December 2022

Amazon Connect has expanded to support inbound telephone numbers across 6 additional countries, Iceland, Brunei and Serbia from the Europe (London) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions and Guatemala, Nicaragua and Bolivia from the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With the ability to reach customers across the the globe with Amazon Connect, you can now support inbound calls to more than 77 countries globally.

Amazon Connect has reduced outbound dialing rates to the Caribbean by 21% on average in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. This includes 76% to the Bahamas, 60% to the Cayman Islands, and 56% to Jamaica.

Amazon Connect Wisdom now enables agents to receive knowledge recommendations from PDF & Word documents. Companies that store knowledge articles in PDF and Word formats no longer need to convert them to HTML or text formats to use them with Wisdom. 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.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Customers use TranslateText API for real time text string translations to support use cases like chat translation. Earlier, the TranslateText API had a size limit of 5,000 bytes for translation requests. Starting today, customers can now use the TranslateText API for real time translation requests up to 10,000 bytes.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall provides a status message about the current state of each firewall endpoint. This further simplifies troubleshooting firewall endpoint failures by displaying an error message describing the reason for a firewall endpoint failure and reduces mean time to recovery by providing steps to recover the firewall endpoint.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for SQL Server now supports creating database instances from a Custom Engine Version (CEV). Customers can use CEV to build a golden image from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the required Windows operating system (OS) and database customizations, such as custom drivers or third-party software. They can then create RDS Custom for SQL Server instances based on this golden image. Using a CEV allows customers to maintain their preferred baseline configuration of the OS and database. In addition, customers can deploy fleets of RDS Custom for SQL Server database instances with the same configuration. User-initiated recovery actions such as snapshot restores and point-in-time recovery benefit from restoring customizations, which can lead to faster recovery times.

Amazon Connect has expanded to support inbound telephone numbers and national calling in Brazil from the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With the ability to reach customers across the the globe with Amazon Connect, you can now support inbound calls to more than 78 countries globally.

Amazon Connect Chat now allows agents and customers to receive message delivered and read receipts after they send a chat message. Message receipts are useful as they provide confirmation that the message has been successfully delivered and read by the recipient. 

Amazon Connect has expanded to support inbound telephone numbers and national calling across the Caribbean in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With the ability to reach customers across the Caribbean added to Amazon Connect, you can now support inbound calls to more than 78 countries globally.

AWS Config now supports 13 more resource types for services including Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Lightsail (Virtual Server), AWS DataSync, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Fault Injection Simulator (Amazon FIS), Amazon CloudWatch real-user monitoring (Amazon RUM), and AWS Backup. 

Starting today, you can enable RStudio on Amazon SageMaker on your existing Amazon SageMaker Studio domains. This eliminates the administrative burden of decommissioning and re-creating your Studio domains to enable RStudio on SageMaker. You can also select whether all user profiles in the domain have access to RStudio on SageMaker by default or enable it for specific user profiles individually. You can set the type of access your users have in RStudio (i.e., user or administrator access).

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports 30x higher limits for the number of categorical hyperparameter values that can be searched per tuning job.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports updates to encryption in transit on existing cluster resources. You can change the TLS configuration of your Redis clusters without re-building or re-provisioning them or impacting application availability. When enabling encryption in transit, your overall solution can remain connected to Redis clusters.

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

AWS CloudFormation now supports AllowedValues and AllowedPattern properties for CommaDelimitedList parameter type. You can use the CommaDelimitedList parameter type to specify multiple string values in a single parameter. For example, you can create three different subnets with their own VPC CIDR blocks, and use CommaDelimitedList to specify three different CIDR blocks. With these language enhancements, you can add validation checks to your CommaDelimitedList, and reduce input errors to your CommaDelimitedList while updating your stacks and/or stack sets.

Amazon Connect Chat now provides the ability to programmatically monitor the activity status of customers and agents participating in a chat conversation. A participant can be marked as “idle” based on a configurable inactivity timer which can trigger events such as an “Are you still there?” message to the customer. Additional timers can be configured to automatically close chats based on participant idle time, enabling agents to focus on customers who are actively engaged in a conversation.

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

AWS Storage Gateway now makes it simpler and faster for you to get started with setting up and managing your hybrid cloud storage workflow with Amazon S3 File Gateway. Using the Storage Gateway management console, you can now quickly create a new file share in a single step and just a few clicks: Choose between configuring an NFS or an SMB file share. Then, connect to a new or existing Amazon S3 bucket. Lastly, finalize your file share access configuration. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, you get enhanced wizard instructions and updated in-console help panel information, helping you to seamlessly navigate the file share creation process.

We are excited to announce the availability of reserved nodes for Amazon MemoryDB for Redis. Reserved nodes allow you to save up to 55% over On-Demand node prices in exchange for a usage commitment over a one- or three-year term. Reserved nodes are complementary to MemoryDB On-Demand nodes and give businesses flexibility to help reduce costs. Reserved nodes can be reserved for one-year or three-year terms with No Upfront, Partial Upfront and All Upfront payment options.

Today, we are enhancing the AWS Organizations console to enable you to centrally view and update the region opt-in settings for your AWS accounts. With this launch, you can now use the console to easily perform these operations without logging into each account separately. We already launched Organizations console support for alternate contacts and primary contact information, and support for additional account settings will be available in future releases.

AWS Cloud Map is now available in Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich) and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) AWS Regions. 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 resources. 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.

AWS Security Hub has released 9 new controls for its AWS Foundational Security Best Practice standard (FSBP) to enhance your cloud security posture management (CSPM).These controls conduct fully-automatic checks against security best practices for your AWS account settings and for services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SageMaker, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and AWS CodeBuild. If you have Security Hub set to automatically enable new controls and are already using AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, these new controls will run without having to take any additional action.

Starting today, we are launching the AWS Network Firewall service in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region, enabling customers to deploy essential network protections for all their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports renaming Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments with two readable standbys. The ability to rename the RDS Multi-AZ deployments with two readable standbys helps you to replace a deployment without having to change any application code that references the deployment by name such as the connection endpoint. Renaming is used when you restore data from a DB snapshot, or when you do a point-in-time recovery (PITR).

AWS License Manager announces support for cross-region, cross-account tracking of commercial Linux subscriptions you run on AWS. This includes subscriptions purchased as part of EC2 subscription-included AMIs, on the AWS Marketplace, or brought to AWS via Red Hat Cloud Access Program. You can track subscription usage by number of instances for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu Pro distributions in the Linux subscriptions tab of the AWS License Manager console. 

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) now provides an AWS Management Console experience that simplifies the process for satisfying the AWS account prerequisites for provisioning and operating ROSA clusters. The new AWS ROSA console page automatically checks whether ROSA prerequisites are met and provides automated configuration and step-by-step guidance where manual configuration is required. 

Amazon Connect now supports barge-in, a contact center capability that enables managers to help agents resolve customer issues quickly and ensure a superior customer experience. Using barge-in, managers can join and participate in an ongoing customer service call between a contact center agent and customer. After joining, a manager can speak with the customer, add participants, and even choose to remove an agent, if needed. Using Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, a manager can even define specific rules, such as low sentiment score, in order to receive a real-time alert to join a call. 

Today, Amazon Connect announces general availability of Microsoft Edge Chromium browser support. Edge Chromium has grown in popularity and many companies have selected it as their preferred or enterprise-wide standard browser. With this launch, customers now have the option to use the Edge Chromium browser in all regions where Amazon Connect is available. To learn more about Amazon Connect’s browser support, see our documentation.  

Amazon Connect Chat now supports JSON content-type messages. Using JSON you can enable rich personalized experiences by allowing customers and agents to send/receive structured chat messages using the JSON format. For example, messages can be supplemented with additional data (metadata) to pass relevant information (e.g. recent purchases, order status), send custom interactive messages (e.g. buttons, carousels, cards), display language translations and more. 

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides enhanced controls that enable businesses to select specific personal identifiable information (PII) types that they want to redact from call and chat transcripts. Today, Contact Lens redacts PII types such as name, email, SSN, and others from the transcripts. With enhanced PII redaction, businesses now have the flexibility to choose specific PII types to redact (e.g. SSN) while not redacting other data that they want to see. Following are some of the common PII types supported by Contact Lens: name, email, account number, routing number, credit card details, SSN, PIN, phone, and more.

AWS Batch now enables you to gain visibility into the current state of a terminated or cancelled job. This means that once you terminate/cancel a job, a flag of isTerminated or isCancelled can be observed in the job payload throughout the queue before it moves to either a ‘Terminated’ or ‘Cancelled’ state. 

AWS IoT Core announces the capability to decode Google Protocol Buffer (Protobuf) encoded messages to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format using the AWS IoT Core Rules Engine, making it easier to use Protobuf directly in your IoT Rule, without the need to invoke a Lambda function to decode the Protobuf message.

AWS Transfer Family announces built-in support for PGP decryption of files uploaded over SFTP, FTPS or FTP to Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS. Customers can now configure and automate decryption of files that are encrypted using PGP keys by their users before upload, making it easy to meet their data protection and compliance requirements when exchanging sensitive data with third parties.

AWS Compute Optimizer now delivers recommendations to help customers identify optimal Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task CPU and memory configurations for Amazon ECS services running on AWS Fargate.

AWS ParallelCluster 3.4 is now generally available and introduces the ability to create HPC clusters that can access and aggregate compute capacity across multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZ) in a Region. Other important features in this release include:

• Amazon VPC configuration for AWS Lambda functions used by ParallelCluster for managing your clusters.
• Custom AWS IAM prefixes for ParallelCluster IAM roles and policies to enable permission boundaries. 
• Secure file-system mounting for Amazon EFS to enable in-transit encryption and IAM authorizations. 
• Ability to set up custom actions for cluster updates. 

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Optimized writes now supports R6g and R6gd instances. With Optimized Writes you can improve write throughout by up to 2x at no additional cost. This is especially useful for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL customers with write-intensive database workloads, commonly found in applications such as digital payments, financial trading, and online gaming.

Amazon RDS now supports integration with AWS Secrets Manager to streamline how you manage your master user password for your RDS database instances. With this feature, RDS fully manages the master user password and stores it in AWS Secrets Manager whenever your RDS database instances are created, modified, or restored. The new feature supports the entire lifecycle maintenance for your RDS master user password including regular and automatic password rotations; removing the need for you to manage rotations using custom Lambda functions.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe now supports batch transcription in two new languages - Swedish and Vietnamese. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications.

Amazon Rekognition content moderation is a deep learning-based feature that can detect inappropriate, unwanted, or offensive images and videos, making it easier to find and remove such content at scale. Starting today, Amazon Rekognition content moderation comes with an improved model for image moderation that significantly reduces false positive rates for e-commerce, social media and online communities content, without reduction in detection rates for truly unsafe content. Lower false positive rates mean faster approvals for user uploaded content leading to a better end-user experience. Lower false positive rate also imply lower volumes of flagged images to be reviewed further, leading to a better experience for human moderators and more cost savings.

PartiQL—a SQL-compatible query language—for Amazon DynamoDB is now supported in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

Amazon RDS now supports X2iedn DB instances for RDS for MySQL and on RDS for PostgreSQL. The X2iedn instances are ideal for read-intensive and high throughput write workloads. X2iedn instances support recently announced features such as Amazon RDS Optimized Writes and Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments with two readable standbys posts.

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, the next version of Aurora Serverless, is now available in 22 regions, including Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan).

We are excited to announce support for the Amazon Graviton2 instance family in four additional regions. Supported instance types include general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g and R6GD) instances. Support for C6g, M6g, R6g and R6gd is available in the Europe (Paris) region. In addition, the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), South America (Sao Paulo), and Canada (Central) regions already supported C6g, M6g and R6g instance families, and we have now added support for R6gd in these regions. 

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

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams now offers fully managed capabilities to stream video and audio in real-time from Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) standards compliant cameras, IoT devices and browsers to the cloud for secured storage, playback and analytical processing. Customers can now use our enhanced WebRTC SDK and cloud APIs to enable real-time streaming as well as media ingestion to the cloud.

Today, Amazon Nimble Studio announces persistent storage has moved from public preview to general availability. This means faster workstation startup times, and simplified workstation storage volume management for administrators. Additionally, Nimble Studio now supports configurable gp3 AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, providing up to a 20% lower price point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. Customers can scale volume size, IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput, and only pay for the resources they need.

AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator now supports a new feature to import your on-premises virtual machine (VM) images to AWS with a console-based experience for generating Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from your VM image that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements. With this new feature in AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator, you can automate the manual tasks like the validation of pre-requisites to save time and effort, specify correct license type for bring-your-own-licenses (BYOL) use, and easily track the status of VM import process in the console. 

Today, Amazon Neptune announces support for JupyterLab 3 on Neptune notebooks to boost the productivity of developers and data scientists using the Neptune Workbench. With this update, you can now launch Neptune notebooks in the AWS Management console using JupyterLab to access a modern interactive development environment (IDE) complete with developer tools such as code authoring, debugging, and support for the latest open source JupyterLab extensions. 

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere single-node clusters on bare metal. With single-node Amazon EKS Anywhere clusters, the cluster management components run alongside your applications on a single bare metal server.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for Oracle, a managed database services for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying operating system and database environment, is now available in the AWS Regions of Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Osaka).

We are excited to announce support for full cluster lifecycle automation through GitOps or Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform for Amazon EKS Anywhere (EKS-A). Previously, the only mechanism for customers to perform full EKS-A cluster lifecycle operations such as provisioning, updates, and deletion was by using an Amazon command-line-interface (CLI) tool “eksctl”. Now, EKS-A supports GitOps and IaC in the EKS-A management cluster so customers can automate EKS-A workload cluster lifecycle operations including cluster creation, update, and deletion. 

Amazon Nimble Studio now supports Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots with our new Auto Backup feature, providing a simple and secure data protection solution customized for your Amazon Nimble Studio workstations. Auto Backup is intended for artists and administrators leveraging persistent storage for their workstations who wish to protect that data in the event of a recovery situation, such as data loss or misconfigured software. 

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server is a managed database service that allows administrative access to the operating system. Starting today, you can deploy RDS Custom for SQL Server by using AWS CloudFormation templates. AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning and management of resources on AWS.

Amazon Rekognition Labels is a machine learning-based image and video analysis service that can detect objects, people, text, scenes, and activities. On 11/23/2022, we launched an update to the machine learning model of Amazon Rekognition Labels Image to add 600 labels and improve the accuracy of over 2,000 existing labels. We also added an ability to organize label results by “aliases” and “categories” and support filtering of results.

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

Amazon Lookout for Equipment analyzes equipment sensor data to train and build a machine learning model for your equipment – with no ML expertise required. Lookout for Equipment uses your unique ML model(s) and in real-time helps accurately identify early warning signs that could lead to machine failures. This helps you detect equipment abnormalities with speed and precision, quickly diagnose issues, and take action to reduce expensive downtime.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) announced a new feature that enables customers to add automated safeguards for Amazon ECS service rolling updates. You can now monitor and automatically react to changes during an Amazon ECS rolling update by using Amazon CloudWatch alarms. This enables you to more easily automate discovery and remediation for failed deployments and minimize the impact of a bad change.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now gives you the option to set the seed to generate random hyperparameters for more reproducible tuning results. This enables use cases where you need to be able to reproduce your tuning job results, such as for compliance or regulatory reasons.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) in the AWS Europe (Spain) Region.

Amazon MQ now provides support for RabbitMQ version 3.9.24, which includes several fixes to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.9.20.

On December 15 2022, AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces launched support for AWS Lambda aliases as Refactor Spaces Service endpoints. You can now use Lambda aliases with Refactor Spaces to route traffic to specific versions of a Lambda function and configure provisioned concurrency to mitigate Lambda cold starts.

Amazon EC2 announces pagination for the EC2 DescribeImages API. It allows you to describe your images over a number of API requests, instead a single one. You can specify a page size when calling the API, which will be used as the upper bound for resources to return in a single request. A pagination token is returned on the response, which you can then include in your next API request to fetch the next page of images.

Starting today, AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) is available for use in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.

Today, AWS Systems Manager announces the launch of Quick Setup for Resource Scheduler, based on AWS Solutions’ Instance Scheduler. Quick Setup for Resource Scheduler provides a user interface in the console which enables you to easily configure schedules for your instances to optimize compute capacity and save costs across accounts and Regions in your Organization. In this way, you can ensure that EC2 instances only run when they are really needed. For example, you can schedule that targeted instances stop running outside of weekly business hours, during weekends or bank holidays. To learn more, visit this blog.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of three new AWS Systems Manager widgets on Console Home. Customers can now view their operational status as soon as they sign in and take necessary action to remediate operational issues with one-click access to AWS Systems Manager features.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of a new Security Hub widget on AWS Console Home, providing a summary of your security posture generated by the security checks that you have enabled in your account using AWS Security Hub. 

AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) is now available in the Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), and US West (N. California) regions. IAM Identity Center helps you securely create or connect your workforce identities and centrally manage their access to AWS accounts and cloud applications across your AWS organization. You can create user identities directly in IAM Identity Center or you can bring them from your Microsoft Active Directory or a standards-based identity provider, such as Okta Universal Directory or Azure AD. With IAM Identity Center, you get a unified administration experience to define, customize, and assign fine-grained access. Your workforce users get a portal for access to all of their assigned AWS accounts and cloud applications.

Amazon FinSpace now provides customers with additional user activity monitoring options through logging of web application and data access events to AWS CloudTrail. Amazon FinSpace is a managed analytic data hub for capital markets customers that enables analysts and data engineers to access data from multiple sources and transform it using FinSpace’s managed Apache Spark Engine with Capital Markets Time Series Analytics Library. When a user takes an action in the FinSpace web application or uses data stored in their FinSpace Environment, an event is published to their FinSpace environment’s audit repository. It can then be viewed using the Audit Reports viewer hosted in the FinSpace web application. This provides FinSpace administrators a convenient way to quickly view user activity and data access.

AWS Local Zones are now available in two new metro areas—Bangkok and Kolkata. You can now use these Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing.

AWS Glue crawlers now have enhanced support for Linux Foundation Delta Lake tables, increasing operational efficiency to extract meaningful insights from analytics services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue. This feature enables analytics services scan Delta Lake tables without requiring the creation of manifest files by Glue crawlers. Newly cataloged data is now quickly made available for analysis using your preferred analytics and machine learning (ML) tools. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports Read Replicas. Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database (DB) instances. They provide the option to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can create one or more replicas of a given source DB instance and serve high-volume application read traffic from multiple copies of your data, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. Read replicas can also be promoted when needed to become standalone DB instances.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) region. You may now configure and submit MediaConvert jobs using the console or API endpoints within the Africa (Cape Town) region.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 24TiB (u-24tb1.112xlarge) of memory are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with On Demand and Savings Plan purchase options.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Fortuna, an open-source library for uncertainty quantification of ML models. Fortuna provides calibration methods, such as conformal prediction, that can be applied to any trained neural network to obtain calibrated uncertainty estimates. The library further supports a number of Bayesian inference methods that can be applied to deep neural networks written in Flax.

With the general availability of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots Archive in AWS Middle East (UAE), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Regions, customers in these regions can 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 now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) management APIs from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks. You can now manage your Amazon EKS clusters in your VPC using AWS PrivateLink to help your organization’s security and compliance requirements. You can also access the VPC endpoint from on-premises environments or from other VPCs using AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect, or VPC Peering. Creating VPC Endpoints incurs charges, see the AWS PrivateLink pricing page for more information.

The AWS Common Runtime (CRT)-based SDK client and the Transfer Manager for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are now generally available in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x. The CRT-based S3 client is intended for users who want maximized throughput when transferring objects to and from Amazon S3, and the S3 Transfer Manager is a high level transfer utility built on top of CRT-based S3 client and provides additional functionalities such as file directories transfer and progress monitoring.

Today we announce the general availability of Renate, an open-source Python library for automatic model re-training. The library implements continual learning algorithms to train deep neural networks incrementally when new data becomes available.

AWS IoT Device Client introduces a new version 1.8 which provides docker images, PowerPC architectures support, and an implementation to use the new “AWS Run-Command” Job Template. 

You can now query Delta Lake tables seamlessly in Amazon Athena, giving you the benefit of increased operational efficiency, improved query performance and reduced cost. Delta Lake is an open-source table format that helps implement modern data lake architectures commonly built on Amazon S3. Prior to this launch, reading Delta Lake tables in Athena required a complex process of generating and managing additional metadata files. Now you can use Athena to query Delta Lake tables directly without this additional effort.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports VPC endpoint policies configured using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that monitors and alarms on operational metrics at scale. It does this without you having to manage the underlying infrastructure required to scale and secure the ingestion, storage, alerting, and querying of metrics. With this feature, customers can now configure VPC endpoint policies in the Amazon VPC console, via Command Line Interface or SDK, or through AWS CloudFormation. These policies can restrict access of Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus endpoints to particular AWS accounts, IAM users, and IAM roles.

Starting today, the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances and compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances are now available in US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (London) regions. M6a and C6a instances are powered by third-generation AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.6 GHz. M6a instances deliver up to 35% better price performance than comparable M5a instances, while C6a instances deliver up to 15% better price performance than comparable C5a instances. Both M6a and C6a instances offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

Amazon Fraud Detector now provides customers with a simple and effective way to align their business use cases with Amazon Fraud Detector data models. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service enabling customers to identify potentially fraudulent activities and catch more online fraud faster.

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region. Deploying AppStream 2.0 in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience and helps support your local data residency obligations. With this launch, you can deploy General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, and Graphics G4DN instances to meet the needs of your users.

AWS Partners and consulting firms can now create an AWS IQ profile for their company and connect with AWS customers. Customers can message the Partner directly and connect to receive immediate help. Partners can choose to respond as a company or as an individual who works for the company when engaging with customers. Any Partner can set up a public profile showcasing their expertise, solutions, employee profiles, ratings, and reviews.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables you to configure port ranges for your container as part of the port mapping. Port mappings (specified in the container definition) allow containers to access ports on the host container instance to send or receive traffic. In addition to individual ports, Amazon ECS now allows your application to access an entire range of ports that you select by opening these ports on the container for you, and binding them to ports on the host. This makes it easier for you to run applications such as game servers and real-time streaming which typically require multiple ports to be opened simultaneously on the container.

Amazon SageMaker Experiments now supports tracking and analysis of machine learning (ML) experiments performed in any IDE (e.g., SageMaker Studio, JupyterHub) or executable code (e.g., local notebooks, scripts) using the SageMaker Python SDK or Boto3. You can track the inputs, parameters, configurations, and results of your ML training iterations. You can assign, group, and organize these iterations into experiments. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon Personalize has extended limits to support datasets with up to 100 million users and 3 billion interactions. Amazon Personalize enables developers to improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations – no ML expertise required. Amazon Personalize trains custom models for each customer using their unique data. Previously, these models could consider up to 50 million users in training. By doubling this limit, Amazon Personalize improves model performance for large customers by allowing them to train on a more diverse set of data. For customers with larger user bases that may exceed this limit, Amazon Personalize samples an optimal set of users before training. Previously, models trained by Amazon Personalize would also consider a maximum of 500 million of the latest interactions between users and items. Customers now have the option to increase their training time to consider up to 3 billion interactions. This can improve model performance by capturing more historical data for customers with a large user base or a high velocity of interactions. To increase the number of interactions considered by your model, simply request a service quota increase via the Service Quota console.

You can now use the newly re-designed Amazon EMR console. Amazon EMR is the cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning using open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto. The new re-designed console introduces a new simplified experience to launch and manage clusters running big data processing workloads.

We're excited to announce availability of AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region. The AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is the second Region in the Middle East, in addition to the Middle East (Bahrain) Region.

AWS Storage Gateway introduces Terraform modules for deploying Amazon S3 File Gateways in VMware environments. You can now leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate and streamline the provisioning and configuration of Amazon S3 File Gateways, providing users with a faster, repeatable, and secure deployment option that can scale.

AWS Copilot now supports Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Service Connect, a capability that simplifies building and operating resilient distributed applications. Service Connect enables you to have easier network setup and seamless communication between sevices deployed across multiple Amazon ECS clusters and virtual private clouds (VPCs). Service Connect enables you to add a layer of resilience to your Amazon ECS service communication and get traffic insights with no changes to your application code. 

Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall has expanded its offering to include threat intelligence provided by Recorded Future, expanding the breadth of DNS threats you can block using the DNS Firewall’s AWS Managed Domain Lists. Recorded Future’s domain risk list contains over 100,000 domains, with dynamic risk scores, which is updated as new threats are identified and continuously added to DNS Firewall. Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud uses sandbox analysis, network traffic analysis, and command and control detection to identify potentially malicious domains from news sites, blogs, the dark web, TOR sites, underground forums, and other external sources.

AWS Marketplace is announcing free trials for SaaS usage-based pricing products, an extension of the free trials for SaaS contracts experience that was introduced on May 31, 2022. With free trials in AWS Marketplace, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can grow their business by reducing sign up friction and providing prospects a first-hand experience of the product. 

Today, Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is announcing SageMaker Python SDK support for its offline store. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a fully managed, purpose-built repository to store, update, search, and share machine learning (ML) features. SageMaker Feature Store offline store contains historical ML features, and you can use it to generate training data sets for training and batch inference. Until today, you had to use Athena and Glue and write ad hoc SQL queries to create these training datasets. 

AWS DataSync now supports the use of tags with task executions. A DataSync task defines where and how data is transferred using AWS DataSync and a task execution is an individual run of a task. With this new feature, you can apply tags each time you execute a task, giving you greater control and management over your task executions.

AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) and Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint (GWLBE) now support end-to-end connectivity using Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Customers can now send IPv6 traffic through Gateway Load Balancers and its endpoints to distribute traffic flows to dual stack appliance targets. 

Amazon Neptune Serverless is now available in the Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Stockholm) AWS Regions.

QuickSight Q now supports migration of Topics using APIs enabling authors to replicate topics from one account to another or to share topics with users across different namespaces. With this launch customers can use CI/CD pipelines and scripts to migrate topics from development accounts to test or production accounts without having to repetitively setup topics in new environments or accounts manually. Authors can easily migrate a Topic and replicate the metadata settings such as datasets used, fields, field names, synonyms and field settings. To access this feature in preview please contact quicksight-q-api-preview@amazon.com.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6id, M6id and R6id instances are available in AWS Europe (Frankfurt). These instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage. Compared to previous generation C5d, M5d and R5d instances, C6id, M6id and R6id instances deliver up to 15% better price performance. C6id offers up to 138% higher TB storage per vCPU and 56% lower cost per TB; M6id and R6id offer up to 58% higher TB storage per vCPU, and 34% lower cost per TB.

Amazon QuickSight is now available in Stockholm and Paris regions. New accounts are able to sign up for QuickSight with Stockholm or Paris as their primary region, making SPICE capacity available in the region and ensuring proximity to AWS and on-premises data sources. Existing users can switch regions with the region switcher and create SPICE datasets in those regions.

AWS launches Amazon EKS managed node groups for Windows containers to automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of Windows nodes (running on Amazon EC2 instances) for EKS Kubernetes clusters. With this launch, Windows-based applications will automatically provision and register the Amazon EC2 instances that provide compute capacity. Now customers can create, automatically update, or terminate the Windows nodes for their cluster with a single operation. 

AWS Backup now supports schedule-based network bandwidth throttling for VMware. This allows you to optimize network bandwidth used for backups and restores between your VMware environment and AWS. You can throttle the network bandwidth used by the Backup gateway for VMware backups, based on a schedule you set on the Backup gateway. This enables you to regulate network bandwidth use during peak hours to minimize network congestion and prevent you from using all your available bandwidth during peak hours.

Customers can now create file systems using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.

Amazon Timestream announces a fully managed data protection functionality through integration with AWS Backup. You can now protect your time series data through immutable backups, automate backup lifecycle management, copy your backup across AWS Regions and accounts, and restore your data with ease.  

The AWS Pricing Calculator now offers a redesigned user interface that allows you to generate price estimates for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in the shared tenancy model, the dedicated tenancy model, and Amazon EC2 dedicated hosts. The calculator makes it easier for you to switch among the three tenancy options with a single click, by providing a common user interface to enter input parameters for cost estimation. The calculator will also pre-populate costs across the available pricing models (e.g. Savings Plans, Reserved Instances), removing the need to view costs for each price model separately and allowing you to do quick cost comparison. 

AWS Trusted Advisor now helps customers improve fault tolerance with new checks for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, and AWS CloudHSM. AWS Trusted Advisor evaluates your AWS account with automated best practice checks and provides cloud optimization recommendations to reduce costs, improve performance, increase security, and monitor service quotas. You can find more information about the checks here.

The AWS Pricing Calculator now supports the ability to bulk estimate costs for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Dedicated hosts and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes using a structured Excel template.

AWS Backup adds support for VMware vSphere tags, enabling you to protect your VMware virtual machines (VMs) using tag-based policies, simplifying data protection across your on-premises vSphere and AWS environments. This allows you to import your VMware vSphere tags to AWS, where they can be automatically associated with a backup plan via tag-based policies.

Amazon Location Service expands support to four more regions, Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), Europe (London), and South America (Sao Paulo). Developers in these regions can easily add maps, search for addresses and points of interest, calculate routes, track their assets, and geofence regions of interest, while experiencing the lowest latency response. By using local regions to store sensitive tracking and geofencing data, developers can ensure that their data remains in the country where it is collected and that it adheres to data residency restrictions.

Starting today, customers of AWS Cost Anomaly Detection will be able to define percentage-based thresholds when configuring their alerting preferences. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a cost management service that leverages advanced machine learning to identify anomalous spend and root causes, so customers can quickly take action to avoid runaway spend and bill shocks. The percentage-based alerting configuration enables customers to capture the anomalous spend dynamically rather than having to estimate an absolute dollar amount.

Today, AWS Marketplace launched automated emails to communicate relevant details to buyers and sellers once a private offer is successfully created and available for subscription. With this launch, buyers can now directly receive a private offer deep link from a seller, allowing them to promptly review and accept a private offer. ISVs and channel partners can now receive details like the offer ID when an offer is created, enabling them to initiate procurement workflows, internal order creation, and deal tracking. 

Amazon AppFlow announces the release of 4 new data connectors for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. The new connectors for HubSpot, LinkedIn Pages, Productboard, and Recharge provide customers with even more data access capability for use cases such as data lake hydration, analytics and machine learning, and data retention.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, now supports Microsoft SharePoint Online as a source. With this launch, you can now transfer your unstructured data from SharePoint Online to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in just a few clicks. This SharePoint Online integration unlocks many use cases such as uploading documents (e.g. PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, etc.), images, and other information to a data lake or centralized storage built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for applications such as file backup and archival, and help desk management.

With Amazon Athena, you can run SQL queries on data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources without the need to pre-process or move data to another storage solution. Starting today, you can use Athena to query real-time streaming data held in Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka.

The Amazon Chime SDK now offers a new resource for builders to get started with CodeSandbox. The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers embed intelligent real-time communication capabilities into their applications. CodeSandbox is an online code editor and prototyping tool that makes creating and sharing web apps faster. In one-click, builders using the Amazon Chime SDK for virtual meetings can review ready-made code required to set up a meeting, at the same time, seeing a prototype of the meeting experience in real-time.

We are excited to announce support for concurrent account factory actions in AWS Control Tower, allowing you to create, update, or enroll up to five accounts at a time. AWS Control Tower account factory makes it easy for you to provision accounts and automate deployment of AWS resources, roles and policies within those accounts to support a range of business functions across your organization. With this new feature enhancement, you now have the autonomy to create and manage your accounts on-demand, supporting greater automation and decreased operational workload. 

Amazon Location Service adds a new data option to the Maps feature, Open Data, based on data from OpenStreetMap (OSM), a geospatial data source supported by a global community. Developers can now easily access reliable and up-to-date OSM data with no upfront investment or specialized geospatial knowledge. In addition to the high-quality data provider options from Esri and HERE, Open Data Maps now provides developers with more choices to integrate maps into their applications, enabling developers to leverage OSM’s flexible licensing terms and continuously improving data quality.  

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights alarms enables customers to alarm on entire fleets of dynamically changing resources with a single alarm using standard SQL queries. CloudWatch Metrics Insights offers fast, flexible, SQL-based queries. By combining CloudWatch alarms with Metrics Insights queries, customers can now set up dynamic alarms that consistently monitor fast moving environments and alert when anomalies are detected.

Amazon Neptune version 1.2.0.2 now supports the W3C RDF CBD (Concise Bounded Description) for the SPARQL query language. The Concise Bounded Description of an RDF resource (that is, a node in an RDF graph) is the smallest subgraph of leaf nodes that are not blank (anonymous resource, a node with no URI). A CBD query starts from a node, then recursively traverses the graph beyond blank nodes until it finds a node with an identifier.

Today, we are excited to announce the release of automatically generated feature-level visualizations 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. Data Wrangler offers a variety of configurable visualization options from general data visualizations such as histogram, scatter plot or table summary to advanced visualizations such as anomaly detection or seasonable-trend decomposition for time series data, data leakage and feature bias for machine learning needs. 

Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra to build intelligent search applications in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region.

Amazon EKS now supports advanced configuration of cluster add-ons, enabling you to customize add-on properties to help you meet performance, compliance, or additional requirements not handled by default settings. Configuration can be applied to add-ons either during cluster creation or at any time after the cluster is created. Amazon EKS now supports configuration for the following add-ons: Amazon VPC CNI, CoreDNS, kube-proxy, EBS CSI driver, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. As an example, you can now install and configure Amazon VPC CNI to leverage EC2 prefixes for increased pod density on cluster worker nodes. Amazon EKS add-ons configuration is available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Today, we would like to announce enhancements to AWS Mainframe Modernization service including an expansion to 5 new regions and support for AWS CloudFormation, AWS PrivateLink, and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) resulting in repeatable deployment, and greater security and compliance.

You can now bring machine learning (ML) models built anywhere into Amazon SageMaker Canvas and generate predictions, to address a wide range of business problems. SageMaker Canvas is a visual interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate ML predictions on their own — without requiring any ML experience or having to write a single line of code.

Starting today, AWS Cloud WAN supports Appliance Mode feature, giving you the ability to deploy stateful network appliances in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and forward network traffic to the correct appliance for security inspection. Appliance Mode simplifies centralized deployment of security appliances in a VPC and allows using multiple Availability zones (AZs) for highly availability.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth synthetic data, a premium tailored service to generate labeled synthetic data, now supports dynamic 3D environments. We now provide support for full 3D scenes, 3D depth maps, multiple cameras in a scene, moving objects on a conveyor belt, and generation of auto-labeled video data. These features enable synthetic data generation for dynamic 3D environments for customer use cases in manufacturing, warehouse robotics, food packaging, retail, autonomous mobility and smart home.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides conversational analytics in Africa (Cape Town) region. This launch adds to the list of regions that Contact Lens’ conversational analytics already supports: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) launches a new networking capability called Service Connect in the AWS China (Beijing) and AWS China (Ningxia) Regions. 

Amazon EMR on EKS now supports accelerated computing over graphics processing unit (GPU) instance types using Nvidia RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark. The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in analytics has increased the need for processing data quickly and cost efficiently with GPUs. Nvidia RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark helps customers leverage the benefit of GPU performance while saving infrastructure costs. With this release, EMR on EKS customer can use the RAPIDS accelerator by simply specifying the Spark-RAPIDS release label when calling EMR on EKS API.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams now offers a simple, efficient and cost-effective way to connect to IP cameras on customer premises, locally record and store video from those cameras, and stream videos to the cloud on a customer defined schedule for long term storage, playback and analytical processing. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL-compatibile edition and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL running major version 14. PostgreSQL 14  consists of performance improvements for parallel queries, heavily-concurrent workloads, partitioned tables, logical replication, and vacuuming. PostgreSQL 14 also improves functionality with new capabilities. For example, you can cancel long-running queries if a client disconnects and you can close idle sessions if they time out. With this launch, you can enforce SCRAM (Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism) password-based authentication for proxy, making connections from your applications more secure.

Amazon MQ is now available in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region. With this launch, Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 27 regions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports memory optimized X2idn, X2iedn, and X2iezn instances designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory.

Starting with Amazon Neptune version 1.2.0.2, customers can now use real-time inductive inference with Amazon Neptune ML to enable machine learning (ML) predictions on nodes, edges and properties (entities) that were added to the graph after the ML model training process. With this launch, customers can make predictions on new data without requiring an update to their ML models. Amazon Neptune ML is powered by Amazon SageMaker, and uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a machine learning technique purpose-built for graph that can improve the accuracy of most predictions for graphs by over 50% when compared to making predictions using non-graph methods based on published research from Stanford University.

Starting in April 2023, Amazon S3 will introduce two new default bucket security settings by automatically enabling S3 Block Public Access and disabling S3 access control lists (ACLs) for all new S3 buckets. Once complete, these defaults will apply to all new buckets regardless of how they are created, including AWS CLI, APIs, SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation. These defaults have been in place for buckets created in the S3 management console since the two features became available in 2018 and 2021, respectively, and are recommended security best practices. There is no change for existing buckets.

Amazon EBS direct APIs now support the IPv6 protocol, so that applications to connect through EBS direct APIs over IPv6. EBS direct APIs enable customers to simplify their backup and recovery workflows by directly creating and reading EBS snapshots via APIs. With this change, customers can meet their IPv6 compliance needs, integrate with existing IPv6-based on-premises applications, and remove the need for expensive networking equipment to handle the address translation between IPv4 and IPv6.

You can now enable more granular access controls for security profiles by configuring resource tags within the Amazon Connect admin website. Tagging a security profile allows you to configure granular permissions and define who is able to access a specific security profile. For example, you can now tag all security profiles assigned to users within a business process outsourcer (BPO) with BPO:A, and then only enable administrators of that BPO to access to these security profiles. To learn more about tagging security profiles and tag-based access controls, see the Connect Administrator Guide.

You can now enable granular access controls for users by configuring resource tags within the Amazon Connect admin website. Tagging a user allows you to configure granular permissions and define who is able to access a specific user record. For example, you can now tag users with Team:Innovators and then only let the Innovators team manager see or edit these users. To learn more about tagging users and tag-based access controls, see the Connect Administrator Guide.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports copying option groups during in-region cross-account snapshot copy requests using the API, CLI, or AWS Backup. Amazon RDS uses option groups to enable and configure features that make it simple to manage your databases. Copying the option groups with the snapshot on cross account copy allows you to restore that snapshot in the target account with the same options as the source snapshot without needing to reconfigure the option groups. 

AWS Amplify is announcing the release of version 5 of the JavaScript library, which includes highly requested features for Web and React Native developers. This release also introduces a new Notifications channel, In-App Messaging, that developers can use to display contextual messages to their users based on their behavior. The Amplify JavaScript library has also received improvements to reduce the overall bundle size and installation size. 

Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option that makes it simple for data analysts and engineers to run open-source big data analytics frameworks without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters or servers.

We are excited to announce general availability of v2.0 Amplify Library for Android! Amplify Library for Android allows developers building apps for the Android platform to easily include features like authentication, storage, maps, and more. This version of the library has been re-written to improve Android developers’ experience when using Auth and Storage features. The Amplify Library for Android is open source on GitHub, and we deeply appreciate the feedback we have received from the community.

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS now detects if your Amazon Aurora database is receiving a significantly larger number of SQL queries and if those queries are reading more data than usual. This new functionality will help you to discover, in the event of degraded database performance, if an application traffic change is the likely cause of the performance degradation. If you use DevOps Guru for RDS, you don’t have to take any specific step in order to use this functionality. As long as you have DevOps Guru for RDS monitoring turned on for your Amazon Aurora databases, this new feature will be available wherever applicable.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, Amazon Translate launches support for translation of files stored in nested S3 folders.

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

Starting today, storage optimized Amazon EC2 I4i Instances are now also available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions. Amazon EC2 I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake) and deliver the highest local storage performance within Amazon EC2 using AWS Nitro NVMe SSDs.

Amazon Connect now allows you to configure hierarchies and resource tags for users in bulk. You can now optionally assign agent hierarchies and resource tags to each agent using the CSV bulk upload template, available on the user management page. For example, you can import a group of users and assign both a hierarchy to denote which country the users operate in, and a tag like Department:A to indicate which department they work for. To learn more about adding users individually or in bulk, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. 

You can now enable granular access controls for queues by configuring resource tags within the Amazon Connect admin website. Tagging a queue allows you to configure granular permissions and define who is able to access a specific queue. For example, you can now tag queues with SupportLevel:Premium and then only let premium support managers see or edit these queues. To learn more about tagging queues and tag-based access controls, see the Connect Administrator Guide.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Amazon Translate now supports language detection of input files for batch translations.

You can now enable granular access controls for routing profiles by configuring resource tags within the Amazon Connect admin website. Tagging a routing profile allows you to configure granular permissions and define who is able to access a specific routing profile. For example, you can now tag routing profiles with Type:Holiday and then only let managers handling holiday contact center activity see or edit these routing profiles. To learn more about tagging routing profiles and tag-based access controls, see the Connect Administrator Guide.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Service Connect now supports AWS Fargate workloads running on AWS Graviton Processors. Service Connect simplifies service discovery, connectivity and traffic observability for Amazon ECS and helps you build applications faster by letting you focus on the application code instead of your networking infrastructure.

Starting today, customers can now disable Always Free Tier offers when creating a global pricing rule in AWS Billing Conductor (ABC). Pricing rules with free tier disabled allow customers to default to the first paid tier for all AWS services. For example, AWS partners can use a global pricing rule with free tier disabled to match the negotiated terms between themselves and their end customers. This feature makes it easier to align the Billing Conductor's pro forma billing reports with internal chargeback logic.

Amazon Managed Grafana now supports AWS CloudFormation. You can use AWS CloudFormation templates to create, update, and delete your Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces, as well as manage or update workspace SAML authentication settings.

Amazon SageMaker model training now supports preview of ml.p4de.24xlarge(p4de) instances, powered by NVIDIA A100 GPUs and high-performance HBM2e GPU memory. These instances provide the highest performing compute infrastructure currently available for use cases that require training of large language models (LLMs), computer vision (object detection, semantic segmentation) and generative artificial intelligence.

SV1, the on-demand state vector simulator on Amazon Braket, now supports the computation of gradients using the adjoint differentiation method, enabling customers to reduce runtime and save costs for their quantum machine learning and optimization workloads. With this launch, customers simulating variational quantum algorithms with a large number of parameters, such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), can now seamlessly incorporate adjoint gradient computation either directly from the Braket Python SDK or API, or through PennyLane, an open-source software framework built for quantum differentiable programming.

Starting today, AWS IoT TwinMaker will support asset synchronization with AWS IoT SiteWise, making it easier for AWS IoT SiteWise customers to bring their assets and asset models into AWS IoT TwinMaker.

EC2 Auto Scaling customers can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math to customize the metrics they use with Target Tracking policy without actually having to publish and pay for customized metrics. Customers can use both arithmetic operators (such as +, -, /, and *) and mathematical functions (such as Sum and Average) to easily create custom metrics based on existing CloudWatch metrics. Target Tracking, like other EC2 Auto Scaling policies, helps customers maintain high availability while reducing costs by auto scaling their environments to meet changing demand. Specifically, Target Tracking works like a thermostat: it constantly changes the capacity of an Auto Scaling group to maintain the specified metric at a customer-defined target level. Today’s release makes it easier and cheaper to configure Target Tracking with custom metrics.

Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. VPC IPAM makes it easier for you to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for your AWS workloads. 

We are pleased to announce that as of today, customers will see additional details in AWS Cost Anomaly Detection’s console, alerting emails, and SNS topics posted to Slack and Chime. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a cost management service that leverages advanced machine learning to identify anomalous spend and root causes, so customers can quickly take action to avoid runaway spend and bill shocks. With this launch, customer can spend less effort trying to understand what account and monitor is tied to a cost anomaly, which in turn helps them take necessary actions more quickly.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports streaming data delivery to Logz.io, enabling Logz.io users to ingest streaming metrics and logs without having to manage applications or write code. 

Amazon RDS Proxy, a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), now supports creating proxies in Amazon Aurora Global Database primary and secondary regions. An Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, you can use RDS Proxy to make your applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure in both the primary and secondary Global Database regions. 

Starting today, customers can view AWS CloudTrail event logs of a change request using AWS Systems Manager Change Manager. The feature helps customers understand which resources were impacted by the change request which provides customers with more visibility into the change request process. Change Manager already helps customers request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to their application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. With this launch, customers can now get the CloudTrail events associated with the change requests within the Change Manager console which offers them more visibility into their changes. For example, if a change was made to restart an EC2 instance, customers can now see which instances were actually impacted as part of the execution and the APIs that were invoked.

AWS Cost Management now offers a 1-click experience to refresh Savings Plans Recommendations, so you can generate new Savings Plans Recommendations at any time to reduce costs and accelerate your cloud optimization journey. Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one or three-year period. 

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes in Amazon SageMaker Studio. 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. Starting today, you can connect to Amazon EMR Presto as a big query engine to bring in very large dataset, and prepare data for ML in minutes in Data Wrangler visual interactive.

Amazon QuickSight now supports even larger SPICE datasets on the Enterprise Edition. Today, all new SPICE datasets can accommodate up to 1 billion rows (or 1TB) of data in the Enterprise Edition and 25 million rows (or 25GB) for Standard Edition. Before the launch, each SPICE dataset could hold up to 500 million rows and 500GB of data. Customers who want to use QuickSight's rich visualizations to explore very large datasets had to rely on data engineers to manually orchestrate data between QuickSight and another data store, which made it challenging to access and analyze very large datasets quickly. With billion-row support in SPICE, it’s easier to connect to data stores and ingest data into SPICE. Users now have greater autonomy to visually analyze large datasets directly in QuickSight, without coordinating with engineering teams to manually orchestrate data among services. See here for details.

AWS Config now supports configuration recorder as a configuration item. Configuration recorder must be enabled before AWS Config can detect changes to your resource configurations and capture these changes as configuration items. With this launch, you can now monitor configuration changes to the configuration recorder in your AWS account. 

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at your data center and on-premises locations in Egypt.

Amazon EC2 customers can now use Recycle Bin for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region to recover from accidental deletions to meet their business continuity needs. With Recycle Bin, you can specify a retention time period and recover a deregistered AMI if needed, before the expiration of the retention period. A recovered AMI would retain its attributes such as tags, permissions, and encryption status, which it had prior to deletion, and can be used immediately for launches. AMIs that are not recovered from the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted upon expiration of the retention time.

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store now supports the ability to create feature groups in the offline store in Apache Iceberg table format. The offline store contains historical ML features, organized into logical feature groups, and is used for model training and batch inference. Apache Iceberg is an open table format for very large analytic datasets such as the offline store. It manages large collections of files as tables and supports modern analytical data lake operations optimized for usage on Amazon S3.

With the general availability of Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, customers in that region can now automate the creation, sharing, copying and retention of Amazon EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs via policies. Data Lifecycle Manager eliminates the need for complicated custom scripts to manage your EBS resources, saving you time and money.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides APIs that enable you to programmatically manage rules for Contact Lens’ conversational analytics and third party applications (e.g., Salesforce etc.). Rules allow you to automatically categorize contacts, send notifications about customer escalations, and assign tasks when a new case is created in your third party application. 

Amazon Redshift Serverless, which allows you to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters, is now generally available in additional AWS regions Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Canada (Central). With Amazon Redshift Serverless, all users including data analysts, developers, and data scientists, can use Amazon Redshift to get insights from data in seconds. Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and intelligently scales data warehouse capacity to deliver high performance for all your analytics. You only pay for the compute used for the duration of the workloads on a per-second basis. You can benefit from this simplicity without making any changes to your existing analytics and business intelligence applications.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Is4gen and Im4gn instances, the latest generation storage-optimized instances, are available in Europe (Paris) region. Based on the AWS Nitro System, Im4gn and Is4gen instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and are built using AWS Nitro SSDs which reduce both latency and latency variability compared to the third generation of EC2 storage optimized instances. 

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe Custom Language Models (CLM) now support German and Japanese languages in both batch and streaming mode. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. CLM allows you to use pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine for your specific batch and streaming transcription use cases. No prior machine learning experience is required to create your CLM.

Today, AWS CloudFormation Hooks launches wildcard resource type for Hook configurations enabling customers to match multiple resources types. Customers can use wildcards to define resources targets for building flexible Hooks. Such Hooks can activate for resource types which are not explicitly known when the Hook was created. For example, customers can use AWS::ECR::* wildcard to define a Hook that triggers for all resource types under Amazon ECR. 

AWS Snow Family Large Data Migration Manager (LDMM) is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), and Africa (Cape Town) Regions. Snow Large Data Migration Manager enables you to plan, track, and manage your large data migrations when using multiple Snowball Edge devices. You can now easily plan and monitor your jobs from a minimum of 500 Terabytes to Petabytes scale data migrations.

AWS CloudShell is now a System and Organization Controls (SOC) compliant service. You can now use AWS CloudShell for workloads that are subject to SOC compliance. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives. The purpose of these reports is to help you and your auditors understand the AWS controls established to support operations and compliance.

Amazon Neptune Workbench is now available in  Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions. Starting today, you can use the Neptune Workbench to create Neptune notebook instances in these regions for visualizing graph data in Neptune, accessing tutorials, and running code samples using an interactive coding environment.

Today, AWS IoT Device Defender launched  a new audit check AWS IoT policy potentially misconfigured to identify certain potential misconfigurations in IoT policies. Security misconfigurations such as overly permissive policies can be a major cause of security incidents. With this new audit check in AWS IoT Device Defender, you can now more easily identify flaws, troubleshoot issues, and take the necessary corrective actions. 

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a service that provides fully managed shared storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system, today announced four new features that make it even easier to configure and manage your file systems.

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

Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that makes it easy to launch and run feature-rich and highly-performant file systems, is now authorized for Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Levels 4 and 5 (DoD SRG IL4 and IL5) in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Today’s launch builds on Amazon FSx’s existing DoD SRG IL2 authorization in AWS US Regions, FedRAMP Moderate authorization in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon), and FedRAMP High authorization in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is extending the NVMe read cache support that is already included with Multi-AZ file systems to Single-AZ file systems. With the read cache, you can drive up to 650,000 IOPS and 6 GB/s of read throughput when reading your frequently-accessed data.

AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) has achieved FedRAMP High authorization in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. You can now use AWS IAM Identity Center to centrally manage workforce access to workloads that require FedRAMP High categorization level.

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now includes a guided DynamoDB Local installation process to streamline setting up your DynamoDB local development environment. You can use this new feature to build, test, and deploy workloads on DynamoDB more quickly.

Amazon Cognito is now available in the Europe (Milan) Region. Amazon Cognito makes it easy to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via standards such as SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

We’re excited to announce the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS in the AWS Cape Town region. This launch marks the 22nd AWS region to support VMware Cloud on AWS and provides customers running VMware-based workloads a faster and more seamless path to migrate to the cloud. 

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now supports creating data models directly from sample data model templates to help you design data schemas for your workloads. You can use this feature to get familiar with NoSQL data modeling best practices when building your applications on DynamoDB.

Amazon Location Service is now Health Information Trust Alliance Common Security Framework (HITRUST CSF) certified, aligning with customer requirements for security and privacy. Customers can use Amazon Location Service as part of their AWS environment to help them meet the requirements of the HITRUST CSF. In addition to HITRUST CSF, Amazon Location Service is compliant with SOC, PCI, ISO, HIPAA, and OSPAR. 

Sensitive data detection and processing in AWS Glue is now generally available in 18 additional AWS Regions: US West (Northern California), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and South America (Sao Paulo).

Amazon SageMaker Studio is a fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning. Studio comes with built-in integration with Amazon EMR so that data scientists can interactively prepare data at petabyte scale using frameworks such as Apache Spark right from Studio notebooks. We’re excited to announce that SageMaker Studio now supports applying fine-grained data access control with AWS Lake Formation when accessing data through Amazon EMR.

AWS Security Hub now integrates with AWS Control Tower, allowing you to pair AWS Security Hub detective controls with AWS Control Tower proactive or preventive controls and manage them together using AWS Control Tower. AWS Security Hub controls are now mapped to related control objectives in the AWS Control Tower control library, providing you with a holistic view of the controls required to meet a specific control objective. This combination of over 160 detective controls from AWS Security Hub, with the AWS Control Tower built-in automations for multi-account environments, gives you a strong baseline of governance and off-the-shelf controls required to scale your business using new AWS workloads and services. This combination of controls also helps you monitor whether your multi-account AWS environment is secure and managed in accordance with best practices, such as the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard.

Starting today, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides automatic encryption of data in transit between Nitro-based compute instances and new FSx for ONTAP file systems.

AWS AppConfig has released an agent for container runtimes that makes the use of feature flags and runtime configuration simpler, with improved performance. Customers that use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Docker, or Kubernetes can now use the AWS AppConfig Agent to manage the calls from their containerized application to the AWS AppConfig service. Previously, customers needed to manage their own retrieval and caching of configuration data when using a container runtime. Now, by using the AWS AppConfig Agent, the agent will do this for them. This agent will query AWS AppConfig for configuration data and make it available locally. It will also handle polling and caching logic on behalf of customers. Applications will make local HTTP calls to the AWS AppConfig Agent, thus seeing performance improvements when retrieving configuration data.

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager enables you to centrally deploy and monitor FortiGate Cloud-Native Firewall (CNF) across all AWS virtual private clouds (VPCs) in your AWS organization. With this release, customers now have a single firewall management solution to deploy and manage both AWS native firewalls and FortiGate CNF firewalls.

Today, AWS is launching a preview of Amazon CodeCatalyst, a unified software development service that makes it faster to build and deliver software on AWS. CodeCatalyst provides software development teams with an integrated project experience that brings together the tools needed to plan, code, build, test, and deploy applications on AWS. Software teams spend significant time and resources on collaborating effectively and setting up tools, development and deployment environments, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) automation. These activities can detract from their ability to quickly deliver new features or software updates to customers. With CodeCatalyst, teams can automate many of these complex activities, so they can focus on quickly enhancing their applications and deploying them to AWS.

EventBridge Pipes provides a simpler, consistent, and cost-effective way to create point-to-point integrations between event producers and consumers, expanding the EventBridge offering beyond event buses and scheduling. EventBridge Pipes makes it easy to connect your applications with data from sources including Amazon SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Managed Streaming Kafka, self-managed Kafka, and Amazon MQ. EventBridge Pipes supports the same target services as event buses, such as Amazon SQS, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon SNS, Amazon ECS, and event buses themselves.

Amazon Comprehend announced single-step APIs that customers can now use to classify and extract entities of interest from PDF documents, Microsoft Word files, and images.

AWS re:Post is a cloud knowledge service that provides customers the technical guidance they need to innovate faster and improve operational efficiency with AWS services. re:Post has integrated with AWS Builder ID to provide re:Post users an additional sign-in method to join the community without an AWS account. Additionally, users can link multiple logins with AWS Management Console or AWS Builder ID so that community contributions live in a single re:Post profile. re:Post integration with AWS Builder ID and the ability to link multiple logins to a single re:Post profile allow users to keep their contributions, points earned, and reputation status on re:Post, even if they transfer to a new role or organization.

AWS Step Functions expands support for iterating and processing large sets of data such as images, logs and financial data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a cloud object storage service. 

The general availability (GA) of Amazon GameLift Anywhere de-couples game session management from the underlying compute resources. During the game development phase, developers need instant compute resources to deploy, test and iterate their game builds continuously. In addition, customers often have ongoing bare-metal contracts or on-premises game servers and need the flexibility to use their existing infrastructure with cloud servers. 

AWS Application Composer helps developers simplify and accelerate architecting, configuring, and building serverless applications. You can drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture by using AWS Application Composer’s browser-based visual canvas. AWS Application Composer helps you focus on building by maintaining deployment-ready infrastructure as code (IaC) definitions, complete with integration configuration for each service.