July 2021

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports parameter changes for full-text search. Full-text search in SQL Server lets users and applications run full-text queries against character-based data in SQL Server tables.

AWS Control Tower guardrail naming and descriptions have been revised to better reflect the guardrail policy intention. The revised names and descriptions will help users more intuitively understand how guardrails enhance control of their accounts. For example, names of detective guardrails were modified from “Disallow” to “Detect” since the detective guardrail itself does not enforce a specific action but detects policy violations and provides alerts through the dashboard. Guardrail behavior, guidance, and implementation remains unchanged.

You can now use AWS IoT Core Credential Provider to request temporary, limited-privilege security token that are valid up to 12 hours and use the token to sign and authenticate any AWS request. Until now, the AWS IoT Core Credential Provider issued security tokens that were valid up to 1 hour only. Now with tokens valid up to 12 hours, customers have the ability to optimize the number of calls made to the Credential Provider by caching the credentials for a longer duration per their business needs.

Today we’re releasing a flexible and simple way to implement custom authorization logic with AWS Lambda for AWS AppSync GraphQL API calls.

AWS Security Hub has released 10 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard to enhance customers’ cloud security posture monitoring. These controls conduct fully-automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon API Gateway (APIGateway.4), Amazon CloudFront (CloudFront.5, CloudFront.6), Amazon EC2 (EC2.17, EC2.18), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS.1), Amazon Elasticsearch Service (ES.4), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM.21), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS.15), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3.8). ). If you have Security Hub set to automatically enable new controls and are already using AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, these controls are enabled by default. Security Hub now supports 141 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) now supports idempotent creation of EBS Volumes, allowing you to safely retry volume creation without additional side effects. Idempotent creation of EBS Volumes is intended for customers that have higher level processes such as container orchestration systems or automation scripts that create EBS volumes as part of a workflow.

Organizations continue to need options that rapidly enable users to work from any location and any computer while remaining secure and productive. To streamline deployments of Amazon WorkSpaces using WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) without having to install a native client application, your users can now access Amazon WorkSpaces from supported web browsers on Windows, macOS, or Linux computers.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle  supports the auto upgrade of Oracle time zone files. The Oracle time zone file auto upgrade feature provides an automated way to upgrade the DST timezone file version in the database instance. Customers observing timezones with TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE data types in their databases previously had to provision a new database instance and migrate their data manually. These customers can now benefit from this feature by automating the upgrade of their current time zone file version to the latest available version in the database instance.

Agents in Amazon Connect can now set their next status while still on a contact, enabling seamless transition from work to offline or lunch. This enables agents to indicate that they are about to go to lunch, and don’t want to be routed new contacts, while finishing up ongoing work. Once the agent has wrapped up any after contact work for their ongoing contacts, they will be automatically transitioned to the status they had selected. 

Amazon WorkSpaces introduces USB redirection support for YubiKey Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) on PCoIP Windows WorkSpaces with WorkSpaces Windows client app. The feature is intended for customers who need to perform YubiKey U2F authentication to access web-based services from their WorkSpaces.

The Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for Java 2.x is now available and is compatible with the AWS SDK for Java 2.x. You can build Java applications with accelerated access to DynamoDB and benefit from non-blocking I/O and other features of the latest AWS SDK for Java.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now automatically optimizes client connections made through AWS PrivateLink to improve availability and read/write throughput.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you control which instances to terminate during a scale-in event by allowing you to provide a custom function that selects which instances to terminate. Previously, you could use one of the predefined termination policies to determine which instances Auto Scaling would terminate. (For example, the OldestLaunchTemplate termination policy would terminate instances in order of their launch template age, oldest first.) Now, you can provide a custom Lambda function that indicates which instances are safe to terminate on scale in. This feature is useful for stateful applications where you want to control which instances Auto Scaling terminates so that your application is not disrupted on scale in.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now offers two larger storage tiers: 240 TB and 380 TB. These new storage tiers help you meet your needs for workloads with larger object storage requirements, and add to the existing options of: 26 TB, 48 TB, and 96 TB storage tiers.

You can now launch RabbitMQ 3.8.17 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to RabbitMQ contains several fixes and enhancements compared to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.8.11.

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels introduces a simplified on-boarding experience with the ability to explore images, labels, and datasets by one-click creation of example projects. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels provides out of the box video tutorials, and example projects with hundreds of images for single-class classification, multi-class classification, object detection, and logo detection.

Amazon Neptune announced support for openCypher, a popular query language for building applications with graph databases. Developers can now use openCypher with Amazon Neptune, giving them more choices to build or migrate graph applications to a highly available, secure, and fully managed graph database. Support for openCypher is compatible with our customers’ existing property graphs and developers can use both Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and openCypher queries within the same graph.

Amazon CloudWatch announces support for the trimmed mean statistic on CloudWatch Metrics. With trimmed mean statistics, customers gain visibility on the average performance of a metric without the noise of outliers. Trends in average performance represented by the trimmed mean can be visualized on CloudWatch Dashboards or used to set thresholds in alarms for proactive alerting.

Amazon Neptune announces support for SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol (GSP)  for graphs using W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF). Using GSP on SPARQL 1.1 endpoints, customers now have an efficient method to interact with complete named graphs within a graph store. This can streamline building graph applications using Amazon Neptune and tools that support the W3C Recommendation GSP such as Apache Jena.

We are excited to announce the availability of smaller sized Amazon EC2 G4ad instances that deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable GPU-based instances for graphics intensive applications such as virtual workstations and game streaming. Like the other G4ad instances, these new sizes are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors and are designed to be cost-effective for workloads that don’t need the high vCPU and system memory that current larger G4ad instance sizes offer providing the lowest cost GPU instance in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports the ability to create and access S3 objects on Outposts directly from your on-premises network. You can now configure S3 endpoints using your customer owned IP (CoIP) addresses and access your S3 objects from your on-premise network through the Outposts Local Gateway (LGW). With direct access, applications outside the Outposts Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can now directly access data stored in S3 buckets on your Outposts. 

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, a feature of AWS IoT SiteWise that makes it easy for industrial customers to collect, organize, process, and monitor equipment data on-premises (i.e. at the edge). SiteWise Edge software enables factory operators to get visibility into their equipment data and make decisions that help improve equipment uptime, product quality, and process efficiency.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 D3 instances, the latest generation of the dense HDD-storage instances, are available in the Europe (London) region. 

Amazon Neptune ML, a machine learning capability for graphs that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), is now generally available in all regions where Amazon Neptune is available. Using the Deep Graph Library (DGL), an open-source library to which AWS contributes, Neptune ML automates the heavy lifting of selecting and training the best ML model for graph data. With Neptune ML, you can improve the accuracy of most predictions for graphs by over 50% when compared to making predictions using non-graph methods.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is now available in the China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. You can create DAX clusters in this AWS Region for your DynamoDB applications that require microsecond response times.

AWS Lambda larger functions are now available in 3 additional regions enabling customers to provision Lambda functions with a maximum of 10,240 MB (10 GB) of memory, a more than 3x increase compared to the previous limit of 3,008 MB. With larger functions, customers can now more easily use AWS Lambda for workloads such as batch, extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs, and media processing applications perform memory intensive operations at scale.  

AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. DataSync can copy data between Network File System (NFS) shares, Server Message Block (SMB) shares, self-managed object storage, AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

CDK Pipelines is a construct library for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) that makes it easy to set up simple or complex continuous delivery pipelines with AWS CodePipeline. With CDK Pipelines, development teams can define and share “pipelines-as-code” patterns for deploying their applications. Teams can easily add stages to their pipeline to deploy their applications across multiple AWS accounts or additional AWS Regions.

Master AWS skills with four new AWS Modern Application Development Specializations on Coursera using interactive learning to earn a certificate of completion. Choose an AWS Specialization based on your preferred programming language—Python, Java, .NET, and Node.js—to develop new skills in four months with three hours a week. Learners should have intermediate knowledge of their preferred coding language, though no prior knowledge of AWS is required.  

Amazon DynamoDB global tables are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to a DynamoDB table for fast read and write performance. You also can use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability and disaster recovery.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the AWS Europe (Milan) Region. For a list of regions where AWS Glue DataBrew is available, see the AWS Region Table.

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 Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) placement groups allow you to influence the placement strategy of instances on the underlying hardware. You can select from cluster, spread or partition placement strategies, depending on the needs of the workload.

The Amazon Redshift Data API enables you to painlessly access data from Amazon Redshift with all types of traditional cloud-native, and containerized, serverless web services-based applications and event-driven applications. You can use the Data API with languages supported with the AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++.

Today, we are excited to announce that you can now automatically setup Amazon CodeGuru Profiler on your Lambda functions from within the Lambda console. This makes it easier for you to understand your Lambda function’s runtime and optimize their performance and costs.

AWS Amplify now supports Sign in with Apple (SIWA), making it easier for app developers to reach a broad base of Apple users. SIWA supplements Amplify’s currently supported Identity Providers (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and continues to allow developers to easily enable social sign-in to their applications, even without AWS experience.

Today, AWS Service Catalog is releasing a new Getting Started Library (GSL) experience that simplifies discovering best practice templates and offers better guidance for Service Catalog Administrators when they use the library. The GSL contains more than 250 AWS best practice solutions for a wide variety of technical and business problems. The Library is regularly enriched with new solutions, with “New Relic AWS Control Tower Integration” or “Amazon EKS Architecture” as recent additions.

Starting today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets enables you to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set to easily create resources, applications or environments in other AWS accounts and AWS Regions. That way you can avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually. For example, you can import security resources such as AWS IAM roles described in CloudFormation into a stack set and then centrally manage and deploy those IAM roles across multiple accounts to achieve a consistent organization-wide security compliance in a scalable manner.

Today we are announcing the availability of Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM), which you can use to gain insight into the operations of your lifecycle policy. You can use these metrics to see exactly how many Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are create, copied, shared and deleted each time a lifecycle policy is run. You can also create alarms to be triggered when resources are not created, copied or deleted by the policy, allowing you to take immediate action to diagnose and fix potential policy issues.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at your datacenter and on-premises locations in Argentina*, Chile, and Peru.

Today, we are announcing new functionality in AWS Control Tower that provides you the option to use a single customer provided AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key to secure the AWS Control Tower deployed services (AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config) and the associated AWS S3 data. The use of AWS KMS encryption gives you enhanced encryption over the default SSE-S3 encryption used by AWS Control Tower.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now gives you the ability to send live video from your mobile applications to an Amazon IVS channel as an input for a live stream using the Amazon IVS mobile broadcast SDK for Android and iOS.

AWS Solutions has updated the AWS MLOps Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that streamlines the pipeline deployment process and enforces architecture best practices for machine learning (ML) model productionization. This solution addresses common operational pain points that customers face when adopting multiple ML workflow automation tools.

Today, we are announcing that a new version of the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam is now available. This is the first AWS Certification exam to allow candidates to demonstrate skills with exam labs. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate is intended for system administrators in cloud operations roles to validate technical skills.

We’re excited to announce the launch of MLOps Engineering on AWS, a three-day classroom training course from AWS Training and Certification. This course will help ML data platform engineers, DevOps engineers, and developers/operations staff responsible for operationalizing ML models bring DevOps-style practices into the building, training, and deployment of ML models. 

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

The Amazon Virtual Andon solution provides a scalable digital Andon system to optimize factory floor processes, reduce issue resolution time, support the transition to predictive maintenance, and prevent issues. The solution provides a workflow to help users monitor manufacturing workstations for events, log events, and then route specific events to the correct engineer for resolution. The solution is fully customizable and allows users to update available issue types and root causes as processes evolve and change.

Today, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, a new capability in Route 53 that makes it easy for developers to continuously monitor their applications’ ability to recover from failures and control their recovery across AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and on-premises infrastructure. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name Service that routes end-user and application requests to internet applications. Application Recovery Controller triggers traffic failovers between redundant application copies, or replicas, running in separate AWS or on-premises locations. Application Recovery Controller also monitors AWS resource configurations and routing policies associated with your applications and alerts you when changes are made that affect the ability of your applications to recover using replicas. 

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the Europe (Paris) region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Regional Services List.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and IVR systems. Today, Amazon Lex launches UK Postal Code built-in slot type. You can now design bots to capture postal codes in the UK region. The postal codes extracted from user responses can then be used to fulfill user requests. For example, a retail chain may need to collect a caller’s postal code to provide the nearest store location and hours. With UK Postal Code built-in slot type, developers can easily capture the postal code and resolve it to a standardized format.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. Today, we are announcing support for exporting your AWS IoT SiteWise data to Amazon S3. With this feature, you can configure AWS IoT SiteWise to export your equipment data to your industrial data lake in Amazon S3. Once your data is exported, you can leverage a host of other AWS services such as AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon QuickSight, to perform analytics and build machine learning (ML) models. You can also join and augment your equipment data from AWS IoT SiteWise with other data sources in your data lake (such as from Enterprise Resource Planning systems) to get even richer insights that enable you to optimize your maintenance and operations activities.

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Denver. Customers can now use the new Local Zone to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations in the Denver metro area.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with popular third-party source code repositories such as GitHub and BitBucket; and software development automation tool - Jenkins. Customers can now leverage the same tools that they use for managing the software development lifecycle for building and deploying ML models as well, eliminating the need to adopt new tools for managing the ML lifecycle and speeding up their ML projects.

AWS IoT Analytics now supports JOIN operation on AWS IoT Analytics data stores, enabling customers to combine data from two or more AWS IoT Analytics data stores based on a common attribute between them. Customers can now create a AWS IoT SiteWise data backed AWS IoT Analytics data store and join it with other S3 backed AWS IoT Analytics data stores to discover insights about their industrial assets such as viewing properties and relationships between various AWS IoT SiteWise assets, run statistical queries on AWS IoT SiteWise and S3 data, and perform advanced analytics. You can use this feature to create an AWS IoT Analytics SQL query data set that uses a join operation (inner join, left, right and full outer join, self join and cross join ) to combine two or more customer managed AWS IoT Analytics data stores and AWS IoT SiteWise managed data stores on a join condition using attribute names that exist in both data stores.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition adds support for the pg_proctab extension in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. pg_proctab is a collection of stored functions that can access the operating systems process table so that system statistics can be queried through the database. pg_proctab functions make it easier to collect data on your PostgreSQL database including up-to-date information on processor and I/O statistics on SQL queries which makes troubleshooting easier.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that extracts text and structured data from any document or image, now offers specialized support for invoices and receipts. Until today, these important documents were difficult to process at scale because they do not follow set design rules, and often require context to interpret correctly. For example, customers might need to extract the vendor name from the Amazon logo at the top of an invoice even though it is not labeled “Vendor: Amazon”. Now with Textract, customers can extract explicitly labeled data, implied data, and line items from itemized list of goods or services from almost any invoice or receipt without any templates or configuration.

AWS CloudTrail now supports logging of data events for Amazon EBS direct APIs that customers can use to identify when their Amazon EBS snapshots are accessed using the ListSnapshotBlocks, ListChangedBlocks, GetSnapshotBlock, or PutSnapshotBlock APIs by users in their AWS account. These data events are delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Events, and help customers’ security and operations teams detect unauthorized access and take immediate action. Until now, customers could use management events logged in AWS CloudTrail to identify when EBS snapshots were created, copied, or shared with other AWS accounts. With this new capability, customers can also identify when users in their AWS account access Amazon EBS snapshots at the block level using EBS direct APIs.

The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin now supports running more pods per node on AWS Nitro based EC2 instance types. To achieve higher pod density, the VPC CNI plugin leverages a new VPC capability that enables IP address prefixes to be attached to EC2 instances.

AWS Batch is a cloud-native batch scheduler that enables anyone - from enterprises, to scientists and developers - to easily and efficiently run batch jobs on AWS. Whether you have a few jobs or hundreds of thousands, AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the work you submit. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that you use to run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across AWS compute services and features, such as AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, and Spot Instances.

FreeRTOS 202107.00 now includes the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) client library to make it easier for developers to add time information in their FreeRTOS-based IoT applications. The SNTP client library, named coreSNTP, is used to synchronize clocks between a device and the cloud.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce now enables you to embed the Amazon Connect out-of-the-box chat widget within Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud). This chat widget enables customers using Salesforce Experience Cloud to interact with Amazon Connect agents. For example, when a customer is requesting help from the IT support website hosted on the help center in Experience Cloud and starts a chat, offering an end to end chat experience, without the need for technical skills to implement.

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

AWS Network Firewall is now a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant service. AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The service automatically scales with network traffic volume to provide high-availability protections without the need to set up or maintain the underlying infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall is integrated with AWS Firewall Manager to provide you with central visibility and control of your firewall policies across multiple AWS accounts.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce now provides an improved guided setup after installing the CTI Adapter AppExchange package. Customers leveraging the guided setup will accelerate the time to deploy and take the first call to minutes. In addition, each step of the guide will have contextual documentation links for additional information on the setup. The guided setup will validate configuration settings to minimize risk of misconfigurations when installing the CTI Adapter into Salesforce Lightning or Classic.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while giving you full control and visibility, and Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning (AMT) automatically finds the best version of a machine learning model for any algorithm and data set. Autopilot and AMT now support enhanced access control using Amazon SageMaker-specific condition keys. You can use these keys in the Condition element of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to further refine the conditions under which the policy statement applies.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you quickly and easily solve your machine learning problems with one-click access to popular model collections from TensorFlow Hub, PyTorch Hub and Hugging Face (also known as “model zoos”), and to 16 end-to-end solutions that solve common business problems such demand forecasting, fraud detection and document understanding.

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports containerization and deployment of multi-tier Windows applications. This is in addition to A2C support for ASP.NET applications. With this release, customers can now containerize the following types of Windows applications: a) Multi-tier Windows applications — IIS applications or Windows services running in multi-tier architecture containerized separately, deployed to ECS or EKS clusters, and create network resources for communication between deployed applications, b) Cooperating applications on the same host - multiple applications running on the same host containerized in a single container. This release also allows customers to containerize a Windows service in a stand-alone container. Customers can continue to deploy these containerized multi-tier applications to their choice of container platforms, ECS or EKS using A2C.

Amazon S3 Access Points aliases allow any application that requires an S3 bucket name to easily use an access point. With S3 Access Points, you can create hundreds of unique policies to easily control access to shared datasets. Now, you can use S3 Access Point aliases anywhere you use S3 bucket names to access data in S3. With this update, you can use S3 Access Point aliases with AWS services, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Storage Gateway, and Amazon Athena, open-source packages, such as Apache Spark and Apache Hive, and Amazon Partner Network (APN) solutions without any code changes and at no additional cost.

AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass are test automation tools for your IoT devices running FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Greengrass.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition supports the Partition Manager (pg_partman) extension in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. pg_partman is a PostgreSQL extension that helps you to manage both time series and serial-based table partition sets, including automatic management of partition creation and runtime maintenance. pg_partman works with PostgreSQL native partitioning so users can benefit from significant performance enhancements.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can index and search documents from Amazon WorkDocs – a fully managed, secure content creation, storage, and collaboration service.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) now supports customer managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys to encrypt data at rest. Starting today, customers can encrypt QLDB Ledgers with keys created and controlled exclusively in their account, with key policy, audits, and key lifecycle managed by the customer. With this feature, QLDB customers can meet data security standards that require encryption using customer managed keys. New ledgers with customer managed KMS key support can be easily created with a single click in the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or an API call in AWS CloudFormation. 

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports writing cleaned and normalized data directly into JDBC-supported databases and data warehouses without requiring customers to move large amounts of data into intermediary data stores. In just a few clicks, customers can configure their recipe jobs to specify the following output destinations - Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL.

AWS Solutions has updated Discovering Hot Topics using Machine Learning, an AWS Solutions Implementation that ingests text, image and video (video: upcoming feature) from online discourse in order to perform topic modeling, sentiment analysis on plain text and text embedded within images as well as detection of unsafe content in images.

AWS Glue DataBrew now allows customers to specify which data quality statistics to auto-generate for datasets when running a profile job. This allows users to customize data profile statistics such as determining duplicate values, correlations, and outliers based on the nature and size of their datasets, and create a custom data profile overview with only the statistics that meet their needs.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL 12.6, 11.11, 10.16, and 9.6.21 in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. As a reminder, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 will reach end of life on January 31, 2022.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition adds support for the pg_cron extension in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. pg_cron allows you to use cron syntax to schedule PostgreSQL commands directly within your database. You can use pg_cron to schedule tasks such as periodically rolling up data for analytic reports, refreshing materialized views, and scheduling vacuum jobs to reclaim storage. pg_cron includes an AWS open source contribution that adds an audit table so that you can query the outcome of each scheduled job.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition adds support for the pg_bigm extension in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. pg_bigm extension provides full text search capability in PostgreSQL. This extension allows a user to create *2-gram* (bigram) index for faster full text search.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to assign IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes to your EC2 instances, enabling you to scale and simplify the management of your container and networking applications that require multiple IP addresses on an instance. 

You can now create secure continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that follow your organization’s best practices with a new pipeline configuration capability for serverless applications. AWS Serverless Application Model Pipelines (AWS SAM Pipelines) is a new feature of AWS SAM CLI that gives you access to benefits of CI/CD in minutes, such as accelerating deployment frequency, shortening lead time for changes, and reducing deployment errors. AWS SAM Pipelines comes with a set of default pipeline templates for popular CI/CD systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline that follow AWS’ deployment best practices. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

Providers using AWS Data Exchange can now publish new revisions to their data products more easily. Before this launch, providers were required to take both finalization and publishing steps to add new revisions to products. Additionally, if a revision was included in multiple products, providers had to take other publishing actions for each individual product they wanted to update.

Amazon Connect now supports claiming local toll-free and direct inward dial phone numbers in Colombia in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. These new local telephony services enable you to support end-customers in Colombia.

With the July release of Microsoft Power BI Desktop, you can now create reports and dashboards using a built in, Microsoft-certified connector for Amazon Athena. This release makes it possible for AWS customers using Power BI for business intelligence to leverage their Amazon S3 data lake and federated data sources to analyze, visualize, and share insights with Power BI.

Today, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announces support for AWS Config, allowing you to enable AWS Config recording and deploy conformance packs across all the accounts and Regions in your organization – with a few clicks. Quick Setup also lets you customize the types of resources to record and conformance packs to deploy for different groups of organizational units (OUs).

The new AWS Training Partner (ATP) program enables AWS customers to work with a single, trusted Partner who can offer, deliver, and/or resell official AWS-authored training. All AWS Training Partners are selected based on their quality and expertise in providing training. They must continually meet or exceed rigorous criteria to maintain their status in the program.

AWS RoboMaker WorldForge, a capability that makes it faster, simpler, and less expensive to create a multitude of virtual 3D worlds, now supports adding doors to indoor residential simulation worlds. With this new feature, robotics developers can add doors to connect rooms on the same floor of their indoor residential simulation world to test robot behaviors like navigating through doors and avoiding closed doors. Robotics developers can specify the initial angle doors are open in order to test their robot behaviors in a variety of simulated scenarios.

Today we are announcing the availability of AWS provided License included Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Microsoft SQL Server Amazon Machine Images (AMI). Customers can now combine the scale, performance, and elasticity of Amazon EC2 with consistency, reliability, and high performance of Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL to deploy mission critical transactional systems and data warehouses.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Cross-Region Automated Backups feature is now available in the AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Stockholm), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), South America (Sao Paulo), AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East).

You can now respond to AWS IQ messages from experts and buyers directly from your email, without logging into AWS IQ. If you are offline and receive responses from buyers or experts, you will receive unread responses via email. Reply to the email or log in to AWS IQ to continue the conversation. All responses will appear as chat messages in the AWS IQ application.

You can now use Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro to run Kubernetes v1.21, which is currently the latest available stable version of upstream Kubernetes. Highlights of the Kubernetes version 1.21 release include Cronjobs and Immutable Secrets and ConfigMaps reaching stable status, and Graceful Node Shutdown graduating to beta. You can find more details about Kubernetes 1.21 release in EKS blog post and in Kubernetes project release notes.

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. Using CodeBuild, you are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use.

Amazon Redshift Data Sharing, a secure and easy way to share live data across Redshift clusters, is now available in AWS GovCloud(US) regions. Ability to share data across Redshift clusters in the same AWS account is generally available and sharing across Redshift clusters that are in separate AWS accounts in the same region is available as preview. Data Sharing enables instant, granular, and high-performance data access across Amazon Redshift clusters without the need to copy or move data. Data Sharing provides live access to the data so that your users always see most up-to-date and consistent information as it is updated in the data warehouse. Data Sharing can be used on your Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters at no additional cost.

AWS Edit in the Cloud is an AWS Solutions Implementation that helps the content creator to build a virtual editing environment on AWS. This allows your editors and creative professionals to work from anywhere in the world using only a laptop with a high-speed connection. Leveraging the AWS Cloud for editorial and content delivery, this solution brings collaborators together to publish content to your preferred platform using high-speed internet.

Today AWS announced general availability of io2 Block Express volumes that deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, and are designed to deliver sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block Express refers to io2 volumes running on the EBS Block Express architecture, and supports standard io2 features such as Multi-Attach and Elastic Volumes. io2 Block Express volumes are available first with Amazon EC2 R5b instances, which delivers the highest EBS-optimized performance, with support for other instances coming soon. Using R5b instances customers can now provision a single io2 volume with up to 256,000 IOPS, 4000 MB/s of throughput, and storage capacity of 64 TiB. This makes io2 Block Express and R5b instance combination ideal for your largest, most I/O intensive, and mission critical deployments of Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.

We are delighted to announce the addition of Tamper Proof Quality Data Using Amazon QLDB to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. We are excited to announce streaming transcription support in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, Operated by Sinnet, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. 

AWS Systems Manager Automation now enables customers to upgrade SQL Server 2012 or later on Amazon EC2. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 will reach extended end-of-support on 7/12/2022. Customers can use AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook to easily upgrade SQL Server 2012 to newer supported versions such as SQL Server 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019. The following upgrade paths become available across SQL Server Enterprise, Standard, and Web editions.

1. SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server 2014/2016/2017/2019
2. SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2016/2017/2019
3. SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2017/2019
4. SQL Server 2017 to SQL Server 2019

Amazon Rekognition is a machine learning (ML) based service that can analyze images and videos to detect objects, people, faces, text, scenes, activities, and inappropriate content. Label Detection makes it easy for customers to detect thousands of objects, scenes, actions, or concepts found in an image or video based on its contents. For example, a photo taken during a tropical beach holiday may contain labels such as ‘Palm Tree’ (object), ‘Beach’ (scene), ‘Running’ (action), and ‘Outdoors’ (concept). In addition, Amazon Rekognition provides bounding boxes for common objects such as cars, furniture, apparel, or pets. Starting today, customers can view the complete list of labels and object bounding boxes supported by Amazon Rekognition, to quickly identify those that are relevant to their applications and use cases.

Amazon Athena has updated its integration with Apache Hudi to support new features and the latest 0.8.0 community release. Hudi is an open-source data management framework used to simplify incremental data processing in S3 data lakes. The updated integration enables you to use Athena to query Hudi 0.8.0 tables managed via Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, Apache Hive or other compatible services and includes new support for snapshot queries and reading bootstrapped tables.

Today, AWS announced that AWS Marketplace customers can now distribute to their AWS Organizations ID using Managed entitlements in AWS License Manager. AWS Marketplace uses Managed entitlements to enable buyers to govern, track, and distribute entitlements from a centrally managed license.

You can now update the maintenance window start time for your Amazon MQ brokers. Every Amazon MQ broker has a weekly 2 hour maintenance window during which changes are applied. These changes can include broker version updates, configuration changes, or patching of the operating system and other system software. The maintenance window gives you control over when these changes occur, in the event either are requested or required. You can minimize downtime during maintenance by using Multi-AZ brokers. The maintenance window start time can be changed using the console, CLI, or API.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation service, is now AWS Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) eligible, allowing healthcare and life science customers to build analytics and machine learning solutions for HIPAA workloads in conjunction with other HIPAA-eligible AWS services. Customers are able to leverage DataBrew’s 250+ no-code transformations to clean and normalize healthcare data in order to reach better healthcare decisions, operate more efficiently, and help identify medical and scientific trends. 

Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows you to optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain machine learning (ML) models on fleets of smart cameras, robots, personal computers, and mobile devices. With SageMaker Edge Manager, you can use your own model deployment mechanism to bring model packages to edge devices. Starting today, SageMaker Edge Manager also integrates with AWS IoT Greengrass Version 2, allowing you to deploy your ML model packages and Edge Manager agent (the on-device inference engine of Edge Manager) to fleets of edge devices easily.

Amazon HealthLake, now in General Availability, is a HIPAA-eligible service that enables healthcare providers, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to securely store, transform, query, and analyze health data at petabyte scale.

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

Today we are launching Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS into the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS is a serverless solution that provides a user interface for managing data in your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. Deploying this solution allows you to seamlessly browse any EFS file system in your Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) account and upload, download, or delete data from virtually any device, without the need to setup or maintain any dedicated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or networking infrastructure. As an example, you can use this solution to upload large machine learning (ML) model files to an Amazon EFS file system that is used by an AWS Lambda function for ML inference.

FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations are pre-integrated FreeRTOS projects ported to microcontroller-based evaluation boards that demonstrate end-to-end connectivity to AWS IoT Core. This helps developers save months of development effort and accelerate time to market. FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations now include the new managed AWS IoT Over-the-Air update (OTA) library, AWS IoT Jobs library, and the AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics feature from the FreeRTOS 202012.01 LTS release, and the coreMQTT Agent library from the FreeRTOS 202104.00 release.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage is a video origination and just-in-time packaging service that allows video distributors to securely and reliably deliver live streaming or on-demand content at scale. From a single video input, MediaPackage creates video streams formatted to play on connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles. It makes it easy to implement popular video features commonly found on DVRs, such as start-over, pause, and rewind. The service can also protect your content using Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies.

ACM Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports an open source plugin for cert-manager that offers a more secure certificate authority solution for Kubernetes containers. cert-manager is a widely-adopted solution for TLS certificate management in Kubernetes. Customers who use cert-manager for application certificate lifecycle management can now use this solution to improve security over the default cert-manager CA, which stores keys in plaintext in server memory. Customers with regulatory requirements for controlling access to and auditing their CA operations can use this solution to improve auditability and support compliance.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) now offers a new console experience that makes it easier for you to create, modify and manage your DLM policies. The new console allows you to create policies and modify existing policies in a more streamlined manner and provides you more information and easier access to additional resources.

The AWS App Mesh constructs module for AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available. The new AWS App Mesh service construct for AWS CDK simplifies provisioning of AWS App Mesh resources into your CDK infrastructure stacks. Strongly typed interfaces make it easy to select the appropriate configurations for your mesh, as well as integrate with other supported AWS Services.

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

Healthcare and life science organizations are undergoing transformation from bench-top to the point of care — reinventing how they collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, accelerate therapy development, and decrease the cost of care. Industry leaders like Wellforce, Rush Medical Center, GRAIL, Moderna, and Genomics England use the AWS Cloud to support critical functions in health, while adhering to global compliance requirements.

AWS IoT Core is now integrated with AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to create private IoT Core data endpoints in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using Interface VPC Endpoints. AWS PrivateLink is an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, such as IoT Core, by using private IP addresses that are not reachable from the public internet and do not require an internet gateway or NAT device to access. When used in conjunction with one of the many network-to-VPC connectivity options, your IoT Core VPC endpoint can function as though it were hosted directly on your private network.

AWS IoT SiteWise has now launched AWS PrivateLink support for control plane APIs to manage AWS IoT SiteWise resources such as gateways, asset models, and assets. You can now securely create, update or delete your AWS IoT SiteWise resources without crossing the public Internet and without using public IP addresses. For more information, please visit the updated AWS IoT SiteWise and interface VPC endpoints page in our developer guide.

Amazon EC2 now provides customers the flexibility to specify weekly recurring time window(s) for Scheduled Events that reboot, stop or terminate EC2 instances. AWS schedules infrequent events, such as a reboot, stop, or termination, for EC2 instances when it detects irreparable failure of the underlying host or when it must perform tasks such as maintaining the underlying host. With the flexibility to specify event windows, customers can set up Scheduled Events for their EC2 instances to occur during off-peak periods. Customers can also align these time windows with their internal maintenance schedules. Software vendors can leverage this capability to customize time windows for scheduled events based on their customers’ preferences.

Customers use AWS Glue workflows tocreate and visualize complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) activities involving multiple crawlers, jobs, and triggers. AWS Glue now supports event-driven workflows, a new capability that lets customers start AWS Glue workflows based on events delivered by Amazon EventBridge. With this new integration, you can trigger a data integration workflow using events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. For example, customers can trigger a data integration workflow as soon as a hundred files land in an S3 bucket.

Forty-four new or updated datasets from the National Library of Medicine, Digital Earth Africa, Amazon, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now allows you to import Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) X.509 certificates of additional key types and key sizes, including Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and RSA 3072 and 4096 keys and bind them with integrated services like Amazon CloudFront and Application Load Balancer. Previously, you could use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to import and use these certificate types as ACM only supported usage of imported RSA 1024 or RSA 2048 key certificates.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it.

Starting today, you can use Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) P256 certificates to negotiate HTTPS connections between your viewers and Amazon CloudFront. As noted by NIST, ECDSA certificates can provide comparable security strength with smaller key sizes than RSA. As a result, conducting TLS handshakes with ECDSA certificates requires less networking and computing resources making them a good option for IoT devices that have limited storage and processing capabilities.

Amazon Lex is a service for building natural language conversational interfaces using voice and text into your application. Earlier this year, we launched an enhanced V2 management console and APIs. The V2 API makes it easier for bot developers to add new languages to a bot and also deliver natural conversational experiences such as wait and continue (“Can you wait while I get my credit card?”). Today, we introduce tooling to automate migration of bots from Lex V1 Console to the Lex V2 Console. The migration tool uses existing intents and slot types to create corresponding resources in the Lex V2 Console.

Starting today, racers from anywhere in the world can compete with each other virtually and in real-time from within the AWS DeepRacer Console while colleagues, friends, and family watch a LIVE broadcast of the event online. Previously only available to qualifiers in the AWS DeepRacer League’s monthly Pro Division finale, this new LIVE event option for Community Races gives every participant a chance to post fastest lap time while manually managing their agent’s speed within the AWS DeepRacer simulation.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) now offers the ability for customers and AWS Partners to mark individual best practices as not applicable during their workload review.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

Image Builder components, which are a set of documents that enable image customization in EC2 Image Builder, now support parameters as an input in the image build process. You can now reuse your existing component investments in EC2 Image Builder to create different custom images by easily passing component parameters, such as installation directory or software version, in the image recipe.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with SageMaker's automatic model tuning capability. Customers can add a model tuning step (TuningStep) in their SageMaker Pipelines which will automatically invoke a hyperparameter tuning job. The hyperparameter tuning finds the best version of a model by running many training jobs on the dataset using the algorithm and the ranges of hyperparameters specified by the customer. They can then register the best version of the model into the model registry using the RegisterModel step.

Patch Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, now provides a more holistic view of the patch compliance and inventory of your fleet of instances by additionally reporting on stopped instances. This feature helps you to further simplify patch compliance and inventory reporting because information is now readily available for stopped instances.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. For a list of regions where AWS Glue DataBrew is available, see the AWS Region Table.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports customer endpoints in VPCs. With this feature, your IoT devices and applications can communicate with IoT Core for LoRaWAN from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without the need to allow traffic from the VPC to public IP addresses. VPC endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, like AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, on the private AWS network.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 13.3, 12.7, 11.12, 10.17, and 9.6.22. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Data API in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region to access Amazon Redshift. The Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with the AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++.

Today, we are excited to announce AWS Deep Learning Containers (DLCs) with integrated SDKs for inference that enable customers to easily deploy Hugging Face models in Amazon SageMaker at scale. This was the number one requirement from customers that have been leveraging the Hugging Face AWS DLCs for training (Hugging Face training DLCs) that released in March 2021.

Tag policies help you govern tag consistency across resources in your organization's accounts. For example, with tag policies, you can define rules on tag keys, including how they should be capitalized and their allowed values. With this release, the maximum size of a tag policy document has been increased from 2.5k to 10k characters for both new and existing tag policies. The number of allowed policies has also been increased from 5 to 10.

Starting today, AWS AppSync is available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region.

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. To deploy ML models for real-time predictions, Amazon SageMaker provides you with a large selection of AWS compute instances, so you can find the right cost to performance ratio depending on your requirements. The Amazon Inf1 instance is powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate ML inference workloads. Starting today, Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are additionally available on Amazon SageMaker in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions.

On 6th July 2021, Amazon Pinpoint lowered the Transaction Per Second (TPS) sending limits to 1 TPS for campaigns and journeys. The new limit allows customer to execute slower sends through email, push and SMS channels. This will optimize delivery rates, and allow for easier testing and monitoring. A campaign is a messaging initiative that engages a specific audience segment with a single tailored message, while journeys are multi-step campaigns to guide a user through an experience with multiple messages. Campaigns and journeys are intended for customers with user engagement use cases, and who want to send targeted messages to their users and drive high value actions.

NoSQL Workbench for DynamoDB, a client-side tool that helps you design, visualize, and query nonrelational data models by using a point-and-click interface, now helps you run frequent data-plane operations more easily to modify and access table data. Now, you can save or bookmark as many as 50 DynamoDB data-plane operations in the NoSQL Workbench operation builder.

Today, we’re announcing that we have updated AWS Amplify’s tools and libraries for Flutter to support null safety for all of our use cases. Flutter developers can now enjoy all the easy-to-integrate Amplify functionality with higher reliability and improved developer ergonomics. Sound null safety is a Dart language feature in which code is non-nullable by default and turns runtime null-dereference errors into edit-time analysis errors. This enables developers to reduce bugs in their code and benefit from performance improvements through smaller binaries and faster execution.

AWS Cloud Map now provides the ability to configure the negative caching for DNS queries. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows customers to define custom names for their application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) tasks, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. They can then use these custom names to discover the network location and metadata of these cloud resources from their applications using AWS SDK and authenticated API queries.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the South America (São Paulo) region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table.

With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon Fraud Detector now includes model variable importance values with every new fraud detection machine learning (ML) model to provide customers with more insight into their model’s performance.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as credit card transactions that are likely to result in costly chargebacks, using customized machine learning models. The service now supports Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which applies to entities that store, process, or transmit cardholder data or sensitive authentication data.

Following the announcement of updates in MySQL database versions 5.7 and 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL to support MySQL minor versions 5.7.34, and 8.0.25. We recommend that customers upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about upgrading your database instances in the Amazon RDS User Guide; and create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database using the latest available minor versions in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the oracle_fdw extension, which allows your PostgreSQL database to connect and retrieve data stored in separate Oracle databases.

Today, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announces support for Amazon DevOps Guru, enabling you to set up Amazon DevOps Guru across the accounts and Regions in your organization with a few clicks. By setting up Amazon DevOps Guru across your organization, you can identify any operational issue long before it impacts your customers.

Amazon ECS today announced a new feature that provides greater configurability for Amazon ECS Tasks that run on a periodic or scheduled basis, or are triggered by Amazon EventBridge (EventBridge) events. Customers now have access to the same rich configurations for scheduled and event-driven Tasks as they do for Tasks launched directly using the Amazon ECS run-Task API.

AWS Training and Certification is pleased to introduce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This advanced, 50-minute course will help you learn how to implement a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your Amazon S3 implementation. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and a quiz to check your knowledge.

With today’s release, Amplify DataStore now supports multiple authorization modes, making it easy for developers to control how their users can access app data. DataStore provides frontend app developers the ability to build real-time apps with offline capabilities by storing data on-device (web browser or mobile device) and automatically synchronizing data to the cloud and across devices on an internet connection. Customers can configure authorization rules visually using Amplify Admin UI or by editing a GraphQL schema file using the Amplify CLI.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 5 AWS Regions. This is in addition to the IoT Core for LoRaWAN availability in US East (N. Virginia) and EU (Ireland) AWS regions.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting and data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on your feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce an accuracy enhancement update to the handwriting extraction feature. Starting today, you will see improved accuracy of handwritten transcriptions, specifically for numerals, dates, phone numbers, and website address across many documents in finance, healthcare, legal, public sector, and others. Textract now more accurately detects handwriting within documents such as checks, medical forms, travel forms and more. 

Amazon CloudFront announces two new APIs, ListConflictingAliases and AssociateAlias, that help locate and move Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) if you encounter the CNAMEAlreadyExists error code. These new APIs let you see which distribution has the CNAME and move the CNAME to a target distribution as long as the source distribution is in the same account or if the source distribution in another account is disabled. To move a CNAME between accounts where the source distribution is still enabled, you must contact AWS Support and follow these steps.

AWS Storage Gateway adds support for AWS Privatelink for Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Access Points.  If you use Amazon S3 File Gateway for your on-premises gateway (VMware, Microsoft Hyper V, Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) or AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance), you can now create a private connection from your gateway directly to Amazon S3 without the need for an HTTP proxy.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports real-time audio-video (AV) by seamlessly redirecting local webcam video input to AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions using a web browser. Previously, this feature was available only for the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With real-time AV support available in the web browser, your users can use AV collaboration and media applications within their AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions, and connect from a broad range of client devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, and thin clients. Your users can collaborate without having to leave their AppStream 2.0 sessions, and without additional client software to manage.

Effective July 1, 2021, AWS is reducing data processing charges for VPC Interface Endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink). The new tiered pricing will reduce the costs for accessing high-volume, data intensive services over AWS PrivateLink. AWS PrivateLink enables customers to access AWS services or any other service hosted on AWS in a secure and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. 

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager allows customers to centrally monitor route configurations for AWS Network Firewall, and get alerts on routes non-compliant with their configuration. With this launch, customers can now monitor VPC routes to ensure traffic egressing through Internet Gateway (IGW) is inspected by the Network Firewall deployed by Firewall Manager in each VPC. Customers get alerted on route configurations that are non-compliant, such as, routes that bypass firewall inspection, or routes that lead to asymmetric traffic, and get suggestions to remediate the routes.

Today, AWS announces a new feature of Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, which customers can use to manage and provision their AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks without leaving the Application Manager console. With Application Manager, customers can discover and manage applications across multiple AWS services like AWS Launch Wizard, AWS Service Catalog App Registry, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This new feature provides customers with a ready-to-use solution to manage the lifecycle of CloudFormation templates and stacks without having to set up Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or version control systems for template management.

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ as an event source, allowing customers to quickly and easily build applications that are triggered from messages in their RabbitMQ queue. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Customers can build applications quickly and easily with Lambda functions that are invoked based on messages posted to Amazon MQ message brokers without needing to worry about provisioning or managing servers.

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Dallas and Philadelphia. 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 Dallas and Philadelphia metro areas.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is now available in four additional AWS Regions: US West (Northern California), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), and South America (São Paulo).

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Starting today, developers can capture the contents of their Amazon Chime SDK meeting and save them to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice with media capture pipelines. This new feature captures meeting audio, video, and content share streams in 5 second segments and directly delivers them, along with meeting events and data messages, to developer’s designated S3 bucket.

AWS customers can now compare any two application configuration versions side by side within AWS AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager. This new functionality highlights the differences between the changed configuration values in the two versions, and helps Developers and Devops professionals to understand how their configuration data has changed over time. This adds additional safety features when deploying the intended configuration values to mitigate the risk of any application outages.

Workflow Studio is a new visual workflow designer for AWS Step Functions that makes it faster and easier to build workflows using a drag and drop interface in the AWS console.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports resource identifiers and tags for security group rules. You can now manage VPC security group rules using the assigned rule IDs and resource tags.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can use the Amazon Kendra web crawler to index and search webpages.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, R6g, and T4g instances are available in EU (Paris, Milan) regions. Additionally, Amazon EC2 M6g instances are also available in Middle East (Bahrain) regions.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Management Agent (OMA) version 13.5 for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud Control 13c Release 5. OEM 13c offers web-based tools to monitor and manage your Oracle databases. Amazon RDS for Oracle installs OMA, which then communicates with your Oracle Management Service (OMS) to provide monitoring information. Customers running OMS 13.5 can now manage databases by installing OMA 13.5.

Amplify Admin UI now supports importing existing Amazon Cognito User Pools and Identity Pools. This means you can link your Cognito User Pool and Identity Pool resources to your Amplify app to take advantage of authorization scenarios for your data model, and manage users and groups directly from the Admin UI.

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

You can now use the consistent hash exchange type on your Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ brokers. This exchange type uses consistent hashing to uniformly distribute messages across queues. Consistent hash exchanges are useful in applications like transaction processing to maintain the order of dependent messages while scaling up the number of consumers.

Amazon Athena users can now leverage the reusability, simplification, and security benefits of parameterized queries. Available today, analysts can save time and eliminate errors by converting queries that have frequently modified criteria, such as date filters or aggregation periods, into a parameterized query that serves multiple use cases. Application developers can use them to safeguard against SQL injection risks and simplify application integrations that generate SQL based on a user’s selections.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage now supports timed ID3 metadata passthrough for live and VOD streams in HLS, CMAF, and DASH formats. ID3 metadata tags enable data to be embedded into video streams at specified timecodes and used by downstream systems or clients to enhance the playback experience. By dynamically adding metadata to a stream, you can enable use cases such as ad-insertion beaconing, client-side dynamic graphical overlays, content chapters, and audio track listing.

AWS Glue Studio now allows you to preview your data at each step of the visual job authoring process. AWS Glue Studio automatically samples your data, then runs each transform in your job so you can test and debug your transformations without having to save or run the job. Data previews are available for each source, target, and transform node in the visual editor, so you can verify the results step by step.

Amazon Redshift RA3 is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region, China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Amazon Redshift RA3 instances with managed storage allow you to scale compute and storage independently for fast query performance and lower costs and also enable you to securely and easily share live data across Amazon Redshift clusters. RA3 is available in three different node types, RA3.16xlarge, RA3.4xlarge, and RA3.xlplus to allow you to balance price and performance depending upon your workload requirements. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) managed node groups now supports upgrading multiple nodes in parallel.

Amplify CLI now supports storing environment variables and secrets to be used in AWS Lambda functions to help separate environment-specific configurations from business logic. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud that often include business logic powered by AWS Lambda functions. Customers use environment variables to store environment-specific values, such as API endpoints, and secrets to securely store sensitive information, such as API keys.

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads.

With this launch, AWS Amplify now supports conditional backend builds, automatic build-time aws-exports.js generation, and a simpler console workflow to re-use backends across multiple frontend branches. AWS Amplify’s continuous deployment service offers frontend developers the fastest way to build and deploy full-stack apps (both the frontend and backend) on every code commit.

We are excited to announce that Kendra Enterprise Edition is now offered in smaller more granular units to enable smaller workloads. The base Kendra Enterprise Edition (KEE) now starts at $1.40/h ($1,008/mo), offering the same functionality and availability at a smaller scale and cost. The base KEE now supports up to 100,000 documents and 8,000 searches per day, with adaptive bursting capability to better handle unpredictable query spikes. Similarly, the Virtual Storage Capacity units now offer scaling in increments of 100,000 documents (up to 30GB) per unit at $0.7/h. Our Virtual Query Units offer scaling increments of 8,000 queries per day at $0.7/h.