December 2021

We are excited to announce the launch of phone number enrichments for Amazon Fraud Detector machine  learning (ML) models. Amazon Fraud Detector (AFD) 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 AFD automatically identifies potentially fraudulent activity in milliseconds—with no ML expertise required.

AWS Secrets Manager now transparently supports SSL connections when rotating database secrets for Amazon RDS MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. You can now enforce SSL to be always enabled for these databases, without first modifying AWS Lambda resources provided by AWS Secrets Manager. 

Amazon S3 on Outposts is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions allows U.S. government agencies and contractors to move sensitive workloads onto their AWS Outposts by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements for object storage.

The Amazon Connect Chat user interface now supports browser notifications through your customers’ web browser, improving customer satisfaction by letting the customer know when the agent has responded to their message. When your customer receives a new chat message while in another application or browser window, they will receive a notification through their web browser that they can easily click to view the message in the Chat user interface. This feature is supported out-of-the box without the need for manual configuration.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. Amazon Chime SDK meetings now support stereo audio, with 48kHz sampling and 128kbps encoding. These capabilities enable developers to capture live instruments or stereo microphone audio in their applications as well as sharing of pre-recorded music or other stereo content with stereo playback to users.

AWS Transfer Family is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and as FedRAMP High in GovCloud(US-West) and GovCloud(US-East).

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.3 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.3 includes security improvements and bug fixes. To learn more about these fixes you can review the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.3.

Now customers can use EC2 Image Builder to build custom images from their on-premise images in a single console-based experience. This capability makes it easier for customers to incorporate on-premise images stored in S3 (in OVA, VHD, VHDX, VMDK and raw format) in EC2 Image Builder pipelines. Those customers can now leverage existing EC2 Image Builder capabilities, such as process automation, build security and image distribution, to build images via an intuitive console.

NICE DCV version 2021.3 introduces multiple new features such as DCV Connection Gateway and a refreshed DCV Web Client user interface. NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that helps customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

Starting today, customers can track Savings Plans Utilization and Coverage with hourly granularity in the AWS Cost Management Console. Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that offers savings of up to 72% on your Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate type usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term. Savings Plans discounts are calculated and applied at hourly basis. Hourly granularity in Savings Plans Utilization report helps you to visualize and understand how well you are using your existing Savings Plans subscriptions per hour. Similarly, hourly granularity in Savings Plans Coverage report helps you visualize and understand how much of your total Savings Plans eligible spend is covered by Savings Plans per hour.

Porting Assistant for .NET now supports .NET 6 as a target framework and porting of certain ASP.NET Web Forms application configurations to ASP.NET Core Blazor framework. With this release, Porting Assistant will translate select Web Forms view/UI layer files, page life-cycle events, and application life cycle events to the cross-platform Blazor Framework. Developers can use the Porting Assistant for .NET standalone tool or Porting Assistant for .NET Visual Studio IDE extension to modernize their Web Forms applications. This release also enables developers to port their applications to the latest Long Term Support release .NET 6, in addition to .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5 target versions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports additional use cases for Oracle Connection Manager (CMAN). CMAN is a proxy server that forwards connection requests to database servers or other proxy servers.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is now Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) compliant and in scope for System Organization Controls (SOC 1 and SOC 2). Customer Profiles is designed to automatically bring together customer information from multiple applications and surfaces it to a contact agent at the moment they begin interacting with a customer. 

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now supports near real-time data ingestion from Segment and Shopify. Use existing Segment data sources to ingest customer information such as name, email address, and phone number into Amazon Connect. Once your connectors are configured, customer profiles are created and updated in near real-time for new customer actions such as new customer registration, change in contact information, and new order transactions. When a customer calls in, Customer Profiles identifies the customer and presents the agent with latest and most up to date customer information to help them service the customer.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.7.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.7.2 includes security improvements and bug fixes. To learn more about these fixes you can review the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.7.2. 

Starting today, AWS Elemental MediaConnect supports the Fujitsu Quality of Service (QoS) protocol. Fujitsu QoS is one of several transport protocols supported in MediaConnect, a list that includes Zixi, Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST), Secure Reliable Transport (SRT), and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). Because MediaConnect translates between protocols, you can build a variety of reliable live video transport applications running inside and outside of AWS.

AWS Lambda now supports IPv6 endpoints for inbound connections, allowing customers to invoke Lambda functions over IPv6. This helps customers to meet IPv6 compliance requirements, and removes the need for expensive networking equipment to handle address translation between IPv4 and IPv6.

NICE DCV web client software development kit (SDK) version 1.0.4 introduces support for multiple concurrent connections. Developers can now use the web client SDK to build applications with multiple side-by-side streaming views that show different DCV sessions in a single webpage.

Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation on two new resources: contact flow and contact flow module. You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to help you 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.

AWS DataSync now supports copying data to and from Amazon FSx for Lustre, a fully managed service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable storage for compute workloads. Using DataSync, you can quickly and securely perform data movement tasks such as moving data from one FSx for Lustre file system to another, migrating your on-premises data to your FSx for Lustre file system, or copying data between your FSx for Lustre file system and other AWS Storage services such as Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. You can also use DataSync for ongoing data transfers between on-premises storage and AWS for processing.

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 meetings to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice. Developers can now use media capture pipelines with Amazon S3 buckets which use server side encryption with customer managed keys using Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS), to help support your encryption requirements.

AWS Trusted Advisor now supports new recommendations that help you simplify your SQL Server optimization on Amazon EC2. The checks inspect your SQL Server workloads and automatically lists your SQL Server instances that need optimization. You can then take recommended actions to reduce costs and improve security. You can find the details of the three checks below.

1. Amazon EC2 Instances with Microsoft SQL Server End of Support - Checks the SQL Server versions for Amazon EC2 instances and alerts you if the versions are near or have reached the end of support. For example, SQL Server 2012 Extended Support will end on July 12, 2022. You can find the flexible migration and upgrade options on AWS through check recommendations.
2. Amazon EC2 Instances Over-provisioned for Microsoft SQL Server - Checks your Amazon EC2 instances that are running SQL Server and alerts you if an instance exceeds the SQL Server software vCPU limit. For example, An instance with SQL Server Standard edition can use up to 48 vCPUs. An instance with SQL Server Web can use up to 32 vCPUs.
3. Amazon EC2 Instances Consolidation for Microsoft SQL Server - Checks your Amazon EC2 instances and alerts you if your instance has less than the minimum number of SQL Server licenses. You can consolidate smaller SQL Server instances to help lower costs.

AWS Well-Architected now supports four new AWS Trusted Advisor checks as a unified home of best practice recommendations to identify the most impactful risks and take action to mitigate them. The new checks are:

1. AWS Well-Architected high risk issues for cost optimization
2. AWS Well-Architected high risk issues for performance efficiency
3. AWS Well-Architected high risk issues for security
4. AWS Well-Architected high risk issues for reliability

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Starting today, you have the ability to mask commonly understood profane terms and prevent them from appearing in your translations. By default, Amazon Translate chooses clean words for your translation output. In cases where profane words appear in the translated output, you can now choose to mask the profane words and phrases with a grawlix string “?$#@$”. This 5-character sequence is used for each profane word or phrase, regardless of the length or number of characters. 

Amazon Detective has added support for AWS Organizations to simplify account management for security operations and investigations across all existing and future accounts in an organization. With this launch, new and existing Detective customers can onboard and centrally manage the Detective graph database for up to 1,200 AWS accounts. This support is available today in all Detective supported AWS Regions. To learn more, see the Amazon Detective Administration Guide.

Today, Amazon Lex announces language support for Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Mandarin Chinese. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With these new languages, you can build and expand your conversational experiences to better understand and engage your customer base.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the South America (São Paulo) Region with an AWS Ground Station antenna location in Punta Arenas, Chile in Preview. This is the 10th AWS Ground Station connected to the AWS Global Network. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Global expansion to Punta Arenas now enables satellite owners and operators to connect with their satellites and process their space workloads more frequently. An additional AWS Ground Station location in the Southern Hemisphere reduces the time between contacts for Low-Earth Orbit satellites. Customers who operate from this region now have access to even lower latency processing capabilities. Governments, businesses, and universities can benefit from this more timely satellite data to make precise, data driven decisions. 

Starting today, Amazon Nimble Studio has added new features for customers deploying or updating their cloud-based studios. With additional support for Usage Based Licensing (UBL) from AWS Thinkbox Deadline, deeper Linux integration, and the Los Angeles Local Zone, Amazon Nimble Studio provides customers added functionality when deploying their cloud-based content creation studio.

Today, AWS announced the opening of two new Direct Connect locations in Jakarta, Indonesia. AWS customers in Indonesia can now establish dedicated network connections from their Indonesia premises to AWS to gain high-performance, secure access to other AWS Region (except Regions in China). With the announcement of Direct Connect locations in Indonesia, the Direct Connect Management Console and related documentation for Direct Connect have been localized to support the Bahasa language for Indonesia customers.

Amazon FinSpace now makes it even easier to start analyzing data with newly included financial services sample data, catalog configurations with taxonomy and metadata, capabilities to load your data into Amazon FinSpace, and the ability to run multiple Spark jobs in parallel.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6i instances are available in these additional AWS Regions US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo).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, offering 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.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i instances are available in additional AWS Regions Canada (Central) and Europe (London). 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.

Amazon EMR now supports using multiple custom Amazon Machine Images (AMI) when you mix Arm-based AWS Graviton2-based instances with non-Graviton2 based instances in a single cluster. This capability allows you to diversify across more instance types when using custom AMIs, helping improve your access to EC2 capacity for large clusters. Prior to this release, you could still mix multiple instance types within a cluster, but could not do so when using Custom AMIs. Custom AMIs enable you to preload additional software and libraries required by your applications, customize cluster and node configurations, and encrypt the EBS root device volumes of EC2 instances in your cluster.

Amazon Lookout for Vision is excited to preview support for anomaly detection at the edge. Starting today, you can use your trained Amazon Lookout for Vision models on the edge by deploying these models to a hardware device of your choice. Your trained models can be deployed on any NVIDIA Jetson edge appliance or x86 compute platform running Linux with an NVIDIA GPU accelerator. You can use AWS IoT Greengrass to deploy and manage your edge compatible customized models on your fleet of devices. AWS IoT Greengrass is an open-source edge runtime and cloud service for building, deploying, and managing device software.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 R6i instances are available in additional AWS Regions US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (London), and Europe (Paris). Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i 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. R6i 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 R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as SQL and noSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases like SAP HANA, and real time big data analytics like Hadoop and Spark clusters.

Amazon Lex now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to create bots and organize Amazon Lex resources using CloudFormation stack templates. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With CloudFormation support, you can easily model resources on Lex V2 APIs - namely Bot, BotVersion, BotAlias, and ResourcePolicy - to provision resources quickly and consistently, and manage them through their lifecycles.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to quickly deploy solutions that use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems.

You can now use Amazon FinSpace in applications that are subject to System and Organization Controls (SOC) compliance. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives. You can download the AWS SOC reports in AWS Artifact. To learn more, visit AWS Compliance Programs, or you can go to the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program webpage to see a full list of services covered by each compliance program.

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports containerization and deployment of .NET applications running on Linux. With this release, customers can use A2C to detect the .NET Core runtime version (.NET Core 3.1, .NET 5, .NET 6) and containerize the application using the corresponding runtime base images. Customers can take advantage of cost and performance benefits offered by Linux containers. Customers can continue to deploy these containerized applications to their choice of container platforms, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), AWSFargate, and AWS App Runner using A2C.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is now available in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) add-ons in preview, enabling you to use the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API to install and manage the add-on. This release is in addition to existing support for the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin, CoreDNS and kube-proxy, and makes it easier to define consistent Kubernetes clusters and keep them up to date using Amazon EKS.

Amazon Route 53 is adding domain specific API actions: DeleteDomain and ListPrices. Sorting and filtering functions are also being added to the API action, ListDomains. The DeleteDomain API action is a function previously only available in the AWS Console.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports data compression for data stored within a file system’s capacity pool storage. Combined with FSx for ONTAP’s existing support for data deduplication and compaction, data compression enables you to reduce your storage costs for a wide spectrum of data sets — for example, you can reduce your costs for general-purpose file shares by 65%.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP has now reduced the minimum file system throughput capacity from 512 MB/s to 128 MB/s, decreasing the minimum cost of an FSx for ONTAP file system by over 50%.

AWS Network Firewall now supports AWS Managed Rules, which are groups of rules based on threat intelligence data, to enable you to stay up to date on the latest security threats without writing and maintaining your own rules.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) and Africa (Cape Town) regions.

Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, announces a new feature for customers to report and visualize the cost of their applications through integration with AWS Cost Explorer. Application Manager is a central hub on AWS to create, view and operate applications from a single console. With Application Manager, customers can discover and manage their applications across multiple AWS services like AWS CloudFormation, AWS Launch Wizard, AWS Service Catalog App Registry, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Using this feature, IT professionals can now view the cost of their applications and application components within the Application Manager console.

AWS EMP now supports packaging for end-of-support (EOS) Windows Server applications where installation media is not available, through a guided user interface (UI) experience. With today’s release of the Guided Reverse Packaging (GRP) feature, customers can input files and folders related to the application and the tool will automatically search for dependencies such as registry keys and related files and present to the user for confirmation. Next, customers will have the ability to simulate typical application workflows to ensure the full scope of dependencies is captured. Customers can then generate the compatibility package needed to then be deployed onto a newer, supported version of Windows Server in EC2 with the running application.

You can now cache responses returned by your Custom Authorizer Lambdas when using AWS IoT Core Custom Authentication workflow for HTTP connections. Customers can now define a caching duration (i.e. refreshAfterInSecs) for responses returned by customers’ custom authorizer lambdas when using long-lived HTTP connections. Customers can set a “refreshAfterInSecs” between 5 mins and 24 hours to reduce custom authorizer lambda invocations. This feature enhancement helps customers reduce their custom authorizer lambda cost and makes the behavior for HTTP match with that of other protocols supported by AWS IoT Core.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to lead you through a best practices deployment of self-managed Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) on Amazon EC2. AWS Launch Wizard uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide you through the sizing, configuration, and deployment of RD Gateway on the AWS Cloud, without the need to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources. RD Gateway employs Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) over HTTPS which helps establishes a secure, encrypted connection between remote users and Amazon EC2 instances running Windows, without needing to configure a virtual private network (VPN). This helps reduce the attack surface on your Windows-based instances while providing a remote administration solution for administrators.

Amazon DevOps Guru now supports enhanced analysis for Amazon Aurora databases, a new Machine Learning (ML) powered capability, as part of Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to lead you through a best practices deployment of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Amazon EKS runs the Kubernetes management infrastructure for you across multiple AWS Availability Zones to help eliminate a single point of failure. AWS Launch Wizard uses AWS Well-Architected Quick Start architectures to guide you through the sizing, configuration, and deployment of an Amazon EKS control plane, connecting worker nodes to the cluster, and configuring a bastion host for cluster admin operations. Additionally, the Launch Wizard deployment provides custom resources that enable you to deploy and manage your Kubernetes applications using AWS CloudFormation by declaring Kubernetes manifests or Helm charts directly in CloudFormation templates.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5n instances are available in AWS Africa (Cape Town) region.

In April 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create IAM policies based on access activity found in your AWS CloudTrail. IAM Access Analyzer has now increased policy generation quotas to 50 per day to help you right-size permissions for more roles in your account. As you right-size permissions across multiple workloads in your account, you can now use policy generation across your roles to grant just the required permissions. To use IAM Access Analyzer policy generation, visit your role’s detail page and select “generate policy” to get started. When you request a policy, IAM Access Analyzer reviews your CloudTrail logs to identify the actions used and creates a fine-grained policy. Read the blog to learn more.

Today, Amazon Location Service added metadata for tracking position updates to help developers reduce cost, improve accuracy, and simplify the development of tracking applications. Amazon Location Service Trackers already make it easy for developers to build highly scalable device-tracking applications by enabling them to retrieve the current and historical location of their tracked devices, and automatically evaluate device-positions relative to linked areas of interest (geofences). With the new metadata feature, developers can enrich these applications with additional information about each device’s position, for example the speed, direction, or engine temperature of vehicles, by including three user-defined key-values pairs with each position update. They can retrieve this information for a device’s current or historical position directly from the Amazon Location Service Tracker, for example to analyze engine performance, without building additional systems and code to track this data. Developer can also receive this metadata in the Amazon EventBridge Entry and Exit event when tracked devices cross a geofence.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on the  Vodafone 4G/5G network in Germany. Wavelength Zones are now available in Berlin, Munich, and Dortmund. Developers, enterprises, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can now use the AWS Wavelength Zones in Germany to build ultra-low latency applications for mobile devices and users. AWS Wavelength Zones on Vodafone’s 4G/5G network are now available in four cities across Europe, including the previously announced Wavelength Zone in London.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a HIPAA-eligible natural language processing service that uses machine learning to extract health data from unstructured medical text accurately and quickly. Much of health data today is in free-form medical text like doctors’ notes, clinical trial reports, and patient health records. Manually extracting the data is a time consuming process that requires broad use of synonyms and nonstandard medical terms. As a result, data often remains unusable in large-scale analytics which is needed to advance healthcare and life sciences industry.

Today, AWS Systems Manager announces new features for Session Manager to support maximum session timeout and annotate the reason for starting a session. AWS Systems Manager is the operational hub for AWS, that provides a unified user interface to track and resolve operational issues across AWS applications from a central place. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows you to manage your EC2 instances, edge devices, and on-premise servers and virtual machines (VMs), using either an interactive browser based shell or command line.

Today, Amazon Location Service is adding Suggestions functionality.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.5.13, 10.4.22, 10.3.32, and 10.2.41. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

The AWS Toolkit for VS Code now provides developers with convenient IDE functionality to connect to Amazon ECS containers and issue commands using Amazon ECS Exec. This allows VS Code users to directly interact with containers, such as running commands in or get a shell to an ECS container running on an Amazon EC2 instance or on AWS Fargate, without leaving their IDE. ECS Exec uses the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Session Manager under the hood to establish a connection with the running container.

AWS Glue streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs can now read from AWS Glue Data Catalog tables created using the AWS Glue Schema Registry. With streaming ETL in AWS Glue, you can set up continuous ingestion pipelines to prepare streaming data on the fly and make it available for analysis in seconds. The AWS Glue Schema Registry allows you to centrally discover, control, and evolve data stream schemas. This integration streamlines the job setup process and simplifies schema enforcement.

Today we are announcing general availability of NICE EnginFrame 2021.0. NICE EnginFrame is an easy-to-use, web front-end that makes HPC job submission and management easier for customers. With this latest release, customers are able to use NICE EnginFrame across both on-premises and AWS environments using its new AWS HPC Connector feature. Where customers may have previously used NICE EnginFrame for these tasks on-premises and separately managed AWS resources for HPC using the AWS CLI or AWS Management Console, NICE EnginFrame customers can now manage all of these HPC workflows across both their on-premises and AWS environments using a single, unified interface.

Amazon Pinpoint now includes a one-time password (OTP) management feature. An OTP is an automatically generated string of characters that authenticates a user for a single login attempt or transaction. The OTP feature makes it easier to add OTP workflows to your application, site, or service. You can use this feature to generate new OTP codes and send them to your recipients as SMS text messages. Your applications can then call the Amazon Pinpoint API to validate that the OTP code the recipient entered is valid. 

Amazon Redshift has launched the ability to run a single-node RA3.xlplus cluster. Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters support many important features including Amazon Redshift Managed Storage (RMS), data sharing and AQUA. Single-node RA3.xlplus clusters allow you to take advantage of the most advanced Redshift features at a lower cost. You can migrate single-node DS2.xlarge or single-node DC2.large clusters to single-node RA3.xlplus clusters as part of a cross-instance Classic Resize function. You can also use cross-instance Classic Resize as part of the Reserved Instance (RI) Migration feature in the Amazon Redshift Console, CLI or API to migrate your single-node DS2.xlarge RI clusters to RA3.xlplus RI clusters without changes to the RI contract’s start or end dates and without incurring additional charges.

Fleet Manager, a feature in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps IT Admins streamline and scale their remote server management tasks, now offers an easy console-based experience for customers to view and manage processes on their instances. This new feature provides customers a consolidated view of the processes running on an instance coupled with the ability to assess their resource consumption in real-time and optimize operations through start/stop actions.

AWS Graviton2-based R6g database instances are now available in Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), and Europe (Stockholm) regions for Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

You can now send AWS WAF logs directly to a CloudWatch Logs log group or to an Amazon S3 bucket. With this launch, we’re adding two new optional destinations for WAF logs in addition to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which was already supported. When you use CloudWatch Logs as your WAF log destination, you can search and analyze WAF logs directly in the WAF console using CloudWatch Logs Insights. Using CloudWatch Logs Insights, you can view individual logs, compile aggregated reports, create visualizations, and construct dashboards.

Amazon S3 File Gateway now enables you to force-close locked files on SMB file shares on Amazon S3 File Gateway by providing access to local security groups. Amazon S3 File Gateway provides on-premises applications with file-based, cached access to virtually unlimited cloud storage using SMB and NFS protocols. End users and applications using files on SMB shares, may stop working on those files without closing them. This leaves the files in an open, or locked, state. Until now, gateway administrators did not have permissions to close these files.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of a neural version of Takumi, Polly’s Japanese male text to speech (TTS) voice. Takumi neural TTS sounds natural, friendly and smooth. With this launch, you can now select from three unique Japanese TTS voices: Mizuki Standard, Takumi Standard and Takumi Neural.

Today, we are releasing a new feature in AWS AppSync that allows customers to use custom domain names with their AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs.

AWS Lambda now logs the Hyperplane Elastic Network Interface (ENI) ID in AWS CloudTrail data events, for functions running in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Customers can use the ENI ID in AWS CloudTrail data events to audit the security of their applications, and verify that only authorized functions are accessing their VPC resources through a shared Hyperplane ENI.

SageMaker Model Registry, a purpose-built service which enables customers to catalog their ML models, now provides endpoint visibility from Studio UI, ability to store custom metadata and view/store broad array of metrics for a given model.

Amazon Redshift has launched support for the VARBYTE data type. VARBYTE is a variable size data type for storing and representing variable-length binary strings. With this announcement, Amazon Redshift can now support variable length binary data for use with core Amazon Redshift features, SQL UDFs and SQL DDL for creating VARBYTE columns in tables. VARBYTE(n) syntax gives you the flexibility to specify the size (‘n’). The default for n is 64KB and max is 1MB. VARBYTE values are displayed/printed as Hex values to ensure all binary bytes are printable.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands its functionality by introducing Time Travel, a feature granting customers flexibility on their logging capabilities and enhancing their troubleshooting experience. With Time Travel, you can store and encrypt AWS DMS logs using Amazon S3, and view, download and obfuscate the logs within a certain time frame. Time Travel help make troubleshooting more easily and securely.

Amazon Fraud Detector is now in scope for AWS SOC 1 , SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports. You can now use Amazon Fraud Detector in applications requiring audited evidence of the controls in our System and Organization Controls (SOC) reporting. For example, if you use AWS to detect fraud and abuse, you can use the SOC reports to help meet your compliance requirements for those use cases. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives.

Automated Materialized View (AutoMV) for Amazon Redshift helps lower query latency for repeatable workloads like dashboard queries minimizing the effort for manually creating and managing materialized views. 

Amazon Redshift simplifies organizing, documenting, and sharing of multiple SQL queries with support for SQL Notebooks (preview) in Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2. The new Notebook interface enables users such as data analysts and data scientists to author queries more easily, organizing multiple SQL queries and annotations on a single document. They can also collaborate with their team members by sharing Notebooks.

We’re excited to announce the AWS SDK for Rust is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Rust empowers developers to interact with AWS services and enjoy APIs that follow Rust idioms and best practices. It utilizes modern Rust language features like async/await, non-blocking IO, and builders. The SDK also integrates with popular libraries in the Rust ecosystem like Tokio, Tracing, and Hyper.

Today, AWS and the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) announced the first stable release of Open 3D Engine (O3DE), an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds for video production, and simulations for non-gaming use-cases unencumbered by licensing fees or commercial terms. Since the formation of O3DF and launch of the O3DE Developer Preview in July, over 250 developers from a wide range of industries have contributed thousands of pull requests, issues, and millions of lines of code changes to add developer features, improve stability, and increase performance to ensure that O3DE is ready for use in live games and simulations. As the successor to Amazon Lumberyard, O3DE offers developers and content creators a wide set of 3D content creation tools and a growing community of developers and foundation partners including AccelByte, Adobe, Apocalypse Studios, Audiokinetic, AWS, Backtrace.io, Carbonated, Futurewei, GAMEPOCH, Genvid Technologies, Hadean, HERE Technologies, Huawei, Intel, International Game Developers Association, KitBash3D, Kythera AI, Niantic, Open Robotics, PopcornFX, Red Hat, Rochester Institute of Technology, SideFX, Tafi, TLM Partners and Wargaming.

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) now supports global resource types, enabling you to provision a global resource once and share that resource across your accounts. A global resource is a resource that can be used in multiple AWS Regions. For example, you can now create a RAM resource share with an AWS Cloud WAN core network, which is a managed network containing AWS and on-premises networks, and share it across your organization. As a result, you can use the Cloud WAN core network to centrally operate a unified global network across Regions and across accounts.

Today AWS announced the preview release of AWS Cloud WAN, a new wide area networking (WAN) service that helps you build, manage, and monitor a unified global network that manages traffic running between resources in your cloud and on-premises environments.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go (preview) is now generally available in a single package, making it easier for you to use the CDK and stay up-to-date with new versions as we evolve it going forwards. AWS CDK v2 consolidates the AWS Construct Library into a single package called aws-cdk-lib, and eliminates the need to download individual packages for each AWS service used. If you write your own CDK construct libraries, you only need to take a minimum dependency on this single package and let library consumers choose which exact AWS CDK version to use.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers improve their cloud workloads since 2015. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. Today we are introducing a new AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.

Today, we are announcing Extended Maintenance Plan for FreeRTOS - a real-time operating system for microcontrollers. FreeRTOS Extended Maintenance Plan (EMP) allows embedded developers to receive critical bug fixes and security patches on their chosen FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) version for up to 10 years beyond the expiry of the initial LTS period. FreeRTOS EMP helps customers secure their microcontroller-based devices for years, save operating system upgrade costs, and reduce risks associated with patching their devices. FreeRTOS EMP applies to libraries covered by FreeRTOS LTS, so developers can continue using a version that provides feature stability, security patches, and critical bug fixes, without having to plan a costly version upgrade.

We’re happy to announce that the AWS SDK for Swift is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Swift has been designed from the ground-up to provide idiomatic support for Swift’s concise syntax, multi platform capabilities, and features extensions to take advantage of Swift’s new concurrency features. This initial release supports iOS, macOS and Linux, with support for other platforms such as tvOS, watchOS, Catalyst, and Windows coming in the future.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Construct Hub, a registry of open-source construct libraries for simplifying cloud development. Constructs are reusable building blocks of the Cloud Development Kits (CDKs). Discover and share CDK constructs for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s) and CDK for Terraform (CDKtf) and other construct-based tools.

AWS Amplify announces AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features (public preview) to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Amplify Studio automatically translates designs made in Figma to human-readable React UI component code. Within Amplify Studio, developers can visually connect the UI components to app backend data. For configuring and managing backends, Amplify Admin UI’s existing capabilities will be part of Amplify Studio going forward, providing a unified interface to enable developers to build full-stack apps faster. Learn more.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M1 Mac instances for macOS are available in preview. Built on Apple silicon Mac mini computers and powered by AWS Nitro System, EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads. EC2 M1 Mac instances also enable native ARM64 macOS environments for the first time in AWS to develop, build, test, deploy, and run Apple applications. Developers rearchitecting their macOS applications to natively support Apple silicon Macs can now provision ARM64 macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to enjoy faster builds and convenient distributed testing. Learn more and get started with EC2 M1 Mac instances preview here.

We’re pleased to announce that the AWS SDK for Kotlin is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Kotlin allows developers to interact with AWS services using idiomatic Kotlin, including native coroutine support for concurrent usage.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of AWS re:Post (re:Post), a new, community-driven, questions-and-answers service to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and enhance operation. AWS re:Post enables you to ask questions about anything related to designing, building, deploying, and operating workloads on AWS, and get answers from community experts, including AWS customers, Partners, and employees.

Today, we are excited to announce a new and simplified out-of-box AWS IoT connectivity experience that can be implemented on two partner-provided FreeRTOS Reference Integration boards: the STM32L4+ and the ESP32-C3. 

The AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Scholarship program, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, provides students who self-identify as underserved and underrepresented in tech educational content, career mentorship programs, and 2,500 scholarships annually as part of a commitment to a more diverse future AI & ML workforce.

Amazon DynamoDB announces the new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (DynamoDB Standard-IA) table class, which helps you reduce your DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent for tables that store infrequently accessed data. The DynamoDB Standard-IA table class is ideal for use cases that require long-term storage of data that is infrequently accessed, such as application logs, old social media posts, e-commerce order history, and past gaming achievements.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway supports intra-region peering, giving you the ability to establish peering connections between multiple Transit Gateways in the same AWS Region. With this change, different units in your organization can deploy their own Transit Gateways, and easily interconnect them resulting in less administrative overhead and greater autonomy of operation.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of three new features: (1) Experience Builder to create fully functional search applications in a few clicks, (2) Search Analytics Dashboard for search insights and metrics, and (3) Custom Document Enrichment for document pre-processing and enrichment during ingestion.

Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is a new feature that makes it easier for you to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for your AWS workloads. With IPAM's automated workflows, network administrators can more efficiently manage IP addresses.

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a new Machine Learning (ML) powered capability for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that automatically detects and diagnoses database performance and operational issues, enabling you to resolve bottlenecks in minutes rather than days. Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a feature of Amazon DevOps Guru, which detects operational and performance related issues for all Amazon RDS engines and dozens of other resource types. DevOps Guru for RDS expands upon the existing capabilities of DevOps Guru to detect, diagnose, and provide remediation recommendations for a wide variety of database-related performance issues, such as resource over-utilization and misbehavior of SQL queries. When an issue occurs, DevOps Guru for RDS immediately notifies developers and DevOps engineers and provides diagnostic information, details on the extent of the problem, and intelligent remediation recommendations to help customers quickly resolve the issue.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support of dead-letter queue (DLQ) redrive to source queue, giving you better control over the life cycle of unconsumed messages. Dead-letter queues are an existing feature of Amazon SQS that allows customers to store messages that applications could not successfully consume. You can now efficiently redrive messages from your dead-letter queue to your source queue on the Amazon SQS console. DLQ redrive augments the dead-letter queue management experience for developers and enables them to build applications with the confidence that they can examine their unconsumed messages, recover from errors in their code, and reprocess messages in their dead-letter queues.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a fully managed service that enables you to create, automate, and manage end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflows, now supports integration with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and Amazon SageMaker Clarify. With these integrations, you can easily incorporate model quality and bias detection in your ML workflow. The increased automation can help reduce your operational burden in building and managing ML models.

Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender helps you choose the best available compute instance and configuration to deploy machine learning models for optimal inference performance and cost.

Today AWS announces a new structure for the 2022 Season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League. The AWS DeepRacer League is the world’s first global autonomous racing league, including an autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning and a 3D racing simulator where developers can get hands-on experience with Machine Learning (ML). 2022 introduces more opportunities to race LIVE for everyone via the return of physical racing on the Summit Circuit and a new LIVE head-to-head format in the Virtual Circuit, plus a new student-only division dubbed the AWS DeepRacer Student League.

AWS Shield Advanced now automatically protects web applications by blocking application layer (Layer 7) DDoS events with no manual intervention needed by you or the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT). When you protect your resources with AWS Shield Advanced and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced will identify patterns associated with layer 7 DDoS events and isolate this anomalous traffic by automatically creating AWS WAF rules in your web access control lists (ACLs). These rules can be implemented in count mode to observe how they will impact resource traffic and then deployed in block mode. These capabilities enable you to quickly respond to and mitigate DDoS events that threaten the availability of your applications.

Amazon SageMaker now offers enhancements to the machine learning (ML) lineage tracking capability that enables customers to track and query the lineage of artifacts such as data, features, and models across an ML workflow. Now, customers can retrieve the end-to-end lineage graph spanning the entire workflow from data preparation to model deployment through a single query. This feature eliminates undifferentiated heavy lifting needed to retrieve lineage information one workflow step at a time and manually stitch them all together. Customers can also retrieve lineage information for segments of the workflow by defining a step as the focal point and querying the lineage of the steps that are upstream or downstream of that focal point. For instance, customers can define a model as the focal entity and retrieve the location of the raw data set from which features were extracted to train that model.

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 SQL Server database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install drivers, and enable native features to meet the dependent application's requirements.

Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to identify unintended network access to your resources on AWS. Using Network Access Analyzer, you can verify whether network access for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources meets your security and compliance guidelines. With Network Access Analyzer, you can assess and identify improvements to your cloud security posture. Additionally, Network Access Analyzer makes it easier for you to demonstrate that your network meets certain regulatory requirements.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a free, no-configuration service that allows developers, academics, and data scientists to learn and experiment with machine learning.

We are excited to announce the preview of automatic chatbot designer in Amazon Lex, enabling developers to automatically design chatbots from conversation transcripts in hours rather than weeks. Amazon Lex helps you build, test, and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants on contact center services (such as Amazon Connect), websites, and messaging channels (such as Facebook Messenger). The automatic chatbot designer enhances the usability of Amazon Lex by automating conversational design, minimizing developer effort and reducing the time it takes to design a chatbot.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is pleased to announce the launch of AWS DMS Studio, a new service console that makes it easy to manage database migrations from start to finish. AWS DMS Studio accelerates and simplifies migrations by integrating tools for each phase of the migration journey from assessment to conversion to migration. AWS DMS Studio integrates AWS DMS Fleet Advisor to inventory and analyzes your database and analytics fleet, AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to convert database schema and application code, and AWS DMS to migrate your data. At each step of the migration, AWS DMS Studio assists you by providing contextual resources such as documentation and guidance on engaging migration experts where needed.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from any document or image, now offers specialized support to extract data from identity documents, such U.S. Driver Licenses and U.S. Passports. You can extract implied fields like name and address, as well as explicit fields like Date of Birth, Date of Issue, Date of Expiry, ID #, ID Type, and more in the form of key-value pairs. Until today, current OCR based solutions were limited, and did not offer the ability to extract all the required fields accurately due to rich background images or the ability to recognize names and addresses, as well as the fields associated with them (e.g., Washington state ID lists home address with the key "8"), or support ID designs and formats that varied by country or state.

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler, a new feature of SageMaker that can accelerate the training of deep learning (DL) models by up to 50% through more efficient use of GPU instances.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). It provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data, as well as to build, train, and deploy models. We recently introduced  the ability to visually browse and connect to Amazon EMR clusters right from the SageMaker Studio notebook. Starting today, you can now monitor and debug your Apache Spark jobs running on EMR right from SageMaker Studio notebooks with just a click. Additionally, you can now discover, connect to, create, terminate and manage EMR clusters directly from SageMaker Studio. The built-in integration with EMR therefore enables you to do interactive data preparation and machine learning at peta-byte scale right within the single universal SageMaker Studio notebook.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a new feature of AWS DMS that allows you to quickly build a database and analytics migration plan by automating the discovery and analysis of your fleet. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is intended for users looking to migrate a large number of database and analytic servers to AWS.

Today AWS announced the general release of AWS Direct Connect SiteLink. SiteLink makes it easy to create private network connections between your on-premises locations, such as offices and data centers, by connecting them to Direct Connect locations throughout the world.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus, a new turnkey data labeling servicethat enables you to create high-quality training datasets quickly and reduces costs by up to 40%.

Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference is a new inference option that enables you to easily deploy machine learning models for inference without having to configure or manage the underlying infrastructure. Simply select the serverless option when deploying your machine learning model, and Amazon SageMaker automatically provisions, scales, and turns off compute capacity based on the volume of inference requests. With SageMaker Serverless Inference, you pay only for the duration of running the inference code and the amount of data processed, not for idle time.

AWS DeepRacer Student Presented by Intel is a new service for students enrolled in high schools and colleges globally. AWS DeepRacer Student builds on the success of of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer service, which educates aspiring developers on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), while removing barriers to entry faced by students. AWS DeepRacer Student provides an all-in-one solution with free learning modules, model training, and competition.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) now helps optimize scaling decisions for improved performance and resilience with Amazon CloudWatch. Starting today, AWS Managed Microsoft AD provides domain controller and directory utilization metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for new and existing directories automatically. Analyzing these utilization metrics helps you quantify your average and peak load times to identify the need for additional domain controllers. With this, you can define the number of domain controllers to meet your performance, resilience, and cost requirements.