2021

Today, we are launching EMR on EKS support for Pod Templates to make it simple to run Spark jobs on shared EKS clusters. A Pod is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage and network resources, and a specification for how to run the containers. Pod Templates are specifications which determine how each Pod runs. Customers often consolidate multiple applications on a shared EKS cluster to improve utilization and save costs. However, each application may have different requirements. For example, you may want to run performance intensive workloads such as ML model training jobs on SSD-backed instances for better performance, or ad-hoc workloads on Spot instances for lower cost. You can also schedule a separate logging container to forward logs to your existing monitoring application. With this release, you can use Pod Templates with EMR on EKS to configure how to run Spark jobs on shared EKS clusters.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.15 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.14.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With 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. Starting today, you can use new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler that make it easier and faster to prepare data for machine learning including: cross-account access for Amazon S3, support for up to 1000 columns of data, distributed jobs, and a new SageMaker Data Wrangler notebook experience.

AWS Organizations now offers a new console experience that provides you with a more intuitive way to manage your multi-account environment on AWS. You can now more easily navigate through your Organizational Unit hierarchy and perform AWS account management tasks in a streamlined way. The updated interface also gives you easy access to documentation, product information, and resources to assist you in managing your multi-account environment.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is now generally available. The EBS CSI driver makes it simple to configure and use block storage for applications running in both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and self-managed Kubernetes clusters running on AWS using standard Kubernetes interfaces.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning enables you to find the best version of a model by finding the optimal set of hyperparameter configuration for your dataset. Starting today, SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports running up to 100 parallel training jobs for hyperparameter tuning, which gives you a 10X increase of parallel training jobs so you can complete your tuning faster. Additionally, for “Random” search strategy, SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports exploring up to 10,000 hyperparameter configurations, a 20x increase over previous limit of 500, enabling you to improve coverage of search space leading to potentially better predictive performance of your model.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports cron expressions, allowing for flexibility when you schedule canaries to monitor your endpoints. For example, you can run a canary every minute on weekdays between 8 AM and 5 PM. Alternately, you can schedule a canary run for the third Tuesday of the month at 12 PM.

Today we announced AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Control for Amazon MSK. IAM Access Control is a security option offered at no additional cost that simplifies cluster authentication and Apache Kafka API authorization using IAM role or user policies to control access. By using IAM Access Control, customers no longer need to build and run one-off access management systems to control client authentication and authorization for Apache Kafka, and MSK clusters are secured using least privileged permissions by default.  

Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts of up to 36% in India and up to 26% in Asia Pacific region (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, & Thailand) for Regional Data Transfer Out to Internet rates. The new CloudFront prices in these regions are effective May 1st, 2021. You can find CloudFront’s updated on-demand pricing on the CloudFront Pricing Page. 

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Connect is now available in the Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Africa (Cape Town), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass is a test automation tool for your IoT devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.

AWS Audit Manager now offers three new prebuilt standard frameworks: NIST Cybersecurity Framework version 1.1, AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, and AWS Well-Architected framework. These frameworks add to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from any of these frameworks with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in the framework you choose and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

AWS Data Provider for SAP version 4.0 is now available in all commercial regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for Nitro Enclaves are available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. This is now the 9th Ground Station connected to the AWS Global Network.

DevOps Automation Springboard is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Capgemini, an AWS Migration Competency Partner. DevOps Automation Springboard offers customers the ability to address their deployment needs as they move to the AWS Cloud. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a DevOps CI/CD pipeline; static code analysis; application build, testing, and security scanning; and deployment.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint announces the ability for customers to pause and resume Journeys — being able to temporarily halt the execution of message sends. Previously, customers needed to stop and recreate their Journey entirely if there was a situation such as: a conflicting campaign, a seasonal event, or an issue. Journeys are multi-step campaigns that can be executed across SMS, email, and push messages. Journeys are intended for customers with user engagement use cases, and want to send targeted messaging to their users to drive high value actions.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at customer datacenters and on-premises locations in Colombia, Macao, and Puerto Rico.

Host Resource Groups, which is a logical collection of Dedicated Hosts that you can manage as a single entity, now support AWS CloudFormation, allowing customers to create Host Resource Groups using CloudFormation templates and automate EC2 Dedicated Host management.

Starting May 1st 2021, all data transfer over a VPC Peering connection that stays within an Availability Zone (AZ) is now free. All data transfer over a VPC Peering connection that crosses Availability Zones will continue to be charged at the standard in-region data transfer rates. You can use the Availability Zone-ID to uniquely and consistently identify an Availability Zone across different AWS accounts.

Today, we are excited to announce support for customer-managed customer master keys to encrypt your code repositories in Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. Customer-managed customer master keys allow you to create, own, and manage your encryption keys, giving you more control over how you manage the security of your CodeGuru Reviewer code.

Amazon Translate is a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, affordable and customizable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate has increased the concurrent API limits for batch translation jobs from 10 to 1000.

Today, we are reducing the price of metric samples ingested by up to 84% for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP). Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor containerized applications at scale. With AMP, you can use the open source Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) to monitor the performance of containerized workloads on AWS or on-premises. AMP automatically scales the ingestion, storage, and querying of operational metrics (from, for example, your Amazon Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters) as workloads grow or shrink, and is integrated with AWS security services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS PrivateLink, and AWS CloudTrail to enable fast and secure access to data.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers instances from the AWS Graviton2 instance family. Instance types include general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g, R6gd). Customers can enjoy up to 38% improvement in indexing throughput, 50% reduction in indexing latency, and 30% improvement in query performance when compared to the corresponding x86-based instances from the current generation (M5, C5, R5).

Porting Assistant for .NET is now available as a Visual Studio IDE extension. With this release, developers can access Porting Assistant for .NET directly from the Visual Studio IDE to assess incompatibilities and be more productive with an integrated experience for porting their .NET applications. Along with rich source code editing features provided by the IDE, this extension provides developers with feedback on lines of code that need to be modified to make the source code compatible with .NET Core. Developers can now run automated porting and take advantage of continuous assessment of incompatibilities as they make updates to the code.

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 at scale.

Amazon QuickSight can now notify users of changes to important metrics in their dashboards with threshold-based alerts. Readers and authors can set up personalized rules on key metrics in their dashboards and be automatically notified via email when data crosses the defined thresholds, highlighting important changes in their business. For instance, a manager might want to track the sales of their business and know when weekly sales drop below $100,000. To set up an alert, users can go to any QuickSight dashboard and click on a KPI or gauge visual and then use the ‘alert’ icon in order to configure the alert. Threshold alerts are billed per metric processed (which means each time an alert rule is checked) at tiered rates starting at $0.50 per 1000 metrics processed. See details on alerts pricing.

Today we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Amazon DevOps Guru – a 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.

Now, with AWS Systems Manager, IT administrators can clone runbooks and other Systems Manager documents such as Command documents. Using this feature, you can quickly create a copy of your existing runbooks or publicly available managed documents and update them based on your use case.

Amazon Personalize enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, using the same machine learning technology as used by Amazon.com, without requiring any prior machine learning experience. Using Amazon Personalize, you can generate personalized recommendations for your users through a simple API interface. Amazon Personalize now offers a new set of APIs to enable customers to export the data present in their Users, Items and Interactions Datasets to their own S3 buckets.

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports the current long term support (LTS) version of Puppet Enterprise for its fully managed service. Customers are upgraded automatically during the weekly system maintenance window scheduled individually by each customer.

FreeRTOS version 202104.00 includes a new managed over-the-air update (OTA) library, coreMQTT-Agent library and the AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics feature as generally available. Developers can use these libraries to update firmware, manage IoT device fleets, design multi-threaded applications, and monitor fleet metrics for their IoT devices.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now supports policy conditions to help manage permissions for AWS services that access your resources. Many AWS services require access to your internal resources to perform tasks, and they often use their own service identity called a service principal to achieve this. Using the new service principal conditions, it is simple to author rules that enforce a rule for all your service principals, or exclude service principals from certain permission rules that are intended only for your own identities.

We are excited to announce that you can now hierarchically delete resources in Amazon Forecast at a parent level without having to locate the child resources. You can stay focused on building value adding forecasting systems and not worry about trying to manage individual resources that are created in your workflow. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now support Amazon RDS Encrypted Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to set up automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region. These backups are encrypted using an AWS KMS customer master key in the destination Region.

S3 Object Lambda is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. With S3 Object Lambda you can add your own code to S3 GET requests to modify and process data as it is returned to an application. For the first time, you can use custom code to modify the data returned by standard S3 GET requests to filter rows, dynamically resize images, redact confidential data, and much more.

Amazon CloudFront announces the general availability of CloudFront Functions, a new serverless edge compute capability. You can use this new CloudFront feature to run JavaScript functions across 225+ CloudFront edge locations in 90 cities across 47 countries. CloudFront Functions is built for lightweight HTTP(S) transformations and manipulations, allowing you to deliver richer, more personalized content with low latency to your customers.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now automatically detects duplicate customer profiles in your Amazon Connect Customer Profiles domain and allows you to review the results by using Identity Resolution APIs (preview). Identity Resolution uses machine learning to detect duplicate profiles based on similar name, email address, and phone number. For example, two or more profiles—with spelling mistakes such as “John Doe” and “Jhn Doe,” or different casing email addresses such as “JOHN_DOE@ANYCOMPANY.COM” and “johndoe@anycompany.com,” or different phone number formats such as “555-010-0000” and “+1-555-010-0000”, can be detected as belonging to the same customer “John Doe” and merged into a unified profile by using the MergeProfiles API.

Amazon FinSpace is a new fully managed data management and analytics service that makes it easy to store, catalog, and prepare financial industry data at scale, reducing the time it takes for financial services industry (FSI) customers to find and access all types of financial data for analysis from months to minutes.  

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce now enables customers to extend their Contact Control Panel (CCP) with customizable buttons called CTI Actions. These buttons can be configured in Salesforce and used to simplify common agent actions. For example, you can add a button that transfers calls to a manager, start and stop recordings, automate case creation, or start a customer refund process. CTI Actions are configured in the CTI Adapter’s Actions Admin panel to execute CTI Flows which are process blocks that enable you to easily design agent workflows within our Salesforce integration. There are no technical skills required and customers can easily configure an end to end agent workflow in Salesforce Lightning and Classic. 

You now can use the AWS SDK for Java 2.x with DynamoDB local, the downloadable version of Amazon DynamoDB. With DynamoDB local, you can develop and test applications by using a version of DynamoDB running in your local development environment without incurring any additional costs. DynamoDB local does not require an internet connection, and it works with your existing DynamoDB API calls. 

To learn more about the AWS SDK for Java 2.x, see the official AWS SDK for Java - Version 2 on GitHub. For more information about DynamoDB local, see Setting Up DynamoDB Local (Downloadable Version).

Cloud Assessment and Design is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Atos, an AWS Migration Competency Partner. Cloud Assessment and Design leverages the Atos Cloud Assessment Tool (ACAT) to transform a customer’s IT landscape in their journey to the cloud with a detailed approach and business use case. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers application discovery and analysis, blueprint design, framework deployment, and migration execution.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Ability to share data across clusters that are in the same AWS account is already generally available. Now you can preview cross-account data sharing to share data across Redshift clusters in different AWS accounts, both within and outside your organization. Cross-account data sharing is available on all Redshift RA3 node types. There is no additional cost to use cross-account sharing on your Amazon Redshift clusters. 

We are delighted to announce the addition of AWS Blueprints to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports UpdateApplicationMaintenanceConfiguration in preview. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics periodically patches the underlying infrastructure of applications with OS and container-image security updates to meet AWS compliance and security goals during the default maintenance windows in each region. You can use UpdateApplicationMaintenanceConfiguration via the CLI or the API to choose your preferred maintenance window start times for an application.

Amazon Monitron is an end-to-end system that uses machine learning (ML) to detect abnormal conditions in industrial equipment, enabling you to implement predictive maintenance and reduce unplanned downtime. It includes sensors to capture vibration and temperature data from equipment, a gateway device to securely transfer data to AWS, the Amazon Monitron service that analyzes the data for abnormal equipment conditions using machine learning, and a companion mobile app to set up the devices and receive reports on operating behavior and alerts to potential failures in your equipment. Today, we are announcing that the Amazon Monitron service is now also available in Europe (Ireland). This is in addition to the US East (N.Virginia) region where the Amazon Monitron service is already available.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 is now available for Developer Preview, and offers two new capabilities for CDK users. The first is all CDK versions now support Go, expanding the number of programming languages developers can use to define infrastructure-as-code, and provision through AWS CloudFormation. The second is that all stable constructs from the AWS Construct Library are now available in a single, separate package, making it easier for you to use the CDK and stay up-to-date with new versions as we evolve it going forwards.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports linear interpolation, enabling customers to estimate and retrieve the values of missing data points in their time series data.

The Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript now provides a way for builders to prioritize video streams according to their online meeting user case. If there is insufficient bandwidth to download all available video streams, the Amazon Chime SDK uses the video prioritization policy to maximize the fidelity and quality of high-priority video streams.

AWS RoboMaker, now supports ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy (ROS 2 Foxy), which is the latest long-term support (LTS) release for ROS 2, and its compatible simulation engine, Gazebo 11, and Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) operating system.

AWS RoboMaker has released a new feature that enables developers to open a desktop session to the IDE and run graphical tools to interact with simulations. AWS RoboMaker IDE provides a cloud robotics workspace that is preconfigured with the essential tools to start building and testing robot applications without needing to provision additional hardware. This feature provides a single space for developers to get started with building and simulating robotics applications.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows customers to deploy SAP workloads using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 8.2.

AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager, a new capability in AWS Systems Manager that helps you streamline and scale your remote server management process is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers with stringent U.S. federal, state, or local government compliance requirements.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate now lets you configure the size of ephemeral storage for your Tasks up to a maximum of 200GiB. All ephemeral storage on AWS Fargate continues to be encrypted by default with service-managed keys.

Now on EC2 Image Builder, you can create a new version of your EC2 Auto Scaling launch template that references your latest Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Using Image Builder pipeline, you can easily create these new launch template versions with the latest AMI to be used across all your AWS regions.

Amazon Connect is announcing 26 telephony rate reductions for customers in Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador from the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions.

Starting today, you can now use the Node.js 14.x runtime to develop functions in AWS Lambda@Edge. This runtime is in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Node.js 12.x runtimes.

Node.js 14.x, the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js, uses the new V8 8.1 engine and provides better performance than the previous LTS version, 12.x. In addition, Node.js 14.x supports new features such as nullish coalescing (?? operator), options chaining (?. operator), and diagnostic reporting. For more information about the benefits and new features of Node.js 14.x, read the Node.js 14.x announcement post on the AWS Compute Blog.

To get started with Node.js 14.x, upload your code to AWS Lambda through the AWS CLI or Lambda console, and select Node.js 14.x as the runtime. If you already have existing Node.js functions in Lambda, you can switch to the new runtime by making any required code changes to ensure compatibility with the new runtime and then editing the function configuration to set the runtime to Node.js 14.x.

To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page. For more information about the Node.js programming model in AWS Lambda, read the AWS Lambda Node.js documentation.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications, as a public preview. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the following ten additional regions:

• Africa (Cape Town)
• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
• Asia Pacific (Osaka)
• Asia Pacific (Seoul)
• Canada (Central)
• Europe (Milano)
• Europe (Paris)
• Middle East (Bahrain)
• South America (São Paulo)
• US West (N. California)

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology. Multi-AZ helps you meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds support for Recursive Common Table Expression (CTE). Starting today, you can use a Recursive CTE on your Redshift cluster to query hierarchical data such as organizational charts where employees reports to other employees (managers), or multi-level product orders where a product consists of many components, which in turn consist of other components.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework, a reference architecture that makes it easier for customers to set up Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor Apache workloads running on AWS.

We’re excited to announce an intermediate, 150-minute, digital course: Amazon Elastic Block Store Primer. This free course provides an overview of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and explores how to balance cost and performance using different volume types. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, a self-paced lab, and a quiz to check your knowledge. 

AWS Glue DataBrew announces native console integration with Amazon AppFlow to connect to data from applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, ServiceNow, and tens of other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. To get started, when you create a new dataset in DataBrew, you can pick from a list of pre-configured flows from AppFlow that load data (scheduled by, by event and on-demand) into Amazon S3 or create a new flow. The transferred data has to be in S3 before you can use them as input for DataBrew. You can then clean and normalize this data in DataBrew, and join, union, aggregate or combine with datasets from other data stores or SaaS applications. You can leverage already available 250+ transformations to prepare data for analytics of machine learning, without writing any code. Learn more about supported AppFlow sources and destinations.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when using Amazon SNS to send SMS to your customers, you can set a principal entity ID and a message template ID, as Amazon SNS message attributes. 

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is pleased to announce the ability for you to purchase AMS through your preferred Solution Provider, separately from your AWS infrastructure services. AMS understands the need for flexibility in how you buy AWS infrastructure services and AWS Managed Services based on the complexity of workloads and organizational needs. This new feature enables you to purchase AWS infrastructure services directly or through any AWS Solution Provider Partner  (SPP) of your choice, while utilizing an AMS partner for value-added infrastructure operations separately.

AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snowball Edge jobs directly from the console or via APIs. Many Snowball Edge customers deploy Snowball Edge devices for one or more years. By paying the device fees upfront, Snowball Edge’s long-term pricing options enable you to use Snowball Edge devices for 1 year or 3 years at up to a 62% discount compared to on-demand per-day fees. This pricing is available for all Snowball Edge device types in all regions where Snowball Edge is available.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve updated AWS Instance Scheduler, a reference implementation that makes it easier for customers to control their AWS compute resource capacity and cost by configuring start and stop schedules for their Amazon EC2 and RDS instances.

Amazon Connect reduces telephony rates for 3 countries in Europe: Cyprus, Belgium and Portugal. Starting April 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use omnichannel contact center service, decreased the following telephony rates in the EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions:

Today, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) adds support for an AWS managed Lambda layer in Java, node.js, and Python, providing a simple getting started experience for customers to add the OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector into their AWS Lambda functions for collecting trace data. In addition, ADOT has added support for AWS Systems Manager agent, enabling customers to update, manage, and configure ADOT Collector on an EC2 instance, an on-premises server, or a virtual machine (VM). As part of this release, Zipkin and Jaeger receivers are also integrated in the ADOT collector.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.2 includes several bug fixes and security fixes. Version 2.6.2 will replace 2.6.1 as the default recommended version for new clusters created in Amazon MSK. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.2.

Amazon Redshift native support for JSON and semi-structured data is now generally available. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to ingest and store semi-structured data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouses. Amazon Redshift also includes support for PartiQL for SQL-compatible access to relational, semi-structured and nested data. Using the SUPER data type and PartiQL in Amazon Redshift, you can perform advanced analytics that combine classic structured SQL data (such as string, numeric, and timestamp) with the semi-structured SUPER data (such as JSON) with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: AWS Network Connectivity Options. The course introduces network connectivity concepts, describes network design patterns, and demonstrates how to apply the design patterns to common use cases. This intermediate, 150-minute course includes reading modules, quizzes to check your knowledge, and an optional hands-on lab. The course is designed for network engineers, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, systems engineers, and application architects.

Database Activity Streams is now available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora provides a near real-time stream of database activities in your relational database. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.8.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.8.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include connection rate limiting to avoid problems with misconfigured clients (KIP-612) and topic identifiers which provides performance benefits (KIP-516). There is also an early access feature to replace zookeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum (KIP-500), however this is not recommended for use in production. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.8.0.

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in AWS Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

Streaming ETL jobs in AWS Glue now support SSL client certificate authentication with Apache Kafka stream producers. You can now provide a custom certificate while defining an AWS Glue connection to an Apache Kafka cluster, which AWS Glue will use when authenticating with it.

AWS Audit Manager now offers a new prebuilt standard framework for GxP EU Annex 11. This framework adds to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from this framework with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in GxP EU Annex 11 and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio. Nimble Studio is a managed service that empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable. With Nimble Studio, artists can accelerate digital content creation with virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure footprint.  

Media & entertainment customers face industry-wide transformation, with companies reinventing how they create content, optimize media supply chains, and compete for audience attention across streaming, broadcast, and direct-to-consumer platforms. Industry leaders such as Netflix, FORMULA 1, Discovery, and Disney use the AWS Cloud to pioneer new ways to entertain—launching new streaming services, expanding their content catalogs, and setting new standards with audiences for viewing experiences.

AWS Storage Gateway adds a new gateway type, Amazon FSx File Gateway, providing low-latency on-premises access to fully managed file shares in the cloud. Customers that want to take advantage of fully managed cloud file storage, but require low latency for their users and applications, can now easily extend Amazon FSx for Windows File Server into their existing on-premises environment.

AWS DeepRacer offers an autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by a reinforcement learning model, a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, and a global racing league. Over 85,000 developers have participated in the AWS DeepRacer virtual and in-person leagues, making AWS DeepRacer one of the most popular developer programs to ramp up on reinforcement learning. For all the thrills of racing, developers want to go beyond league racing and find new uses for the physical car. To enable developers to prototype robotics applications with the AWS DeepRacer hardware, we are open sourcing the device software running the car and offering 6 sample projects on the AWS DeepRacer Open Source page to get started.

AWS Proton now features a cancellation API to help you manage your deployments in real time. You can use the cancel deployment API to stop the deployment of a service and try again if it’s taking too long or has an error.

AWS Nitro Enclaves now supports the creation of isolated compute environments, called enclaves, from parent EC2 instances running Windows operating system. Nitro Enclaves further isolates the CPU and memory of the enclave from users, applications, and libraries on the parent EC2 instance.

AWS Proton now allows customers to import their existing shared resources as customer-managed environments. Customers can now create environments in AWS Proton by providing an infrastructure-as-code template that AWS Proton will provision, or by linking to their existing provisioned resources. This allows customers to start incorporating Proton in their existing infrastructure without having to recreate the shared resources.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for PostgreSQL is now available in preview. This open-source database driver allows applications connecting to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL to minimize failover time by closely monitoring the database cluster status.

Starting today, you can configure AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to automatically aggregate security findings from AWS Security Hub into OpsCenter as operational issues. This enables operations engineers and IT professionals to view, investigate, and resolve security issues along with other operational issues in OpsCenter. Additionally, you can now view Security Hub findings in AWS Systems Manager Explorer. AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter enables operators to track and resolve operational items related to AWS resources in a central place and AWS Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS environment. AWS Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security alerts and security posture across your AWS accounts.

Today we are announcing the availability of on-demand Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with High Availability and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with High Availability Amazon Machine Images. Customers can combine the scale, performance and elasticity of Amazon EC2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with High availability (HA) to easily build reliable and highly available compute clusters for mission critical workloads. RHEL with HA AMIs are pre-configured with software packages and access to Red Hat’s High availability add-on repositories that customers can use to build and maintain their instances. RHEL with HA can be launched directly from the Amazon EC2 console and marketplace.

Starting today, AWS customers can use the Performance Dashboard on AWS, a new open source AWS Solutions Implementation, to build, deploy, and maintain customizable dashboards designed to increase transparency between governments and their constituents around the performance of public sector services and initiatives.

Alexa for Business is now available to run directly on Zoom Rooms Appliances, enabling customers with voice-activated control without deploying additional hardware. Users get a touch-free way to interact with Zoom Rooms and keep meetings on track by leveraging Alexa to join meetings and be reminded to wrap up when a meeting is about to end. They can optimize meeting room reservations by saying, “Alexa, find me an available room”.

Amazon CloudWatch announces the availability of moving graphs, which allows you to animate your CloudWatch Dashboard and more easily see the progression of health and operational performance trends over time.

AWS Proton now allows you to add and remove instances from your services. Developers can now dynamically update their services as their deployment needs change. For instance, they can add a new production instance if a new production environment is added, without having to tear their service down.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, that enables organizations to provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, Amazon Kendra is giving AWS customers more control when it comes to optimizing search results for end users with the release of dynamic relevance tuning.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports major version 13 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. PostgreSQL 13 includes improved functionality and performance from new features and enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, incremental sorting to accelerate data sorts, parallel processing of indexes with the VACUUM command, more ways to monitor activity within a PostgreSQL database, new security capabilities, and more. This release also adds support for bool_plperl, which simplifies writing Perl procedures.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) message filtering lets you simplify your pub/sub messaging architecture by offloading message filtering logic from your subscriber systems as well as message routing logic from your publisher systems. Amazon SNS message filtering offers a set of matching operators, which enables you to filter messages based on their attribute keys or attribute values.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. AWS Glue custom connectors makes it easy for customers to transfer data between SaaS applications, cross-cloud data stores, AWS services, data warehouses, custom data sources, and Amazon S3. Today, we are announcing the the availability of data sink capability that will allow customers to use bidirectional connectors as both source and destination. Data sink capability for AWS Glue custom connectors is also supported on AWS Glue Studio enabling a no-code experience for users building their data pipelines.

We are pleased to announce that AWS Control Tower customers can discover a curated collection of third-party software built for AWS Control Tower from within the AWS Control Tower Console. You can choose from professional services and software solutions including identity management, security for a multi-account environment, centralized networking, operational intelligence, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), cost management or offerings for customized guardrails, account factory, regulatory compliance solutions, and enterprise-specific solutions (e.g. Internet of Things, data lake, etc).

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is now available in three additional regions AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai).

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) AWS Region along with support for AWS Direct Connect. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway.  

Patches 1.9.2, 2.7.2, 3.4.2, 4.0.2 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation. You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation.

Today, AWS Secrets Manager launched the AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider (ASCP), a plugin for the industry-standard Kubernetes’ Secrets Store CSI driver. ASCP enables applications running in Kubernetes pods to retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager easily, without the need for custom code. Once installed, ASCP ensures your applications always receive the most recent version of your secrets as these are rotated. As a result, you automatically benefit from the rotation and lifecycle management features that Secrets Manager provides, without added coding effort. ASCP also enables convenient and secure access to your configurations in AWS SSM Parameter Store. AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider is available for download now. Read the blog to learn more.

Amazon Translate is a fully managed, neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, affordable and customizable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate has increased the size limit of parallel data (PD) from 1 GB to 5 GB. PD is used in Active Custom Translation (ACT), a feature that gives you more control over your machine translation output. You create PD by simply providing your translation examples in TMX, TSV, or CSV format. Then Amazon Translate uses your PD along with your batch translation job to customize the translation output at runtime. With the increase in PD size, you can use more data to customize your ACT output.

Today, AWS Service Catalog announces console support for AppRegistry applications. With this release, administrators can create and manage their application metadata in an easy-to-use console experience. AppRegistry is a feature of AWS Service Catalog, which is used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS.

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

AWS CodeDeploy improves support for Amazon EC2 deployments with Auto Scaling Groups by automatically detecting and updating EC2 instances that have outdated software revisions. After a deployment, CodeDeploy checks for outdated instances and creates a new deployment to bring the fleet to the intended revision of the software. In addition, as new instances are added to the Auto Scaling group, CodeDeploy checks that the updated revision is installed.

AWS Cost Categories is a feature within the AWS Cost Management product suite that enables you to group your cost and usage information into meaningful categories for your organization’s unique needs. You can define rules to categorize your costs using dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. Once Cost Categories are set up, you can use them across various products in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. This includes AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR), and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

Amazon EC2 announces the Replace Root Volume feature that enables customers to replace the root volume for a running instance. The feature restores the root volume of an instance to its launch state, or to a specific snapshot, without stopping the instance. This allows customers to fix issues, such as root volume corruption or guest operating system network configuration errors, while retaining the instance store data, networking and IAM configuration.

Today, AWS announces a new feature of AWS Systems Manager Application Manager that customers can use to manage Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) clusters. This feature provides IT professionals the ability to view operational data, manage compliance, and take remedial actions on their ECS clusters.

We are delighted to announce the availability of a new program, Built on Control Tower, which provides AWS Partners with a framework to build custom solutions that complement AWS Control Tower capabilities. AWS Technology Partners and AWS Consulting Partners will leverage the Built on Control Tower framework to build AWS Control Tower specific customized professional services offerings, and software solutions for you to integrate with your environment. Professional services include customized guardrails, account factory, regulatory compliance solutions, and enterprise-specific solutions (e.g. Internet of Things, data lake, etc.). Software solutions include identity management, security for a multi-account environment, centralized networking, operational intelligence, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and cost management.

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service Performance Optimization. This advanced 60-minute course explores tools and techniques you can use to optimize your Amazon S3 performance. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and a quiz to check your knowledge.  

We are excited to announce that Amazon Forecast now displays the estimated time it takes to complete an in-progress workflow for importing your data, training the predictor and generating the forecast. You can now manage your time more efficiently and better plan for your next workflow around the estimated time remaining for your in-progress workflow. Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

You can now publish the Redis slow log from your Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The Redis slow log provides visibility into the execution time of commands in your Redis cluster, enabling you to continuously monitor the performance of these operations. You can choose to send these logs in either JSON or text format to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

AWS Service Catalog is now available to customers in the AWS Region in Osaka, Japan. AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create, govern, and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS.

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation, so you can manage and modify DynamoDB data models with CloudFormation templates. In addition, you now can configure table capacity settings in NoSQL Workbench.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) announces its first India edge locations in Mumbai and Chennai with more point of presences (PoPs) in additional cities coming soon. The new edge locations will enable streamers and viewers based in India to enjoy a 5-10 second latency live video experience.

AWS Ground Station now supports data delivery to Amazon S3, enabling customers to capture data directly from their satellite into an S3 bucket in an available AWS region. Now, customers have more choices in how they capture their satellite data, enabling low-cost archiving and the ability to develop automated processing chains. They can either stream satellite data to Amazon EC2 for real-time processing or instead directly store data in Amazon S3. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 7.10 and its corresponding version of Kibana. This minor release includes bug fixes and enhancements.

Amazon RDS on VMware no longer requires the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel back to AWS. By removing the VPN tunnel requirement and moving to HTTPS, we’ve simplified the preparation that is required on your network to be able to take advantage of Amazon RDS managed database services in your VMware vSphere clusters on-premises. You are no longer required to open up the VPN ports in your corporate firewalls, nor add a VPN Originator, and can potentially lower your setup and operating costs.

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.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at customer datacenters and on-premises locations in the Philippines and Brunei.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Asynchronous Search. Asynchronous Search lets you submit a query that gets executed asynchronously, monitor the progress of the request, and retrieve results at a later stage. You can also retrieve partial results as they become available even before the search has fully completed. Once the search completes, it can be stored for consumption at a later time up to an expiry duration.

With this new release of the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, customers can use federated credentials, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to connect their IDEs to AWS.

You can now launch AWS Cloud9 development environments with Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser. It includes a code editor, debugger, and terminal. Cloud9 comes pre-packaged with essential tools for popular programming languages including JavaScript, Python, PHP, and more, so you don’t need to install files or configure your development machine to start new projects.

You can now assign tags to Amazon Rekognition resources such as collections, stream processors, and Custom Labels models. Tags are key value pairs which enable you to control access to your AWS resources. You can easily identify, classify, or categorize your Amazon Rekognition resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to ensure that your Amazon Rekognition resources have the right level of access control. You can also assign user-defined cost allocation tags to Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels models, making it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs.

Amazon EMR Release 5.33 now supports 10 new instance types - C6gd, M6gd, R6gd, C6gn,C5a, C5ad, d3, d3en, m5zn and R5b. These instances are supported in all commercial regions where the instances are available. Amazon EMR 5.33 ships with Apache Hudi 0.7.0, ApacheFlink 1.12.1, PrestoDB 0.245 and Zeppelin 0.9.0.

Today we are announcing Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans, a new flexible pricing model that allows you to save up to 64% on Amazon SageMaker ML instances in exchange for making a commitment to a consistent amount of eligible usage (e.g. $10/hour) for a 1- or 3-year term. We are also pleased to share that effective April 19th, 2021 we are reducing the prices by up to 14% for instances in Amazon SageMaker. The price reductions apply to instances families ml.t2, ml.t3, ml.m4, ml.m5, ml.m5d, ml.c4, ml.c5, ml.c5d, ml.c5n, ml.r5, ml.r5d, ml.inf1 and ml.g4dn for SageMaker Studio notebooks, SageMaker On-Demand Notebooks, SageMaker Processing, SageMaker Training, SageMaker Real-Time Inference, SageMaker Data Wrangler and SageMaker Batch Transform.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports the ability to monitor your S3 on Outposts events via Amazon CloudWatch. You can now use CloudWatch Events to create a rule for any S3 on Outposts API Event to get notified via all supported CloudWatch targets such as Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS.

Amazon Textract has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization, approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB), for the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Additionally, Amazon Textract is now authorized in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) Regions under FedRAMP Moderate.

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of EMR Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics 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. EMR Studio uses AWS Single Sign-On and allows you to log in directly with your corporate credentials without logging into the AWS console.

AWS Chatbot customers can now receive notifications in chat channels from an expanded range of AWS services through Amazon EventBridge. AWS Chatbot allows users to monitor and interact with AWS resources directly from Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms.  

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

You now can use AWS CloudTrail to log Amazon DynamoDB Streams data-plane APIs—GetRecords and GetShardIterator—to monitor and investigate item-level changes in your DynamoDB tables. Previously, you could use CloudTrail to log DynamoDB Streams control-plane activity (and not data-plane activity) on your DynamoDB tables.

IT admins and security teams can now view, analyze, and report on the patch compliance of their environment from a single dashboard using Patch Manager. The Patch Manager dashboard provides you with enhanced reporting capabilities and integrates key patching information such as non-compliant instances and instances never scanned for patches into a single pane of glass. It further enables you to troubleshoot issues easily by providing a drilled down view of patch compliance, enabling you to monitor missing patches and analyze execution logs. Using this feature, you can generate patch compliance reports on demand or on a schedule to simplify analysis and sharing of patch compliance information.  

Today, Amazon Athena announced the general availability of a new capability that makes working with machine learning models as simple as running a SQL query. You can now build and deploy machine learning models in Amazon SageMaker and use SQL functions in Amazon Athena to generate predictions from your SageMaker models. This enables analytics teams to make model-driven insights available to business users and analysts without the need for specialized tools and infrastructure.

IoT Resource Monitoring Framework is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Trek10, an AWS IoT Competency Partner. IoT Resource Monitoring Framework gives companies clear and constant visibility into their IoT device and backend operations from a single pane. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a discovery session, AWS infrastructure deployment, a dashboard with monitors and alerts, and an application design document.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. This solution is a framework to send equipment telemetry data to your AWS account, allowing you to leverage AWS Services to conduct analysis on your equipment data instead of managing underlying infrastructure operations. The solution currently allows for robust data ingestion using either the OPC Data Access (OPC DA) protocol or the CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) Seamless Messaging Protocol (SLMP). Support for OPC Unified Access (OPC UA) protocol will follow in the next release. 

The Amplify CLI now gives developers the ability to make multiple global secondary index (GSI) updates to their Amazon DynamoDB tables in a single deployment, enabling faster and safer data model iterations. AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend web and mobile developers create cloud backends and connect them to their app for common use cases, like managing app data using AWS AppSync and Amazon DynamoDB.  

IAM helps customers with capabilities to analyze access and achieve least privilege. When you are working on new permissions for your teams, you can use IAM Access Analyzer policy generation to create a policy based on your access activity and set fine-grained permissions. To analyze and refine existing permissions, you can use last accessed information to identify unused actions in your IAM policies and reduce access. When we launched action last accessed in 2020, we started with S3 management actions to help you restrict access to your critical business data. Now, IAM is increasing visibility into access history by extending last accessed information to Amazon EC2, AWS IAM, and AWS Lambda management actions. This makes it easier for you to analyze access and reduce EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions by providing the latest timestamp when an IAM user or role accessed an action. Using last accessed information, you can identify unused actions in your IAM policies and tighten permissions confidently.  

Today, we are announcing new functionality in AWS Control Tower that provides you the ability to customize your landing zone naming. You can retain the names that AWS Control Tower recommends for the organizational units (OUs) and core accounts, or you can modify these names during the initial landing zone set up process.

User Defined Functions (UDF), which enable users to apply custom operations to their data, are now generally available for Amazon Athena. While Athena provides a wide range of built-in functions, users can extend these capabilities with their own functions and use them directly within their queries. This allows users to address specific use cases, such as redacting or encrypting sensitive data, without the need for complex data processing steps elsewhere in their data pipeline.

AWS Backup extends centralized backup management for Amazon FSx to AWS Europe (Milan), AWS Africa (Cape Town), AWS Middle East (Bahrain), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can create, manage, and restore your Amazon FSx backups directly from AWS Backup. AWS Backup support for Amazon FSx file systems includes Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems.  

Amazon Pinpoint is now authorized as FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. This service is also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in this Region.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets extend the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and Regions with a single operation. We are now announcing the support for CloudFormation Macros and transforms in templates that are used to create a stack set. AWS CloudFormation macros perform custom processing on CloudFormation templates from simple actions such as find-and-replace, to helping transform the entire template. CloudFormation macros use the same technology that powers AWS::Include and AWS::Serverless transforms. CloudFormation transforms help simplify template authoring by condensing the expression of AWS infrastructure as code and enabling reuse of template components.

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) is a fully managed service that manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves. Customers can now upgrade their AMG workspaces to Grafana Enterprise with a 30-day free trial via an AWS Marketplace subscription, enabling access to Enterprise data source plugins such as ServiceNow, Splunk, and New Relic as well as support, training, and consultation directly from Grafana Labs. AMG now also supports open source Grafana version 7.5, which includes new features such as support for larger Prometheus queries via POST method, Amazon CloudWatch plugin enhancements, AWS X-Ray service map visualization, and many more. The new Open Distro for Elasticsearch data source plugin provides improved log data exploration and visualization for Elasticsearch data stored on Amazon Elasticsearch Service or clusters running Open Distro for Elasticsearch (an Apache 2.0-licensed distribution of Elasticsearch). Additionally, customers will now see their AMG usage and billing information in their AWS Billing and Cost Management console. 

We are excited to announce the launch of Machine Learning Essentials for Business and Technical Decision Makers, a series of three free digital courses. These on-demand courses are designed to help business and technical decision makers without Machine Learning (ML) experience understand ML basics and develop the skills to plan an ML strategy for their organization.

Twenty eight new or updated datasets from the US Geological Survey, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, iNaturalist.org, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), and others are available in the Registry of Open Data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the following categories.

Amazon MQ for ActiveMQ is now available in a total of 22 regions, with the addition of the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.

AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation solution supports 11 new AWS Foundational Security Best Practices controls.

Amazon Macie now publishes job status and health logs to CloudWatch, providing you with continuous visibility into operations of your sensitive data discovery jobs to quickly identify, investigate, and address errors.

AWS CloudFormation enhances the existing dynamic referencing of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store parameters in CloudFormation templates. You can now reference the latest Systems Manager parameter values in CloudFormation templates without specifying parameter versions. If you choose not to specify the parameter versions in the template, CloudFormation will automatically fetch the latest parameter values from Parameter Store.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the US East (N. Virginia) and EU (Frankfurt) regions. In these new regions, customers can schedule contacts, and perform command and control of their satellites on orbit.

Amazon EventBridge now supports cross-Region event bus as a target, allowing customers to aggregate events in a central Region. Customers can now have all their event information in one place. This makes it easier for developers to find those events and write code that reacts to them, manage permissions for access to sensitive events, and generate insights that stem from events generated across the entire organization. Customers can also reduce operational burden by removing the need to manage duplicate infrastructure in multiple Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports integrating with Microsoft Power BI, a business analytics service that delivers insights to enable fast, informed decisions. Powered by the Open Distro for Elasticsearch ODBC Driver you can now integrate your Microsoft Power BI environment with you Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains using the Open Distro for Elasticsearch SQL Engine.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the pg_bigm extension for faster full text search of languages that require multi-byte character sets such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

AWS Data Exchange now gives customers an easy way to set up export jobs upon subscribing to products. Instead of navigating to separate screens, subscribers can use the AWS Data Exchange console to configure export jobs that will begin automatically after their subscription is completed. This functionality reduces friction and time to value for customers. For subscribers just getting started on AWS Data Exchange, setting up data exports to Amazon S3 is a critical first step towards downstream analysis in a variety of AWS services.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and EU (London) regions.

Amazon Connect now gives contact center managers the ability to change the visibility of the options that appear on the Settings page of the Contact Control Panel (CCP) when using the the Amazon Connect Streams API. For example, contact center managers may want to hide the “Phone Type” setting to prevent users from selecting a phone type that might increase costs or go against company policy. Alternatively, contact center managers can make the new “Audio Device” setting visible, which allows agents to select which speaker, microphone, and ringer device they want to use. This enables agents to complete work away from their computer and still hear the inbound ringtone through the speaker when contacts come in.

Amazon Connect now allows agents to select which speaker, microphone, and ringer device to use in the Contact Control Panel (CCP). For example, agents can change the ringer device from their headset to their speaker if they need to step away from their desk. Then, when a call comes in, the agent will hear the ring from speakers even if they are away from their computer.

AWS Storage Gateway has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate authorization, approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB), for the AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) Regions. You can use AWS Storage Gateway to store and manage your critical data in AWS with up to the Moderate impact level.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is generally available now. 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 enterprise cloud data warehouses.

AWS CloudShell is now generally available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Frankfurt) regions.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data, as well as build, train, and deploy models. With a single click, data scientists and ML developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks for exploring datasets and building models. Now you can use custom resource tags to track and categorize the costs of SageMaker Studio Notebooks by users, groups, lines of businesses, or cost centers.  

Starting today, AWS CodeArtifact is now available in the Europe (Paris), Europe (London), and Europe (Milan) Regions.

AWS CodeCommit is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. AWS CodeCommit is a secure, highly scalable, managed source control service that hosts private Git repositories. CodeCommit eliminates the need for you to manage your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to store anything from code to binaries. It supports the standard functionality of Git, so it works seamlessly with your existing Git-based tools.

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

AWS Training and Certification has launched Getting Started with Data Analytics on AWS, a new self-paced digital course available on Coursera and edX. In this one-week course, you’ll learn how to go from raw data to meaningful insights using AWS services such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight. This course is intended for business analysts, business intelligence analysts, data scientists, and SysOps administrators who are new to AWS data and analytics services.

AWS CloudFormation Modules encapsulate one or more AWS resources and their respective properties for reuse across your organization. Modules make it simple to use the specific resources you need, while keeping resource configurations aligned with organizational best practices. You can now create YAML-formatted Modules in your CloudFormation templates. YAML-formatted Modules follow the same anatomy as existing JSON-formatted Modules. We have also added delimiter support for Modules.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 13.2, 12.6, 11.11, 10.16, 9.6.21, and 9.5.25. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. This also includes the final release of PostgreSQL 9.5.

We are excited to announce the launch of our updated three-day classroom course, Systems Operations on AWS. This course helps you build and demonstrate your skills in configuring, deploying, and troubleshooting your AWS environments.  

AWS Batch has increased a variety of performance characteristics, including job scheduling speed for EC2 Compute Environments, EC2 instance scaling reactivity, and most AWS Batch APIs.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now provides the ability to easily identify the user responsible for an AWS action performed while assuming an IAM role. By setting the new source identity attribute, which gets logged in AWS CloudTrail for most actions, you can easily find out who is responsible for actions performed using IAM roles.  

Today we are announcing the availability of two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS). You can use these metrics to monitor the performance of your live streams. The new ConcurrentStreams metric provides a count of your channels which are streaming live and the new ConcurrentViews metric provides the number of simultaneous views across all your live channels and for any individual channel.  

AWS Console Mobile Application users can now use Asia Pacific (Osaka) region on the Console mobile app.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live data across Redshift clusters for read purposes without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Redshift already allows you to pause and resume your data sharing consumer clusters on-demand or based on schedule according to your workload demands. With this new capability, producer clusters can also be paused while still allowing data sharing with consumer clusters.  

AWS DeepRacer is the fastest way to get rolling with machine learning, giving developers the chance to learn ML hands-on with a 1/18th scale autonomous car, 3D virtual racing simulator, and the world’s largest global autonomous car racing league. With the 2021 AWS DeepRacer League Virtual Circuit now underway, developers have five times more opportunities to win physical prizes, such as exclusive AWS DeepRacer merchandise, AWS DeepRacer Evo devices, and even an expenses paid trip to AWS re:Invent 2021 to compete in the AWS DeepRacer Championship Cup.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL now supports AWS Graviton2-based (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/) database instances in the additional regions of US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (London). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload.

NICE DCV is a high performance remote display protocol that helps users to securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.  

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation, which means you can enable streaming to an Amazon Kinesis data stream on your DynamoDB tables with CloudFormation templates. By streaming your DynamoDB data changes to a Kinesis data stream, you can build advanced streaming applications with Amazon Kinesis services. For example, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics reduces the complexity of building, managing, and integrating with Apache Flink, and provides built-in functions to filter, aggregate, and transform streaming data for advanced analytics. You also can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to take advantage of managed streaming delivery of DynamoDB table data to other AWS services such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3. 

To learn more about Kinesis Data Streams for DynamoDB, see Change Data Capture for Kinesis Data Streams with DynamoDB. For more information about working with CloudFormation, see What Is AWS CloudFormation?

Amazon FSx and AWS Backup now enable you to copy your Amazon FSx file system backups (both Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre) across AWS Regions, AWS accounts, or both. With cross-region backups, you can store a copy of your backup data in AWS Regions other than where your primary backups are stored, helping you meet business continuity, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements. In addition, cross-account backups enable you to copy backups into a secondary backup account to provide an additional layer of protection, should the main backup account experience disruption from accidental or malicious deletion, disaster, or ransomware. Customers may use their AWS Organizations management account to designate certain accounts as secondary backup accounts, allowing them to copy backups only to trusted accounts in the organization.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API is now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Canada (Central) regions.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Connect is now available in the US East (Ohio), Europe (London, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai), Canada (Central), and South America (São Paulo) Regions.

We are delighted to announce the addition of Amazon S3 Glacier Re:Freezer to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions which are packaged and deployed as container images. With CloudWatch Lambda Insights you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions. 

Starting today, you can use managed Amazon AppStream 2.0 image updates to keep your AppStream 2.0 images up-to-date with the latest Windows operating system updates, driver updates, and AppStream 2.0 agent software. Previously, AppStream 2.0 images were kept up to date by installing your applications on the latest base image each time a new image was released, or by installing updates for the Windows operating system, your applications, and their dependencies on a new or existing image using the AppStream 2.0 image builder. With this launch, you can select the image that you want to update, and with a single action, AppStream 2.0 creates an image builder in the same AWS account and Region to install the updates and create the new image. After the new image is created, you can test it before updating your production fleets or sharing the image with other AWS accounts. To get started, see Keep Your AppStream 2.0 Image Up-to-Date in the Amazon AppStream 2.0 Administration Guide.

You can now use Service Quotas in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to view and manage your service quotas at scale as your AWS workloads grow.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway supports internet group management protocol (IGMP) multicast in major AWS regions worldwide. The regions include US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), EU (Stockholm), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions with support for other regions coming soon.

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager is available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS CloudFormation announces the general availability (GA) of TypeScript support for the AWS CloudFormation Command Line Interface (CFN-CLI), which enables you to create AWS and third-party resource types using the TypeScript programming language. The CFN-CLI TypeScript plugin is a GitHub open source project that the community created in 2019 in an early preview mode. With this release, you can now use the plugin for your production needs.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now support SQL Server extended events, a performance monitoring system that can be used to monitor and troubleshoot performance problems in SQL Server.  

Amazon Athena users can now view the execution plan for their queries. When querying large, complex datasets, users are often unaware of how their query will be executed or how optimizations will impact performance. Now generally available for Amazon Athena, the EXPLAIN statement helps users understand and improve the efficiency of their queries.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools help applications scale out faster and save money by requiring fewer continuously running instances. With Warm Pools, customers can improve the elasticity of their applications by creating a pool of pre-initialized EC2 instances that are ready to quickly serve application traffic. Additionally, Warm Pools offer a way to save compute costs by placing pre-initialized instances in a stopped state.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch our updated one-day classroom course, AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. Learn from an accredited AWS expert instructor with deep technical knowledge to explore the AWS Cloud via a mix of presentations, peer discussion, and interactive activities. Whether you’re in a technical or non-technical role, this course helps develop the knowledge and skills necessary to demonstrate an overall understanding of the AWS Cloud.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to create Amazon Connect Customer Profiles resources. This feature helps you to use CloudFormation to deploy Amazon Connect Customer Profiles resources — along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure — in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. You can use CloudFormation templates to specify Amazon Connect Customer Profiles domains and pre-built connectors to bring in customer data from your applications to create customer profiles.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Connect Customer Profiles directly as a private endpoint within your secure, virtual network using a new interface VPC endpoint in your Virtual Private Cloud. This extends the functionality of existing gateway endpoints by enabling you to access Amazon Connect Customer Profiles using private IP addresses. API requests and HTTPS requests to Amazon Connect Customer Profiles from your on-premises applications are automatically directed through interface endpoints, which connect to Customer Profiles securely and privately through PrivateLink.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from virtually any document. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on customer feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce a quality enhancement to our table recognition feature. Starting today, Textract more accurately detects the outer boundaries, row and column boundaries, and content of tables. The accuracy is especially improved for the tables in receipts and invoices, but you will see improvements across many documents in finance, healthcare, legal, and public sector.

Today, Amazon Lookout for Equipment is generally available to all AWS customers. Amazon Lookout for Equipment is a machine learning (ML) industrial equipment monitoring service that detects abnormal equipment behavior so customers can take action and avoid unplanned downtime.

eksctl, the official CLI for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), now lets you create node groups inside an Amazon EKS cluster by simply providing node requirements in vCPUs, memory, or GPUs. Additionally, eksctl now lets you preview the cluster configuration before creating a new cluster or a new node group by using the new dry-run mode.

Application Modernization and Migration to AWS Cloud is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Deloitte, an AWS Mainframe Migration Competency Partner. Application Modernization and Migration to AWS Cloud, powered by innoWake™, is a comprehensive solution for enterprises' mainframe migration and modernization journeys. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers roadmaps, transformation of legacy code and data, testing, and go-live support.

• C5a instances are now available in AWS Europe (Paris), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.
  
• C5ad instances are now available in AWS South America (Sao Paulo), US East (Ohio), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan) and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.
  
• M5a, R5a and T3a instances are now available in AWS Europe (Milan) Region
  
• 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes of Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances are now available in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions.
  

AWS Control Tower is releasing four new, less restrictive, mandatory preventative S3 Log Archive guardrails and changing the guidance of the four previous, more restrictive, preventative S3 Log Archive guardrails from mandatory to elective. With these guardrail changes you can now separate S3 Log Archive governance for resources created by AWS Control Tower from governance for the S3 resources you create.  

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.

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

RegCloud: ControllerView® on AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from AxiomSL, an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner. RegCloud offers a set of cloud-native technical and operational capabilities that enable financial institutions to harness the power of the cloud for their risk and regulatory data management and reporting initiatives. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that follows a phased approach including design, initial system setup, data provisioning, implementation, testing and production.

AWS RoboMaker now supports the ability to configure simulation tools to diagnose or interact with RoboMaker simulation jobs. This simulation tool configuration feature provides developers flexibility to use custom simulation tools in place of, or in addition to the default simulation tools (Gazebo, rqt, rviz and terminal access tools) provided by default in RoboMaker.

AWS Step Functions now features a data flow simulator in the Step Functions console, making it easier to evaluate the input and output processing for your state machines, allowing you to build workflows faster.

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the region to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data stored in Amazon S3.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints to help you run highly regulated workloads more easily.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces the ability to deploy CloudFormation Stacks to multiple AWS regions in parallel. This reduces the overall stack set provisioning times and provides a performance improvement when using StackSets. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. Currently, using StackSets you can specify the region order preference to deploy stacks across AWS regions in a sequential manner. StackSets now expands on that by providing the additional ability to specify deploying across AWS regions in parallel as part of the deployment preferences for the stack set.

AWS Control Tower is now available in 3 additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). AWS Control Tower is also available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). With this launch, AWS Control Tower is now available in 13 AWS Regions.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud, using customized machine learning (ML) models. To train an ML model, customers provide a dataset that contains examples of legitimate and fraudulent events related to the business activity they want to evaluate for fraud risk. These fraud datasets are often highly imbalanced. For example, a dataset containing one million past transactions may only include 5,000 fraudulent ones, corresponding to a fraud rate of 0.5%. This imbalance in the training data can lead to lower model performance, which results in the customer capturing less fraud. There are a number of common techniques used to treat imbalanced datasets, but applying them requires ML expertise and the best technique often depends on the characteristics of the particular dataset.

AWS Glue now offers missing value imputation on incomplete datasets. You can use the Fill Missing Values transform to get predicted values for blank entries in a column of your data. This feature makes it easy to clean datasets that have null or empty values so that they don’t need to be accounted for at query time.

You can now launch RabbitMQ 3.8.11 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to RabbitMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.8.6.

When we launched IAM Access Analyzer, we started by helping you remove unintended public and cross account access by analyzing your existing permissions. Recently, IAM Access Analyzer added policy validation to help you set secure and functional permissions during policy authoring. Now, we are taking that a step further and generating policies for you. You can now use IAM Access Analyzer to generate fine-grained policies based on your access activity found in your CloudTrail. When you request a policy, IAM Access Analyzer gets to work and generates a policy by analyzing your CloudTrail logs to identify your activity. The generated policy makes it easier to grant only the required permissions for your workloads.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports tag-based access control and adding tags to additional cluster resources. By using tags for access control, your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and roles get access only to the Amazon ElastiCache resources with matching tags. This provides you the capability to scale by reducing the number of distinct permissions you need to create and manage in your AWS account. You can define AWS IAM policies that grant or deny access to a resource based on its tags. Furthermore, you can use specific condition context keys to customize your AWS IAM policies to limit specific behaviors on Amazon ElastiCache resources. For a complete list of condition context keys for Amazon ElastiCache, visit the Amazon ElastiCache documentation.

AWS Backup now enables you to use cost allocation tags for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) backups within AWS Billing and Cost Management. With cost allocation tags, you can get better transparency and visibility into your Amazon EFS backup costs. For example, you can allocate your Amazon EFS backup costs to different departments (e.g., finance, engineering) or analyze Amazon EFS backup costs across your various workloads to better understand and manage your costs.

AWS Amplify iOS can now be installed through the Swift Package Manager. iOS developers can interface with AWS services through Amplify iOS, which is a use case based client library. Developers have been importing Amplify iOS through dependency management tools like CocoaPods. With Swift 3.0, Apple introduced a native package management tool called Swift Package Manager that allows developers to manage these dependencies within their Swift project.

Last week, AWS announced the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, a managed firewall that enables customers to block DNS queries made for known malicious domains and to allow queries for trusted domains. DNS Firewall provides more granular control over the DNS querying behavior of resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

With thirteen more regions, EBS Multi-Attach for Provisioned IOPS io2 is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong).

AWS Audit Manager now offers a new prebuilt standard framework for NIST 800-53 (Rev. 5) Low-Moderate-High. This framework adds to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from this framework with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in NIST 800-53 (Rev. 5) Low-Moderate-High and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

With Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) you can now save your live video content to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Saved video is available for actions like editing or replaying as a video on-demand (VOD).

We are excited to introduce Developing Serverless Solutions on AWS, an instructor-led course that promotes developer productivity and agile application development. This three-day, intermediate course covers how to build, secure, deploy, and manage modern serverless applications. The course includes lectures, demonstrations, group discussions, exercises, six hands-on labs, and a quiz to check your knowledge.

AWS announces a new feature of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store that supports the removal of a label associated with a parameter, to enable customers to reorganize Parameter Store parameters with new labels.

Amazon EC2 G4ad instances which provide the best price performance for graphics intensive applications in the cloud are now available in US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt and London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Canada (Central). 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.

You can now quickly and conveniently copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS China Regions and other AWS regions (also known as partitions) to ensure that your AMIs are available and consistent globally.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential defects that are difficult to find in your code and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are excited to announce, a new repository size-based pricing model with a price reduction of up to 90%, making it easier for customers to predictably scale their automated code reviews across their software development processes.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential defects that are difficult to find in your code and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are announcing the general availability of Python support for CodeGuru Reviewer to help you detect coding issues and vulnerabilities in your Python code and applications.  

AWS Batch now supports using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles, which allows customers to easily delegate permissions to AWS Batch to run their batch computing workloads.

The data management experience in the AWS Amplify Admin UI is now generally available with new capabilities for seed data generation, data sorting, and data filtering. Launched at re:Invent 2020, the Amplify Admin UI is an externally hosted console for frontend teams to visually create an app backend and manage the app content and users.

Streaming ETL jobs in AWS Glue can now read from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in a different AWS account than the one running the AWS Glue job. This feature allows you to run your ETL jobs from the consumer account rather than the data producer account, keeping all ETL activity in one location and simplifying data-integration management.

Today, we are excited to announce HTML5-based motion graphics capabilities for AWS Elemental MediaLive channels. With an HTML5 source, you can add rich graphics directly onto your MediaLive channel including lower thirds, scrolling text, scoreboards, or full-screen graphics.

Run Command, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now displays up to 24,000 characters of the output log of a Run Command invocation from the console. This is an increase from the 2,500 characters available in the console before this enhancement. Additionally, you can now view the output and error logs separately, and you can copy the logs or download them as text files directly from the console. This feature reduces the need to navigate to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon CloudWatch consoles to view and download logs for Run Command invocations, which helps you troubleshoot invocation issues more quickly.

Starting today, Amazon WorkSpaces supports real-time audio-video (AV) by seamlessly redirecting local webcam video input to WorkSpaces desktops. With webcam support, you can make video conferencing and other streaming applications available to your users, to enhance the ability of teams to collaborate from anywhere. Your users can collaborate by using familiar video conferencing applications without having to leave their WorkSpaces desktops. To get started, see Webcams and Other Video Devices in the Amazon WorkSpaces User Guide.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now supported as a target for routing events in Amazon EventBridge. This enables customers to trigger the execution of the Amazon SageMaker model building pipeline based on any event in their event bus or on a schedule by selecting the pipeline as the target in Amazon EventBridge. For example, customers can set up EventBridge to trigger the execution of the SageMaker model building pipeline when a new file with the training data set is uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket or when the SageMaker Model Monitor indicates a deviation in model quality through alarms in Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Customers can also create rules in Amazon EventBridge that trigger the pipeline execution on an automated schedule.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 20 regions, with the addition of the Japan (Osaka) region.

Design and Build Applications at Speed with DAPx is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Version 1, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Design and Build Applications at Speed with DAPx delivers an AWS cloud digital solution bespoke to customer requirements that follows AWS best practices to support your digital presence and business solution. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers planning and design analysis, delivery, release management, and support.

Starting today, you can use the Amazon WorkSpaces macOS client application with Common Access Card (CAC) and Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart cards. Smart card support is available on WorkSpaces using the WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP). WSP is a cloud-native streaming protocol that enables a consistent user experience when your end users are accessing their WorkSpaces across global distances and unreliable networks. To learn more, see Amazon WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol.

Amazon Macie is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now discover sensitive data stored in this region to help protect your AWS workloads and data in Amazon S3.

Patches 1.9.1 / 2.7.1 / 3.4.1 / 4.0.1 now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation. You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation.

You can now configure budgets actions to enforce budget limits for your AWS Budgets resources in your AWS CloudFormation templates, stacks, and StackSets. With budget actions, you can define the action you want to take in your account when a budget exceeds the threshold you defined (actual or forecasted amounts). This level of control will allow you to reduce unintentional overspending in your account. You can choose among three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy, Service Control policy (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). For example, you can choose to apply a custom “Deny EC2 Run Instances” IAM policy to a user, group, or role in your account, once your monthly budget for EC2 has been exceeded. With the same budget threshold, you can configure a second action that shuts down specific EC2 instances within a particular AWS Region.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics in text. Today, we are announcing support for two security focused features: support for IAM condition keys and support for encrypting custom models with customer managed KMS keys. With AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) condition keys, you can control the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and encryption settings for your Amazon Comprehend APIs. You can use the new condition keys in IAM policies when granting permissions to create asynchronous jobs and creating custom classification or custom entity training jobs in your organization. For example, As a security requirement, you can now enforce that all Comprehend asynchronous jobs must use VPC endpoints.Additionally, while Amazon Comprehend already supported Customer Managed Keys (CMK) for encrypting your training data and machine learning volumes used for inference, you can now encrypt your custom models in Amazon Comprehend using a Customer Managed Key (CMK).

AWS WAF now lets you generate labels and customize your WAF rules based on those labels. With this feature, you can configure WAF to add descriptive labels to web requests when a WAF rule matches the request, regardless of the action associated with the rule. You can also check for the presence of those labels in subsequent WAF rules and combine with other WAF rules to take action on web requests that include the label. Creating a label also generates a corresponding CloudWatch metric and adds the label to your WAF logs for improved visibility.

You can now clean and transform data with an interactive, point-and-click visual interface from Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL through native JDBC connectors in AWS Glue DataBrew. In just a few clicks, you can configure these JDBC connections from the AWS Management Console to directly explore and experiment with datasets from AWS data lakes, data warehouses, and databases without writing code.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs now makes it easier to query VPC flow logs using Amazon Athena. With a few clicks, you can now automate the integration between Athena and your VPC flow logs delivered to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can also choose from a set of predefined Athena queries to derive actionable insight such as the total egress traffic from your VPCs, identify the top talkers in your subnets, or troubleshoot anomalies in your VPC traffic.

Starting today, Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) is available in four additional AWS Regions: GovCloud (US-East), GovCloud (US-West), Asia Pacific (Hong-Kong), and US West (Northern California).  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters running in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are now compliant with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline.

AWS Firewall Manager now enables security administrators to deploy the recently launched AWS WAF Bot Control across accounts in their organization, from a central administrator account. AWS WAF Bot Control is a new managed rule group that gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bot traffic to your applications. You can use Bot Control to protect your web applications from automated bots that consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other malicious activities.

AWS Batch customers can now specify EFS file systems in their AWS Batch job definitions. AWS Batch jobs using EFS will automatically mount the file systems specified by the customer in the job definition and make them available to the jobs, across Availability Zones. This enables persistent, shared storage to be defined and used at the job level.

Amazon Redshift now supports managed VPC endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink) to connect to your Amazon Redshift cluster in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With an Amazon Redshift-managed endpoint, you can now privately access your Amazon Redshift data warehouse within your (VPC) from your client applications in another VPC within the same or another AWS account and running on-premises without using public IPs or requiring traffic to traverse the Internet.

AWS Firewall Manager now supports Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, making it easy for security administrators to identify the set of DNS Firewall rules they wish to use and deploy across their organization, from a central place. AWS recently launched Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, a managed firewall feature that enables customers to block DNS queries made for known malicious domains and to allow queries for trusted domains. DNS Firewall provides more granular control over the DNS querying behavior of resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Now that Firewall Manager supports DNS Firewall, you can identify the set of DNS Firewall rules you wish to use and deploy them across multiple accounts, organizational units (OUs), and VPCs, all from a single central security administrator account.

Amazon Lightsail now offers PrestaShop and CentOS 8 blueprints. Lightsail provides a curated selection of blueprints that specify the operating system and software that is preinstalled on your instance bundles when they’re created. With the addition of PrestaShop and CentOS 8, Lightsail makes it easier to create an e-commerce site or custom application with a few clicks.

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Forecast Weather Index is now also available in the CA region. Weather Index 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, customers who have been using Weather Index for US and Europe locations, can now also use Weather Index for the Canada region to include a 14-day weather forecasts with one click to your demand forecast.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g and R6g instances with EMR Versions 6.1.0, 5.31.0 and later in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. 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.

AWS announces a new feature of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store that helps you discover public parameters more easily.

You can now use the AWS Glue Schema Registry, a serverless and free feature of AWS Glue, in the Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions to validate and control the evolution of streaming data using registered Apache Avro schemas.  

AWS Security Hub is now athorized as FedRAMP High in AWS GovCloud (US) and is available for security posture management on high-impact workloads. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to the security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP follows the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800 series and requires cloud service providers to receive an independent security assessment conducted by a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) to ensure that authorizations are compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

AWS Backint Agent version 1.03 is now available in all commercial regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the recently announced AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

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

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports using HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) packages as input. HLS is a streaming format used for video distribution across a wide range of devices including smart phones, desktop browsers, and connected TVs.

AWS WAF announces the launch of AWS WAF Bot Control, which gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bots that consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other undesired activities. With Bot Control, you can easily monitor, block, or rate-limit pervasive bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers, or you can allow common bots, such as status monitors and search engines. You can add the Bot Control managed rule group alongside other Managed Rules for WAF or your own custom WAF rules to protect your applications.

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

Customers who bring in private classroom training for their teams now have new options to supplement the in-course labs and instruction with an AWS Jam event. Seven of our popular three-day instructor-led courses are now available with an optional fourth day—an AWS Jam event—with gamified challenges to match the topics and services covered in the course. These are curated and instructor-facilitated to maximize learning and build your team’s capability in the AWS Cloud. These courses are generally available in all geographies, delivered in English.

The new AWS Storage Gateway management console makes it easier for you to create, manage, and monitor resources such as file shares, tapes, and volumes. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, you can now connect your gateway with a simple activation key to help speed up deployment, and create new file shares using a streamlined process. You can easily configure your gateway to use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints and leverage enhanced troubleshooting information for the endpoint configuration. Throughout the console, contextual information about your Storage Gateway resources is provided as part of the help panel, allowing you to easily find answers to common questions and browse related User guide content.

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Osaka) regions. With this launch, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is now available in 21 regions.

Following the announcement of updates in MySQL database versions 5.6 , 5.7, and 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL to support MySQL minor versions 5.6.51, 5.7.33, and 8.0.23. We recommend that customers upgrade to any of the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about upgrading your database instances in the Amazon RDS User Guide, including automatic minor version upgrades.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe Custom Language Models (CLM) now support Australian English, British English, Hindi and US Spanish. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. CLM allows you to use pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine for your specific batch transcription use cases. No prior machine learning experience is required to create your CLM.

Today, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, a managed firewall that enables customers to block DNS queries made for known malicious domains and to allow queries for trusted domains. DNS Firewall provides more granular control over the DNS querying behavior of resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).  

AWS Direct Connect now offers IEEE 802.1AE MAC Security Standard (MACsec) encryption for 10Gbps and 100Gbps Dedicated Connections at select locations to secure your high-speed, private connectivity to the cloud.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Canada (Montreal) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to nine. You can claim toll-free and local telephone numbers from Canadian telephony suppliers.

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Query Editor with Amazon Redshift clusters in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can query data in your Amazon Redshift cluster directly from your AWS Management console, using the Query Editor. The Redshift Query Editor provides an easier way for admins and end-users to run SQL queries without having to install and setup an external JDBC/ODBC client. Query results are instantly visible within the console.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the EU (Milano) and Africa (Cape Town) AWS Regions. This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in Italy and South Africa where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES.

Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams - a new feature that enables customers to create a continuous, near real-time stream of metrics to a destination of their choice.

Amazon CloudFront announces reduced billing granularity for Lambda@Edge function duration from 50ms down to 1ms. This will lower the price for most Lambda@Edge functions, more so for functions of short duration. Now, compute duration will be billed in 1ms increments per invocation instead of being rounded up to the nearest 50ms increment per invocation as before.

Lightweight functions such as header manipulations or URL rewrites tend to have a short duration. With this change, it will now be even more cost effective to run these functions on Lambda@Edge. For example, a function that runs in 10ms on average used to be billed for 50ms. Now, that function will be billed for 10ms resulting in a 80% reduction in duration spend. This change applies to all four Lambda@Edge event triggers - viewer request, viewer response, origin request and origin response. This change will be effective starting April 1, 2021. For more information, visit the CloudFront Pricing Page.

Starting today, the interactive EC2 Serial Console is now generally available. EC2 Serial Console provides a simple and secure way to troubleshoot boot and network connectivity issues by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. It provides a one-click, text-based access to an instances’ serial port as though a monitor and keyboard were attached to it. This access can be used for interactive troubleshooting.

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Data API in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to access Amazon Redshift. The Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++ so you can focus on building applications versus managing infrastructure.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. Using AWS Glue Workflows, you can orchestrate and execute a complex multi-job, multi-crawler data-integration workflow. AWS Glue custom blueprints make it easy for data engineers to create repeatable AWS Glue workflows.

When creating datasets in AWS Glue DataBrew from the Amazon S3 data lake, you can now create dynamic datasets to schedule data preparation on new incoming Amazon S3 files or apply transformations on filtered or conditionally chosen files or folders in S3. You can create a dynamic S3 path to choose files based on a time-window or time of last file update, and defining custom parameters to replace string, number, or date-based values in your S3 file path with filter conditions such as begins with, ends with, contains, does not contain, less than, greater than, before, and others. Custom parameter names can be included as columns in your datasets and the revised schema will be used for jobs running on dynamic datasets. With parameterized S3 paths and/or files, users can schedule to apply existing recipes to run on selected dynamic datasets.

With AWS Glue DataBrew, you can now visually detect outliers in data from your data lake, data warehouses, and other JDBC-accessible data sources. You can further handle outliers by replacing, removing, rescaling, or flagging them using mathematical and algorithmic methods such as z-score (to find the difference from mean value and divide it by the standard deviation), modified z-score (to calculate the difference from median absolute deviation), interquartile ranges (to calculate values between the first quartile and the third quartile) and one or more transformations such as creating a flag column, applying window functions, or choose from over 250+ other transformations.  

AWS Config now supports the ability to capture and view the compliance history of AWS Config conformance packs. You can see how the overall compliance status of a conformance pack changed over time, and which rules within a conformance pack impacted the status change. You can aggregate conformance pack compliance data from multiple accounts and AWS Regions using AWS Config aggregators to get a centralized view of your compliance regimes and operational best practices. You can maintain up to 7 years of history. You can also run AWS Config advanced queries on this data for more details about your conformance pack compliance.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Building Data Lakes on AWS. Data lakes enable organizations to generate business value by identifying and acting upon opportunities for business growth. This new one-day classroom course will help you practice building a data lake in a hands-on environment.  An expert instructor will teach you how to build and secure a data lake using AWS Lake Formation while also showing you how to optimize for cost and performance.

AWS Data Exchange now enables providers to copy descriptions, data sets, and public offers from their existing products to a new product. With this launch, providers can select any existing product, published or unpublished, and copy all of its details to a new draft product, which they can then modify as needed and publish within a few seconds. For providers that frequently create new products that share similar metadata, this will save a significant amount of time and effort.

You can now configure each path segment of an API Gateway custom domain name to route requests to different APIs. Using multi-level base path mappings, you can implement path-based API versioning and migrate API traffic between APIs according to request paths with many segments.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN service today increased the default service quotas for the dynamic routes advertised to and from a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway. You can now advertise up to 1,000 dynamic routes (an increase from 100) from a customer gateway device to a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway. Similarly, you can now advertise up to 5,000 routes (an increase from 1,000) from a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway to a customer gateway device. Advertised routes come from the route table that's associated with the VPN attachment.

On March 30 2021, Amazon Pinpoint announced the launch of new Journey controls to allow customers to customize their user experience, and when messages are sent. Journeys are multi-step campaigns that can be executed across SMS, email, and push messages. Journeys are intended for customers with user engagement use cases, and who need to be precise on when messages are delivered to their users.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) v2, in addition to v1, for all IMDS calls to EMR clusters. Instance metadata is data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the running instance. IMDSv1 is fully secure and AWS will continue to support it. But IMDSv2 adds new “belt and suspenders” protections for four types of vulnerabilities that could be used to try to access the IMDS. For more information, please read the AWS Security blogpost.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Queue notifications for Amazon GameLift. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Wargaming, Ubisoft, and more, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this new update, you as a game developer can now receive automatic notifications when changes take place to the state of your player queues on GameLift.

AWS Transit Gateway Connect today increased the default service quotas for the dynamic routes advertised to and from a Transit Gateway Connect peer. You can now advertise up to 1,000 dynamic routes (an increase from 100) from a customer gateway appliance in an on-premises network or a virtual router appliance in a VPC to a Transit Gateway Connect peer. Similarly, you can now advertise up to 5,000 routes (an increase from 1,000) from a Transit Gateway Connect peer to a customer gateway appliance or a virtual router appliance. Advertised routes come from the route table that's associated with the AWS Transit Gateway Connect attachment.

Today, we are happy to announce that Amazon Fraud Detector now supports batch fraud predictions. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. Until today, Fraud Detector supported real-time fraud predictions via the GetEventPrediction API, which is ideal for low-latency synchronous fraud prediction use cases but requires customers to integrate an API and make an API call for every event they want to evaluate. Now, customers who have non real-time fraud prediction use cases can get fraud predictions for a large number of events in one go, or on an hourly or daily basis, using the new batch prediction feature without needing to write any code.  

AMI Factory is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Capgemini, an AWS Migration Competency Partner. AMI Factory helps customers integrate and build any type of AMIs with custom configurations, setting security standards for operating system (OS)-level benchmarks and vulnerability scans based on customer requirements within a few hours. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers identification of eligible AMIs, template creation, and deployment.

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through the new AWS edge location in Jakarta, Indonesia. Using Global Accelerator, users in Indonesia can now see improved performance of up to 20% for internet traffic to the AWS Singapore Region and up to 60% for traffic to AWS Regions in North America and Europe. Global Accelerator is now available through 96 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in more than 20 AWS Regions.  

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, which makes it easy to create highly accurate machine learning models, now provides a model explainability report generated by Amazon SageMaker Clarify, making it easier to understand and explain how the models you create with SageMaker Autopilot make predictions. Explainability reports include feature importance values so you can understand how each attribute in your training data contributes to the predicted result as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more strongly that feature impacts your model’s predictions. You can download the explainability report as a human readable file, view model properties including feature importance in Amazon SageMaker Studio, or access feature importance using the SageMaker Autopilot APIs.

AWS Config advanced queries feature now supports pagination for queries that contain aggregate functions, such as COUNT and SUM. For example, getting the total number of resources in each AWS account requires the COUNT aggregate function. You can now use advanced queries to get complete results for your aggregate queries through pagination, which were previously limited to 500 rows. Pagination is a technique that is used to divide large results into “pages,” where each page contains a subset of results. You can process the first page of results, then the second page, and so on.

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), making it easier to integrate Apache Spark based jobs into your analytics pipeline. You can now build workflows including steps to manage EMR on EKS virtual clusters and submit jobs without writing code to manage the state of the job.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the new AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now centrally view and manage the security posture of your AWS accounts in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

AWS WAF now supports inserting HTTP headers to the user request when WAF allows the request to reach your application. You can use the Request Header Insertion feature to help validate that requests made to your application were evaluated by WAF and configure your application to only allow requests that contain the custom header values that you specify. You can also insert headers so your application can process the request differently based on the presence of the header, or simply log the header in your application logs for reporting and analytics.

AWS WAF now supports configuring the HTTP status code and the response body returned to the user when a request is blocked. Until today, AWS WAF could only return HTTP status code 403 (forbidden) when the user request was blocked by WAF. With Custom Response, you can now configure AWS WAF to send out a different HTTP status code, such as 3xx (redirects), 4xx (client errors), or 5xx (server errors). These codes can be used to redirect users to different parts of your application or provide users a specific response code based on the reason they were blocked by WAF. In addition, you can use Custom Response to include a response body to present a customized error message back to the user.

Pipeline Factory is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Mphasis Stelligent, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Pipeline Factory enables DevOps teams to define, build, and publish standardized pipelines that enforce quality, security, and governance throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers discovery and design, Pipeline Factory implementation, and publication and deployment of standardized Pipeline Products.

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 at scale.

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) region. Using Container Insights, DevOps and systems engineers can monitor, isolate, and diagnose containerized applications and microservices environments through automated dashboards. This helps you visualize the performance and health of Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate resources including clusters, tasks, containers, and services.  

Amazon Forecast adds support for AWS Resource Groups and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

Amazon SageMaker now supports adding authentication to requests for pulling images stored in your private Docker Registry to build containers for real-time inference. Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to deploy your trained models to production with a single click, so you can start generating real-time inferences with low latency. You can bring your own code for performing real-time inference using container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) or a private Docker registry of your choice. SageMaker can now authenticate with your private Docker registry so you can have an additional layer of security and the peace of mind that requests to your container images are serviced only for authorized entities.

We’re excited to announce the launch of AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement.

WorkSpaces Manager for Amazon WorkSpaces (WSM) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Nuvens Consulting, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency Partner. WSM is ideal for customers looking to optimize, automate, and reduce the day-to-day management of their Amazon WorkSpaces estate. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers automation of the administration, integration into existing support mechanisms, and right-sizing the Amazon WorkSpaces estate to ensure cost efficiency.

Starting today, you are now offered additional file and folder sharing controls on your Amazon WorkDocs Android application. With this release, you can now share a folder as well as edit sharing permissions such as adding or removing members of the shared folder. You can also share a link as well as manage shared links for files and folders such as removing your shared link, adding a password to your shared link, or setting expiration dates for your shared link. In addition, you can now manage sharing permissions directly from the Folder List page for documents. These additional controls make it quicker than ever to share with colleagues and partners from your mobile application while also providing full control to manage the sharing workflow securely throughout the Android application.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports adding Amazon EC2 P4d instances as worker nodes to clusters in regions where P4d is available.

You can now use IAM condition keys as part of IAM and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to centrally govern endpoint, authorization, and logging configurations for your APIs in API Gateway.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), enabling applications to achieve the performance of an on-premises machine learning training cluster, with the scalability, flexibility, and elasticity provided by Kubernetes clusters managed by EKS.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports running clusters with high availability across multiple AWS Local Zones. AWS Local Zones are an extension of an AWS Region where you can run your latency-sensitive applications using AWS services in geographic proximity to end-users. Previously, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis only supported launching a cluster in a single AWS Local Zone.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with Amazon Macie to automatically ingest sensitive data findings from Macie. Security Hub previously ingested policy findings from Macie, and this integration adds sensitive data findings. All of Security Hub’s findings are automatically normalized using the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF), enabling you to more easily search, correlate, and operationalize them. To get started, visit the Settings page in the Macie console and select Security Hub as a publish destination for sensitive data findings. You can also learn more about how to discover sensitive data in the Macie documentation.

AWS Backup, a cost-effective, fully managed, policy-based service that further simplifies data protection at scale, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With AWS Backup, you can centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and accounts, to support your regulatory compliance obligations and meet your business continuity goals.

Today Amazon Lookout for Metrics is generally available to all AWS customers. Lookout for Metrics is a machine learning (ML) service that detects 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 Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in the Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions. You can now synthesize all NTTS voices in this Region, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS License Manager automated discovery now allows customers to exclude instances that do not need license payment per a customer’s licensing agreements. AWS License Manager automatically tracks instances across AWS and on-premises environments based on customer defined rules. While configuring automated discovery, administrators can now define exclusion rules using custom defined tags or AWS Account IDs to identify instances that should not count towards license usage. It helps automated discovery exclude instances that matches these rules and thus further simplifies the management of software licenses.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone is now available in the Asia (Osaka) Region, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the Amazon EFS capabilities that customers love.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Python version 3.7. This enables you to write streaming applications in the Python language and run them using Apache Flink v1.11 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Apache Flink v1.11 offers support for Python through the Table API, which is a unified, relational API for data processing.

AWS IoT Core now enables customers to customize the behavior of their data endpoints, making it simpler to onboard IoT applications with existing devices in the field. Customers can now configure their data endpoints with custom domain names and associated server certificates stored in AWS Certificate Manager. They can also attach custom authorizers, and create multiple data endpoints for their account.

Today, Amazon Kendra, an intelligent search service powered by machine learning is releasing new search connectors from Perficient, an AWS partner. These are now available in the Amazon Kendra Connector Library and include search connectors for IBM Case Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Atlassian Jira and Confluence, and many others.

We are excited to announce the launch of the updated Advanced Architecting on AWS course. This instructor-led training course is designed for cloud architects who want to extend their baseline knowledge of AWS services. An expert AWS instructor will help you learn advanced architecting topics such as hybrid connectivity and hybrid AWS devices, networking with a focus on AWS Transit Gateway connectivity, AWS Container services, automation tools for CI/CD, security options, and much more.

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0 of the NICE DCV web client software development kit (SDK). NICE DCV is a high performance remote display protocol that helps users to securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs. This JavaScript SDK is an optional component that enables developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to integrate a customized NICE DCV web client into their web applications. Customers can build custom DCV web clients using custom user interface components and the core DCV streaming features provided by this SDK, delivering unique experiences tailored to their own use cases.

Containers have proven popular with AWS and Red Hat customers because they increase developer velocity, improve application portability, and enable faster application development. Currently, AWS offers a broad range of containers technology in the cloud, including Amazon Elastic Containers Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS with AWS Fargate. Now customers have an additional option with the launch of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), which provides a new managed service that makes it easier for Red Hat OpenShift customers to build, scale, and manage containerized applications on AWS.

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

AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports Enhanced Debug Logs that provide valuable information to troubleshoot playback session issues. When debug log mode is enabled, MediaTailor records all manifest requests and response payloads to the CloudWatch Logs for expanded diagnostics information. Learn more in our blog.

With this new release of the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, customers can use federated credentials, MFA and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to connect Visual Studio Code to AWS. Using AWS SSO, users can sign in to their organization’s Active Directory, a built-in AWS SSO directory, or another external identity provider (IdP) connected to AWS SSO. Regardless of which IdP you use, AWS SSO abstracts those distinctions away, and they all work with the AWS Toolkit, as explained in this short blog post.

You can now access Amazon Timestream APIs from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon Timestream APIs without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance.

AWS CloudTrail now supports logging of data events for Amazon DynamoDB. With this new feature, you can now use CloudTrail to log item-level DynamoDB activity from all your DynamoDB tables or specific tables with read-only and write-only filters. You can also use CloudTrail advanced event selectors for more granular control of which data events you want to log from DynamoDB. All DynamoDB data events are delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Events, which creates an audit log of data access and allows you to respond to events recorded by CloudTrail. Details on when and who made DynamoDB API calls enhances data visibility for security and operations engineering teams. For example, you can quickly determine which DynamoDB items were created, read, updated or deleted and identify the source of the API calls. If you detect unauthorized DynamoDB activity, you can also take immediate action to restrict access.

You can now manage non-IP based cloud resources in AWS Cloud Map’s public and private DNS namespaces. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Using AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. Your application can then discover the location and metadata of cloud resources associated with these custom names via AWS SDK or by making authenticated API calls.

We are excited to announce that you can now enable notifications for workflow status changes while using Amazon Forecast, allowing you to work seamlessly without the disruption of having to check if a particular workflow has completed. Additionally, you can now automate workflows through the notifications to increase work efficiency. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

Amazon Detective is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now easily analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities in both AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East).  

Today, we are announcing the general availability of ML Detect, a new feature of AWS IoT Device Defender that automatically detects device-level operational and security anomalies across your IoT fleet by learning from your past data. Now, in addition to being able to manually set static alarms with AWS IoT Device Defender Rules Detect, you can use machine learning to automatically learn your fleet's expected behaviors so that you don’t need an in-depth understanding of how your devices act across a range of metrics to get started.  

AWS Backup adds support for bulk deletion of recovery points from backup vaults in the AWS Backup console. You can now select multiple recovery points for deletion at one time.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports automated memory management of Elasticsearch clusters with the new Auto-Tune feature. Auto-Tune is an adaptive resource management system that automatically adjusts Elasticsearch internal settings to handle dynamic workloads, optimizing cluster resources to improve efficiency and performance. With Auto-Tune, you can achieve performance boost in ingestion throughput for log analytics workloads, and reduced tail latencies for search queries.  

Now you can use AWS CloudTrail to log data-plane API activity to monitor, alarm, and archive item-level activity in your Amazon DynamoDB tables. You can use this information about item-level activity as part of an audit, to help address compliance requirements, and monitor which AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, roles, and permissions are being used to access your table data. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MariaDB now supports AWS Graviton2-based database instances in the additional regions of US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (London). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload.

Today we are delighted to announce the availability of AWS Media Intelligence (MI) solutions, a combination of services that empower customers to easily integrate AI into their media content workflows. AWS MI allows customers to analyze their media, improve content engagement rates, reduce production costs, and increase the lifetime value of media content. With AWS MI, customers can choose turnkey solutions from participating AWS Partners or leverage AWS Solutions to avoid starting from scratch.

The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver now supports dynamic provisioning of Kubernetes persistent volumes. Kubernetes applications requiring access to a shared file system on AWS can now have storage provisioned on demand, eliminating the need for cluster administrators to pre-provision volumes.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, R5dn instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Based on the AWS Nitro System, these instances make 100 Gbps networking available to network-bound workloads, and Amazon Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for low latency networking HPC/ML workloads. Customers can take advantage of this improved network performance to run a variety of network-bound workloads such as High Performance Computing (HPC), analytics, machine learning, Big Data, and data lake applications, as well as accelerate data transfer to and from Amazon S3, reducing the data ingestion time for applications and speeding up delivery of results. Workloads on these instances will continue to take advantage of the security, scalability and reliability of Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). These instances also support

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).

Today we are announcing new Hugging Face integrations with Amazon SageMaker to help data scientists develop, train, and tune state-of-the-art natural language (NLP) models more quickly and easily.

AWS Glue Studio now provides the option to define transforms using SQL queries, allowing you to perform aggregations, easily apply filter logic to your data, add calculated fields, and more. This feature makes it easy to seamlessly mix SQL queries with AWS Glue Studio’s visual transforms while authoring ETL jobs.

Starting today, you can use inherited and default values with AWS Cost Categories. AWS Cost Categories enables you to define rules to categorize your costs using dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. With the new features, you can achieve more efficient and holistic categorization of your cost and usage information.

Amazon QuickSight launches customized tooltips, which enable dashboard readers to get additional insights from visuals. Custom tooltips provide additional context to any visuals with more dimensions and metrics added beyond those already available on the visual. Dashboard authors can configure these tooltips, sort the display order, and customize field names within the tooltip. To learn more about tooltips, see here.

Amazon EC2 is now available through VPC endpoints in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region, allowing you to access Amazon EC2 from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to Europe (Milan), Europe (Stockholm), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud.  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Db2 LUW version 11.5 as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from Db2 LUW version 11.5 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that sellers can now manage versions and update product information for AMI and Container products through the AWS Marketplace Catalog API. This launch builds upon a prior release for self-service listing updates through the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. Now, sellers can use the Catalog API to automate their workflows for making new versions available to customers.

Customers using the AWS IoT Core Apache Kafka action to connect their IoT applications to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters can now use usernames and passwords to authenticate their rules. The Apache Kafka action for AWS IoT Core evaluates inbound messages and delivers them to your Amazon MSK or self managed Apache Kafka cluster.

AWS Client VPN has expanded the number of Availability Zones supported inside the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Canada (Central) regions. This expansion gives you more zones to choose from and additional flexibility when associating subnets. This change also increases the number of concurrent connections you can make per endpoint in these Regions.

AWS Audit Manager now supports the CIS Benchmark for CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark v1.3.0, Level 1 and 2 as a new prebuilt standard framework. This framework adds to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from this framework with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

Amazon EC2 now supports Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot when migrating virtual machines from on-premise to EC2 without having to convert them to Legacy BIOS. UEFI is a modern firmware that initializes your operating system.

AWS Solutions has updated Discovering Hot Topics using Machine Learning, an AWS Solutions Implementation that ingests text, image and video (video: upcoming feature) from online discourse in order to perform topic modeling, sentiment analysis on plain text and text embedded within images as well as detection of unsafe content in images. In this updated version, the solution allows customers to use geographical coordinates as parameters to filter ingested Twitter data and to narrow visual results. With this capability, organizations can now analyze tweets originating from geographic locations that are relevant to their business and use case.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the January 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1. January 2021 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2, 18c, and 19c have already been launched.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has reduced control plane creation time by 40%, enabling you to create a new EKS cluster control plane in 9 minutes or less, on average.

AWS Proton introduces delete validations for templates in-use, ensuring that dependent resources are not orphaned if a template version is inadvertently deleted.

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the following 9 regions:

1. US West (N. California)
2. EU (London)
3. EU (Paris)
4. EU (Milano)
5. Africa (Cape Town)
6. Middle East (Baharain)
7. Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
8. Asia Pacific (Singapore)
9. Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
   

AWS Fargate platform version 1.4.0 is now the LATEST version. All new Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks or ECS Services that use the Fargate launch type and have the platformVersion parameter set to LATEST or not specified will run on platform version 1.4.0. The new version has features such as Amazon Elastic File System support and Amazon ECS Exec.  

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now offers rollback protection for major version upgrades.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) launches increased performance and latency reduction for control plane verification APIs. With this improvement, QLDB customers will experience an average latency reduction of up to 70% and the ability to scale at least 10 times from the current call volumes in many scenarios.

The Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh feature enables customers to update the EC2 instances in their Auto Scaling groups on a rolling basis. Now, Instance Refresh gives customers more control over the update process by letting them configure Instance Refresh checkpoints to phase their deployments. An Instance Refresh checkpoint specifies what percent of the Auto Scaling group’s instances should be replaced and how long to wait before continuing with the rolling update. This gives customers time to perform any necessary validation or testing steps at various checkpoints.

With S3 Object Lambda you can add your own code to S3 GET requests to modify and process data as it is returned to an application. For the first time, you can use custom code to modify the data returned by standard S3 GET requests to filter rows, dynamically resize images, redact confidential data, and much more.

Starting today, AWS Launch Wizard deployments support the ‘No Rollback on Failure’ feature for all Launch Wizard applications. Now, when a Launch Wizard deployment fails, resources that were created as part of the deployment will not be immediately deleted/rolled back.

AWS Training and Certification launched a new course entitled AWS Cloud Technical Essentials. Available for free on Coursera and edX, this course uses video lectures and demonstrations to teach the technical fundamentals of AWS. Upon course completion, learners will be able to make an informed decision about when and how to apply core AWS services for compute, storage, and database to different use cases.

Amazon Comprehend now supports identification of text documents that contain personally identifiable information (PII). You can use Amazon Comprehend’s Contains PII API synchronously to discover documents that contain PII, to set up alarms and control access on documents with sensitive information. Amazon Comprehend’s machine learning models find documents that contain PII information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses and allow you to target the PII of your choice.

Today, AWS X-Ray launches Insights in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. X-Ray Insights helps customers proactively discover issues in applications by using anomaly detection. it also enables developers and DevOps engineers to detect anomalies in fault rate for an application and then notify their teams on these issues and why it occurred.

Starting today, you can use AWS Elemental MediaConnect to transport live video using the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol. With the addition of SRT, you have more flexibility and compatibility for creating highly reliable, low-latency live video transport workflows.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an update to Amazon GameLift, which increases global coverage for developers, while providing seamless, low-latency gameplay experiences for players worldwide. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Gungho and Ubisoft, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this update, you as a game developer can now tap into six new regions (from 15 to 21), while also getting up and running faster from simpler fleet management.  

Amazon Connect analytics users can now define queue service levels to measure the percentage of customer contacts answered by an agent between 1 second and 7 days for both real-time and historical metrics.  

The new AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) app, found in the Azure Active Directory app gallery, makes it easier to use your Azure AD identities for sign-in across multiple AWS accounts and AWS SSO integrated applications. Customers who want a centralized way to manage Azure AD users and groups across AWS can use the app to connect Azure AD to AWS SSO once. Customers can then manage permissions to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable users to sign in using Azure AD to access assigned AWS accounts and applications, such as Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks.

AWS introduces the Developer Preview of its opinionated deployment tool for .NET cloud-native applications. Using this tool, developers can now deploy their .NET applications in just a few easy steps from the .NET CLI.  

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by analyzing resource policies to provide provable security and help you identify unintended public or cross-account access. A recent update allows you to validate public and cross-account access before deploying permissions changes. Now, we are extending policy validation in IAM Access Analyzer by adding over 100 policy checks with actionable recommendations. These checks use static analysis to help you proactively validate your permission policies during policy authoring to set secure and functional permissions. The checks include functional validation like developers might expect from a linter, and go beyond that to evaluate best practices in granting access. These checks analyze your policy and report security warnings, errors, general warnings, and suggestions based on their impact. They provide actionable recommendations that guide you to set secure and functional permissions. For example, IAM Access Analyzer reports a security warning when your policy grants access to pass any role to any service, which is overly permissive. The security warning includes a recommendation that you scope down the permissions to pass specific role(s) instead.

Amazon RDS Proxy now lets you create additional endpoints each with their own VPC settings, enabling access to your Aurora or RDS databases from applications in a different VPC.

Amazon RDS Proxy now lets you create an additional read-only endpoint to connect your application to Amazon Aurora Replicas. In some cases, RDS Proxy helps improve application scalability, resiliency, and security. These benefits can extend to your Aurora Replicas when connected through the RDS Proxy. To learn about Aurora Replicas, see our documentation.

Deploy Containers on AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from NTT DATA Services, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Deploy Containers on AWS delivers a ready-to-deploy secure foundation that expedites the deployment of both greenfield container-based applications and already-containerized applications. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a current state assessment, deployment of the solution, and a solution walk-through.

Build Cloud Foundations is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from NTT DATA Services, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Build Cloud Foundations provides a secure, scalable cloud foundation to accelerate your cloud adoption journey. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a multiple-account security strategy that accelerates cloud adoption with training, documentation, and resources to help teams get the skills they need.

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

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service Cost Optimization. This advanced 60-minute course explores techniques and tools you can use to optimize your Amazon S3 costs. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and video demonstrations. 

Amazon SageMaker now supports deploying multiple containers on real-time endpoints for low latency inferences and invoking them independently for each request. This new capability enables you to run up to five different machine learning (ML) models and frameworks on a single endpoint and save up to 80% in costs. This option is ideal when you have multiple ML models with similar resource needs and when individual models don't have sufficient traffic to utilize the full capacity of the endpoint instances. For example, if you have a set of ML models that are invoked infrequently or at different times, or if you have dev/test endpoints.

Today, AWS Copilot launched version 1.4 which now provides more operational capabilities for applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This allows you to directly access a container to troubleshoot and run commands with ECS exec. AWS Copilot also added the ability to deploy applications from a Bitbucket repository and attach Amazon Elastic File Service (EFS) volumes.

Amazon Corretto 16 is now generally available. This version supports the latest Java feature release JDK 16 and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 16 from our GitHub Releases.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed service for running fault injection experiments on AWS that makes it easier to continuously improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone is now available in 5 additional regions, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the Amazon EFS capabilities that customers love.  

Accelerate is a new operations plan from AWS Managed Services (AMS) that offers operations support for customers with existing workloads, with new planned workloads, or migrating to AWS. AMS Accelerate provides operational services such as monitoring, incident management, security, patch, and backup to help you with day-to-day operations management so that your teams can focus on business transformation in the cloud.

Starting today, the next generation of memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2gd instances are available. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 55% better price performance compared to current generation x86-based X1 instances and provide high memory per vCPU at the lowest cost per GiB of memory in Amazon EC2. The higher performance and additional memory of X2gd instances enable customers to run memory-intensive workloads such as in-memory databases (Redis, Memcached), relational databases (MySQL, PostGreSQL), electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, real-time analytics, and real-time caching servers. Customers running containerized workloads can also use X2gd instances to optimize their infrastructure by consolidating more containers on a single instance. X2gd instances also feature local NVMe-based SSD storage for applications that need high speed, low latency access to data.

Today, AWS Batch is available in the Africa (Cape Town) and the Asia-Pacific (Osaka) Regions.  

Amazon S3 is reducing the cost to move data to Amazon S3 Glacier by lowering PUT and Lifecycle request charges by 40% for all AWS Regions. You can use the S3 PUT API to directly store compliance and backup data in S3 Glacier that does not require immediate access. You can also use S3 Lifecycle policies to move data from S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, or S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access to S3 Glacier to save on storage costs when data becomes rarely accessed.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports provisioning cost monitors and alert subscriptions via AWS CloudFormation templates. You can now set up Cost Anomaly Detection via JSON or YAML commands, enabling quick, consistent, and scalable configurations across AWS accounts.

Amazon WorkSpaces bundle management APIs are now available for customers to perform WorkSpaces bundle operations via command-line interface (CLI). The new set of APIs supports creation, deletion, and image association operations for WorkSpaces bundles. These APIs are intended for use by WorkSpaces administrators who want to automate WorkSpaces management workflows.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces Amazon ECS Exec - a simple, secure, and auditable way for customers to execute commands in a container running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or AWS Fargate. ECS Exec gives you interactive shell or single command access to a running container making it easier to debug issues, diagnose errors, collect one-off dumps and statistics, and interact with processes in the container.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the following three additional AWS Regions:

• Asia Pacific (Seoul)
• North America (Montreal)
• South America (Sao Paulo)

AWS Config now supports three new AWS Config managed rules to help you verify that your secrets in AWS Secrets Manager are configured in accordance with your organization’s security and compliance requirements. AWS Config records and evaluates configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config managed rules are predefined rules that AWS Config uses to evaluate whether your AWS resource configurations comply with common best practices. AWS Secrets Manager helps easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets through their lifecycle.

ISO Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength are now in compliance with ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, and ISO/IEC 27018 standards. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed.

Virtual Desktop Accelerator is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from RedNight Consulting, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency Partner. Virtual Desktop Accelerator will accelerate your Amazon WorkSpaces deployment and empower you to manage and scale your virtual environment. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a walkthrough of the critical design elements, help making decisions on features and functions to use, and deployment of Amazon WorkSpaces for your organization.

AWS Graviton2-based database instances are now generally available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL Compatible Edition. Graviton2 instances provide up to 20% performance improvement and up to 35% price/performance improvement for Aurora depending on database size. You can also mix and match Graviton2 R6g and Intel R5 instances within the same cluster for your primary instance or for your read replica, enabling you to maximize price/performance improvements based on workload requirements. Graviton2 instances are already generally available for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

Conversational AI Platform is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Accenture, an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Conversational AI Platform helps organizations manage a conversational AI solution's end-to-end lifecycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers discovery and planning, proof of value, a solution pilot, and ongoing scaling and management.

The scheduled scaling feature of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to set a schedule for your Auto Scaling group to scale in and scale out your EC2 capacity. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows you to set a local time zone for scheduled scaling actions via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs, with support in the AWS Management Console and AWS CloudFormation coming soon. Selecting a time zone makes schedules easier to review and also removes the need to adjust schedules for Daylight Saving Time (DST).

Design and Implementation for Druva Data Protection Solutions is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Softcat, an AWS Storage Competency Partner. With the Design and Implementation for Druva Data Protection Solutions consulting offer, Softcat can design and deploy a fully executed backup solution for your organization. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that includes performing the total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, planning the implementation, procuring the software, and delivering the project.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now publishes events to Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge to provide better visibility into the service. Events to indicate the availability of a service software update for a domain, the start of an update, and the completion of an update will be included in the initial release. You will also be able to view these events under the new ‘Notifications’ view in the Amazon Elasticsearch Service console.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Management Agent (OMA) version 13.4 for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud Control 13c Release 4 Update 9. OEM 13c offers web-based tools to monitor and manage your Oracle databases. Amazon RDS for Oracle installs OMA, which then communicates with your Oracle Management Service (OMS) to provide monitoring information. Customers running OMS 13.4 can now manage databases by installing OMA 13.4.

Today we are excited to announce Channel Assembly with AWS Elemental MediaTailor. With Channel Assembly, you can create linear channels that are delivered over-the-top (OTT) in a cost-efficient way, even for channels with low viewership. Virtual live streams are created with a low running cost by using existing multi-bitrate encoded and packaged VOD content. You can also easily monetize Channel Assembly linear streams by inserting ad breaks in your programs without having to condition the content with SCTE-35 markers.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their voice-enabled applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe has offered confidence scores for each word in its transcription output for its batch (asynchronous) API. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe will surface word-level confidence scores for its streaming (synchronous) transcription API as well.

Amazon Redshift Data Sharing, a secure and easy way to share live data across Redshift clusters, is now generally available. Data Sharing enables instant, granular, and high-performance data access across Amazon Redshift clusters within an AWS account, 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. Data Sharing can be used on your Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters at no additional cost.

Amazon Redshift Cross-database queries provide ability to query across databases in a Redshift cluster. This feature is now generally available in all regions where Amazon Redshift RA3 node types are available. With Cross-database queries, you can seamlessly query data from any database in the cluster, regardless of which database you are connected to. Cross-database queries can eliminate data copies and simplify your data organization to support multiple business groups on the same cluster. Cross-database queries can be used on your RA3 clusters at no additional cost.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now enables you to validate access before deploying permissions changes. IAM Access Analyzer uses comprehensive policy analysis to provide provable security and generate findings for resource access. Now with IAM Access Analyzer, you can prevent public and cross-account access before you set permissions. You can preview findings and validate that your policy changes grant only intended access to your resources. By previewing findings, you can prevent unintended access before you deploy permissions.

AWS Backup adds support for continuous backups and point-in-time recovery (PITR) of Amazon Relational Database (Amazon RDS) instances. You can now streamline your backup planning, management, and access control to Amazon RDS continuous backups in addition to the existing support of scheduled Amazon RDS snapshots.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (KVS) updates the service quota model for its media playback APIs to throttle based on the number of fragments requested rather than the number of playback sessions. This gives developers the flexibility to enable up to 10x more simultaneous playback sessions for applications that use Kinesis Video Streams for live or on-demand playback.

Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

CloudEndure Migration and CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, services offered by AWS, now allow you to migrate, replicate, and recover applications from any source directly into AWS Outposts or between AWS Outposts devices, leading to lower latencies, better performance, and reduced costs. Previously, replicated data had to be transferred to and stored in a public AWS Region before being copied into EBS volumes on the AWS Outposts device. This caused increased cutover and recovery times, as well as data residency issues.

Customers can now enable multiple authentications protocols at the same time for an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition cluster. Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility supports both Kerberos authentication with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and IAM database authentication, but in the past you could choose only one for a given cluster. Now, Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility supports enabling Kerberos and IAM authentication for a cluster simultaneously. For example, customers can enable IAM for authenticating AWS Lambda and enable Kerberos for other authentication situations.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports single Availability Zone (AZ) storage classes (One Zone), reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the EFS capabilities that customers love. With this launch, you can achieve an effective storage price of $0.043/GB-month.[1]

When you generate data quality profiles on your datasets, DataBrew now publishes a visual dashboard on the AWS Glue DataBrew console with 40+ statistics and visualizations listed in a tabular format for easy comparison. Understanding data quality is key to the success of your analytics and machine learning projects. With this new capability in DataBrew, it’s easy to spot anomalies in data distributions, detect outliers, understand skews, and more for datasets varying from a few thousand rows to tens of millions of rows and varying file formats.  

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS Regions, enabling disaster recovery from region-wide outages and low latency global reads. With today’s launch, the feature is available in the AWS Americas (São Paulo) and AWS Europe (Stockholm) Regions.  

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports single Availability Zone (AZ) storage classes (One Zone), reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the EFS capabilities that customers love. With this launch, you can achieve an effective storage price of $0.043/GB-month.[1]

AWS Graviton2-based database instances for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL are now supported in: US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (London). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, increasing the number of AWS Regions in which WorkSpaces is available to 14. This expansion into a new AWS Region allows you to provision WorkSpaces closer to your users and data, providing a more responsive experience. Additionally, you can better meet data sovereignty requirements without the cost and complexity of building on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). For companies that provide services such as customer support, development, or back office services like accounting or IT support, using Amazon WorkSpaces in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) can enable a more reliable way of giving users a persistent desktop while helping you to reduce the risk of data leakage, with the closest possible AWS Region.

AWS Security Hub has released 25 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard. These controls conduct fully automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon API Gateway (APIGateway.1), Amazon Cloudfront (CloudFront.1-4), Amazon DynamoDB (DynamoDB.1-3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2.9-10), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS.2), Amazon Elasticsearch Service (ES.2-3), Amazon RDS (RDS.9-10), Amazon Redshift (RedShift.1-3,6), Amazon Simple Notification System (SNS.1), AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB.3-6), and AWS Key Management Service (KMS.3). If you enabled the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard in an account and configured Security Hub to automatically enable new controls, the above new controls are enabled by default. Security Hub now supports 115 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

Today, we are announcing first-class support for Kotlin in Amplify Android. Amplify Android is part of AWS Amplify, a set of libraries, tools, and services that help frontend web and mobile developers build secure, scalable, full-stack applications. Kotlin is a popular programming language commonly used by Android developers, among others.

AWS Lambda now supports four new Trusted Advisor checks to help customers optimize the cost, security, function runtime version and fault tolerance of their Lambda functions.  

Starting today Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing Amazon 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.  

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to create and manage Amazon S3 on Outposts resources, allowing you to create buckets, endpoints and access points. Amazon S3 on Outposts delivers object storage to your on-premises AWS Outposts environment to meet local data processing and data residency needs. Using Amazon S3 APIs and features, Amazon S3 on Outposts makes it easy to store and manage data on your Outpost.

AWS Proton now allows you to define services that do not include pipelines, giving developer and platform teams flexibility in defining, provisioning, and deploying their services.  

Amazon EMR now supports instance fleets: a new way to provision clusters in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Instead of specifying an Amazon EC2 availability zone for your Amazon EMR cluster and an Amazon EC2 instance type for an Amazon EMR instance group, you can now provide a list of availability zones and instances, and Amazon EMR will automatically select an optimal combination based on cost and availability.

The over-the-air update (OTA), AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics, and AWS IoT Device Shadow named shadow features are now generally available in AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202103.00. With this release, developers can use the C-SDK libraries to update firmware, manage device fleets, monitor fleet metrics, and create multiple shadows for their IoT device.

AWS Glue DataBrew adds four new visual transformations - Binning, Skewness, Binarization, and Transpose helping data analysts and data scientists leverage these transformations without writing any code.

Amazon Connect Chat now provides an out-of-the-box chat widget, making it easy to begin servicing your customers through chat in just a few clicks. The widget allows you to design the customer experience to align with your corporate branding by customizing the font and color scheme in the user interface. Once configured, the widget can be easily embedded for display on a website by copying and pasting a simple code snippet. The widget also provides advanced configuration options to restrict access to authenticated users or to define specific domains where the widget can be displayed.

AWS Proton has made two new fields, service_instance and service_instance_name, available as inputs for the Jinja parametrization of templates. Template writers can use these fields to name individual resources in the template without requiring additional inputs from developers.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to create and manage EKS add-ons using AWS CloudFormation. EKS add-ons provide lifecycle management for Kubernetes operational software, making it easy to consistently start and update common and critical add-on software for your EKS clusters.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 D3 instances, the latest generation of the dense HDD-storage instances, are available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions.

AWS Shield Advanced now supports tagging of protected resources and protection groups. You can use tagging to restrict the ability to create or modify protections to sensitive resources via IAM policies, or to organize and track your AWS Shield Advanced costs at the tag level. Resource tagging allows you to define custom names for protected application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53.  

AWS Elemental MediaLive now offers a Workflow Wizard to help you create a live streaming workflow in just a few minutes. The Workflow Wizard guides you through setting up a live streaming workflow using AWS Elemental MediaLive and other AWS services including AWS Elemental MediaStore, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and Amazon CloudFront.  

AWS Proton now supports tagging of AWS Proton resources and tag-based access control. AWS Proton also tags all provisioned resources automatically with identifiers. You can now group and control your AWS Proton resources using tags, and track down all AWS resources provisioned through AWS Proton, including their costs.  

Amazon Quicksight now supports Sankey diagram. Sankey diagram is used to depict a flow from one set of values to another like customer journey, cash flows, process flow, or analysis of an energy system. For example, a Sankey diagram can show the path a web visitor takes from one page to the next on a company website, with possible stops along the way. See here for more details.

AWS IoT Device Defender now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring AWS IoT Device Defender resources such as scheduled audits and Security Profiles in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

AWS Secrets Manager now enables you to replicate secrets across multiple AWS Regions. You can now give your multi-Region applications access to replicated secrets in the corresponding Regions and rely on AWS Secrets Manager to keep the replicas in sync with the primary secret. This feature abstracts the complexity of replicating secrets across Regions, enabling customers to leverage Secrets Manager to easily manage secrets needed to support their multi-Region applications and disaster recovery strategies. You can use this functionality through the AWS Secrets Manager console, CreateSecret and ReplicateSecretToRegions API, or via AWS CloudFormation to replicate secrets in one or more Regions.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm) AWS Regions.

Starting today, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS is now available in US West (N. California), US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt and London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions.

Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the US East (Ohio) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to define multiple, sequential levels of approvals that are required for your operational changes. 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. Now, you can further streamline your change approval process by specifying the order in which approvals are required.

AWS Step Functions now supports YAML state machine definitions within the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and in AWS CloudFormation, making it possible to define workflows in the same language as your infrastructure as code.

Amazon EventBridge now supports API Destinations, a simple and reliable way for customers to send events to any HTTP API, such as self-managed or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, allowing customers to easily extend their existing applications without writing code. Authorization is built in so customers don’t have to write or manage additional code to authorize their requests.

Amazon Redshift RA3.16xlarge and RA3.4xlarge nodes are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. In addition, the smallest RA3 node type, RA3.xlplus, is also now available in five additional AWS regions. RA3.xlplus is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Mumbai) and EU (Frankfurt, London, Stockholm), in addition to the previously available regions Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo), Brazil (São Paulo), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland, Paris), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (N. California, Oregon).

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions. This update enables customers to build and iterate on their chatbots faster. The new functionalities help customers scale the use of their chatbots with additional languages and support for more natural conversations.

Customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region can now use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

Starting today, you can view all operational issues (OpsItems) for an impacted resource in AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. OpsCenter allows operations engineers and IT professionals to investigate, diagnose, and resolve operational issues related to AWS resources from a central place. This enables you to understand the greater context while troubleshooting an issue such as an instance failure, and helps you to resolve issues faster.

FreeRTOS is now certified for the Security Evaluation Standard for IoT Platforms (SESIP) Assurance Level 2. With this certification, FreeRTOS libraries have demonstrated meeting a specific set of security criteria for IoT platforms. In addition, embedded developers writing FreeRTOS-based applications can achieve SESIP certification for their own applications more quickly because the underlying libraries have been tested for compliance. According to the technical standards organization GlobalPlatform, SESIP provides a common and optimized approach for evaluating the security of connected products that meets the specific compliance, security, privacy and scalability challenges of the evolving IoT ecosystem. SESIP is based on the industry-established Common Criteria framework.

Driving Digital Transformation with Sitecore is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Slalom, an AWS DevOps Competency and AWS Digital Experience Competency Partner. With the Driving Digital Transformation with Sitecore consulting offer, Slalom leverages Sitecore’s combination of content management, commerce, and customer insights to design and create a complete, customer-centric strategy and solution. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a customized Sitecore configuration and deployment as well as customer experience strategy, training, and support.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now publishes certificate metrics and events through Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge. Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates are used to secure network communication and establish the identity of websites over the internet. Certificates have a defined lifetime and for continued use need to be renewed before they expire. These new metrics and events help administrators keep track of certificate expiration dates and take necessary action or configure automation to prevent certificate expiry and related outages.

You can now add four additional metadata fields in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs, namely flow-direction, traffic-path, pkt-src-aws-service and pkt-dst-aws-service. With these enriched fields you can derive insights into the AWS services that your workloads are communicating with, differentiate between ingress and egress traffic flows and identify the next hop of your egress traffic, such as an internet gateway, a VPC peering connection or a virtual private gateway.

We’re excited to introduce four new digital training offerings that help you learn how to plan, deploy, secure, and manage cloud-based desktops and applications. The offerings are designed for desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure managers, IT administrators, and technical professionals interested in cloud-based virtualization. These free self-paced courses and curriculums include presentations, interactive e-learning modules, videos, demonstrations, and quizzes.

AWS Glue DataBrew extends its datasets to support files without an explicit file extension or a header row. Often times, extensionless files are tricky to work with and require visually exploring the data to understand it. Similarly, customers often work with files without an explicit row that defines the header in the file. In both of these cases, you can now define both these configurations when you create a dataset in DataBrew.

Intelligent SAP Migration and Management on AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Protera, an AWS SAP Competency Partner. Intelligent SAP Migration and Management uses the Protera FlexBridge® platform to speed up your migration, reduce your project risk, and run your SAP environment more efficiently on AWS. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers analysis of existing SAP systems, AWS target architecture design, cost modeling, and migration and management of your SAP environment on AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain. Ethereum is a popular decentralized blockchain framework that establishes a peer-to-peer network allowing participants to transact without a trusted central authority. It enables popular use cases such as decentralized finance (DeFi), a network of financial applications built on top of blockchain networks. DeFi is different from existing financial networks because it is open and programmable, operates without a central authority, and enables customers to offer new methods for payments, investing, lending and trading. As customers build these Ethereum-based applications, they find it complicated and time-consuming to operate and manage their Ethereum infrastructure. Specific concerns include data reliability due to out-of-sync nodes, data storage scaling challenges, and time-sensitive Ethereum software upgrades.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL versions 11.9, 10.14, and 9.6.19 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community.

FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) release 202012.01 now includes the over-the-air update (OTA), AWS IoT Device Defender, and AWS IoT Jobs libraries in the first LTS release (FreeRTOS 202012.00 LTS). With this release, developers can use the FreeRTOS LTS libraries to update firmware, manage device fleets, and monitor fleet metrics for their microcontroller-based IoT devices. In addition, developers can rely on a FreeRTOS version that provides feature stability, and security patches and critical bug fixes for two years.

The Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) console with a new and updated user interface is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports tag-based authorization for easy management of access to configuration APIs that are used for operations such as creating, modifying, or updating Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains.

Amazon EventBridge now supports propagation of AWS X-Ray trace context, enabling you to view the end-to-end flow of events through your applications. AWS X-Ray traces user requests as they travel through your entire application. It connects and visualizes the data generated by individual services like AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 and the many resources that make up your application, providing you an end-to-end view of how your application is performing.

We reorganized features on the console based on key tasks such as, writing code, testing, monitoring and configuring. With this update, we reduced the amount of scrolling needed to access common configuration options by creating a dedicated configuration tab. In addition, the new navigation design orients your work on the Lambda console towards the tasks you want to complete and focuses your work around relevant features. This change will also help you find new features more easily when they are available in the console.

AWS AppConfig is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS AppConfig helps you deploy application configurations in a managed and monitored way just like you do with code deployments, but without the need to change the code if a configuration value changes. AWS AppConfig is intended for users who want to quickly and safely deploy changes that are used during runtime of an application or platform. AWS AppConfig is a feature of AWS Systems Manager, which helps you to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to implement envelope encryption of Kubernetes secrets using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys for existing EKS clusters. Envelope encryption adds an addition, customer-managed layer of encryption for application secrets or user data that is stored within a Kubernetes cluster. Implementing envelope encryption is considered a security best practice for applications that store sensitive data and is part of a defense in depth security strategy.

Starting today, AWS CodePipeline supports 1,000 pipelines per account by default, an increase from the previous limit of 300. You can request a limit increase beyond 1,000 pipelines per Region/Account through the Support Center Console.

Amazon Connect now allows you to separate historical metrics into 15 minute intervals. Historical metrics reports include data about past, completed activity and performance in your contact center. This 15 minute interval provides a new time range to allow more granular insights into queue, routing profile, and agent performance. These insights can be used in variety of ways, which includes improving the accuracy of contact forecasting and staffing plans.

AWS DeepRacer allows you to get hands-on with machine learning (ML) through a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, a 3D racing simulator on the AWS DeepRacer console, a global racing league, and hundreds of customer-initiated community races. Whether you want to win, or just increase your understanding of machine learning, the AWS DeepRacer League is the best way to get rolling with ML.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is a feature of Amazon Connect and automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. It now supports ingestion of customer data from homegrown and third- party applications with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in addition to existing pre-built connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports storing your canary run artifacts, including log files, screenshots, and HAR files, in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket in another Region with a new major runtime version, syn-nodejs-puppeteer-3.0. CloudWatch Synthetics now also supports upgraded major versions of the Puppeteer, Chromium, and Node.js dependencies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the launch of Asia Pacific (Osaka) as a standard AWS Region, expanding Osaka from its design as a Local Region. The number of Availability Zones (AZs) in Asia Pacific (Osaka) is increasing from one to three, the service portfolio is expanding, and new pricing options are available.

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and EU (Frankfurt and Stockholm) regions.  

AWS Config now supports Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in all AWS Regions. With this launch, you can now use AWS Config to monitor configuration data for container-based resources in your AWS account, such as monitoring configuration changes to EKS cluster settings and tracking compliance for cluster configurations. AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account, including how resources were configured, how they relate to one another, and how the configurations and relationships change over time.

Today, we are announcing the launch of Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect in the Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. This expands support for Real-Time Contact Lens from the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions that were launched at re:Invent 2020.

Starting today, AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN customers can use the AS923-1 frequency band to connect LoRaWAN gateways and devices that are physically present in countries that support the frequency ranges and characteristics of this band. AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN enables customers to setup a private LoRaWAN network by connecting their LoRaWAN devices and gateways to the AWS cloud without developing or operating a LoRa Network Server (LNS). AS923-1 is commonly used in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan among other countries. In addition, AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN also supports the US902-928 and EU863-870 bands, commonly used in the North America and European regions, respectively.

AWS Launch Wizard now gives you the option to specify a private IP address of your choice for each EC2 instance in your SAP deployment. This makes it easy to adhere to organizational security/ governance processes that dictate which IP addresses are permissible.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor introduces new Configuration Aliases, that can reduce the number of MediaTailor configurations needed to support multiple origins and media paths. This feature enables a single MediaTailor configuration to support URL fields with dynamic user-defined variables.

JumpStart for Amazon Textract  is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from TensorIoT, an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. JumpStart for Amazon Textract enhances the the benefits of Amazon Textract by reducing setup time and adding functionality that improves the data extraction experience and streamlines the user interface. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers identification of requirements; development, testing, and verification of form templates; and deployment of the solution.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course on Coursera and edX. If you’re new to the cloud or in a technical or non-technical role such as finance, legal, sales, or marketing, this course provides you with an understanding of fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to help you gain the confidence to contribute to your organization’s cloud initiatives.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new digital course, Getting Started with DevOps on AWS, together with the optional Getting Started with DevOps on AWS self-paced lab. This course explores the basics of developing, delivering, and maintaining high-quality secure applications and services at high velocity on AWS. The course covers the philosophies, practices, and tools used to implement a DevOps environment on AWS, while the lab gives you practical experience with the technologies discussed in the course.

We’re excited to announce the launch of AWS Network Firewall Deployment Automations for AWS Transit Gateway, a reference implementation to help customers deploy and configure the AWS resources needed to inspect and filter VPC-to-VPC (East-West) traffic.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce two new courses for Media Services: Media Supply Chain: Video Processing and Delivery and Introduction to AWS Media Services by Use Case. These digital courses are designed for organizations and individuals seeking to build cloud-based media workflows. 

We’re excited to announce a free new digital curriculum: Build Modern Apps with Purpose-Built Databases. The curriculum explores the benefits of Amazon purpose-built databases and illustrates a step-by-step process for creating and modeling the databases for modern applications. Designed for data engineers, database developers, and solutions architects, this intermediate, three-hour curriculum has six self-paced modules that include presentations, video demonstrations, and downloadable user guides. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service introduces index rollups that lets you summarize high granularity data and preserve feature-rich aggregations over large data sets for analytics while reducing the storage costs.

Today, Amazon Lookout for Vision is generally available to all AWS customers. Amazon Lookout for Vision is a machine learning (ML) service that spots defects and anomalies in visual representations of manufactured products using computer vision (CV), allowing you to automate quality inspection.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports major version 13. PostgreSQL 13 includes improved functionality and performance from new features and performance from new features and enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, incremental sorting to accelerate data sorts, parallel processing of indexes with the VACUUM command, more ways to monitor activity within a PostgreSQL database, new security capabilities, and more. This release also adds support for bool_plperl, which simplifies writing Perl procedures.

AWS Transfer Family, a service that provides fully managed serverless file transfers for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), is now available in AWS Middle East (Bahrain), AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and AWS Africa (Cape Town) Regions. With this launch, AWS Transfer Family is now available in 19 commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows you to view deleted Auto Scaling groups in the scaling history. Previously if you deleted an Auto Scaling group, you needed to either maintain a record of scaling activities for deleted Auto Scaling groups or ask AWS support team to retrieve the scaling activities for you. Now, you can specify one additional parameter in a describe call to get a description of the scaling history for deleted Auto Scaling groups. This makes it easier to keep a record of scaling activities after an application has been shut down.

Today, AWS launched a new feature for static analysis of your event “detector models” (representations of your IoT devices as state machines on the AWS cloud) in AWS IoT Events. The feature automatically performs 7 different analyses (see list in developer guide) of your models for potential syntax errors (e.g. bad expressions or payloads), structural issues (e.g. missing states or input triggers) and runtime errors (e.g. data type mismatch, missing data, potential to hit service limits, etc.). This debugging tool is particularly useful for complex detector models which have a large number of state changes, each with unique conditional logic triggered by multiple input data streams. The analysis summarizes diagnostic information of each of the 7 analyses by severity level ('info', 'warning', 'error') and identifies its location within the model (state, transition, action, etc.) to help you fix issues in your model even before publishing it.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now offers Always On Availability Groups (AGs) for the Multi-AZ configuration in all AWS Regions on Standard Edition. This new high-availability option meets the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads on SQL Server.  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for MariaDB version 10.5. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to MariaDB 10.5 databases, and from MariaDB 10.5 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets.  

AWS Training and Certification is excited to launch the Solutions Training for Partners: Sales Best Practices digital training series. These 30-minute fundamental courses are designed to introduce AWS Partners to cloud concepts and relevant AWS solutions for services that customers leverage most to innovate and transform their business.

Starting today, you can access Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems from your Amazon EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur. You can now mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your instances by using the Amazon EFS client, an open source toolset, installed using the Homebrew package manager. You can also mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your instances using the macOS native NFS client version 4.0. To learn more about mounting Amazon EFS file systems on EC2 Mac instances, see the Amazon EFS documentation.

Starting today, customers can run macOS Big Sur (11.2.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on EC2 Mac instances. macOS Big Sur is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. macOS Big Sur will support running Xcode versions 12.5 and later, which will include additional SDKs for iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, tvOS 14.5, watchOS 7.4, and macOS Big Sur 11.3. Customers can now also access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur.

We are delighted to announce the addition of IoT Static IP Endpoints to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform.  

Patches 1.8.2 / 2.6.2 / 3.3.2 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation. You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Reporting, a new feature that enables Kibana users to generate and download reports. They can now generate reports directly from the Dashboard, Visualize and Discover panels, and export them to PDF, CSV and PNG file formats.

Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling you to manage Contributor Insights settings for DynamoDB with CloudFormation templates.  

Amazon Connect CTR (contact trace records) stream now includes disconnect reason for Voice calls & Tasks. This will indicate whether an agent or customer disconnected the call, or whether a telecom or network issue caused a call to disconnect, or if a task was completed by an agent or flow.  

AWS CodeBuild’s support for Arm-based workloads now run on AWS Graviton2 without any additional configuration.

Today, we are announcing AWS Control Tower Region Selection, a new capability that provides you the ability to efficiently manage the geographical footprint of your AWS Control Tower resources. You can now select the additional Regions you would like AWS Control Tower to govern; providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory concerns while balancing the costs associated with expanding into additional regions.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the January 2021 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2, 18c, and 19c. January 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1 will be launched soon.  

Starting today, the latest generation of burstable, general purpose Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Europe (Stockholm) regions. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications.

Starting today, the latest generation of burstable, general purpose Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications.

AWS Config now supports the ability to use an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key or alias Amazon Resource Name (ARN) that you provide, to encrypt the data delivered to your Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket. By default, AWS Config delivers configuration history and snapshot files to your S3 bucket and encrypts the data at rest using S3 AES-256 server-side encryption, SSE-S3. With this release, if you provide AWS Config with your KMS key or alias ARN, AWS Config will use that KMS key instead of using AES-256 encryption.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare, build, train and tune, deploy and manage models.

Amazon RDS adds new events reporting the cause of an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ automated database failover so that you can detect and respond to your outage faster. You can view these failover reasons in the event log.  

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports monitoring canary events with Amazon EventBridge. This allows you to send notifications to teams, capture canary event information, and take corrective action in response to a canary state change or the completion of a canary run.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets extends the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation. Last year, we introduced StackSets integration with AWS Organizations, allowing you to define a central template that can be applied across AWS accounts, reducing the need for you to set up permissions, networking needs, and infrastructure for each new account, and allowing you to easily apply changes across your organization. We are now announcing the ability to delegate an AWS member account in your organization as an administrator to create and manage stack sets for your entire organization. Delegated administration removes the need for you to access the management account for stack sets administration on behalf of the organization. Using this feature enables you to adopt an AWS security best-practice, which recommends that you delegate responsibilities outside of the management account where possible.

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

Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing that enables developers and IT operators to find and fix performance problems in distributed applications, leading to faster problem resolution times.  

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Query editor with Amazon Redshift clusters enabled with enhanced VPC routing. You can leverage AWS Secrets Manager to store your cluster credentials and use that with the Amazon Redshift Query Editor.

AWS Glue Studio now supports updating the AWS Glue Data Catalog during job runs. This feature makes it easy to keep your tables up to date as AWS Glue writes new data into Amazon S3, making the data immediately queryable from any analytics service compatible with the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

You can now use the updated Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) console in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The updated console makes it even easier for you to create and manage your file system resources. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, you can create file systems configured with the recommended settings in just few clicks. You can also monitor your file system’s behavior using Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms natively in the Amazon EFS console.

Amazon Pinpoint now includes the ability to register Ten-Digit Long Codes (10DLC), and purchase toll-free phone numbers. Both 10DLC phone numbers and toll-free numbers are used to send SMS text messages to recipients in the United States. Both of these types of phone numbers enable you to send Application-to-Person (A2P) messages with improved delivery rates and at an affordable price.  

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. To deploy ML models for real-time predictions, Amazon SageMaker provides you with a large selection of AWS compute instances, so you can find the right cost to performance ratio depending on your requirements. One such instance type is Amazon Inf1, powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate ML inference workloads. Amazon ml.Inf1 instances were available in Amazon SageMaker in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. Starting today, Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are available on Amazon SageMaker in 14 additional AWS regions worldwide.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports ten-digit long codes (10DLC) and toll-free numbers (TFN) for sending SMS text messages from businesses to consumers in the US. These new origination ID types enable SNS customers to send messages using a phone number that is unique to them, and provide improved delivery rates.

AWS Glue now supports reading data stored in Amazon S3 without first adding it to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This feature makes it fast to start authoring Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and ELT jobs in AWS Glue Studio by allowing you to use locations and objects in Amazon S3 directly as data sources. AWS Glue infers the schema of the data in real time , allowing you to easily define transforms on it in the AWS Glue Studio visual job authoring interface.

Today, Amazon WorkMail announced that you can now update content of in-transit emails to and from your organization with AWS Lambda functions when using Email Flow Rules. With this, you can easily update the contents of the email as it flows in and out of your organization in order to help meet security, compliance, or productivity needs. For example, you can create a Lambda function which removes all attachments, or adds disclaimers or signatures on the email before it is delivered.

AWS Config advanced queries feature now supports the ability to save your queries in your AWS Config account in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now, when you customize a sample query or write your query, you can save it with a name, description, and tags. This reduces 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.

AWS Fargate recently increased default service quotas to 500 and starting today you can launch up to 1000 concurrent Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) pods running on Fargate On-Demand and 1000 concurrent Amazon ECS tasks running on Fargate Spot. These are default quotas (also commonly known as limits) for an account in a given AWS Region, but you can always raise these values even further to meet your application needs by requesting a quota increase. This makes it even more seamless to run your workloads at scale on Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Batch.

Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Highlights of the Kubernetes 1.19 release include Ingress API and Pod Topology Spread reaching stable status, EndpointSlices being enabled by default, and immutable Secrets and ConfigMaps. Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.19 in the Kubernetes project release notes.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports the ability to transfer your AWS Elemental Link device from one service region to another. You can transfer the device to any region that supports MediaLive.

AWS Elemental Link is now available in the Europe (Paris) region. Using Link, you can now ingest your high-quality video in the AWS Cloud in more locations globally.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in EU (Stockholm) region. Additionally, Amazon EC2 M6gd, C6gd and R6gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage are now available in US West (Northern California), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.  

Flutter support in AWS Amplify is now generally available (GA). Amplify is a set of tools and services that help frontend web and mobile developers build secure, scalable, full-stack applications. Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google for developing applications for Android and iOS from a single codebase. Amplify Flutter brings together Amplify and Flutter. It is designed for developers who have invested in the Flutter ecosystem and now want to take advantage of the power of AWS. You can use the Amplify Flutter libraries with Amplify-created backends, as well as existing AWS backends.

AWS Direct Connect now offers native 100 Gbps Dedicated Connections to support your private connectivity needs to the cloud.

AWS Outposts now offers a 26 TB storage tier for Amazon S3 on Outposts. This new storage tier gives you flexibility to configure 26 TB of Amazon S3 storage alongside up to 11 TB of Amazon EBS on your AWS Outposts. This adds to the 48 TB and 96 TB tiers of S3 storage currently available for S3 on Outposts.  

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance to help you run payment processing workloads more easily.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports additional automatic input failover conditions including black frame and audio loss detection. You can use automatic input failover to build highly resilient and redundant live streaming workflows on AWS.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next-generation, burstable general-purpose Amazon EC2 T3 instance types, which provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage however long is required.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports replication filters for MySQL and MariaDB instances. Replication filters specify which databases and tables are replicated in a read replica. Customers create lists of databases and tables to include or exclude for each replica.  

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare, build, train and tune, deploy and manage models. Starting today, you can now automate the process of creating SageMaker Studio domains and adding user profiles using AWS CloudFormation.

AWS WAF can now natively parse request body JSON content, allowing you to inspect specific keys or values of the JSON content with AWS WAF rules. This capability helps you protect your APIs by checking for valid JSON structure, inspecting the JSON content for common threats against your application, and reducing false positives by inspecting only the keys or values in the JSON content.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports using OpenID Connect (OIDC) compatible identity providers as a user authentication option to Kubernetes clusters. With OIDC authentication, you can manage user access to EKS clusters by using the standard procedures in your organization for creating, enabling, and disabling employee accounts. 

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to Japan (Osaka region). 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 Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) has launched a redesigned service console that customers can access via an opt-in link on the classic console. With its streamlined look and feel, the new console makes it even easier for customers to leverage the speed, reliability, and flexibility that Amazon SES has to offer.

You can now access AWS CloudHSM service APIs from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to AWS CloudHSM service APIs without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance.

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports seven additional numeric data types including Byte, Short, Integer, Long, Float, Double, and Decimal. Customers can now cast columns in these in addition to Timestamp and Date data types.

Starting today, general purpose Amazon EC2 M5zn instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore and Sydney) regions. 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.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now allows administrators to use tags to manage and secure access to Customer Managed Policies, Instance Profiles, OpenID Connect Providers, SAML Providers, Server Certificates, and Virtual MFAs.  

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that can span up to 6 AWS Regions, enabling disaster recovery from region-wide outages and low latency global reads. With today’s launch, you can seamlessly change your global cluster’s primary AWS Region, the region that serves writes, while preserving the replication between all regions in the global cluster. With this managed planned failover capability, you can repeatedly change which AWS Region hosts the primary cluster while preserving the physical topology of your global database and avoiding unnecessary application changes. Aurora Global Database managed planned fail over simplifies the planned fail over process in scenarios like rotating the primary region for regulatory compliance or disaster recovery exercises. Check out this blog to learn how to perform managed planned failovers with Global Database.

When running profile jobs in AWS Glue DataBrew to auto-generate 40+ data quality statistics like column-level cardinality, numerical correlations, unique values, standard deviation, and other statistics, you can now configure the size of the dataset you want analyzed. This allows you to customize your profile to run on x% of the dataset for really large datasets or focus on a sub-sample of the dataset for faster results.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Traffic Mirroring is now supported on additional select non-Nitro instance types. Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring allows you to replicate the network traffic from EC2 instances within your VPC to security and monitoring appliances for use cases such as content inspection, threat monitoring, and troubleshooting.

The Serverless Image Handler solution enables fast and cost-effective image manipulation in the cloud by combining highly available, trusted AWS Services with the open-source imaging processing suite, Sharp. The solution automatically deploys and configures a serverless architecture optimized for dynamic image manipulation. It uses Amazon CloudFront for global content delivery and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for reliable and durable cloud storage at low costs.

Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents and IVR systems.

Amazon Timestream has added new capabilities to its SQL query language to enable customers to gain deeper insights from their time series data by running cross table queries and queries with advanced time series functions. Starting today, customers can also gain more transparency into the query execution statistics, to better understand the cost and duration of a running query. Lastly, the implementation of Amazon Timestream’s JDBC Driver is now available under the Apache 2.0 License on GitHub, so customers can contribute new features and enhancements to the JDBC driver.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an update to Amazon GameLift FleetIQ, enabling you as a game developer to use AMD EPYC™ processor-based instances. GameLift is an AWS managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated servers for multiplayer games, and it is trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world, including Ubisoft, Gameloft, and N3TWORK. With this update, GameLift FleetIQ adds AMD EPYC instance families allowing game developers more server types to choose, while still delivering the same low-cost, low-latency player experience.

AWS Cloud9 now includes visual source control integration for Git (Git panel) built in to Cloud9. Prior to this release Git could only be used on the command line of the integrated Cloud9 terminal. Today’s release gives you the option to use a visual tool, built in to the IDE, to clone, push, pull, add, and commit files to your Git repositories on Cloud9 environments.

The FindMatches ML transform in AWS Glue now includes information on how much each column in the dataset contributed to determining if records were matches. The FindMatches transform enables you to identify duplicate or matching records in your dataset, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier and no fields match exactly. This feature makes it easier to decide how to improve your FindMatches transforms.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of a new Transformer notebook on GitHub. AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to get hands-on with the latest generative AI techniques expand their machine learning skills. The Transformer is a state-of-the-art model that works with sequential data such as genomic data or stock prices. By using a mechanism called attention, the algorithm attempts to learn the relationships between the different data points so it can generate better predictions. In the AWS DeepComposer Music studio, the Transformers feature will allow you to iteratively extend a melody to create new and longer compositions. Learn more about the Transformer technique in the learning capsule in the AWS DeepComposer Console.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you automate table creation by supporting point-in-time recovery (PITR) and tag settings in AWS CloudFormation.

We’re excited to announce a free new digital curriculum: Managing Amazon Simple Storage Service. This advanced 150-minute curriculum covers techniques to simplify the management of Amazon S3 storage. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, video demonstrations, a self-paced lab, and quizzes. The self-paced lab costs up to 15 USD per lab (this cost is not included with free digital training on aws.training).

AWS Glue is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. AWS Glue provides both visual and code-based interfaces to make data integration easier so that you can start analyzing your data and putting it to use in minutes instead of months.

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region.  

AWS Data Exchange now allows subscribers to export full data set revisions to Amazon S3 in a single export job. Starting today, subscribers who want to export all assets within a data set revision can do so using the AWS Data Exchange console or programmatically using the AWS Data Exchange API. This functionality eliminates the need to set-up and maintain code when configuring the export of revisions with many assets. For customers who have subscribed to 3rd party data sets containing hundreds or thousands of assets in individual revisions, this feature materially simplifies the receipt and ingestion of data.

Amazon CloudFront announces its first edge location in Zagreb, Croatia. This new edge location in Zagreb will provide viewers as much as a 14% reduction in first-byte latency and is included within CloudFront's European region pricing. For more
information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure.

Persistent Digital Bank and Credit Union Solution (PDBCUS) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Persistent Systems, an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner. PDBCUS will enable you to deploy new digital banking capabilities including customer onboarding, digital deposits, loan account opening, and automated credit decisioning. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers discovery, onboarding, configuration, and deployment.

Application Load Balancer (ALB) now supports Application-based cookie stickiness. This new feature helps customers ensure that clients connect to the same load balancer target for the duration of their session using application cookies. This enables customers to achieve a consistent client-server experience with greater controls such as the flexibility to set custom cookie names and criteria for client-target stickiness within a target group.

Today, AWS CloudHSM launched service in additional Availability Zones (AZs) in US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) to support high demand from our growing customer base.  

AI-Powered Inventory Management is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Intellify, an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. AI-Powered Inventory Management helps improve inventory health by automating inventory forecasting to take the time and guesswork out of inventory management. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers data integration, machine learning modelling, solution deployment, and support.

Digital Banking Engagement Platform (DBEP) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Sopra Steria, an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner, and its subsidiary Sopra Banking Software. DBEP offers data-driven financial services to help institutions adopt Open Banking capabilities and enhance customer engagement. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers inception, design, and implementation of the platform.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) launches integrated service discovery in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) regions.

DynamoDB local now supports PartiQL (a SQL-compatible query language) so that you can query, insert, update, and delete DynamoDB table data. PartiQL is supported for all DynamoDB data-plane operations, and it helps improve the productivity of developers as they use this familiar, structured query language to perform operations. Developers can use PartiQL to develop applications, and test them offline before deploying them to production.

You can now tag your AWS Cloud Map namespaces and services through AWS Console. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Using AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, or any other cloud resource. Your application can then discover the location and metadata of cloud resources associated with these custom names via AWS SDK or by making authenticated API calls. 

Today, we are announcing the Amazon CloudFront Security Savings Bundle, a flexible self-service pricing plan that helps you save up to 30% on your CloudFront bill in exchange for a monthly spend commitment for a 1-year term. The savings bundle also includes free AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) usage up to 10% of your committed amount. Any additional Standard CloudFront or WAF charges not covered by the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle still apply.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions. Additionally, Amazon EC2 M6gd, C6gd and R6gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage are now available in EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn bare metal instances that can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for HPC/ML workloads are generally available. Amazon EC2 bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements. 

The AWS Solutions team recently updated AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon MSK, an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data. This update adds a template that accelerates development of streaming data workloads by reducing the need for you to model and provision resources using AWS CloudFormation; set up Amazon CloudWatch alarms, dashboards, and logging; and manually implement streaming data best practices in AWS.

AWS Solutions has updated the AWS MLOps Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that now provides a pipeline for model monitoring. In addition to the bring-your-own-model pipeline, the solution offers the ability to provision multiple model monitor pipelines to periodically monitor the quality of deployed ML models on Amazon SageMaker endpoints. This added functionality is key in ensuring model performance as customers can get notified when drift in model quality, bias, and feature importance occur in production.

AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes v1.3.0 is now available and includes support for mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) authentication on App Mesh. The AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh using Kubernetes directly. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and allowing high availability for your applications.

Today, AWS Copilot  launched version 1.2 which now provides more deployment capabilities for applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

Starting today, with Amazon EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts you can store snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes locally on Amazon S3 on Outposts to meet your data residency and local data processing needs. EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts require your Outpost to be provisioned with S3 on Outposts. You can also continue to back up your EBS volumes to snapshots stored on S3 in the AWS Region. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your data which can be used to enable disaster recovery and improve backup compliance.

AWS App Mesh now supports mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security) authentication that offers two-way peer authentication. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

Today, we are announcing the availability of a new AWS Wavelength Zone on KDDI’s 5G network in Osaka. Wavelength Zones are now available in 2 locations in Japan, including the previously announced Wavelength Zone in Tokyo.

AWS Amplify Hosting now allows users to monitor metrics for Amplify hosted applications in near real-time. Amplify provides a dashboard with metrics for Incoming requests, Bytes downloaded, Bytes uploaded, 4XX/5XX errors, and latency. You can create CloudWatch alarms in the Amplify console that send notifications when specific criteria are met. An alarm watches a single metric and sends an Amazon Simple Notification Service notification when the metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods.

Amazon Connect is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to eight. Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center service that helps organizations of any size deliver superior customer service at lower cost. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region allows U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

AWS Backup adds the ability to monitor your AWS Backup metrics and events via Amazon CloudWatch. AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and accounts, helping you support your regulatory compliance obligations and meet business continuity goals.

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now enables you to configure actions to be performed on a managed instance before and after installing patches. Using this feature, you can configure actions to perform pre-installation checks such as ensuring that “Windows Update Service” is running before patching instances. Furthermore, you can configure actions that perform post-installation health checks to ensure that your instances are healthy after being patched.  

You can now author AWS Lambda functions in Node.js 14 and use its new features, such as top-level-await, enhanced diagnostics, modifications of the streams APIs, and a revised JavaScript engine for better performance. Lambda functions written in Node.js 14 run on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. To learn more about writing functions in Node.js 14, see the Node.js programming model in the Lambda documentation.  

You can now configure AWS Elemental MediaLive to deliver live video directly to your own Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). For customers running specialized video workflows in their own Amazon VPC, MediaLive can now deliver live video to those applications without using public IPs. MediaLive already supports VPC inputs for a MediaLive channel.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) makes it easier to setup reverse Domain Name System (DNS) lookup for your Elastic IP addresses and improves your email deliverability. A reverse DNS lookup for an IP address returns its domain name and is commonly used by email services to filter out spams. This release improves your email deliverability from EC2 by enabling you to set reverse DNS lookup with just a few clicks and meet a key spam filter requirement.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds support to create canaries for your Amazon API Gateway APIs using the API blueprint. This simplifies your canary setup time and makes it easy to monitor your API Gateway APIs.

AWS Console Mobile Application users can now use Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain), Europe (Milan), and Africa (Cape Town) regions on the Console mobile app.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports 20.2 version of Oracle Application Express (APEX) for 12.1, 12.2, 18c and 19c versions of Oracle Database. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser.

Amazon S3 now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to S3 via a private endpoint within your virtual private network. Simplify your network architecture by connecting to S3 from on-premises or in AWS using private IP addresses in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs, configure firewall rules, or configure an Internet Gateway to access S3 from on-premises.

We are excited to announce a series of new capabilities that have been added to Amazon Macie to make it easier to configure, scope, and run sensitive data discovery in AWS, including support for scanning jobs that cover Amazon S3 buckets residing across multiple accounts, scoping of scans by object prefix, better cost estimation for visibility of spend before jobs are submitted, and sensitive data location information added to Macie findings.  

Today, AWS X-Ray launches Insights, which helps customers proactively discover issues in applications by using anomaly detection. X-Ray Insights enables developers and DevOps engineers to detect anomalies in fault rate for an application and then notify their teams on these issues and why it occurred.

You can now perform S3 Delete Object Tagging operations using Amazon S3 Batch Operations to delete object tags across many objects with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. S3 Batch Operations lets you perform repetitive or bulk actions like copying objects or replacing tag sets across billions of objects. S3 Batch Operations handles all the manual work, including managing retries and displaying progress.  

Application Auto Scaling’s scheduled scaling, commonly known as scheduled actions, now supports Local Time Zones in addition to the default Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You can now create the scheduled actions in your local time zone or another time zone from your network.  

Improved cold query performance is now available in South America (São Paulo), Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions.

AWS Launch Wizard now configures Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) clustering for High Availability (HA) at the SAP application layer.

Amazon GuardDuty introduces a new machine learning domain reputation model that can categorize previously unseen domains as highly likely to be malicious or benign based on their behavioral characteristics. GuardDuty uses this new capability to alert customers when an EC2 instance in their AWS environment is communicating with a domain identified as malicious and to improve the accuracy of existing domain based threat detections.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now allows you to drive up to 3x higher read throughput on your file system. For example, bursting mode file systems now provide 300MB/s of bursting read throughput, or 300MB/s per TiB of data stored in Amazon EFS standard, whichever is higher. If you have configured 1 GB/s of provisioned throughput, your application can now drive up to 3 GB/s for read operations (and continue to drive 1GB/s for write operations) without any application or configuration changes.  

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now publishes metrics at 1-minute resolution to Amazon CloudWatch, providing granular monitoring for Amazon SNS standard and FIFO topics. Previously, Amazon SNS published metrics to Amazon CloudWatch in 5-minute resolution.  

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 healthcare and life science applications. As of today, we’re excited to launch support for the automatic identification of protected health information (PHI) in your medical transcriptions. With automatic PHI identification, customers can reduce the cost, time, and effort expended on identifying PHI content through manual processes. PHI entities are labeled clearly with each output transcript, making it convenient to build additional downstream processing for a variety of purposes, such as redaction prior to text analytics.

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports assigning tags to networks, members, proposals, invitations, and nodes. Tags can be assigned to existing resources and to new resources at the time of creation. You can also define fine-grained access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions. Tags are key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize and search for resources, automate resource activities, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the following six additional AWS Regions:

• US West (N. California)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• EU (Stockholm)
• EU (London)
  
• EU (Paris)

AWS Control Tower now includes the ability for you to update up to 300 accounts in a registered AWS organizational unit (OU) with a single click from the AWS Control Tower console. This is particularly useful in cases where you update your AWS Control Tower landing zone and must also update your enrolled accounts to align them to the current landing zone version.

You can now extend AWS Control Tower governance to existing AWS organizational units (OUs) from within the AWS Control Tower console. This feature allows you to bring your top-level OUs and included accounts under AWS Control Tower governance. When you register an Organizational Unit, AWS Control Tower will perform a series of checks to ensure successful extension of governance and enrollment of accounts within the OU.

AWS Control Tower is now available in 5 additional AWS Regions: Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). AWS Control Tower is also available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). With this launch, AWS Control Tower is now available in 10 AWS Regions.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced support for multiple Private Marketplace catalogs, which allows customers to create unique sets of approved software available in AWS Marketplace for different AWS accounts within their organization. Before today, customers were limited to one Private Marketplace catalog per AWS account structure. This launch expands AWS Marketplace's Private Marketplace functionality to empower customers to scale their software governance for diverse user groups while increasing agility to enable a faster software procurement process.

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports the following delimiter options for its datasets giving you flexibility to bring in a variety of .csv and .tsv files into DataBrew for data preparation. The supported delimiters include:

• comma (,)
• colon (:)
• semi-colon (;)
• pipe (|)
• tab (\t)
• caret (^)
• space ( )

AWS announces the availability of Fluent Bit support for Amazon CloudWatch, a fully managed, pay-as-you-go monitoring and observability service for resources running on AWS and on-premises. CloudWatch Container Insights and Log Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your container logs collected from the Fluent Bit processor. Container Insights also provides access to the automated dashboards that summarize the performance and availability of the FluentBit Daemon set running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Kubernetes.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports major version 12. PostgreSQL 12 includes better index management, improved partitioning capabilities, and the ability to execute JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications. It also enables nondeterministic collations that support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that compute values with an expression, and many additional features.

Starting today, you can perform an in-place upgrade of your Amazon Aurora database cluster from PostgreSQL major version 11 to 12. Instead of backing up and restoring the database to the new version, you can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK or CLI.

AWS RoboMaker now supports data upload configurations in simulation jobs, which allows developers to define the type of simulation data they want to upload, choose the upload behavior, and reliably upload the simulation data to their preferred Amazon S3 output location. This functionality makes it easier for developers to review or analyze application output generated during a simulation run or reuse artifacts.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports encryption of data at rest and node-to-node encryption on existing domains, enabling organizations hosting sensitive workloads to meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

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 Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions. With this launch, Amazon FSx is now available in all standard AWS Regions.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now analyzes AWS Secrets Manager resource-based policies to help you discover secrets that can be accessed publicly or from other accounts or organizations. IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to identify and remediate unintended public, cross-account, or cross-organization sharing of your Secrets Manager secrets. This helps you reduce access to your secrets and adhere to the security best practice of least privilege.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Timestream can now be used for workloads that are subject to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Starting today, AWS CodePipeline is now available in the Europe South (Milan) Region.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with Cloud Storage Security: Antivirus for Amazon S3. Cloud Storage Security uses the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF) to send findings to Security Hub. Security Hub’s integrations with Forcepoint CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker), Forcepoint DLP (Data Loss Prevention), Forcepoint NGFW (Next-Generation Firewall), Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud Compute and Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud Enterprise are now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Forcepoint CASB, Forcepoint DLP, Forcepoint NGFW, Palo Alto Networks Prisma Compute and Palo Alto Networks Prisma Enterprise now send findings to Security Hub using the ASFF. To learn more, visit the Integration pages in the Security Hub console and click on the "Configuration" link for the integration to learn more about the integration and how to set it up.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables you to assign a configuration set to an email identity, such as a specific email domain or individual email address. This allows rules from the configuration set to be applied to all emails sent from that email identity. Configuration sets are a grouping of rules that enable customers to publish open, click, send, delivery, bounce, and complaint events from sent emails. They are also used to organize sending results from IP address pools. For example, customers can associate one pool of dedicated IP addresses for sending marketing communications, and another for sending transactional emails.

Starting today, you can launch Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server on Amazon EC2 R5d and Amazon EC2 M5d instance types with tempdb configured to use local instance storage. By placing tempdb data files and log files locally, you can achieve lower read and write latencies when compared to the standard EBS based offerings.

AWS Direct Connect is now live at Equinix ML2, Milano, Italy. This is the second Direct Connect location in Italy. Equinix ML2 compliments the existing CDLAN Srl in Via Caldera 21, Milano, Italy Direct Connect location. Customers in Italy can use both Milan locations to deploy location-redundant connectivity.

We are excited to announce that all Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types now receive CloudWatch metrics with 1-minute granularity at no additional cost. You can use CloudWatch metrics to monitor the performance and status of your Amazon EBS volumes. Additionally, you can use CloudWatch alarms to automatically perform actions or send SNS Topics based on CloudWatch Metrics.

The AWS Shield Advanced dashboard now displays additional mitigation metrics and network traffic timeline details for events detected on protected resources. This also includes details about the actions automatically taken to mitigate DDoS attacks. You can use this information to more easily evaluate your applications when an unexpected increase in traffic is detected by Shield Advanced and better understand the actions taken by Shield Advanced to protect your availability.

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, doubles the managed storage capacity for RA3.16XL and RA3.4XL node-types to 128 TB per node. If your data is growing rapidly, doubling the managed storage quota will help you analyze even more data without increasing your compute cost or changing your workload.

Starting today, the latest generation of burstable, general purpose Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney), Europe (London), North Amreicas (Canada Central, San Francisco), and South Americas (Sao Paulo) regions. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications.  

Starting today, customers can use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs to create EBS snapshots in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) Region directly from any block storage data, including on-premises data. With a set of API calls, customers can use EBS snapshots to store data in AWS, regardless of where it resides. This enables customers to achieve business continuity in AWS at a lower cost.

Amazon GuardDuty has added Amazon Detective hyperlink pivots to make it even easier to jump from a GuardDuty security finding into a pre-populated Amazon Detective investigation experience.

In a conversation, we often pause to lookup information or interrupt a speaker with an answer before they finish asking a question. Today we are launching streaming conversation APIs, so you can easily configure your bot to handle such pauses and interruptions that might occur in a conversation. With streaming capabilities, bot builders can quickly enhance the ability of virtual contact center agents and smart assistants. 

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Amazon Kendra, an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, can now be used for workloads subject to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. This is in addition to eligibility for U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), announced by Amazon Kendra previously.

Amazon CloudWatch agent now supports macOS on Amazon EC2 Mac instances and on-premises hosts. Mac instances are the first EC2 instance type to support macOS operating system from Apple. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data that provides you with a unified view of data across AWS resources, applications, and services. With this launch, developers and operators can now use the CloudWatch agent to monitor macOS workloads that run on AWS and on-premises hosts.

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications. 

AWS has updated the Monthly Uptime Percentage in the service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Cloud Map to 99.95%.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) syntax to help you read and write data from other systems more easily. 

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application. Today, Amazon Lex launches an enhanced, V2 management console and APIs that make it easier to build, deploy and manage bots. With the Lex V2 console and revised APIs, you can expedite your process in building virtual agents, conversational IVR system, self-service chatbots, or informational bots.

With Amazon CloudWatch agent, you can now use OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs to send application telemetry data to CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. This update enables the agent to receive OpenTelemetry metrics and traces from applications and services running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and is intended for existing CloudWatch agent users who want to begin monitoring applications with OpenTelemetry without installing or configuring multiple agents.

You can now scale your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) clusters on demand by changing the size or family of your brokers without reassigning Apache Kafka partitions. Changing the size or family of your brokers gives you the flexibility to adjust your MSK cluster’s compute capacity based on changes in your workloads, without interrupting your cluster I/O. In just a few clicks, you can scale up or scale down your Amazon MSK clusters’ compute capacity that includes CPU, memory, network throughput and I/O capacity. You will be charged for the chosen broker size or family per Amazon MSK standard pricing.

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

The GetResources operation of the Resource Groups Tagging API helps you return all the tagged or previously tagged resources located in the specified region in an AWS account. The GetResources operation now supports the ResourceARNList parameter. This new parameter accepts a list of up to 100 Amazon Resource Names (ARNs), and returns a list of the specified resources and the tag data attached to each. This new ResourceARNList parameter lets you keep track of the tag status of the AWS resources you care about. Instead of having to do multiple calls to check for each resource individually, and then assemble the results, this feature lets you check tag status for multiple ARNs and get the results using a single call.

Amazon Detective now provides enhanced IP address analytics enabling faster security investigations. With this new capability you can answer questions about a specific IP address such as “how long has this IP address been interacting with the resources in my accounts”, “which of my EC2 instances did this IP address communicate with?”, “What were the data volumes exchanged with this IP address and which ports did the communication occur on?”, or “Which users and roles invoked API operations from this IP address?”. By providing answers to questions such as these, Detective empowers security analysts to quickly determine IP address behavior and diagnose security incidents.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now supports Amazon CloudWatch 1-minute metrics in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions Amazon SQS already supports Amazon CloudWatch 1-minute metrics in all commercial regions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB version 10.5.8 in all AWS regions. This release includes fixes to bugs in MariaDB 10.5.7 affecting point-in-time restore, data replication, and tables with triggers that caused database crashes and data corruption. To read more about this version, please see the release notes for MariaDB 10.5.8.

The Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android now enables developers to support screen sharing in their iOS and Android applications. The Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android support screen share as a second video stream, in addition to the audio and camera video stream. Screen sharing for the Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android use the same content sharing concept introduced in the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript (except that audio sharing is not supported). By including screen share video in their iOS and Android applications, developers can enable users to share their mobile screen with other meeting participants or view shared content.

AWS Chalice now integrates with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). With CDK integration, you can now combine the familiar, decorator-based APIs of Chalice to write your application code with the entire CDK constructs to define your service infrastructure. This enables you to deploy your serverless application as a single, cohesive stack using the CDK.

AWS IoT is excited to announce the launch of the AWS IoT Device Client. This provides a free, open-source, and modular device-side reference implementation written in C++ that you can compile and install on Embedded Linux based IoT devices, allowing you to easily access AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Management, and AWS IoT Device Defender features by default. Moreover, since it is open-source, you can modify it to fit your use cases, and optimize it to your business needs as you move from proof of concept (PoC) to production.

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, now offers Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated endpoints to help you protect sensitive information. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information. U.S. Federal agencies and companies contracting with the U.S. Federal government can leverage this validation to help them better meet the FIPS security requirement to encrypt sensitive data on their Amazon FSx file systems.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today increased the default service quotas for ECS tasks per service and services per cluster. You can now launch up to 5,000 tasks per service and 5,000 services per cluster, an increase from 2,000 each.

We are excited to announce that AWS IoT SiteWise now supports date and time functions, and global time zones for use in metric and transform computations in the AWS IoT SiteWise asset model. You can now use date and time expressions to retrieve the current timestamp of equipment data in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) or in your local time zone, construct timestamps given input parameters such as year, month, day of the month and time, and extract different time fields such as year or month given a specific timestamp value. The date and time functions supported by AWS IoT SiteWise are listed below.

AWS Training and Certification has launched a new self-paced digital course: Introduction to Designing Data Lakes in AWS. This course is for learners ranging from storage administrators to data scientists who want to explore how to create and operate a data lake in a secure and scalable way.

Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the Europe (Ireland) region. 

PCI Eligible AWS services deployed in AWS Wavelength can now store, process, or transmit cardholder data (CHD) or sensitive authentication data (SAD), including merchants, processors, acquirers, issuers, and service providers. PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a proprietary information security standard administered by the PCI Security Standard Council. Many Wavelength use cases like interactive live video streams, AR/VR, and real-time gaming require in-app purchases. Starting today, you can use AWS Wavelength to build, deploy, and run applications that store and use sensitive payment card data in compliance with PCI DSS. 

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the pg_cron extension.  

We’re excited to introduce three free digital courses that help you learn how to configure, optimize, secure, and audit your Amazon S3 implementation. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, these intermediate courses include reading modules, demonstrations, quizzes, and optional self-paced labs. The self-paced labs cost up to 15 USD per lab (this cost is not included with free digital training on aws.training).

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports additional customization options for issuing CA and end entity certificates to meet additional use cases such as identity certificates, including smart card certificates. Customers can now include certificate attributes via API calls at the time of issuance in addition to inclusion in the certificate signing request (CSR). Additionally, with this launch, customers can configure the certificate start date and time to account for clock skew and other situations in which IoT or other devices reset to a specific date in the past when they lose power.

Today, the AWS SDKs and Tools announces general availability of the AWS SDK for Go, version 2 (v2). This release has a modular architecture that allows customers to model service dependencies in their application and independently control service client updates using Go modules. A marked improvement in CPU and memory utilization provides more resources for application’s compute and memory intensive tasks.

Now enterprises with Oracle databases can easily setup monitoring, alerting and dashboards for their EC2 and RDS Oracle instances on AWS with CloudWatch Application Insights. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers simply setup monitoring and enhanced observability for their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature automatically setups the metrics, telemetry and logs for monitoring the health and wellness of Oracle databases running in AWS. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now lets you attach IAM resource policies to VPC Endpoints. This allows you to control access to your ECS resources from VPC Endpoints, helping you meet compliance and regulatory requirements. 

The graphical user interface of Porting Assistant for .NET is now available in open source. Users can now view, modify, and contribute to its source code. The Porting Assistant for .NET data store and analytics engine , which includes information such as package compatibility and their known replacements, is already available through open source. With the new release, user can also participate in the UI development process.

The Amazon Builders’ Library published a new article titled, Making retries safe with idempotent APIs . AWS Principal Engineer Malcolm Featonby write about how you can use APIs to manage retries, he walks you through the strategies used at Amazon for using idempotent APIs to reduce complexity and handle retries.

AWS announces the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, a fully managed, integrated, and pay-as-you-go container monitoring and analytics service for CloudWatch on AWS Graviton2. CloudWatch Container Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your container metrics, Prometheus metrics, application logs, and performance events through automated dashboards in the CloudWatch console. These dashboards summarize the performance and availability of clusters, nodes or EC2 instances, services, tasks, pods, and containers running on Amazon Elastic Containers (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and Kubernetes. 

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is now available in four additional regions AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) feature that allows customers to find objects and scenes in images, unique to their business needs, with a simple inference API. Customers can create a custom ML model simply by uploading labeled images. No ML expertise is required.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Multi-Region Application Architecture, a reference architecture that models a serverless active/passive workload with asynchronous replication of application data and failover from a primary to a secondary AWS Region.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 X1 and X1e instances are available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) and Asia Pacific (Osaka) regions. X1 and X1e instances are memory-optimized instances designed for running large-scale and in-memory applications in the AWS Cloud. X1 instances offer up to 1,952 GiB of memory while X1e instances offer up to 3,904 GiB of memory. Both, X1 and X1e, instances are powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 processors and offer up to 128 vCPUs. EC2 X1 and X1e instances are ideal for running in-memory databases, like SAP HANA, high-performance databases, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Amazon Pinpoint now provides customers additional filters to perform more granular segmentation. Amazon Pinpoint customers can now increase the level of campaign and message personalization by being able to reach more specific audiences. 

Eighteen new or updated datasets from Illumina, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, IntelinAir, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories.

Learn how to define and provision cloud infrastructure using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) with our new digital course AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) Primer. This intermediate course is designed for developers that are familiar with AWS services, including AWS CloudFormation.

We’re excited to announce a free new digital course: Configuring and Deploying VPCs with Multiple Subnets. The course covers how to create a secure AWS network environment with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service. This intermediate, one-hour course includes reading modules, video demonstrations, a quiz, and an optional self-paced lab. The course is designed for network engineers, solutions architects, and cloud architects.

With the recent Amplify Library release, Amplify DataStore gains the ability to selectively sync a subset of your app data and to sort your app data. DataStore provides frontend web and mobile developers a persistent on-device storage repository for you to write, read, and observe changes to data even if you are online or offline, and seamlessly sync to the cloud as well as across devices.  

Amazon Cognito Identity Pools now enables you to use attributes from social and corporate identity providers to make access control decisions and simplify permissions management to AWS resources.

The AWS Snow Family console has been enhanced to make it easier for you to create and monitor your Snow data transfer and compute jobs. In addition to an improved user experience, the AWS Snow Family console will enable you to more easily understand which Snow device is more suitable for your use case depending on the size and type of your workloads. You can also now order an AWS Snow Family device with just a few clicks in the AWS Snow Family console.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud, using customized machine learning (ML) models. In just a few clicks you can create and train a fraud detection model, with no prior machine learning experience required.

Amazon EMR Release 5.32 now supports Amazon EMR on EKS. For more details on getting started with EMR on EKS, please see our documentation.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports the use of smart cards such as Personal Identity Verification (PIV) and Common Access Card (CAC) smart cards for authentication to AppStream 2.0 streaming instances. Smart cards are also supported for in-session authentication for streaming applications. With this launch, your users can use a smart card reader and smart card connected to their local computer to sign in to an AppStream 2.0 streaming instance that is joined to a Microsoft Active Directory domain. They can also use their local smart card reader and smart card to sign in to applications within their streaming session.  

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports usage of methods in formula expressions through Uniform Function Call Syntax (UFCS).

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 12.5, 11.10, 10.15, 9.6.20, and 9.5.24. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. We recommend that customers upgrade to any of the new minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL.

Today we are delighted to announce the global expansion of AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions powered by AWS AI Services and made available through the AWS Partner Network. With our partners, you can quickly implement AWS CCI solutions to add AWS machine learning (ML) capabilities into your current contact center infrastructure to increase operational efficiencies and deliver a better customer experience with no machine learning expertise required. AWS CCI provides solutions comprised of AWS AI-powered services such as Amazon Transcribe for call transcriptions, Amazon Translate for translation, Amazon Kendra for intelligent search, Amazon Lex for conversational AI, and Amazon Comprehend for language comprehension functionalities.

AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams, routing, load balancing, and other networking use cases by enabling instances on a Snow device to have direct access to an external network. By providing instances with layer 2 network access without any intermediary translation or filtering, customers gain increased flexibility over the network configuration of their Snow device along with improved network performance, enabling use cases that were previously not possible. 

You can now grant the privilege to run COPY and UNLOAD commands to specific users and groups in your Amazon Redshift cluster to create more fine-grained access control policy.

Amazon Lightsail now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on Lightsail resources like instances, containers, load balancers and CDN. With this launch, Lightsail resources operate in dual-stack mode, accepting both IPv4 and IPv6 client connections. This helps unlock application scenarios where some end user clients are IPv6 only.

You can now use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to deliver messages to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. This new subscription type for SNS enables message storage, analytics, and auditing by providing a simple way to send Amazon SNS messages to data lakes, data stores, and analytics services.

Starting today, you can perform an in-place upgrade of your Amazon Aurora database cluster from MySQL major version 5.6 to 5.7. Instead of backing up and restoring the database to the new version, you can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK or CLI. 

You can now monitor the storage size of your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) resources using Amazon CloudWatch. Using the Amazon EFS or Amazon CloudWatch consoles, you can view your file system's storage size over time, including size in each of the EFS storage classes - EFS Standard, and the cost-optimized EFS Infrequent Access.

The Amazon EC2 API now supports the IPv6 protocol, allowing applications to connect over IPv6. This allows you to more easily meet IPv6 compliance requirements, more easily integrate with existing IPv6-based on-premises applications, and remove the need for expensive networking equipment to handle the address translation between IPv4 and IPv6.

You can now manage custom tags for quantum tasks and notebooks directly in the Amazon Braket console. A tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and value pair. The ability to attach tags such as owner name, project, or cost center makes it easier for you to organize your resources into categories that are useful to you.

Using AWS CloudFormation, you can now model and provision AWS DataSync resources, along with other resources within your AWS infrastructure, in a safe, predictable, and repeatable way. This enables you to standardize the creation of DataSync resources such as Tasks and Locations across deployments.

Amazon EMR now natively integrates with Apache Ranger, allowing you to define, enforce, and audit fine-grained data access control. With this feature, you can define and enforce 1/ database, table, and column level authorization policies for Apache Spark and Apache Hive users to access data through Hive Metastore, and 2/ prefix and object level authorization policies when accessing data in Amazon S3 via the Amazon EMR File System (EMRFS), leveraging Amazon CloudWatch to capture auditing logs.

AWS Cloud Map is now certified as a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) service. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. With AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) tasks, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. You can then use these custom names to discover the location and metadata of cloud resources from your applications using AWS SDK and authenticated API queries. AWS Cloud Map is a highly available, managed service with rapid change propagation. 

AWS App Mesh is now certified as a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) service. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and enables options to tune for high-availability of your applications. 

We’ve updated the AWS Config console to make it more efficient for you to track your AWS resource configuration changes, and monitor your AWS Config rule and conformance packs compliance. The new AWS Config console experience now includes features, such as Advanced Query, Aggregators, and resource configuration and compliance timeline pages.

Amazon API Gateway now supports data mapping definitions from an HTTP API’s method request data (e.g. path parameters, query string and headers) to the corresponding integration request parameters and from the integration response data (e.g. headers) to the HTTP API method response parameters. 

AWS Transfer Family now supports file transfers for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, enabling AWS Transfer Family customers to easily and securely provide their business partners and end customers access to files stored in Amazon EFS file systems for use cases such as data distribution, supply chain workflows, content management, and web serving applications. With this launch, you can use AWS Transfer Family and Amazon EFS to migrate your file transfer workflows that rely on file storage without impacting your end users or application integrations, while eliminating the need to manage any file transfer infrastructure. 

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for MySQL is now available in preview. This open source database driver helps applications take advantage of clustered databases, such as Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, reducing failover times from minutes to seconds.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.  

You can now include AWS Glue DataBrew data preparation jobs in your workflows created using AWS Step Functions. This saves you time and allows you to orchestrate cleaning and data normalization steps into your analytics and machine learning workflows. 

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now supports Salesforce Pardot. Salesforce Pardot is a marketing automation solution that helps companies create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. AppFlow makes it easy for customers to configure data transfers with Salesforce Pardot in just a few clicks.

Amazon CloudSearch has updated the existing search instances with new instances that provide better availability and performance at the same pricing. The new instances are one to one replacements, but leverage newer generation EC2 instances underneath, thereby improving the overall stability of your domain.  

FreeRTOS now includes pre-configured projects that emulate real microcontroller (MCU) cores in software using the QEMU open source emulator. Running FreeRTOS in an emulator makes it easier to test applications using the actual binary code that will run on your MCU device, without having physical access to the MCU device. MCU emulations reduce development time by giving you access to enhanced debugging capabilities and the flexibility to run design experiments on multiple MCUs before you make the final MCU selection. This release includes a QEMU demo project for the Arm Cortex-M3 based MPS2+ FPGA. For more details, see FreeRTOS README.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports using up to 40 instance types with mixed instances policies. This doubles the number of instance types you can specify. Previously, you could only specify 20 instance types. Now, you can specify up to 40 instance types when you first create an Auto Scaling group, and when you update existing Auto Scaling groups. You can use the Overrides section in your mixed instances policy structure to input up to 40 instance types that Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can use to provision your On-Demand and Spot Instances. By using a variety of instance types, you can maintain your workload’s availability as you can provision your application’s resources across more Spot instance pools per Availability Zone and reduce the chance of getting insufficient capacity error in case of On-Demand. Running your application's resources across diverse Spot instance pools also allows you to further reduce your operating costs over time. 

Registration is now open for the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate beta exam, which will be available from February 16, 2021 to March 26, 2021. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate is intended for system administrators in cloud operations roles who have at least one year of hands-on experience with deployment, management, networking, and security on AWS.

Effective Jan 1st, 2021, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides tiered pricing for monthly API requests. Tiered pricing will provide discounts based on your monthly usage of Amazon SQS. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Using Amazon SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

Amazon Connect has launched a new version of Contact search. You can now use an enhanced UI to search with an extended eight-week timeframe getting unlimited results, use more filters, and multi-select values such as Agent name and Queue name. Search was also rebuilt to offer faster rate of return. This means you can build queries incrementally and explore results faster. You can also bookmark commonly used search criteria and review multiple chat transcripts, call recordings, and contact categorization results from the search page. We are maintaining the previous version of search during transition period and customers can switch back and compare with the previous experience with one click. To learn more, see the Contact Search documentation.

APN Navigate's newest track for all AWS Partners, APN Foundations Advanced, is now available. This track enables AWS Select Tier Partners to achieve AWS Advanced Tier as a Consulting or Technology Partner and can be found in APN Partner Central in your existing APN Navigate Foundations Toolbox.

Voicemail Queues for Amazon Connect is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from CloudHesive, an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner. Voicemail Queues for Amazon Connect helps solve common challenges around voicemail workflow management and provides management insight and oversight around agent responsiveness to voicemail contacts. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers evaluation of and integration with current environments, solution design, testing and deployment, and post-go-live support.

Accelerated Cloud Engineering FedRAMP Launchpad is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Coalfire, an AWS Government Competency Partner. Accelerated Cloud Engineering FedRAMP Launchpad can help you create an operationally secure cloud environment ready for regulatory compliance audits in as little as 60 days. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers planning workshops, architecture design and deployment, functionality and compliance validation, and audit documentation.

APN Navigate's newest track for all AWS Partners, APN Foundations ISV Partner Path, is now available. This track guides AWS Partners through best practices to grow an AWS business through the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, implement AWS best practices, and promote AWS-verified solutions to customers through Partner programs that best serve Partner's business needs.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the October 2020 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 Enterprise Edition. The October 2020 PSU for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 Standard Edition and Standard Edition One will be launched in early 2021. 

Amazon EC2 R5B Instances are now certified for SAP workloads. 

AWS Certificate Manager(ACM), including Private Certificate Authority(CA) is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and as FedRAMP High in GovCloud(US-West) and GovCloud(US-East). These services are also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in these regions.

The Serverless Image Handler solution combines highly available, trusted AWS services and the open source image processing suite Sharp to enable fast and cost-effective image manipulation on the AWS Cloud. The solution automatically deploys and configures a serverless architecture that is optimized for dynamic image manipulation, and uses Amazon CloudFront for global content delivery and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for reliable and durable cloud storage at a low cost. 

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.1 includes several bug fixes and improvements such as persisting an update in group membership (KAFKA-10284) and improved CPU usage during consumer rebalancing (KAFKA-10134). For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.1.  

Amazon Detective's resource summary home page now provides a dashboard of user and resource behavior that helps you visualize and investigate trends that may lead to security issues. For example, you can use the dashboard to highlight users making the most frequent successful or failed AWS control plane operations, determine security principals making API calls from previously unseen geographies, and identify Amazon EC2 instances producing unusual network traffic. The new resource summary home page provides interactive panels of information so that you can sort, select, and expand to identify resources of interest. Each resource comes with a behavioral profile page that allows you to review deeper insights and summaries extracted from up to 12 months of data to investigate activity such as users and IPs that have interacted with a given resource and the specific API calls made to it.

Amazon CloudFront announces a new Regional Edge Cache (REC) located in US West (Northern California). As part of this launch, a few CloudFront Edge locations that previously sent their origin requests through the REC in Oregon will now send their requests through the REC in Northern California. Because of their proximity to Northern California, or more direct connections to Northern California, these Edge locations will see as much as a 60% reduction in latency fetching content from the California REC when compared to the Oregon REC. 

CloudFront now operates 13 Regional Edge Caches around the world which act as mid-tier caching layers positioned between CloudFront’s Edge locations and your origins. These mid-tier caches provide incremental cache width to retain your content for longer periods of time, and further protect your origin from traffic spikes. Like all Regional Edge Caches, the location in Northern California is provided free of charge and automatically included by default for your CloudFront distributions. No configuration change is required to take advantage of CloudFront’s Regional Edge Caches. 

For more information on CloudFront’s global infrastructure, including the location of each Regional Edge Cache, go to Amazon CloudFront Key Features page.

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

Amazon GuardDuty has incorporated new machine learning techniques that have proven highly effective at discerning potentially malicious user activity from anomalous, but benign operational behavior within AWS accounts. This new capability continuously models API invocations within an account, incorporating probabilistic predictions to more accurately isolate and alert on highly suspicious user behavior. This new approach has proven to identify malicious activity associated with known attack tactics, including discovery, initial access, persistence, privilege escalation, defense evasion, credential access, impact, and data exfiltration. The new threat detections are available for all existing Amazon GuardDuty customers with no action required and at no additional costs.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the pg_partman extension.

Amazon CloudFront announces its first edge location in Jakarta, Indonesia. Viewers served by this new edge location can expect up to a 30% improvement in first-byte latency. Traffic delivered from this edge location is included within CloudFront's Asia Pacific region pricing. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure.

The AWS Architectutre Center has launched four additional technology categories and two additional industries. The Architecture Center now features best practices, reference architecture diagrams, reference architecture deployments, whitepapers, tech guides, and more, organized around Cost Optimization, End User Computing, Internet of Things, and Microsoft.