2021

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.

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 need to either maintain the record of scaling activities for deleted Auto Scaling groups or ask support team to get the record for the same. 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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

Patches 1.8.1 / 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 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.  

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.  

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Amazon EC2 R5B Instances are now certified for SAP workloads. 

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 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 RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the pg_partman extension.