May 2021

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.2.37, 10.3.28, 10.4.18, and 10.5.9. We recommend that customers upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community. Amazon RDS customers can leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade their databases to the latest minor version during scheduled maintenance windows. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including automatic minor version upgrades, in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon SageMaker customers can now select ml.G4dn instances to run Batch Transform and Processing Jobs. Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform enables you to run predictions on datasets stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for scenarios where you are working with large batches of data and don’t need sub-second latency. Amazon SageMaker Processing enables you to run your pre- or post-processing workloads, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation with a fully managed experience.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now allows customers to rollback the latest customer approved version of ML models deployed to SageMaker hosted endpoints to a previous customer approved version of the model. Customers can now change the status of the deployed model package version in the model registry from "Approved" to "Rejected". This will trigger the model deployment CI/CD pipeline to roll back the current version of the model deployed to the SageMaker endpoint to the latest previous version of the model that was approved for deployment.

Starting today, Amazon EMR Studio is available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, and Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions.

AWS Glue Studio now allows you to specify the settings for your streaming extract-transform-and-load (ETL) job in the visual job editor. This feature allows you to optimize your AWS Glue streaming ETL jobs for your use case. You can choose the window size for reading data from the data stream, whether to detect the schema of each record or use the schema from the AWS Glue Data Catalog, and connection settings that fine-tune how the AWS Glue job reads from the stream.

Amazon CloudWatch now gives operators and developers visibility and actionable insights into their utilization of control plane APIs across AWS services. You can find API call count metrics organized by AWS service in the CloudWatch console, and search and discover usage metrics from thousands available in the AWS/Usage namespace.

Synchronous Express Workflows can now be triggered with Amazon API Gateway’s REST APIs, allowing you to build interactive applications and orchestrate high-volume, short-duration microservices.

Amazon CloudWatch Resource Health is a new feature that enables you to automatically discover, manage, and visualize the health and performance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) hosts across your applications in a single view. With Resource Health, you can visualize the health of your Amazon EC2 hosts in a map (or list) view by performance dimension such as CPU or Memory, and slice and dice hundreds of hosts using tags and available filters such as instance type, instance state, and status check. This helps in reducing your Mean time to resolution (MTTR) by easily isolating EC2 hosts that are performing sub-optimally.

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

Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces Dimension support for Metric Filters. CloudWatch Logs Metric Filters allow you to create filter patterns to search for and match terms, phrases, or values in your CloudWatch Logs log events, and turn these into metrics that you can graph in CloudWatch Metrics or use to create a CloudWatch Alarm. Now with Dimension support for Metric Filters you can create metrics from JSON or space-delimited logs with up to 3 dimensions, where a dimension is a key-value pair that is part of the identity of a metric.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to deploy Microsoft SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) using fully- managed, shared storage in Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (Amazon FSx). AWS Launch Wizard provides a simple console-based provisioning experience to deploy a SQL Server FCI high-availability environment without having to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources. The complexity and cost of running your SQL Server Always On deployments are reduced when you use Amazon FSx as shared storage.

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now provides developers with convenient IDE functionality to create and manage deployments from their code or image repositories using AWS AppRunner. AWS App Runner that was recently announced  is a new service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. Starting today, Autopilot performs cross validation on input datasets under 50,000 rows for all problem types - regression, binary classification and multi class classification. With cross validation, you benefit from increased robustness to undesired splits between training and validation data, resulting in improved model quality. Depending on dataset and problem type, you may see improved model quality by up to 35%.

We're excited to announce that Redshift ML is now generally available. Amazon Redshift ML enables you to create, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using familiar SQL commands. With Amazon Redshift ML, you can now leverage Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service, without moving your data or learning new skills.

On Dec 17, 2020, Amazon Simple Queue Service supported a preview of high throughput mode for FIFO queues. Today, Amazon SQS announces the general availability of high throughput mode for FIFO queues, allowing you to process up to 3000 messages per second per API action. This is a tenfold increase compared to current SQS FIFO queue throughput quota.

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports nest and unnest transformations to help users pack or unpack data into columns to manipulate their datasets. With these transformations, users can now easily extract data from nested json string fields or combine data without writing any code.

All AWS System and Organization Controls (SOC) (1,2,3) compliant services deployed in AWS Wavelength are now in scope. You can download the SOC Report in AWS Artifact. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio is now available, enabling you to interactively query data streams in real time, and easily build and run stream processing applications using SQL, Python, and Scala. With a few clicks, you can launch a serverless notebook to perform ad hoc querying and live data exploration on data streams, and get results in seconds. From the notebook interface, you can also easily build and deploy your code as a stream processing application with durable state and autoscaling to continuously generate actionable insights in real time with no additional development effort.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file storage for compute workloads, now supports data compression, enabling you to reduce the cost of storage for machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), and analytics data sets.

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, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra’s Query Suggestions feature to guide end users towards more commonly asked questions and save them time in their search for the information they need.

CloudWatch Synthetics, a feature that supports monitoring your REST APIs, URLs, and website content every minute, 24/7, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With CloudWatch Synthetics, you can continually verify your customer experience even when there is no customer traffic on your applications. This helps you discover issues before your customers do and react quickly to fix them.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere, a new capability of Amazon ECS. Amazon ECS Anywhere provides a fully managed container orchestration service that enables customers to run and manage containerized applications on-premises using the same APIs, cluster management, workload scheduling, monitoring, and deployment pipelines they use with Amazon ECS today. Customers can use Amazon ECS Anywhere on their own infrastructure by connecting their servers or instances to the managed Amazon ECS control plane. Enterprises who need to keep their data on-premises for latency or regulatory reasons can now use a single and consistent cloud-managed container orchestrator across their hybrid footprint.

The Alarms feature in AWS IoT Events allows you to set up, visualize and manage rule-based alerts for devices, equipment, and processes. You can receive alerts via SMS or email in near-real time when equipment data breaches thresholds, allowing operations teams to take timely actions to reduce unplanned equipment downtime.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) version of Seoyeon, a Korean Polly voice. Now Amazon Polly customers can enjoy Seoyeon either as an NTTS or Standard Korean voice.

You can now route traffic from your custom root domains (such as example.com) to your Lightsail container services using Lightsail DNS. Lightsail DNS already supported creating CNAME records mapping to your container services. With this launch, Lightsail DNS supports aliasing your custom root domain to your container service’s default domain which was not possible before. Thus, you can create an A/AAAA record in your Lightsail hosted DNS zone pointing the zone apex to a container service.

You can now create Amazon API Gateway REST APIs to trigger a Synchronous Express Workflow from AWS Step Functions and respond with the output of that workflow.

AWS Training and Certification has launched four, new self-paced digital courses, Building Modern .NET Applications on AWS, How to Buy Cloud - Strategies for Cloud Procurement, Improve your Java Code using Amazon CodeGuru, and Improve your Python Code using Amazon CodeGuru on Coursera, edX, and Udemy. 

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, is now Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible to help you run healthcare workloads more easily.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility now supports T3.large instances, in addition to the T3.medium, T3.small, and R5 class instances already available. Using T3.large instances with Amazon Aurora MySQL is a cost-effective option for smaller workloads such as test, dev, and QA, while still giving you the option to use larger class instances for production deployments. 

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports using S3 Block Public Access when storing certificate revocation links (CRL) in S3 buckets.

AWS Security Hub now supports a bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM).  You can now automatically create and update issues in Atlassian JSM from AWS Security Hub findings. Updates to those issues in Atlassian JSM will be synced with the findings in AWS Security Hub. This integration is available via the AWS Service Management Connector for JSM app. After downloading the app, you can decide if you want to send all findings, or only certain findings with specific severity levels to JSM. When you make an update to various fields in an issue, such as state or priority, those changes are automatically sent to AWS Security Hub so that AWS Security Hub always has the latest and correct information about that issue.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances with 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB of memory (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge, u-9tb1.112xlarge, and u-12tb1.112xlarge) are available in US West (Oregon) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions. The global availability of these new instances now includes US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US-West), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS regions. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with OD and Savings Plan purchase options. For more information, visit the Amazon EC2 High Memory page.

Amazon EMR 6.3 release version now supports Apache Spark 3.1.1 and provides runtime performance improvements with EMR Runtime for Spark.

You can now launch Apache Airflow 2.0 environments on Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA). Apache Airflow 2.0 is the latest version of the popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows.

Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ 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.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now maintains read availability through writer node restarts. Previously, when a writer node restarted, all nodes in an Aurora MySQL cluster restarted as well. With today’s launch, reader nodes will continue to serve read requests during a writer node restart, improving read availability in the cluster.  

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

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with SageMaker Experiments, a capability that lets customers organize, track, compare, and evaluate their ML experiments. Customers can now compare metrics such as model training accuracy across multiple executions of their SageMaker Pipelines just as easily as they compare such metrics across multiple trials of a ML model training experiment. SageMaker Pipelines automatically creates an Experiment with the pipeline name and an Experiment trial for every execution of the pipeline. The creation of an experiment for a pipeline and a trial for every pipeline execution is turned on by default. You can choose to opt-out of the auto-creation.

We are excited to announce the launch of our updated, three-day classroom training course, Migrating to AWS. This course helps you to build skills to migrate with confidence to the AWS Cloud to achieve business outcomes, innovate, and advance your professional future. Migrating to AWS is ideal for solution architects, software engineers, IT project managers, operation leads, and anyone with a role in planning or executing a migration to the AWS Cloud.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.7.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.7.1 includes several bug fixes. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.7.1.

Amazon Braket now offers a fully managed, density matrix simulator, DM1, to simulate quantum circuits with noise. DM1 helps you investigate the effects of realistic noise on your quantum algorithms to inform error mitigation strategies to get more accurate results from today’s quantum computing devices. With DM1, you can simulate circuits with up to 17 qubits and run up to 35 simulations in parallel, to speed up your experiments. For rapid prototyping and debugging, you can now also use the local noise simulator in the Amazon Braket SDK.

AWS IoT is excited to announce the public preview of “Job Templates” for AWS IoT Device Management Jobs. Job Templates make deploying remote actions faster, easier, and more secure. IoT developers and fleet administrators can pre-define the remote operations to be executed on their IoT devices, and specify key deployment parameters like rollout rates, abort thresholds, and timeout criteria. Fleet operators and technicians who focus on fleet monitoring and troubleshooting can identify and select specific groups of devices as targets, and use these pre-defined Job Templates to securely deploy remote actions to their targets.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for PostgreSQL version 13 in preview mode. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to PostgreSQL 13 databases, and from PostgreSQL 13 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets. 

AWS Transfer Family customers can now use AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD), on-premises and self-managed AD in AWS to authenticate their file transfer end users, enabling seamless migration of file transfer workflows that rely on AD, without changing end users’ credentials or needing a custom authorizer.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, expands its features with Marketo. Customers now can select Leads and Activities Objects in Marketo and move these into AWS Services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift or Amazon Lookout for Metrics. In addition customers can also synchronize these objects with Salesforce, Snowflake, and Upsolver, or create new Leads objects in Marketo based on data in Amazon S3 or Salesforce.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of a DB instance with a single pluggable database (PDB) using the Oracle multitenant architecture, which enables the DB instance to operate as a multitenant container database (CDB). A PDB is a set of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects that logically appears to a client as a non-CDB.  

Data subscribers on AWS Data Exchange can now pay for their data products in installments with custom payment schedules created by their data provider. Before this launch, subscribers paid the total price of their private offer at the start of the subscription. With the introduction of payment schedules, providers can now create private offers for subscribers that generate up to 36 invoices on specific dates throughout a subscription.

AWS Lambda Extensions are a new way to integrate your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance with AWS Lambda. Starting today, extensions are generally available with new performance improvements and an expanded set of partners including Imperva, Instana, Sentry, Site24x7, and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

Amazon Lumberyard 1.28 Beta is now available for download, bringing you a range of updates including updated Twitch Gem, an improved setup and installation experience, plus various smaller improvements and over 40 bug fixes.

Starting today, you can create and manage reserved capacity on Amazon EC2 instances on your Outposts. You can also share the Capacity Reservations on Outposts with other AWS accounts within your organization. With Capacity Reservations on Outposts, you can ensure that you always have access to EC2 capacity when you need it, for as long as you need it.

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

AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that recommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics. Today, Compute Optimizer is launching several updates to its EC2 instance type recommendations. Through these updates, Compute Optimizer has improved recommendation quality, doubled the number of supported EC2 instance types, offered deeper insights into the recommendations, and provided customers a way to identify OS configuration changes needed to apply recommendations.

You can now view and manage all Amazon CloudWatch Logs transactional API service quotas with Service Quotas. Service Quotas consolidates the default values and your account specific quotas for CloudWatch Logs in one single view with the Service Quotas console. With the CloudWatch Logs and Service Quotas integration you can now easily view and adjust your quotas.

You can now use Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs) while creating clusters in Amazon EMR. When rotating a long running cluster, you might have strict requirements on the instance types and Availability Zones for the new instances you provision. Using Capacity Reservations, you can get capacity assurance to complete the cluster rotation without interruptions. You can also use Capacity Reservations to provision a group of successive short-lived clusters for individual workloads such that when you terminate a cluster, the next cluster can use the Capacity Reservations.

Now, you can manage service quotas for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, through the Service Quotas console.

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

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports deployment of containerized Java and Springboot web applications to AWS App Runner. With this feature, users can now target App Runner as deployment runtime in addition to ECS and EKS that were previously supported. Using App2Container, developers can take a running Linux based web application, analyze, containerize, and deploy to App Runner in few simple steps and receive a secure URL to access the webservice. Users can take advantage of continuous deployment, auto-scaling, and monitoring of deployed webservice offered by App Runner.

Today we are excited to announce that Amazon Forecast can now generate predictions for 5X more items using 3X more historic data points, increasing the number of items and the amount of historic information that your forecasting models can learn from and predict.

Amazon Rekognition is a machine learning powered image and video analysis service that can identify objects and concepts, people, faces, inappropriate content, as well as detect text. Rekognition text detection detects and reads text in an image, and returns bounding boxes for each word found. Starting today, Rekognition can detect up to 100 words in an image, up from the previous limit of 50 words. In addition, you get higher accuracy, especially for cases with illegible text, which are correctly rejected now. Lastly, the average latency for each text detection API call is reduced by up to 70%.

AWS X-Ray now supports VPC endpoints. With this feature, you can communicate with X-Ray service from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing that traffic to the public internet. VPC endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, like X-Ray, on the private AWS network.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) will support the use of longer resource identifiers (IDs) for newly created file systems and mount targets. You can opt into this change by using the API, Command Line Interface (CLI), Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and Amazon EFS Console.

Starting today, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS is now available in the South America (São Paulo) region.

Starting today, customers can easily enable AWS Wavelength Zones themselves from the new “Settings” section of the EC2 Console or ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API . Once enabled, customers can create and manage resources in the Wavelength Zone using the same APIs and Management Console they use for Availability Zones in AWS Regions.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now allows customers to specify custom dependencies between the steps of the model building pipeline. Previously, specifying the output of a step as the input to another was the only option for specifying the dependency and the execution order between the two steps of the model building pipeline. Now, customers have the option of explicitly listing the steps that a given step execution needs to wait on.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports using the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API to install and manage CoreDNS and kube-proxy in addition to existing support for the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin. This makes it easier to define consistent Kubernetes clusters and keep them up to date using Amazon EKS.

Using the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, customers can now create, locally debug, and deploy AWS Lambda functions written in Java and Go. Java users will be able to step-through debug Lambda functions built with Maven and Gradle in Java 8, Java 8.al2, and Java 11, while Go users will be able to do the same with Lambda functions built in Golang 1.14+.

Now you can easily setup monitoring, alarms and dashboards for your applications deployed in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Kubernetes on EC2 containers running on AWS with CloudWatch Application Insights. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers monitor and troubleshoot their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature adds monitoring tier options for capturing the metrics, telemetry and logs for monitoring the health and wellness of applications running in containers on AWS.

The Amazon Chime SDK for Javascript now enables developers to support audio and video functionalities in a iOS WKWebView component. With support for WKWebView, developers can now use the Amazon Chime SDK for Javascript within a native iOS application's WKWebView component to enable audio and video capabilities. 

Starting today, you can create Amazon Lightsail instances, databases, and more in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.

We recently updated Customizations for AWS Control Tower, a reference implementation that makes it easier to build your own guardrails and integrations with the AWS Control Tower service. Customizations for AWS Control Tower v2.1 is for new or existing AWS Control Tower customers that want to use the managed service, but have additional requirements that are not yet supported by the service. AWS Partners can also use the framework to develop and package their own custom guardrails and integrations for AWS Control Tower.

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Forecast Weather Index is now also available in the South America region. Weather Index can increase your forecasting accuracy, by automatically including the latest local weather information in your demand forecasts with one click and at no extra cost. Weather conditions influence consumer demand patterns, product merchandizing decisions, staffing requirements and energy consumption needs – however - acquiring, cleaning, and effectively using live weather information for demand forecasting is challenging and requires ongoing maintenance. With this launch, customers who have been using Weather Index for US, Canada and Europe region can now also use Weather Index for the South America region to include a 14-day weather forecasts with one click to your demand forecast.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now natively supports Predictive Scaling so you can proactively scale out your Auto Scaling group to be ready for upcoming demand. Predictive Scaling can help you avoid the need to over-provision capacity, resulting in lower EC2 cost, while ensuring your application’s responsiveness. (Previously, Predictive Scaling was only available via AWS Auto Scaling Plans.)

You can now configure EventBridge to send and receive events between event buses in the same AWS account and Region, to aggregate all your events from different event buses into a single event bus. You can also fan out events from a single event bus to other event buses, making it easier to decouple applications and produce more extensible, maintainable event-driven architectures within your organization.

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

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon MSK, an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data.

Today, AWS announced AWS Application Cost Profiler, a managed service that enables you to view apportioned cost of AWS resources for software applications shared by multiple users (a.k.a. tenants).

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. Starting today, you have a convenient option to auto deploy the best trained model after running an experiment to create models. With auto deploy option enabled, SageMaker Autopilot will automatically create an endpoint and deploy your best model, enabling you to run real time inference on your endpoint. You can modify or delete the endpoint at anytime to meet your changing inference needs.

Today, AWS Copilot announced the general availability of version 1.7, which enables you to easily deploy request-driven web services with AWS App Runner in addition to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). AWS App Runner is a fully managed container application service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks.

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that allows customers to automatically set up a chatbot application with sample interactions. The new functionalities help customers scale the use of their chatbots with integrations with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS License Manager now allows you to take periodic snapshots of your license usage across all your AWS accounts and store these reports directly into your S3 bucket. You can use these reports to track your historical license usage, manage compliance, and reduce licensing spend by accounting for maximum license usage. You can enable, disable, and modify the frequency of report generation based on your license tracking requirements. 

Today, we are pleased to announce that AWS Compute Optimizer now supports exporting Amazon EBS volume and AWS Lambda function memory size recommendations as csv files to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

AWS IoT Core Device Advisor, a fully managed cloud-based test capability for validating IoT devices, is now generally available in us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, and ap-northeast-1 regions. Now, developers can use pre-built tests provided by Device Advisor to validate that their IoT devices implement best practices for reliable and secure connectivity with AWS IoT Core. Device Advisor’s pre-built tests help developers to quickly validate their device software against best practices for usage of TLS, MQTT, Device Shadow, and IoT Jobs thereby reducing the cost and time of development, testing and deployment.

Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Highlights of the Kubernetes 1.20 release include RuntimeClass and Process ID Limits reaching stable status, API Priority and Fairness being enabled by default, and kubectl debug reaching beta status. Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.20 in the Kubernetes project release notes.  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded its integrity and confidentiality of secure communication to Apache Kafka self-managed and Amazon MSK endpoints. Using AWS DMS with improved Transport Layer Security (TLS) authentication and encryption, you can now use SSL encryption and authentication or SASL-SSL to secure Kafka endpoint connections. This security enhancement addresses the increasing demand of cloud security and improves the security of AWS DMS.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN), a new service that enables organizations to move applications to AWS without making changes to the applications, their architecture, or the migrated servers. AWS Application Migration Service is the primary migration service recommended for lift-and-shift migrations to AWS. Customers currently using CloudEndure Migration or Server Migration Service (SMS) are encouraged to switch to AWS Application Migration Service for future migrations. Visit our product comparison page for specific reasons to use CloudEndure Migration or SMS.

AWS Amplify Hosting now supports deploying and hosting server-side rendered (SSR) apps built with the Next.js framework with zero configuration. Frontend developers can now leverage all of Amplify Hosting’s CI/CD and hosting capabilities for deploying SSR apps. Next.js is a React framework that combines build-time static site generation (SSG) and dynamic server-side rendering (SSR) to enable developers to build performant, SEO-friendly web apps. Amplify Hosting supports all Next.js features in version 9.x.x including SSR API routes, dynamic pages, and automatic pre-rendering.

Today, we are excited to announce support for AWS Cloud Digital Interface (AWS CDI) flows in AWS Elemental MediaConnect. A MediaConnect CDI flow allows you to build uncompressed video workflows in the AWS Cloud, using MediaConnect to link different products and services together into a virtualized live video production system. With MediaConnect CDI flows, you can build additional on-demand live video production capacity at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premises capital investment, paying for transport only when you use it. MediaConnect CDI flows support uncompressed video transport up to UHD 2160p60 at a latency between nodes of only 1 frame. 

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) company, announces the general availability of AWS App Runner, a fully managed container application service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks. Customers simply provide source code, a container image, or deployment pipeline, and App Runner automatically builds and deploys the web application, load balances traffic, scales on demand, and monitors application health.

AWS CloudFormation announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0. This release makes Guard a general-purpose policy-as-code evaluation tool. With Guard 2.0, developers can write policy rules for any JSON- and YAML-formatted file such as Kubernetes configurations and Terraform JSON configurations, in addition to already supported CloudFormation templates.

Enterprise Cloud Foundation Accelerator is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from World Wide Technology (WWT), an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Enterprise Cloud Foundation Accelerator enables customers to immediately find value and begin the use of AWS by building out a new, secure, multi-account AWS environment. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a discovery workshop, foundational environment design, and deployment of your environment.

Amazon Macie now allows you to define a run-time criteria to determine which S3 buckets should be included in a sensitive data discovery job. When a job runs, Macie identifies the S3 buckets that match your criteria and automatically adds or removes them from the job’s scope. This capability makes it easier for you to manage S3 buckets that should be monitored for sensitive data and also removes the need to create new jobs to monitor newly created or modified S3 buckets.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Connect is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, Amazon Lex is available in the AWS Canada (Central) region. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex combines advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text. This enables you to build applications with engaging users experiences and lifelike interactions. With Amazon Lex, you can easily create sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents and IVR systems.  

Starting today, you can now add or remove filters by activity type on a file to narrow your results for both iOS and Android. The Activity Feed is designed to easily track all activities related to your files and folders, allowing you to stay connected to what’s going on. Now with the ability to filter by activity type, you can apply filters to refine your search which allows you to quickly read through updates and changes in real-time for the files you own as well as those that have been shared with you.  

Amazon DynamoDB global tables now support AWS CloudFormation, which means you can create global tables and manage their settings with CloudFormation templates. Global tables build upon the global footprint of DynamoDB to deliver a fully managed, multi-Region, multi-active database. You can use global tables to replicate table updates automatically across the AWS Regions you select, and you can set up global tables at any time with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK.

See Amazon DynamoDB pricing for pricing details and a full list of supported AWS Regions. For more information about global tables, see Global Tables: Multi-Region Replication with DynamoDB, and see What Is AWS CloudFormation? for more information about working with CloudFormation.
 

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. We are pleased to launch support for the automatic identification of protected health information (PHI) in your medical transcriptions feature for batch processing. With automatic PHI identification, customers can now reduce the cost, time, and effort spend on identifying PHI content from both live audio streams and static recordings. 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.

Today, AWS Premium Support launches Support Automation Workflows (SAW) to enable self-service diagnosis and remediation for AWS customers. Further, we are launching additional advanced runbooks that will be available to Enterprise and Business Support customers for faster issue resolution.

AWS Step Functions now supports a service integration with Amazon EventBridge, enabling you to send custom events from your Step Functions workflows to an EventBridge event bus without writing custom code. You can now emit custom events from your workflows that allow loosely-coupled applications to react to steps in your business logic, orchestrated by Step Functions. You can also use this integration to send events to applications in a different region or a different account by using EventBridge’s cross-account and cross-region capabilites.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports cold storage, a fully-managed storage tier that makes it easy for customers to securely store and analyze their infrequently accessed data on-demand, at a lower cost than other storage tiers. You pay for compute only when you need it. Cold storage allows you to retain any amount of data in your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain while reducing cost per GB to near Amazon S3 storage prices.

Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra to build intelligent search applications in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Region.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports PostgreSQL 12.5 for production deployment. Amazon RDS on Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. You can deploy Amazon RDS on Outposts to set up, operate, and scale MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL relational databases on-premises, just as you would in the cloud.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API now offers Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated endpoints. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information. If you require use of FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules, you can now do so with RDS Data API.

Amazon EMR integration with Apache Ranger is now available on EMR 6.3, 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 WAF now supports log filtering, enabling you to specify which web requests are logged and which requests are discarded from log after the inspection. You can use log filtering to keep only the information you want to analyze. Log filtering can also help you save on log delivery and storage costs by reducing the amount of log data stored.

Amazon Connect now allows customers to subscribe to a near real-time stream of contact (voice calls, chat, and task) events (e.g., call is queued) in your Amazon Connect contact center. These events include when a voice call, chat, or task is initiated, queued to be assigned to an agent, connected to an agent, transferred to another agent or queue, and disconnected. Contact events can be used to create analytics dashboards to monitor and track contact activity, integrate into workforce management (WFM) solutions to better understand contact center performance, or to integrate applications that react to events (e.g., call disconnected) in real-time. Amazon Connect contact events are published via Amazon EventBridge, and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon EventBridge AWS console and creating a new rule.

Amazon Athena users can now query databases and tables across AWS accounts through built-in support for AWS Glue Data Catalogs in other AWS accounts. Customers need a central data catalog to enable analysts and data scientists to access their data lake without the complexity of replicating catalog metadata in individual AWS accounts. Today’s release makes it easier to connect AWS Glue Data Catalogs in other accounts using the Athena console or API.

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

Machine Downtime Monitor on AWS is a new solution that provides a dashboard to industrial customers to help them monitor the health of factory floor equipment, which enables easier identification of machine breakdowns and quicker response, improving asset availability. This solution offers an intuitive interface that allows non-technical users to easily configure machines and get up and running quickly. It also empowers production personnel to respond proactively to production interruptions and maximize asset availability.

At re:Invent 2020, AWS announced the preview of AWS SaaS Boost, an open source tool that helps software developers migrate their existing solutions to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. SaaS Boost significantly offloads development effort by accelerating application transformation to SaaS, freeing up software developers to focus on features that differentiate their products. After receiving interest from hundreds of developers in the project, today we’re pleased to announce its public availability on GitHub. All SaaS products need the foundational capabilities to onboard users, provision infrastructure for tenants, monitor consumption trends, configure tenant profiles, integrate with a billing systems, and surface key metrics. These functions are critical for helping SaaS providers to scale. If every SaaS company spent their resources building these capabilities before building their actual applications, it would result in burning finite capital and slowing down their time to market.

We are happy to announce that all AWS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) endpoints have been updated to only accept a minimum of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 connections. This update ensures that our customers who run regulated workloads can meet FedRAMP compliance requirements that mandate a minimum of TLS 1.2 encryption for data in transit. Attempts to connect to AWS FIPS endpoints using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 will result in an HTTP response 503 Service Unavailable error.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL patch releases are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. To review the changes, visit the documentation history and 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.

Starting today, the new EC2 High Memory instances with 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB of memory (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge, u-9tb1.112xlarge, and u-12tb1.112xlarge) are available for usage with On-Demand (OD) and Savings Plan purchase options. This launch gives customers greater flexibility for instance usage and procurement. Customers can choose from two instances with 6TB of memory - u-6tb1.56xlarge and u-6tb1.112xlarge - both offering 100Gbps network and 38Gbps EBS bandwidth, and with 224 vCPUs and 448 vCPUs, respectively. These new instances provide additional flexibility for customers with memory-bound workloads and helps further optimize workload price/performance. The 9TB and 12TB instances offer 448 vCPUs, 100Gbps network and 38Gbps EBS bandwidth. 

The AWS Solutions team updated Improving Forecast Accuracy with Machine Learning, an AWS Solutions Implementation that helps customers easily generate, test, compare, and iterate on forecasts. The solution allows customers to automatically trigger a workflow to automate the creation of forecasts in Amazon Forecast based on user-provided configuration. The solution then provides automatic visualization using Amazon QuickSight (and optionally Amazon SageMaker Jupyter Notebooks) providing a quick, easy, drag-and-drop interface that displays time series input and forecasted output for any input time series data.

Amazon CloudWatch now supports composite alarms in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. With Amazon CloudWatch composite alarms, you can combine multiple alarms to reduce alarm noise and focus on critical operational issues. You can easily combine multiple alarms together into alarm hierarchies that only trigger once when multiple alarms fire at the same time. This helps you stay focused on finding the root cause of operational issues to reduce system and application downtime.
 

You can now use Change Calendar to prevent desired-state configuration updates made using State Manager. Change Calendar and State Manager are both capabilities of AWS Systems Manager. With Change Calendar, you can schedule calendar events to control when changes can be made to your AWS resources. You can use State Manager to define, enforce, and report on desired state configuration compliance for your infrastructure. With this new integration, you can help ensure that your desired-state configuration updates do not conflict with important business activities, such as sales events or new product launches.

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 (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) managed node groups now supports Kubernetes node taints, simplifying node lifecycle management for clusters with varying application resource requirements.

Starting today, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS is now available in the EU (Paris and Stockholm) region.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe now supports partial results stabilization, which further improves the live subtitling experience. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. As Amazon Transcribe processes streaming audio content, it generates partial transcription results until it provides a final transcript for a segment of continuous speech. However, some words or phrases in these partial results might change as Transcribe further understands the context of the audio. Partial results stabilization makes it easier for viewers to read the text output by defining how much the transcript will change during the transcription process.  

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami. Customers can now use these new AWS Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations in Boston, Houston, and Miami metro areas.

We’re excited to add seven free, digital training courses to the series of AWS End User Computing Digital Training curriculums. Use these new Amazon WorkSpaces Deep Dive and Amazon AppStream 2.0 Primer courses to learn how to administer, optimize, and troubleshoot your cloud-based desktops and applications. Designed for desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure managers and IT administrators, these interactive, self-paced courses include presentations, videos, and quizzes.  

Amazon Fraud Detector now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring Amazon Fraud Detector resources such as detectors and rules along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure. 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.  

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. This regional expansion extends the availability of ACM Private CA across the globe, increasing the number of regions to 22. The Osaka region only supports CAs with the private key stored in a FIPS 140-2 level 2 HSM. To learn more about the key storage certification level see the AWS Private CA Documentation.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server on AWS Outposts is now available to all AWS Outposts customers. Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports three new application management APIs in preview. RollbackApplication allows you to restore your application to the last running version and application state from the most recent, successful snapshot. ListApplicationVersions allows you to get all application versions and a summary of the associated configurations. DescribeApplicationVersion gives you the most comprehensive view of the application configuration of a particular version.

AWS Lake Formation now supports tagging data lake resources (databases, tables and columns) and creating logical access control policies based on those tags. Tag-based access control (TBAC) decouples policy creation from resource creation which helps data stewards govern large number of databases, tables, and columns by removing the need to update policies every time a new resource is added to the data lake. TBAC ensures that governance can be scaled easily by replacing the policy definition from 1000s of resources down to a small number of logical tags.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports Kantar SNAP watermarking for mezzanine and OTT content delivery. With this feature, audio streams processed by MediaConvert can now be watermarked with unique identifiers that allow for audience measurement across a variety of playback and consumption methods. When enabled, the unique identifier and Kantar account details are transmitted to Kantar during processing to automatically register each piece of media into the audience tracking system. Once the content is watermarked and logged, viewership statistics can be used to make programming decisions, track advertisement exposure, and to guide content investment decisions using Kantar audience measurement technologies.

Today, AWS announces Incident Manager, a new capability of AWS Systems Manager that enables faster resolution of critical application availability and performance issues. Incident Manager helps you prepare for incidents with automated response plans that bring the right people and information together. The Incident Manager console provides a unified user interface to view operational data from multiple AWS services and track incident updates, such as alarm status changes and response plan progress. Incident Manager helps you improve service reliability by suggesting post-incident action items, such as automating a runbook step or adding a new alarm.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for training machine learning models. EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. EFA can significantly speed up distributed training on SageMaker at no additional cost. For example, we trained the BERT natural language processing model with SageMaker’s distributed data parallel library on 32 ml.p4d.24xlarge instances. The training was up to 130% faster with EFA compared to Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

Building a business case for the cloud can be a time-consuming process on your own. With Migration Evaluator, organizations can accelerate their evaluation and decision-making for migration to AWS. Quick Insights - a new capability of Migration Evaluator, provides customers with a one-page summary of their projected AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. This complimentary pre-migration assessment enables customers to rapidly understand the projected cost of running their on-premises estate in the AWS Cloud.

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

With the latest release of JDBC and ODBC drivers for Amazon Athena, you can use Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) or Ping Identity’s PingFederate for authentication with compatible business intelligence, SQL, or embedded analytics applications.

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

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

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface. Starting today, you can use new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler that make it easier and faster to prepare data for machine learning including: cross-account access for Amazon S3, support for up to 1000 columns of data, distributed jobs, and a new SageMaker Data Wrangler notebook experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Amazon DevOps Guru – a machine learning (ML) powered service that gives you a simpler way to measure and improve an application’s operational performance and availability and reduce expensive downtime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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