April 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of EMR Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. EMR Studio provides fully managed Jupyter Notebooks, and tools like Spark UI and YARN Timeline Service to simplify debugging. EMR Studio uses AWS Single Sign-On and allows you to log in directly with your corporate credentials without logging into the AWS console.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon EC2 G4ad instances which provide the best price performance for graphics intensive applications in the cloud are now available in US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt and London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Canada (Central). G4ad instances are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors, and provide up to 45% better price performance over G4dn instances for graphics intensive applications such as virtual workstations, game streaming, and graphics rendering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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