March 2022

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today increased the default service quota for container instances per cluster. You can now launch up to 5,000 instances per cluster, an increase from 2,000. The limit increase enables customers to scale further and improve manageability of their clusters.

AWS introduced the Sustainability Pillar during re:Invent 2021 to help customers minimize the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Today, the Sustainability Pillar is available for customers to use during workload reviews in the AWS Well-Architected Tool, a central place for cloud architecture best practices and guidance. The Sustainability Pillar is designed to help CTOs, architects, developers, and operations team members contribute to an increasing number of sustainability targets set by their organizations.

Starting today, you can configure your CloudFront distributions to include Server Timing headers to monitor CloudFront behavior and performance. Server Timing headers provide detailed performance information, such as whether content was served from cache when a request was received, how the request was routed to the CloudFront edge location, and how much time elapsed during each stage of the connection and response process.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports using the Amazon EKS console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and EKS API to install and manage the the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. This launch enables a simple experience for attaching persistent storage to an EKS cluster.

Starting today, all public AMIs will have the deprecation time set to two years after their creation date. This means that public AMIs that are more than two years old will by default be deprecated. Once an AMI is deprecated, it will no longer appear in DescribeImages API calls for users that aren’t the owner of the AMI. Deprecating an AMI only reduces the visibility of the AMI in untargeted searches, but continues to be usable and available to you. Users of a deprecated AMI can continue to launch instances and describe the deprecated AMI using its ID.

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. Deploying AppStream 2.0 in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience and helps support your local data residency obligations. With this launch, you can deploy General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, Graphics Design, Graphics Pro and Graphics G4 instances to meet the needs of your users.

AWS Storage Gateway adds support for VMware ESXi 7.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2022 and 2019 hypervisors, enabling you to deploy your gateway virtual machines on the latest versions of these hypervisors.  

You can now select all or a subset of the functions that use a Lambda layer, and update them simultaneously to a newer layer version in the Lambda console.

Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint launched the ability to add tags to messaging templates in the template editor. Amazon Pinpoint is an omnichannel marketing and communication service that helps customers engage their users by sending messages through targeted messaging campaigns across email, SMS, push notification, in-app, and social media channels. A tag is a label that customers can define and associate with an AWS resource. Adding a tag to a messaging template lets customers control which users can view, edit, or use specific templates. Tags can be tailored to a customer’s organizational needs, allowing customers to organize templates by areas such as purpose, owner, region, or other criteria. With Amazon Pinpoint’s new template search feature, customers can also use tags to more easily find the template they need.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports the January 2022 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1 and Release Updates (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2 and 19c. Please note 21c is already shipped with January 2022 RU.  

AWS Firewall Manager now enables you to centrally deploy and monitor Palo Alto Networks Cloud Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) across all AWS virtual private clouds (VPCs) in your AWS organization. With this release, customers will now have a single firewall management solution to deploy and manage both AWS native firewalls and Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFWs.

AWS Glue version 2.0 now supports the AWS Glue FindMatches machine learning transform. AWS Glue FindMatches automates the process of identifying partially matching records for use cases including linking customer records, deduplicating product catalogs, and fraud detection. Using Glue 2.0, ETL jobs that perform fuzzy matching using FindMatches start in under a minute and have 1-minute minimum billing.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now enables you to change the throughput capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to scale up or down to meet your evolving needs over time.

Now you can easily set up monitoring, alarms and dashboards for many of your resources and workloads automatically in CloudWatch. The new one-click option on the CloudWatch Getting Started page provides customers a convenient means to launch CloudWatch Application Insights. Once launched, Application Insights will discover the underlying resources in your account or Resource Group and set up the recommended metrics, logs and alarms to monitor their health.

Today, Amazon EC2 announces automatic recovery by default, a new feature that makes it even easier for customers to recover their instance when it becomes unreachable. Automatic recovery improves instance availability by recovering the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware issue. Automatic recovery migrates the instance to another hardware during an instance reboot while retaining its instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata.

AWS Security Hub has released 12 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard (FSBP) to enhance your Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These controls conduct fully automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Lambda, Amazon Network Firewall, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). 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 187 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL 13.6, 12.10, 11.15, and 10.20. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. Refer to the Aurora version policy to help you to decide how often to upgrade and how to plan your upgrade process.

Amazon EMR Managed Scaling automatically resizes EMR clusters for best performance and resource utilization. Today, we are excited to announce a new capability in Managed Scaling that prevents it from scaling down instances that store intermediate shuffle data for Apache Spark. Intelligently scaling down clusters without removing the instances that store intermediate shuffle data prevents job re-attempts and re-computations, which leads to better performance, and lower cost.

You can now centrally close member accounts in your AWS Organizations through the console and programmatically via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and SDK. This feature makes it easier and more efficient for you to manage your Amazon Web Services workloads by enabling you to close member accounts from your organization’s management account without needing to login to each member account individually. You can also use IAM permissions to authorize IAM roles or users in your management account to securely perform account closures while protecting mission-critical accounts in your infrastructure. 

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from virtually any document. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on customer feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce few quality enhancements to both our Tables and checkbox detection features.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports a foreign data wrapper that can connect to databases that use the Tabular Data Stream (TDS) protocol, such as Sybase databases and Microsoft SQL server. You can use this foreign data wrapper to connect to data sources in other databases eliminating the need to replicate or copy data.

AWS License Manager announces support for license usage tracking for customers granting entitlements from AWS Marketplace. This feature allows AWS Marketplace to track and meter license usage across AMI and metered SaaS products.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now supports real-time streaming that helps businesses access Contact Lens analytics in real-time, eliminating the need to constantly make requests from existing Contact Lens API with rate limitations. The real-time streaming also offers additional data segments that consist of sentence-by-sentence transcripts for low latency requirements.

Amazon EventBridge schema registry now supports Go language for generating code bindings for event schemas, making it easier to use your schema as objects in your code. You can generate these code bindings for a schema by using the EventBridge console, APIs, or AWS SDK toolkits for Jetbrains (Intellij, PyCharm, Webstorm, Rider) and VS Code. Previously, we have supported Java, Python, and Typescript for generating code bindings. With support for Go, you can download code bindings in your preferred IDE to take advantage of features like code validation and auto-completion.

Starting today, the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) free tier will include db.t3.micro and AWS Graviton2- based db.t4g.micro instances in all commercial regions. This provides you with more options in addition to the db.t2.micro instance in the current AWS Free Tier for new AWS customers.

You can now configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms to detect when your AWS Panorama application encounters errors. These CloudWatch alarms can help to identify emergent performance and operational issues, enabling you to troubleshoot quickly and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Starting today, customers can use Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM), Data Center version, as a single place to track and manage cases (incidents) from AWS Support via the AWS Service Management Connector for JSM. AWS Support enables users to create, track and resolve cases related to AWS resources in a central place, helping customers reduce the time to issue resolution. The dual sync integration between AWS Support cases and Jira Service Management incidents enables JSM users/developers to manage AWS Support cases while leveraging their existing workflows in Jira Service Management (incidents).

You can now configure your AWS Panorama application to receive inbound messages over the local area network, which you can use to start, stop, or adjust your AWS Panorama application. For example, you can run an ML model to visually detect paint defects when a vehicle crosses a gate on the production line. You can also use inbound messages to serve a web application accessible from another computer on the same network for human-in-the-loop review. Using human-in-the-loop review, line operators can review anomaly detections from the ML model to ensure accuracy and flag low-accuracy results for model retraining.

You can now run models and algorithms from TensorFlow, PyTorch, and OpenCV directly on the AWS Panorama Appliance GPU for low-latency use cases, such as object tracking, traffic analysis, and worker safety. AWS Panorama also supports models optimized with Nvidia TensorRT or any machine learning library with Nvidia CUDA support. Nvidia TensorRT can double the number of camera streams that can be processed simultaneously on the AWS Panorama Appliance for a given use case.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now publishes Auto Scaling instance lifecycle states in the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS), enabling you to easily initiate on-instance actions as an instance transitions from one lifecycle state to another. Instances in an Auto Scaling group transition through various lifecycle states from the time they are launched and placed in service to when they are removed from service and terminated. By polling IMDS, you can setup your on-instance application to easily determine its lifecycle state without having to setup Amazon CloudWatch Events or other services.

AWS Lambda customers can now configure up to 10,240 MB of ephemeral storage for their Lambda functions, a 20x increase compared to the previous limit of 512 MB. This helps workloads such as financial analysis, machine learning inference, and media processing applications perform data intensive operations at scale.

Amazon Comprehend now supports documents in image formats in addition to text, PDFs, and Word. Customers can now use Comprehend custom entity recognition to extract entities from image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF) and can also use Comprehend directly on Amazon Textract JSON outputs to extract custom entities from documents. With this launch customers can simplify their intelligent document processing (IDP) workflows, taking advantage of an out-of-the-box integration between Comprehend and Textract to extract entities from documents. Below is a detailed description of these features:

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

Today, AWS Service Catalog is releasing a feature that helps to simplify builders’ access to the resources associated with their Provisioned Products. Previously, customers had to manually navigate through the AWS console to find a specific resource. With this feature, they can easily locate and access the resource of a provisioned product, right in the provisioned product detail page.

AWS Proton support for defining infrastructure in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and provisioning infrastructure using Terraform Open Source is now generally available in all regions where Proton is available. Platform teams can now define AWS Proton templates using Terraform modules, in addition to CloudFormation. AWS Proton leverages the customer-managed Terraform automation to provision or update the infrastructure. Customers can use Terraform as their infrastructure definition and provisioning tool, and AWS Proton keeps modules that are used consistently up to date. This generally available launch includes support for BitBucket repositories for infrastructure management, and improved messaging across the service to further clarify the status of provisioning.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of two voices: a Neural version of Mia, Polly’s Mexican Spanish female text to speech (TTS) voice and Arlet, a new Catalan Neural voice.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables customers to help applications scale out faster and save costs by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling Warm Pools with their Amazon ECS clusters. Warm Pools allow customers to create a pool of pre-initialized Amazon EC2 instances that are ready to quickly serve application traffic.

AWS Cost Categories now supports resource and tag-based access controls for easy management and access to cost categories. You can define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to specify fine-grained permissions for AWS Cost Categories based on resource names and tags, improving governance and information security through these two granular access control features.

AWS Amplify announces the new @mapsTo GraphQL directive, enabling developers to iterate and rename their GraphQL models without worrying about data migration. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. With Amplify’s GraphQL Transformer, developers can configure their backend data model using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, and Amplify CLI automatically transforms the schema into a fully functioning GraphQL API with its underlying database tables.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports resource and tag-based access controls for easy management and access to cost anomaly monitors and alert subscriptions. You can now define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to specify fine-grained permissions for AWS Cost Anomaly Detection monitors and alert subscriptions based on their resource names and tags, improving governance and information security through these two granular access control features.

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

Amazon QuickSight now supports native groups management with an interactive user interface. With this change, administrators can efficiently and easily administer and govern user groups via the QuickSight admin console. They can create and manage groups and manage users membership within groups. Groups Management UI is available to administrators with access to the QuickSight admin console pages via IAM credentials. For more information visit here.

We are happy to announce the preview of Amazon GameSparks, a managed AWS service that provides game developers with features for building, running, and scaling the backend for their games without having to manage servers or low-level cloud primitives. Amazon GameSparks makes building a game backend easy for game developers who have little to no cloud experience since it comes with out-of-the-box backend features that require minimal setup and is pre-integrated with the Unity game engine.

Today we are releasing AWS GameKit, a new solution that allows game developers to deploy and customize game backend features directly from Unreal Engine. AWS GameKit comes with AWS CloudFormation templates for each feature that follows AWS Solution Architect designs. AWS GameKit also comes with an integration code between the game backend features and Unreal Engine. AWS GameKit is for game developers looking to build AWS-powered game features directly from Unreal Engine with just a few clicks.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and IVR systems. Today, Amazon Lex introduces grammar slot type. You can now you can author your own grammar in the XML format per the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) to collect information in a conversation. You can also provide semantic interpretation rules using ECMAScript tags within the grammar files. You can use the slot type to port your existing grammars to Amazon Lex. Alternately, you can choose from a list of pre-built industry grammars commonly used in domains such as financial services, insurance, and telecom. The grammar slot type provides granular control for collecting and post-processing user input so you can manage an effective dialog.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add intelligent real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. Presenters can now deliver real-time media to 10,000 participants. Participants can be brought “on stage” with their existing WebRTC connection, allowing them to contribute to the live conversation without missing a moment of content.

Amazon EBS direct APIs is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region, enabling customers to create Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots of their block storage data regardless of where it resides, including on-premises. Customers can use EBS direct APIs to backup their on-premises workloads to EBS snapshots that can be quickly and easily recovered into EBS volumes for use cases like disaster recovery.

Amazon Corretto 18 is now generally available. This version supports the latest Java feature release OpenJDK 18 and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 18 from the downloads page. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto is distributed by Amazon under an open source license.

Starting now, AWS Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports (CURs) provide more granular and detailed billing of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) charges. Additional detail is reported for Amazon RDS Backups and General Purpose, Provisioned IOPS, and Magnetic Storage volumes that are provisioned in Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server database instances. Your bill will contain a detailed break down of costs by database engine for the above Amazon RDS resources and features.

Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics announces support for call summarization, a machine learning (ML) capability that helps improve the productivity of contact center agents and managers so they can focus on providing excellent customer experiences. Using the Transcribe Call Analytics API, developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) can analyze audio recordings and add call analytics to their applications without needing any ML expertise.

Amazon Connect now provides new machine-learning powered capabilities to make it easy for contact center managers to predict contact volumes and average handle time with high accuracy, determine ideal staffing levels, and optimize agent schedules to ensure they have the right agents at the right time. Enabling these capabilities takes just a click, eliminating the need to build custom applications or integrate with third-party products, which can be complex and expensive. These new capabilities help businesses optimize their operations, meet service level goals, and improve agent and customer satisfaction.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports customizable certificate subject names. Security and public key infrastructure (PKI) administrators, builders, and developers now have greater control over the types of certificate subject names they can create using ACM Private CA. For example, it’s now possible to represent your organization’s directory structure in certificates by including multiple organizational units (OUs) in your certificate subject names. It’s also possible to create subject names representing Internet of Things (IoT) product and vendor identifiers such as those conforming to Matter, a new industry standard for secure and reliable home automation devices.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for tds_fdw which allows your PostgreSQL database to connect and retrieve data stored in separate SQL Server databases.

AWS Service Catalog now supports Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoint policies in all regions. Previously, Service Catalog supported integration with AWS PrivateLink in all regions, where customers could use default policies that provided full access to Service Catalog. With this newly supported feature, customers can create or modify their VPC endpoint(s), interface or gateway, and have the option of attaching a customer-managed policy that specifies access to Service Catalog.

Today, we are announcing the availability of AWS Backup in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. AWS Backup is a fully-managed, policy-driven service that allows you to centrally automate data protection across multiple AWS services spanning compute, storage, and database. Using AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage immutable backups of your application data, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions, and restore the data to your specified point-in-time with a few simple clicks.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Amazon Lex provides automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies so you can build conversational interfaces. Today we are launching the Amazon Chime SDK integration with Amazon Lex, enabling builders to develop conversational interfaces for calls to or from the public telephone network. With this integration, you can now easily create conversational experiences in contact centers that use Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for voice communications.

AWS App Mesh now supports AWS CloudTrail integration with Envoy Management Service (EMS). With CloudTrail integration for EMS, customers now get a history of all API calls that Envoy proxies make to App Mesh to retrieve dynamic configuration. This can help customers enhance governance, compliance, and risk auditing capabilities for the workloads running in AWS App Mesh. 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 Graviton2-based T4g database instances are now available in Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm) regions for Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

AWS Backup Audit Manager adds new controls to further simplify the compliance auditing and reporting of your data protection policies. You now have controls for ‘cross-Region copy’ and 'cross-account copy’, which enable you to demonstrate compliance of creating logical air-gapped backups across AWS Regions and AWS Accounts in accordance with your disaster recovery strategy. Additionally, you now have a control for ‘backups protected by AWS Backup Vault Lock’ which helps you track whether your backups are immutable via WORM (write-once, read-many) capabilities, to protect your application data from inadvertent or malicious actions.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of a feature that allows AWS Chatbot customers to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads from their Slack channels. AWS Chatbot customers can do this by running AWS CLI commands and AWS System Manager Automation Runbooks from Slack channels. Previously, AWS customers could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK supports native integration with Amazon Polly, making it easy for builders to create applications that turn text and numerical data into lifelike speech and automatically plays the output to a caller.

Starting today, customers can use AWS Billing Conductor to easily provide customizable pricing and cost visibility for their end customers or business units. The AWS Billing Conductor does not impact the billing and invoicing relationship between customers and AWS. AWS Billing Conductor is intended for customers who have specific showback and chargeback needs.

Developers can now share test events with other developers in their AWS account. Test events provide developers the ability to define a sample event in the Lambda console, and then invoke a Lambda function using that event to test their code. Previously, test event were only available to the developers who created them. With this launch, developers can make test events available to other team members in their AWS account using granular IAM permissions. This capability makes it easier for developers to collaborate and streamline testing workflows. It also allows developers to use a consistent set of test events across their entire team.

Connections to AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now make use of hybrid post-quantum key establishment for transport layer security (SSL/TLS). These hybrid post-quantum TLS configurations use key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) from Round 3 of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) selection process. This allows you to measure the potential performance impact of PQC algorithms ahead of a formal standardization announcement. You can also benefit from the longer-term confidentiality afforded by hybrid post-quantum TLS. 

AWS RoboMaker has launched AWS PrivateLink support for application programming interface (APIs) to manage AWS RoboMaker resources such as simulation jobs, robot applications and simulation applications.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in Europe (Milan) region adding to the list of available regions where you can use Amazon DocumentDB.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can use the Amazon Kendra FSx Connector to index and search documents from their FSx for Windows File Server file systems. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed shared storage built on Windows Server, and delivers a wide range of data access, data management, and administrative capabilities.

Starting today, Amazon Route 53 supports Geolocation and Latency-Based routing policies for Private DNS, enabling customers to route traffic for their private hosted zones based on the location of the source query or based on the route that provides the best latency with optimal round-trip time.

AWS IQ Experts can now complete proposals with one click. Previously, you were required to send a final payment request to close a proposal, even if no additional payment was needed. Now you can select the “Complete'” button within an open proposal without requesting an additional payment.

Today, Amazon Location Service added two new HERE map styles for developers, HERE Explore and HERE Explore Truck. With HERE Explore, developers have a new global map that features roads, buildings, landmarks, and water features, including a fully designed map of Japan. With HERE Explore Truck, developers can now display a global map containing truck restrictions and attributes e.g., width, height, HAZMAT, symbolized with highlighted segments and icons on top of HERE Explore to support use cases within transportation and logistics. For example, a customer who manages a fleet of delivery trucks, who needs to calculate the optimal driving route with appropriate restrictions, can use HERE Explore Truck to see driving routes with restrictions shown on the map.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for mysql_fdw which allows your PostgreSQL database to connect and retrieve data stored in separate Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible, MySQL, and MariaDB databases. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL minor versions 14.2, 13.6, 12.10, 11.15, and 10.20. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the PostgreSQL community. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement for more details about the release.

Amazon Lookout for Vision is now generally available to AWS customers to use at the edge. You can deploy your trained Amazon Lookout for Vision models to a hardware device of your choice and run inference locally without any cloud dependencies. 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.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Amazon Voice Focus uses artificial intelligence to help reduce background noises such as fans, lawnmowers, and barking dogs. Starting today, developers can use Amazon Voice Focus with Amazon Chime SDK Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio applications to help reduce unwanted noise on PSTN audio calls. Builders can use this feature for customer service conversations to help improve caller experience.

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database (DB) instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) is now available in US East (Ohio) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. This deployment option give you up to 2x faster transaction commit latency, automated failovers typically under 35 seconds, and readable standby instances. 

AWS is announcing general availability for AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature flagging allows you to quickly roll out new features safely and with more confidence. AWS AppConfig is a feature of AWS Systems Manager.

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) regions. Using Container Insights, you can monitor, isolate, and diagnose containerized applications and microservices environments through automated dashboards. This helps you visualize the performance and health of Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate resources including clusters, services, tasks, and containers.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports the containerd container runtime on Windows worker nodes. Containerd is a lightweight container runtime that manages the complete container lifecycle on its host system, from container image transfer to execution, as well as storage and network attachment. Customers with Windows workloads can now get similar performance, security, and stability benefits from containerd that are available to customers running Linux-based worker nodes.

Amazon Connect Chat now allows your agents and customers to use rich text formatting when composing a message, enabling them to quickly add emphasis and structure to messages, improving comprehension. The available formatting options include bold, italics, hyperlinks, bulleted lists, and numbered lists.

Starting today, you can receive AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alert notifications in Slack and Amazon Chime through AWS Chatbot. Integration with AWS Chatbot allows you to easily configure your cost anomaly alert subscriptions with a Slack or Amazon Chime chat channel. This allows you to receive individual AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alerts within your existing chat channels, supporting improved collaboration and timely resolution of the alerts.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports managing on-premises workloads running on a Windows operating system with Amazon ECS Anywhere. Amazon ECS Anywhere is a capability of Amazon ECS that enables customers to more easily run and manage container-based applications on-premises, including virtual machines (VMs), bare metal servers, and other customer-managed infrastructure. Customers, who need to manage containerized workloads on-premises running on Windows, can now more easily orchestrate them using ECS Anywhere. Developers no longer need to run additional container orchestration software or convert their Windows-based workloads to Linux OS. 

Over the course of March 2022, Amazon is reducing the cost of using the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall in all regions. First, Amazon is launching new tiered pricing effective March 1 that provides for reduced query processing fees as your query volume increases. Secondly, Amazon is implementing internal optimizations to reduce the number of DNS queries for which you are charged. Note that these optimizations will not reduce the number of DNS queries that are inspected or introduce any other changes to your security posture. Amazon customers will see these cost reductions automatically reflected in their Route 53 bills going forward. To learn more, please visit the Amazon Route 53 pricing page.

AWS Network Firewall has achieved FedRAMP High authorization for the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. You can now use AWS Network Firewall to protect and control access to and from your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in these regions for workloads that require FedRAMP High categorization level.

Amazon Cognito now enables you to use Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) in the same region where your Amazon Cognito user pools are configured. By integrating these services in the same region, you can more easily achieve lower latency and remove cross-region dependencies in your architecture.

AWS CodeBuild’s support for Arm using Graviton2 is now available in: Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), and Europe (London).

Amazon Personalize enables developers to improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations – no ML expertise required. Personalize now supports AWS CloudFormation, an AWS service which allows you to automate the setup and deployment of resources through JSON/YAML text files, also called templates. You can use these templates to create or delete Personalize resources - schemas, datasets and dataset group resources, set-up dataset import jobs and configure solutions. Furthermore, you can configure, provision, and manage the complete lifecycle of these individual resources or a collection of them (stack) in a repeatable and efficient fashion through CloudFormation. Support for CloudFormation templates adds a complimentary new way of provisioning your Personalize service resources in addition to the Personalize Console and AWS CLI/SDK.

Amazon EventBridge’s updated console capabilities are now generally available in all AWS regions where EventBridge is available. Customers can use these new capabilities improve the experience of testing and configuring event patterns, transform events, and set up rules and targets.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. Live transcription uses an integration with Amazon Transcribe to generate live audio transcription for use as subtitles or transcripts. Starting today, developers can use automatic language identification to detect the language spoken and generate transcriptions in that language.

Following the announcement of updates in MySQL database versions 5.7 and 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL to support MySQL minor versions 5.7.37, and 8.0.28. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about upgrading your database instances in the Amazon RDS User Guide, and create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database using the latest available minor versions in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

AWS Lambda now supports the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition key in Lambda function resource-based policies. Customers can use resource-based policies for Lambda functions including specific version or alias to grant usage permissions for other AWS accounts or AWS services. The aws:PrincipalOrgID condition key is designed to control access to AWS resources by using the AWS organization of IAM principals. You can now use this condition key in the function resource-based policies to require all principals accessing Lambda functions to be from an account in the organization. Additionally, when you add and remove accounts, policies that include the aws:PrincipalOrgID key should automatically include the correct accounts and help minimize manual updating.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to access AWS Glue Data Catalog S3 tables from other AWS accounts if an appropriate resource policy is created in the AWS Glue console. After creating a policy, the relevant Data Catalog S3 tables can be selected as input sources when creating a DataBrew dataset, making it easier to share that data across accounts before cleaning and transforming it with DataBrew.

Starting today, memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances are generally available. X2idn and X2iedn instances are designed for memory-intensive workloads and deliver improvements in performance, price performance, and cost per GiB of memory compared to previous generation X1 instances. These new instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Ice Lake) and deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance than comparable X1 instances. X2idn has a 16:1 ratio of memory to vCPU and X2iedn has a 32:1 ratio, making these instances a great fit for workloads such as in-memory databases and analytics, big data processing engines, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now allows custom configuration providers for MSK Connect. With this capability, you can store secrets with providers such as Amazon Secrets Manager and avoid storing passwords and other credentials in connector and worker configuration properties. You can supply any Apache Kafka compatible ConfigProvider as part of an MSK Connect plugin, and use this to fetch configuration.

Amazon Lightsail Object Storage provides you with the ability to store your static content such as images, videos or HTML files that can be used for your websites and applications. Effective immediately, the account-level block public access setting in Amazon S3 applies to buckets in the Lightsail object storage service. We are making this change to improve the security of all of your buckets; whether they are in Amazon S3 or in Lightsail. Adding S3 block public access (BPA) settings to your account protects you from unintentionally exposing data in your bucket to the public internet. When account-level BPA is enabled, buckets and objects become "private" (not accessible to anyone on the internet), regardless of the bucket-access permissions currently configured for those buckets and objects.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports M6i and R6i instances. M6i instances are the 6th generation of Amazon EC2 x86-based General Purpose compute instances, designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources. R6i instances are the 6th generation of Amazon EC2 memory optimized instances, designed for memory-intensive workloads. Both M6i and 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.

Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags for an existing ECS service. The added flexibility makes it easier for customers to update their Amazon ECS service configurations, without having to recreate their services, thus reducing operational overhead and potential service disruption.

Amazon EC2 now adds a new property called ‘lastLaunchedTime’ for owners of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This property helps AMI owners view the timestamp of the last time the AMI was used for an EC2 instance launch. It allows AMI owners to understand the usage of their AMIs, especially publicly-shared AMIs, and to make informed decisions about deprecating or deregistering their AMIs.

Amazon DynamoDB increases default service quotas to simplify use of large numbers of tables. DynamoDB increased the default quota for the number of DynamoDB tables you can create and manage per AWS account and AWS Region from 256 to 2,500 tables. DynamoDB also increased the number of table management operations you can perform concurrently from 50 to 500. You can now perform a larger number of create, delete, and update table operations in parallel per account and per Region. 

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to approve or reject multiple change requests together, thereby making it easier for approvers to take bulk actions on pending change requests. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. Now, approvers get the flexibility to select multiple change requests and take actions on them, making approvals faster.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural-language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover insights in text data. Starting today, Comprehend now offers Targeted Sentiment, a new API that provides more granular sentiment insights by identifying the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral, or mixed) towards entities within text.

You can now create your own Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) resources using AWS CloudFormation templates in multiple new regions. Amazon SES is a scalable, cost-effective, and flexible cloud-based email service that allows digital marketers and application developers to send marketing, notification, and transactional emails from within any application. To learn more about Amazon SES, visit this page. SES can be used via SDK, CLI, Console, and AWS CloudFormation templates

Amazon DynamoDB now supports limiting the number of items processed in PartiQL operations as an optional parameter on each request.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, which combines contact history from Amazon Connect with disparate customer data from third-party applications into a unified customer profile, now provides a no-code experience for configuring how customer data from sources such as Salesforce and S3 is aggregated into a profile. This helps makes it simple for admins to provide agents with the customer information they need by customizing how data is added to customer profiles without writing code. Through the Amazon Connect AWS console, admins can customize how data is mapped to a customer profile, create user-defined data attributes on a profile, and customize the search keys available to find profiles. At launch, the following data sources are supported: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo. 

Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, now supports OpenQASM 3.0 for gate-based quantum devices and simulators. With this launch, customers have the choice of using the Braket SDK to build and run programs as before, or directly supply equivalent OpenQASM 3.0 strings via the Braket SDK and API. Amazon Braket’s introduction and ongoing support for OpenQASM 3.0, will continue to make it easier for customers to migrate quantum programs between different development environments.

Amazon QuickSight now supports auto refresh for direct query controls every 24 hours. This new feature provides a more streamlined experience for QuickSight readers to use controls for their dashboards without having to manually refresh the control values from their direct query datasets. For further details about QuickSight data refreshing, visit here.

Bottlerocket, a Linux based operating system that is purpose built to run container workloads, now supports GPU based EC2 instance types that are powered by NVIDIA. Customers can now benefit from using the same container focused host operating system for both their non-GPU and GPU workloads, including machine learning, video encoding, and streaming workloads. This helps customers standardize on a single operating system that utilizes the underlying specialized compute hardware.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports Oracle Database 21c. You can now launch Amazon RDS instances for Oracle Database 21c.

Today, we announced the Amazon Genomics CLI has added Snakemake to its catalog of workflow management tools for genomics analysis, which also includes Cromwell, Nextflow, and miniWDL.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports Multi Major Version Upgrades which allows you to perform major version upgrades across multiple different major versions.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon DevOps Guru now features an integration with Amazon CodeGuru Profiler. With this integration, you can access recommendations from Amazon CodeGuru Profiler as insights in the DevOps Guru console, making it easier to connect application performance issues with the underlying code responsible for the issue.

Today, we are announcing the Developer Preview of the Amplify iOS Library that has been rewritten to exclusively use Swift. This initial release enables Swift developers to add cloud-based app features, including Auth, Storage, Data, and APIs, without having to transition to Objective-C to debug or contribute to the underlying open-source code. In coming releases, we plan to add support for additional Amplify use cases, as well as Swift-based language features like structured concurrency.

You can now customize how data is stored on your Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file system to optimize performance for database applications and other workloads that consistently read and write data in small increments.

You can now configure your database connections on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition from an allowable list of ciphers. Configurable cipher suites provide you more security control over the connection encryption that your database server accepts.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.6.7, 10.5.15, 10.4.24, 10.3.34 and 10.2.43. 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.

Amazon SageMaker Serverless and Asynchronous Inference now support Amazon SageMaker Python SDK, which abstracts the steps required for deployment and thereby simplifies the model deployment workflow. The SageMaker Python SDK is an open source library for deploying machine learning models on Amazon SageMaker. You can use any of the optimized machine learning frameworks, SageMaker supported first-party algorithms, or bring your own model to deploy using the Python SDK.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)—a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service—now helps you automate resource management by using the AWS SDK.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports two new customer modifiable sqlnet.ora parameters for the Oracle Native Network Encryption (NNE) option. This feature allows customers to block older ciphers and algorithms from being used by the SQL*Net encryption and checksum parameters.

Amazon EMR is the industry-leading cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Presto. Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon EMR now supports auto termination of idle clusters in Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Africa (Cape Town), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions.

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

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, and helps organizations provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra’s Spell Checker to suggest spell corrections for misspelled words in a query.

With the introduction of LZ4 data compression, you can now choose from two different compression options on Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems. LZ4 provides another highly popular performance-optimized compression option (in addition to Z-Standard) to help you optimize storage efficiency and performance based on the needs of your individual workloads.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for MySQL is now generally available for use with your Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible edition database clusters. This database driver minimizes failover time by monitoring database cluster status and caching the cluster’s topology. The cache is then used to improve DNS name resolution speed if a node fails, reducing failover time from minutes to seconds.

AWS Data Provider for SAP version 4.1 is now available in all commercial regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL and for MySQL now supports a new Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database (DB) instances across three Availability Zones (AZs). This deployment option is optimized for write transactions and is ideal when your workloads require lower write latency, automated failovers, and more read capacity.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation to manage Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) cluster configurations and SASL/SCRAM secrets. To learn more about Amazon MSK support for AWS CloudFormation, refer to our AWS CloudFormation documentation.

Amazon Detective has improved search capabilities by adding support for wildcard characters and classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) notation on IP addresses. Amazon Detective helps customers conduct security investigations by distilling and organizing data from sources such as, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon GuardDuty, into a graph model that summarizes resource behaviors and interactions observed across a customer’s AWS environment.

Starting today, students over the age of 16 and currently enrolled in high school or undergraduate programs globally can compete in the DeepRacer Student Virtual League for the chance to win prizes, glory and a trip to AWS re:Invent 2022, a learning conference for the global cloud computing community featuring keynote announcements. The AWS DeepRacer Student League provides access to dozens of hours of free machine learning model training and educational materials on the basics of machine learning and its real-world applications. Students can use AWS DeepRacer to turn theory into hands-on action by learning how to train machine learning models to power a virtual race car, all with no credit card required.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) customers can now inject task-level container failures using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiments. With this new AWS FIS fault action you can stop running tasks in your container-based applications, whether they are deployed on AWS Fargate or Amazon EC2 infrastructure, so that you can uncover the hidden bugs, monitoring blind spots, and performance bottlenecks that are difficult to find in distributed systems. AWS FIS experiments can help you measure, validate, and improve the resilience of your applications in use cases such as chaos engineering, gameday testing, and continuous delivery.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 26 regions, with the addition of the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.

Today we are announcing the launch of IoT Application Kit for AWS IoT SiteWise, an open source front end library, that enables developers to quickly build applications to visualize industrial data from processes, devices, and equipment that are connected to AWS IoT SiteWise. The IoT Application Kit provides user interface (UI) components for managing and visualizing IoT data, including bar charts, line charts, scatter plots and timeline views. Developers can use these UI components to build their own applications tailored to different use cases and their unique business needs.

You can now record Amazon Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiment activities by sending logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3. AWS FIS experiment logs contain detailed information about experiments, actions, and targets, including start and end times, action names, and target resource ARNs. You can use these logs to identify the activities performed by AWS FIS experiments and correlate them with your systems’ responses and monitoring and observability tools, so that you can implement improvements. In addition, you can use experiment timeline charts in the AWS Management Console to monitor a running or completed experiment.

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon MSK Serverless in the Europe (Ireland) AWS Region.

AWS Trusted Advisor Priority is now available in preview for AWS Enterprise Support customers, and provides a prioritized view of cloud optimization recommendations and the ability to track the status of these recommendations.

Starting today customers can calculate the environmental impact of their AWS workloads with the new customer carbon footprint tool. This new tool uses easy-to-understand data visualizations to provide customers with their historical carbon emissions, evaluate emission trends as their use of AWS evolves, approximate the estimated carbon emissions they have avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on current use. The forecasted emissions are based on current usage, and show how a customer’s carbon footprint will change as Amazon stays on path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target of 2030, and drives toward net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge.  

Today AWS launches the 2022 season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League Virtual Circuit. Developers of all-skill levels advance their machine learning (ML) skills and compete in the world’s first global autonomous racing league.