January 2021

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.

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.

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.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the pg_partman extension.

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. 

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.  

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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. 

Amazon EC2 R5B Instances are now certified for SAP workloads. 

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