October 2021

Amazon GameLift, a fully managed dedicated game server hosting solution that deploys, operates, and scales cloud servers for multiplayer games, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. Game developers can now deploy instances in Osaka using GameLift multi-region fleet.

Amazon Lightsail now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to utilize CloudFormation templates to provision and manage your application stacks comprised of Lightsail instances, disks or databases. You can also easily automate and replicate your stacks as needed. This adds a new convenient way of managing Lightsail resources in addition to the Lightsail Console and AWS CLI/SDK.

You can now share your Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with AWS Organizations and Organizational Units (OUs). Previously, you could share AMIs only with specific AWS account IDs. To share AMIs with AWS Organizations, you had to explicitly manage sharing of AMIs with AWS accounts that were added to or removed from AWS Organizations. With this new feature, you no longer have to update your AMI permissions because of organizational changes. AMI sharing will be automatically synced when organizational changes occur. This feature helps you centrally manage and govern your AMIs as you grow and scale your AWS accounts.

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports deployment of containerized Windows applications to AWS Fargate for ECS Windows containers. With this feature, users can now target AWS Fargate for ECS Windows containers as deployment runtime in addition to ECS and EKS that were previously supported. Using App2Container, developers can take a running Windows based .NET application or a Windows service, analyze, containerize, and deploy to AWS Fargate for ECS Windows containers, in few simple steps. Developers can take advantage of auto-scaling, host management, and secured application lifecycle management offered by AWS Fargate.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) launches a new version of the QLDB Shell that is easier to install and use. QLDB customers can now download the QLDB Shell tailored to their favorite operating system and begin querying a QLDB ledger without any other installation steps or dependencies to install. Expert users have the option to build from source code and tailor to their custom requirements, because the QLDB Shell is open sourced. The updated QLDB Shell also provides improved query runtime statistics, introduces an optional tabular data format for query output, offers config file support for saving preferred options, and adds convenient commands for listing tables and switching ledgers, regions, and endpoints.

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. On 8/26, we launched an update for Rekognition Image where customers got higher accuracy (lower false detections and rejections) and increased coverage for global celebrities. In addition, customers got three new attributes for each celebrity recognized: presentation of gender, expression, and smile.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications without any machine learning expertise. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe supports batch transcription in the AWS Stockholm and Cape Town Regions. 

AWS App Mesh Metric Extension is now generally available. With the Metric Extension, customers can collect and filter aggregated App Mesh service metrics that help with debugging, simplify monitoring, and reduce usage costs. App Mesh Metric Extension is available to all customers running workloads on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and self-managed Kubernetes. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure.

Amazon Connect Chat now provides new APIs that allow you to create customized experiences for your customers by enabling you to subscribe to a real-time stream of chat messages. Using the new APIs, you can integrate Amazon Connect Chat with SMS solutions and third party messaging applications (e.g., Facebook Messenger, Twitter), enable mobile push notifications, and create analytics dashboards to monitor and track chat message activity. Messages are published via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon SNS console and creating a new SNS topic.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances. C6i 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 C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Designed for compute-intensive workloads, C6i 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 an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a new capability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition that enables it to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with a fraction of the work required, compared to a traditional migration. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol (TDS) and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

AWS Marketplace announces Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts
Today, AWS Marketplace announced Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts, which allows customers to add purchase order numbers to their AWS invoices for SaaS contracts purchased in AWS Marketplace. Previously, customers could only add one purchase order number across all their AWS Marketplace transactions. Now, customers can add purchase order numbers specific to public and private offers for SaaS contracts when transacting in AWS Marketplace. Purchase order numbers entered in AWS Marketplace appear on corresponding invoices, easing software spend allocation to internal budgets.

Starting today, you can use two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor your AWS Global Accelerator resources. You can now monitor the total number of healthy endpoints and the total number of unhealthy endpoints served by your accelerator, including EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers and Elastic IP addresses. With the two new metrics, you can create CloudWatch alarms to more quickly and easily detect issues with your Global Accelerator endpoints.

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 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, and 10.18. 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.

If you are working with Nielsen for audience measurement, you can now use AWS Elemental MediaLive to encode Nielsen's proprietary watermarks in your MediaLive channel.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now adds native support for Bottlerocket in EKS managed node groups in all commercial AWS regions. Most EKS customers today deploy their applications on worker nodes backed by operating systems that are designed for a variety of use cases. AWS launched Bottlerocket, a minimal, Linux-based open source operating system that is purpose built and optimized to run containers. When combined, EKS managed node groups and Bottlerocket give customers a simple way to provision and manage compute capacity using the latest best practices for running containers in production. Bottlerocket is now included as a built-in AMI choice for managed node groups, enabling customers to provision container optimized worker nodes with a single click.

Amazon EC2 R5b instances, which provide the fastest block storage performance on EC2, are now available in AWS Europe (Ireland and London) Regions. R5b instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System and provide 3x higher EBS-Optimized performance compared to R5 instances. These instances offer up to 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 260,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), enabling customers to lift and shift memory intensive applications to AWS.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostGIS major version 3.1. This new version of PostGIS is available on PostgreSQL versions 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and higher.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to ten. You can now claim South Korean toll-free and local telephone numbers. 

Today, AWS announces the availability of AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS Windows containers. This feature simplifies the adoption of modern container technology for Amazon ECS customers by making it even easier to run their Windows containers on AWS.

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, screen sharing, and messaging capabilities to their applications. With the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio APIs, developers can build customized telephony applications like voice menus, click-to-call, and call routing using the agility and operational simplicity of a serverless AWS Lambda function. Starting today, developers can record PSTN and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice calls and store the recordings in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice using the call recording feature. 

The Babelfish for PostgreSQL open source project is now available. Babelfish for PostgreSQL provides the capability for PostgreSQL to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on PostgreSQL with a fraction of the work required, compared to a traditional migration. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

AWS IoT SiteWise now allows customers to use the same asset model under different asset model hierarchies. With this feature, customers can simplify the asset modeling experience by reducing the number of models required to build a virtual representation of their industrial operations. Previously, for the same type of machine deployed in different production sites, users had to create one asset model for each production site model. Now, users can create one asset model and reuse it in all of your production site models. 

Amazon Textract now supports Tag Image File Format (TIFF) documents in addition to the PNG, JPEG, and PDF formats. Customers can now process TIFF documents either synchronously or asynchronously using any of the following Amazon Textract APIs - DetectDocumentText, StartDocumentAnalysis, StartDocumentTextDetection, AnalyzeDocument, and AnalyzeExpense. Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts printed and handwritten text and data from any document.

Today, we are introducing Amazon EC2 Spot placement score to help you find the optimal location for your Spot workloads. Spot Instances availability varies depending on the instance type, time of day, Region, and Availability Zone. Until now there was no way to find an optimal Region or Availability Zone to fulfill your Spot capacity needs without trying to launch Spot Instances there first. Now, Spot placement score can recommend a Region or Availability Zone based on your Spot capacity requirements. Spot placement score is useful for instance type flexible workloads that can be launched in any Region or Availability Zone.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK supports iOS and Android push notifications via Amazon Pinpoint for messages sent through Amazon Chime SDK messaging channels. With push notifications, a developer using Amazon Chime SDK messaging for chat can help ensure their users are notified about new messages even when they are not actively using their app. Users can switch applications or lock their mobile device and receive a notification when a new message or call comes in, allowing them to tap the notification and return to the original app to continue the conversation or join the call.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) announces a public preview of AWS SAM Accelerate. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications. SAM Accelerate is a new capability of SAM CLI that makes it faster and easier for developers to test code changes made locally to their serverless applications against a cloud-based environment, reducing the time from local iteration to production-readiness.

Starting today, you can request EC2 capacity based on your workload’s instance requirements. Attribute-based instance type selection, a new feature for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet, makes it easy to create and maintain instance fleets without researching and selecting EC2 instance types. This is useful for running instance type flexible workloads and frameworks such as containers, big data, and CI/CD, or for simple cases where you want your instance fleets to automatically use the latest generation instance types. Instead of creating and maintaining a list of acceptable instance types, you can now simply define your instance requirements once, and let attribute-based instance type selection handle the rest.

Amazon QuickSight announced the availability of Incremental Refresh, a feature in Amazon QuickSight that supports incrementally loading new data to SPICE data sets without needing to refresh the full set of data. SPICE is QuickSight's Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine.

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Las Vegas, New York City (located in New Jersey) and Portland. Customers can now use these new Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or for on-premises installations in these three metro areas.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. Starting today, SageMaker Autopilot supports time series data. You can now use SageMaker Autopilot to build machine learning models for regression and classification problems for time series data or any sequence data, enabling scenarios such as supervised anomaly detection, risk assessment or fault prediction based on a sequence of datapoints. For example, you can now build models to identify and classify anomalous network traffic recorded over time, or identifying faulty devices based on emitted metrics.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom is a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying OS and DB environment. Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the Oracle database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install patches, and enable native features to meet the dependent application's requirements.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 DL1 instances powered by Gaudi accelerators from Habana Labs, an Intel company. EC2 DL1 instances deliver up to 40% better price performance than current generation GPU-based EC2 instances for training deep learning models and are optimized for workloads such as image classification, object detection and natural language processing.

Amazon Route 53 Resolver is the recursive DNS service that runs by default in your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Paired with Route 53 Resolver Endpoints and Resolver Rules, you can create seamless DNS query resolution across your entire hybrid cloud, with precise control over the resolution of DNS namespaces between your on-premises data center and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

You can now define a cutoff behavior for your maintenance tasks using AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows, which allows you to stop or continue ongoing tasks when the cutoff time is reached. This provides DevOps and IT engineers with more control on the cutoff behavior to ensure disruptive tasks are not run outside the desired period. For instance, while registering an Automation task with a maintenance window, you can now set up the cutoff behavior to cancel ongoing tasks. This would ensure that no new task invocations are started when the cutoff time is reached.

AWS Migration Hub now helps you easily build a migration and modernization strategy for your applications running on-premises or in AWS. The new Strategy Recommendations feature is the ideal starting point to begin your transformation journey delivering prescriptive guidance on the optimal strategy and tools to help you migrate and modernize at scale. Strategy Recommendations automates the manual process of analyzing each running application, its process dependencies and technical complexity to reduce the time and effort spent on planning application migration and modernization, and accelerate your business transformation on AWS.

Amazon CloudFront now provides a CloudFront-Viewer-Address header that includes IP address and connection port information for requesting clients. The connection port field indicates the TCP source port used by the requesting client. Previously, IP address and client connection port information were available only in CloudFront access logs, making it harder to resolve issues or perform real-time decision-making based on these data. Now you can configure your CloudFront origin request policies to forward the CloudFront-Viewer-Address header to your origin servers. The header can also be used in CloudFront Functions when included in an origin request policy. The CloudFront-Viewer-Address header uses the following syntax: CloudFront-Viewer-Address: 127.0.0.1:4430

Following the release of updates in MySQL version 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL on Outposts to support MySQL minor version 8.0.26. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor version 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.

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

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

Amazon Pinpoint now includes the ability to perform an extended review of your company’s Ten-Digit Long Code (10DLC) registration details. This extended review process is called “vetting.” By vetting your company’s 10DLC registration, you can gain higher throughput rates for the messages that you send using 10DLC numbers.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

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

You can now inject Amazon EC2 Spot Instance interruptions into your Spot Instance workloads using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS). Spot Instances enable you to run compute workloads on Amazon EC2 at steep discounts in exchange for returning the Spot Instances when Amazon EC2 needs the capacity back. Because it is always possible that your Spot Instance may be interrupted, you should ensure that your application is prepared for a Spot Instance interruption. However, until now it has been difficult to recreate the circumstances of a Spot Instance interruption in order to evaluate and improve how your application responds.

AWS Audit Manager now offers custom framework sharing so you have a secure and easy way to share custom frameworks across AWS accounts and regions. This enables instant access of your custom frameworks across multiple AWS accounts, without the need to manually copy or move underlying custom controls. Custom framework sharing provides quick access to the shared framework so that your users always see the most up-to-date and consistent information as it is provided by you. You can use the custom framework sharing feature on your AWS Audit Manager account at no additional cost.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage hours of operation. Using this API, you can programmatically configure hours of operation which can be used in contact flows to decide which queue to route contacts to. Additionally, you can now delete hours of operation that are no longer required using the delete API. To learn more, see the API documentation.

Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation on three new APIs: Users, User Hierarchies, and Hours of Operation. You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to deploy these Amazon Connect resources—along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. Additionally, you can use these templates to maintain consistency across Amazon Connect instances. For more information, see Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Web Client for AWS Transfer Family provides an intuitive web browser interface for using AWS Transfer for Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). It allows you to adopt AWS Transfer Family plus provides a simple web portal to your corporate SFTP environments for your users.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web applications. Developers can now use video background blur to obfuscate their users’ surroundings, which can help increase visual privacy.

AWS Amplify for JavaScript now supports pause, resume and cancel actions on file uploads to Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) via the Amplify Storage category. Amplify provides a set of use-case oriented UI components, libraries and command-line tools to make it easy for frontend web and mobile developer to build AWS cloud backends for their apps. With this release, developers can create experiences where end-users can reliably upload very large files, including raw video and large productivity documents. Being able to resume uploads is particularly useful for handling scenarios where a user experiences network interruption during an upload.

Starting today, you can trigger the interruption of an Amazon EC2 Spot Instance using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS). Spot Instances use spare EC2 Capacity that is available up to 90% discount compared to the On-Demand price. In exchange for the discount, Spot Instances can be interrupted by Amazon EC2 when Amazon EC2 needs the capacity back. When using Spot Instances, you need to be prepared to be interrupted. With FIS, you can test the resiliency of your workload and validate that your application is reacting to the interruption notices that EC2 sends before terminating your instances. You can target individual Spot Instances or a subset of instances in clusters managed by services that tag your instances such as ASG, Fleet and EMR.

Amazon RDS Proxy now supports Amazon RDS for MySQL major version 8.0. MySQL 8.0 is the latest Community Edition major version, and offers better performance, reliability, security, and manageability. To learn more about Amazon RDS for MySQL, please visit our details page or view our documentation.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK allows developers to execute business logic on in-flight messages before they are delivered to members of a messaging channel with channel flows. Using channel flows you can create flows that remove sensitive data such as government ID numbers, phone numbers, or profanity from messages before they are delivered, which may be helpful for implementing corporate communications policies or other communication guidelines. Channel flows can also be used to perform functions like aggregation of responses to a poll before sending results back to participants.

AWS Security Hub now allows you to designate an aggregation Region and link some or all Regions to that aggregation Region. This gives you a centralized view of all your findings across all of your accounts and all of your linked Regions. After you link a Region to the aggregation Region, your findings are continuously synchronized between the Regions. Any update to a finding in a linked Region is replicated to the aggregation Region, and any update to a finding in the aggregation Region is replicated to the linked Region where the finding originated. To learn more about this feature, you can read about in our documentation here or watch a demo video.

We have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL on Outposts to support MySQL minor versions 8.0.23, 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.

Today, the AWS Panorama Appliance is generally available. The AWS Panorama Appliance is a new device that enables customers to improve their operations and reduce costs by using existing on-premises cameras and analyzing video streams locally with computer vision.

We are pleased to announce that Amazon Transcribe will now support custom language models (CLM) for streaming transcription. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. CLM allows you to leverage pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine tailored for your transcription use case. No prior machine learning experience required. 

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that you provide to encrypt the canary run data that CloudWatch Synthetics stores in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. By default, these artifacts are encrypted at rest using an AWS managed key.

Amazon QuickSight now supports advanced styling for your Table and Pivot Table. Authors can create beautiful tables, follow a design pattern or apply a standardized corporate identity to their tabular visuals with the newly launched options to customize borders and colors. They can also apply custom borders and styling for their totals and sub-totals letting them create financial reports like income statements etc. See here for more details.

Amazon CloudFront is now supported by the AWS Pricing Calculator. Estimate the cost of CloudFront workloads, which primarily includes costs associated with data transfer and requests. Apart from providing tips to estimate the number of requests based on your data transfer volume, the calculator gives you a granular view of costs across different usage tiers and CloudFront regions. 

We are announcing the public preview of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, a new feature that enables customers to find and subscribe to third-party data in AWS Data Exchange that they can query in an Amazon Redshift data warehouse in minutes. Data providers can list and offer products containing Amazon Redshift data sets in the AWS Data Exchange catalog, granting subscribers direct, read-only access to the data stored in Amazon Redshift. This feature empowers customers to quickly query, analyze, and build applications with these third-party data sets.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports rich text rendering of IMSC 1.1 text profile subtitles and the TTML subtitle format. Both of these formats allow detailed formatting that includes text size, position, justification, color, styling, and shadowing. For many viewers, on screen subtitles are an important part of the viewing experience and this feature gives subtitle authors more creative control of how text is rendered on screen. Additionally, IMSC and TTML allow greater text localization options including right-to-left text, rubies, and vertical text.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers APIs which you can use to keep your WorkSpaces images up-to-date with the latest AWS drivers. Previously, WorkSpaces images were kept up to date by manually launching a WorkSpaces instance, installing driver updates and creating a new image. With this launch, you can use WorkSpaces APIs to know if latest AWS drivers are available for your images, install those updates and create updated images. After the new image is created, you can test it before updating your production bundles or sharing the image with other AWS accounts. Keeping your WorkSpaces up to date with latest AWS drivers lets you leverage the benefits of the latest instance types and other infrastructure components offered by AWS.

Fleet Manager, a feature in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps IT Admins streamline and scale their remote server management processes, now enhances the reporting and filtering experience for Managed Instances. This new feature presents filtering options applicable to your data, taking out the guess work. You no longer need to memorize and manually enter values for filtering. It automatically populates applicable filtering criteria such as instance IDs or IP addresses.

On October 19th, Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions. Corretto 11.0.13 and 8.312 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto 17 updates will be available shortly after the release is tagged in the OpenJDK 17 repository. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

PostgreSQL 14 RC 1 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to test the release candidate version of PostgreSQL 14 on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

AWS Systems Manager now supports bulk editing of work items within OpsCenter.

FreeRTOS adds symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support in the kernel, enabling developers designing FreeRTOS-based applications to utilize the SMP capabilities of multi-core microcontrollers. Multi-core microcontrollers, in which two or more identical processor cores share the same memory, allow the operating system to distribute tasks between cores to balance processor load as desired by the application. This allows applications to optimize the resource utilization of multi-core microcontrollers.

Porting Assistant for .NET now supports assessment and porting of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN), and ASP.NET System.Web.Mvc namespaces to .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5. Following the GA release of Core WCF project in February 2021, Porting Assistant can now assess and provide recommendations to port WCF applications to Core WCF. It also supports assessment and porting of OWIN and System.Web.Mvc namespace configurations to .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5. Developers can use the existing Porting Assistant for .NET tool or Porting Assistant for .NET Visual Studio IDE extension to get started. 

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. With AppFlow, you can run data flows at enterprise scale between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, SAP, Zendesk, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, in just a few clicks. See where Amazon AppFlow is available by using the AWS Region Table.

Today, we announced the AWS Networking Competency for Consulting Partners. These partners have deep domain expertise in developing a consistent network and security policy, as well as solutions that offer a new way of routing traffic through private backbones and cloud cores. AWS Networking Competency Consulting Partners can help customers provide secure ingresses and convenient on-ramps into clouds to mitigate latency, improve availability, enhance application experience, and provide visibility and control in cloud networking.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now supports automatic data expiration by using Time to Live (TTL) settings. With TTL, you set expiration times on attributes or rows in your tables, and Keyspaces automatically deletes those expired attributes or rows.

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 in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. The feature brings a refreshed Windows 10 desktop experience, and enables customers to run applications that require recent Windows versions.

Distributed Load Testing on AWS is a solution that automates software applications testing at scale and at load to help you identify potential performance issues before their release. It creates and simulates thousands of connected users generating transactional records at a constant pace without the need to provision servers.

Read below for 26 new or updated datasets from University of Sydney, International Brain Laboratory, Taiwanese Central Weather Bureau, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories.

AWS Glue includes crawlers, a capability that make discovering datasets simpler by scanning data in Amazon S3 and relational databases, extracting their schema and automatically populating the AWS Glue Data Catalog, which keeps the metadata current. This reduces the time to insight by making newly ingested data quickly available for analysis with your favorite analytics and machine learning tools.

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

Amazon EC2 now adds 8 new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with SQL Server 2019 and 2017 on Windows Server 2022. With these AWS managed AMIs, customers can launch SQL Server on Windows Server 2022 and take full advantage of the latest Windows features on AWS. The AMIs are available in four editions – Enterprise, Standard, Web, and Express. See the list below.

* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2019_Enterprise
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2019_Standard
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2019_Web
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2019_Express
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2017_Enterprise
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2017_Standard
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2017_Web
* Windows_Server-2022-English-Full-SQL_2017_Express

Starting today, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is generally available in 11 additional AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (London, Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo).

AWS RoboMaker, a service that allows customers to simulate robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports expanded configuration for any robot and simulation software. Previously Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo are the only supported robot and simulation software configuration in RoboMaker. This new feature enables customers to use and configure any robot and simulation software of their choice while running simulations in RoboMaker.

AWS customers can now use Amazon Kendra to build intelligent search applications in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that allows customers to simulate robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports GPU based simulation jobs for compute-intensive simulation workloads such as high fidelity simulation, vision processing, and machine learning (ML). Previously, AWS RoboMaker simulation jobs ran only on central processing unit (CPU) instances; now you can choose between a CPU based or GPU based simulation job.

Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, enabling you to optimize the performance of your backend application servers while helping to keep your workloads secure. TLS 1.3 on NLB works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the load balancer, and provides encryption all the way to your targets. TLS 1.3 is optimized for performance and security by using one round trip (1-RTT) TLS handshakes and only supporting ciphers that provide perfect forward secrecy. As with other versions of TLS, NLB preserves the source IP of the clients to the back-end applications while terminating TLS on the load balancer.

Today, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling announced the ability to describe Auto Scaling groups using tags. Tag-based filtering makes it easier for you to view and manage your Auto Scaling groups based on the tags that you are interested in. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value.

Amazon EMR 6.4 release version now supports Apache Spark 3.1.2 and provides runtime improvements with Amazon EMR Runtime for Apache Spark. Amazon EMR 6.4 provides Presto runtime improvements for PrestoDB 0.254, and runtime improvements for Apache Hive 3.1.2 when you use AWS Glue Data Catalog for your metastore.

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.

You can now manage AWS Step Functions workflows in the AWS Batch console, where you can automate Batch jobs to help build long-running business-critical workflows that require machine learning, data analysis, or overnight batch processing.

Amazon QuickSight now supports larger SPICE datasets on the Enterprise Edition. Earlier each SPICE dataset could hold up to 250 million rows and 500GB of data. Now, all new SPICE datasets can accommodate up to 500 million rows (or 500GB) of data in the Enterprise Edition and 25 million rows (or 25GB) for Standard Edition. This raises the limit for your datasets, letting you accelerate dashboards with more data. See here for details.

Today we are announcing the availability of a new Amazon CloudWatch dimension for metrics in the AWS Outposts namespace. CloudWatch dimensions are unique identifiers for metrics that allow customers to search and filter results.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.16.3 brokers on Amazon MQ. This version update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and improvements compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.16.2.

Amazon SageMaker Projects, the first purpose-built service that manages continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) resources for machine learning (ML) projects, now has CI/CD templates for building Docker images used in training, processing, and inference.

Amazon Virtual Public Cloud (VPC) is introducing three new features to make it faster, easier and more cost efficient to store and run analytics on your Amazon VPC Flow Logs. First, VPC Flow Logs can now be delivered to Amazon S3 in the Apache Parquet file format. Second, they can be stored in S3 with Hive-compatible prefixes. And third, your VPC Flow Logs can be delivered as hourly partitioned files. All of these features are available when you choose S3 as the destination for your VPC Flow Logs.

You can now build and run stream processing applications using Apache Flink version 1.13 in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Apache Flink v1.13 provides enhancements to the Table/SQL API, improved interoperability between the Table and DataStream APIs, stateful operations using the Python Datastream API, features to analyze application performance, an exactly-once JDBC sink, and more. With this launch, you also get an Apache Kafka connector that works with AWS IAM authentication when you’re using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka(Amazon MSK) as your application’s data source.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports prefetch ad requests for personalized ad insertion. Prefetching manages the request of ads in advance of ad breaks, increasing the time an ad decision server (ADS) has to respond.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential code defects that are difficult to find and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are building on our set of detectors for the AWS SDKs with the addition of detectors for the AWS Java SDK v2. These new detectors help to ensure customers are following the Java SDK v2’s best practices, such as using client builders over client constructors, waiters over custom polling, or auto-pagination over manual pagination. The detectors can also find bugs customers create while using the new SDK’s AWS service clients, such as identifying data loss in the Amazon Kinesis v2 client. After detecting an issue or bug, CodeGuru Reviewer provides recommendations for how the developer can remediate it.

Automated Account Configuration helps you automate operational processes in an efficient, error-free, standardized and consistent way, to ensure that your AWS accounts are set up properly and with the necessary resources to meet your business and production needs. You can use the solutions implementation to configure and deploy the following business critical services:

• AWS Backup to centrally managed the backups of AWS services including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EFS.
• AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to automate the patching of managed instances such as EC2 instances.

AWS Console Mobile Application users can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on both the iOS and Android applications. The Console Mobile Application provides a secure and easy-to-use on-the-go solution for monitoring ECS clusters, services, configurations, tasks and container workloads. Customers can also stop ECS tasks and launch desired number of tasks for an ECS service.

Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes (CDK8s) is now Generally Available and ready for production usage with any conformant Kubernetes cluster. To ensure continued community involvement, cdk8s is also now an official CNCF Sandbox project and has moved from the AWS Labs GitHub organization to a dedicated home on GitHub, cdk8s-team.

During September, 2021, 5 new versions of the AWS Cloud Development Kit  (CDK) for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go were released (v1.121.0 through v.125.0). With these releases, the CDK CLI now has support for hotswap deployments for faster inner-loop development iterations on the application code in your CDK project. Hotswap initially supports AWS Lambda handler code, but support is planned for additional resource types and a “watch” mode which continually watches for changes and deploys any updates. Additionally, users can preserve successfully provisioned resources by disabling automatic stack rollbacks, further reducing deployment and iteration time. These releases also resolve 21 issues and introduce 40 new features that span over 30 different modules across the library. Many of these changes were contributed by the developer community.

AWS CloudFormation customers can now view operational data and quickly take action to resolve issues involving CloudFormation stack resources through Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. Using this feature, customers can obtain an application view of resources provisioned via a CloudFormation stack. With the operational metrics, logs, alerts, and cost information obtained from the Application Manager Dashboard, developers can manage their stack resources efficiently throughout their lifecycle.

Today we are announcing support for jumbo frames via the virtual ethernet framework in the AWS FPGA Developer kit. With this support, developers using  Amazon EC2 F1 instances can use jumbo frames to get the maximum allowed networking bandwidth for the instance delivering up to double the networking performance. 

AWS Marketplace sellers, including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and consulting partners, can now view agreements, cancel offers, and extend offer expiration dates for Professional Services from the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). Professional Services in AWS Marketplace enables ISVs and consulting partners to create new Professional Services listings in AWS Marketplace and extend Private Offers to AWS customers. 

Amazon Fraud Detector is excited to announce the Transaction Fraud Insights model, a low-latency fraud detection machine learning (ML) model specifically designed to detect online card-not-present transaction fraud. Like other Amazon Fraud Detector models, Transaction Fraud Insights leverages more than 20 years of fraud detection expertise from Amazon and AWS. The new Transaction Fraud Insights model type detects up to 30% more fraudulent transactions and maintains its performance up to six times longer than Amazon Fraud Detector’s previous model type, Online Fraud Insights.

We are excited to announce that we are lowering the price of Amazon Fraud Detector machine learning (ML) based fraud predictions. Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. Using ML under the hood and based on over 20 years of fraud detection expertise from Amazon, Fraud Detector automatically identifies potentially fraudulent activity in milliseconds—with no ML expertise required.

Amazon Connect Tasks is now HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) eligible. Connect Tasks empowers contact center managers to prioritize, assign, track, and automate customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents. HIPAA eligibility means you can prioritize and automate tasks with Protected Health Information (PHI), and even provide agents with this information they need to resolve your customers’ inquiries or service requests. You can prioritize or automate tasks from customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as Salesforce or Zendesk, electronic health records (EHR) systems such as Epic or Cerner, or with your homegrown and business-specific applications. Amazon Connect has been HIPAA eligible since 2017.

We are excited to announce event dataset storage for Amazon Fraud Detector. The new capability enables customers to easily send and store their production fraud data directly within Amazon Fraud Detector. Customers can use their event datasets to train machine learning (ML) models with higher predictive performance since the models can apply historical context to new events by automatically calculating values such as account age and purchase frequency. Customers can also move faster by retraining models without needing to upload a new training dataset to S3, and they can close the feedback loop from offline fraud investigations by updating their fraud labels for stored events.

You can now launch the T3 database instance type when using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon WorkMail now offers an expanded capability around its Mobile Device Access Rules (MDARs). The new Mobile Device Access Override API (MDOA) allows customers to adjust existing MDARs, either manually through the CLI, or in an automated fashion when using a third-party Mobile Device Management (MDM) tool. Customers use trusted third-party MDM tools to perform security posture assessments before granting devices access to corporate resources. The new API simplifies the creation and management of exceptions to default MDARs, either because there is a need to permit an out-of-posture device to connect to WorkMail, or because a user has reported a specific device to be stolen or lost. In that case, the individual device can be blocked to reduce the risk of data leakage.

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 import and automatically populate sample data to help build and visualize your data models. Now, you can import sample data from .csv files into new and existing data models. You also can export your query results in .csv format from the NoSQL Workbench operation builder.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Maintaining Personalized Experiences with Machine Learning, an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides end-to-end automation and scheduling for your Amazon Personalize resources. This solution keeps your item and user data current and manages re-training for your models to ensure that recommendations are kept up-to-date with recent user activity and to retain their relevance for your users. This solution publishes Amazon Personalize model offline metrics to Amazon CloudWatch to provide a directional sense of the quality of your models over time.

Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) now enables customers to manage containerized GPU-based workloads running on-premises infrastructure using Amazon ECS Anywhere. With Amazon ECS Anywhere GPU support, customers can deploy GPU based applications that need to remain on premise due to regulatory, network latency, data residency, or other requirements. Additionally, enterprises can make use of their existing investment on GPU compute capacity to run machine learning, 3D visualization, image processing and big data workloads without the need to transfer data to the cloud.

Today, AWS Backup announced the availability of AWS Backup Vault Lock. This new feature enhances customers’ ability to protect backups from inadvertent or malicious actions. It helps customers implement safeguards that ensure they are storing their backups using a Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) model*.

We are pleased to announce that AWS QnABot has now been released as an official AWS Solution Implementation. The AWS QnABot is an open source, multi-channel, multi-language conversational chatbot built on Amazon Lex, that responds to your customer’s questions, answers, and feedback. Without programming, the AWS QnABot solution allows customers to quickly deploy self-service conversational AI on multiple channels including their contact centers, web sites, social media channels, SMS text messaging, or Amazon Alexa.

You can now use Amazon Neptune Auto Scaling to automatically add or remove Read Replicas in response to changes in performance metrics you specify. Neptune Read Replicas share the same underlying volume as the primary instance and are well suited for read scaling. With Neptune Auto Scaling, you can specify a desired value for CloudWatch (CW) metrics for your Replicas such as average CPU utilization. Neptune Auto Scaling adjusts the number of Read Replicas to keep the CW metric closest to the value you specify.

We have updated the Amazon OpenSearch Service management console to improve your overall experience with configuring and managing your OpenSearch  clusters on the service. The new console helps you create and update domains, as well helps you get information about your domains, more easily.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Fast File Mode for accessing data in training jobs. This enables high performance data access by streaming directly from Amazon S3 with no code changes from the existing File Mode. For example, training a K-Means clustering model on a 100GB dataset took 28 minutes with File Mode but only 5 minutes with Fast File Mode (82% decrease).

We are excited to announce a new recipe in Amazon Personalize that, when given an item, will recommend similar items based on both user-item interaction data and item metadata. The combination of your users’ historical interactions and the information you have about your items increases the relevance of recommendations and ensures similar items capture your users’ attention. To assess the similarity of items we measure how frequently the items are found together in users’ histories. As a benchmark, we found that the new recipe is 10.2% more accurate in identifying similar items than recipes that use interactions data alone. This means your users will be more likely to find the items most related to what they are viewing.

AWS Lambda functions that are triggered from Amazon MSK topics can now access MSK clusters secured by IAM Access Control. This is in addition to SASL/SCRAM, which is already supported on Lambda. To get started, customers who select MSK as the event source for their Lambda function can configure their function's execution role to allow Lambda to connect to their clusters and read from their topics. This feature requires no additional charge to use, and is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK is supported as an event source for AWS Lambda.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Kendra is adding support for 34 languages for keyword-based search over documents and FAQs. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Customers with content in one or more of the supported languages can now use Amazon Kendra to index and search their content with native language support.

Starting today, you can configure your Amazon Lex bots to provide periodic updates to users while their requests are processed. Customer support conversations often require execution of business logic that can take some time to complete. For example, updating an itinerary on an airline reservation system may take a couple of minutes during peak hours. Typically, support agents put the call on hold and provide periodic updates (e.g., “We are still processing your request; thank you for your patience”) until the request is fulfilled. Now, you can easily configure your bot to automatically provide such periodic updates in a conversation. With progress updates capability, bot builders can quickly enhance the ability of virtual contact center agents and smart assistants.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. With media capture pipelines, 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. Starting today developers can configure APIs to customize the media capture experience for their applications, by easily switching the way they capture audio, video and content streams.

Amazon QuickSight now supports pixel-perfect dashboards with the new free-form layout mode. Free-form layouts provide authors with precise, pixel-level control over the size and placement of visual elements on QuickSight dashboards, including support for overlapping content. In addition, authors can also set additional attributes for QuickSight visuals in free-form layout, including background color, transparency, border color, selection color as well as visibility of the loading animation, visual context menu and on-visual menu. Free-form layout also supports conditional rendering of visual elements, which allows authors to show or hide content based on QuickSight parameter values, enabling context sensitive display of text, visuals and images. The combination of these options allows QuickSight authors to showcase their creativity by creating complex, interactive dashboards that allow end-users to understand key insights from their data.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available in Europe (Stockholm), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes. EC2 Mac enables developers to dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to develop, build, test, sign, and publish their apps.

AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in the Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 11 AWS Regions.

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.

We are announcing the support of using Apache Spark SQL to update Apache Hive metadata tables when using Amazon EMR integration with Apache Ranger.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports decoupling a database running in an Elastic Beanstalk environment. Previously, a database instance created by Elastic Beanstalk was tied to the lifecycle of the environment. With this launch, the lifecycle of your database instance will not be tied to your application’s environment lifecycle, and you can decouple a database managed by Elastic Beanstalk from a Beanstalk environment. The environment’s health is not affected by the decoupling operation and you can keep the database operational as an external database, available for multiple environments to connect to it. You also have the option to terminate an Elastic Beanstalk environment while leaving the database operational.

AWS Network Firewall now offers new configuration options for rule ordering and default drop, making it easier to write and process rules to monitor your virtual private cloud (VPC) traffic.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (London). 

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 Africa (Cape Town) Region. See where DataBrew is available by using the AWS Region Table.

AWS Backup Audit Manager now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to audit and report on the compliance of your data protection policies using AWS CloudFormation templates. You can now deploy AWS Backup Audit Manager's pre-built, customizable controls using AWS CloudFormation templates and evaluate whether all your backups are in compliance with your policies. You can also generate audit reports that help you monitor your operational posture and demonstrate compliance of your backups with regulatory requirements.

You can now access D-Wave’s Advantage 4.1 quantum annealing system on Amazon Braket, the AWS quantum computing service. According to D-Wave, the new Advantage quantum processing unit (QPU) has more than 5,000 active qubits with 15-way connectivity to enable researchers and developers to explore larger and more complex optimization problems.

Using Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservation Fleet, you can easily migrate your reserved Amazon EC2 capacity to new generation instance types. Capacity Reservations allow you to reserve capacity for your immediate use in a specific instance type and Availability Zone and can be cancelled by you at any time. With Capacity Reservation Fleet, you can reserve capacity across a prioritized list of instance types. When your reservations for lower priority instance types are unused, it will automatically convert them to capacity reservations for higher priority instance types.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Performance Insights is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Osaka) regions. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature of RDS and Aurora that helps you quickly assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action.

AWS Transfer Family now supports Amazon S3 Access Points, a feature of Amazon S3 that allows you to easily manage granular access to shared data sets. Now, you can use S3 Access Point aliases anywhere an S3 bucket name is used today for shared datasets that are utilized by hundreds of SFTP, FTP, and FTPS users and groups.

Today, Amazon Location Service is adding distance-based filtering of device position updates.

We are announcing the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, a jointly-engineered solution that delivers VMware Cloud on AWS as a fully managed experience to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility with AWS Outposts. It runs VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software on dedicated AWS Nitro System-based EC2 bare metal Outposts instances. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is built for VMware workloads that require low-latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or data residency.

AWS Firewall Manager now enables you to configure logging for your AWS Network Firewalls provisioned using a Firewall Manager policy. When you set up a Firewall Manager policy for Network Firewall, you can now enable logging for all the accounts that are in scope of the policy and have the logs centralized under your Firewall Manager administrator account. This makes it easy to enable logging for AWS Network Firewall across multiple accounts and VPCs through a single Firewall Manager policy. 

AWS Backup Audit Manager now allows you to generate reports to track the compliance of your defined data protection policies in AWS Backup. You can create a report plan in AWS Backup Audit Manager to deliver compliance reports in your designated Amazon S3 bucket. You can use these reports to identify violations of your data protection policies, perform remediation, and demonstrate compliance of your data protection policies to meet regulatory requirements.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports cross-cluster replication, enabling you to automate copying and synchronizing of indices from one domain to another at low latency in same or different AWS accounts or Regions. With cross-cluster replication, you can achieve high availability for your mission critical applications with sequential data consistency. 

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.

Starting today, Amazon Textract now extends support for AWS PrivateLink to both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Customers can now access Amazon Textract from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in AWS GovCloud (US) without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Amazon Workspaces Cost Optimizer, a solution that analyzes all of your Amazon WorkSpaces usage data and automatically converts the WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly), depending on your individual usage. This solution also helps you monitor your WorkSpace usage and optimize costs.

AWS IoT Events is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, extending the footprint to 13 AWS regions.

Amazon EC2 now supports Hibernation for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS operating system. 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 Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports PostGIS major version 3.1. This new version of PostGIS is available on PostgreSQL versions 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and higher.

AWS License Manager announces Delegated Administrator support for Managed entitlements. This feature allows license administrators to manage and distribute licenses across their AWS accounts from a delegated account outside of the management account. Using delegated administrator, you can grant licenses from AWS Marketplace and Independent Software Vendors across your organization and benefit from the administrative capabilities previously afforded to the management account only.

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.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.8.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.8.1 includes several bug fixes. To learn more about these fixes you can review the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.8.1.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have added support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL minor versions 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and 9.6.23. We have also added support in Amazon RDS on Outposts for PostgreSQL minor versions 13.4 and 12.8. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.

Today, we are making it easier for customers to view and update the alternate contacts on their AWS accounts using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDK. Customers can now programmatically keep their billing, operations, and security contacts for their accounts up to date to ensure that they receive important notifications about their AWS accounts. Support for additional account settings will be available in future releases.

You can now use open source frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto running on Amazon EMR clusters directly from Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks to run petabyte-scale data analytics and machine learning. Amazon EMR automatically installs and configures open source frameworks and provides a performance-optimized runtime that is compatible with and faster than standard open source. For e.g. Spark 3.0 on Amazon EMR is 1.7x faster than it’s open source equivalent. Amazon SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data, as well as build, train, and deploy models. Analyzing, transforming and preparing large amounts of data is a foundational step of any data science and ML workflow. This release makes it simple to use popular frameworks such as Apache Spark, Hive, and Presto running on EMR clusters directly from Sagemaker Studio to help simplify data science and ML workflows.