October 2022

Amazon EMR release 6.8 now supports Apache Hudi 0.11.1 and Apache Iceberg 0.14.0. You can use these frameworks on Amazon EMR on EC2, and Amazon EMR on EKS as well as on Amazon EMR Serverless.

Starting today, you can use certificate-based authentication with Amazon AppStream 2.0 fleets that are joined to Active Directory to remove the logon prompt for the domain password.

Today, we are announcing Elastic IP transfer, a new Amazon VPC feature that allows you to transfer your Elastic IP addresses from one AWS Account to another, making it easier to move Elastic IP addresses during AWS Account restructuring. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store streaming data at massive scale. Data Viewer is a new capability for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams that allows viewing data records directly from AWS Management Console. As a result, you can easily inspect the data records without programming a dedicated consumer app just to view the data, quickly check the data structure of an unfamiliar stream, or query specific records for QA and troubleshooting.

AWS IoT Core announces Location Action - a capability to route latitude and longitude data from IoT devices to Amazon Location Service, making it easier for software developers to add geospatial data and location functionality to IoT applications. With this launch, you can route live location data of an IoT device to Amazon Location Service for tracking and geo-fencing use cases, such as tracking the live location of a device or receiving alerts when a device crosses a geo-fence.

AWS Launch Wizard now supports for placing Microsoft SQL Server tempdb in instance store volumes during SQL Server deployment on Amazon EC2. With the launch, you can save time and effort by easily configuring tempdb by one click during deployment without needing to manually configuring it after deployment.

We are excited to announce that Amazon EMR release 6.8 includes Apache Flink 1.15.1. This feature is available on EMR on EC2.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now offers Tiered storage that brings a virtually unlimited and low-cost storage tier. Tiered Storage lets you store and process data using the same Kafka APIs and clients , while saving your storage costs by 50% or more over existing MSK storage options . Tiered Storage makes it easy and cost-effective when you need a longer safety buffer to handle unexpected processing delays or build new stream processing applications. You can now scale your compute and storage independently, simplifying operations.

Starting today, AWS Elemental MediaConnect has new flow alerts enabling quicker debugging of MediaConnect flows, sources, and outputs. The new alerts are available via the MediaConnect API as a text string and the AWS Management Console under the Alerts tab of a flow. The alerts will complement the existing CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Events for MediaConnect.

AWS App Runner now supports PHP 8.1, Go 1.18, .Net 6, and Ruby 3.1 managed runtimes for building and running web applications and APIs. These runtimes enable you to leverage the App Runner “build from source” capability to build and deploy directly from your source code repository without needing to learn the internals of building and managing your own container images.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM can now send RUM metrics with additional dimensions to CloudWatch. CloudWatch RUM can be used to collect and view your web application’s client-side health and performance. Today, RUM automatically sends aggregated metrics of user session health to CloudWatch Metrics. Now you can add additional dimensions to these default metrics to gain a more granular view of your RUM metrics.

Amazon QuickSight launches the new capability for Row Level Security (RLS) on Dataset-as-a-Source. This is a follow-up feature to enhance the security level for the current QuickSight Dataset-as-a-Source feature. Previously, if any of the QuickSight parent datasets is RLS-enabled, the creation of a child dataset from that parent dataset was blocked. Now with the new capability, customers can create child datasets with the RLS rules inherated from the parent dataset. When querying the child dataset, QuickSight applies the parent RLS filter on top of the parent data at runtime. For further details, visit here.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports a new instance event, RDS-EVENT-0230, under the event category of security patching, that will alert you when an operating system update is available for your DB instance.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint announces pool management capabilities within the Amazon Pinpoint console. Pool management, a feature that allows you to group phone numbers and Sender IDs for sending SMS, was released earlier this year as part of our version 2.0 SMS and voice API and now brings the experience into the Amazon Pinpoint UI for customized configuration.

You can now monitor the quality of machine learning predictions from Batch Transform jobs in SageMaker using Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor provides a fully managed experience to monitor models in production, detect deviations, and take timely actions such as auditing or retraining.

Amazon EMR supports PrestoDB and Trino for running interactive SQL analytics over large datasets across multiple data sources. Today, we’re excited to announce the latest PrestoDB and Trino updates included in EMR release 6.8.

Starting today, memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2idn instances are available in Asia-Pacific(Osaka) region. X2idn instance, powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (code named Ice Lake), 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. X2idn has a 16:1 ratio of memory to vCPU making this instance a great fit for workloads such as in-memory databases and analytics, and big data processing engines. X2idn deliver up to 45% more SAPS than comparable X1 instances and are SAP-Certified for running Business Suite on HANA, SAP S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver workloads on any database. You can view the certification data for X2idn on the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 supports the replacement of instance root volume using an updated AMI without requiring customers to stop their instance. This allows customers to easily update their applications and guest operating system, while retaining the instance store data, networking and IAM configuration.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Is4gen and Im4gn instances, the latest generation storage-optimized instances, are available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Based on the AWS Nitro System, Im4gn and Is4gen instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and are build using AWS Nitro SSDs which enable up to 60% lower latency and up to 75% reduced latency variability in Im4gn and Is4gen instances compared to the third generation of storage optimized instances. Im4gn instances deliver up to 40% better price-performance and up to 44% lower cost per TB versus comparable current generation x86-based storage optimized instances for applications requiring dense local SSD storage and higher compute performance such as MySQL, NoSQL, and file systems. The Is4gen instances provide the lowest cost per TB and highest density per vCPU of SSD storage in Amazon EC2 for applications such as stream processing and monitoring, real-time databases, and log analytics, that require high random I/O access to large amounts of local SSD data. These instances enable 15% lower cost per TB of storage and up to 48% better compute performance compared to I3en instances.

Hive users run Metastore check command with the repair table option (MSCK REPAIR table) to update the partition metadata in the Hive metastore for partitions that were directly added to or removed from the file system (S3 or HDFS). When run, MSCK repair command must make a file system call to check if the partition exists for each partition. This step could take a long time if the table has thousands of partitions. In EMR 6.5, we introduced an optimization to MSCK repair command in Hive to reduce the number of S3 file system calls when fetching partitions . This feature improves performance of MSCK command (~15-20x on 10k+ partitions) due to reduced number of file system calls especially when working on tables with large number of partitions. Previously, you had to enable this feature by explicitly setting a flag. Starting with Amazon EMR 6.8, we further reduced the number of S3 filesystem calls to make MSCK repair run faster and enabled this feature by default.

AWS Local Zones are now available in Hamburg and Warsaw—the first AWS Local Zones launch in Europe. You can now use AWS Local Zones in these metro areas to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing.

Starting today, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G5 instances powered by NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs are available in Stockholm. G5 instances can be used for a wide range of graphics intensive and machine learning use cases. They deliver up to 3x higher performance for graphics-intensive applications and machine learning inference, and up to 3.3x higher performance for training simple to moderately complex machine learning models when compared to Amazon EC2 G4dn instances.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports memory optimized R5b instance types for Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model, featuring up to 4x the RAM per vCPU of existing R5b instance classes to better fit your workloads. Many Oracle database workloads require high memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth but can safely reduce the number of vCPUs without impacting application performance. R5b memory optimized instances come in various configurations from 2 vCPU to 48 vCPU and memory from 32 GiB to 768 GiB and up to 32:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio. These configurations will allow you to right-size the Oracle workloads.

We are excited to announce the general availability of i4i.metal instance for VMware Cloud on AWS. Designed for storage I/O intensive workloads, i4i.metal instance is powered by 3rd generation Intel® Xeon® Ice Lake processor with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 30% better compute price performance over i3 instances. This new instance is intended for VMware Cloud on AWS customers looking for an optimal balance of compute, memory, and storage configuration.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gd instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are available in Europe (Paris) region. C6gd instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. The local SSD storage provided on these instances benefit applications that need access to high-speed, low latency storage such as high-speed caches and scratch files, and temporary data storage like batch and log processing.

AWS Cloud Control API has expanded its availability to the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region. Cloud Control API is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that is designed to make it easy for developers to manage their cloud infrastructure in a consistent manner and leverage the latest AWS capabilities faster. Using Cloud Control API, developers can manage the lifecycle of hundreds of AWS resources and over a dozen third-party resources with five consistent APIs instead of using distinct service-specific APIs. With Cloud Control API, AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners can automate how their solutions integrate with existing and future AWS features and services through a one-time integration, instead of spending weeks of custom development work as new resources become available. Terraform by HashiCorp, Pulumi, and Red Hat Ansible have integrated their solutions with AWS Cloud Control API.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is thrilled to announce the new Amazon EKS Service Delivery specialization to highlight AWS Partners with consulting offerings that have demonstrated proven capabilities to architect, run, and operate containerized workloads on Amazon EKS. Amazon EKS Delivery partners play a crucial role in the customer journey as customers navigate modernization of legacy applications, operations, and infrastructure. Recognizing the complexity of Kubernetes, customers seek proven methodologies, tools, and best practices for accelerating EKS modernization on AWS. 

AWS Control Tower provides the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment, and reduces the complexity and time required to establish governance supporting multiple AWS accounts. We are excited to introduce AWS Control Tower Delivery Partners offering consulting services on AWS Control Tower, and AWS Control Tower Ready Partners offering software products that support AWS Control Tower. AWS Control Tower Partners receive prescriptive guidance to build solutions on Control Tower, and their offerings are vetted by AWS Solutions Architects.

Amazon Redshift introduces a new way to work on multiple SQL queries by organizing them into a single Notebook with documentation, visualization, and collaboration capabilities. The new SQL Notebook interface available in Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 allows users such as data analysts and data scientists to run data analytics more efficiently by keeping relevant queries and the information together for ease of use.

Amazon QuickSight launches new capability for account administrators to use Customer Managed Keys (CMK) to encrypt and manage SPICE datasets. Previously, QuickSight fully manages the protection of customer-data stored inside of the QuickSight service. Using the new Customer Managed Keys (CMK) capability will benefit QuickSight users to 1/ be able to revoke access to SPICE datasets with one click, and 2/ maintain an auditable log that tracks how SPICE datasets are accessed. This feature increases level of security and transparency, gives customers more control over their SPICE datasets and satisfies security requirements by company and government agency policies. For further details, visit here.

AWS WAF announces AWS Bot Control for Targeted Bots, a new feature of AWS Bot Control that provides protection against bots that attempt to evade detection and target applications such as e-commerce, retail, and financial services websites. Traffic from targeted bots can result in a poor user experience by competing against legitimate user traffic for website access to high-demand inventory, increasing business risk through chargebacks from fraudulent transactions, and increasing infrastructure costs.

Amazon MSK Connect now supports Private DNS hostnames for enhanced security. With Private DNS hostname support in MSK Connect, you can configure connectors to reference public or private domain names. Connectors will use the DNS servers configured in your VPC’s DHCP option set to resolve domain names. You can now use MSK Connect to privately connect with databases, data warehouses and other resources in your VPC to comply with your security needs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the new Amazon OpenSearch Service Delivery specialization for AWS Partners that help customers perform interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, and more. Amazon OpenSearch Service manages software installation, upgrades, patching, scaling (up to 3 PB), and cross-region replication with no downtime. Amazon OpenSearch Service is also bundled with a dashboard visualization tool, OpenSearch Dashboards. This tool helps visualize not only log and trace data, but also machine-learning powered results for anomaly detection and search relevance ranking.

Amazon Aurora now supports exporting database clusters directly to S3 in Apache Parquet format without creating a snapshot first. Customers can also initiate an export to S3 directly from the Aurora database cluster, saving them time, cost and the extra overhead of creating/retaining snapshots to export data to S3.

AWS Console Mobile Application users can now access AWS CloudShell in the iOS and Android applications. The Console Mobile App provides AWS CloudShell in a mobile-friendly interface that enables users to run scripts with the AWS command-line interface (AWS CLI) to interact with 250+ AWS services while on-the-go. Users also have access to an extended mobile keyboard when using AWS CloudShell in the Console Mobile App. The extended mobile keyboard provides users with key inputs (e.g. tab, ctrl, alt, esc) that are available in the AWS CloudShell console on desktop. The Console Mobile App currently offers AWS CloudShell in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and South America (São Paulo).

Amazon WorkSpaces now supports the following new features for WorkSpaces Web Access using the WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP):

• Bi-directional audio/video - IT administrators can make video conferencing and other tools that use webcam and microphone available to their end users who use Web Access, to enhance the ability of teams to collaborate from anywhere.
• Clipboard redirection - Users can copy and paste from their local client to their remote WorkSpace, or vice versa. Clipboard permission can be enabled, disabled, or enabled unidirectionally.
• Time zone redirection - Administrators and users can now configure their Windows WorkSpace to use the web client's local time zone. This enables administrators and users to improve productivity by making it easier to use applications, such as calendar apps, that utilize their local time.
• Streaming metrics - Customers can now view streaming metrics such as frame rate, network latency, and download bandwidth inside their WorkSpaces Web Access session.
• Display resolution - Web Access now offers the option to configure the display resolution of the remote WorkSpaces. Customers can set it to a fixed resolution or to adapt dynamically to the Web Access’ client window resolution.
• Relative mouse positioning - Many 3D, design, or visual effects applications require relative mouse positioning for the best mouse performance. Users can now enable relative mouse positioning inside WorkSpaces Web Access.
• Mac keyboard preferences - Users can configure WorkSpaces Web Access to remap Option and Command keys.

Amazon Neptune Serverless is a new deployment option that automatically scales capacity based on the needs of the application, making it easy and cost effective for developers to run graph databases without managing database capacity. Neptune is a fast, reliable, and fully managed graph database service for building and running applications with highly connected datasets, such as knowledge graphs, fraud graphs, identity graphs, and security graphs. With Neptune Serverless, you can run applications built using a graph database with a just few steps, and scale automatically to meet your application’s needs.

We are excited to announce the support of assigning tags to user-profiles created within Amazon SageMaker. This enables you to track Amazon SageMaker Canvas usage costs categorized by users, departments, lines of businesses, or cost centers.

AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) now offers short-lived certificate mode, a lower cost mode of AWS Private CA designed for issuing short-lived certificates. With this new mode, public key infrastructure (PKI) administrators, builders, and developers can save money when issuing certificates with validity periods of 7 days or fewer. If you use certificates to convey privileged access, such as with IAM Roles Anywhere, short-lived certificates may offer better security because they expire quickly rather than relying on the need to revoke certificates with a longer validity period. With today’s launch of short-lived certificate mode, you can now use a private CA with a dedicated mode for issuing those short-lived certificates.

The AWS Toolkit for .NET Refactoring is a new extension for Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2022. The extension helps transform your legacy .NET Framework applications to a modern, cloud-optimized architecture letting you fully leverage the benefits of reduced cost, increased up time, and improved scalability. It extends the functionality of Porting Assistant for .NET with new features, such as testing on AWS environments directly from Visual Studio IDE.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6i and M6i instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) and Africa (Cape Town) regions. C6i instances are an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC). M6i instances are SAP Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

Amazon Connect now includes the ability to view agent schedule adherence in real-time as part of the forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling capabilities (preview). Within the real-time metrics page, contact center supervisors can identify when agents deviate from their planned schedule, enabling supervisors to quickly take action to help improve agent productivity. For example, if agents are working but supposed to be in training, you can use Amazon Connect real-time schedule adherence to identify those agents and remind them to join the training to improve their long term performance and avoid overstaffing.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.3.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 3.3.1 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include enhancements to metrics and partitioner. Amazon MSK will continue to use and manage Zookeeper for quorum management in this release for stability. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 3.3.1.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports Grid Search to enable use cases that require reproducibility of hyperparameter tuning. Grid search will cover every combination of the specified hyperparameter values and yield reproducible tuning results.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) now supports network connectivity disruption as a new FIS action type. Using the new disrupt connectivity action in AWS FIS, you can inject a variety of connectivity issues as part of an AWS FIS experiment. Supported connectivity issues include disrupting all traffic, or, limiting the disruption to traffic to/from a specific Availability Zone, VPC, custom prefix list, or service (including Amazon S3 and DynamoDB). This helps you validate that your applications are resilient to a total or partial loss of connectivity.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now supports six additional resource types to help you identify public and cross-account access from outside your AWS account and organization. These six resource types include Amazon SNS topics, Amazon EBS volume snapshots, Amazon RDS DB snapshots, Amazon RDS DB cluster snapshots, Amazon ECR repositories, and Amazon EFS file systems. IAM Access Analyzer now analyzes resource policies, access control lists, and other access controls for these resources to make it easier for you to identify public, cross-account, and cross-organization access. These findings can help you adhere to the security best practice of least privilege and reduce unintended external access to your resources.

Amazon SageMaker expands access to eight new Graviton2 and Graviton3-based machine learning (ML) instance families so that customers have more options for optimizing their cost and performance when deploying their ML models on SageMaker. Now, customers can use ml.c7g, ml.m6g, ml.m6gd, ml.c6g, ml.c6gd, ml.c6gn, ml.r6g, and ml.r6gd for Real-time and Asynchronous Inference model deployment options.

AWS DataSync now supports the use of self-signed certificates when connecting to object storage locations via HTTPS. When configuring an object storage location, you can specify a self-signed X.509 (.pem) certificate that the DataSync agent will use to secure the TLS connection to your self-managed object storage server. With this launch, you can now configure DataSync to use secure HTTPS connections with self-managed object storage systems that do not provide certificates from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA).

Aurora MySQL 2.11, compatible with MySQL 5.7, is now generally available. Aurora MySQL 2.11 includes security updates and also supports R6i instances powered by 3rd generation Xeon Scalable processors.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 24TiB (u-24tb1.112xlarge) of memory are now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) region and high Memory instances with 18TiB (u-18tb1.112xlarge) of memory are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. These instances give customers greater flexibility for instance usage and procurement - customers can start using them with On Demand, Reserved Instance, and Savings Plan purchase options. With u-24tb1 and u-18tb1, customers have a choice of 24TiB and 18TiB of memory, respectively - both offering 448 vCPUs, 100Gbps network and 38Gbps EBS bandwidth. 

Today, we are enhancing the AWS Organizations console to enable you to centrally view and update the primary contact information for your AWS accounts. This follows the release of the Primary Contact Information API that enabled you to programmatically manage primary contact information for accounts in your organization. With this launch, you can now also use the console to easily perform this operation without logging into each account separately. We already launched API and Organizations console support for alternate contacts, and support for additional account settings will be available in future releases.

Amazon Location Service adds two new map styles for the base map service from our data provider HERE Technologies. HERE Imagery provides high quality satellite imagery with global coverage and HERE Hybrid displays the road network, street names and city labels over the satellite imagery. Amazon Location Service now has a total of 11 map styles to support a wide range of use cases for interactive maps in applications.

Today, AWS Batch introduced support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), enabling customers to run their jobs on Amazon EKS clusters as Kubernetes pods. AWS Batch manages the scaling of Kubernetes nodes, placement of pods, and supports job execution using Amazon Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Amazon EC2 Spot. Furthermore, Batch respects other workloads on these EKS clusters, and will not place jobs on non-Batch nodes.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

Amazon SageMaker Multi-Model Endpoint (MME) is fully managed capability of SageMaker Inference that allows customers to deploy thousands of models on a single endpoint and save costs by sharing instances on which the endpoints run across all the models. Until today, MME was only supported for machine learning (ML) models which run on CPU instances. Now, customers can use MME to deploy thousands of ML models on GPU based instances as well, and potentially save costs by 90%.

CDK For Kubernetes Plus (CDK8s+) is a multi-language class library for defining Kubernetes applications using high level intent based constructs. Customers defining Kubernetes application indicate that maintainability of Kubernetes manifests is challenging; CDK8s+ aims to lower the entry barrier and improve maintainability of Kubernetes manifests by offering a hand crafted construct for each core Kubernetes object, exposing a richer API with reduced complexity. With this launch, CDK8s+ is now generally available and stable for use. This means that the API will remain unchanged and fully supported (no breaking changes), at least until the next major version. CDK8s+ is vended as a separate library for each Kubernetes spec version, all those libraries are now generally available and stable to use.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM (Real User Monitoring) adds the ability for customers to include additional customer-defined metadata attributes as key-value pairs to RUM events when instrumenting their web applications. Additionally, customers are now able to use these self defined attributes as an additional filter when slicing and dicing the data in the AWS Management Console. When combined with pre-defined metadata attributes (eg. browser, device, country) that RUM supports today, customers can see a better classification of different end user activities.

AWS Batch customers can now submit Fargate type jobs to use up to 16 vCPUs, an approximately 4x increase from before. vCPUs are the primary compute resource in Fargate type Batch job. Larger vCPUs enable compute-heavy applications like machine learning inference, scientific modeling, and distributed analytics to more easily run on Fargate. In addition, customers can now provision up to 120 GiB of memory for Fargate type jobs, also a 4x increase from before. This helps their batch jobs better perform memory-intensive operations on Fargate. Larger vCPU and memory options may also make migration to serverless container compute simpler for jobs that need more compute resources and cannot be easily re-architected into smaller sized containers.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots Archive helps customers save up to 75% on storage costs for Amazon EBS Snapshots that they rarely access and intend to retain for more than 90 days. Amazon EBS Snapshots are incremental in nature, storing only the changes since the last snapshot. This makes them cost-effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently. If you have snapshots that you access every few months or years, and would like to retain them long-term for legal or compliance reasons, you can use Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a lower cost than what you would incur if stored in the standard tier. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager to create snapshots and automatically move them to EBS Snapshots Archive based on your specific policies, further reducing the need to manage complex custom scripts and the risk of having unattended storage costs. 

Amazon Aurora now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4g database instances in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. T4g database instances deliver a performance improvement of up to 49% over comparable current generation x86-based database instances. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition.

Amazon S3 Replication now supports objects encrypted with server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C). SSE-C is an encryption option that allows you to store your own encryption keys to satisfy compliance or security requirements, rather than having AWS store the keys on your behalf using SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS. Now you can automatically replicate your SSE-C encrypted objects to a secondary bucket for your data protection or multi-region resiliency needs. S3 Replication will automatically replicate newly uploaded SSE-C encrypted objects if they are eligible, as per your S3 Replication configurations. To replicate existing SSE-C objects, you can use S3 Batch Replication. To retrieve a replicated SSE-C encrypted object from S3, you supply the same key used to encrypt that object when it was initially uploaded to S3.

You can now activate deletion protection for your Amazon Cognito user pools. When you configure a user pool with deletion protection, the pool cannot be deleted by any user. Deletion protection is now active by default for new user pools created through the AWS Console. You can activate or deactivate deletion protection for an existing user pool in the AWS Console, the AWS Command Line Interface, and API. Deletion protection prevents you from requesting the deletion of a user pool unless you first modify the pool and deactivate deletion protection.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere on Apache CloudStack which expands the choice of infrastructure options for customers running Kubernetes on-premises. Apache CloudStack enhances the list of deployment options for Amazon EKS Anywhere customers, which already includes bare metal servers and VMware vSphere.

Starting today, AWS Nitro Enclaves is available on AWS Graviton2 and AWS Graviton3 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. With this launch, Nitro Enclaves is supported on the majority of Graviton, Intel, and AMD-based Amazon EC2 instance types built on the AWS Nitro System.

AWS Global Accelerator now offers two new APIs, AddEndpoints and RemoveEndpoints, that allow you to add and remove endpoints behind your accelerator. With these new APIs, you can now configure endpoints behind your accelerators without having to provide the full list of endpoints for adding or removing endpoints. Both AddEndpoints and RemoveEndpoints APIs can accommodate up to 10 endpoints in a single API call. The new APIs help increase scalability and reduce errors when you manage your endpoint workflows with Global Accelerator. You can continue to use the AddEndpointGroup and RemoveEndpointGroup APIs to add and remove endpoint groups, and the DescribeEndpointGroup API to describe all endpoints behind an accelerator.

Today, we are excited to launch dark mode as a beta feature in the AWS Management Console. Dark mode is available as a setting for visual mode in Unified Settings. The setting persists for customers across browsers and devices.

Today, we are excited to announce support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in Amazon EKS Anywhere. You now have broader choice of operating systems to create and operate Amazon EKS Anywhere clusters with RHEL in your on-premises data centers. RHEL support is available for Amazon EKS Anywhere clusters running on VMware vSphere, on Apache CloudStack, or directly on bare metal servers.

Today, we are excited to announce support for scheduling Data Wrangler processing jobs in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. 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. Previously, scheduling a data processing job would involve integrating with a serverless compute capability and an event bus service. This process would also involve writing code to schedule the data processing job in a production environment. Integrating these various capabilities together and writing the code to orchestrate this workflow can be a laborious, time-consuming task for data scientists, data engineers and ML engineers.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports Access Point aliases to simplify application access to data. Beginning today, you can configure applications to use the Access Point alias in place of the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) when accessing S3 on Outposts buckets. With Access Points, you can create hundreds of unique policies to control access to shared datasets, and applications can access S3 on Outposts buckets by utilizing this alias. Amazon S3 on Outposts Access Point aliases are now available in all AWS Regions where AWS Outposts are available at no additional cost.

AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows you to export signed query results from Lake to a specified Amazon S3 bucket of your choice. This feature lets you integrate CloudTrail Lake with your downstream workflows for further analysis and visualization purposes, such as query join operations with data sets in Amazon Athena, and dashboards with Amazon QuickSight. Every query result file exported from CloudTrail Lake includes a CloudTrail signature. This signature file, designed to provide security assurance, can help verify any unauthorized modifications to the data exported from CloudTrail Lake.

Today, we are excited to announce the ability to dynamically support different datasets stored on S3 through use of parameters in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With 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. Previously, customers did not have an easy way to dynamically refer to data sets when running Data Wrangler processing jobs on a schedule. Customers also lacked a way to more easily filter down files in an S3 bucket to be used for processing. Finally, customers lacked a simple way to change data sources when running a Data Wrangler processing job from the Create Job workflow or from a Data Wrangler processing notebook.

Today, we are excited to announce support for dimensionality reduction using principal components analysis (PCA) in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With 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. PCA is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions per observation and is a helpful statistical technique for reducing the dimensionality of a dataset for use with popular ML algorithms like XgBoost and random forest. Previously, to perform PCA on a data set, data scientists would have to find appropriate libraries and write code to reduce high-dimensional data.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of language Transform called ‘AWS::LanguageExtensions' to the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. When declared in a template, the transform enables extensions to the template language in AWS CloudFormation.

You can now view and filter the list of resources analyzed by Amazon DevOps Guru within the DevOps Guru console. You can view the list of resources on the ‘Analyzed resources’ page and sort and filter by resource name, DevOps Guru tag name (or tag value), CloudFormation stack name, or AWS Service name. You can optionally download the list via CSV file which also includes the Amazon Resource Names (ARN).  

Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, aims to accelerate research and software development in quantum computing. Today, we are adding support for pulse-level access to superconducting quantum processors from Rigetti Computing and Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) by launching Braket Pulse, a new feature for running pulse-level quantum programs. With this launch, Braket customers have more choice and can dive deeper in their research with the option to code their quantum programs using gates, pulses, or a combination of both.

Using AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On), you now have more control over user session management. You can use the console to set customized session lengths (up to 7 days), based on your organization’s security requirements and desired end-user experience. With this feature, you can also terminate sessions, enabling you to manage sessions that are no longer needed or potentially suspicious.

Starting today, AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow (version 4.7.5) enables customers to streamline the display of AWS Service Catalog portfolios and products by Account and Region in ServiceNow Service Portal. This feature enables ServiceNow Service Portal end users to identify and drill-down to the appropriate AWS Service Catalog product if they have access to shared portfolios from multiple accounts and regions. Previously the drilldown feature was restricted to only portfolio names. This version also includes additional filter navigator modules for open incidents in AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager integration and displays timeline events as comments on the AWS incident in user-readable format. The AWS Support integration now introduces an optional configuration to create the support cases in an intermediate table for customers who want to leverage custom business workflows for managing support cases. The AWS Service Management Connector supports latest ServiceNow releases for Tokyo(T), San Diego(S) and Rome (R).

Customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region can now use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL now support 15 read replicas per instance, including up to 5 cross region read replicas, delivering up to 3X the previous read capacity.

Amazon CloudFront now offers three additional data fields in CloudFront real-time logs: Origin first-byte latency, Origin last-byte latency, and autonomous system number (ASN). CloudFront real-time logs contain detailed information about requests delivered by CloudFront such as the HTTP status codes of the response, or whether the response was cached. With the three new data fields, customers can get more granular insights on CloudFront performance while analyzing real-time logs, or in the dashboards created using the logs. The Origin first-byte latency provides the time taken in seconds by the origin server to respond back with the first byte of the response. The Origin last-byte latency indicates the time taken in seconds by the origin server to respond back with the last byte of the response. ASN is a unique number that identifies the network, such as an internet service provider (ISP) network, that provides the viewer IP address. 

Today AWS announced up to 10x faster exports to Amazon S3 for snapshot exports for Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition for MySQL 5.7 and 8.0. The performance improvement is automatically applied to all types of database snapshot exports, including manual snapshots, automated system snapshots, and snapshots created by the AWS Backup service.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces the general availability of an increased default quota for a high throughput mode for FIFO queues, allowing you to process up to 6,000 transactions per second, per API action in: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt) regions. For Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, the default throughput quota has been increased to 3,000 transactions per second, per API action. This is a twofold increase compared to the current SQS FIFO queue throughput quota. For a detailed breakdown of default throughput quotas per region, see SQS documentation.

AWS Step Functions now provides a new console experience for viewing and debugging your Express Workflow executions that makes it easier to trace and root cause issues in your executions.

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 launches the FreeFormInput built-in slot type.

AWS Panorama customers can now pause and resume existing camera stream connections within applications deployed on the AWS Panorama Appliance using the AWS Panorama APIs. As customers deploy Panorama Appliances across multiple sites, they want a scalable way to manage individual camera streams without the overhead of a full application deployment. Using this capability, customers can achieve failover between redundant camera streams, thereby meeting their high availability requirements. They can also dynamically swap between multiple camera streams to meet their business needs. To learn more, visit the AWS Panorama documentation.

AWS Panorama customers can now remotely reboot their connected AWS Panorama Appliance from the AWS console or by using the AWS Panorama SDK. Before this launch, customers were only able to reboot Panorama Appliance by physically pressing the reboot button on the appliance. As customers deploy Panorama Appliances across multiple sites, they want a scalable way to reboot the appliances from one central place. Remote reboot makes it easier for customers to recover from application or device issues and ensures high application uptime without needing to be physically present onsite. To learn more about Remote Reboot for AWS Panorama, click here.

AWS GovCloud (US) enables U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. By expanding AWS Control Tower to the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, AWS Control Tower now provides customers on the GovCloud (US) Region and their partners the ability to architect their secure cloud solutions.

Today Amazon WorkDocs, a fully managed product for creating, sharing, and enriching digital content, announced the General Availability of an Apple Silicon (M1, M2) compatible WorkDocs Drive. Apple Silicon support for WorkDocs makes it easy for customers with Apple Silicon MacBooks to install and sync WorkDocs files on their devices.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights will now auto-generate Application Level Health Dashboards. Application Insights helps you automatically set up monitoring and enhanced observability for AWS resources. With the new health dashboards, you get a centralized view of all aspects of your application, making it easier and faster to view, sort and search your problems. The visual clues will help you take a faster path towards diagnosing and resolving potential issues.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) announces the launch of a new model of Dedicated IPs (managed) which helps customers to grow, manage and maintain their sending reputation via exclusive IP addresses without all of the heavy lifting associated with provisioning and managing dedicated IPs. 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.

Amazon Connect Wisdom now delivers improved machine learning capabilities to continuously understand issues throughout a call and to deliver the right knowledge article to contact center agents. Wisdom analyzes contact center calls in real-time and proactively delivers agents the information they need to solve customer issues, improving agent productivity and caller satisfaction. 

We are announcing the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Workstation for accelerated GPU instances on AWS Marketplace. RHEL Workstation is a cloud-based remote desktop solution that allows end users from anywhere in the world to access a workstation instance to do their work and collaborate with team members. RHEL Workstation is designed for advanced Linux users working on more powerful hardware, and is optimized for activities such as animation, computer-aided design and engineering, scientific research, medical imaging etc. It is delivered via NICE DCV, a secure, high-performance remote display protocol. RHEL Workstation on AWS allows customers to provide high-end hardware capabilities to a distributed workforce, without the need for large capital investments in expensive workstation equipment.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas announces Quick build support for time-series forecasting models, enabling faster prototyping and experimentation to select the best performing machine learning (ML) model. SageMaker Canvas is a visual point-and-click interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate machine learning (ML) predictions on their own — without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amplify Library for Swift (previously Amplify iOS)! This release allows Swift developers to easily build cloud-connected iOS apps. Since its Developer Preview release in April 2022, we have re-written our APIs to support idiomatic Swift features like async/await that makes it easier for developers to implement structured concurrency. We also want to take this opportunity to introduce beta availability of macOS support--one of our most requested features--with watchOS and tvOS support coming in future releases. As with the Preview, the Amplify Library for Swift is open source on GitHub, and we deeply appreciate the feedback we have gotten from the community.

Today, AWS launched the AWS Parameters and Secrets Lambda Extension, a convenient method for AWS Lambda users to retrieve parameters from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. AWS Lambda customers can leverage this extension to improve their application performance as it decreases the latency and the cost of retrieving parameters and secrets. Previously, customers had to initialize either the core library of a service or the entire service SDK inside a Lambda function for retrieving secrets and parameters, now they can simply use the extension. This lightweight and easy-to-use extension caches parameters and secrets, and persists them throughout the lifecycle of the Lambda function. The extension runs inside an isolated execution environment using the same permissions as the role of the user running the Lambda function.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Middle East (UAE) Region.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now provides SDKs for stream chat with support for web, Android and iOS. The Amazon IVS stream chat SDKs support common functions for chat room resource management, sending, and receiving messages, and managing chat room participants. Visit the Amazon IVS chat documentation to learn more. Using the Amazon IVS stream chat SDKs incurs no additional charges beyond standard Amazon IVS usage costs.

On October 18th, 2022 Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 19.0.1, 17.0.5, 11.0.17, 8u352 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 15 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to test the release candidate of PostgreSQL 15 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. You can deploy PostgreSQL 15 RC2 for development and testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database. 

AWS announced an enhanced Snowball Edge Compute Optimized with expanded compute, memory and storage options. The AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized device doubled the compute capacity up to 104 vCPUs, doubled the memory capacity up to 416GB RAM, and is now fully SSD with 28TB NVMe storage. AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is a secure, rugged device that brings AWS computing and storage capabilities, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS IAM to your rugged edge environments.

Starting today, Amazon Detective automatically groups related GuardDuty findings to help security analysts reduce triage time and create a more comprehensive security investigation. Detective uses machine learning (ML) to group related GuardDuty findings that in isolation may have been ignored but together show the lifecycle of an attack, which can help security analysts identify advanced threats more easily. Available under the Summary page, Detective shows groups of related GuardDuty findings with severity, all affected AWS accounts, and resources. In addition, Detective maps the evolution of findings to tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) from the MITRE ATT&CK framework - a well adopted framework for security and threat detection.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) now supports Amazon EC2 C6i and R6i instance types. These instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offering up to 15% better compute price performance over comparable Generation5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

Today, we are excited to announce the second release of FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) - FreeRTOS 202210.00 LTS. This release includes new libraries such as AWS IoT Fleet Provisioning and Cellular LTE-M Interface for easier device provisioning and cellular connectivity. It also includes coreMQTT and FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP libraries with improved modularity and robustness. All libraries included in this FreeRTOS LTS version, summarized in this post, will receive security and critical bug fixes until October 2024. With an LTS release, you can continue to maintain your existing FreeRTOS code base and avoid any potential disruptions resulting from FreeRTOS version upgrades.

Today, we are excited to announce support to refit transforms with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. To make data usable by algorithms such as XgBoost, data scientists must transform non-numeric values to numeric values using transforms such as one-hot encoding. Since transforms like one-hot encoding depend on the data, these transforms are frequently referred to as fitted transforms. These transforms must be updated or re-fitted to account for changes in the data as data continues to change over time. Additionally, when working on a sample data set, transforms must be updated to account for changes between a sample data set and the larger data set. Use of transforms like one-hot encoding generates additional information, which needs to be tracked and captured in the data preparation pipeline. Omitting or incorrectly tracking this information can lead to errors in the data preparation process. Without support to refit transforms, many data scientists did not have an easy way to specify when to use a fitted version of a transform or to refit their transform on new data. Data scientists also lacked an easy way to generate updated versions of their transformation pipelines when refitting on new datasets. 

AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) now supports higher default quotas to help you scale your environment. With the increased quota you can create and assign up to 2,000 permission sets in an Identity Center instance. You can also assign up to 100,000 users and 100,000 groups to as many as 3,000 applications and accounts (combined) that are accessible via the AWS access portal.

AWS Transfer Family now supports post-upload processing of partially uploaded files using managed workflows, offering customers even more control in defining and executing file-processing steps for both complete and incomplete file uploads.

AWS Glue includes crawlers based on Amazon S3 Event Notifications, a capability that make discovering datasets simpler by scanning only data based on events in Amazon S3. The Glue crawler extracts the data schema and automatically populates the AWS Glue Data Catalog, which keeps the metadata current. By crawling datasets based on S3 events, this reduces the time to insight by making newly ingested data quickly available for analysis with your favorite analytics and machine learning tools.

Starting today, we are adding service quotas for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You will now see three new quotas in the EC2 section on the Service Quotas console page. The first quota is for the total number of AMIs within your AWS account, the second quota is for the total number of public AMIs within your AWS account, and the third quota is on the number of shares you can have for each AMI. These quotas are added by default for all AWS accounts and do not require any action from you. Each quota is per AWS account per AWS Region.

Starting today, all new AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) directories run on Windows Server 2019. For current customers with existing directories, you can simply update with just a few clicks or programmatically via API. With this feature, you can initiate updates for existing directories when it’s most convenient, avoiding peak business hours, for example. Additionally, starting in March 2023, AWS will begin automatically updating any AWS Managed Microsoft AD directories to Windows Server 2019.

Starting today, you have the option to automatically set up connectivity between an existing Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora database and an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute instance. From the Amazon RDS console, you can choose an action to set up connection between your RDS or Aurora database and an EC2 instance. Amazon RDS automatically sets up your related network settings to enable a secure connection between the EC2 instance and the RDS database.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports Hindi and Dutch. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With these new languages, you can build and expand your conversational experiences to better understand and engage your customer base.

We're excited to announce that you can now monitor and debug jobs in EMR Serverless using native Apache Spark & Hive Tez UIs. The Apache Spark & Hive Tez UIs present visual interfaces with detailed information about your running and completed jobs. You can dive into job-specific metrics and information about event timelines, stages, tasks, and executors for each job. 

AWS Launch Wizard now supports deployment of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 alongside SAP S/4HANA,BW/4HANA and NetWeaver on HANA solutions.

AWS Cloud Map is now available in Middle East (UAE) AWS Region. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. With AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) tasks, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or other cloud resource. You can then use these custom names to discover the location and metadata of cloud resources from your applications using AWS SDK and authenticated API queries.

Amazon Athena has upgraded its SQL query engine to include the latest features from the Trino open source project. Athena engine version 3 includes over 50 new SQL functions, 30 new features, and more than 90 query performance improvements. With today’s launch, Athena is also introducing a continuous integration approach to open source software management that will improve currency with the Trino and Presto projects so that you get faster access to community improvements, integrated and tuned within the Athena engine.

Today we are launching a new feature that provides an option to define flow handling behavior for AWS Gateway Load Balancer. Using this option, customers can now rebalance existing flows to a healthy target, when the target fails or deregisters. This helps reduce failover time when a target becomes unhealthy, and also allows customers to gracefully patch or upgrade the appliances during maintenance windows.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, AWS has updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL 14.4. PostgreSQL 14.4 fixes an issue that could cause silent data corruption when using the CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY or REINDEX CONCURRENTLY commands. Refer to the Aurora version policy to help you to decide how often to upgrade and how to plan your upgrade process. Aurora has also included the fix for this issue in Aurora PostgreSQL 14.3.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports Predictive Scaling in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. Predictive Scaling can proactively scale out your Auto Scaling group to be ready for upcoming demand. This allows you to avoid the need to over-provision capacity, resulting in lower EC2 cost, while ensuring your application’s responsiveness. To see the list of all supported AWS public regions and AWS GovCloud (US) regions, click here.

AWS Lambda now supports content filtering options for Amazon MSK, Self-Managed Kafka, Amazon MQ for Apache ActiveMQ, and Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ. With event pattern content filtering, customers can write complex rules so that their Lambda function is only invoked to process meaningful events. This helps reduce traffic to customers’ Lambda functions, simplifies code, and reduces overall cost. Filtering was already available for SQS, DynamoDB, and Kinesis as event sources for Lambda.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface (CLI) announces general availability of Open ID Connect (OIDC) support in SAM CLI Pipelines. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, test, package, and deploy serverless applications. SAM Pipelines make it easier to create continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for serverless applications with Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions, Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines, and AWS CodePipeline. SAM Pipelines comes pre-packaged with a set of default pipeline templates for all supported systems that showcase AWS best practices for secure, multi-account, and multi-region deployments.

RStudio on Amazon SageMaker now comes with the new RStudio Workbench version 2022.02.2-485.pro2 with enhanced developer productivity and security capabilities. The new capabilities include an enhanced R help system, improved editor support for the R pipe-bind placeholder and full end-to-end encryption that secures communication between the RStudioServerPro and RSession applications.

New minor versions of Microsoft SQL Server are now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, offering performance and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports the new minor versions for SQL Server 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019 on the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 3TiB (u-3tb1.56xlarge) of memory are now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Canada (Central) regions. Additionally, High Memory instances with 6TiB (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge) of memory are now available in Canada (Central) region and High Memory instances with 12TiB of memory (u-12tb1.112xlarge) are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East). Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with On Demand and Savings Plan purchase options.

You can now deploy SAP HANA systems with Host Auto-Failover on AWS. Host Auto-Failover is a fully automated host fault recovery solution for SAP HANA that allows you to add one or more hosts in standby mode to an SAP HANA system. Using Host Auto-Failover, SAP HANA can automatically detect host failures (EC2 instance, OS-level, or SAP HANA) and trigger an automated failover to a standby host, enabling you to automatically recover in minutes.

AWS Glue now offers integration with Git, the widely-used open source version control system. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that uses reusable jobs to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) tasks on data sets of nearly any scale. With this feature, customers can use GitHub and AWS CodeCommit to maintain a history of changes to their AWS Glue jobs and apply their existing DevOps practices to deploy them. Before now, customers needed to set up their own integrations with their code versioning systems and build tooling to move jobs from development environments to production environments.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gn instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

AWS Activate provides startups, including both smaller, early stage companies and more advanced digital businesses, with free tools and resources to quickly get started on AWS. Today we are excited to announce the availability of the new AWS Activate to any self-identified startup. Activate is full of personalized tools and resources designed to support startups through every stage of their journey, from their initial idea, to building a MVP, to securing their first customer, to scaling their business on AWS and beyond.

Today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets increased the default for three service quotas: number of stack instances per stack set, number of stack sets per management account, and number of concurrent stack instance operations in a single AWS Region per management account. You can now (1) deploy up to 100,000 stack instances per stack set (previously 2,000), (2) create up to 1,000 stack sets in your management account (previously 100), and (3) run up to 10,000 concurrent stack instance operations in a single Region per management account (previously 3,500). See AWS CloudFormation quotas for the latest service quotas.

Starting today, Cost Explorer customers will see a new interface in the console to visualize their cost and usage. The new summary widget provides an at-a-glance view of the total and average monthly cost. Customers can also look up specific spend and usage information using the new search function introduced in the table view. Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can analyze your data at a high level (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts) or dive deeper into your costs and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.

Starting today, in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you have the option to automatically set up connectivity between the EC2 instances and an Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora database. Once you have provisioned EC2 instances, you can select a RDS db instance or cluster, and with a single click, complete connectivity configurations to allow traffic from the EC2 instance to the RDS database. Amazon EC2 follows the connectivity best practices and automatically sets up security groups on your behalf, helping to establish a secure connection.

AWS Neuron adds  support for AWS Trainium powered Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances to unlock high-performance, cost effective deep learning training at scale. The Neuron SDK includes a compiler, runtime libraries, and profiling tools that integrate with popular ML frameworks such as PyTorch and Tensorflow. With this first release of Neuron 2.x, developers can now run deep learning training workloads on Trn1 instances to save training costs by up to 50% over comparable GPU-based EC2 instances, while getting the highest training performance in AWS cloud for popular NLP models. 

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn1 instances. Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances are powered by AWS Trainium chips, which are purpose built for high-performance ML training applications in the cloud. Trn1 instances deliver the highest performance on deep learning (DL) training of popular natural language processing (NLP) models on AWS while offering up to 50% cost savings over comparable GPU-based EC2 instances. You can get started with Trn1 instances by using popular ML frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, helping you to lower training costs, reduce training times, iterate faster to build more innovative models, and increase productivity. You can use EC2 Trn1 instances to train natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and recommender models across a broad set of applications, such as speech recognition, recommendation, fraud detection, image and video classification, and forecasting. 

You can now inject Amazon EC2 Spot Instance interruptions into your Spot Instance workloads directly from the Amazon EC2 console. In 2021, we launched the ability for you to use AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS) to simulate what happens when Amazon EC2 reclaims Spot Instances, enabling you to test that your application is prepared for an interruption. Now, we have made this capability available in the Amazon EC2 console.

QuickSight Q now supports questions for access restricted datasets that use Row level Security (RLS) with user based rules. Readers can now ask questions about Topics that contain restricted access datasets and instantly receive accurate and pertinent answers based on access control rules defined by authors in RLS settings. Authors can create Q Topics to answer questions on RLS enabled datasets without making any additional changes to existing rules. QuickSight Q leverages existing user based rules defined in RLS settings and enforces these rules not only on answers to questions but also on auto complete suggestions provided at the time of question framing. Therefore, Q Topics created with RLS enabled datasets always surface data that users are granted permission for.

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through two new AWS edge locations in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Kansas City in the United States. With the addition of these two edge locations, Global Accelerator is now available through 104 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in 21 AWS Regions.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs customers can now run up to 20 concurrent Log Insights queries for their analytic needs. By increasing the number of concurrent queries from 10 to 20, customers can create dashboards with a higher number of Log Insight queries. Additionally, multiple users within the same account can, in the aggregate, execute up to 20 queries at the same time.  

New versions of the Amazon Chime iOS and Android mobile apps are being rolled out with a new experience designed to improve your Amazon Chime Meetings on mobile devices. This update introduces features that aim to make it easier for you to participate in meetings when you are away from a desk and on the move. The update includes a new roster screen, a new meeting join experience, new meeting controls, performance improvements, and more. 

You can now connect with partners and independent consultants located in Australia, Bahrain, European Union member states, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates. Quickly find, engage, & get help from partners and independent consultants in these new regions for on-demand work.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports real-time audio-video (AV) by seamlessly redirecting local webcam video input to Linux AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions. Previously, this feature is only available when streaming Windows applications and desktops. With real-time AV support available in Linux streaming sessions, your users can collaborate using webcams without having to leave their Linux AppStream 2.0 sessions.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds Graphical User Interface (GUI) support for the Linux Image Assistant tool. With this launch, you can now create Linux AppStream 2.0 images in the similar easy way you create Windows AppStream 2.0 images. The new tool gives you step-by-step visual guidance throughout the entire process, greatly reducing the complexity of creating Linux AppStream 2.0 images.

Amazon Detective has improved it’s search capability by adding support for case insensitivity with security findings and entities. You can now conduct security investigations without having to search for exact upper or lowercase characters. For example, if you wanted to search for “Admin” or “admin” logins, you can use either term to show results for all admin logins across data sources that store text such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty findings, and Amazon EKS audit logs.

The AWS JDBC Driver for PostgreSQL is now generally available for use with your Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible edition database clusters. This wrapper driver is designed to work with the PostgreSQL community driver and provide improved failover handling for clustered databases such as Aurora PostgreSQL. The AWS JDBC Driver for PostgreSQL is drop-in compatible with your existing applications because it adds failover functionality alongside the community driver, reducing the need for you to make application changes. This release replaces the standalone AWS JDBC Driver for PostgreSQL previously released as a preview.

Serverless application developers can now use the new AWS::Serverless::Connector resource available in AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to simplify granting the appropriate level of access to the resources in their application’s infrastructure. With AWS::Serverless::Connector resources, developers describe how data and events need to flow between two resources and the type of access required. AWS SAM will compose purpose-built AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) policies in order to facilitate the interaction defined by the developer in the connector resource.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) has announced the availability of additional metadata attributes for tasks running on Amazon EC2 capacity. You can now use the Amazon ECS task metadata endpoint to retrieve the service name of a task as well as the Amazon VPC ID of Amazon EC2 instance that the task is running on. These additional task metadata attributes provide you increased visibility over your ECS container workloads running on Amazon EC2.

Amazon Connect has reduced prices for Mexico in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions by 69% for DID Inbound calls from $0.0070 to $0.0022 per minute, 61% for Toll Free Inbound calls from $0.055 to $0.021 per minute and 77% for Outbound calls from $0.033 to $0.0075 per minute.

Customers using Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM), Data Center version can respond, investigate and resolve incidents affecting their AWS-hosted applications via AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager and the AWS Service Management Connector. AWS Systems Manager is the operations hub for AWS applications and resources, that helps to automate reactive processes to quickly diagnose and remediate operational issues. With the Incident Manager integration with JSM, customers can now automate their incident response plans in Incident Manager and automatically synchronize their incidents into JSM. This feature enables faster resolution of critical application availability and performance issues without disrupting existing workflows in JSM.

Amazon DevOps Guru now provides you controls over the SNS notifications for issues impacting your applications allowing you to limit the notifications you receive. Along with this, DevOps Guru Console will show only ‘High’ and ‘Medium’ severity issues by default. These changes allow you to focus on higher severity issues.

AWS Storage Gateway increases Tape Gateway throughput performance by up to 2x for backing up data to and restoring data from the cloud, helping you to meet application backup and recovery times of your business. With this launch, your on-premises Tape Gateway can backup data to the cloud up to 2x faster than before, up to 5.2 Gbps, and read data from the cloud up to 2x faster than before, up to 8 Gbps. This enhancement enables you to upload more data per gateway to the cloud in your backup window, accelerate restore times of your data stored in the cloud, and optimize on-premises storage used by the gateway.

In addition to US East (Ohio) Region, Amazon Pinpoint is available in US East (Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London) Regions. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can engage your customers by segmenting your audience, building personalized content, creating targeted campaigns and journeys, and gathering actionable insights using email, SMS, voice, push notification, in-app messaging, and custom channels.

AWS Config now supports 15 more resource types including AWS DataSync, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), AWS AppSync, AWS Cloud Map, Amazon EC2, and AWS AppConfig. For the full list of newly supported resource types see [1].

AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now available in 12 additional regions - Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (Sao Paulo) and US West (N. California). With up to 34% better price-performance, functions running on AWS Graviton2 are ideal for powering mission critical Serverless applications.

AWS Storage Gateway increases the maximum supported virtual tape size on Tape Gateway from 5 TiB to 15 TiB, enabling you to store more data on a single virtual tape and reducing the number of tapes you need to manage. Additionally, this enhancement makes migrating long-term retention data stored on physical tapes to AWS easier by enabling you to copy data from Linear Tape-Open (LTO) generation 1 to generation 7 tapes to a virtual tape in AWS.

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the Middle East (UAE) Region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in this additional region to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. 

AWS Storage Gateway makes it simpler and faster for you to start setting up and managing your hybrid-cloud storage workflows. Now, using the Storage Gateway console, you can easily create an Amazon EC2 instance for your cloud-based gateway in just a few clicks. In the updated Create Gateway wizard, simply enter the VPC network, VPC subnet, and key pair for your EC2 instance and select Launch instance to automatically create and launch an EC2 instance with minimally required settings including instance type, cache storage, upload buffer, and inbound security ports.

Amazon WorkMail now offers Impersonation Roles, a secure way to more easily grant programmatic access to mailboxes. Customers can use Impersonation Roles with Exchange Web Services (EWS) to perform impersonated actions in other users’ mailboxes. Administrators have the ability to limit the scope of Impersonation Roles to specific users, including choosing whether actions have full or read-only access.

Starting today, you can now budget by two new dimensions, invoicing entity and legal entity, in AWS Budgets. This additional granularity allows you to setup specific budget thresholds according to your invoice issuer using invoicing entity or AWS Marketplace seller using legal entity. Once you’ve saved your budget, you can then receive alerts when your actual costs exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budget thresholds. AWS Budgets is generally available in all public AWS Regions.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer policy generation has expanded support to identify actions used from over 140 services to help developers create fine-grained policies based on their AWS CloudTrail access activity. New additions include actions from services such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Queue Service. When developers request a policy, IAM Access Analyzer gets to work and generates a policy by analyzing their AWS CloudTrail logs to identify actions used. For example, developers using AWS CloudFormation to set up resources need to provide CloudFormation permissions to create resources. They can use policy generation to create a fine-grained policy and limit CloudFormation role’s permissions to only those necessary to deploy a given template. The generated policy makes it easier for developers to grant only the required permissions to run their workloads.

AWS Local Zones are now available in Delhi and Taipei. You can now use these AWS Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are adding formality customization support for Dutch, Korean, and Mexican Spanish. We are also adding support for asynchronous batch translation. Now you can customize the formality of your translated output to suit your communication needs.

We’re excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker Clarify supports online explainability by providing explanations for machine learning (ML) model’s individual predictions in near real-time on live endpoints. SageMaker Clarify gives ML developers greater visibility into their training data and models so they can identify potential bias and explain predictions. ML models may consider some feature inputs more strongly than others when generating predictions. SageMaker Clarify provides scores detailing which features contributed the most to your model’s individual prediction after the model has been run on new data. These details can help determine if a particular input features has more influence on the model predictions than expected. You can view these details for each prediction in real-time via online explainability or get a report in bulk that utilize batch processing of all the individual predictions. This new feature reduces latency for explanations from minutes to seconds or less. The possibilities for real-time explanations are broad. For example, customer service representatives can better understand the reasons why a customer may churn when they call for help resolving a problem in real time. As the representative learns more about the nature of the customer’s issue and enters that data, real-time explanations can provide updated reasoning for suggested resolutions.

Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports tagging of resources such as namespace and workgroup. Tagging allows you to assign a key-value pair to your resources and organize them by business departments, billing groups, and production environments.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next version of Aurora Serverless, now supports AWS CloudFormation. You can use AWS CloudFormation templates to deploy and modify Aurora Serverless v2 along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure in a secure, efficient, and repeatable manner. To learn more, read the AWS CloudFormation user guide.

AWS Backup now offers a new Backup Vault Lock console experience that provides you a more intuitive way to configure your vault lock details. AWS Backup Vault Lock allows you to deploy and manage your vault’s immutability policies, protecting your backups from accidental or malicious deletions. Depending on your data retention needs, with AWS Backup Vault Lock, you can set governance mode or compliance mode to configure your vault’s immutability policies with greater flexibility and multiple levels of security. Under governance mode, users with the appropriate role-based permissions can test and change retention policies or even remove the lock completely. In compliance mode, the user can specify a lock date after which the vault is locked immutably. Once locked, the acceptable retention periods cannot be changed and the lock cannot be disabled even by the root user. With this feature, the console also provides you with visibility into into your vaults’ lock status and facilitates reporting across all locked vaults. 

Amazon Nimble Studio now provides a Amazon Machine Image (AMI) running Windows Server 2022 in the AWS Marketplace that contains the same pre-installed software as our existing AMIs. Nimble Studio users can further customize this baseline AMI for studio specific workflows. Microsoft Windows Server 2022 helps studios take advantage of the latest Windows features and support of content creation software, such as Epic’s Unreal Engine and Adobe Creative Cloud. The complete list of features and improvements are available in the official Microsoft documentation for Windows Server 2022 here. The supported Windows Server 2022 AMI is an addition to our supported Windows Server 2019 AMI and Linux AMI.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has introduced two new networking metrics; 1) Network Address Usage and 2) Peered Network Address Usage. These new metrics will help network administrators plan for expansion of their VPC architecture while proactively managing service quotas.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 3TiB (u-3tb1.56xlarge), 6TiB (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge), 9TiB (u-9tb1.112xlarge), and 12TiB of memory (u-12tb1.112xlarge) are available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with On Demand and Savings Plan purchase options.

Amazon S3 Object Lambda now supports adding your own code to S3 HEAD and LIST API requests, in addition to S3 GET requests. With S3 Object Lambda, you can modify the data returned by S3 GET requests to filter rows, dynamically resize images, redact confidential data, and much more. Now, you can also use S3 Object Lambda to modify the output of S3 LIST requests to create a custom view of all objects in a bucket and S3 HEAD requests to modify object metadata such as object name and size. With this update, S3 Object Lambda now uses AWS Lambda functions to automatically process the output of S3 GET, HEAD, and LIST requests.

Starting today, AWS Cloud WAN is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region.

As of November 23, 2021, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) supported Server-Side Encryption with Amazon SQS-managed encryption keys (SSE-SQS) to protect sensitive data. Today, Amazon SQS announces SSE-SQS encryption by default for newly created queues. SSE-SQS can help you build security-sensitive applications to support your encryption compliance and regulatory requirements.

IAM Access Analyzer policy validation helps you author secure and functional policies. Now, we are extending policy validation to role trust policy to make it easier to author and validate the policy that determines who can assume a role. The new IAM console experience for role trust policy guides you to add each element of the policy, such as the list of available actions for role trust policies, and offers context specific documentation. As you are authoring your policy, IAM Access Analyzer policy validation evaluates the policy for any issues to make it easier for you to author secure policies. This includes new policy checks specific to role trust policies, such as validating the format of your identity provider. Prior to saving the policy, IAM Access Analyzer generates preview findings for the external access granted by the role trust policy. This helps you review external access, such as access granted to a federated identity provider, and ensure only the intended access is granted when the policy is created.

AWS IoT SiteWise has increased quota limits for Assets and Asset Models to support larger and more complex equipment representations, and allow customers to perform bulk operations on resources.

You can now set an EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to use Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) by default. IMDSv2 is an enhancement to instance metadata access that requires session-oriented requests to add defense in depth against unauthorized metadata access. IMDSv2 requires a PUT request to initiate a session to the instance metadata service and retrieve a token. To set your instances as IMDSv2-only, you previously had to configure Instance Metadata Options during instance launch or update your instance after launch using the ModifyInstanceMetadataOptions API.

Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS-optimized Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server have traditionally leveraged Mirantis Container Runtime (formerly Docker Engine – Enterprise) as the default runtime framework. AWS customers have been using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS to run and optimize their Microsoft Windows Server workloads. AWS has now migrated all the latest (September 2022) container-optimized Windows Server AMIs to use Docker Community Edition (CE). This change is to help customers avoid paying additional costs to get continued support, bug fixes and security patches for Mirantis Container Runtime with the Microsoft announcement to transfer support for Mirantis Container Runtime to Mirantis at the end of September 2022.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports version 21.2 of Oracle Application Express (APEX) for all Oracle Database versions. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser. To learn more about the latest features of APEX 21.2, please refer to Oracle’s documentation.

You can now launch Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems in four additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Europe (Stockholm).

Amazon Connect Cases provides built-in case management capabilities that make it easy for your contact center agents to create, collaborate on, and quickly resolve customer issues that require multiple customer conversations and follow-up tasks, all without having to build custom applications or integrate with third-party products. Cases provides your agents with a unified timeline view of all activities and customer information associated with a case, including individual tasks that can be assigned and tracked across multiple agents. Additionally, case information can be used to answer customer questions in self-service IVR and chatbot interactions.

We’re pleased to announce that AWS IoT TwinMaker has released a new Application Kit that will help IoT application developers build customized web applications for their digital twins. This Application Kit is a part of the open-source UI components library for IoT application developers - AWS IoT Application Kit.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now supports quicker set up of time-series forecasting models with simplified administration of required permissions. SageMaker Canvas is a visual point-and-click service that enables business analysts to generate accurate machine learning (ML) models for insights and predictions on their own — without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code.

AWS Security Hub now publishes announcements through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) in AWS GovCloud (US), helping you stay up to date with the latest feature releases and announcements. To receive announcements about new AWS Security Hub features, subscribe to the AWS Security Hub SNS topic in your preferred Region.

AWS is excited to announce the launch of a new hands-on course on Coursera for business analysts - “Practical Decision Making using No-Code ML on AWS," featuring Amazon SageMaker Canvas.