August 2021

Today, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) adds support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) metrics running on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights (preview), enabling customers to easily collect container metrics and analyze them along with other metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. You can also collect AWS Lambda application metrics and send them to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (preview).

When you deploy SAP applications with AWS Launch Wizard it now saves the CloudFormation templates and application configuration code in your S3 buckets and creates an AWS Service Catalog product when deployment is complete. This allows you to leverage Launch Wizard-generated infrastructure as code to repeat deployments with identical configuration, or customize them to meet organizational requirements. This provides a number of benefits:

• Choice: Use the deployment tools (e.g. ServiceNow, Jira, CloudFormation) and processes of your choice.
• Versioning: Adopt new Launch Wizard features and capabilities at your own pace.
• Simplification: This launch allows you to reduce number of inputs needed for repeat deployments of the same product/pattern. For example, when deploying multiple HANA systems of same version in the same VPC and subnet, you can default these settings in AWS ServiceCatalog/AWS CloudFormation and let the end user only interact with other inputs that change from deployment to deployment.

Today we announced Dynamic Partitioning in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. With Dynamic Partitioning, you can continuously partition streaming data in Kinesis Data Firehose using keys within data like “customer_id” or “transaction_id” and deliver data grouped by these keys into corresponding Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) prefixes, making it easier for you to run high performance, cost-efficient analytics on streaming data in Amazon S3 using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

Today, AWS IoT is announcing the general availability of several new enhancements for AWS IoT Device Management. These new features will enable customers to better monitor characteristics of their fleet over time, diagnose connectivity issues, and perform aggregation queries to group devices across different values.

Amazon Managed Grafana is now generally available. Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed, secure data visualization service that enables customers to query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces for their applications across multiple data sources. Developed in collaboration with Grafana Labs, Amazon Managed Grafana manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves.

You can now configure routes in your subnet route tables to forward traffic between two subnets in a VPC, via virtual appliances such as network firewalls, intrusion detection and protection systems, etc.

Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now supports additional features that help customers to easily manage their applications end-to-end, without switching consoles. With this release, IT professionals can edit application and resource tags, and invoke appropriate runbooks based on the application type, all within the Application Manager console.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports the July 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1 and Release Updates (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2 and 19c.

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is now available in six new AWS Regions: South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), EU (London), and EU (Paris).

Today, we are excited to announce the release of version 1.10 of AWS Copilot with support for publish/subscribe architectures that customers can use to decouple microservices and consume events asynchronously. Customers can now use AWS Copilot to build event-driven architectures or to decouple services in order to increase performance, reliability, and scalability.

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

AWS Backint Agent now supports three new features: Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering, the ability to send log and data backups to separate folders, and compatibility with Ansible.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for Redis, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis as targets. Redis is a fast, open-source, in-memory key-value data store for use as a cache, database, message broker, and queue. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a fully managed caching service that combines the speed, simplicity, and versatility of open-source Redis with manageability, security, and scalability from Amazon to power the most demanding real-time applications. Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service that delivers ultra-fast performance for modern, microservices applications. Using AWS DMS, you can now migrate data live from any AWS DMS supported sources to Redis data stores with minimal downtime.

AWS CloudFormation users can now choose to preserve the state of successfully deployed resources in the event of CloudFormation stack operation errors. Using this feature, you can retry the operation using an updated CloudFormation template and quickly iterate through feedback loops, shortening development cycles.

Now on EC2 Image Builder, customers can use events to trigger an image build schedule in their event-driven architectures. Integrate your image build schedule with your events from AWS services, our SaaS partners, and custom events, via Amazon EventBridge. You can also create rules for event patterns, such as listening for a specific variable, and configure those rules to initiate image builds using EC2 Image Builder.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to resize your VPC prefix list, making it easier to manage your security posture and routing behavior as your network grows. Prefix lists allow you to group multiple CIDR blocks into a single object, and use it as a reference to simplify network configuration. You can share your prefix list with other AWS accounts using Resource Access Manager (RAM) and use it to configure VPC routes tables, security groups, and AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) route tables.

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 GovCloud (US-West) Region. Refer to AWS GovCloud documentation to learn more, and see where AWS Glue DataBrew is available by using the AWS Region Table.

Amazon CloudWatch announces the immediate availability of custom widgets, a new feature that enables you to gain operational visibility and agility by customizing the content of your CloudWatch dashboard such as adding visualizations, displaying information from multiple data sources or adding controls like buttons to take remediation actions. A set of templates and a sample library is provided to help you get started.

Starting today, Amazon Transcribe supports batch transcription in six new languages - Afrikaans, Danish, Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan), Thai, New Zealand English, and South African English. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech to text capabilities to your applications. 

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

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. Celebrity Recognition makes it easy for customers to automatically recognize tens of thousands of well-known personalities in images and videos using ML. Celebrity recognition significantly reduces the repetitive manual effort required to tag produced media content and make it readily searchable. Starting today, customers can get higher accuracy (lower false detections and rejections) and increased coverage of global celebrities. In addition, customers get three new attributes for each celebrity recognized: presentation of gender, expression, and smile. This metadata helps further refine content search and filtering workflows. For example, customers can now easily search for images where a particular actor is smiling, or measure the coverage of female versus male celebrities in event photos to ensure fair representation.

Amazon Textract is a managed service that leverages computer vision and machine learning to automatically extract printed and handwritten text, tables and forms data from scanned documents with no machine learning experience necessary. Today, we are excited to announce that effective September 1, 2021, customers will see a price reduction of up to 32% and save even more on the use of AnalyzeDocument and DetectDocumentText requests in eight global AWS Regions.

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

AWS Compute Optimizer now helps customers understand impact of migrating to Graviton2-based instances by recommending up to 3 Graviton2-based instance type options for x86-based Linux instances.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports Boolean DB parameter expressions in PostgreSQL parameter groups, which enables database administrators to optimize more database configurations with fewer parameter groups.

When you create an AWS DataSync task to transfer your data to and from AWS Storage, you can now specify include filters as well as exclude filters, providing you with even greater control over how your data is transferred. With this enhancement, you can now schedule tasks that utilize both exclude and include filters to transfer only a subset of files in your source location. Additionally, you can now queue multiple executions of a task when the filter settings differ between executions.

The Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service, Amazon Time Sync Service, and Amazon VPC DNS server can now be accessed over IPv6 endpoints by instances built on the Nitro System. These local instance services have IPv6 addresses that can be accessed from your Amazon EC2 instances. These IPv6 endpoints use Unique Local Addresses (ULA); IPv6 for local instance services is useful for running software and containers in an IPv6-only single stack configuration. Additionally, if you are starting your transition to IPv6 in a dual-stack environment, the endpoints for the Instance Metadata Service, Amazon Time Sync Service, and Amazon VPC DNS are available over both IPv4 and IPv6.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now offers greater insight into the usage of Amazon MSK resources through 19 new metrics published to Amazon CloudWatch. These metrics offer customers additional visibility into resource utilization across CPU, storage, and the network, enabling customers to maximize the performance and uptime of their Apache Kafka applications interacting with Amazon MSK.

The new Amazon DynamoDB console is now your default experience to help you manage data and resources more easily through simpler navigation and by providing you richer contextual information.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability.

IAM Access Analyzer helps you achieve least privilege by generating fine-grained policies that specify the required actions for more than 50 services. In April 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create IAM policies based on your AWS CloudTrail activity. Now, we are extending policy generation to identify actions used for more than 50 services such as Amazon ECR, Amazon Athena, and AWS Security Hub. When you request a policy, IAM Access Analyzer gets to work and generates a policy by analyzing your AWS CloudTrail logs to identify actions used. For other services, IAM Access Analyzer helps you by identifying the services used and guides you to add the necessary actions. The generated policy makes it easier to grant only the required permissions for your workloads.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics in text. Today, we are announcing support for tagging with analysis jobs. In order to scale AI/ML within organizations, it is important to tag analysis jobs so that organizations can track jobs and users using the service. Now, a user can add tags during an analysis job creation in Amazon Comprehend. They can subsequently use these tags to charge back costs associated with the job to the appropriate cost center or user, analyze the number of jobs associated with a given project, or keep their AI/ML analyses organized with appropriate access control.

Today, we announced the AWS Level 1 MSSP Competency to support AWS customers looking for AWS Partners with deep specialization and expertise protecting and monitoring essential AWS resources on behalf of their customers.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, you can assign tags to easily organize, track, or control access your resources. This can be used to allocate costs or get detailed billing reports across your Transcribe jobs. You can attach tags to resources such as transcription jobs, vocabulary, vocabulary filter, and custom language models within Transcribe.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Aria, Polly’s first New Zealand English voice. Aria is a neural text-to-speech (NTTS) voice that is expressive, natural and easy to follow.

Retained messages is a standard MQTT feature that provides an easy way for you to store the latest important message on a topic for future subscribers. With AWS IoT Core, you can now use retained messages to easily push configuration information or important updates to devices without knowing exactly when they will come online.

AWS Backup announces AWS Backup Audit Manager, a new feature within the AWS Backup service that allows you to audit and report on the compliance of your data protection policies to help you meet your business and regulatory needs. AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection policies across AWS services based on organizational best practices and regulatory standards, and AWS Backup Audit Manager helps you maintain and demonstrate compliance with those policies. AWS Backup Audit Manager is also integrated with AWS Audit Manager, an AWS service that helps customers with overall audit readiness.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands its functionality by supporting parallel threads when using Redshift as a target during full load. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. You can start with just a few hundred gigabytes of data and scale to a petabyte or more. By taking advantage of the multithreaded full load task settings, you can improve the performance of your initial migration from any DMS supported sources to Amazon Redshift.

AWS IoT Greengrass is an Internet of Things (IoT) edge runtime and cloud service that helps customers build, deploy, and manage device software. Our version 2.4 release includes two new sets of features that simplify the provisioning of large fleets of IoT devices and allow fine-grained control of IoT device system resources from the cloud:

You can now extract data from SAP ERP/BW applications (including ECC, BW, BW/4HANA and S/4HANA) to AWS services in just a few clicks using Amazon AppFlow and SAP OData APIs.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by supporting automatic segmentation using MongoDB and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can configure DMS tasks to segment the collection of a MongoDB cluster automatically and migrate them in parallel to any AWS DMS supported target including Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) with minimal downtime.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6i instances, expanding the 6th generation EC2 instance portfolio to include x86-based compute options. Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. M6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments. 

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for MongoDB 4.2 and 4.4 as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now migrate data live from MongoDB 4.2 and 4.4 clusters to any AWS DMS supported targets including Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) with minimal downtime.

Starting today, customers will be able to automatically deprecate their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM). Deprecating an AMI prevents outdated images from being accessed by new users after a specific time, helping to ensure that any new EC2 Instances are launched from only the most up-to-date AMIs. With Amazon DLM, customers can automate when to deprecate their AMIs, removing the need for complicated custom scripts.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i instances are available in additional AWS Regions US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage and network resources, M6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

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 versions 9.6.22, 10.17, 11.12, and 12.7. 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. Minor version 9.6.22 is limited to upgrades for clusters already running Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports the oracle_fdw extension, which allows your PostgreSQL database to connect to and retrieve data stored in Oracle databases.  

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Forecast Weather Index is now also available in the Asia-Pacific 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 in the US, Canada, South America and Europe, can now, with one click to your demand forecast, also include 14-day weather forecasts for Asia-Pacific.

In April 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create fine-grained policies based on AWS CloudTrail activity stored within your account. Now, we are extending policy generation to enable you to generate policies based on access activity stored in a designated account. For example, you can use AWS Organizations to define a uniform event logging strategy for your organization and store all CloudTrail logs in your management account to streamline governance activities. IAM Access Analyzer helps you by reviewing access activity stored in your designated account and generates a fine-grained IAM policy in your member accounts. This helps you to easily create policies with just the required permissions for your workloads.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto scaling to automatically adjust capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. You can automatically scale your cluster horizontally by adding or removing shards or replica nodes. ElastiCache for Redis uses AWS Application Auto Scaling to manage scaling and Amazon CloudWatch metrics to determine when it is time to scale up or down. 

We are introducing Amazon SageMaker Asynchronous Inference, a new inference option in Amazon SageMaker that queues incoming requests and processes them asynchronously. This option is ideal for inferences with large payload sizes (up to 1GB) and/or long processing times (up to 15 minutes) that need to be processed as requests arrive. Asynchronous inference enables you to save on costs by autoscaling the instance count to zero when there are no requests to process, so you only pay when your endpoint is processing requests.

Starting today, you can split your shared costs within your AWS Cost Categories  by defining Split Charge rules. AWS Cost Categories enables you to group your cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. Every organization has a set of costs that are shared by multiple teams, business units, or financial owners, for instance, data transfer costs, enterprise support, or operational costs of a central infrastructure team. These costs are not directly attributable to a single owner, and so cannot be categorized into a singular Cost Category value. With Split Charge rules, you can now equitably allocate these costs across your Cost Category values.

You can now hibernate Amazon EC2 C5d, M5d, and R5d Instances. Hibernation allows you to pause your EC2 Instances and resume them at a later time, rather than fully terminating and restarting them. Resuming your instance lets your applications continue from where they left off so that you don’t have to restart your OS and application from scratch. Hibernation is useful for cases where rebuilding application state is time-consuming (e.g., developer desktops) or an application’s start-up steps can be prepared in advance of a scale-out.

Amazon Managed Services (AMS) Accelerate Operations Plan now supports the AWS Europe (Stockholm) region. AMS Accelerate provides operational services including monitoring, incident management, security, patch, and backup to help you with day-to-day operations management of AWS resources so that your teams can focus on business transformation in the cloud.

Today, we’re pleased to announce AWS Glue version 3.0, a new version of AWS Glue Spark for your batch and streaming jobs that accelerates your data integration workloads in AWS. AWS Glue 3.0 introduces a performance-optimized Spark runtime that includes optimizations from AWS Glue and Amazon EMR, and is based on open-source Apache Spark 3.1.1. The AWS Glue 3.0 runtime optimizes both read and write access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), using faster vectorized readers and Amazon S3 optimized output committers. It also optimizes access to the AWS Glue Data Catalog with the use of partition predicates. For highly partitioned datasets, Glue 3.0 improves the execution speed by filtering out unnecessary partitions using partition indexes. AWS Glue 3.0 runtime is also fully integrated with AWS Lake Formation, so you can secure your data access in different granularities like database-, table-, column-, row-, and cell-level access control using resource names and AWS Lake Formation tag based access control. With AWS Glue 3.0, we also bring in new capabilities to improve user experience for monitoring, debugging, and tuning Spark applications. Spark 3.1.1 enables an improved Spark UI experience that includes new Spark executor memory metrics and Spark Structured Streaming metrics that are useful for AWS Glue streaming jobs. Similar to AWS Glue 2.0, AWS Glue 3.0 reduces startup latency and improve the overall job completion times.

EC2 VM Import/Export now supports migration of virtual machines that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot. UEFI is a modern firmware that initializes your operating system. You can now use EC2 VM Import/Export APIs to bring your UEFI based virtual machines directly to AWS EC2 without converting to legacy BIOS.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker notebook instance supports Amazon Linux 2. You can now choose Amazon Linux 2 for your new Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to take advantage of the latest update and support provided by Amazon Linux 2.

Starting today, Amazon Redshift introduces spatial query performance enhancements, 3D/4D geometries, and new spatial functions in Amazon Redshift to improve processing of spatial data.

AWS IoT Analytics is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region, extending the footprint to 9 AWS Regions.

AWS Glue Studio is a new visual interface for AWS Glue that makes it easy for extract-transform-and-load (ETL) developers to author, run, and monitor AWS Glue ETL jobs. You can now use a simple visual interface as well as SQL to compose jobs that move and transform data, and then run them using AWS Glue’s serverless engine. You can use AWS Glue Studio’s job run dashboard to monitor ETL job execution and confirm that your jobs are operating as intended.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is now HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) eligible. Customer Profiles is designed to automatically bring together customer information from multiple applications and surface it to a contact agent at the moment they begin interacting with a customer. HIPAA eligibility means you can use Customer Profiles to provide agents with the Protected Health Information (PHI) data they need to resolve your customers’ questions or inquiries. You can ingest data from electronic health records (EHR) systems such as Epic, Cerner, and Siemens using Amazon S3 data connectors between EHR systems and Customer Profiles. Amazon Connect has been HIPAA eligible since 2017. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is also ISO, IRAP certified.

AWS Security Hub has released 18 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, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon SQS. 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 159 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers new bundles powered by Windows Server 2019, providing a Windows 10 desktop experience along with a 64-bit Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus bundle option. The feature brings a refreshed Windows 10 desktop experience, and enables customers to run applications that require recent Windows versions.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code. Developers can use Amazon CodeGuru Profiler to understand the runtime behavior of their applications, identify and remove code inefficiencies, improve performance, and significantly decrease compute costs.

AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) release 202108.00 includes the AWS SigV4 library and a refactored AWS IoT Fleet Provisioning client library for IoT applications. This release makes it easier for developers using C-SDK to authenticate inbound API requests to AWS services from IoT devices running HTTP, and provision IoT devices that do not have unique certificates.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can now add custom product dimensions and specify End User License Agreement (EULA) when authorizing their preferred consulting partners to resell their software to AWS Marketplace buyers. This launch enables ISVs and consulting partners to work together more efficiently to create a Consulting Partner Private Offer (CPPO), which allows customers to purchase software solutions in AWS Marketplace directly from consulting partners. ISVs and consulting partners can now further simplify their operations and accelerate delivery to their customers.

Today, we are excited to announce AWS DeepRacer model action space is now fully customizable. AWS DeepRacer is the fastest way to get started with machine learning (ML) through a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, a 3D racing simulator, and a global racing league. Until now, AWS DeepRacer customers were modifying the steering angle and speed beyond the 20 options available in console by downloading, editing offline, and importing back into the console to improve their model’s performance. With a fully customizable action space, AWS DeepRacer console users can now specify both provided actions and add actions of their own to push their models performance to its limits! 

AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager, a capability in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps you streamline and scale your remote server management processes, now offers the ability to generate at-a glance reporting on your SSM Managed Instances. The new feature enables you to customize the Fleet Manager information panel in which you can view alerts, status, and details of managed instances and download it for local viewing and analysis. 

Starting today, AWS customers can use ED25519 keys to prove their identity when connecting to EC2 instances. ED25519 is an elliptic curve based public-key system commonly used for SSH authentication.

AWS Transfer Family now supports configuring a client side externally accessible IP address on an FTPS/FTP server, allowing clients behind a firewall or a NAT router to connect to the server. Additionally, customers can now easily scale up their workloads by creating up to 50 servers within AWS Transfer Family in a single AWS account and region, a fivefold increase in the previously supported limit of 10 servers.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Capacity Rebalancing for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups (ASG). This feature reduces Spot Instance interruptions to customers’ applications. When enabled, ASG Capacity Rebalancing is designed to automatically attempt to replace Spot Instances in an Auto Scaling group before they are interrupted.

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 ML including: multicollinearity detection, easy export of results to Amazon S3, support for column delimiters, and the ability to reuse the same SageMaker Data Wrangler flow on different datasets of your choice.

AWS Lambda now supports Python 3.9 as both a managed runtime and a container base image. You can now author AWS Lambda functions in Python 3.9 and use its new features, such as support for TLS 1.3, new string and dictionary operations, and improved time zone support. Python 3.9 also includes performance optimizations that you can benefit from without making any code changes. For more information on Lambda’s support for Python 3.9, see our blog post at Python 3.9 runtime now available in AWS Lambda.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now includes enhancements to the Auto Minor Version Upgrade feature for Amazon RDS for SQL Server database instances. Auto Minor Version Upgrade is a feature that you can enable to have your database automatically upgraded when a new minor database engine version is available.

Starting today, you can use Common Access Card (CAC) and Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart cards to authenticate users into Amazon WorkSpaces through your self-managed Active Directory (AD) and AWS Directory Service AD Connector in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. Additionally, you can now use the AWS Management Console to configure smart card authentication with AWS Directory Service. Previously, smart card authentication with AD Connector for Amazon WorkSpaces was only supported in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region and could only be configured through the AWS Directory Service API or CLI.

AWS Neuron, the SDK for running machine learning inference on AWS Inferentia-based Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances now supports TensorFlow 2. Starting with Neuron 1.15.0 you can execute your TensorFlow 2 BERT based models on Inf1 instances with support for additional models coming soon. To learn more about Neuron TensorFlow 2 support, visit our TensorFlow 2 FAQ page.

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

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports writing prepared data from recipe jobs into AWS Lake Formation-based AWS Glue Data Catalog S3 tables. With this feature, DataBrew automatically adopts the existing access permissions and security defined on the AWS Lake Formation-based Glue Data Catalog table and its associated Amazon S3 location.

The Transfer Manager for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is now available in the AWS SDK for 2.x as a Preview release. Using S3 Transfer Manager’s simple API, you can now perform high-throughput uploads and downloads of objects to and from Amazon S3 and benefit from the enhanced throughput, performance, and reliability.

AWS Glue DataBrew, now supports numerical format transformations including setting decimal precision, customizing thousands separators, and abbreviating large values. With just a few clicks, customers can visually standardize numbers and customize their datasets for specific reporting use cases.

Amazon API Gateway enables customers to authenticate clients using certificate-based mutual TLS, where digital certificates are exchanged between the client and API Gateway before a secure connection is established. Previously, only certificates issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) could be used as the server certificate when configuring mutual TLS in API Gateway. Starting today, customers can use a server certificate issued by a third-party certificate authority (CA) or ACM Private CA.

AWS CodeBuild project owners are now able make build logs and artifacts publicly accessible to people who are not logged into the AWS Console. This simplifies how CodeBuild project owners are able to collaborate with open source contributors because project owners don’t need to administer AWS account access for each contributor.

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to specify AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role as approvers for change requests and change templates. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. Now, you have more flexibility to leverage your existing identity provider for change management practices.

AWS Snowcone customers can now remotely monitor and operate their devices from AWS OpsHub or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). This enables customers to manage one or thousands of Snowcone devices, even when they are geographically dispersed. Customers can remotely view a central dashboard to see whether a device is online or unlocked and monitor metrics such as storage and compute capacity. Additionally, customers can now remotely unlock or reboot devices in the field that have a network connection.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code. Developers can use Amazon CodeGuru Profiler to understand the runtime behavior of their applications, identify and remove code inefficiencies, improve performance, and significantly decrease compute costs.

With AWS Glue DataBrew, customers can now use IF, AND, OR, and CASE logical conditions to create transformations based on functions. With this feature, customers have the flexibility to use custom values or reference other columns within the expressions, and can create adaptable transformations for their specific use cases.

AWS Glue DataBrew recipe jobs now support Tableau Hyper as a data output format, allowing customers to easily take the prepared datasets from Amazon S3 and upload them into Tableau for further visualization and analysis. For a list of supported output formats, please see the AWS Glue DataBrew output formats table.

We are delighted to announce the addition of AWS Innovation Sandbox to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio.

Amazon Connect now makes it easier for customers to build, deploy, and manage chatbots using the enhanced Amazon Lex V2 console and APIs. Amazon Lex allows customers to create intelligent chatbots that turn their Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. Amazon Lex V2 console and API enhancements include: 1) support for multiple languages in a simple bot and the ability to manage them as a single resource through the life cycle (build, test, and deploy), 2) ability for end-users to request a bot to wait (“Can you wait while I get my credit card?”), and interrupt a bot in mid-sentence, 3) simplified bot versioning, and 4) new productivity features such as support for saving partially completed bots, bulk upload of sample utterances, and navigation via a dynamic ‘Conversation flow’ for more flexibility and control in the bot design process. For more details on Amazon Lex V2, see the “Amazon Lex introduces an enhanced console experience and V2 APIs” blog post.

You can now easily list Amazon EMR releases available in an Amazon region and describe the applications available with any Amazon EMR release. Previously, if you were looking to launch Amazon EMR clusters in new regions, or with the latest version of an application, you had to read the release notes and manually update your cluster launch workflow. The new API parameters now allow you to programmatically identify this information, enabling you to automate your cluster launch workflows.

PostgreSQL 14 Beta 2 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 14 on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon S3 Access Points, a feature of Amazon S3 that allows you to easily manage access for shared data lakes. Using your S3 Access Point alias, you can simplify your data access at scale on Amazon EMR.

AWS Snow Family now supports AWS IoT Greengrass version 2.0 or higher, which makes it easier for you to build IoT solutions and run ML inference on Snowball Edge and Snowcone devices. With support for AWS IoT Greengrass on Snow, you can now use Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager to optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain ML models on fleets of Snowball Edge devices.

The AWS Toolkit for VS Code now provides developers with convenient IDE functionality to create and manage deployments from their code or image repositories using AWS App Runner. AWS App Runner is a fully managed 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.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. Starting today, developers can overlay subtitles, build a transcript, or perform real-time content analysis with live audio transcription powered by Amazon Transcribe or Amazon Transcribe Medical. 

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports three new enhancements to AWS IoT SiteWise formula expressions to allow users greater flexibility in monitoring their IoT assets in near real-time.

AWS Snowball Edge (SBE) Storage Optimized devices now support high performance Network File System (NFS) data transfer operations. With this launch, customers can now transfer up to 80TBs of data onto Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices through both file and object interfaces. The file interface exposes a Network File System (NFS) mount point for each bucket on your AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized device. After mounting the file share, you can drag and drop files from your computer into Amazon S3 buckets on the Snowball Edge device.

AWS Amplify Hosting now supports deploying and hosting server-side rendered (SSR) apps built with version 11 of Next.js with zero configuration. Amplify Hosting supports all the latest Next.js features including incremental static regeneration, automatic image optimization, and script optimization.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports CloudWatch usage metrics, enabling you to monitor your CloudWatch Logs API Usage. Using usage metrics, you can create alarms to be notified when you're approaching a CloudWatch Logs API service quota and visualize your usage on CloudWatch dashboards.

Starting today, interactive EC2 Serial Console is available in AWS GovCloud (US), us-west-1, ca-central-1, eu-west-2 , eu-west-3 , ap-northeast-2 , ap-south-1 , sa-east-1 and eu-north-1 regions.

Building on the Hugging Face deep learning containers released earlier this year, Amazon SageMaker is now making it even easier to deploy and fine-tune the state-of-the-art natural language processing models (NLP) with just a few clicks using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you quickly and easily get started with machine learning (ML). SageMaker JumpStart provides a set of solutions for the most common use cases that can be deployed readily with just a few clicks, and supports one-click deployment and fine-tuning of popular open source models such as natural language processing, object detection, and image classification models. These solutions are fully customizable and showcase the use of AWS CloudFormation templates and reference architectures so you can accelerate your ML journey. SageMaker JumpStart is also integrated in Amazon SageMaker Studio, our fully integrated development environment (IDE) for ML, making it intuitive to discover models, solutions, and more.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to analyze text documents and identify insights such as sentiment, entities, and topics in text. Today, we are updating our custom entity recognition models so that you can train models with fewer training documents. Custom entity recognition extends the capability of Amazon Comprehend by enabling you to identify new entity types not supported as one of the preset generic entity types. This means that in addition to identifying the entity types from the Detect Entities API such as LOCATION or DATE, PERSON, you can analyze documents and extract entities like PRODUCT_CODE, EMPLOYEE_ID, CONTRACTOR_NAME or business-specific entities that you define and that fit your particular needs. Starting today, we have reduced the minimum required training documents by 50%. This means, you can train custom models with as few as 100 annotations per entity type from 250 documents. If you have more training documents, you can even expect to get better results from the newer models than before!

Amazon WorkSpaces now allows users to view default quota and applied quota information through Service Quotas.

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows administrators to auto-approve known and less risky changes through pre-configured change templates thereby eliminating the approval step and expediting changes.

Starting today, OpsCenter, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, automatically analyzes operational items in customers’ accounts. Then, OpsCenter generates operational insights when it detects duplicate operational items or a large number of operational items created by the same event source. For each operational insight, OpsCenter recommends actions that operators and IT professionals can take to address the underlying issue. This improves operational efficiency by reducing alert noise, so that you can focus on issues that matter most. By using OpsCenter, you can track and resolve operational items related to AWS resources in a central place, helping to reduce the time to issue resolution.

AWS WAF now enables you to select a specific version of a managed rule group within your web ACL, giving you the ability to test new rule updates safely and roll back to previously tested versions. When using a versioned managed rule group, you control when new rule updates are applied to your traffic. By default, you will continue to automatically receive rule updates to your managed rule group. You can change this behavior by manually selecting a version, enabling you to pause automatic updates or go back to a previous version. Once you select a specific version, you will no longer receive automatic updates but will remain on the selected version until it reaches end of life.

Amazon RDS Proxy now enables you to create Proxies in a shared, centrally-managed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). VPC sharing allows teams, each with their AWS accounts, to create resources into a centrally-managed VPC. This reduces the number of VPCs that you need to create and manage, while using separate accounts for billing and access control. To learn more about VPC sharing, see our documentation.

Contact Center supervisors can now use Rules in Amazon Connect to categorize contacts with more granularity. You can also generate an Amazon Connect Task for a supervisor to further investigate customer experience issues and follow-up, or configure Rules to automatically generate an EventBridge event.

Amazon Rekognition Video is a machine learning (ML) based service that can analyze videos to detect objects, people, faces, text, scenes, activities, and inappropriate content. Video segment detection makes it easy for media companies to streamline common operational tasks by automatically detecting frame-accurate silent black frames, end credits, color bars, and shot changes in video files. Starting today, customers can detect four additional segment types – opening credits, content segments, slates, and studio logos. In addition, customers get improved accuracy for shot detection and complex end credit sequences, along with new filtering options for black frame detection to handle varied file quality and color ranges. 

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports sharing of S3 capacity across multiple accounts within an organization using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). Multiple teams within your organization can now create and manage buckets, access points, and endpoints on S3 on Outposts.

Amazon CloudWatch announces cross account alarms, a new feature that enables customers to set alerts and take actions based on changes to metrics in other AWS accounts. Cross account alarms provide alerting based on trends in metrics in different AWS accounts and can be used in combination with existing cross account dashboards to setup operational visibility in a centralized monitoring account. With cross account alarms, you can be alerted when a trending metric in a different AWS account indicates that further investigation is required before the trend starts to cause operational issues or impacts the end user experience.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh now supports performing updates to the Auto Scaling group (ASG) configuration as well as the ability to skip replacing already updated instances during an Instance Refresh. These new capabilities make it easier to deploy changes to an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) or install additional software in a controlled manner. To help you further deploy updates on Auto Scaling instances, we are also announcing four new Instance Refresh-based event notifications available through Amazon EventBridge.

Since our last update in March 2021, AWS CloudFormation has expanded the CloudFormation Registry to support 79 new resource types between April and July 2021 (see the complete list at the end of this post). A resource type includes schema (resource properties and handler permissions) and handlers that control API interactions with the underlying AWS or third-party services. Out of these 79, AWS has published 56 and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners have 23. Customers can now configure, provision, and manage these newly supported resources through CloudFormation in a predictable and reliable way. Among the AWS resources, we are pleased to announce that 8 new AWS services added launch day CloudFormation support. These services include: Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), Amazon Nimble Studio, AWS IoT Device Management, Amazon FinSpace, Amazon Fraud Detector, Amazon Location Services, AWS App Runner, and Amazon Lookout for Equipment. CloudFormation now supports 775 AWS resource types across 160 AWS services.

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With Amazon FSx, customers can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely-used open source and commercially-licensed file systems, while avoiding time-consuming administrative tasks like hardware provisioning, software configuration, patching, and backups.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. This solution isa framework to send equipment telemetry data to your AWS account, allowing you to leverageAWS Services to conduct analysis on your equipment data instead of managing underlyinginfrastructure operations. The solution allows for robust data ingestion using OPC Data Access(OPC DA) and OPC Unified Access (OPC UA) protocols.

AWS Lambda customers in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions can now 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 that need to perform memory intensive operations at scale.

Today, we are announcing the availability of three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix. Wavelength Zones are now available in 13 major US cities , including the previously announced cities of Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Amazon Personalize now enables you to optimize personalized recommendations for a business metric of your choice, in addition to improving relevance of recommendations for your users. You can define a business metric such as revenue, profit margin, video watch time, or any other numerical attribute of your item catalog to optimize your recommendations. Amazon Personalize automatically learns what is relevant to your users, considers the business metric you’ve defined, and recommends the products or content to your users that benefit your overall business goals. 

Amazon Athena now lets you store results in the format that best fits your analytics use case. Using Athena's new UNLOAD statement, you can format results in your choice of Parquet, Avro, ORC, JSON or delimited text. Athena's SQL-based interface and support for open formats are well suited for creating extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processing.

Private Connectivity for AWS NAT Gateway is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions enables U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by helping them to address certain regulatory and compliance requirements. With this launch, AWS Private NAT Gateway is now available in all AWS regions.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring, allowing you to catch visual defects on your web application’s end user experience. CloudWatch Synthetics supports monitoring your REST APIs, URLs, and website content by running scripts 24/7. The new visual monitoring feature makes it possible to catch visual defects that cannot be scripted.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Amazon GameLift, now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Wargaming, Behaviour Interactive, and Ubisoft, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. Now, GameLift and its full suite of features has increased its global coverage further, while providing seamless, low-latency gameplay experiences for players worldwide.

Today, AWS Copilot announced the release of version 1.9. With this release, AWS Copilot now allows you to configure a friendly DNS name for your request driven web services deployed with AWS App Runner. This feature was already available for load balanced web services deployed with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Customers using AWS App Runner can now provide a friendly DNS name, such as api.example.com, directly in the manifest file and AWS Copilot will provision and manage the necessary infrastructure to associate the domain name with the customer’s service deployed with App Runner.

You can now set up SQL-Based ETL with Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. This solutions implementation provides declarative data processing support, codeless extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities, and workflow orchestration automation to help data scientists and analysts access their data and create meaningful insights without the need for manual IT processes.

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.

AWS Cloud9 introduces 3 new features, including support for CloudWatch Logs, S3 and EC2 instance profiles. Cloud9 users can now list their log groups and view log streams instantly without leaving their IDE. In addition, the S3 integration has improved performance in VPCs and now supports a new “Upload current file” feature. Finally, Cloud9 users using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and private VPCs can automatically authenticate via EC2 instance metadata and environment variable credentials sources.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now supports a LambdaStep that allows customers to directly invoke an AWS Lambda function as a step in the ML model building pipeline. Customers can use the new LambdaStep to run any tasks or jobs on AWS Lambda such as splitting datasets or sending custom notifications, as long as the processing can be completed within 10 minutes. Customers can either write the Lambda function in their preferred language including Python and provide it as a file or provide us a .zip package that contains the code, compiled programs and any depenencies. SageMaker Pipelines will automatically create a new Lambda function and run it as part of the LambdaStep execution. Alternatively, if customers have a Lambda function that has already been created, they can choose to invoke it in the LambdaStep execution.

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics, a new machine learning (ML) powered conversation insights API that enables businesses to improve their customer experience and agent productivity. Using Transcribe Call Analytics API, you can analyze call recordings to get turn-by-turn call transcripts and actionable insights. Businesses can better understand customer-agent interactions, identify trending issues, and track performance metrics. The API combines powerful speech-to-text and natural language processing (NLP) models that are trained specifically to understand customer service and sales calls. Transcribe Call Analytics allows developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to add call analytics in their applications, without the need for any ML expertise. 

AWS Data Exchange subscribers can now track and manage their organizations’ entitlements to AWS Data Exchange products using AWS License Manager. With this enhancement, subscribers can manage and distribute licenses using individual Account IDs or Organization IDs, which entitles other accounts within their AWS organization to access data procured via AWS Data Exchange. For organizations with elaborate AWS account structures, this eases the burden of managing data entitlements across accounts.

AWS License Manager announces support for Delegated Administrator, a feature that allows license administrators to manage and distribute licenses across all of their AWS accounts from a delegated account other than the central payer account. Using delegated administrator, you can discover licenses running across all accounts and track license usage centrally. Delegated Administrator provides you flexibility to separate license management from the billing activities. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports the Multus Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin, enabling pods running in EKS clusters to attach multiple network interfaces in support of advanced networking configurations.

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. 

AWS Control Tower is now available in 2 additional AWS Regions: South America (Sao Paulo), and Europe (Paris) that expands AWS Control Tower availability to 15 AWS Regions. We are announcing AWS Control Tower Region Deselection that enhances your ability to efficiently manage the geographical footprint of your AWS Control Tower resources. You can now deselect Regions you would no longer like AWS Control Tower to govern; providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory concerns while balancing the costs associated with expanding into additional regions.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker now supports Amazon EC2 M5d, R5, P3dn, and G4dn instances for SageMaker Notebook Instance. Customers are able to launch SageMaker Notebook Instance with these instance types in the regions where they are available.

Amplify Geo enables developers to quickly add location-aware features to their frontend web and mobile applications. Extending existing Amplify capabilities, Amplify Geo includes a set of abstracted client libraries built on top of Amazon Location Service, pre-integrated map UI components (based on the popular MapLibre open-source library) and it updates the Amplify Command Line Interface (CLI) tool with support for provisioning all required cloud location services.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), extends Automatic Table Optimization to modify column compression encodings. This new capability maintains the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift database tables on an ongoing basis to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization. By using automation to manage column compression, customers can ensure that column compression encodings are always optimized in order to get the best possible performance.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports Quest NetVault Backup 13 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from Quest NetVault Backup to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports Quest NetVault Backup 13 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Amazon Redshift now supports an authentication profile that enables administrators to centrally store client-side properties required to connect Redshift data warehouse using JDBC/ODBC/Python drivers. You can create an authentication profile by specifying a JSON file with the name and value for the required client and extended properties. End-users such as analysts, developers, and data engineers can use these profiles with client tools such as SQL Editors, BI Tools, and ETL tools.

AWS Config now supports AWS Backup resource types (AWS::Backup::BackupPlan, AWS::Backup::BackupSelection, AWS::Backup::BackupVault and AWS::Backup::RecoveryPoint) in all AWS Regions. AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured. This enables you to see how the configurations and relationships have changed over time. For example, you can now use AWS Config to monitor changes to your backup plan that defines when and how you want to back up your AWS resources, monitor the resource assignment to the backup plan, track changes to the backup vault configuration or monitor changes to the recovery points for different resource types.

Amazon Kendra has been Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessed at the PROTECTED level. Now, you can meet the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM) control objectives while using Kendra.