December 2020

AWS Control Tower now includes an organization-level aggregator, which assists in detecting external AWS Config rules. This will provide you with visibility in the AWS Control Tower console to see externally created AWS Config rules in addition to those AWS Config rules created by AWS Control Tower. The use of the aggregator enables AWS Control Tower to detect this information and provide a link to the AWS Config console without the need for AWS Control Tower to gain access to unmanaged accounts.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) launched a new management console. You can now create, edit, view, and delete Amazon ECS services and tasks, and view ECS clusters in fewer simpler steps. You can also learn about ECS capabilities and discover your ECS resources quickly and easily in the new console, as well as switch back to the existing console if needed. The new console will be continuously updated until all functionality from the existing console is available, and both consoles will be available to use until this time.

AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to create and manage AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor resources such as portals, projects, dashboards, widgets, and properties using CloudFormation.

AWS CodePipeline has released two new actions for creating and deploying CloudFormation StackSets. The CloudFormationStackSet action dynamically creates and deploys an initial or updated stack set configuration. The CloudFormationStackInstance action safely rolls out the stack set changes to new or existing stack instances in the stack set, region by region, reducing the risk of failure.

AWS Data Exchange Publisher Coordinator and AWS Data Exchange Subscriber Coordinator are new AWS Solutions Implementations that automate the publishing and consumption of data via AWS Data Exchange.

Starting today, you are now offered additional controls on your Amazon WorkDocs Android application that enable you to execute workflows such as deleting, renaming, and adding files and folders to your Favorite list directly from the Folder List view. You can also rename as well as add a file or folder to your Favorite list for quick access and offline use from the Document Preview view. These additional controls now surfaced from the Folder List and Document Preview view further facilitate content collaboration for you and your team.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.7.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.7.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some key features include the ability to throttle create topic, create partition, and delete topic operations (KIP-599) and configurable TCP connection timeout (KIP-601). For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.7.0.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports publishing Oracle Management Agent (OMA) logs from your DB instances to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.  

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports real-time audio-video (AV) by seamlessly redirecting local webcam video input to AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions. As more users work from home, they rely heavily on video conferencing applications for collaboration. With real-time AV support, you can make video conferencing and other streaming applications available to your users, to enhance the ability for teams to collaborate from anywhere. Your users can collaborate by using familiar video conferencing applications without having to leave their AppStream 2.0 session.

Today, we are announcing the availability of two new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Denver and Seattle. Wavelength Zones are now available in 10 cities, including the previously announced cities of Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Amazon QuickSight is now available two new regions - Canada (Central) and South America (Sao Paulo). New users can sign up for QuickSight with either of these regions as their home region, making SPICE capacity available in these regions and ensuring proximity to AWS and on-premise data sources. Existing QuickSight users can switch to Canada (Central) or South America (Sao Paulo) via the region switcher in the User Interface to provision SPICE capacity, and to enable faster and cheaper connectivity to data sources in this region. With this launch, QuickSight is now available in 14 regions globally, US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland and London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo), GovCloud (US-West), Canada (Central) or South America (Sao Paulo). Learn more about available regions here.  

Today, AWS Service Catalog is releasing TagOption sharing, which enables administrators to distribute TagOptions when sharing portfolios to AWS accounts. TagOptions are key-value pairs used by administrators to define and enforce their tagging taxonomy. In their central account, administrators can define TagOptions and associate them to products and portfolios.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware is a service that delivers AWS-managed relational databases in on-premises VMware environments. RDS on VMware customers running SQL Server can now recover their databases using point-in-time recovery for database recovery and duplication.

Service Workbench on AWS is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that enables IT teams to provide secure, repeatable, and federated control of access to data, tools, and compute power that researchers need. With Service Workbench on AWS, researchers no longer have to worry about configuring and managing cloud infrastructure. Instead, they can focus on achieving research missions and completing essential work in minutes, not months. Researchers can use Service Workbench on AWS to quickly and securely stand up research environments and share data with peers inside and across institutions. By automating the creation of baseline research environments, simplifying data access, and providing cost transparency, researchers and IT departments save time and achieve research reproducibility.

Customer owned IP (CoIP) addresses are now available for use with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts. CoIP allows you to assign addresses from your local network to services running on your AWS Outposts. Support for CoIP makes it easier to access your Amazon RDS databases from your local network using your own IPs. Amazon RDS on Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. You can deploy Amazon RDS on Outposts to set up, operate, and scale MySQL and PostgreSQL relational databases on premises, just as you would in the cloud. 

AWS Service Catalog now supports referencing Service Catalog provisioned product outputs in new provisioned products or AWS CloudFormation stacks. Provisioned product outputs, such as a VPC identifier, can now be made available as inputs to dependent provisioned products and stacks. This saves time building applications that have dependencies on existing infrastructure, such as a VPC, S3 bucket, or RDS database.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports additional production ready versions of MySQL (8.0.19, 8.0.20, 8.0.21) and PostgreSQL (12.3, 12.4) for deployment. Amazon RDS on Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. You can deploy Amazon RDS on Outposts to set up, operate, and scale MySQL and PostgreSQL relational databases on-premises, just as you would in the cloud.

AWS Compute Optimizer, a recommendation service that helps you identify optimal resource configurations for your AWS workloads, now delivers memory size recommendations for AWS Lambda Functions.

The Video on Demand on AWS solution cost-effectively delivers video-on-demand (VOD) content to global audiences using the AWS Cloud. It provisions the AWS services required to build scalable, distributed VOD processing, and delivery workflows and provides several features including:

• Amazon Step Functions orchestration of the ingest, transcoding (including pre-and post-processing steps), and publishing steps of the workflow.
• Choice of video file or metadata file trigger.
• Delivery of videos to viewers with Amazon CloudFront, formatted for playback on a wide range of devices.
• Input file metadata, job settings, and output details storage in a DynamoDB table for easy access by downstream consumers.
• Optional automated archive of video inputs to help reduce storage costs

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on SK Telecom (SKT)’s 5G network, allowing developers to build ultra-low latency applications for mobile devices and users throughout South Korea.  

You can now use Host Resource Groups application programming interfaces (APIs) to onboard to the simplified bring your own license (BYOL) experience for software licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, which require a dedicated physical server. This allows you to specify your management preferences for Dedicated Host, such as host allocation, host capacity utilization, and instance placement at the time of onboarding. You can then launch instances on EC2 Dedicated Hosts just as you would launch an Amazon EC2 instance with AWS-provided licenses. This new capability also allows you to add existing Dedicated Hosts to Host Resource Groups so that you can let AWS manage them on your behalf.

Starting today, AWS CodePipeline is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. 

We’ve added support for tagging and attribute-based access control (ABAC) for Service Quotas in your AWS account. You can now attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to applied quotas, enabling you to easily identify, classify, or categorize applied quotas in your AWS account. Applied quotas, or account-specific quotas, are overrides that are specific to your account and that have been granted to you in the past. Additionally, you can now leverage these tags for attribute-based access control (ABAC). ABAC is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on tags attached to users and AWS resources. ABAC simplifies permissions management — you can author a single permission policy that you won’t need to update as new resources are added to your AWS environment. You can also improve your security posture by authoring granular permission rules based on the tags you define.

FHIR Works on AWS is a new AWS Solutions Implementation with an open source software toolkit that can be used to create a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface over existing healthcare applications and data. It uses a serverless implementation to provide FHIR APIs that support the majority of FHIR resource types and operations. FHIR Works on AWS also includes architecture patterns for designing and building integrations to existing systems. Independent software vendors, system integrators, and healthcare providers can use the solution to improve access from mobile devices and web portals with standard FHIR APIs. Finally, the solution includes guidance on how to customize the default FHIR Works on AWS API to an organization’s specific needs.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in South America (Sao Paulo) and AWS GovCloud (US) 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.

FreeRTOS now supports the ability to update multiple file types in an over-the-air (OTA) update operation. With this feature, FreeRTOS users can classify different types of files (e.g. firmware, certificate, general image) while creating an OTA update job. This enables a FreeRTOS device to identify the category of an incoming update and use it for a specific purpose (e.g. firmware update, certificate rotation, picture download) or target (e.g. secondary microcontroller, external memory) in an embedded application. Learn more here.

Starting today, AWS WAF is available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region.

Amazon GuardDuty introduces three new threat detections that inform you when data residing in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets is accessed from an IP address associated with known malicious actors on the internet. These threat detections are available to customers that have enabled S3 protection in GuardDuty, and represent the latest in a continuously growing library of managed threat detections available for customers who enable Amazon GuardDuty in their AWS accounts.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for MariaDB version 10.4. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to MariaDB 10.4 databases, and from MariaDB 10.4 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets.

You can now launch your Amazon Neptune RDF/SPARQL or Apache TinkerPop graph application with a db.r5.24xlarge instance type for improved loading performance in all regions where Amazon Neptune is available.

Starting today, you can use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) source and target database credentials. Rotating credentials is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice that helps you meet your security and compliance requirements.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded its functionality by supporting parallel apply when using Redshift as a target during on-going replications. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. By taking advantage of the multithreaded CDC task settings, you can improve the performance of your on-going replications from any DMS supported sources to Amazon Redshift.

Today we announced the availability of AWS Glue custom connectors, a new capability in AWS Glue and AWS Glue Studio that makes it easy for you to transfer data from SaaS applications and custom data sources to your data lake in Amazon S3. With just a few clicks, you can search and select connectors from the AWS Marketplace and begin your data preparation workflow in minutes. For example, with the new capability, you can take advantage of connectors for Salesforce, SAP, and Snowflake. You can also build custom connectors and share them across teams, and integrate open source Spark connectors and Athena federated query connectors into you data preparation workflows. If you are an AWS Partner, you can develop custom connectors and share them on the AWS Marketplace.

AWS Config conformance packs now enable the inclusion of process checks rules, in addition to AWS Config managed rules, custom rules and remediation actions. Process check rules help you track resource-agnostic tasks as part of different compliance frameworks and operational best practices. You can add process check rules to new and existing conformance pack templates in your account. Unlike other rules and remediation actions in AWS Config, which can be used to automatically evaluate the compliance of specific AWS resources, the compliance status of a process check rule is manually administered and set by you through the AWS Config console or using the PutExternalEvaluation API. Two new sample conformance pack templates for operational best practices for CIS benchmarks Level 1 and Level 2 are now available, which include process check rules to match specific controls.

Customers are no longer required to execute a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before downloading AWS compliance reports from the AWS Artifact service. As such, we have removed the click-through NDA requirement from most compliance reports. Instead, we have added applicable Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) to the first page of every compliance report in AWS Artifact, that details the circumstances under which customers can distribute the applicable report. AWS customers can now share many of the AWS compliance reports (depending on the T&Cs) with their regulators and customers directly, without requiring to contact AWS for such requests.

AWS Config advanced queries feature adds ability to save your queries in your AWS Config account. Now, when you customize a sample query or write your query, you can save it with a name, description, and tags. This eliminates the need to save a query in a separate repository or rewrite it every time you want to run it. After you save the query, you can search it, copy it to the query editor, edit it, or delete it.

Compliant Framework for Federal and DoD Workloads in AWS GovCloud (US), a new AWS Solutions Implementation, helps customers accelerate their Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing (CC) Security Requirements Guide (SRG) compliance while reducing the level of technical effort, cost, and risk. The solution deploys foundational AWS infrastructure to support an automated, secure, scalable, multi-account environment based on AWS best practices in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. It is designed to meet requirements prescribed by the DoD for hosting Impact Level (IL) 4 and IL 5 workloads in the cloud, as well as provide the foundation for a CMMC compliant environment. With the Compliant Framework solution, U.S. Federal and DoD customers, as well as defense industrial base contractors, are able to quickly deploy an architecture baseline that will allow them to more rapidly achieve Authority to Operate and CMMC certification.

Amazon EMR Release 6.2 now supports improved Apache HBase performance on Amazon S3 with persistent HFile tracking, and Apache Hive ACID transactions on HDFS and Amazon S3. EMR 6.2 contains performance improvements to EMR Runtime for Apache Spark, and PrestoDB performance improvements. 

AWS Systems Manager now lets you perform a side-by-side comparison between different versions of your runbooks and other Systems Manager documents such as Run Command documents. Using this feature, you can quickly troubleshoot issues by visually comparing what changed in your runbook across versions.

Starting today, general purpose Amazon EC2 M5zn instances are available in the AWS South America (Sao Paulo) region. These new instances are a high frequency, high speed and low-latency networking variant of Amazon EC2 M5 instances, powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake). M5zn instances deliver the highest all-core turbo CPU performance from Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud, with a frequency up to 4.5 GHz.

High-Governance Foundation with AWS Control Tower is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Logicworks, an AWS Migration Competency Partner. High-Governance Foundation with AWS Control Tower accelerates the design and build-out of cloud architecture that can scale to support multiple teams, applications, or tenants. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers assessment of customer requirements and existing architecture; design and build of the solution; and migration, testing, and optional management of the new environment.

Just in time for the holidays, we are excited to announce the update to Amazon GameLift Server SDK Version 4.0.2. An AWS managed service, GameLift enables developers to deploy, operate, and scale dedicated servers in the cloud for multiplayer games. Game developers, such as Ubisoft and Behavior, expect to be able to use the latest versions of Unity and Unreal with the GameLift Server SDK, so we’re giving them a treat to close out the year.

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports remote execution of containerization Workflow. With this feature, users can now direct A2C workflows that need to be run on an application server (where applications are deployed) remotely. This is done without directly logging into the application server. Ability to run some of the containerization workflows remotely, has been supported in previous releases. With this new feature, users can now use a remote machine as a single place to run all A2C workflows interacting with applications running on different application servers. This eliminates the need for installing A2C on each application server.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announced the general availability of Amazon ECS deployment circuit breaker, for EC2 and Fargate launch types. With this feature, Amazon ECS customers using the ECS Rolling update deployment type can automatically roll back unhealthy service deployments without the need for manual intervention. This empowers customers to quickly discover failed deployments, without worrying about resources being consumed for failing tasks, or indefinite deployment delays. 

Amazon QuickSight adds dashboard performance improvements and query cost optimization through Dynamic Querying, along with introducing advanced data preparation capabilities.  

AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS now supports FreeRTOS 202012.00 release which can be used to validate and qualify development boards using the latest FreeRTOS. The updated AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS also supports qualification of development boards with cellular connectivity modules. AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass now supports AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 which can be used to qualify devices running AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0.

AWS OpsHub now supports the Linux operating system. AWS OpsHub is a graphical user interface you can use to manage your AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowball devices, enabling you to rapidly deploy edge computing workloads and simplify data migration to the cloud. With just a few clicks in AWS OpsHub, you have the full functionality of Snow devices at your fingertips; you can unlock and configure devices, drag-and-drop data to devices, launch applications, and monitor device metrics. AWS OpsHub for Windows and Mac operating systems was announced in April 2020. Starting today, AWS OpsHub will be available for Linux as well.

You can now send attachments directly through Amazon Connect Chat, making it easier than ever to resolve your customers’ support needs. For example, an agent can send a copy of a recent hotel invoice or a customer can share a photo of a damaged product. Attachments are included in the chat transcript, to help ensure the full context from the conversation is available if a contact is transferred to another agent. The files are also stored in your S3 bucket to allow access from other systems such as customer relationship management or case management systems. You can turn attachments on in the AWS console with a couple of clicks.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce v5.9 now supports automatically adding transcripts and insights from Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to customer records and cases in Salesforce Service Cloud. Amazon Connect customers have enjoyed being able to gain valuable insights from their call recordings such as customer sentiment, agent sentiment, sentiment change, key phrase detection, categorization tagging, and more simply by enabling Contact Lens in their contact flows. With the v5.9 release of the Amazon Connect CTI adapter for Salesforce, Connect users can now deliver those same insights, including the full call transcript, directly to the end-customer’s record or case history in Salesforce. There are no technical skills required, users of the CTI adapter simply make the configuration choice to enable this feature and a transcript and insights will be delivered to the customer’s Salesforce environment every time a call is completed and the recording is analyzed by Contact Lens.

You now can use PartiQL with NoSQL Workbench to run SQL-compatible queries on your DynamoDB data. PartiQL makes it easier to interact with DynamoDB, and now you can use PartiQL to query, insert, update, and delete table data by using NoSQL Workbench.  

PartiQL—a SQL-compatible query language—for Amazon DynamoDB is now supported in the following 23 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Montreal), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), China (Beijing), China (Ningxia), and Middle East (Bahrain).  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon DocumentDB 4.0 as a source. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from Amazon DocumentDB 4.0 clusters to any AWS DMS supported targets with minimal downtime.

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

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA-eligible automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Starting today, you can use the new Channel Identification feature to transcribe the speech from both live audio streams or static audio files that contain multiple audio channels. With Channel Identification, you can process audio from multiple channel to generate a single transcript of the conversation complete with channel labels.  

The s3:ResourceAccount and s3:TLSVersion IAM condition keys help you write simple policies that restrict access to your buckets based on the AWS Account ID of the bucket owner, or by the TLS Version used by the client.

You can now add tags to your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Elastic IP addresses while creating the resource. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can assign to Elastic IP addresses to easily organize, search, identify, and control access using Identity and Access Manager (IAM) policies. By tagging at the time of creation you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after Elastic IP addresses creation. 

Porting Assistant for .NET now supports automated code translation. In addition to identifying incompatibilities in the source code, Porting assistant can now automatically make changes to the source code to address commonly found incompatibilities with .NET Core. For example, when Porting Assistant detects the usage of Entity Framework in an application, it automatically adds EF Core as a dependency, update the namespaces in the source code, and add applicable stubs to allow developers to quickly port the application.

Today, we are excited to release a new learning capsule that dives deep into Transformer models. To learn the concepts behind 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 Transformer models which use attention layers to capture dependencies non-sequentially. Transformers are a machine learning architecture model designed to handle sequential data. By building a transformer-based model that understands musical motifs, or sequences, developers can create a model that can generate new music based on a series of sequences learned during training. Get started with creating a composition using the Transformers technique in the AWS DeepComposer Music studio.

The AWS Load Balancer Controller provides a Kubernetes native way to configure and manage Elastic Load Balancers that route traffic to applications running in Kubernetes clusters. Elastic Load Balancing offers multiple load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to help make your applications fault tolerant.

You can now reboot individual brokers within your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) cluster by using the Reboot Broker API. The Reboot Broker API enables you to test the resiliency of your data producers and consumers by simulating MSK service maintenance such as automated patching or the effect a version upgrade has on a MSK broker. Visit the Amazon MSK API Reference for information on how to use this API. 

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning. With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio notebooks to explore and prepare datasets to build, train and deploy machine learning models in a single pane of glass. Amazon EMR is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Starting today, customers can use Studio notebooks to easily and securely connect to Amazon EMR clusters and prepare vast amounts of data for analysis and reporting, model training, or inference. 

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Windows Server and SQL Server workload compute cost estimates. The workload estimate now accounts for Microsoft licensing. The Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon EC2 calculator provides a selection of licensing options such as AWS-provided licenses with License Included (LI) offerings and customers’ existing licenses with bring your own license (BYOL) offerings for optimal cost savings. It also identifies suitable cloud tenancy and a cost-saving pricing model, based on licensing and infrastructure inputs.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed data integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, added Upsolver as a destination. You can now use Amazon AppFlow to configure data flows with Upsolver as the destination. Upsolver is a data lake ETL platform that stores data on the cloud, applies advanced transformations, and distributes it to multiple destinations.

The EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Hibernation gives you the ability to launch EC2 instances, set them up as desired, hibernate them, and then quickly bring them back to life when you need them. Applications pick up exactly where they left off instead of rebuilding their memory footprint. By using Hibernation, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances to get to a productive state faster without modifying your existing applications.

Amazon Macie is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions. You can now discover sensitive data stored in these regions to help protect your AWS workloads and data in Amazon S3.

AWS Systems Manager Automation now lets you define the actions to perform when an operator cancels the execution of a runbook. Using this feature, you can automatically roll back any changes or perform necessary cleanups when the execution of a runbook is canceled.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.14 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.13.

Amazon Corretto11 on ARM32 for Linux Platforms and x86 (32-bit) on Windows are now Generally Available. With our ARM32 build, you can run Corretto 11 on Linux distributions on 32bit ARMv7 hardware. Our x86 on Windows build will run on the same supported versions of Windows and will allow usage of 32-bit libraries. These are full-featured, fully supported JDK11 builds. You can report any issues on our GitHub repo at https://github.com/corretto.

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports Ethereum in preview. Ethereum is a popular decentralized blockchain platform that establishes a peer-to-peer network allowing participants to transact without a trusted central authority. AWS customers can easily provision Ethereum nodes in minutes, and connect to the public Ethereum main network and test networks such as Rinkeby and Ropsten. With Amazon Managed Blockchain, customers get secure networking, fast and reliable syncs to the Ethereum blockchain, durable elastic storage for ledger data, encryption at rest and transport, and secure access to the network via standard open-source Ethereum APIs. Amazon Managed Blockchain automatically scales the storage, monitors node health, replaces unhealthy nodes, and automates Ethereum software upgrades, improving the availability of customers’ Ethereum infrastructure.

You can now connect your on-premises AWS Outposts infrastructure privately over Direct Connect to services running in the AWS region using AWS Outposts Private Connectivity.  

Multi-Attach is now available on Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volume type, io2. Launched in August 2020, io2 is the newest generation of our Provisioned IOPS volume type designed for 99.999% durability (100x io1) and 500:1 IOPS:GiB (10x io1). Multi-Attach lets you share access to an EBS data volume between up to 16 Nitro-based EC2 instances within the same Availability Zone (AZ). Each attached instance has full read and write permission to the shared volume. Multi-Attach is intended to make it easier to achieve higher application availability for customers that want to deploy applications that manage storage consistency from multiple writers in shared storage infrastructure.

AWS Snow Family now supports the Amazon Linux 2 operating system, enabling you to run your Amazon Linux 2-based workloads at the edge on AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized, and AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. Amazon Linux 2 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 Linux 2 is provided at no additional charge.

AWS Glue DataBrew today announced integration of third-party data sets available via AWS Data Exchange directly in the AWS Glue DataBrew console. Customers who use AWS Data Exchange to acquire third-party data can now easily view their entitled third-party data in the AWS Glue DataBrew console and then, visually explore , combine, clean and transform the data to make it ready for analysis. Similarly, these customers can easily export their entitled third-party data sets directly from the AWS Data Exchange console as an AWS Glue DataBrew dataset and start visually transforming the data.  

Data providers using the AWS Data Exchange console can now see filtered views of their products and owned data sets. Providers now have the ability to filter their products in the console by name, short description, publishing status, and subscriber visibility. They can also filter their owned data sets by name, data set ID, and data set ARN. This filtering capability is additionally surfaced in the process of adding data sets to new or existing products. For providers with many data sets and products, these console features facilitate faster product creation and management. 

Customers can now join Amazon Chime meetings on Echo Show 8. We recommend customers simply link their calendar using the Alexa app. Once linked, customers can say, “Alexa, join the Amazon Chime meeting” or “Alexa, join the meeting” at the time of the meeting to enjoy the meeting experience on their Echo Show 8. If customers do not wish to link their calendars, they can also speak the Amazon Chime meeting ID at the time of the meeting to join the meeting.  

Starting today, Echo Show 8 customers can use Alexa to join Zoom meetings on a dedicated device, by simply saying “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting.” No setup is required. Alexa will ask for the meeting ID and Passcode. You can also join a meeting more seamlessly by linking your Microsoft, Google, or Apple calendar account via the Alexa app. After saying “Join my Zoom meeting” Alexa will confirm the meeting title if details are included in the invite and then join the meeting. Alexa won’t ask for additional information.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now stores encrypted credentials used to connect to flow sources and destination applications including OAuth tokens, Application and API keys, and passwords in customers’ own AWS Secrets Manager account. Previously, AppFlow was storing these encrypted credentials in the AWS Secrets Manager account owned by the Amazon AppFlow service.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced a new and easier self-service experience for independent software vendors (ISVs) to add new versions and update product information on their container product listings. AWS Marketplace is consistently improving the way that sellers can keep their products up-to-date. With this release, ISVs with container products can now rapidly update and adjust their listing on their own. AWS Marketplace has made it easier for ISVs to publish new container images and Helm charts by hosting dedicated ECR repositories for their product.

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

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to Africa (Cape Town), EU (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain). StackSets is a CloudFormation feature that allows you to centrally manage deployment of cloud resources to multiple AWS accounts and Regions in a single operation. StackSets is also integrated with AWS Organizations so you can take advantage of automatic deployments whenever an account enters an organization. 

Amazon EC2 now allows you to copy up to 100 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) concurrently per destination region per account, an increase from the previous limit of 50 concurrent copies. This increase helps reduce the throttling exceptions and propagation limitations faced while copying multiple AMIs across regions at the same time. You can use CopyImage API to copy an AMI from one region to another.  

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, which makes it easy to create highly accurate machine learning (ML) models without requiring any ML expertise, now includes deep learning models, enabling you to quickly and accurately make predictions in a wide variety of deep learning applications. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gn instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and featuring up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth are generally available. Amazon EC2 C6gn instances deliver up to 40% better price-performance over C5n instances for applications requiring high network bandwidth such as high performance computing (HPC), network appliances, data lakes and data analytics.

AWS Lambda functions that are triggered from an Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) topic can now access to usernames and passwords secured by AWS Secrets Manager using SASL/SCRAM (Simple Authentication and Security Layer/Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism).  

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chatbot to improve engagement with customers who speak Latin American Spanish or German. 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.  

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, today announced that customers can now access Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems from non-RFC1918 IP addresses. Starting today, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server customers can now also join their file systems to on-premises Active Directories with non-RFC1918 IP addresses. 

Today, the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is announcing availability for attribute-based access control (ABAC) to allow the use of tags and aliases in policy conditions for IAM policies and AWS KMS key policies. Attribute-based access control is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on tags which can be attached to users and AWS resources. KMS additionally supports the use of key aliases in policy conditions.

Customers of EC2 Image Builder can now build and test container images compliant with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification. As a result, EC2 Image Builder can be used to automate the building of both – Virtual Machine and container images with similar workflows.

Amazon SQS now supports a preview of a high throughput mode for FIFO queues, allowing you to process up to 3000 messages per second per API action. This is a tenfold increase compared to current SQS FIFO queue throughput quota.

Today we are announcing AWS Well-Architected Guidance Engine (WAGE), a feature in the AWS Management Console that helps you determine next steps, best practices, and make choices so you can make the most of AWS. WAGE enables you to receive prescriptive guidance in the console based on questions and answers you provide. Each WAGE scenario is similar to a decision tree, and built and reviewed by AWS experts.

AWS Cloud Map is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS Regions.  

Amazon SageMaker now supports ml.p4d instances, the next generation of GPU-based instances that provide the best performance for machine learning (ML) training in the cloud for applications such as natural language processing, object detection and classification, seismic analysis, genomics research, and more.  

Starting today, AWS Nitro Enclaves and ACM for Nitro Enclaves are available in Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), and US West (N. California). 

Today, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for Amazon Route 53. You can now enable DNSSEC signing for all existing and new public hosted zones, and enable DNSSEC validation for Amazon Route 53 Resolver. Amazon Route 53 DNSSEC provides data origin authentication and data integrity verification for DNS and can help customers meet compliance mandates, such as FedRAMP.

Member accounts in an AWS Organization can now set-up Cost & Usage Reports containing the specific cost and usage data for just their account. This will provide member account-level insights for cost optimization initiatives and save management account holders' time from having to generate detailed cost and usage data for their member accounts.

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

The AWS Well-Architected Tool now offers APIs that allow customers and APN partners to extend AWS Well-Architected functionality, best practices, measurements, and learnings into their existing architecture governance processes, applications, and workflows.  

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the availability of three new digital courses for AWS Partners.

AWS Launch Wizard now enables you to install SAP application software as part of the deployment process, with support for SAP NetWeaver on HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA.

Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that helps developers easily add location data to their applications without sacrificing data security and user privacy. The service is now in preview. With Amazon Location, you can build a wide range of location-enabled applications for use cases such as asset tracking, geomarketing, and delivery management. 

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a free service that monitors your spending patterns to detect anomalous spend and provide root cause analysis. It helps customers to minimize cost surprises and enhance cost controls.  

Today, we are announcing the public preview of ML Detect, a new feature of AWS IoT Device Defender that automatically detects device-level operational and security anomalies across your fleet by learning from past data. Today, customers can use AWS IoT Device Defender’s Rules Detect to manually set static alarms. ML Detect makes this easier by automatically learning your fleet’s expected behavior using machine learning so that you don’t need an in-depth understanding of how your devices behave across a range of metrics to get started, like messages sent, disconnect frequency, and bytes in/out. Also, ML Detect automatically updates the expected behavior based on new data trends caused by seasonality and other changing factors. When an anomaly is detected, you can respond by choosing a built-in mitigation action like quarantining a device. 

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is a new, fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor containerized applications at scale. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Prometheus project is a popular open source and alerting monitoring solution optimized for container environments.  

AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell available from the AWS Management Console. Once logged into the Management Console, starting a CloudShell session gives customers immediate access to a Amazon Linux 2 environment with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) pre-installed and pre-authenticated using the same credentials used to login to the console. CloudShell makes it easy to securely manage, interact with, and explore your resources from the command line. Common tools and AWS CLIs are pre-installed and you can install other tools as needed by using the provided root access. Bash, zsh, and PowerShell are all included so you can choose your favorite shell.

For customers using AWS Organizations, the AWS Personal Health Dashboard now provides an all-up view of Health events occurring across your organization. From a single aggregated dashboard, you can learn about maintenance events, security vulnerabilities, and AWS service degredations affecting any account in your AWS organization. Organizational View for the Personal Health Dashboard comes at no additional cost and does not require a premium AWS Support plan. 

Today, we are announcing AWS IoT SiteWise Edge (Preview), a new feature of AWS IoT SiteWise providing software that runs on-premises at industrial sites and makes it easy to collect, process, and monitor equipment data locally before sending the data to AWS Cloud destinations. SiteWise Edge is installed on local hardware such as third-party industrial gateways and computers, or on AWS Outposts and AWS Snow Family compute devices. 

Today, AWS announces Change Manager, a new change management feature of AWS Systems Manager. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. With Change Manager, you can use built-in change management best practices based on Amazon’s 20+ years of operational experience to more safely make operational changes.

Today, AWS announces Fleet Manager, a new capability in AWS Systems Manager that helps you streamline and scale your remote server management process. Fleet Manager provides you with visual tools to manage your Windows, Linux, and macOS servers, so you can easily perform common administrator tasks for your fleet running on AWS and on-premises, without needing to remotely connect to these servers. 

AWS Lambda now allows customers to automatically checkpoint records that have been successfully processed for Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB Streams, using a new parameter, FunctionResponseType. When customers set this parameter to “Report Batch Item Failure”, if a batch fails to process, only records after the last successful message are retried. This reduces duplicate processing, and gives customers more options for failure handling.

You can now use AWS IoT Device Defender to monitor operational health metrics that are unique to your fleet or use case. For example, you could define a new metric to monitor the memory usage or CPU usage on your devices. After your devices start sending these metrics to the cloud, you can monitor the metrics and trigger alarms when memory usage exceeds expected ranges or when CPU usage exceeds a statistically significant threshold. The alerts can be viewed in the Device Defender console or shared through AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS). 

AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0 is now available. With this major release, AWS IoT Greengrass provides an open source edge runtime, a rich set of pre-built software components, tools for local software development, and new features for managing device software on large fleets of devices.

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana is a fully managed and secure data visualization service that enables customers to instantly query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces for their applications from multiple data sources. Developed in partnership with Grafana Labs, Amazon Managed Service for Grafana manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves. Customers also benefit from built-in security features that enable compliance with governance requirements, including integration with AWS Single Sign-On, data access control, and audit reporting via AWS CloudTrail.

Today, AWS announces Application Manager, a new capability in AWS Systems Manager to enable customers to manage their applications from a single console. The new capability enables developers and operators to discover their applications, view operational data, and perform actions within the context of an application. 

Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better through better connectivity options. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Sidewalk Integration for AWS IoT Core to help device manufacturers easily onboard their Sidewalk device fleet with AWS IoT Core. Amazon Sidewalk has been designed to support a wide range of customer devices like locating pets or valuables, to smart home security and lighting control, to remote diagnostics for appliances and tools.  

We are thrilled to announce AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, a fully managed capability that allows AWS IoT Core customers to connect and manage wireless devices that use low-power long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) connectivity with the AWS cloud. Using AWS IoT Core, enterprises can now setup a private LoRaWAN network by connecting their own LoRaWAN devices and gateways to the AWS cloud - without developing or operating a LoRaWAN Network Server (LNS). This allows customers to eliminate the undifferentiated work and operational overhead of managing an LNS, and enables them to quickly connect and secure LoRaWAN device fleets at scale. AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN also makes it easy to act on the data from connected devices using AWS services for processing, storage, analytics, or machine learning. With built-in integration with AWS IoT Rules Engine, AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN automatically routes messages from connected LoRaWAN devices to customer defined rules, thus accelerating IoT application development. 

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that makes it easy to collect, pre-process, enrich, store and analyze IoT data at scale to run sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data and gain insights into how IoT devices are operating without having to worry about the complexity typically required to build an analytics platform.

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service that makes it easy to collect, pre-process, enrich, store and analyze IoT data at scale to run sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data and gain insights into how IoT devices are operating without having to worry about the complexity typically required to build an analytics platform.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now synchronizes groups, in addition to user information, for customers who use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as their identity source. You can now manage your users and groups in AD, and AWS SSO's AD sync will ensure that this information is accessible to you in a consistent manner within AWS accounts and applications. You will be able to access AD users and groups from AWS SSO-integrated applications and use them for improved collaborative experiences like searching and sharing, and fine-grained access control to application resources like dashboards. Any changes you make to user and group information in AD will automatically reflect in AWS SSO, reducing your administrative effort to manage identities in AWS.

With Application Manager, a new capability in AWS Systems Manager, it is now easier to manage SQL Server workloads that are deployed using AWS Launch Wizard. Application Manager automatically imports SQL Server resources created by AWS Launch Wizard, and enables you to perform operational tasks such as database integrity checks, backup and restore, and index maintenance centrally from the Application Manager console.  

AWS IoT Core Device Advisor, a fully managed cloud-based test capability for validating IoT devices, is now available in preview. Previously, device developers had to build their own test infrastructure to confirm if their IoT devices could reliably and securely interoperate with AWS IoT Core. This adds to the cost of development and testing, and slows down completion of their IoT projects. Now, developers can use pre-built tests provided by Device Advisor to validate their IoT devices for reliable and secure connectivity with AWS IoT Core. Developers can connect their devices to an IoT Device Advisor test endpoint in the AWS cloud with just a few clicks, and start testing their devices. Developers can identify common device software issues such as IoT devices being unable to reconnect by using the pre-built test for MQTT reconnect. Developers can get detailed logs in Amazon CloudWatch to troubleshoot and fix the issues during their development and testing cycles before deploying their devices in production. Device Advisor also provides a signed qualification report which can be used by hardware partners to qualify their devices for inclusion in the AWS Partner Device Catalog.

AWS IoT Core now supports a new IoT rule action to deliver messages from your devices directly to your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (“Amazon MSK”) or self-managed Apache Kafka clusters for data analysis and visualization, without writing a single line of code.  

AWS introduces AWS IoT EduKit, an easy way to learn to build IoT applications using AWS services through a prescriptive learning program. AWS IoT EduKit helps developers – from students to experienced engineers and professionals – receive hands-on experience building end-to-end IoT applications by combining a reference hardware kit with a set of easy to follow guides and example code. To learn more, please visit AWS IoT EduKit.

We are excited to announce Alarms, a new feature (currently in preview) in AWS IoT Events that allows you to set up, visualize and manage rule-based alerts for devices, equipment, and processes. You can now receive alerts via SMS or email in near-real time when equipment data breaches thresholds, allowing operations teams to take timely actions to reduce unplanned downtime.  

AWS Lambda now allows customers to build applications that can be triggered by messages in an Apache Kafka cluster hosted on any infrastructure. Customers can keep their existing Apache Kafka cluster as-is, and quickly and easily build Kafka consumer applications with Lambda without needing to worry about provisioning or managing servers.  

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on KDDI’s 5G network in Japan. Wavelength allows developers to build applications that need ultra-low latency or high bandwidth for mobile devices and users on KDDI’s 5G network. AWS Wavelength is available on the KDDI 5G network today in Tokyo, and we are collaborating with KDDI to bring AWS infrastructure and services closer to customers across Japan.

The AWS SDK for JavaScript, version 3 (v3) is now generally available and includes many frequently requested features, such as a new middleware stack and a first-class TypeScript support. It also has a modular architecture, with a separate package for each service. You can improve your application performance by only importing the packages your application requires and reducing your application bundle.

Today, AWS IoT is announcing Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management (preview). The new feature enables customers to easily create a fully managed web application to view and interact with their device fleets to monitor fleet and device health, respond to alarms, take remote actions, and reduce time for troubleshooting. 

Today, we are announcing the first FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) release. With this release, developers can rely on a FreeRTOS version that provides feature stability, and security patches and critical bug fixes for two years. This makes it easier to identify and include only recommended changes to the FreeRTOS kernel and libraries, without adding the risk of introducing updates that could break an existing application.

Today, AWS and Grafana Labs launched the AWS IoT SiteWise plugin for Grafana. This plugin lets you easily visualize your AWS IoT SiteWise data in your Grafana dashboards. With this plugin, you can easily visualize and monitor your equipment data in near-real time using the wide range of visualization options in Grafana dashboards. You can also easily combine data from multiple sources (e.g., AWS IoT SiteWise, Amazon Timestream, Amazon CloudWatch) and monitor them all using a single Grafana dashboard. You can also embed these Grafana dashboards into your custom applications. 

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to deploy new Active Directory (AD) infrastructure on Amazon EC2, or add domain controllers to an existing Active Directory hosted on Amazon EC2 or on-premises. AWS Launch Wizard uses AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide you through setting up your deployment on environment which includes setting up Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), security groups, and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) roles. AWS Launch Wizard reduces the time that it takes to set up an Active Directory infrastructure and deploy self-managed domain controllers.  

Customers can now use AWS Lambda to build analytics workloads for their Amazon Kinesis or Amazon DynamoDB Streams. For no additional cost, customers can build sum, average, count, and other simple analytics functions over a contiguous, non-overlapping time windows (tumbling window) of up to 15 minutes per shard. Customers can consolidate their business and analytics logic into a single Lambda function, reducing the complexity of their architecture.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports data ingestion using ModBus TCP and EtherNet/IP (EIP) protocols. You can do so by adding Modbus or EIP devices as data sources to your SiteWise Gateway. For data ingestion from OPC-UA data sources, you can now customize the scan mode and scan rate along with specifying deadbands. Lastly, you can provide a custom AWS IoT Greengrass StreamManager stream as a destination for protocol data.

FreeRTOS is an MIT licensed open source, real-time operating system for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Starting today, FreeRTOS includes a preview of a cellular LTE-M library and AWS IoT reference integrations with cellular modules from vendors such as Sierra Wireless, u-blox, and Quectel. With this launch, customers will find it easier to build IoT devices that use the cellular LTE-M protocol to connect to AWS IoT Core. 

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 prepare, build, train and tune, deploy and manage models. Starting today, you can secure the connection from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to SageMaker Studio using AWS PrivateLink. When using PrivateLink, all the traffic flows entirely within the AWS network without traversing the public internet, thus adding an additional layer of security. 

We are excited to announce the launch of Unified Search to enable AWS users to easily search and discover information in the AWS Management Console. AWS users can now search for services (e.g. IAM), features (e.g. Users), Marketplace products (e.g. Splunk), and AWS Documentation (e.g. troubleshooting guides) without leaving the AWS Management Console. You can access the search bar using a keyboard shortcut (alt-s or option-s), autocomplete by using the right arrow key, and navigate to the top search result by pressing the enter key. Unified Search is available in all public AWS Regions.

AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202012.00 now includes an over-the-air update (OTA) library (release candidate) and a PKCS #11 implementation (corePKCS11). The OTA library makes it easier to manage notifications, download, and perform cryptographic verification of firmware updates. You can use the OTA library with your chosen MQTT library, HTTP library, and underlying operating system (e.g. Linux, FreeRTOS). This release includes examples for how to use the OTA library with coreMQTT and coreHTTP over Linux. The corePKCS11 library implements a subset of the PKCS #11 v2.40 standard, with a focus on operations involving asymmetric keys, random number generation, and hashing. You can use the corePKCS11 library to manage keys and certificates for TLS authentication and verify code-sign signatures on your IoT devices. The OTA and corePKCS11 libraries have been optimized for memory usage and modularity, and have undergone code quality checks (e.g. MISRA-C compliance, Coverity static analysis). For additional information on all C-SDK libraries and updates, , see C-SDK 202012.00 README.

Spot Blueprints is an infrastructure code template generator that makes it easy to start using Spot Instances. It saves time in learning to use Spot and to start leveraging the steep savings and scale that Spot offers for interruptible workloads. You can use Spot Blueprints for the most popular services used with Spot Instances, including Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon EMR, AWS Batch, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

AWS Security Hub now supports a bidirectional integration with ServiceNow ITSM, making it easier for Security Hub users to automatically create and update tickets in ServiceNow ITSM from Security Hub findings and ensure that updates to those tickets are synced with the findings. This integration is available via the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow app. After downloading the app, you can decide if you want to send all or only certain findings with specific severity levels to ServiceNow and you can decide if you want to automatically create incident or problem tickets. Then, when you make an update to various fields in the ticket, such as state or priority, those changes are automatically sent to Security Hub, so that Security Hub always has the latest and correct information about that issue.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility can now make calls to AWS Lambda functions. AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, and without worrying about scalability.

On December 11, 2020 we launched the AWS Toolkit for AWS Cloud9, enabling users of our browser-based IDE to easily manage core AWS services through the graphical user interface. A key component of the AWS Toolkit is the Resource Explorer – a view that allows you to navigate and interact with your AWS resources such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3, and more. Cloud9 will continue to increase support for other AWS resource types through the Toolkit.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL versions 11.9, 10.14, and 9.6.19. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community.

Amazon Lumberyard 1.27 Beta is now available for download, bringing you a range of updates including usability with optimized work flows throughout the user interface, support for new and improved physics features, and even more customization options for developers on major platforms.

Starting today, customers can view and select EC2 specific parameters (single and list) during provisioning from AWS accounts associated with the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow, formerly known as the AWS Service Catalog Connector. Customers can also view consolidated cloud resources via AWS Config Aggregator within the ServiceNow CMDB, making it easier for ServiceNow administrators to see cloud resource transparency across AWS Accounts.

Customers can now create HTTP APIs that route requests to the new AWS Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows. 

December 11th, 2020 – You can now create Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1) and Cold HDD Volumes (SC1) as small as 125GB, allowing you to save up to 75% over the previous 500GB minimum when creating volumes at this new minimum size. 

AWS Graviton2-based database instances are now available in preview for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility. Graviton2 instances are already generally available for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

Amazon QuickSight dashboards can now visualize data from Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at scale. Authors in QuickSight can select Amazon Elasticsearch Service as a data source, select the specific data domain to analyze and start visualizing in QuickSight. See here to learn more.

Amplify CLI helps front-end web & mobile developers provision APIs and host websites. With today’s Amplify CLI release, you gain the ability to deploy the GraphQL & REST APIs and host websites using AWS Fargate in addition to existing AppSync, API Gateway and Amplify console options. Just run the “amplify configure project” command and enable the “container-based deployments” option.

VPC Reachability Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to perform connectivity testing between resources in your virtual private clouds (VPC). With Reachability Analyzer, you can quickly troubleshoot connectivity issues caused by misconfiguration, and proactively verify that your configuration matches your network connectivity intent.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use custom synonyms with Amazon Kendra to improve the accuracy of their search results.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway supports Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for simplified deployment and management of multicast applications. IP multicast on AWS Transit Gateway delivers a single stream of data to many users simultaneously. IGMP, an open standard, enables dynamic establishment of multicast group memberships allowing large groups of end users to access multicast data on demand.

Today AWS announced the availability of AWS Transit Gateway Connect, a new feature of the AWS Transit Gateway that simplifies branch connectivity through native integration of Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) appliances into AWS.

Amazon EC2 now provides additional network performance metrics to help customers gain more insights into instance network performance. Five new metrics provide customers visibility when their instances exceed network allowances defined by AWS. This visibility helps customers proactively resolve application performance issues and right size instance fleets based on desired network performance. 

Amazon Redshift RA3 with managed storage is the the latest generation node type and allows you to scale compute and storage independently. Today, we're announcing RA3.xlplus - the third and smallest member of the RA3 node-family. RA3 allows you to size your cluster based primarily on your compute needs. With the introduction of RA3.xlplus, you now have even more compute sizing options to choose from to address a broader set of workload requirements. 

AWS Lake Formation transactions, row-level security, and acceleration are now available for preview. These capabilities are available via new, open, and public update and access APIs for data lakes. These APIs extend AWS Lake Formation’s governance capabilities with row-level security. In addition, with this preview, we introduce governed tables - a new Amazon S3 table type that supports atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) transactions. AWS Lake Formation transactions simplify ETL script and workflow development, and allow multiple users to concurrently and reliably insert, delete, and modify rows across multiple governed tables. AWS Lake Formation automatically compacts and optimizes storage of governed tables in the background to improve query performance. 

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 G4ad instances that provide the best price performance for graphics intensive applications in the cloud. G4ad instances are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors, and provide up to 45% better price performance over G4dn instances for graphics intensive applications such as virtual workstations, game streaming, and graphics rendering. 

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, now enables a secure and easy way to share live data across Amazon Redshift clusters. Data sharing enables instant, granular, and high-performance data access across Amazon Redshift clusters without the need to copy or move data. Data Sharing provides live access to the data so that your users always see most up-to-date and consistent information as it is updated in the data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, announces preview of native support for JSON and semi-structured data. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to store the semi-structured data in Redshift tables. Redshift also adds support for the PartiQL query language to seamlessly query and process the semi-structured data. This functionality enables you to achieve advanced analytics that combine the classic structured SQL data (such as strings, numerics, and timestamps) with the semi-structured SUPER data with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, announces general availability of Automatic Table Optimization, a new self-tuning capability that optimizes the physical design of tables by automatically setting sort and distribution keys to improve query speed. You can use Automatic Table Optimization to get started with Amazon Redshift easily or optimize production workloads by decreasing the administrative effort required to get the best possible performance. 

Today we are announcing the public preview of EMR Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug data engineering and data science applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. EMR Studio provides fully managed Jupyter Notebooks, and tools like Spark UI and YARN Timeline Service to simplify debugging.

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS provides a new deployment option for Amazon EMR that allows you to run Apache Spark on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). If you already use Amazon EMR, you can now run Amazon EMR based applications with other types of applications on the same Amazon EKS cluster to improve resource utilization and simplify infrastructure management across multiple AWS Availability Zones. If you already run big data frameworks on Amazon EKS, you can now use Amazon EMR to automate provisioning and management, and run Apache Spark up to 3x faster. With this deployment option, you can focus on running analytics workloads while Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS builds, configures, and manages containers.

AWS Global Accelerator announces custom routing accelerator, a new type of accelerator that allows you to use your own application logic to route user traffic to a specific Amazon EC2 destination, while still leveraging the benefits of Global Accelerator. 

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used data warehouse, now offers the ability to move an Amazon Redshift cluster to another AWS Availability Zone (AZ). The cluster relocation feature moves a cluster to another AZ in one step without requiring application changes. You can invoke the relocation function in cases where resource constraints in a given AZ are disrupting cluster operations such as the ability to resume or resize a cluster. This feature is available for use on clusters leveraging the RA3 instance family and is offered at no additional cost.

We announced general availability of Amazon Redshift federated query with support for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL earlier this year. With this feature, many customers have been able to combine live data from operational databases with the data in Amazon Redshift data warehouse and the data in Amazon S3 data lake environment in order to get unified analytics view across all the data in the enterprise. We now extend the federated query capability to Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL. 

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports native integration with select AWS partners from within the Amazon Redshift Console. With the new console partner integration, you can accelerate data onboarding and create valuable business insights in minutes by integrating with select partner solutions. With these solutions, you can bring data from applications like SalesForce, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Slack, Jira, Splunk, and Marketo into your Amazon Redshift data warehouse in an efficient and streamlined way. It also enables you to join these disparate datasets and analyze them together to produce actionable insights.

We’re excited to announce the Amazon Forecast Weather Index, which can increase your forecasting accuracy, by automatically including the latest local weather information to your demand forecasts with one click and at no extra cost. Weather conditions influence consumer demand patterns, product merchandizing decisions, staffing requirements and energy consumption needs; however, acquiring, cleaning, and effectively using live weather information for demand forecasting is challenging and requires ongoing maintenance. With this launch, you can now include 14-day weather forecasts for US and Europe locations with one click to your demand forecasts.  

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler now profiles your application’s memory, giving you a consolidated view of the heap. The heap summary shows all objects allocated on the heap during a given time frame. For each object (e.g. String, int, char[], custom types, etc.) you can see a summed-up size and number of objects. These metrics are also presented in a time series so you can see how the object size or count changes over time.  

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor continuously monitors machine learning models for concept drift (i.e. changes in data distribution and characteristics over time) and alerts you if there are any deviations so you can take remedial action. Starting today, you can also use Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to detect drift in model quality, bias, and feature importance. With these new fully managed capabilities, SageMaker Model Monitor helps you maintain high quality machine learning models in production.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you easily and quickly bring machine learning (ML) applications to market using pre-built solutions for common use cases and open source models from popular model zoos.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, customers can centralize content from over 40+ data sources and make it discoverable, with the launch of the Amazon Kendra connector library.

We’re excited to announce new capabilities with Amazon SageMaker Debugger with real-time monitoring of system resources for efficient utilization. With these new capabilities, you can now get automatic recommendations to re-allocate resources for your training jobs, helping you train better and reduce time and costs.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports cross region replication of images in private repositories, enabling developers to easily copy container images across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single push to a source repository. Storing images in-region to your infrastructure helps applications start up faster as image download time is reduced due to lower latency, and removes cross region downloads that helps with region isolation. Geographically dispersed images also helps you meet backup and disaster recovery requirements for your application. By creating a simple way to reliably replicate images across regions, Amazon ECR now makes it even easier to run highly available applications in AWS. 

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, Amazon Kendra will use incremental learning to continuously optimize search results based on end-user search patterns and feedback.

Today, Amazon announced Amazon Neptune ML, a new capability of Amazon Neptune that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a machine learning (ML) technique purpose-built for graphs, to make easy, fast, and accurate predictions using graph data. With GNNs, you can improve the accuracy of most predictions for graphs by over 50% when compared to making predictions using non-graph methods based on published research from Stanford University. 

Amazon Redshift ML makes it possible for data warehouse users such as data analysts, database developers, and data scientists to create, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using familiar SQL commands. Amazon Redshift is the most widely used cloud data warehouse and, with Amazon Redshift ML, you can now leverage Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service, using SQL and without moving your data or learning new skills.

Amazon HealthLake is a HIPAA-eligible service that enables healthcare providers, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to store, transform, query, and analyze health data at petabyte scale.

We’re excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker to build, manage, automate, and scale end to end machine learning workflows. SageMaker Pipelines brings automation and orchestration to ML workflows, enabling you to accelerate machine learning projects and scale up to thousands of models in production.

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 Google Drive repositories using Amazon Kendra's new built-in Google Drive connector.

Today we are introducing two new distributed training libraries for Amazon SageMaker, providing integrated methods for you to quickly train large deep learning models. Using partitioning algorithms, these SageMaker distributed training libraries automatically split large deep learning models and training datasets across AWS GPU instances in a fraction of the time it takes to do manually. SageMaker achieves these efficiencies through two techniques: model parallelism and data parallelism. Model parallelism splits models too large to fit on a single GPU into smaller parts before distributing across multiple GPUs to train, and data parallelism splits large datasets to train concurrently in order to improve training speed.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface. 

We’re excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker to ingest, store, share, reuse, and serve features for real time and batch machine learning (ML) applications.  

Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to detect anomalies, or unexpected changes in your metrics, helping you proactively monitor the health of your business, diagnose issues and find opportunities quickly – with no ML experience required. 

Amazon Braket now supports PennyLane, an open source software framework for hybrid quantum computing. Pennylane provides interfaces to common machine learning libraries, including PyTorch and TensorFlow, so you can train quantum circuits in the same way you would train a neural network. The integration with Amazon Braket allows you to test and fine-tune algorithms faster and at a larger scale on scalable and fully managed simulators and run them on your choice of quantum computing hardware.

Amazon Braket provides a fully managed and high-performance tensor network simulator (TN1). This tensor-network-based circuit simulator can support quantum computing simulations with up to 50 qubits, and is particularly powerful for sparse circuits, circuits with local gates, and other circuits with inherent structure.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with AWS Audit Manager, which helps simplify how you assess risk and monitor your compliance with regulations and industry standards. AWS Audit Manager is a new service that helps you continuously audit your AWS usage and automates evidence collection to make it easier for you to assess whether your policies, procedures, and activities are operating effectively. Using a prebuilt or customized framework, you can launch an Audit Manger assessment to begin collecting and organizing evidence, such as Security Hub findings, in accordance with the requirements of an industry standard or regulation, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark standard. With Audit Manager, you can focus on reviewing the relevant evidence to ensure your controls are working as intended and build audit-ready reports with much less manual effort. For more information on AWS Audit Manager, see their documentation here.

Today we are introducing Amazon SageMaker Clarify to help machine learning developers achieve greater visibility into their training data and models so they can identify and limit bias and explain predictions.

Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager is a new feature of Amazon SageMaker that enables developers with the tools for model management across your fleets of edge devices so you can optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain machine learning models on fleets of edge devices such as smart cameras, robots, personal computers, and mobile devices.  

AWS Audit Manager is a new service that helps you continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how you assess risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards. Audit Manager automates evidence collection to make it easier to assess whether your policies, procedures, and activities, also known as controls, are operating effectively. When it is time for an audit, AWS Audit Manager helps you manage stakeholder reviews of your controls and enables you to build audit-ready reports with much less manual effort and in less time.

AWS Transit Gateway now supports the ability to establish peering connections between AWS Transit Gateways in Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Europe(Milan) AWS Regions. AWS Transit Gateway is a service that enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. With AWS Transit Gateway, customers only have to create and manage a single connection from a central regional gateway to each Amazon VPC, on-premises data center, or remote office across their networks.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports table charts in AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor. With table charts, you can have a compact representation of the latest data from your equipment in a simple table simply by dragging and dropping the data and metrics you are interested in monitoring into a table. For example, you can now easily tabulate and visualize the latest key operational metrics like equipment properties, status, or aggregate functions such as the production lines’ Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in a single table, making it easy for you to get a bird’s eye view of your plant and also do a side by side comparison of how these assets are performing. You can learn more about table charts here.

With the launch of the revision access rules, data providers can create products that give subscribers access to a subset of data set revisions based on their subscription start date. Starting today, subscribers are able to choose products that include only historical revisions published before their subscription start date, only future revisions published after their subscription start date, or future revisions with a certain number of past revisions from their subscription start date. Before revision access rules were available, subscribers would receive all of the available revisions of a data set, including those published before and after their subscription start date. With the launch of this feature, subscribers pay for and access the revisions that they actually need, while providers have the flexibility to price historical and future data appropriately without having to create and maintain multiple data sets. 

Amazon Connect is announcing 10 telephony rate reductions for customers in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru from the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. 

AWS Security Hub can now automatically receive findings from the open source tool Kube-bench Kube-bench checks whether your Kubernetes cluster is configured in accordance with the recommendations from the Center for Internet Security (CIS), supporting both the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark and the CIS Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Benchmark. Kube-bench’s findings about non-compliant configuration settings can be viewed within Security Hub. In addition, Security Hub’s integration with Cloud Custodian is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. The open source tool Cloud Custodian can both send and receive findings to/from Security Hub. This brings the total number of AWS service and AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner integrations available in Security Hub to 61.

Amazon Connect now supports claiming local toll-free and direct inward dial phone numbers in four new Latin American countries in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. These new local telephony services support customers in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. 

Amazon EC2 now allows you to add tags to your Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and EBS Snapshots during AMI creation. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize, search, and identify resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources. You can define fine-grained access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions.  

AWS CloudTrail now provides more granular control of data event logging with advanced event selectors. Data events provide visibility into the data plane resource operations performed on or within a resource. You can currently log data events on two resource types: Amazon S3 object-level API activity (e.g. GetObject, DeleteObject, and PutObject API operations), and AWS Lambda function execution activity (the Invoke API). With advanced event selectors, you can include or exclude values on fields such as EventSource, EventName, and ResourceARN. Advanced event selectors also support including or excluding values with pattern matching on partial strings, similar to regular expressions, providing more control over which CloudTrail data events you want to log and pay for. For example, you can log S3 DeleteObject APIs to narrow the CloudTrail events you receive to only destructive actions, enabling you to identify security issues while controlling costs. If you detect unauthorized activity, you can also take immediate action to restrict access.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 volumes are now supported for SAP workloads.  

Customers can now create HTTP APIs that route requests to the new AWS Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows. 

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an update to Amazon GameLift FlexMatch, enabling you as a game developer to use the multiplayer matchmaker with any game server solution of your choice. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Metalhead Software, Yager, and Illfonic, GameLift FlexMatch launched in 2017 as a GameLift feature that uses a powerful matchmaking algorithm and flexible developer-defined rules to create high-quality matches at AWS scale. 

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to setup automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region.  

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2, C6g and R6g instances with EMR Versions 6.1.0, 5.31.0 and later and M6g instance types with EMR version 5.30.0 and 6.1.0. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are custom designed by AWS utilizing 64-bit ArmNeoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Please read our blog for more information.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announced in preview, Amazon ECS deployment circuit breaker, for EC2 and Fargate launch types. With this feature, Amazon ECS customers can now automatically roll back unhealthy service deployments without the need for manual intervention. This empowers customers to quickly discover failed deployments, without worrying about resources being consumed for failing tasks, or indefinite deployment delays.

Today, we are excited to announce Python Support for Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer and Profiler to help you improve code quality and optimize performance for Python applications.  

On December 1, we announced support for Amazon EC2 R5b instance types in the US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. Starting today, we’re happy to announce you can now launch Amazon EC2 R5b instance types using Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for SQL Server in additional AWS Regions:

North America

• US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon)

Asia Pacific

• Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

Today we are excited to announce the relaunch of the Amazon RDS Service Delivery Program, part of the AWS Service Delivery Program, to help customers find AWS Partners with specific database engine expertise to set up, operate, and scale relational databases in the cloud.

We are excited to announce the launch of AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub, a growing library of business and technical content to help AWS Partners gain insights, make informed decisions, and enable themselves at any stage of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) journey on AWS. AWS Partners can search by topics most relevant to their business, content types, or specific business or technical role to find whitepapers, case studies, best practices, videos, and more.

AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry provides a place to collect your AWS CloudFormation stacks and associate your customer-defined attribute groups (metadata) that describe your AWS applications. Customers can automate updates of stack and metadata changes by calling AppRegistry from within their CI/CD processes. IT and business stakeholders have up-to-date information on their applications, such as organizational ownership, data sensitivity, and cost center. 

The AWS SaaS Factory Program and AWS Well-Architected teams have combined their expertise in architectural best practices and knowledge of SaaS solutions to launch the new AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens.

Today we are excited to announce the preview release of AWS SaaS Boost. AWS SaaS Boost is an open source ready-to-use reference environment that enables Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to accelerate the move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). From small specialized software businesses to large global solution providers, AWS SaaS Boost helps ISVs rapidly migrate applications to AWS with minimal modifications. ISVs can build, provision, and manage SaaS environments with greater confidence based on AWS best practices and proven patterns from hundreds of successful SaaS companies.

With the Amazon Connect Chat integration for Apple Business Chat, you can now provide convenient and familiar customer service directly through the Apple Messages app. Anytime an iPhone user clicks to call your registered phone number, Apple provides the option to chat, reducing contact center costs and enabling customers to respond at their own pace. Customers interact with you directly through their Apple Messages application, just as they would when chatting with a friend or family member. Amazon Connect makes it easy to deliver customer support through Apple Business Chat, using the same configuration, analytics, routing, and agent UI that you're already using for Amazon Connect voice and chat.

Today AWS Batch introduced the ability for customers to specify AWS Fargate as a compute resource for their AWS Batch jobs. With AWS Batch support for AWS Fargate, customers now have a way to run jobs on serverless compute resources, fully managed from job submission to completion. Now, you only need to submit your analytics, map reduce, and other batch workloads and let AWS Batch and AWS Fargate handle the rest.  

AWS License Manager automated discovery now supports tag-based search and automatic detection of software uninstalls to further simplify the management of software licenses in AWS and on-premises environments. Administrators can now use custom defined tags to discover installed software in their environments, and have License Manager track the discovered instances throughout their lifecycle. When software is uninstalled, License Manager automatically detects the uninstallation and updates its centralized reporting and dashboard.

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

AWS Marketplace now enables customers to find and buy Professional Services from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and consulting partners. Customers can choose from a selection of services such as assessment, implementation, and support for third-party software purchased in AWS Marketplace. The capability to buy software and associated services from multiple sellers in a single cloud marketplace enables customers to reduce onboarding time for each seller and simplify procurement cycles. Customers can buy services with customized pricing, payment schedules and contract terms to fit their business needs, with all software and services charges consolidated on their AWS bill. The AWS Marketplace catalog listings can be refined to show Professional Services using “Professional Services” delivery methods filter.

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports IOPS and throughput-based EBS volume recommendations. 

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is available to AWS Partners who provide software solutions that run on or are integrated with AWS. The program helps AWS Partners by connecting the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with the AWS sales organization, providing increased visibility and cash incentives to the AWS field.

Today, we are announcing the launch of a net-new track within the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response (PSDR) Competency to now include AWS Technology Partners. These AWS Competency Partners have deep expertise and proven customer success in designing technology solutions to aid in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from various natural and man-made disasters and emergencies globally.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 with PostgreSQL compatibility is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), and US West (N. California) regions.

Today, we are announcing availability of APN Navigate’s newest specialization track for all AWS Partners, APN Navigate for Travel and Hospitality. This track enables AWS Partners to build expertise in AWS travel and hospitality solutions including transportation lines, restaurants, accommodation, travel management, and technology services and solution providers.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that buyers can now programmatically manage their Private Marketplace through a set of publicly available APIs. With Private Marketplace, customers can curate a catalog of approved third-party software available in AWS Marketplace. This enables their organization to easily purchase software from AWS Marketplace knowing that it complies with their internal policies. This release also makes it easy for Consulting Partners that manage a customer’s AWS accounts to modify the list of approved products in a Private Marketplace on behalf of their customers.

Today, AWS announced that managed entitlements for AWS Marketplace is now available in AWS License Manager. Managed entitlements enable buyers to govern, track, and distribute entitlements from a software license. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can use AWS License Manager to create, configure, and track licenses for their products used on AWS and on-premises.

The travel and hospitality industry is transforming and being faced with unprecedented disruption, and that is why we are excited to announce the launch of the new AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency.

AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners are now able to prepare for the APN Foundational Technical Review (FTR) by applying the new AWS Well-Architected Tool FTR Lens to workloads when you conduct a Well-Architected Framework Review in the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) can now operate AWS workloads hosted on AWS Outposts in your datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises environment. You can accelerate your migration to the cloud with AMS managed IT services for AWS Outposts hosted resources, including incident, problem, patch, and security management. AMS takes responsibility for managing AWS Outposts and resources hosted on AWS Outposts while providing a simple API for provisioning new capacity, requesting changes, and reporting incidents.

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.

Today, we are excited to announce a new capability in Amazon QuickSight called Amazon QuickSight Q. Q is a machine learning-powered natural language capability that empowers business users to ask questions about all of their data using everyday business language and get answers in seconds. For example, users simply type “what is our year-over-year growth rate” and get an instant answer in QuickSight as a visualization.  

Amazon AppFlow now allows customers to integrate existing workflows and data sources, such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications or AWS services, with Amazon Honeycode apps.

Today AWS announced the availability of gp3, the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that enable customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity and provides up to 20% lower price-point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. With gp3 volumes, customers can scale IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput without needing to provision additional block storage capacity, and pay only for the resources they need.  

Amazon Connect Wisdom uses machine learning (ML) to drastically reduce the time agents spend searching for answers. Today, knowledge articles, wikis, and FAQs are spread across separate repositories and siloes. Agents lose a lot of time trying to navigate all those databases, and in the meantime, the customer waits for the answer. With Amazon Connect Wisdom, agents use ML to search across connected repositories based on phrases and questions exactly as the customer would ask them to find answers quickly. Wisdom connects to relevant knowledge repositories with built-in connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce and ServiceNow, or other internal knowledge stores to aggregate information such as frequently asked questions (FAQs), wikis, documents, and help guides.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, launched at re:Invent 2019, provides a set of machine learning (ML) capabilities integrated into Amazon Connect that analyze call recordings or customer sentiment, trends, and compliance of conversations. Now, Contact Lens supports real-time call analytics capabilities, enabling you to detect customer issues during live calls and resolve them faster.

Today, we are excited to announce additional capabilities with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer to help you find and remediate security issues in your code before you deploy. CodeGuru Reviewer Security Detectors helps identify security risks from the top ten Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) categories (OWASP is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security), security best practices for AWS APIs, and common Java crypto libraries.

Babelfish for Amazon Aurora is a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

AWS Lambda customers can now provision Lambda functions with a maximum of 10,240 MB (10 GB) of memory, a more than 3x increase compared to the previous limit of 3,008 MB. This helps workloads like batch, extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs, and media processing applications perform memory intensive operations at scale.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to install and manage Kubernetes operational software (add-ons) as part of the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API. Today, EKS supports managing the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin, with more add-ons coming soon.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Distro is the same Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS for customers who create Kubernetes clusters manually wherever their applications are deployed. Amazon EKS Distro provides builds and code of open source Kubernetes, etcd, CoreDNS, upstream CNI Core binaries, CSI Sidecar Containers, and the latest security patches. Amazon EKS Distro is available as an open source project from GitHub and Amazon ECR Public Gallery.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to forward container logs from pods running on AWS Fargate to AWS services for log storage and analytics including Amazon Cloudwatch, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and Amazon Kinesis Streams.

Now in preview, AWS Glue Elastic Views is a new capability of AWS Glue that makes it easy to build materialized views that combine and replicate data across multiple data stores without you having to write custom code. With AWS Glue Elastic Views, you can use familiar Structured Query Language (SQL) to quickly create a virtual table—a materialized view—from multiple different source data stores. AWS Glue Elastic Views copies data from each source data store and creates a replica in a target data store. AWS Glue Elastic Views continuously monitors for changes to data in your source data stores, and provides updates to the materialized views in your target data stores automatically, ensuring data accessed through the materialized view is always up-to-date.

The Amazon WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) is now generally available. WSP is a cloud-native streaming protocol that enables a consistent user experience when accessing your WorkSpaces across global distances and unreliable networks.

Amazon Connect Voice ID (available in preview) provides real-time caller authentication that makes voice interactions in contact centers more secure and efficient. Voice ID provides an additional security layer that doesn’t rely on the caller answering multiple questions (such as birthdate and mother’s maiden name) and makes it easy to enroll and verify customers without changing the natural flow of the conversation.

We are excited to announce Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end system that uses machine learning (ML) to detect abnormal behavior in industrial machinery, enabling you to implement predictive maintenance and reduce unplanned downtime.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles equips contact center agents with a more unified view of a customer’s current situation to provide more personalized customer service. Customer Profiles automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) company, launched AWS Proton, the first fully managed deployment service for container and serverless applications. Platform teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. 

AWS Lambda reduced the billing granularity for Lambda function duration from 100ms down to 1ms. This will lower the price for most Lambda functions, more so for short duration functions. Their compute duration will be billed in 1ms increments instead of being rounded up to the nearest 100 ms increment per invoke. For example, a function that runs in 30ms on average used to be billed for 100ms. Now, it will be billed for 30ms resulting in a 70% drop in its duration spend. 

Amazon Honeycode now allows you to integrate your existing workflows and data sources, such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications or AWS services like Amazon S3, with Honeycode apps. Teams can build custom mobile & web apps that connect to their existing tools and data, enabling end-to-end solutions that solve the specific business productivity needs of teams. The connections between Honeycode and other tools are facilitated by Zapier or Amazon AppFlow, which are integration services that you can use with Honeycode. You can also use new Honeycode APIs to integrate with custom or internal tools that aren’t supported by either Zapier or AppFlow. 

Admin UI offers frontend web and mobile developers an easy way to develop app backends and manage app content outside the AWS console. Every Amplify app backend is now automatically set up with the admin UI which can be used to model data, add authentication and authorization, and manage app content, users, and groups. Team members without AWS access can be invited to join the admin UI via email, giving both developers and non-developers easier access to configure and manage the app backend and app data. 

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is available in preview. AQUA provides a new distributed and hardware accelerated cache that brings compute to the storage layer for Amazon Redshift and delivers up to 10x faster query performance than other cloud data warehouses.

Starting today, general purpose Amazon EC2 M5zn instances are available. These new instances are a high frequency, high speed and low-latency networking variant of Amazon EC2 M5 instances, powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake). M5zn instances deliver the highest all-core turbo CPU performance from Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud, with a frequency up to 4.5 GHz.  

Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition now provides a new session capacity-based pricing model with scalable pricing for large-scale deployments. Session capacity pricing allows developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and enterprises to benefit from lower per-session rates as they roll out embedded analytics and BI to hundreds of thousands of users. In such scenarios, average session consumption per user is often low (<10 sessions/month) but aggregate session usage across users is high. With session capacity pricing, users are simply charged in 30 minute blocks of usage starting with first access. You can get started with session capacity pricing at $250/month for 500 sessions. Annual session capacities (starting at $20,000/year for 50,000 sessions) offer packs of sessions available across a 12-month period, providing flexibility across production ramp periods, and busy/lean periods of the year (e.g., first/last week of the month, holidays).

Amazon S3 Replication now gives you the flexibility of replicating object metadata changes for two-way replication between buckets. With this new feature, replica modification sync, you can easily replicate metadata changes like object access control lists (ACLs), object tags, or object locks on the replicated objects. This two-way replication is important if you want to build shared datasets across multiple regions and keep all object and object metadata changes in sync. 

Amazon Connect Tasks improves agent productivity and lowers costs by empowering contact center managers to prioritize, assign, and track customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents. This includes tasks like following up on a case in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application such as Salesforce, or processing a claim in a business-specific application. You can also automate repetitive work by creating contact flows in Amazon Connect to automate action items that don’t require agent interaction (e.g., notifying a customer of an update on their case), so that agents can focus more of their time interacting with customers.

You can now use Amazon Elasticsearch Service as a target data store with AWS Glue Elastic Views. Now in limited preview, AWS Glue Elastic Views is a new capability of AWS Glue that makes it easy to combine and replicate data across multiple data stores without you having to write custom code. With AWS Glue Elastic Views, you can use familiar Structured Query Language (SQL) to quickly create a virtual table—called a view—from multiple different source data stores. Based on this view, AWS Glue Elastic Views copies data from each source data store and creates a replica—called a materialized view—in a target data store. AWS Glue Elastic Views monitors for changes to data in your source data stores continuously, and provides updates to your target data stores automatically, ensuring data accessed through the materialized view is always up-to-date.

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

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports creating and managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances using Amazon EKS managed node groups following Spot best practices. This enables you to take advantage of the steep savings and scale that Spot Instances provide for interruptible workloads running in your Kubernetes cluster. Starting today, you can supply multiple instance types when creating a new Managed Node Group, further allowing you to enhance availability of your applications running on Spot. 

We’ve got some exciting announcements about the upcoming 2021 racing season. The AWS DeepRacer League is introducing new skill-based Open and Pro racing divisions in March 2021, with five times as many opportunities for racers to win prizes, and recognition for participation and performance. Another exciting new feature coming in 2021 is the expansion of community races into community leagues, enabling organizations and racing enthusiasts to set up their own racing leagues and race with their friends over multiple races.

Amazon Lookout for Vision is a new machine learning service that enables you to find visual defects in industrial products, accurately and at scale. With Lookout for Vision you can automate real-time visual inspection with computer vision for processes like quality control and defect assessment - with no machine learning expertise required. It uses computer vision to identify missing components in products, damage to vehicles or structures, irregularities in production lines, and even miniscule defects in silicon wafers — or any other physical item where quality is important.  

Today we are announcing preview of AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami, with plans to launch 12 additional AWS Local Zones throughout 2021 in key metro areas in the United States including Atlanta, Chicago, and New York. Using these new AWS Local Zones, customers will now be able to deliver ultra-low latency applications to end-users in cities across the continental United States.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of Amazon EC2 R5b instances that can utilize up to 60 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth and 260K IOPS (I/O operations per second) for large relational database workloads. These instances offer significantly higher EBS performance across all instance sizes, ranging from 10 Gbps of EBS bandwidth on smaller instance sizes to 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth on the largest instance size. R5b instances are powered by custom second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Cascade Lake) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.1 GHz. These new instances are designed for workloads such as relational databases and File systems that can take advantage of improved EBS bandwidth and IOPS.

Starting today, storage optimized Amazon EC2 D3 and D3en instances are available. These new instances are powered by 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all core frequency up to 3.1 GHz, and offer the highest density local HDD storage in the cloud.  

Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) is a fully managed registry that makes it easy for a developer to publicly share container software worldwide for anyone to download. Anyone (with or without an AWS account) can use Amazon ECR Public to pull container software for use. Amazon ECR Public Gallery is a website that allows anyone to browse and search for public container images, view developer-provided details, and see pull commands. Developers no longer need to use different private and public registries when building and sharing their public container artifacts. And everyone, including anonymous users and logged-in AWS customers, can now pull artifacts from a highly available public registry using a single, global registry URL when building and running their applications. 

Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity.  

Amazon S3 Replication now gives you the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets in the same, or different AWS Regions. S3 Replication (multi-destination) is intended for customers that want to create and maintain multiple copies of their data in one or more AWS Regions. Additionally, when replicating to multiple destinations, you can use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to track replication progress for each region pair.

AWS Panorama is a new machine learning Appliance and SDK, both of which allow organizations to bring computer vision to their on-premises cameras to make automated predictions with high accuracy and low latency. With AWS Panorama, companies can use compute power at the edge (without requiring video streamed to the cloud) to improve their operations, by automating monitoring and visual inspection tasks like evaluating manufacturing quality, finding bottlenecks in industrial processes, and assessing worker safety within their facilities. 

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a service which provides customers with existing sensors on their industrial equipment, a way to send their sensor data to AWS to build machine learning models for them and return predictions to detect abnormal equipment behavior. This enables predictive maintenance that allows them to take action before machine failures occur and avoid unplanned downtime. 

Amazon AppFlow now enables Amazon Connect Customer Profiles  a new AWS service announced today to combine customer profile data from third-party applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo with information in Amazon Connect without having to build and maintain expensive custom integrations.  

Today AWS announced availability, in preview, of io2 Block Express volumes that are designed to deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, while also delivering sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block express refers to io2 volumes running on EBS Block Express architecture. EBS Block Express is the next generation of Amazon EBS storage server architecture purpose-built to deliver the highest levels of performance with sub-millisecond latency. Designed to provide up to 4,000 MB/s throughput , 256,000 IOPS, 64 TiB storage capacity, and 1,000 IOPS/GB per volume, io2 Block Express offers the highest performance block storage in the cloud. This makes io2 Block Express ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.  

Amazon S3 now delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically for all applications. Unlike other cloud providers, Amazon S3 delivers strong read-after-write consistency for any storage request, without changes to performance or availability, without sacrificing regional isolation for applications, and at no additional cost.  

Today, we are launching a tiered pricing structure for provisioned IOPS charges on io2 volumes. With this tiered pricing, we are reducing the price of provisioning peak IOPS (64,000 IOPS) on io2 volume by 15%, or an estimated $608 per month.  

Amazon S3 Bucket Keys reduce the request costs of Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE) with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) by up to 99% by decreasing the request traffic from S3 to KMS. With a few clicks in AWS Management Console and no changes to your client applications, you can configure your buckets to use an S3 Bucket Key for KMS-based encryption on new objects.  

You can now package and deploy AWS Lambda functions as a container image of up to 10 GB. This makes it easy to build Lambda based applications using familiar container tooling, workflows, and dependencies. Just like functions packaged as ZIP archives, functions deployed as container images will benefit from AWS Lambda’s operational simplicity, automatic scaling with sub-second startup times, high availability, and native integrations with 140 AWS services. Customers can start building functions as container images by using either a set of AWS base images for Lambda, or by using one of their preferred community or enterprise images.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to see the Kubernetes API resources and applications running on your Amazon EKS cluster using the AWS Management Console. This makes it easy to visualize and troubleshoot Kubernetes applications using Amazon EKS.

You now can use Amazon DynamoDB as a source data store with AWS Glue Elastic Views to combine and replicate data across multiple data stores—without having to write custom code. With AWS Glue Elastic Views, you can use Structured Query Language (SQL) to quickly create a virtual table—called a view—from multiple source data stores. Based on this view, AWS Glue Elastic Views copies data from each source data store and creates a replica—called a materialized view—in a target data store. AWS Glue Elastic Views monitors continuously for changes to data in your source data stores, and provides updates to your target data stores automatically, ensuring that data accessed through the materialized view is always up to date.

Amazon DevOps Guru is a new machine learning (ML) powered service that gives you a simpler way to measure and improve an application’s operational performance and availability and reduce expensive downtime – no machine learning expertise required. 

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 G4ad instances that provide the best price performance for graphics intensive applications in the cloud. G4ad instances are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors, and provide up to 45% better price performance over comparable GPU instances for graphics intensive applications such as virtual workstations, game streaming, and graphics rendering.