT SiteWise connector that runs on AWS IoT Greengrass. AWS IoT SiteWise automatically calculates (or recalculates) related transforms or metrics on arrival of late data. To learn more, visit the late data ingestion page in the AWS IoT SiteWise user guide.

Starting today, you can now switch the color theme of your Amazon WorkDocs Android application for a darker appearance. With Dark Mode, the appearance of the app is inverted so that instead of black text on a 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 preserving battery life.

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

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the South America (Sao Paulo) region.

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE EnginFrame version 2020.0. NICE EnginFrame is a powerful and easy to use web front-end for accessing technical and scientific applications on-premises and in the cloud.  

You can now build and run streaming applications using Apache Flink version 1.11 in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink. Apache Flink v1.11 provides improvements to the Table and SQL API, which is a unified, relational API for stream and batch processing and acts as a superset of the SQL language specially designed for working with Apache Flink. Apache Flink v1.11 capabilities also include an improved memory model and RocksDB optimizations for increased application stability, and support for task manager stack traces in the Apache Flink Dashboard.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to secure user access to AWS accounts and business applications using multi-factor authentication (MFA) with FIDO-enabled security keys, such as YubiKey, and built-in biometric authenticators, such as Touch ID on Apple MacBooks and facial recognition on PCs. With this release, AWS SSO now supports the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) specification to provide strongly attestable and phishing-resistant authentication across all supported browsers, using interoperable FIDO2 and U2F authenticators.

Today we are announcing the availability of License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server version 20H2 for Amazon EC2, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest version of Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. Windows Server 20H2 provides the latest fixes and performance enhancements for Windows Server.

AWS Glue Schema Registry, a serverless feature of AWS Glue, enables you to validate and control the evolution of streaming data using registered Apache Avro schemas, at no additional charge. Through Apache-licensed serializers and deserializers, the Schema Registry integrates with Java applications developed for Apache Kafka/Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Apache Flink/Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink, and AWS Lambda.

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

AWS Network Firewall is a new AWS-managed service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all of your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The service can be set up with just a few clicks and scales automatically with your network traffic, so you don't have to worry about deploying and managing any infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall is for customers who want to inspect and filter traffic to, from, or between their Amazon VPCs. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now provides access to the Apache Flink Dashboard, giving you greater visibility into your applications and advanced monitoring capabilities. You can now view your Apache Flink application’s environment variables, over 120 metrics, logs, and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of the Apache Flink application in a simple, contextualized user interface.

We are excited to announce the availability of Context Management on Amazon Lex. Conversations involve managing context across multiple turns as the interaction evolves. Similarly, bots need to understand the progression of a conversation’s context in order to respond appropriately. Previously, you had to write code to manage context via session attributes. Depending on the intent fulfilled, the code had to orchestrate invocation of the next intent. Starting today, Lex supports context management natively so you can manage the context directly from the console. With the context management capability, you can easily control when an intent should be activated. For example, consider when a user asks “What were my expenses this month?” and then maintains the same context relating to expenses in the subsequent turn “How about last month?” Utilizing the context natively allows you to create sophisticated, multi-turn conversational experience without having to write any code. In addition, it is now possible to set default slot values. You can set the default to a constant, an active context attribute or a session attribute.

Amazon QuickSight launched enhancements to dashboard filtering experience. When readers slice and dice dashboards with filters, QuickSight will now persist filter selection until they return to the dashboard. Readers can pick up where they left off and do not have to re-select filters. Dashboard persistence is applicable to both QuickSight Web and the Mobile app. Persistence is an optional setting on embedded dashboards where QuickSight admins can choose to make dashboards persist using the getDashboardEmbedURL API. Persistence on web and mobile dashboards is available by default. To learn how to set up persistence on embedded dashboards, see here.

AWS Backup now supports cross-account backup, enabling AWS customers to securely copy backups across accounts within their AWS Organizations.

Real-Time Live Sports Updates Using AWS AppSync is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps media and entertainment (M&E) companies deliver sports information to their customers on mobile and web applications in near real-time. Delivering real-time sports updates is a critical workload for many M&E companies. When a fan’s favorite team scores a goal, hits a home run, or makes a touchdown, it is important that this update makes it to fans in as close to real-time as possible. This solution simplifies historically complex and expensive infrastructure and helps support thousands of fans tracking a game or match in a web or mobile application.

The Amazon Chime SDK now supports noise suppression, 48kHz audio, and client-side video inspection and manipulation. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now supports automated, multi-region replication of your directory. Now you can deploy and use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD (Enterprise Edition) directory across multiple AWS Regions. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows and Linux workloads globally. With the automated multi-region replication capability you get higher resiliency, while your applications use a local directory for optimal performance. 

Amazon Honeycode now supports single sign-on with identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory, Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin, PingFederate, or any SAML-based identity provider, including Google Workspace. Honeycode customers or the IT administrators of organizations using Honeycode can set up single sign-on so that Honeycode users can log in using their corporate credentials instead of Honeycode-specific credentials. 

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul), and Middle East (Bahrain). 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.  

Amazon Cognito is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and Europe (Paris) Regions. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect. 

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract printed text, handwriting, and data from virtually any document. Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon Textract supports encryption of its asynchronous API output stored in your Amazon S3 buckets using your own AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Master Keys (CMKs). With this feature, you have the flexibility to manage which encryption keys are used to protect your data and text extracted by Amazon Textract. For more information on how to accomplish this, please read our newest blog post.  

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now introduces new policy defaults for passwords of IAM users. This policy improves the default security for all AWS customers by ensuring customers set stronger passwords for IAM users in their AWS accounts. 

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you configure your Auto Scaling group with multiple launch templates when you use a MixedInstancesPolicy and specify multiple instance types. After EC2 Auto Scaling released support for multiple instance types within a single Auto Scaling group, customers have been looking for ways to launch different instance types using different Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) so that instances with incompatible CPU architectures can exist in the same Auto Scaling group. With this enhancement you can now specify a launch template alongside the instance type in the overrides of your MixedInstancesPolicy, and that launch template will be used whenever launching instances of its corresponding instance type. 

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.

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chatbot to improve engagement with customers who speak French, Spanish, Italian, or Canadian French. 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 press 1 for sales, or press 2 for appointments.

You now have an option to delete an instant type EC2 Fleet. All running instances associated with it will be terminated and the fleet will be deleted.

AWS IoT Greengrass is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. With AWS IoT Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, or both, execute predictions based on machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet.

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

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage user hierarchies. User hierarchies are a way for you to organize users into groups such as what location they work in or which department they are a part of. With this launch, you can now programmatically mirror your organization's hierarchy in Amazon Connect as changes are made in your internal systems of record, such as HR systems. Additionally, you can extract all hierarchy and agent data as a point-in-time snapshot and copy it into a different instance. To learn more, see the API documentation.

AWS IQ has released two new features to support firms: Project Manager role and group chat. The project manager role allows any US based individual in a firm to view requests, speak with customers, submit proposals, and request payments, without requiring an AWS Certification. Project Managers can then add an AWS Certified expert to the conversation to complete the hands on work in the customer’s account.  

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in EU (Frankfurt), 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, edge storage, 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).

Starting today, you can launch R5, C5, and T3 instance types when using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate your databases. You can easily scale up to these new instance classes by modifying your existing replication instance through the AWS DMS, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports SQL-level metrics on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL so you can identify high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries in seconds.  

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports customizing the default launch settings on the Chrome browser with a new minor runtime version, syn-nodejs-2.1. This allows for more flexibility in the canary launched browser settings such as viewport, setting chromium flags, and handling errors. With syn-nodejs-2.1, you can also configure canary scripts to not take screenshots on a canary step, thereby reducing costs, and avoiding screenshots for sensitive data. 

AWS CloudFormation is extending change sets to support applications modeled with nested stacks, enhancing the predictability of update operations. With this launch, you can now preview the changes to your application and infrastructure resources across the entire nested stack hierarchy and proceed with the update only when you confirm that all the changes are as intended.  

To provide enhanced performance and read scalability, Amazon RDS on VMware adds support for read replicas across Custom Availability Zones for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. You can create cross-custom-availability-zone read replicas of a DB instance to serve read traffic in one region, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. A read replica can also be promoted to become a standalone DB instance if the source DB instance fails.  

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities to their applications. Starting today, the service connects to the global phone network so that attendees can dial into an Amazon Chime SDK meeting using a telephone. The feature also lets you programmatically place an outbound call to a phone number and connect the call to a meeting session. Previously, attendees were able to join Amazon Chime SDK meeting audio using voice over IP (VoIP) in mobile and web applications.

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall, making it easy for security administrators to centrally configure and deploy Network Firewall rules across their organization. AWS recently launched AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed firewall service that gives customers enhanced control and visibility of all traffic leaving and entering their network. With Firewall Manager support, customers can centrally manage the deployment of Network Firewall rules across accounts, organizational units (OUs), and Amazon virtual private clouds (VPCs) in their organization.

You can now use Cruise Control to more easily scale and balance I/O in your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Cruise Control is a popular tool among Apache Kafka users because it drastically simplifies partition management. Cruise Control can also be used to monitor the state and health of clusters using an optional user interface dashboard.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into your object storage usage and activity trends, and makes actionable recommendations to improve cost-efficiency and apply data protection best practices. S3 Storage Lens is the first cloud storage analytics solution to provide a single view of object storage usage and activity across tens to hundreds of accounts in an AWS organization, with drill-downs to generate insights at the account, bucket, or even prefix level. Drawing from more than 14 years of experience helping customers optimize storage, S3 Storage Lens analyzes organization-wide metrics to deliver contextual recommendations to find ways to reduce your storage costs and apply best practices on data protection. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the ability to reload dictionary files without reindexing your data. Elasticsearch uses analyzers to convert string data into terms or tokens that power its search capabilities. These analyzers can do things like remove white space and stop words, perform stemming, handle compound words, and add synonyms. Previously, on Amazon Elasticsearch Service these analyzers could only process data as it was indexed. If you wanted to add some additional synonyms at a later time, you had to reindex your data with the new dictionary file. 

Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now offers customers greater control over how long sessions remain idle before being terminated automatically. This feature can help you meet compliance requirements, such as PCI Requirement 8.1.8, which requires that users reauthenticate if a session is idle for more than 15 minutes.

You can now hibernate newly-launched EBS-backed Amazon EC2 T3 and T3a 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. 

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon API Gateway REST and HTTP APIs, making it faster and easier to build application workflows including microservices created by API Gateway. You can use the API Gateway integration to create a workflow that orchestrates HTTP and REST APIs acting as the ‘front door’ for business logic running on AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service or Amazon Elastic Container Service, fully managed container orchestration service.

Customers using the AWS Migration Hub to discover, plan, and track their migrations now have access to Migration Hub network visualization. Migration Hub network visualization is for migration experts and non-experts who want to quickly organize and validate their on-premises discovery data, and to build their migration plan.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions.

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through the new AWS edge location in Bangkok, Thailand. With this new edge location, AWS Global Accelerator further improves Internet performance for users in Thailand. AWS Global Accelerator is now available in more than 90 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in 20 AWS Regions.  

Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution provisions the AWS services required to build scalable, distributed VOD processing and delivery workflows. This solution is designed to help you quickly get started encoding video files with AWS Elemental MediaConvert. It can be easily customized and used as the starting point to create a more complex workflow. 

Starting today, you can easily move your database migration tasks from one replication instance to another. To move, select the migration task and provide the target replication instance details. You can access this feature using AWS DMS Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. Once the migration task is moved to the target replication instance, you can resume your migration from where you left off.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). It provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to build, train, tune, debug, deploy, and monitor models. Starting today, you can encrypt your Amazon SageMaker Studio storage volumes with customer master keys (CMKs) managed by you in AWS Key Management Service (KMS).  

AWS Launch Wizard now enables you to deploy scripts before and after the AWS resource configuration process to customize your SAP environments. 

AWS Training and Certification has launched a major update to the classroom course AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Machine Learning on AWS (Business). This four-hour, intermediate-level course is designed for account owners and pre-sales representatives at AWS Partner organizations.

Starting today, you can use the console to aggregate AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations across all accounts in your organization with AWS Organizations. The new Organizational View feature in Trusted Advisor allows you to generate reports with detailed check results across multiple accounts in your AWS organization. In addition, you can view a high level summary of check status within the console.  

The Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) extensions module that extends the service construct in AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), is now generally available. The new Amazon ECS service construct for AWS CDK supports extensions that automatically add additional capabilities such as AWS App Mesh or FireLens to your containerized services using familiar programming languages.

Amazon CloudFront announces its first two edge locations in Thailand. These new edge locations in Bangkok will provide viewers as much as a 30% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s Asia Pacific geographic region. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure.

AWS Service Catalog administrators can now add Service Catalog governance to their existing AWS CloudFormation stacks. Once imported into Service Catalog, administrators can manage stack updates, govern parameters, and enforce tagging. With this new feature, long-running stacks can be governed while leaving the underlying resources untouched.

Patches 1.7.6 / 2.5.6 / 3.2.6 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.  

Today, we are excited to announce the AWS DeepRacer League’s 2020 season is nearing the final lap with the Championship at AWS re:Invent 2020. From November 10 through December 15, there are three ways to join in the racing fun: learn how to develop a competitive reinforcement learning model through our sessions, enter and compete in the racing action for a chance to win prizes, and watch to cheer on other developers as they race for the cup. More than 100 racers have already qualified for the Championship Cup, but there is still time to compete. Log in today to qualify for a chance to win the Championship Cup by entering the Wildcard round, offering the top 5 racers spots in the Knockout Rounds.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. It features secure connectivity, fast and robust data ingestion and highly reliable and durable storage of factory equipment data. This solution is easy to deploy, can help reduce machine downtime and increase factory efficiency. 

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service, extracts text and other data from documents as well as tables and forms. Today, we are pleased to announce two new features:

• Amazon Textract now supports recognition of handwritten text from documents such as healthcare forms, prescriptions, dispute letters, tax documents, income documents, checks, claims, academic papers and many more. You can use the Detect Document Text or Analyze Document APIs to process images or PDF’s of scanned documents and extract both printed text and handwriting making it easy for you to automate almost any scanned document processing. You can also use Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I), another AWS service, which makes it easy to build the workflows for human review of the machine learning predictions. You can log in to the Amazon Textract console to test out the handwriting feature, or check out the new demo by Amazon Machine Learning Hero Mike Chambers. 
• Amazon Textract now supports processing of documents with printed text in Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and French. You can start sending documents in these languages for text extraction, and Amazon Textract will automatically detect and extract the information for you.

Starting today, Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) is a HIPAA eligible service. Amazon Augmented AI makes it easy to build the workflows required for human review of ML predictions. HIPPA eligibility applies to AWS Regions where the service is available and means you can use Amazon A2I to help you add human review of Protected Health Information (PHI) to power your healthcare workflows through your private workforce.

Today we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports multi-GPU instances of ml.g4dn.12xlarge, ml.p3.8xlarge, and ml.p3.16xlarge. Multi-GPU instances accelerate machine learning model training significantly, allowing users to train more advanced machine learning models that are too large to fit into a single GPU. They also provide the flexibility to process larger batches of data such as 4k images for image classification and object detection.

AWS Shield Advanced now allows you to bundle resources into protection groups, giving you a self-service way to customize the scope of detection and mitigation for your application by treating multiple resources as a single unit. Resource grouping improves the accuracy of detection, reduces false positives, eases automatic protection of newly created resources, and accelerates the time to mitigate attacks against multiple resources. For example, if an application consists of four CloudFront distributions, you can add them to one protection group to receive detection and protection for the collection of resources as a whole. Reporting can be consumed at the protection group level, in addition to the resource level, giving a more holistic view of overall application health.

AWS X-Ray now supports trace context propagation for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) enabling customers to view end-to-end requests when using Amazon S3. AWS X-Ray traces user requests as they travel through your entire application. It aggregates the data generated by the individual services like AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 and the many resources that make up your application, providing you an end-to-end view of how your application is performing.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports the use of environment variables with canaries. This allows you to save time by using a single canary script to create different canaries that have a similar task. 

Open Banking Enablement Service is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Capgemini, an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner. Open Banking Enablement Service creates a strong foundation for a financial institution’s open banking journey. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an open banking transformation map and prioritized list of use cases, a detailed statement of work, a sandbox launch, and a collaborative delivery model.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers using Amazon Kendra can easily validate the identity of individual users, as well as user groups who perform searches with the addition of secure search tokens.  

The EKS Construct Library is an AWS CDK module that helps customers provision Amazon EKS clusters using infrastructure-as-code best practices. Up until now, it has been in an experimental state, incorporating lots of customer feedback and undergoing multiple API and behavioral changes. Starting from version 1.65.0 (https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/releases/tag/v1.65.0), the library is graduating to Developer Preview. This means that we are not planning any breaking changes going forward and are preparing the library for GA.

AWS IoT Device Management customers use Secure Tunneling to securely access and troubleshoot remote devices located behind a restricted firewall. Now, customers can make concurrent client connections to a single device over a secure tunnel using the new multiplexing capability. Multiplexing enables customers to perform more advanced device troubleshooting, such as modifying parameters via a web application on the device while simultaneously issuing remote shell commands to verify the device is working properly.

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon EKS, making it easier to build resilient applications that orchestrate jobs running on Kubernetes with AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS with minimal code. You can now build workflows including steps that launch tasks in Amazon EKS and wait for its completion without writing code to manage the state of the Kubernetes job.  

Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). With this launch, you can now configure NLB to operate in dual-stack mode, accepting both IPv4 and IPv6 client connections.

Amazon QuickSight now supports Waterfall charts. Waterfall charts show how any metric is affected positively or negatively by a series of contributing factors. Dashboard authors can create a waterfall chart by choosing this new visual type from the visuals menu. See here for more details.  

Amazon QuickSight has added a powerful new data governance feature: Column Level Security (CLS). This feature compliments the existing Row Level Security (RLS) feature and, in combination, gives authors control over who can access what data within their visualizations. CLS enables dataset owners to apply restrictions on a per column basis. This ensures that users only see columns that they are allowed to see. For example, a dataset owner could set up their dataset so that only members of a Human Resources group could see salary information, while everyone can see less sensitive information, like first and last name. CLS can be configured on a dataset through the QuickSight interface and through APIs. See here to learn more.  

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams adds client metrics support to its WebRTC SDK in C. Kinesis Video Streams with WebRTC enables developers to build web, mobile, and IoT devices application for real-time media and data streaming. Developers can use this capability to build applications for use cases such as home security and monitoring, camera-enabled doorbells, baby and pet monitoring, smart appliances, and more. Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC SDK in C enables IoT devices to securely connect with Kinesis Video Streams for peer discovery and media streaming. The client metrics allows developers to monitor and track performance of the applications built using the WebRTC SDK in C.  

Today, Amazon Athena announced general availability of a new query engine version, Athena engine version 2. 

You can now create custom endpoints for Amazon Neptune to access your workload. Custom endpoints allow you to distribute your workload across a designated set of instances within a Neptune cluster.

Federated queries in Amazon Athena enable users to run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources. The feature, which is now generally available in the us-east-1, us-west-2, and us-east-2 regions, enables customers to submit a single SQL query that scans data from multiple sources running on-premises or hosted in the cloud.  

Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to run containerized workloads on the cloud with little-to-no prior cloud experience. With this native service, called Lightsail Containers, you can now deploy containerized applications to the cloud using the Docker images directly from your desktop or from the ones in public registries like DockerHub – with just a few clicks, through an easy to use interface. Lightsail takes care of all the infrastructure management complexities and allows you to focus on your application code. Lightsail Containers come with the same predictable pricing as its other offerings with prices starting at $7/month for a Container Service.

Amazon Personalize now allows you to apply business rules to your recommendations on the fly; without any extra cost. Dynamic filters save you time by removing the need to define all possible permutations of your business rules in advance and enable you to use your most recent information to filter recommendations. You control the recommendations for your users in real-time while responding to their individual needs, preferences, and changing behavior to improve engagement and conversion. Based on over 20 years of personalization experience, Amazon Personalize enables you to improve customer engagement by powering personalized product and content recommendations, and targeted marketing promotions.

We’re excited to announce that you can now measure the accuracy of your forecasting model to optimize the trade-offs between under-forecasting and over-forecasting costs, giving you flexibility in experimentation. Costs associated with under-forecasting and over-forecasting differ. Amazon Forecast allows you to optimize these costs for your business objective by providing an average forecast as well as a distribution of forecasts that captures variability of demand from a minimum to maximum value. With this launch, Forecast now provides accuracy metrics for multiple distribution points when training a model, allowing you to quickly optimize for under-forecasting and over-forecasting without the need to manually calculate metrics.

Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.7 is now the default for newly created Amazon EKS clusters.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs now offer Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS) compliant endpoints in the US Commercial and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.

You can now send logs from AWS Lambda functions directly to a destination of your choice by using AWS Lambda Extensions. AWS Lambda Extensions are a new way for monitoring, observability, security, and governance tools to integrate with Lambda, and today, you can use extensions that send logs to the following providers: Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Honeycomb, Lumigo, and Coralogix.

Amazon Managed Services (AMS) now supports the AWS Europe (Paris) region. You can use AMS to monitor the operations of your account, including incident management, problem management, patch management, and security management for your AWS resources. In addition to operating AWS services, AMS provides a secure AWS Landing Zone, and features to help you meet compliance program requirements for HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR, SOC, ISO, and PCI.

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s latest Australian-English conversational voice, Olivia. Built on Amazon Polly’s neural text-to-speech technology, this new voice delivers groundbreaking improvements in speech quality, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo.

Atlassian Managed Hosting is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from kreuzwerker, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Atlassian Managed Hosting allows customers to run all Atlassian server-deployed applications on AWS. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an assessment of existing data, onboarding, and testing to prepare for migration, product migration, and postmigration support.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course. If you’re new to the cloud—whether you’re in a technical or nontechnical role—this course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of the AWS Cloud. As a result, you can build your skills and confidence while contributing to your organization’s cloud initiatives.  

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added a new feature called Automated ABR Configuration which automatically customizes the ABR (Adaptive Bit Rate) encoding configuration for each source video. Automated ABR Configuration simplifies the set up of transcoding, optimizes video quality, and reduces ABR package size. Automated ABR Configuration is available at no additional cost for MediaConvert jobs in the on-demand, Professional pricing tier. To learn more, please read the Automated ABR Configuration documentation.

AWS RoboMaker WorldForge now supports tag-on-create for 3D simulation worlds, world generation jobs, and world export jobs. RoboMaker WorldForge is a capability that makes it faster, easier, and less expensive to create a multitude of 3D simulation worlds for testing and training robots. By tagging worlds at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after world creation, which can save time and make it easier to manage simulation worlds.  

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Olivia, Polly’s first Australian English voice, available via Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS). Thanks to its unique vocal personality, the voice sounds expressive, natural and it is easy to follow. Amazon Polly customers can now enjoy a selection of three Australian English voices: Russell, Nicole and Olivia. 

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Today, we are launching support for French, Spanish, Italian and Canadian French. With these new languages, you can build and expand your conversational experiences to better understand and engage your customer base. Amazon Lex can be applied to a diverse set of use cases such as virtual agents, conversational IVR systems, self-service chatbots, or application bots.  

Amazon Aurora now supports T3.large and medium instances as well as R5 class instances in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Using T3.large instances with Amazon Aurora is a cost-effective option for smaller workloads such as test, development, and QA, while still giving you the option to use larger class instances for production deployments. 

AWS CodePipeline Source Action now supports cloning of AWS CodeCommit repositories. With this improvement, when you define a Source Action, CodePipeline will clone the CodeCommit git repository to fetch the commit history and metadata.

AWS Amplify offers a fully managed static web hosting service that accelerates your application release cycle by providing a simple CI/CD workflow for building and deploying full-stack static web applications. Simply connect your application's code repository in the console, and changes to your frontend and backend are deployed in a single workflow on every code commit.  

Starting today, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of AWS Config rules and associated resource compliance, to help you check overall compliance status and quickly find non-compliant resources. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

You can now take automatic backups of your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems with AWS Backup in AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS Africa (Cape Town) regions, directly using the Amazon EFS console or API. Automatic backups for Amazon EFS further simplifies backup management of your file systems by enabling you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements.  

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds native support for TIME and TIMETZ data types. TIME data type stores the time of day without timezone information, and TIMETZ stores the time of day including timezone information. This new data type builds on the existing support in Amazon Redshift for DATE, TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMPTZ data types that can store date and date-and-time values.

This free new digital training curriculum explains how to modernize a legacy, monolithic application by transforming it into a microservices-based application that uses serverless, scalable, and fully managed databases. The two-hour fundamental curriculum includes three self-paced modules with video demonstrations. It is designed for data platform engineers, database developers, and solutions architects.

AWS Training and Certification has launched two new self-paced digital courses, Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things, on edX and Coursera. Designed for application developers, the IoT course helps you utilize AWS IoT services to build, test, and distribute applications to simulated devices. You’ll also learn how to use analytics tools to collect, process, and analyze data from IoT devices.

You can now sign up to receive event notifications on your Amazon Neptune DB clusters, DB instances, DB cluster snapshots, parameter groups, or security groups. Whenever certain events occur, event notifications can be sent in any notification form supported by the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for an AWS Region, such as an email, a text message, or a call to an HTTP endpoint.

Today we introduced several new features for AWS Elemental Link along with expanded region availability. Link devices can now ingest video into all regions where AWS Elemental MediaLive is supported.

You can now use the updated Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) console in the AWS Europe (Milan), AWS Africa (Cape Town), AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co., Ltd. (“NWCD”) and the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Beijing Sinnet Technology Co., Ltd. (“Sinnet”). The updated console makes it even easier for you to create and manage your file system resources. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, you can create file systems configured with the recommended settings in just a few clicks and you can customize your view to quickly find information you’re looking for. You can also monitor your file system’s behavior using Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms natively in the Amazon EFS console.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports automatic refresh and query rewrite capabilities to simplify and automate the usage of materialized views. The automatic refresh feature helps administrators to keep materialized views up-to-date, while the automatic query rewrite feature enables end-users to easily benefit from improved query performance.

We’ve updated the Amazon S3 console to make it even easier for you to manage your storage. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, the updated Amazon S3 console now simplifies common tasks by presenting contextual information about your storage resources and other S3 features throughout the console. Some key changes include streamlining the work to copy bucket settings when creating new buckets, indicating the bucket level settings you have permissions to change, improving the performance of uploads, and having a new page that gives more visibility into upload progress.  

Today AWS announced the availability of AWS Gateway Load Balancer, a new service that helps you deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual network appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, analytics, visibility and others. An addition to the Elastic Load Balancer family, AWS Gateway Load Balancer combines a transparent network gateway (that is, a single entry and exit point for all traffic) and a load balancer that distributes traffic and scales your virtual appliances with the demand.

FreeRTOS version 202011.00 is now available with refactored IoT and AWS libraries: coreMQTT, coreJSON, corePKCS11, and AWS IoT Device Shadow, in addition to the FreeRTOS kernel and FreeRTOS+TCP library. These refactored libraries have been optimized for modularity and memory usage for constrained microcontrollers, and have undergone code quality checks (e.g. MISRA-C compliance, Coverity static analysis), and memory safety validation with the C Bounded Model Checker (CBMC) automated reasoning tool. For more details on these libraries and other features of this release, see the 202011.00 release blog on FreeRTOS.org. 

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE DCV version 2020.2 with the following new features:

• DCV Session Manager - It is an optional component that provides REST APIs to create and manage the lifecycle of a session across a fleet of DCV servers. It is available at no cost for AWS customers running DCV on Amazon EC2 instances and for on-prem customers with DCV Plus and DCV Professional Plus licenses.*
• Improved support for high-frame rate use cases - DCV frame rate limiter is now set to 60 FPS, by default, for console sessions on servers and Amazon EC2 instances with an NVIDIA GPU. Furthermore, by enabling the new QUIC-based transport protocol, customers running high frame rate, highly dynamic workloads, such as gaming, can experience more fluid and responsive streaming quality, especially under sub-optimal network conditions.
  
• Support for SLES 15 and Ubuntu 20.4 - Customers can now use DCV server and client components on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 and Ubuntu 20.4 hosts.
• Smart Card Redirection for Windows server - Applications running in a remote Windows session can now use smart cards connected to the customer's client machine. This feature was already available for Linux servers.

AWS Glue DataBrew is a new visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue that helps you clean and normalize data without writing code, reducing the time it takes to prepare data for analytics and machine learning by up to 80% compared to traditional approaches to data preparation. AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data.

You can now create Amazon Aurora database clusters with up to 128TB of storage in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. 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.

Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached has added support for the latest Memcached version 1.6.6. This version brings a number of enhancements, such as improved memory management reducing the memory usage from idle client connections and lowers the risk of memory fragmentation from large number of connections. Additionally, this version introduces the experimental meta protocol and meta commands. 

Starting today, AWS AppSync is available in three new regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain) and China (Ningxia). 

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Today, we are announcing the availability of two new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Dallas and Miami. Wavelength Zones are now available in seven cities, including the five previously announced cities of Boston, San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Washington DC, and Atlanta. 

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, and today we are excited to announce the general availability of our brand-new British Newscaster speaking style voice – Amy. The speaking style mimics a formal and authoritative British newsreader and it is the result of our latest achievements in Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology. 

This new on-demand digital course provides a deep dive into AWS IAM and best practices for using IAM policies. The advanced course is designed for security professionals with a working knowledge of AWS and it includes five learning modules, video demonstrations, assessments, and three optional self-paced labs.

Starting today, you can privately connect your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.  

AWS Managed Services (AMS) now provides Infrastructure Auto-Tagging feature for automated tagging of AMS infrastructure provisioned for management purposes.  

Today, we are excited to release a new learning capsule that provides an overview into the history of neural networks used for sequence modeling and the origins of Transformers. To learn the concepts of generative AI, developers can use easy-to-consume, bite-sized learning capsules in the AWS DeepComposer console. In this new learning capsule, developers will learn about the kind of problems sequence modeling is used to solve, the history of sequence modeling neural networks, and why Transformers are the new standard for solving sequence modeling problems. Transformers are a machine learning architecture model designed to handle sequential data. With this new model, developers can extend an input melody by up to 30 seconds.  

Amazon S3 Object Ownership is now generally available with the addition of support for AWS CloudFormation. 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. 

Today, we are reducing the price of Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1) volumes by 40%, or an estimated $160 for each 16TB sc1 volume.  

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.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports local storage cache of up to 64 TB for Tape Gateway and Volume Gateway, enabling low-latency access to larger working datasets at your premises. Now, you can easily scale your gateway’s local cache to manage more of your application data closer to your on-premises applications and users.  

Now you can control connection pool configuration in your mesh and leverage outlier detection functionality that simplifies implementing circuit breaker capabilities and helps to build applications resilient to connection errors. 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 helping to provide high availability for your applications. 

Today, we are excited to announce our next AWS DeepComposer Chartbusters challenge, Keep Calm and Model On. AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to get hands-on using a musical keyboard and the latest generative AI techniques to expand their skills. Chartbusters is a global competition where developers use AWS DeepComposer to create original compositions and compete to showcase their machine learning and generative AI skills for a chance to win prizes. In this challenge, developers can experiment with our newly launched Transformers algorithm which allows developers to extend an input melody by up to 30 seconds. Entries are due by January 31, 2021. Learn more about how to compete on the AWS DeepComposer Chartbusters competition.

AWS Snowball Edge now supports Windows operating systems, including Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019. Previously, you were able to run instances on Snowball devices using either the Ubuntu or CentOS Linux operating systems. Now, with support for Windows, you can run your Windows-based workloads at the edge on Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices.  

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) now supports the creation and retention of EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). In addition to defining policies that provide a simple, automated way to back up data stored on EBS volumes, you can now create policies targeting EC2 instances to create EBS-backed AMIs. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to manage your AMIs. Nor will you need to manually delete associated snapshots once an AMI has been de-registered.

Today, we are excited to announce a Transformers-based algorithm in AWS DeepComposer. AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to get hands-on using a musical keyboard and the latest generative AI techniques to expand their skills. Transformers are state-of-the-art models that work on sequential data such as text, stock values, music, and genome sequences. With the newly launched Transformers feature, developers can iteratively extend a melody in AWS DeepComposer to create new and longer compositions.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports the use of Amazon FSx for Windows File Server in Amazon ECS task definitions. With this capability, you can now use persistent, shared storage across ECS containers. Customers can use Amazon FSx for their Windows containers in task definitions compatible with the EC2 launch type. Amazon ECS tasks using Amazon FSx will automatically mount the file systems specified by the customer in the task definition and make them available to the containers in the task across all availability zones in an AWS Region.  

AWS Storage Gateway introduces access-based enumeration for File Gateway, enabling you to protect sensitive information by allowing you to prevent users from seeing SMB file shares, folders, and files that they would not be able to open based on their access permissions. 

AWS Snowball Edge now supports the ability to import virtual machine (VM) images as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into your Snowball Edge device after it has been deployed to your edge location, reducing the time it takes to add or update AMIs at the edge from days to minutes. This feature is available for the Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and Snowball Edge Storage Optimized device types and is available in all AWS Regions where these device types are available, and at no additional cost.  

AWS Storage Gateway introduces file-level upload notifications for File Gateway, enabling you to trigger automated workflows in the cloud and easily process on-premises file data stored with AWS as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects.  

AWS Backup adds support for Amazon FSx file systems, automating policy-based backup and restore capabilities for Amazon FSx as well as streamlining compliance and data protection for Amazon FSx customers. You can now create, manage, and restore Amazon FSx backups directly from the AWS Backup console for both Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems.  

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now helps you update and store common data between multiple rows efficiently by using static columns. 

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering now supports automatic data archiving to further reduce storage costs by up to 95% when objects become rarely accessed over long periods of time. The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is the first and only cloud storage that automatically optimizes customers’ storage costs. S3 Intelligent-Tiering delivers milliseconds latency and high throughput performance for frequently and infrequently accessed data in the Frequent and Infrequent Access Tiers, and now the lowest storage costs in the cloud when data is rarely accessed in the Deep Archive Access Tier.

AWS DataSync now enables you to have more granular control over the portion of network bandwidth used to transfer your data. In addition to the existing capability allowing you to set a maximum network bandwidth limit per task, you can now increase or decrease this limit while the task is running. This enables you to minimize impact on other users or applications when a task spans multiple days.

Starting today, you can use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Quick Create from the Amazon EC2 Launch Instance Wizard to create new file systems using the recommended settings without having to leave the Amazon EC2 console. You can then immediately add your newly created file system to the EC2 instance you are launching and it will be automatically mounted on your instance after it has launched.  

AWS DataSync can now transfer billions of files or objects between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, with just a few clicks in the DataSync console. This enables you to easily replicate data between your managed file systems for business continuity, as well as copy portions of your data to different buckets or file systems as needed by evolving application requirements.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, now supports storage quotas. With storage quotas, you can monitor and control user- and group-level storage consumption on your file systems to ensure that no user or group consumes excessive amounts of capacity. Storage quotas are ideal for storage administrators who manage multi-user file systems such as user shares for data scientists, computational engineers, and genomics researchers. 

Starting today, Amazon Aurora Global Database is expanding its manageability capabilities to more closely match the in-region versions of Aurora. Fast Database Cloning and AWS CloudFormation are both supported.  

Subscribers and providers can now use AWS Data Exchange Private Products to exchange private or custom-made data products. Starting today, qualified data providers interested in offering their data to specific customers or partners can now use AWS Data Exchange Private Products to package, deliver, and bill for their products without having to build, operate, and maintain any data delivery infrastructure. Subscribers that need data products specifically made for them and not intended for the general public can use AWS Data Exchange Private Products to have that data delivered to them in the cloud. With the launch of Private Products, subscribers can use AWS Data Exchange as a single consistent way to acquire all externally sourced data, reducing their operational burden and allowing them to quickly onboard new data sources.

Amazon S3 Replication is now able to replicate delete markers from one S3 bucket to another. For buckets that use S3 versioning, when a customer issues a delete request without a version ID specified, S3 adds a delete marker on the latest version of the object to protect data from accidental deletions. With S3 Replication, you can easily enable or disable the replication of these delete markers between source and destination buckets for each replication rule. This is critical for customers that have an active-active architecture within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions.

Data subscribers that acquire data products on AWS Data Exchange using Private Offers can now configure those subscriptions to automatically renew, enabling seamless continuity of their data subscriptions without interruptions in their data feeds. Data providers that want to give their customers the option to auto-renew their subscription on the AWS Data Exchange platform can do so during the private offer creation process. Subscribers are able to view their auto-renew setting for each subscription in the Subscriptions section of the AWS Data Exchange console, where they can turn it on or off at any time.  

AWS Transfer Family now supports creating Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) hosted server endpoints in centrally managed and shared Amazon VPC environments, helping you meet your compliance requirements as you segment your AWS environment using tools such as AWS Landing Zone for security, cost monitoring, and scalability.

AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes v1.2.0 is now available with support for outlier detection and configurable connections pools for circuit breaking. The AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh using Kubernetes directly. 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 allowing high availability for your applications.

Amazon S3 Replication now provides detailed metrics and notifications to monitor the status of object replication between buckets. You can monitor replication progress by tracking bytes pending, operations pending, and replication latency between your source and destination buckets using the S3 management console or Amazon CloudWatch. You can also set up S3 Event Notifications to receive replication failure notifications to quickly diagnose and correct configuration issues. S3 Replication metrics and notifications help you closely monitor replication progress. Previously, S3 Replication metrics and notifications were available with S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC). Beginning now, they can be enabled for all replication rules.

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler helps developers improve application performance and reduce costs by pinpointing an application’s most expensive line of code, and providing recommendations on how to improve code to save money. 

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon DocumentDB 4.0 as a target. 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. Using DMS, you can now perform live migrations to Amazon DocumentDB 4.0 from MongoDB replica sets, sharded clusters, or any AWS DMS supported source including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SAP ASE and Microsoft SQL Server databases with minimal downtime.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports schedule-based network bandwidth throttling for Tape Gateway and Volume Gateway, enabling you to optimize network use between your data center and AWS for data synchronization.  

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a fully managed service that provides shared file storage built on Windows Server, today announced that you can now access file systems using any Domain Name System (DNS) name of your choosing. Each Amazon FSx file system has a default DNS name for accessing it. Starting today, you can now also associate alternate DNS names for accessing your file systems.  

Data providers who use AWS data Exchange to license their data can now choose whether to enable auto-renewals when creating a public or private offer. When the auto-renewals option is enabled by the data provider, data subscribers can choose whether or not their subscription automatically renews when it expires. Before the launch of this feature, all public products supported auto-renewals. This new functionality gives providers the flexibility to choose when to enable auto-renewals, enabling them to list products that are not intended to be renewed (such as trial or static historical data products).  

Now you can export your Amazon DynamoDB table data to your data lake in Amazon S3, and use other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Lake Formation to analyze your data and extract actionable insights. No code-writing is required. 

Amazon WorkDocs now supports the ability to change the color theme (Light or Dark) directly in the WorkDocs iOS app. With this release, you are provided full control to manage the WorkDocs specific color theme within your WorkDocs iOS setting menu independently from your device’s system wide light or dark appearance setting. By default, the Amazon WorkDocs iOS app will follow you device’s appearance; however, at any time you can override your Amazon WorkDocs application appearance by setting the theme to Light or Dark in the settings. See the user guide for specific details.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports native Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for Amazon ECS tasks using task networking (awsvpc networking mode). Previously, IPv6 was only supported in host networking mode. With this capability, tasks using awsvpc networking mode can communicate with other endpoints in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and internet in dual-stack mode via either IPv4 or IPv6. This will allow customers to communicate with on-premises resources that support only IPv6 addresses and meet IPv6 compliance requirements.

Amazon EventBridge now supports Event Replay, which makes event-driven applications more durable and extensible by providing developers an easy way to replay past events. Event replay enables developers using Amazon EventBridge to build applications with the confidence that they can quickly recover from errors in their code, and the ability to easily extend their existing applications to add new functionality.

With Amazon DynamoDB global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to DynamoDB tables for fast read and write performance. All of your data in DynamoDB is encrypted by default using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Starting today, you can now choose a customer managed key for your global tables, giving you full control over the key used for encryption of your DynamoDB data replicated using global tables. Customer managed keys also come with full AWS CloudTrail monitoring so you can view every time the key was used or accessed. 

Starting today AWS Transit Gateway supports internet protocol (IP) multicast in AWS regions worldwide namely: US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), US East (Ohio), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), EU (Paris), EU (Milano), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and South Africa (Cape Town).

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports importing data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets to PostgreSQL tables in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. A new extension, aws_s3, has been added to perform the import operation. You can import any data format that is supported by the PostgreSQL COPY command, using the ARN role association method or using Amazon S3 credentials. 

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports PostgreSQL minor versions 10.12 and 9.6.17 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These releases contains bug fixes and improvements from the PostgreSQL community, as well as bug fixes and improvements specific to Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL.  

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce v5.7 that enables you to easily integrate Amazon Connect with Salesforce Service Cloud to build innovative customer experiences is now localized in nine new languages: Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Italian, German, (Simplified/Traditional) Chinese, and Japanese. This means contact center agents and supervisors can now use the Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP) within Salesforce Service Cloud to receive calls, chat with contacts, transfer them to other agents, and perform other key tasks using their native language.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. You can now delete Amazon Fraud Detector models, event types, entity types, outcomes, labels, and variables. You can also remove an imported AWS SageMaker model from Amazon Fraud Detector (while keeping the model’s endpoint available within SageMaker). In addition, the Amazon Fraud Detector console now lists associated resources so you can more easily discover where a particular resource is utilized across the service. For example, you can view which Models and Detectors are using a particular Event Type.

Amazon Translate – a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality, and affordable language translation in fifty-five languages – is now enabling you to tag content so that it isn’t translate. Now, customer can wrap the text that need not be translated in a HTML element span and set translate attribute to “no”. This is available for both real-time and asynchronous batch API.  

Amazon Connect now provides a discount tier for pricing of US toll-free numbers in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With the discount tier, you automatically get a 35% discount after claiming in excess of 1,000 toll-free numbers per month, lowering the rate to $0.039 per number per day. For example, if you have 5,000 toll-free phone numbers, the first 999 are priced at our standard rate of $0.06 per number per day, and the next 4,001 numbers will be at the discounted rate of $0.039 per number per day.

AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202011.00 now includes refactored coreHTTP, AWS IoT Device Defender, and AWS IoT Jobs libraries alongside of the existing coreMQTT, coreJSON, and AWS IoT Device Shadow libraries. All libraries have been optimized for memory usage and modularity, and have undergone code quality checks (e.g. MISRA-C compliance, Coverity static analysis), and validation of memory safety with the C Bounded Model Checker (CBMC) automated reasoning tool. For more details, see the README and Changelog files.  

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for Apache ActiveMQ as an event source to give customers more choices for messaging services to use with their serverless application. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Customers can build applications quickly and easily with Lambda functions that are invoked based on messages posted to Amazon MQ message brokers without needing to worry about provisioning or managing servers.  

AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup now enables you to target your setup to a specific resource group in an AWS account. Now, with a single click you can enable operational actions, such as patch compliance scanning and instance inventory collection, on a logical grouping of resources such as an application or environment.

Amazon Redshift JDBC and Python drivers are now open source and available for the user community under the Apache-2.0 license. With this release, customers will gain enhanced visibility to the driver implementation and can contribute to its development. Users can now browse the code for both drivers on the relevant AWS GitHub repositories, submit driver functionality enhancements through Git Pull Requests, and report issues for review.

Starting today, you can configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms to automatically create operational issues in AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. This enables operations engineers and IT professions to view, investigate, and resolve operational issues related to AWS resources from a central place, helping reduce time to issue resolution. Amazon CloudWatch enables you to collect monitoring data for AWS resources and applications, and allows you to generate alarms based on configured thresholds. 

Next-Generation Landing Zone (NGLZ) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from AllCloud, an AWS Migration, AWS DevOps, and AWS Security Competency Partner. NGLZ provides an enterprise-scale governance and security framework for a cloud migration or any modernization journey. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers technical design sessions and NGLZ framework deployment.

AWS Client VPN is a managed, scalable, virtual private network service that enables users to securely access both AWS resources and on-premises networks.

Starting October 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center service, decreased the outbound telephony rate in the EU Central (Frankfurt) and EU West (London) regions for calls to Poland by 68% from $0.1217 per minute to $0.0390 per minute.

You can now enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, ensuring that EBS volumes restored from FSR-enabled snapshots instantly receive full provisioned performance. You can enable FSR for an additional hourly charge to your regular snapshot cost for each Availability Zone (AZ) in which FSR is enabled. This new capability enables you to restore multiple volumes from a snapshot without the need to initialize volumes yourself. Improved and predictable performance helps with use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup & restore, test/dev volume copies, and booting from custom AMIs. 

AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announced features to improve configuration and metrics of containers: environment files, secret versions and JSON keys, granular network metrics, and more metadata.

You can now use AWS Service Quotas to view and manage your Amazon EMR service limits, also known as quotas, from a central location via the AWS console, API, or AWS CLI. Using AWS Service Quotas, you can view your service limits in one place and eliminate the need to go to multiple sources or maintain your own list.  

The new console for Amazon SQS is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The SQS console now simplifies development and production workflows by creating a new user experience.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now provides the ability to define a custom endpoint for your domain and associate an SSL certificate from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Defining a friendly name makes it easier for your users to access Kibana, and allows you to move to a new domain without updating your clients.

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 Cloud repositories using Kendra's new built-in Confluence Cloud connector.

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that offers savings of up to 72% on your Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate type usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term. When you purchase a Savings Plan, you will be charged the discounted Savings Plans price for your usage up to your commitment.

AWS Service Catalog now supports Stack Set instance operations. With this new feature, end-users can control the individual instances for their StackSets, within the constraints specified by their AWS Service Catalog administrator.

Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ, a popular open source message broker. This enables you to migrate your existing RabbitMQ message brokers to AWS without having to rewrite code. Amazon MQ is a fully managed service that provisions and manages open source message brokers like RabbitMQ and Apache ActiveMQ for you. Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ manages both individual and clustered message brokers and handles tasks like provisioning the infrastructure, setting up the broker, and updating the software.

Starting today, you can proactively rebalance your workloads running on EC2 Spot Instances without having to wait until the Spot Instance receives a two minute Instance interruption notice. You now have access to a new feature called “EC2 Instance rebalance recommendation”, a signal that notifies you when a Spot Instance is at elevated risk of interruption. The signal can arrive sooner than the two minute Spot Instance interruption notice, giving you the opportunity to proactively rebalance your workload to new or existing Spot Instances that are not at elevated risk of interruption. For example, you can start checkpointing your work early to save as much state as possible before the instance is interrupted. Or you can prevent scheduling new work onto the Spot Instances that received the rebalance recommendation, thus increasing the chance of completing the work.

The Client VPN self-service portal is a read-only web portal that helps end-users of Client VPN to download VPN Profile and updated versions of AWS Client VPN desktop application. End-users will be able to download the VPN profile and desktop application directly to their computers. We will also continue to support the ability for end-users to directly download the desktop application without the need to enter any credentials.  

Amazon CloudWatch launches Metrics Explorer – a tag-based dashboard tool that enables customers to filter, aggregate, and visualize operational health and performance metrics by tags. Metrics Explorer provides customers with a flexible troubleshooting experience, allowing them to build their tag-based application health dashboards, identify correlations, and quickly analyse their operational data to pinpoint issues. These tag-based dashboards will stay up to date as resources come and go, and they will help customers to identify the root cause and quickly isolate the issues when an alarm occurs on an application or environment. 

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 German and Italian language support for streaming audio. We are also announcing availability of Amazon Transcribe streaming in the EU (London) and EU (Frankfurt) regions. These new languages and regions expand the markets served by Amazon Transcribe streaming and enable customers to reach a broader global audience.

Document Understanding Solution is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an easy-to-use web application that extracts text from documents, identifies structural data (tables, key value pairs), extracts critical information (entities), and creates smart search indexes from the data. Additionally, files can be uploaded directly to and analyzed files can be accessed from your AWS account. Part of the Intelligent Document Processing services offered from AWS, this solution uses AWS artificial intelligence (AI) services to solve business problems that apply to various industry verticals:

• Search and discovery: Search information across multiple scanned documents, PDFs, and images
• Compliance: Redact information from documents
• Workflow automation: Easily plugs into your existing upstream and downstream applications

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with 3CORESec, cloudtamer.io, Prowler, StackRox, and ThreatModeler. Further, Amazon GuardDuty’s integration with AWS Security Hub is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East). Lastly, AllCloud is now an AWS Security Hub APN Consulting Partner. This brings the total number of AWS service and AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner integrations available in Security Hub to 60 and the number of APN Consulting Partners with a Security Hub offering to 3. 3CORESec, Prowler, and StackRox send findings to Security Hub. ThreatModeler receives findings from Security Hub. Cloudtamer.io both sends and receives findings to/from Security Hub. To learn more, visit the Integration pages in the Security Hub console and click on the "Configuration" link for the integration to learn more about the integration and how to set it up.  

Today, AWS Marketplace announced the ability for independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide tags corresponding to the metered usage of their software. Customers can enable the vendor provided tags as cost allocation tags to gain visibility into third-party software spend.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to perform single-instance deployments of Microsoft SQL Server on Windows Server and Ubuntu Server.  

You can now store streaming data for up to one year in Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Long term retention of streaming data enables you to use the same platform for both real-time and older data retained in Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. For example, you can train machine learning algorithms for financial trading, marketing personalization, and recommendation models without moving the data into a different data store or writing a new application. You can also satisfy certain data retention regulations, including under HIPAA and FedRAMP, using long term retention. You only pay for data stored and retrieved without provisioning additional storage or compute resources.

RDS Data API now supports tag-based authorization to enable easy management of access to Amazon Aurora Serverless clusters.  

Starting today, you can proactively manage the EC2 Spot Instance lifecycle by using the new Capacity Rebalancing feature for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet. Capacity Rebalancing helps you maintain workload availability by proactively augmenting your fleet with a new Spot Instance before a running instance receives a two-minute interruption notice. Previously, EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet replaced Spot Instances only after they were interrupted. Now, with Capacity Rebalancing, these services attempt to proactively replace Spot Instances when they receive the new EC2 Instance rebalance recommendation, rather than waiting until they receive a two-minute in interruption notice.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations are now supported with AWS Wavelength Zones. Customers can now reserve capacity for their Amazon EC2 instances for any duration.  

Amazon EventBridge is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications using data from a variety of data sources. Amazon EventBridge enables you to build event-driven architectures that are loosely coupled and distributed.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Database Mail. With Database Mail you can send email messages from your Amazon RDS for SQL Server database instance. After specifying the email recipient(s), you can add files or query results to the message you send. 

Antares Cloud Management is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Claranet, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Antares Cloud Management provides an ecosystem of tools for day-to-day operation of containers in production. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a discovery workshop, implementation of the Antares platform, application migration, and 24/7 optimization and support.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to create and manage SiteWise Asset Models, Assets and Gateway resources using CloudFormation.

Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra to build intelligent search applications in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region.

Amazon Braket now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing private connectivity between Amazon Braket, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and on-premises applications. Amazon Braket is a fully managed quantum computing service that enables researchers and developers to explore quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies. 

Amazon Braket, the fully managed quantum computing service, now supports resource tagging, making it easy for you to manage resources effectively as you scale use of the service. Tags are simple labels consisting of a customer-defined key and value that make it easier for you to manage and filter resources. You can now add, manage, and remove tags for quantum task resources using the AWS CLI and the Amazon Braket SDK.

We are excited to announce that Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) now supports NVIDIA GPUDirect Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). GPUDirect RDMA support on EFA will be available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P4d instances- the next generation of GPU-based instances on AWS. P4d provides the highest performance for machine learning (ML) training and high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud for applications such a natural language processing, object detection and classification, seismic analysis, and computational drug discovery. GPUDirect RDMA support on EFA enables network interface cards (NICs) to directly access GPU memory. This avoids extra memory copies, making remote GPU-to-GPU communication across NVIDIA GPU-based Amazon EC2 instances faster, and reduces orchestration overhead on CPUs and user applications. As a result, our customers running applications using NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) on P4d will be able to further accelerate their multi-node tightly-coupled workloads.

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 P4d instances, the next generation of GPU-based instances that provide the best performance for machine learning (ML) training and high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud for applications such as natural language processing, object detection and classification, seismic analysis, and genomics research. P4d instances are powered by the latest NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and provide first in the cloud 400 Gbps instance networking with support for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA (remote direct memory access) to enable efficient scale-out of multi-node ML training and HPC workloads.

AWS CodeArtifact now supports resource tagging making it simpler for customers to manage their CodeArtifact resources.  

AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale, now supports three new visualization options in SiteWise Monitor:

• AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor now supports Status charts, a chart type that visualizes data that has a small number of well-defined states. With Status charts, you can now visualize live equipment status as a grid, or view historical status as a timeline simply by configuring conditional thresholds using <, >, ≤, ≥, and = operators and assigning colors to the thresholds. For example, for a temperature sensor, you can define a temperature value greater than, say, 80° F as “RED” and anything less than or equals to 80° F as “GREEN” so that you can easily visualize whether the temperature is currently RED (above 80° F) or GREEN (less than or equals to 80° F), or when the temperature has been GREEN and RED over a period of time in the past.
• AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor now supports Scatter charts, a chart type that helps customers visualize distinct data points (without connecting lines) for live and historical operational data. With Scatter charts, you can look for any correlations between the measured values over a period of time. Scatter charts provide a cleaner visualization of the overall spread of operational data from processes, devices, and equipment plotted against time. Scatter charts also help with visualizing and comparing sensor data and manually-ingested data in the same chart in SiteWise.
• AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor now supports Trend lines, a linear regression line that best approximates the relationship between measured data and time. With Trend lines, you can now intuitively identify gradual shifts and changes in your live and historical data simply by adding trend lines to any of your Line, Scatter, and Bar charts. For example, in a windfarm, if you see a gradual decline in the power output trend line from a wind turbine while there is a flat and steady wind speed trend line, you can easily identify a power conversion efficiency issue with the wind turbine and immediately deploy field technicians to inspect and troubleshoot the wind turbine.
  

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in this region to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3. 

Amazon Honeycode has introduced three new app templates that help you build mobile & web apps for managing work in teams - with no programming required. Honeycode app builders can now launch app templates for applicant tracking, instant polls, and collaborative brainstorming in addition to Honeycode’s existing template library. The new templates are intended for Honeycode builders who are seeking more app examples or want to build an app faster than starting from scratch.