April 2022

Starting today, AWS customers have access to additional features to manage their EC2 key pairs. Customers can view the creation date and public key material for existing and new key pairs created using EC2 key pairs. Customers will also be able to create ED25519 key pairs in ppk format in addition to pem format and create key pairs using CloudFormation templates.

AWS Audit Manager now allows use of custom rules from AWS Config to define custom controls in Audit Manager. Audit Manager users could already import pre-built, managed rules. Now, they are also able to leverage existing Custom Config rules and report these compliance checks directly. In order to do so, they must enable their AWS Config account through their preferred method of Config set up.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically change the current status of an agent. Agent statuses are used to determine when an agent is “Available” to be routed contacts in Connect, versus when they are set to “Offline” or a custom status such as “Lunch” or “Break” and should not be routed contacts. Using this API, businesses can now build custom dashboards for contact center managers to change an agents’ current status, for example if an agent has forgotten to change their status to “Offline” when they are done handling contacts for the day. Previously, this functionality was available only via the Amazon Connect Real Time Metrics page.

Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is publishing usage metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, so that you can monitor against account-wide service limits. Publishing these usage metrics gives you the operational visibility to manage utilization and alarm as your usage approaches service limits. We added support for 11 service limit metrics: AllocatedStorage, DBInstances, DBClusters, DBSecurityGroups, ReservedDBInstances, DBClusterParameterGroups, DBParameterGroups, ManualSnapshots, ManualClusterSnapshots, DBSubnetGroups, OptionGroups.

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 Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. This deployment option give you up to 2x faster transaction commit latency, automated fail overs typically under 35 seconds, and readable standby instances.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now offers customers the option to use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses in their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on new and existing RDS instances. Customers moving to IPv6 can simplify their network stack by running their databases on a network that supports both IPv4 and IPv6.

Amazon Connect now allows you to search for and view Voice ID authentication and fraud detection outcomes on the contact detail page, making it easier to take action based on Voice ID results. You can search for contacts based on Voice ID attributes such as authentication status, caller actions (enrollment or opt out), fraud risk status, and fraud risk reason. These details are also available from within the contact detail page for a specific contact. For example, you can search for all contacts categorized as high risk for fraud and then listen to these call recordings in order to identify fraudster patterns or strategies, which can enable you to deploy additional security measures to address.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, version 11 and higher, 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.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows you to clone the inputs when you deploy an SAP system for use in future deployments. In most cases, the majority of these parameters will remain the same across deployments. Today’s launch eliminates the need to re-enter every parameter manually for subsequent deployments, allowing you to save time and reduce error by instead focusing on the few that make each deployment unique.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of a neural version of Vitória, Polly’s Brazilian Portuguese female text to speech (TTS) voice.

AWS Network Firewall now supports AWS Managed Threat Signatures to detect threats and block attacks against known vulnerabilities so you can stay up to date on the latest security threats without writing and maintaining your own rules.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Amazon MSK Serverless, a type of Amazon MSK cluster that makes it easier for developers to run Apache Kafka without having to manage capacity. MSK Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute and storage resources and offers throughput-based pricing, so you can use Apache Kafka on demand and pay for the data you stream and retain.

AWS Service Catalog constructs for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) are now available. Service Catalog administrators can now define their catalog in code within a CDK application that deploys through AWS CloudFormation. They can also define a Service Catalog product entirely in code in CDK without having to upload and reference CloudFormation templates in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or AWS CodeCommit first.

Today, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events, a fully managed service for camera manufacturers and service providers that uses machine learning (ML) to detect objects such as people, pets, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events sends them a notification as soon as the desired object is detected in the live video stream. With these event notifications, service providers can send timely and actionable smart alerts to their users such as “Pet detected in the backyard,” enable home automation experiences such as turning on garage lights when a person is detected, build custom in-app experiences such as a smart search to find specific video events of packages without scrolling through hours of footage, or integrate these alerts with Echo devices for Alexa announcements such as “A package was detected at the front door” when the doorbell detects a delivery person dropping off a package – all while keeping cost and latency low. Learn more about Amazon Rekognition Streaming Video Events.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL version 8.0 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.

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region.

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, Databricks Delta Lake, and Snowflake.

Today, AWS Snow Family launches Large Data Migration Manager, a new feature that enables you to plan, track, and manage your large data migrations when using multiple Snowball Edge service products. You can now easily plan and monitor your jobs from a minimum of 500 Terabytes to Petabytes scale data migrations. Using Large Data Migration Manager eliminates the need for you to manually track all of your Snow jobs and the status of their data ingestion.  

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API can now return results in a new simplified JSON format that makes it easier to convert JSON string to an object in your application. Previously, Amazon RDS Data API returned a JSON string as an array of data type and value pairs. This required developers to write custom code to parse the response and extract the values in order to manually translate the JSON string into an object. Instead, the new format returns an array of column names and values, which makes it easier for common JSON parsing libraries to convert the response JSON string to an object. The previous JSON format is still supported and existing applications using Amazon RDS Data API will work unchanged. To learn more about the new format and how to use it see our documentation.

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

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add intelligent real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging to their web applications. Media Pipelines allow developers to capture the contents of Amazon Chime SDK WebRTC media sessions to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK now has media pipeline API endpoints in US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions.

You can now use data tiering for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a lower cost way to scale your clusters to up to hundreds of terabytes of capacity in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), and South America (Sao Paulo) Regions. Data tiering provides a new price-performance option for Redis workloads by utilizing lower-cost solid state drives (SSDs) in each cluster node in addition to storing data in memory. It is ideal for workloads that access up to 20% of their overall dataset regularly, and for applications that can tolerate additional latency when accessing data on SSD.

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introduced a new way that you can control access to your resources based on the account, Organizational Unit (OU) or organization in AWS Organizations that contains your resources. AWS recommends that you set up multiple accounts as your workloads grow. Using a multi-account environment has several benefits including flexible security controls by isolating workloads or applications that have specific security requirements. With this new IAM capability, you now can author IAM policies to enable your principals to access only resources inside specific AWS accounts, OUs, or organizations.

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, Databricks Delta Lake, and Snowflake.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 I4i instances. Designed for storage I/O intensive workloads, I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 30% better compute price performance over I3 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

You can now build scalable stream chat rooms with built-in moderation options designed to accompany live streaming video using the new Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) stream chat feature. With this feature, streamers and viewers can build community relationships by asking questions and participating in discussions. Amazon IVS chat provides chat room resource management and a messaging API for sending, receiving, and moderating chat messages. Visit the Amazon IVS chat feature page to learn more.

Today, we are announcing an update to AWS Control Tower that includes a change to the Notification Forwarder Lambda to use the Python version 3.9 runtime. This update addresses the planned deprecation of Python version 3.6 runtime. Function invocations continue indefinitely after the runtime version reaches end of support. However, AWS strongly recommends that you migrate functions to a supported runtime version so that you continue to receive security patches and remain eligible for technical support. Please refer to the runtime deprecation policy for additional deprecation details.

Today we are launching the ability for AWS Snowball Edge customers to update device certificates for Snowball Edge devices deployed at edge locations. Customers, Solutions Architects, or Account Managers can open a support case with AWS Snow team to request software update package with new device certificate. Customers then use the existing software update process to apply the new device certificate to their Snow devices. This enables customers to deploy Snowball Edge devices for multiple years without having to replace devices to update their operating certificates.

Amazon Lightsail has added two new security features for the Lightsail load balancer: the ability to automatically redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS and the ability to configure the security policy used for TLS termination of the HTTPS requests. With these features, you can easily make your websites more secure, meet compliance goals, achieve better search ranking and high SSL/TLS scores just by configuring a Lightsail load balancer with the Lightsail instances hosting your websites.

AWS Backup’s policy-based data protection capabilities are now available for Amazon FSx in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now use AWS Backup to centrally automate backup and restore of your application data stored in Amazon FSx along with other AWS services for compute, storage, and database in the Osaka Region.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is announcing v0.9.0 of the Karpenter open-source cluster autoscaling project. Karpenter is a flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler that helps improve application availability and resource utilization. Karpenter v0.9.0 adds supports for Kubernetes podAffinity and podAntiAffinity scheduling constraints, which increases its compatibility with popular third-party Helm charts and expands support for high-availability use cases.

Starting today, memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage are available in South America (São Paulo). R6gd instances provide up to 40 percent better price-performance and up to 50% more NVMe storage GB/vCPU over comparable x86-based instances for memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. They are ideal for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency storage, as well as for temporary storage of data such as batch and log processing, and for high-speed caches and scratch files. Amazon EC2 R6gd instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors that are custom-designed by AWS to enable the best price performance in Amazon EC2.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of a Neural version of Inês, Polly’s European Portuguese female text to speech (TTS) voice.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB, version 10.4 and higher, 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 EC2 C6i, M6i and R6i instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These instances are powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offering up to 15% better compute price performance over comparable Gen5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Wavelength on the Bell 5G network in Toronto. Enterprises, application developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), can now use the AWS Wavelength Zone in Toronto to build ultra-low latency applications for mobile devices and end-users in Canada.

With V2 of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), you can now send and receive emails of up to 40MB message size (including the email text, images, attachments, and the MIME encoding).

Amazon Connect now provides a new API to search for user records in your Amazon Connect instance. This new API provides a programmatic and flexible way to search for users by first name, last name, username, routing profile, security profile, agent hierarchies or tags. For example, you can now use this API to search for all users tagged with a Department:A key value pair. You can also quickly find a list of all users assigned to a specific security profile, routing profile, or agent hierarchy. To learn more about this new API, see the API documentation and read the blog post.

Amazon Nimble Studio is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. Deploying Nimble Studio in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience. In just a few hours, you can create a new studio environment in which creative talent can access virtual workstations powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4dn instances, with NVIDIA Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), and high-speed storage enabled by Amazon FSx. With support for both Windows and Linux operating systems, artists can work with their creative tools of choice using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) enabling a seamless on-premises to cloud migration. When ready to render images, Nimble Studio allows customers to scale compute resources with AWS Thinkbox Deadline.

Amazon Redshift RA3 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain) and Africa (Cape Town) regions. Amazon Redshift RA3 instances with managed storage allow you to scale and pay for compute and storage independently for fast query performance and lower costs, and also enable you to more securely and more easily share live data across Amazon Redshift clusters. RA3 is available in three different node types, RA3.16xlarge, RA3.4xlarge, and RA3.xlplus to help you to balance price and performance depending upon your workload requirements.

You can now easily setup AWS Lambda monitoring and view the health of the Lambda functions via Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights problems directly from the Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights console. This integration makes it easier to dive deep into issues, troubleshoot problems and reduce mean time to resolution for your Lambda functions. The simple set up and problem analysis of Application Insights now combines with the monitoring details and troubleshooting of Lambda Insights to provide a consolidated view of the health and performance of your Lambda functions running on AWS.

Amazon Connect now allows customers to subscribe to a near real-time stream of contact (voice calls, chat, and task) events (e.g., call is queued) in your Amazon Connect contact center in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. These events include when a voice call, chat, or task is initiated, queued to be assigned to an agent, connected to an agent, transferred to another agent or queue, and disconnected. Contact events can be used to create analytics dashboards to monitor and track contact activity, integrate into workforce management (WFM) solutions to better understand contact center performance, or to integrate applications that react to events (e.g., call disconnected) in real-time. Amazon Connect contact events are published via Amazon EventBridge, and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon EventBridge AWS console and creating a new rule.

Amazon Connect now allows customers to subscribe to a near real-time stream of contact (voice calls, chat, and task) events (e.g., call is queued) in your Amazon Connect contact center in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. These events include when a voice call, chat, or task is initiated, queued to be assigned to an agent, connected to an agent, transferred to another agent or queue, and disconnected. Contact events can be used to create analytics dashboards to monitor and track contact activity, integrate into workforce management (WFM) solutions to better understand contact center performance, or to integrate applications that react to events (e.g., call disconnected) in real-time. Amazon Connect contact events are published via Amazon EventBridge, and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon EventBridge AWS console and creating a new rule.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to lead you through a best practices deployment of self-managed Microsoft Exchange Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). AWS Launch Wizard uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide you through the configuration, sizing and deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server on AWS Cloud, without the need to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today announced the public preview of the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux 2022 Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022) is the next generation of Amazon Linux from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run your cloud applications. Starting with AL2022, a new Amazon Linux major version will be available every two years and each major version will be supported for five years. Amazon ECS will publish Amazon ECS-optimized AMIs to support the same 2-year release and 5-year support cycle for every new major Amazon Linux version. The two-year major release cycle helps you keep your software up-to-date while the five year support commitment for each major release gives you the stability you need to manage long project lifecycles.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to lead you through a best practices deployment of self-managed IIS (Internet Information Services) for Windows Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). AWS Launch Wizard uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide you through the configuration, sizing and deployment of Microsoft IIS on AWS Cloud, without the need to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources. Nodes are deployed into separate subnets across multiple Availability Zones for high availability. Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web.

Amazon Connect launches API to claim new phone numbers and configure them programmatically. Using this API, you can programmatically search for and claim available phone numbers, associate phone numbers to your contact flows, or release phone numbers that are no longer needed. Additionally, the phone number API comes with support for AWS CloudFormation. To learn more, see the API documentation, blog post, and Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.  

AWS Batch now expands the Compute environment (CE) configuration parameters that can be updated without having to recreate compute environments. Previously customers used UpdateComputeEnvironment API to change CE state, desired CPU count, min and max vCPU count, and service role. To update additional configuration parameters, customers have to create new CEs. With this launch, customers can use the UpdateComputeEnvironment API to dynamically update CE configuration parameters such as AMI, EC2 launch templates, instance types, and more. Rather than having to manually create a new CE to use the updated configurations, Batch will use the updated CE configuration while launching new instances and terminate instances using old CE configuration once the jobs running on them are completed.

Sensitive data detection and processing in AWS Glue is now generally available. This feature uses pattern matching and machine learning to automatically detect Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive data at both the column and cell levels during an AWS Glue job run. AWS Glue includes options to log the type of PII and its location as well as to take action on it.

You can now schedule live content into a linear channel created using Channel Assembly with AWS Elemental MediaTailor. You could already re-use transcoded and packaged HLS and DASH streams from your existing video on demand (VOD) catalogs and now you can use live streams from an origin such as AWS Elemental MediaPackage as scheduled sources for a linear channel.

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 AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) Operator. This launch enables a simplified experience for instrumenting your applications running on Amazon EKS to send metrics and traces to multiple monitoring services including AWS X-Ray, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and Amazon CloudWatch. 

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next version of Aurora Serverless, is now generally available. Aurora Serverless v2 scales instantly to support even the most demanding applications, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity.

AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks are now generally available, providing interactive, notebook-based job authoring in AWS Glue. They help simplify the process of developing data integration jobs. Job Notebooks also provide a serverless, built-in interface for AWS Glue Interactive Sessions, another new feature that allows customers to run interactive Apache Spark workloads on demand.

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 Box connector to index and search documents from Box.

You can now try Amazon Neptune for free with a 1-month free trial. First-time Neptune customers can get started with Neptune for free for 30 days, using up to 750 hours of the T3.medium instance, 10 million I/O requests, 1 GB of storage, and 1 GB of backup storage.

Amazon QuickSight now supports 1-click public embedding, a feature that allows you to embed your dashboards into public applications, wikis, and portals without any coding or development. Once enabled, anyone on the internet can start accessing these embedded dashboards with to up-to-date information instantly, without server deployments or infrastructure licensing needed! 1-click public embedding helps you empower your end users with access to insights in seconds. To access this feature in preview please contact quicksight-public-embedding-preview@amazon.com.

AWS Glue Interactive Sessions are now generally available. They provide a new interface into AWS Glue's highly scalable Serverless Spark environment. They support interactive data integration job development, data exploration, and on-demand distributed data processing for customers' own applications.

Three new managed data identifiers have been added to Amazon Macie to expand its capabilities for discovering and identifying the locations of HTTP Basic Authentication Headers, HTTP Cookies, and JSON Web Tokens present in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Knowing if and where these types of data are present in your S3 storage helps you to better plan the data security, governance, and privacy needs of your organization.

Today, we are excited to announce general availability of Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference in all AWS Regions where SageMaker is generally available (except the AWS China regions). With SageMaker Serverless Inference, you can quickly deploy machine learning (ML) models for inference without having to configure or manage the underlying infrastructure. When deploying your ML models, simply select the serverless option and Amazon SageMaker automatically provisions, scales, and turns off compute capacity based on the volume of inference requests. With SageMaker Serverless Inference, you pay only for the compute capacity used to process inference requests (billed by the millisecond) and the amount of data processed; you do not pay for idle time. SageMaker Serverless Inference is ideal for applications with intermittent or unpredictable traffic.

Amazon MQ now provides support for ActiveMQ 5.16.4. This update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and enhancements compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.16.3

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Amplify Studio Figma-to-React code capabilities, giving frontend developers a faster workflow for building full-stack apps. These new capabilities add to existing Amplify Studio backend creation and management capabilities, helping developers accelerate UI development. Typically, there is a lot of back and forth between frontend developers and designers, which can lead to suboptimal end-user experiences because of compromises made to ship on time. With Amplify Studio, developing UI as per design is as easy as “import from Figma, export to code, and extend code with custom logic.”

Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS IoT TwinMaker, a service that makes it easier for developers to create digital twins of real-world systems such as buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment. Customers are increasingly adopting digital twins to make better operational and strategic decisions in industries such as smart buildings, manufacturing, construction, energy, power & utilities, and more. With AWS IoT TwinMaker you now have the tools you need to build digital twins to help you monitor and improve your industrial operations.

Today, we are announcing that Amplify Geo for Android is now generally available, following the release of Amplify Geo for JavaScript and iOS. Amplify Geo for Android allows developers to add cloud-connected UI components for maps and location search to Android apps. In addition to AWS Amplify’s features like Auth, DataStore, and Storage, Amplify Geo provides a set of client libraries built on top of Amazon Location Service APIs, and includes cloud-connected map UI components that are based on the popular MapLibre open-source library.

Amazon DevOps Guru now provides Proactive Insights that helps you to increase availability, improve performance and optimize utilization of your application resources. Proactive monitoring is key to flagging potential issues with your applications and infrastructure early, enabling you to respond quickly and reduce costly downtime. Amazon DevOps Guru uses machine learning (ML) to analyze application resources, configurations and application metrics to identify potential future operational issues to prevent them from impacting your users and increase application uptime.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from any document or image. Textract now provides you the flexibility to specify the data you need to extract from documents using the new Queries features within Analyze Document API. You do not need to know the structure of the data in the document (table, form, implied field, nested data) or worry about variations across document versions and formats. Queries leverages a combination of visual, spatial, and language cues to extract the information you seek with high accuracy.

Auto Scaling in AWS Glue Apache Spark jobs is now generally available. AWS Glue 3.0 can now dynamically scale resources up and down based on the workload. With Auto Scaling, you no longer need to worry about over-provisioning resources for jobs, spend time optimizing the number of workers, or pay for idle workers.

Today we are announcing the general availability of 10 new data source connectors for Amazon Athena. With Athena, you can query data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources without the need for ETL scripts to pre-process or copy data. This release expands the number of data sources you can query with Athena and helps analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and developers unlock business value from data stored in databases running on-premises or in the cloud.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add intelligent real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. The Amazon Chime SDK has achieved FedRAMP High authorization for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. U.S. government agencies and contractors can now use Amazon Chime SDK to build applications for workloads that require FedRAMP High authorization. 

You can now set a default instance warm-up time for all scaling activities, health check replacements, and other replacement events in the Auto Scaling instance lifecycle. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a service that allows you to automatically scale and manage logical groups of instances, known as Auto Scaling groups, that serve your application. EC2 Auto Scaling does this by monitoring various metrics, such as CPU utilization and application demand, to determine if an instance needs to be replaced, removed from, or added to your Auto Scaling group. Setting the default instance warm-up time parameter can simplify your Auto Scaling group configuration by ensuring that any scaling and replacement policies are aware of the time your instances typically take to be ready to serve demand.

Amazon Personalize now gives you more control over your resources by allowing you to stop and start recommenders. Amazon Personalize enables developers to improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations – no ML expertise required. A recommender is a resource that is optimized for specific use cases, such as “Frequently bought together” for Retail and “Top picks for you” for Media and Entertainment. Stopping the recommender when not in use moves it to an inactive state without having to delete the recommender. Starting moves it to an active state, resuming where you left off without having to recreate the recommender resource. For example, during testing phase, you might need to get recommendations only for a few days. You can stop the recommender when you don’t need it, and then start the recommender again at any time to resume recommendation requests. There are no usage charges for a stopped recommender.

AWS Migration Hub now helps you orchestrate the migration of applications to AWS with the new Migration Hub Orchestrator feature. The scope of large migration projects generally involves selecting migration tools, step-by-step planning, and tracking the migration process across different tools and teams. Migration Hub Orchestrator provides predefined and customizable workflow templates that offer a prescribed set of migration tasks, migration tools, and automation opportunities. With Orchestrator, you can customize the templates, automate the migration of your applications, and track your progress in one place.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) AWS Region along with support for AWS Direct Connect. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway.

You can now customize your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that control access to your Amazon Neptune resources, like Neptune clusters or instances, with AWS global condition context keys. You can use AWS global condition context keys, which are specified in the Condition element of an IAM policy, to allow or disallow access to Neptune resources based on the set conditions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports highly available configurations with Multi-AZ deployments for PostgreSQL and for MySQL on AWS Outposts in all commercial regions. Amazon RDS Multi-AZ on Outposts deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for RDS database (DB) instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance on a second AWS Outposts connected to a different Availability Zone  (AZ). Each Outposts runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic fail-over to the standby, so that you can resume database operations as soon as the fail-over is complete.

AWS Step Functions expands integration with the AWS SDK by expanding support for over 20 new AWS SDK integrations and over 1000 new AWS API actions.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of openCypher query language support with Amazon Neptune. Customers can now use openCypher with Amazon Neptune, giving them more choices to build or migrate graph applications to a highly available, secure, and fully managed graph database.

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you create KMS keys that can be used to generate and verify Hash-Based Message Authentication Code (HMACs). HMACs are a powerful cryptographic building block that incorporates secret key material within a hash function to create a unique keyed message authentication code. HMAC KMS keys can only be generated and used within the FIPS 140-2 validated HSM security boundary in AWS KMS. This architecture can minimize the risk of these secret keys being compromised, in contrast to using plaintext HMAC keys in local application software.

AWS Security Hub has released support for cross-Region security scores and compliance statuses to enable a more complete view of your security posture across all of your accounts and Regions. Last year, Security Hub added support for cross-Region aggregation of findings. This release extends Security Hub's capabilities to now also support cross-Region security scores and compliance statuses, if you have set up an aggregation Region. The security scores for each standard and compliance statuses for each control in your aggregation Region will reflect a composite view across your linked Regions. Your security scores and compliance statuses in your administrator account and in your aggregation Region will reflect a composite view across all of your accounts and Regions.

You can now launch Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems in three additional AWS Regions: Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

Amazon Redshift now offers new enhancements for Audit Logging, which enables faster delivery of logs for analysis by minimizing latency while also adding Amazon CloudWatch as a new log destination. With this release, customers can choose to stream audit logs directly to Amazon CloudWatch, which enables customers to perform real-time monitoring.

The next generation of Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems is now available in three additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (London).

AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. DataSync can copy data to and from Network File System (NFS) shares, Server Message Block (SMB) shares, self-managed object storage, Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS), AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems, and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems. 

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) controllers for Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, Dynamo DB, Amazon S3, AWS Application Autoscaling, and AWS API Gateway v2 are now generally available.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Hannah, a new Austrian German Neural voice.

On April 19th, 2022 Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 18.0.1, 17.0.3, 11.0.15, and 8u332 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

Today, AWS Marketplace launched the ability for customers to easily upgrade and/or renew existing commitments for upfront contract pricing for AMI and Container products, which launched in Nov. 2021. Now, buyers can opt-in to auto-renew their existing contracts and/or increase the number of licenses in their commitment, allowing them to keep up with ever-changing business needs and accommodate expanding workloads on AWS.

Since our last update in January 2022, AWS CloudFormation Registry has expanded to include support for 35 new resource types (refer to the complete list below) between January and March 2022. A resource type includes schema (resource properties and handler permissions) and handlers that allow API interactions with the underlying AWS or third-party services. Customers can now configure, provision, and manage the lifecycle of these newly supported resources as part of their cloud infrastructure through CloudFormation, by treating them as infrastructure as code. Furthermore, we are pleased to announce that 1 new AWS service - AWS Billing Conductor added CloudFormation support on the day of launch. CloudFormation now supports 170+ AWS services spanning over 900 resource types, along with over 40 third-party resource types.

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 Quip connector to index and search documents in their Quip repository.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now helps you read and write data in Apache Spark more easily by using the open-source Spark Cassandra Connector.

The Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) console and APIs for control and creation of video stream resources are now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (Frankfurt). Video ingest and delivery are available around the globe over a separate managed network of infrastructure optimized for live video.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access the AWS Batch APIs from your virtual private cloud (AmazonVPC). AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks. You can now manage your AWS Batch resources in your VPC using AWS PrivateLink and meet your organization’s security and compliance requirements. To use AWS PrivateLink, create an interface VPC endpoint for AWS Batch in your VPC using the Amazon VPC console, SDK, or CLI. You can also access the VPC endpoint from on-premises environments or from other VPCs using AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect, or VPC Peering.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) announces its first points of presence (PoPs) in Indonesia and the Philippines located in Jakarta and Manila. The new edge locations will enable streamers and viewers based in Indonesia and the Philippines to enjoy lower latency, better video quality, and increased capacity.

You can now use Service Quotas in AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region to view and manage your service quotas at scale as your AWS workloads grow.

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

Today, we announced the DevSecOps category for the AWS DevOps Competency. These AWS Partners provide DevSecOps products to help customers integrate security policies and guardrails into their CI/CD pipelines.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports streaming data delivery to Coralogix, enabling Coralogix users to ingest streaming data without having to manage applications or write code.

If you use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as your identity source with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), you can now configure your list of users and groups to synchronize from AD into AWS SSO and pause synchronization. With configurable synchronization, you can synchronize users and groups consistent with your data sovereignty requirements. You can also pause synchronization when necessary and synchronize during desired hours.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 announces session scripts for Elastic fleets. Amazon AppStream 2.0 Elastic fleets help customers remove capacity management tasks and reduce costs. Starting today, AppStream 2.0 Elastic fleets provides on-instance session scripts. These scripts simplify common scenarios for AppStream 2.0 Elastic fleets administrators. You can use these scripts to run your own custom actions when specific events occur in users' streaming sessions, for example, custom actions that execute before a user's session starts and/or after session ends. Before the session begins, you can easily configure applications and streaming environments, as well as perform tasks such as collecting application logs, monitoring session information during the session, and application cleanup before the session ends. Session scripts are already available on AppStream 2.0 Always-On and On-Demand fleets. To get started building your own session scripts for Elastic fleets, see Use Session Scripts to Manage Your AppStream 2.0 Users' Streaming Experience Session.

Amazon CloudWatch announces support for additional statistics such as percentiles on CloudWatch Metric Streams. With Metric Streams, you can create a continuous, near real-time stream of metrics to a destination of your choice. Now with these additional statistics you can gain increased visibility on metric patterns and trends, to more effectively monitor the health and performance of your applications.

Today, we announced the Enterprise Container Management category for the AWS Container Competency. These AWS Partners provide container management products to help customers manage container infrastructure and containerized workloads across different environments.

Starting today, Amazon SageMaker Canvas is generally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

We are excited to announce the new Amazon CloudFront Ready Program for AWS Partners with software products that integrate with Amazon CloudFront. As customers have shifted to building applications in the cloud, they require the right tools and software solutions to help them build and distribute scalable, highly engaging applications and online experiences.

Read below for the 16 new or updated datasets from Space Telescope Science Institute, DNAStack, National Archives and Records Administration, and others available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add intelligent real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. The Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript 3.0 and React Components 3.0 provides developers of web and Electron applications with a simplified developer experience for faster implementation and consistency across popular browsers and Chromium runtimes.

AWS DataSync now supports transferring files to and from Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, a fully managed service that offers highly reliable, scalable, performant, and feature-rich file storage built on the open-source OpenZFS file system. Using DataSync, you can easily and securely migrate your on-premises file or object storage to FSx for OpenZFS or perform ongoing transfers of your data between FSx for OpenZFS and your on-premises storage or AWS Storage services. You can also use DataSync to move data between FSx for OpenZFS file systems.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports Single Availability Zone (AZ) deployments. Single-AZ file systems are designed for use cases that do not require the data resiliency model of a Multi-AZ file system, such as running development and test workloads, or storing secondary copies of data that is already stored on premises or in other AWS Regions. Single-AZ file systems provide a lower-cost storage option than Multi-AZ file systems for these use cases, while offering all the same data management capabilities and features.

AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), now enables customers to scale applications faster, improving performance and reducing wait time. We have made several improvements over the last year that enable you to scale applications up to 16X faster, making it easier to build and run applications at a larger scale on Fargate.

Starting today, you can now automatically attach Amazon EFS file systems to new Amazon EC2 instances created from the Configure storage section of the new and improved instance launch experience, making it simpler and easier to use serverless and elastic file storage with your EC2 instances. This integration helps you simplify the process of configuring EC2 instances to mount EFS file systems at launch time with recommended mount options. In addition, from the Configure storage section of the launch experience, you can also create new EFS file systems using the recommended settings without having to leave the Amazon EC2 console.  

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (ECR Public) is announcing changes to the gallery including navigation breadcrumbs, copying of image identifier from dropdown, addition of publisher alias to the image name, and updates to repository not found page. These changes simplify the experience of discovering and pulling images, thus resulting in less time spent in identifying and pulling the images.

You can now automatically attach Amazon FSx file systems to new Amazon EC2 instances you create in the new EC2 launch experience, making it simple to use feature-rich and highly-performant FSx shared file storage with your EC2 instances.

AWS App Runner now supports streaming all request traces of applications running on App Runner to AWS X-Ray. App Runner makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs to the cloud, at scale and without having to manage infrastructure. X-Ray support in App Runner enables measuring these applications’ performance as they interact with AWS data services such as Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, or Elasticache, or with applications running on ECS, EKS, or Fargate. Further, this launch enables App Runner users to use X-Ray to get an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and gain insights to identify issues or optimization opportunities.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon Connect Wisdom instances from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the internet.

The AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Scholarship program, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, opens applications for underserved and underrepresented students in tech globally to gain hands on learning, tailored mentoring, and up to two of 2,500 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships awarded annually.

Amazon WorkSpaces is introducing two new graphics bundles based on the EC2 G4dn family: Graphics.g4dn and GraphicsPro.g4dn. These bundles allow you to run graphics- and compute-intensive workloads on desktops in the cloud as cost-effective solutions for graphics applications that are optimized for NVIDIA GPUs using NVIDIA libraries such as CUDA, CuDNN, OptiX, and Video Codec SDK. They come with the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU that features multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores and RT Cores, AWS custom second generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors, and the local NVMe storage designed for applications that require fast access to locally stored data.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) eligible. AWS SSO is where customers create, or connect, workforce identities and manage their access centrally across AWS accounts. HIPAA eligibility means that customers subject to HIPAA - including health insurance companies, healthcare providers, healthcare clearinghouses, government programs that pay for healthcare, military and veterans' health programs, as well as their associates - can now use AWS SSO for authentication and authorization of users who configure or manage AWS workloads that store, process or transmit Protected Health Information (PHI) and users who sign into applications integrated with AWS SSO that utilize PHI.

Today we are announcing support for tagging of Amazon Personalize resources to help simplify organization and cost management of resources. Amazon Personalize enables developers to improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations – no ML expertise required. Tags are labels in the form of key-value pairs that may be attached to individual Amazon Personalize resources to search and filter resources, or allocate costs. For example, if you have multiple campaigns that are linked to different use cases on your website, you can set key as “Website” and value as “Home Page” or “Details page” to understand individual spend for each of the two campaigns. This functionality also allows customers with multi-tenant deployments to track spend among their end customers. Tagging functionality is available for several Amazon Personalize resources such as dataset groups, solutions, campaigns, recommenders, import jobs, batch inference, batch segment jobs and other resources. 

Starting today, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now create their own Prefix List in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. A prefix list is a collection of CIDR blocks that can be used to configure VPC security groups and route tables and share it with other AWS accounts using Resource Access Manager (RAM). Customers can easily audit and apply prefix lists across all their accounts to have a consistent security posture and routing behavior.

Amazon Connect now has an updated UI for users, routing profiles and queues that records all changes made as events in AWS CloudTrail. This enables you to look in AWS CloudTrail to identify who took which action, what resources were acted upon, when the event occurred, and other details to help you analyze and respond.

You can now enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation for Application Load Balancer (ALB) resources, in addition to CloudFront distributions, protected by AWS Shield Advanced. When you protect your resources with AWS Shield Advanced and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, patterns associated with layer 7 DDoS events will be identified and isolated by automatically created AWS WAF rules in your web access control lists (ACLs). These rules can be implemented in count mode to observe how they will impact resource traffic and deployed in block mode at any time. You can also view detection, mitigation, and top contributor metrics associated with application layer DDoS events for further investigation or to assess the effect of any mitigations Shield Advanced creates. These capabilities enable you to quickly respond to and mitigate DDoS events that threaten the availability of your applications.

AWS Security Hub has released 5 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practices standard (FSBP) to enhance your Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These controls conduct fully automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), 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 192 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.  

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle 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.  

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

Amazon OpenSearch Service now allows you to use custom dictionaries with the IK (Chinese) Analysis plugin. With support for custom dictionaries, you can use your preferred keywords and synonyms with IK Analyzer to tailor search results to suit your business needs.

Amazon EventBridge now supports Global endpoints, a simpler and more reliable way for customers to improve the availability of their event-driven applications on AWS. Global endpoint is a new feature that makes it easier for customers to build robust and reliable applications by automatically failing over their event ingestion to a secondary region during service disruptions without the need for manual intervention. Customer can use replication to minimize the data at risk during these service disruptions.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps you quickly assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action.

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports the current Puppet Enterprise LTS version 2019.8.10. Customers benefit from receiving the update automatically during the weekly system maintenance window scheduled individually by each customer.

Amazon Redshift now provides native integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), which customers can use for authentication and authorization with tools like Microsoft Power BI. You can now use Azure AD to authenticate access to Amazon Redshift and the end users get their permissions based on their group membership defined in Azure AD.

Today we are announcing the availability of Map and Location Search UI components for web apps built with React. Amplify Geo, launched last year, enables frontend developers to add location-aware features to their web applications using Amazon Location Service. Developers can now make use of a React component for adding modern mapping features to their React-based web application using a single line of code.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Exec adds support for executing commands in a Windows container running on AWS Fargate. ECS Exec gives you interactive shell or single command access to a running container making it easier to debug issues, diagnose errors, collect one-off dumps and statistics, and interact with processes in the container.

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for Amazon MemoryDB enables you to define and use MemoryDB resources directly from your Kubernetes cluster. This lets you take advantage of MemoryDB to support your Kubernetes applications without needing to define MemoryDB resources outside of the cluster or run and manage in-memory database capabilities within the cluster. 

Beginning April 1, 2022, the inter-Availability Zone (AZ) data transfer within the same AWS Region for AWS PrivateLink, AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS Client VPN is free of charge. Previously, customers incurred an inter-AZ data transfer charge for sending data across availability zones while using these networking services. With this pricing change, inter-AZ data transfer for these services is free of charge, making it even more cost-effective for customers to run multi-AZ workloads.  

Amazon Redshift now supports role-based access control (RBAC), a new enhancement that helps you simplify the management of security privileges in Amazon Redshift. You can use the RBAC feature to control end user access to data at a broad or granular level based on their job role/permission rights and level of data sensitivity.

AWS is announcing an integration between AWS AppConfig and Jira in the Atlassian Marketplace. The integration allows feature flags from AWS AppConfig to be tracked in Atlassian’s Jira as individual issues, making it easier for teams to track the release of new capabilities of their software. AWS AppConfig is a feature of AWS Systems Manager. This integration is being announced at the Atlassian Team '22 conference in Las Vegas.  

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Agent job replication. With this new feature, SQL Server Agent jobs created, modified, or deleted on the primary instance will be automatically synchronized to the secondary instance in a Multi-AZ configuration.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now includes an observability interface and log monitoring features, which provide developers and DevOps engineers with the insights they need to diagnose performance issues faster and reduce application downtime.

Amazon Athena now supports data stored in Amazon Ion format, a richly-typed, self-describing format developed and open-sourced by Amazon. Amazon Ion provides interchangeable binary and text formats which combine the ease of use of text with the efficiency of binary encoding. The Ion format is currently used by internal Amazon teams, by AWS services such as Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB), and in the open source SQL query language PartiQL.

AWS Amplify Studio now offers a visual interface for setting up and managing file storage resources, making it easy to store and serve user-generated content (e.g. photos and videos) from web or mobile apps. With Amplify Studio, you can easily create an Amazon S3 bucket, configure file access levels, integrate storage client libraries into your web or mobile app, and manage files in Studio’s drag and drop file explorer.

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports 66 more Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types. Newly supported instance types include the latest generation general purpose instance families from both Intel and AMD (M6i, M6a), compute optimized instance families (C6i, C6a), memory optimized instance family (R6i), and storage optimized instance families (Im4gn, Is4gen). These additions to Compute Optimizer allow customers to ensure they are always sized to an optimal EC2 instance type by delivering recommendations that ensure high performance at the lowest cost.

Metrics Insights is a new feature from Amazon CloudWatch that is now generally available. As a fast, flexible, SQL based query engine, Metrics Insights enables developers, operators, systems engineers, and cloud solutions architects to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution. With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations. Use Metrics Insights and other CloudWatch features to monitor your AWS and hybrid environments, and to respond to operational problems promptly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6a and C6a bare metal instances. M6a and C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz. M6a instances deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, while C6a instances deliver up to 15% better price performance compared to C5a instances, and offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. M6a and 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. M6a instances are SAP-Certified and a good fit for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, web servers, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments. C6a instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly-scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

AWS Lambda is announcing Lambda Function URLs, a new feature that makes it easier to invoke functions through an HTTPS endpoint as a built-in capability of the AWS Lambda service. You can add Function URLs to new and existing functions in a single click from the console, or in a couple of lines using AWS CloudFormation or the AWS Serverless Application Model. Function URLs are ideal for getting started with buiding web services on Lambda or for common tasks like building web hooks.

We are excited to launch Unified Settings in the AWS Management Console. With Unified Settings, settings will persist across devices, browsers, and services. At launch, Unified Settings will support settings called default language, default Region, and favorite service display. Default language displays your preferred language across the Management Console, default Region sets the AWS Region that loads each time you log in or load a service console, and favorite service display will show services in the favorites bar with either the service icon and full name or only the service icon. Unified Settings is available in all public AWS Regions.

AWS Network Firewall is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California) and US West (Oregon). 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 Moderate categorization level.  

Amazon Connect now supports playing recorded voice prompts directly from your Amazon S3 bucket, making it easy to create personalized customer experiences in your automated voice systems. Voice prompts are audio files played during customer interactions, such as playing a welcome greeting, requesting information from your customers, or guiding a customer through their desired transaction.

AWS Backup enhances its support for Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems by now allowing protection of data on its Persistent 2 deployment type. AWS Backup’s centralized data protection capabilities across AWS services including the ability to create immutable, logically air-gapped backups across AWS Regions and accounts, prove-able compliance, and single-click restore, are now available for Amazon FSx for Lustre Persistent 2 file systems.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access the Amazon FSx Application Programming Interface (Amazon FSx API)  from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet.

Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of IoT Device Defender ListMetricValues API. Customers can now access historical device-side, cloud-side, and custom metrics from connected devices that belong to a security profile using ListMetricValues API. In addition to viewing the data in the AWS IoT management console, customers now have the flexibility to programmatically monitor and build their own visualization. What’s more, we have made the AWS IoT Device Defender metrics visualization available in Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management. This enhancement enables customers to view the defender metrics together with other device and fleet level data for issue diagnosis and fleet management in Fleet Hub as a one-stop shop. This new API and the integration with Fleet Hub are available in AWS Global Regions where AWS IoT Device Defender and Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management are available.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds insert, update, delete, and time travel operations to Athena's SQL data manipulation language (DML). Athena ACID transactions enable multiple concurrent users to make reliable, row-level modifications to their Amazon S3 data from Athena's console, API, and ODBC and JDBC drivers. Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are optimized for Amazon S3 storage, support seamless schema evolution, and ensure atomic operations across other services and engines that support the Iceberg table format such as Amazon EMR, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink.

Amazon EC2 Console introduces the new and improved launch experience - a quicker and easier way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout allowing you to view all your settings in one location. You no longer need to navigate back and forth between steps to ensure your configuration is correct. The new design also introduces a summary panel, that provides an overview and helps navigate the page.  

Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports cross-cluster replication on existing domains. Cross-cluster replication enables you to automatically copy and synchronize indexes from one domain to another at low latency in same or different AWS accounts or Regions. With cross-cluster replication, you can achieve high availability for your mission critical applications with sequential data consistency.

Today, we are announcing that Amplify Geo for iOS is now generally available, following the release of Amplify Geo for JavaScript. Amplify Geo for iOS allows developers to add cloud-connected UI components for maps and location search to iOS apps. In addition to AWS Amplify’s features like Auth, DataStore, and Storage, Amplify Geo provides a set of client libraries built on top of Amazon Location Service APIs, and includes cloud-connected map UI components that are based on the popular MapLibre open-source library.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers support for cross-cluster search on existing domains. Cross-cluster search enables you to perform searches and aggregations across multiple domains with a single query or from a single OpenSearch Dashboard interface. With this feature, you can separate heterogeneous workloads into multiple domains, which provides better resource isolation, and the ability to tune each domain for their specific workloads to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

AWS AppSync is a fully managed service that enables developers to build digital experiences based on real-time data. You can easily and effortlessly configure any supported data source to push and publish real-time data updates to subscribed clients with connection management, scalability, fan-out and broadcasting all handled by AppSync, allowing you to focus on your application business use cases and requirements instead of dealing with the complex infrastructure to manage real-time WebSocket connections at scale.

Customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM).

AWS Amplify Hosting now uses GitHub Apps to obtain access to your GitHub code repositories. The Amplify GitHub App offers all the same features as the existing OAuth app, and additionally gives you complete control over scoping permissions to specific repositories in your account or organization.

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker is the industry’s first fully managed RStudio Workbench in cloud. Data scientists and developers can launch the familiar RStudio integrated development environment (IDE) in a single click to build, train, and deploy models on Amazon SageMaker. You can elastically dial up and down the underlying compute resources without interrupting your work, and even switch to programming using Python on Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks. All your work, including code, datasets, repositories, and other artifacts are synchronized between the two environments. You can bring your current RStudio license to Amazon SageMaker at no additional charge to quickly get started. Starting today, you can now automate the process of creating domains and adding user profiles for RStudio on SageMaker using AWS CloudFormation.

In addition to the existing Amazon Pinpoint console capabilities, the Amazon Pinpoint API 2.0 provides customers increased control over their SMS and voice sending and configuration.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Proxy now supports Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL - Compatible edition major version 13. PostgreSQL 13 includes many new features and performance enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, better query planning when using extended statistics, parallelized vacuuming of indexes, and incremental sorting.

Starting today, you can add resource records to your Amazon Route 53 hosted zones beyond the free tier limit using pay-as-you-go pricing. Previously, Route 53 customers could add a maximum of 10,000 resource records to any hosted zone for free. Customers who required more than 10,000 resource records in a hosted zone had to contact AWS Support to request a custom pricing plan. With this launch, customers can add resource records beyond the 10,000-record free tier without requiring a custom pricing plan. Now, any resource records you add to a hosted zone beyond the 10,000-record free tier will automatically be charged at the rate of $0.0015 per resource record per month, making it easier to scale your resource records up or down as needed.

Amazon Connect Wisdom now supports content ingestion from Zendesk, adding to the existing Salesforce and ServiceNow connectors already supporting knowledge content. You can now synchronize knowledge articles from Zendesk, enabling your contact center agents to receive Machine Learning (ML) powered real-time recommendations for content that can help them resolve customer issues quickly. In addition to receiving automatic recommendations while interacting with end-customers, agents can manually search for helpful content by entering key words or phrases.

Today, we are announcing the availability of Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region.

You can now run OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards version 1.2 on Amazon OpenSearch Service. This version includes a new observability interface in OpenSearch Dashboards, improvements to several other features such as anomaly detection, k-NN, and SQL/PPL.

You can now use Amazon EKS, Amazon EKS Distro and Amazon EKS Anywhere to run Kubernetes version 1.22. Highlights of Kubernetes version 1.22 release includes external credential providers, server-side apply, and bound service account token volumes graduating to stable, and warning mechanisms for deprecated API usage. You can find more details about Kubernetes 1.22 release in the EKS blog post and in the Kubernetes project release notes.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to clean and transform data stored in the Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format, a widely used data format for storing Hive data. When creating a dataset in AWS Glue DataBrew, you can now use ORC files in addition to already supported Apache Parquet, Microsoft Excel, CSV, and JSON file formats.  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports Global Datastore in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. Global Datastore is a feature of ElastiCache for Redis that provides fully managed, fast, reliable, and secure cross-Region replication. Using Global Datastore, you can write to your ElastiCache for Redis cluster in one Region and have the data available for read in two other cross-Region replica clusters, thereby enabling low-latency reads and disaster recovery across Regions.

AWS Backup now provides you with the flexibility to restore individual virtual disks that are attached to your VMware virtual machines (VMs), in addition to allowing you to restore the entire VM from its protected copy. Using AWS Backup, you can restore your VMware virtual disk to a VM in another VMware environment or in AWS as an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume.

AWS Backup now enables you to protect VMware’s Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) on VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, helping you meet your business and regulatory compliance needs. You can use a single policy in AWS Backup to centrally automate data protection and lifecycle management of your on-premises VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS, and VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts environments alongside the 12 AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) that AWS Backup supports.

Starting today, Amazon WorkSpaces is offering APIs that allow you to customize your users Amazon WorkSpaces experience with your logo, login message, and help links on the WorkSpaces client login page. Using your own brand provides a familiar look and feel when users access your WorkSpaces. Adding your own help links makes it easy for users to access support resources within your organization.  

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time that it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes in Amazon SageMaker Studio, the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for ML. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization, from a single visual interface. You can import data from multiple data sources such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake. Starting today, you can now use Databricks as a data source in SageMaker Data Wrangler to easily prepare data in Databricks for machine learning. Databricks, an AWS Partner, helps organizations prepare their data for analytics, empower data science and data-driven decisions across the organization, and rapidly adopt ML.

AWS Security Hub now supports specifying company and product names for custom integrations, so that you can better search, aggregate, and take action on findings from custom integrations. Security Hub has 75 official integrations, but it also enables you to ingest findings from custom integrations that you build. Previously, the company and product name for these custom integrations were set to personal and default, respectively, and you could not change them. Now, you can specify the company and product names using Security Hub’s BatchImportFindings API, and you can see the new company and product names reflected in the Security Hub console and in the JSON of each finding. You can use the customized company and product names to search findings, create insights, and you can build automated response and remediation workflows that trigger on them.