February 2022

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now offers customers the option to use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) while accessing the RDS Service APIs. 

AWS Solutions has updated the AWS QnABot, 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.

AWS now further enhances the Chinese yuan payments experience for payment of invoices from Amazon Web Services, Inc. ("AWS Inc."). 

We are excited to announce the unified AWS Health Dashboard, a new destination that brings together the AWS Service Health Dashboard and Personal Health Dashboard into a single connected experience. This new home is designed to provide a more responsive and accurate view, improved usability, and greater operational resilience.

Amazon MQ now provides support for RabbitMQ version 3.8.27, which includes several fixes to version 3.8.26. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easier to set up and operate message brokers on AWS. You can reduce your operational burden by using Amazon MQ to manage the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of message brokers. Because Amazon MQ connects to your current applications with industry-standard APIs and protocols, you can more easily migrate to AWS without having to rewrite code.

The EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and (Osaka) AWS Regions. Hibernation gives you the ability to launch EC2 instances, set them up as desired, and then pause and resume them again whenever you need to. Your instances and applications will pick up right where they left off instead of rebuilding their memory footprint from a cold boot. Hibernation enables you to maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances, getting you to a productive state in less time and without modifying your existing applications. Hibernation is available for instances running Linux and Windows OSes.

Starting today, NAT64 and DNS64 capabilities are available in all AWS Commercial and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

We are excited to announce three updates to Amazon GameLift’s FlexMatch, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed service. GameLift FlexMatch launched in 2017 as a feature that uses a powerful matchmaking algorithm and flexible developer-defined rules to create high-quality matches at AWS scale.

Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, adds support for a new superconducting gate-based quantum processing unit (QPU) from Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) named Lucy, located in the UK. With this launch, European customers can now access more types of quantum hardware during the typical EU workday. Furthermore, customers can now run quantum programs on two different superconducting, gate-based devices on Amazon Braket, allowing them to compare and contrast quantum hardware across different providers.

Amazon FinSpace customers can now manage their Amazon FinSpace application users with the AWS SDK and CLI. Using these APIs, customers can integrate Amazon FinSpace into their identity management provisioning process to help Amazon FinSpace meet their organization’s access management rules. For example, when a user joins a quantitative research team that uses FinSpace, they can have a user account in FinSpace automatically created. Similarly, when a user leaves the customer’s organization or switches roles, they can be automatically deactivated in FinSpace as part of their organization-wide application entitlement workflows. This new feature adds to Amazon FinSpace’s existing single-sign-on capability to give customers more effective controls to manage access.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) has added support for Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit). You can now use Application Migration Service to rehost applications running on these legacy operating systems. Application Migration Service has also added support for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2022. View a complete list of the service’s supported operating systems. 

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, AWS has updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL versions 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, and 10.19 in commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. 

Today, Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds support for Helm chart for Amazon EKS on EC2 using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT), enabling customers to easily define, install, and upgrade applications built on EKS.

AWS Backup now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to AWS Backup via a private endpoint within your virtual private network in a scalable manner. With PrivateLink, you can now simplify your network architecture by connecting to AWS Backup using private IP addresses in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs, firewall rules, or an Internet Gateway.

Amazon CloudWatch agent has added support for configurable log filter expressions. Customers can install and configure the CloudWatch agent to collect system and application logs from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), on-premises hosts, and containerized applications and send them to CloudWatch. This new configuration option is intended for users who want to collect only log events that meet specified criteria.

Payment Profiles is a new payments feature that allows you to customize your payment preferences by AWS service provider (also known as “seller of record”). Using Payment Profiles, you can automatically pay your AWS bills from different service providers using payment methods you choose.

Amazon S3 accelerates integrity checking of requests by up to 90%. For the first time in the cloud, you can choose from four supported checksum algorithms for data integrity checking on your upload and download requests. In addition, enhancements to the AWS SDK and S3 API significantly improve checksum efficiency, increasing the performance and reducing the cost of data validation. You can automatically calculate and verify checksums as you store or retrieve data from S3, and can access the checksum information at any time using a new S3 API or an S3 Inventory report. Using checksums for data validation is a best practice for data durability, and these capabilities increase the performance and reduce the cost to do so.

AWS Glue Schema Registry now supports Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) schemas, enabling customers to use Protobuf schemas to govern the evolution of streaming data and centrally control data quality from data streams to data lake. Glue Schema Registry provides Apache-licensed serializers and deserializers for Protobuf that integrate with Java applications developed for Apache Kafka/Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and Kafka Streams.

Amazon CloudWatch agent now supports  the collection of NVIDIA GPU performance metrics from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) accelerated computing instances running Linux. GPU-based instances provide access to NVIDIA GPUs with thousands of compute cores. You can use these instances to accelerate scientific, engineering, and rendering applications. Customers can install and configure CloudWatch agent to collect system and application metrics from Amazon EC2, on-premises hosts, and containerized applications and send them to CloudWatch. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications and optimize resource utilization. GPU metrics are intended for users who want to monitor the utilization of GPU co-processors in their EC2 accelerated instances.

Amazon CloudWatch agent now allows you to specify how long CloudWatch will retain log events. You can install and configure CloudWatch agent to collect system and application logs from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), on-premises hosts, and containerized applications and send them to CloudWatch. This new configuration option is intended for users who want to apply uniform log group retention periods when deploying the agent.

AWS Amplify is announcing the general availability of the Authenticator UI library for Flutter. Using the Authenticator UI library, Flutter developers can create a login/registration experience in minutes. When a developer adds the Authentication category and sets the authorization and verification attributes from the Amplify CLI or Amplify Studio, the Authenticator login/registration forms are displayed accordingly. Developers can also apply custom theming to the Authenticator forms, and override validations on login/signup fields. Developers can also add/remove the profile attribute fields used in the sign up form.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI announces a public preview of TypeScript native support. The SAM CLI is a developer tool that is designed to initialize and configure serverless applications, build and test locally and on the AWS cloud, and deploy using AWS CloudFormation. SAM CLI’s build, test and deploy features can also be used from IDEs like Visual Studio Code, JetBrains or WebStorm.

AWS App Mesh introduces Agent for Envoy, a new component that monitors Envoy proxies and helps keep them healthy. Agent for Envoy also facilitates Envoy connection draining, helping make your applications more resilient to failures. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easier for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

AWS App Runner now supports a Java language platform for building and running Java based web applications. The Java language platform on App Runner launched with two Amazon Corretto runtimes - Corretto 11 and Corretto 8. Both runtimes add the Maven and Gradle tools to your application's container in addition to the respective Corretto runtime version.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now enables you to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage database access for Amazon RDS for MariaDB instances. Database administrators can now associate database users with IAM users and roles. By using IAM, you can manage user access to AWS resources from a single location, avoiding issues caused by permissions that are out of sync on different AWS resources.

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. It is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to choose single or multiple output files instead of autogenerated files for their recipe jobs in DataBrew. Customers can generate a single output file when the output is small or downstream systems need to consume it more easily such as visualization tools. In some cases, customers want to customize the output file partitions for efficient storage and transfer.  

Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region on engine versions 1.1.0.0 and later. You can now create Neptune clusters using R5, R5d, and T3 instance types.

AWS Lambda now supports .NET 6 as both a managed runtime and a container base image. Developers creating serverless applications in Lambda with .NET 6 can take advantage of new features such as improved logging, simplified function definitions using top-level statements, and improved performance using source generators. Using .NET 6 also lets you take advantage of new .NET language features and performance optimizations. For more information on Lambda’s support for .NET 6, see our blog post at .NET 6 runtime now available in AWS Lambda.

AWS Firewall Manager now allows you to deploy AWS Network Firewall to inspect traffic using a centralized deployment model. Previously, Firewall Manager could deploy AWS Network Firewall only in a decentralized deployment model, where we deploy AWS Network Firewall into each VPC which requires protection. With this release, customers can now use Firewall Manager to deploy AWS Network Firewall in either a distributed deployment model or a centralized deployment model.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools now support two new features: you can now hibernate your Warm Pool instances and you can configure your Auto Scaling group to return running instances to a Warm Pool on scale-in. With Warm Pools, you can scale out faster by bringing instances into service from a pre-initialized pool of EC2 instances. Warm Pools are a good fit for applications that have time consuming initialization steps — like loading gigabytes of data, provisioning services, or running custom scripts — that can take several minutes or longer before those EC2 instances are ready to serve traffic.

• Hibernate Support for Warm Pools helps applications with significant memory state scale-out faster. You can now choose to put your Warm Pool instances in the Hibernated state, in addition to the previously supported states of Stopped and Running. Choosing hibernation allows you to pre-initialize the entire EC2 instance state, not just the disk state, for instances that need to rebuild significant memory state before being placed in service.
• Scale-in to Warm Pool saves you from having to rebuild a new Warm Pool instance during scale-in. This enhancement allows running instances to be placed back into the Warm Pool during a scale-in event. Previously, EC2 Auto Scaling would terminate one of the running “in-service” instances during scale-in and then launch and pre-initialize a new instance to replenish the Warm Pool. Now, instances can be placed back into the Warm Pool in the desired state - stopped, hibernated, or running, but idle.

Amazon Redshift now supports PIVOT and UNPIVOT SQL operators that can help you transpose rows into columns and vice versa with high performance, for data modeling, data analysis, and data presentation. You can also use PIVOT and UNPIVOT to more easily migrate from your existing data warehouse systems to Amazon Redshift.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are introducing formality customization. This feature allows you to customize the level of formality in your translation output for six target languages - French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Now you can customize the formality of your translated output to suit your communication needs. 

Today, AWS Transfer Family is pleased to announce enhancements to the managed workflows capability, which can save you even more time in automating file processing steps such as moving and renaming files, retaining source files for archival, dynamically routing files to user-specific folders, and deploying and monitoring workflows using AWS CloudFormation and AWS CloudWatch metrics.

NICE DCV web client software development kit (SDK) version 1.1.0 introduces a user interface (UI) library, written as a React component. Instead of building the user interface from scratch, developers can now use and modify the React UI component to build applications faster.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle and Amazon Aurora now support Database Activity Streams in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. Database Activity Streams provides a near real-time stream of database activities to meet your relational database for compliance and regulatory requirements . When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database.

NICE DCV version 2022.0 introduces multiple new features such as game controller support and high color accuracy support. 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.

AWS Glue now provides job run insights, a feature that reduces Apache Spark job development time by helping determine sources of errors and performance bottlenecks. AWS Glue is a data integration service that lets customers discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics using serverless Apache Spark and Python. Spark’s distributed processing and “lazy execution” model makes it hard and time-consuming for Data Engineers to diagnose errors and tune performance. With this launch, AWS Glue gives you automated analysis and interpretation of errors in your Spark jobs to make the process faster.

The AWS Snowcone solid state drive (SSD) is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions adding to our growing list of regions already offering Snowcone SSD including AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon) and US West (San Francisco) Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London).

AWS AppSync is a fully managed service that makes it easy to develop and manage GraphQL and Real-time APIs, making it easy to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources via a single API endpoint.

Announcing Amazon QuickSight’s new Community hub, which will allow authors and admins to have a centralized hub for getting started with QuickSight, deepening QuickSight knowledge, or connecting with other QuickSight users. This means users no longer need to search many different resources for learning resources or in order to get in touch with other QuickSight customers.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now supports ingestion of high volumes of data from Salesforce, Marketo, and ServiceNow. Customer Profiles will divide high volumes of data into batches and ingest them in parallel without requiring configuration from customers. This makes it simple for customers to bring as much data as they need into Customer Profiles to help build a unified view of customer information and provide more personalized customer service. 

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you quickly and easily solve your machine learning problems with one-click access to 322 popular model collections from TensorFlow Hub, PyTorch Hub, Hugging Face and Gluon CV (also known as “model zoos”), and to 17 end-to-end solutions that solve common business problems such as demand forecasting, fraud detection and document understanding.

Amazon Kendra is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California) and US West (Oregon) regions.

Starting today, AWS Transfer Family servers can display customized messages, such as organizational policies or terms and conditions to your end users, helping you achieve your legal and compliance requirements. You can also present a customized Message of The Day (MOTD), such as a greeting message, to enhance user experience. For example, you can display a data usage policy before users authenticate, and after successful authentication, greet them with a welcome message.

AWS Firewall Manager now allows you to enable versioning for AWS WAF managed rule groups and to select a specific version of an AWS WAF managed rule group when configuring your AWS WAF policy using Firewall Manager.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now offers Always On Availability Groups (AGs) for the Multi-AZ configuration in all AWS Regions on Standard Edition. This new high-availability option helps you meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads on SQL Server.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports delayed replication, allowing you to set a configurable time period by which a read replica lags behind the source database. In a standard MariaDB replication configuration, there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica. With delayed replication, you can introduce an intentional delay as a strategy for disaster recovery.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3, which adds Amazon S3 to the set of supported services in AWS Backup. This launch makes it easier for you to centrally automate backup and restore of your application data stored in Amazon S3 along with other AWS services for compute, storage, and database. Using AWS Backup’s seamless integration with AWS Organizations, you can centrally create and manage immutable backups of S3 data across all your accounts, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions, and restore the data to your specified point-in-time with a few simple clicks. 

Starting today, you can use AWS Budgets to create auto-adjusting budgets. An auto-adjusting budget dynamically sets your budget amount based on historical cost or usage over a time range that you specify. This reduces the guesswork in setting a budget limit and keeps you updated as your spend patterns change. Auto-adjusting budgets are generally available in all public AWS Regions.

Today, Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds metric collection support for your applications running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with AWS Fargate using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). ADOT is a secure, AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. Customers can now easily collect EKS Fargate metrics, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network, and analyze them along with other container metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. This helps customers observe the performance and resource utilization of their applications directly in the CloudWatch Container Insights console.

We are pleased to announce the availability of s2n-quic, an open-source Rust implementation of the QUIC protocol, in our AWS encryption open-source libraries. We are also renaming s2n, AWS’s open-source C implementation of the TLS protocol, to s2n-tls. s2n-quic has an API that is designed to be fast and small, with simplicity as a priority. It is written in Rust, so it reaps some of its benefits like performance, thread and memory-safety. For the TLS 1.3 handshake, s2n-quic depends on s2n-tls, or Rustls, an open source Rust implementation of TLS.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Ability to share data across clusters that are in the same AWS account and across accounts is already available. Now sharing data across Redshift clusters in different AWS Regions is generally available. Cross-Region data sharing is supported on all Amazon Redshift RA3 node types.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 25 regions, with the addition of the Africa (Cape Town) region.

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) is now a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant service. AWS RAM helps you securely share your AWS resources across AWS accounts or within your organization or organizational units (OUs) in AWS Organizations, or with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and IAM users for supported resource types.

Amazon Redshift adds support for unloading SQL query results to Amazon S3 in JSON format, a lightweight and widely used data format that supports schema definition. With the UNLOAD command in Amazon Redshift, you can now use JSON in addition to already supported delimited text, CSV, and Apache Parquet formats.

Amazon Redshift now offers more efficient query processing for Redshift Concurrency Scaling clusters. Concurrency Scaling automatically adds and removes capacity to handle unpredictable demand from thousands of concurrent users.
Automatic Workload Management(AutoWLM) is designed to process queries more efficiently and is now enabled with Concurrency Scaling clusters.

AWS Security Hub has released 13 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard (FSBP) to enhance customers’ Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These controls conduct fully-automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon CloudFront, Amazon EC2, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN). If you have Security Hub set to automatically enable new controls and are already using AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, these controls are enabled by default. Security Hub now supports 175 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports the new version of Chef Automate for its managed service. Customers benefit from receiving the update automatically during the weekly system maintenance window scheduled individually by each customer.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations to detect security vulnerabilities, improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code.

Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, makes it easy for customers to conduct scientific research and software development with quantum computers. Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Braket has added support for the new 80-qubit superconducting gate-based quantum processor from Rigetti named Aspen-M-1. With this launch, customers will be able to utilize a multi-chip quantum processor architecture for the first time on Braket. With the new 80-qubit processor, customers can run quantum circuits up to twice the qubit count supported by the previous generation Rigetti device, enabling them to tackle larger problems.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations to detect security vulnerabilities, improve code quality, and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports sub-millisecond read latencies for all new and existing One Zone and Standard General Purpose file systems. Latency-sensitive applications such as content management systems, analytics, DevOps, and machine learning inference can now achieve read latencies as low as 600 microseconds on average.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) has increased its alignment with customer compliance requirements for security and privacy. AWS SSO achieved Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance and is Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessed at the PROTECTED level. These are in addition to existing AWS SSO support for customer compliance with International Organization for Standardization (ISO), System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3, Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High, the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) 3000 Type 2 Report requirements, and Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS). As a result, customers have more opportunities to simplify multi-account access management and application authentication for environments that are subject to compliance standards.

Amazon Connect now supports CloudFormation for its third-party data integrations service. Data integrations enable Amazon Connect customers to download data from third-party SaaS apps like CRMs, quality management, billing software, and order management solutions. You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to help you deploy data integrations, along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure, in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. For example, with data integrations, you can download knowledge articles from Salesforce via scheduled syncs and surface them in the Amazon Connect agent application as Wisdom articles, to help agents quickly resolve caller issues, while boosting their productivity.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances. C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (code named Milan) with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.6 GHz, deliver up to 15% better compute price performance compared to C5a instances for a wide variety of workloads, and offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. C6a 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.

AWS WAF announces the launch of AWS WAF Fraud Control - Account Takeover Prevention to protect your application’s login page against credential stuffing attacks, brute force attempts, and other anomalous login activities. Account Takeover Prevention enables you to proactively stop account takeover attempts at the network edge. With Account Takeover Prevention, you can prevent unauthorized access that may lead to fraudulent activities, or you can inform affected users so that they can take preventive action.

Amazon MQ now provides support for RabbitMQ version 3.9.13. This update to RabbitMQ contains several fixes and enhancements compared to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.8.26.

Amazon Connect now publishes Chat metrics to Amazon Cloudwatch, making it easy to help monitor operational metrics. You can now collect, view, and analyze utilization metrics, such as concurrent active chats. This feature is available out-of-the box and no coding is required to access data through CloudWatch.  

You can now define custom machine learning models with Neptune Machine Learning (ML) for your graph data on Amazon Neptune. Neptune ML is Amazon Neptune’s machine learning capability that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) developed with Deep Graph Library (DGL) to automate the heavy lifting of selecting and training ML models for graph data. With this launch, you can also run SPARQL inference queries on W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model, in addition to Apache TinkerPop Gremlin inference queries on property graphs. New machine learning tasks for RDF include object classification, object regression, object prediction and subject prediction.

Amazon Neptune now supports up to 128 TiB of storage per cluster (up from 64 TiB). With this change you can continue to use your graph applications without adding new clusters or making any changes to your application. The increased storage limit is available on engine releases 1.0.2.2 and above.

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easier for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage high performance computing (HPC) clusters on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster uses a simple text file to model and provision all the resources needed for your HPC applications in an automated and secure manner.

Starting today, the AWS Billing console has a new Home page experience, providing an at-a-glance view of your AWS charges. The AWS Billing console allows you to easily understand your AWS spend, view and pay invoices, manage billing preferences and tax settings, and access additional Cloud Financial Management services. The Billing console Home page helps Finance, DevOps, or FinOps users quickly understand AWS spend and identify top drivers.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to custom sort one or multiple columns on their datasets in DataBrew. It enables customers to search and group column values more easily. This transformation is intended for users who want to arrange their data in one or more dimensions using various sorting orders without writing any code.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to format phone numbers in their datasets to the E.164 standard phone number format using DataBrew’s interactive, point-and-click visual interface. E.164 is the international telephone numbering plan that standardizes a phone number as [+] [country code] [subscriber number including area code] and can have a maximum of fifteen digits. This transformation is intended for users who want to accelerate the standardization of phone numbers for downstream software system integrations without writing any code. 

AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, a feature that allows customers to invoke custom logic to automate actions or inspect resource configurations prior to a create, update or delete CloudFormation stack operation. Over 1 million customers use AWS CloudFormation every week to model, provision, and manage their cloud applications and infrastructure in a safe, predictable, and repeatable way. With AWS CloudFormation Hooks, customers can now validate resource properties and send a warning, or prevent the provisioning operation, for non-compliant resources to reduce security and compliance risk, lower operational overhead, and optimize cost. 

Amazon Redshift launches Streaming Ingestion support for Kinesis Data Streams (KDS). Amazon Redshift’s Streaming Ingestion eliminates the need to stage data in Amazon S3 before ingesting it into Amazon Redshift, enabling customers to achieve low latency in the seconds while ingesting hundreds of megabytes of streaming data per second into their data warehouse. 

AWS Managed Services (AMS) Accelerate is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US), giving customers in both the public and commercial sectors and their partners the benefit of AWS Managed Services’ operational capabilities in the GovCloud region.

Today, we are announcing new functionality in AWS Control Tower to align AWS Control Tower with recent updates to the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. As new best practices and controls are identified and developed, it is periodically necessary for AWS Control Tower to add functionality to ensure that your AWS accounts and workloads are in alignment. The new functionality in this release includes support for lifecycle policy and access logging for the access log bucket as well as adding a dead letter queue for Lambda functions. Additionally, this release updates AWS Control Tower to use AWS Config’s Service Linked Role to setup and manage Config rules to match AWS Config best practices. This change will streamline the AWS Control Tower KMS configuration process for encrypting Config data and improve the related status messaging in CloudTrail.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to MediaConnect via a private endpoint within a customer’s virtual private network. Now you can access MediaConnect API using private IP addresses in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs.

Starting today, AWS Transfer Family is available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

Ready to fast-track application refactoring? AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is the new starting point for incremental app refactoring. Using Refactor Spaces, customers focus on refactoring their applications, and not the creation and management of the underlying infrastructure that makes refactoring possible. Refactor Spaces orchestrates AWS services across multiple accounts to create a refactor environment for incrementally evolving an application that helps customers realize value earlier. This new Migration Hub feature reduces the business risk of evolving applications into microservices or extending existing applications with new features written in microservices.

Amazon Rekognition can detect and read text in an image or video, and return bounding boxes for each word found. On 11/17/2021, we launched support for 7 new languages in Amazon Rekognition text detection in images - Arabic, Russian, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Amazon Rekognition can automatically detect and extract text in images in all the supported languages, without requiring a language parameter as user input. In addition, Amazon Rekognition delivers higher overall accuracy, with improvements for vertical and curved text.

AWS App Runner services can now communicate with other applications hosted in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can now connect you App Runner services to databases in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), to Redis caches in Amazon ElastiCache, or to message queues in Amazon MQ. You can also connect your services to your own applications in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). As a result, web applications and APIs running on App Runner can now get powerful support from data services on AWS to build production architectures.

Today, we are enhancing the AWS Organizations console to enable you to centrally view and update the alternate contacts for your AWS accounts. To ensure that you receive important notifications about your AWS accounts, we previously released the Accounts SDK that enabled you to programmatically manage billing, operations, and security contacts for accounts in your organization. With this launch, you can now also use the console to easily perform this operation without logging into each account. Support for additional account settings will be available in future releases.

Amazon S3 Replication is an elastic, fully managed, low-cost feature that replicates newly uploaded objects across two or more Amazon S3 buckets, keeping buckets in sync. Now, with S3 Batch Replication, you can synchronize existing objects between buckets.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.

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 provides new metrics and reports that provide you better visibility into model performance for classification problems. You can leverage these metrics to gather more insights about the best model in the Model leaderboard.

We are excited to announce the launch of a new geolocation enrichment feature for Amazon Fraud Detector machine learning (ML) models that automatically calculates the distance between the IP address, billing address, and shipping address provided for an event. This helps you to prevent more fraud, particularly when a user attempts to create an account with someone else’s information or make a transaction with someone else’s credit card.

Distributor, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, allows you to select from available third-party agents to install and manage on your instances. With this launch, you can deploy the pre-built Alert Logic Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Agent directly from Distributor to your EC2 or on-premises instances without having to create or maintain any software packages. The Alert Logic MDR is now available along with third-party and AWS agents that are already available by default. You can use Distributor to install or update any of these available agents on your instances or create your own software packages to distribute. Your software packages are stored in Systems Manager, providing a centralized repository with version control.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to create IPv6-only subnets in your dual-stack VPCs and launch EC2 instances built on Nitro System in these subnets in AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region.

Starting today, you can use the AWS managed prefix list for Amazon CloudFront to limit the inbound HTTP/HTTPS traffic to your origins from only the IP addresses that belong to CloudFront’s origin-facing servers. CloudFront keeps the managed prefix list up-to-date with the IP addresses of CloudFront’s origin-facing servers, so you no longer have to maintain a prefix list yourself.

Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Forecast services from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet to connect to Amazon Forecast. With this launch, customers can also gain additional access control of the VPC endpoints through usage of VPC endpoint policies. Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to help generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources.

Incident Manager, from AWS Systems Manager, now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to incident data via managed VPC endpoints within your virtual private network. AWS Systems Manager is the operations hub for your AWS applications and resources, providing a secure end-to-end management solution for hybrid cloud environments. To learn more about Incident Manager, visit our product page.

Amazon Redshift now simplifies the use of other services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Glue by allowing customers to create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role from the Amazon Redshift console and assigning it as the default IAM role while creating an Amazon Redshift cluster. The default IAM role helps simplify SQL operations such as COPY, UNLOAD, CREATE, EXTERNAL FUNCTION, CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, CREATE EXTERNAL SCHEMA, CREATE MODEL, or CREATE LIBRARY that accesses other AWS services by eliminating the need to specify the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for the IAM role.

Amazon QuickSight now supports rich text formatting on visual titles and subtitles. Authors can now add rich context to their visuals by choosing from various formatting options like font type, size, style, color and style. They can also better organize the text by choosing from various alignment and ordering options. Visual titles and subtitles now also support hyperlinks as well as parameter-based dynamic text.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows you to deploy SAP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.7 and 7.9 versions. This allows you to take advantage of the latest RHEL operating system (OS) versions to support your SAP systems running on AWS. Additionally, with this launch, you can bring existing RHEL subscriptions to support new SAP deployments with Launch Wizard. This gives you the flexibility to choose between license-included images from AWS Marketplace, or images from the Red Hat Cloud Access program.

Amazon FSx File Gateway now enables your on-premises file share users to browse and restore previous versions of files that are stored on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems by the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This capability enables quick and easy self-service recovery of files in case of a loss due to an accident or malware.

Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle now supports Oracle Database version 12.1. Amazon RDS Custom is a managed database service for applications that require customization of the underlying operating system and database environment. With support for Oracle Database version 12.1, you can now run Oracle E-Business Suite applications on Amazon RDS Custom.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB version 10.6. This release introduces multiple MariaDB features to enhance the performance, scalability, reliability and manageability of your workloads, including:

• MyRocks storage engine: You can use the MyRocks storage engine with RDS for MariaDB to optimize storage consumption of your write-intensive, high-performance web applications.
• IAM integration: You can now configure AWS’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) with your Amazon RDS for MariaDB instances to simplify access management of your AWS resources. With IAM, you can manage user access to all AWS resources from a single location and avoid issues caused by out-of-sync permissions on different AWS resources.
• Flexible Upgrades: You can upgrade to RDS for MariaDB 10.6 from any prior MariaDB major release (10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5) in a single step. You can also take a snapshot of an existing MySQL 5.6 or 5.7 instance and use the RDS snapshot restore feature to convert it into a MariaDB 10.6 instance.
• Delayed replication: You can now set a configurable time period for which a read replica lags behind the source database, as a disaster recovery strategy. In a standard MariaDB replication configuration, there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica.
• Oracle PL/SQL compatibility: With an increased set of PL/SQL compatibility functions (e.g. ROWNUM(), TO_CHAR(), ADD_MONTHS()), you can migrate your legacy Oracle stored procedures as-is to RDS for MariaDB 10.6.
• Atomic DDL: Your DDL statements will now be crash-safe with RDS for MariaDB 10.6. CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, RENAME TABLE, DROP TABLE, DROP DATABASE and related DDL statements are now atomic. Previously a crash during a DDL operation could lead to undetermined results and introduce errors during replication. With atomic DDL, either a DDL operation is either fully done or not done at all. Therefore, recovery from crashes during DDL operations are deterministic and binlog remains consistent across any server crashes.
• Other enhancements: JSON_TABLE function for transforming JSON data to relational format within SQL, faster empty table data load with Innodb, new sys_schema for analysis & troubleshooting, optimizer enhancement for ignoring unused indexes and performance improvements.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS now supports full-copy volumes to make it easier to clone and experiment with your data, enabling you to quickly capture the results of your cloning-based testing for long-term use.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon ElastiCache from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks, without exposing traffic to the public internet and securing your network traffic. The Amazon ElastiCache API supports AWS PrivateLink in all regions where Amazon ElastiCache is available. For a complete list, see supported regions.

You can now use Recycle Bin for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to recover from accidental deletions to meet your business continuity needs. Previously, you could not recover AMIs if you accidentally deregistered them. With Recycle Bin, you can specify a retention time period and recover a deregistered AMI if needed, before the expiration of the retention period. A recovered AMI would retain its attributes such as tags, permissions, and encryption status, which it had prior to deletion, and can be used immediately for launches. AMIs that are not recovered from the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted upon expiration of the retention time.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)—a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service— now is in scope for FedRAMP Moderate compliance to help you run highly regulated Cassandra workloads more easily.

You can now build custom connectors for Amazon AppFlow using the Custom Connector Software Development Kit (SDK). With the SDK, you can connect to private APIs, on-premise proprietary systems, and other cloud services by adding to AppFlow's library of connectors. It is open source and available for both Java and Python.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon MemoryDB for Redis from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises networks, without exposing traffic to the public internet and securing your network traffic. The Amazon MemoryDB for Redis API supports AWS PrivateLink in all regions where Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is available. For a complete list, see supported regions.

Amazon Redshift now simplifies the use of other services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Glue by allowing customers to create an IAM role from the Redshift console and assigning it as the default IAM role while creating an Amazon Redshift cluster. The default IAM role helps simplify SQL operations such as COPY, UNLOAD, CREATE, EXTERNAL FUNCTION, CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, CREATE EXTERNAL SCHEMA, CREATE MODEL, or CREATE LIBRARY that accesses other AWS services by eliminating the need to specify the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for the IAM role. The default IAM role is now available in Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), and Africa (Cape Town) AWS regions.

AWS Solutions has updated the Maintaining Personalized Experiences with Machine Learning solution, which is 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 Connect is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to eleven. You can now claim South African toll-free and local telephone numbers.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support of dead-letter queue (DLQ) redrive to source queue in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, 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 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. With SageMaker Data Wrangler’s data selection tool, you can quickly select data from multiple data sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and Snowflake.

AWS Solutions has updated the MLOps Workload Orchestrator (formerly known as the AWS MLOps Framework), an AWS Solutions Implementation that streamlines the pipeline deployment process and enforces architecture best practices for machine learning (ML) model model operationalization. This solution addresses common operational pain points, including model monitoring and multi-account governance, that customers face when adopting multiple ML workflow automation tools.

Amazon Comprehend now supports model copy functionality which allows customers to copy Comprehend custom classification or custom entity recognition models from a source AWS account to a designated target AWS account in the same AWS region. Enterprise customers and AWS partners often use multiple AWS accounts that are provisioned based on development phases (e.g. build, test, stage, deploy), based on a business function (e.g. data science, engineering), or combination of both. Previously, custom Comprehend models could only be used in the AWS account in which it was trained. This required customers to copy their training dataset and annotations into each AWS account and train a separate model – which is time consuming, expensive, and reduces overall deployment speed.

AWS Secrets Manager now supports the ability to schedule secret rotations within specific time windows. With this feature, you can limit secret rotations to specific hours on specific days. Previously, Secrets Manager supported automated rotation of secrets within the last 24 hours of specified rotation interval. With today’s launch, you no longer have to choose between the convenience of managed rotations and the operational safety of maintenance windows.

You can now configure AWS IoT device-specific logging using devices’ client ID, source IP, or principal ID. Until now, customers were able to configure logging at account level and for a specific thing group. Starting today, AWS IoT now also supports setting fine-grained logging level using client ID, source IP, and principal ID. This enhancement makes it easy for customers to diagnose device specific issues without having to register devices as a thing or define additional thing groups. Customers can now target very specific resources for more detailed logging.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server 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 AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East). Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in these regions.

Amazon FSx for Lustre 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 AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East). Amazon FSx for Lustre is also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in these regions.