March 2023

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Equinix MB2 data center in Mumbai, India. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon VPC Lattice, an application networking service that simplifies connecting, securing, and monitoring service-to-service communication. You can use Amazon VPC Lattice to facilitate cross-account and cross-VPC connectivity, as well as application layer load balancing for your workloads. Whether the underlying compute types are instances, containers, or serverless, with Amazon VPC Lattice developers can work with native integration on the compute platform of their choice.

Today, we are excited to launch Console Toolbar in the AWS Management Console. Console Toolbar is a new feature that allows AWS customers to use the AWS Management Console and AWS CloudShell in a single view. For example, customers can now run a command in CloudShell and view a CloudWatch alarm in the Console at the same time. AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell, pre-authenticated with your console credentials that makes it easier for you to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources.

Today, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) launched a new feature that helps make it easier for brands to see if their registered logo appears on email through Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). Now you can find out when BIMI configuration is missing or misconfigured for all of your email sending domains in SES. BIMI is a digital certificate that lets you show your registered logo on emails, helping customers trust the email sender and message content. SES automatically checks BIMI configuration through Virtual Deliverability Manager Advisor, letting you know if there is a problem with your BIMI configuration. This makes it easier to configure BIMI and check coverage. 

AWS Glue Studio now offers 10 new visual transforms: Concatenate, Split string, Array to columns, Add current timestamp, Pivot rows to columns, Unpivot columns to rows, Lookup, Explode, Derived column, and Autobalance processing. AWS Glue Studio offers a visual extract-transform-and-load (ETL) interface to author, run, and monitor AWS Glue ETL jobs. With these new components, ETL developers can quickly build more sophisticated data pipelines without having to write code.

AWS License Manager now offers an organization-wide view of license entitlements for all software purchased in AWS Marketplace and from independent software vendors. Also, administrators can now distribute grants to an organizational unit (OU), in addition to their organization's root or an AWS account. When distributing grants, users have the option to replace grants for the same software that an AWS account might already have. 

AWS Cloud Map enables service editing capability in the AWS Console. 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.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now makes it easier to check email KPIs with new dashboard tools. Now you can see time series views of key deliverability metrics through Virtual Deliverability Manager's dashboard. These deliverability metrics help make it easier to see how performance indicators such as delivery volume, complaint rate, and click rate vary over time, simplifying monitoring of deliverability performance and streamlining investigations of performance challenges. 

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible service that monitors and provides alerts on containerized applications and infrastructure at scale. Prometheus is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation open source project for monitoring and alerting that is optimized for container environments such as Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS. With this release, customers can send up to 500M active metrics to a single workspace after filing a service limit increase request, and can create many workspaces per account, enabling the storage and analysis of billions of Prometheus metrics. To get started, customers can create an Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace and increase their workspace active series limits by filing a service limit increase request in AWS Support Center or AWS Service Quotas.

AWS Blu Age Blu Insights, the automated refactor capability of AWS Mainframe Modernization service, is now accessible using single sign-on (SSO). As a result, users of the service no longer require dedicated credentials for AWS Blu Insights and benefit from a seamless authentication experience between AWS Management Console and AWS Blu Insights for service usage, monitoring, and billing. All AWS Blu Insights features like Codebase Analysis continue to be available at no additional charge, while the AWS Blu Insights Transformation Center is priced per line of code and duration as outlined on the service pricing page.

You can now use Service Quotas in AWS Europe (Spain), AWS Europe (Zurich), AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne), and AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Regions to view and manage your service quotas at scale as your AWS workloads grow.

Amazon Connect now supports the use of JSON structures such as nested arrays as attributes in flows, enabling you to build more personalized and automated customer experiences. For example, you can now build self-service experiences to help customers track their order status based on multiple purchases in the last month rather than the single most recent purchase. This new capability is supported in both the “Invoke AWS Lambda Function” and “Show View” flow blocks.

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.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports version 22.2 of Oracle Application Express (APEX) for 19c & 21c versions of Oracle Database. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser. To learn more about the latest features of APEX 22.2, please refer to Oracle’s documentation.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) now supports automated replication of new disks added to your source servers to help you maintain readiness of your AWS recovery site. Elastic Disaster Recovery helps minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery.

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports 61 additional Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types. Newly supported instance types include the latest generation general purpose instance families from both Intel and AMD (M6in, M6idn), compute optimized instance families (C6in), and memory optimized instance family (R6in, R6idn).

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) has introduced an open-source Extended Client Library for Python that enables you to publish and deliver large message payloads. Previously, only the Extended Client Library for Java was available. This library is useful for messages that are larger than 256KB, up to a maximum of 2GB. The library automatically saves the actual payload to an Amazon S3 bucket and publishes the reference of the stored Amazon S3 object to the Amazon SNS topic.

AWS Lake Formation is a service that allows you to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics to gain insights and guide better business decisions.

AWS WickrGov is now generally available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, giving government customers and their partners the benefits of AWS Wickr.

Today, AWS announced the availability of next-generation General Purpose gp3 storage volumes for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for Oracle and Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server. Amazon RDS gp3 volumes give you the flexibility to provision storage performance independently of storage capacity, paying only for the resources you need. You can choose gp3 storage type for your Amazon RDS Custom database instance with the ability to select from 40 GiB to 64 TiB (20 GiB to 16 TiB for Amazon RDS Custom SQL Server) of storage capacity, with a baseline storage performance of 12,000 IOPS (3,000 IOPS for Amazon RDS Custom SQL Server) included with the price of storage. For workloads that need even more performance, you can scale up to 64,000 IOPS (16,000 IOPS for Amazon RDS Custom SQL Server) for an additional cost.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 R5b instances, are now available in two new AWS Regions - Europe(Milan), and Europe(Stockholm). R5b instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System and provide EBS-Optimized performance, enabling customers to lift and shift memory intensive applications to AWS.

Today, we are introducing a new capability for AWS Batch to provide user-defined pod labels for jobs that run on your Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. Labels are key-value pairs that are used to specify identifying attributes of objects that are designed to be meaningful and relevant to users. Using labels, customers can map their own organizational structures and bring better accountability, compliance, and cost visibility for their workloads.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for EventBridge and Pipes. This launch allows you to manage EventBridge resources, such as event buses, rules, and pipes, using the Kubernetes API and resource model (custom resource definitions).

AWS Network Firewall now supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection for ingress VPC traffic. This new feature enables customers to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt TLS traffic without having to deploy and manage any additional network security infrastructure. 

Customers can now track the current build status and image build steps for their image pipelines directly in EC2 Image Builder. This capability makes it easier for you to track image builds and troubleshoot build failures. This release also consolidates logs making it easier for you to audit and review builds. Additionally, workflow optimizations provide faster image builds, with internal tests showing up to 35% build speed improvements.

AWS is pleased to announce two new features in the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool)—Consolidated Report and Enhanced Search—that will enable customers to quickly identify risk themes across their workloads and scale improvements across their organization.

Amazon Athena announces that Amazon Athena for Apache Spark is now available in 4 new AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). This release expands Amazon Athena for Apache Spark beyond the 5 regions available today: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland)

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports Hard Disk Drive (HDD) volumes and io2 Block Express EBS volume types. You can start saving cost and improving performance on those EBS volumes with the optimization recommendations.

Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is now available in 18 additional regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Canada (Central), Europe (Zurich), EU (Milan), Europe (Spain), EU (London), EU (Paris), Middle East (UAE), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (Sao Paulo), and US West (N. California).

We are excited to announce search and discovery of AWS resources and AWS documentation content in the AWS Chatbot. The search feature allows customers to find their AWS resources and discover relevant AWS Documentation by simply typing queries in natural language.

Amazon DevOps Guru for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. With this capability, you can resolve RDS for PostgreSQL related performance bottlenecks in minutes rather than days. DevOps Guru for RDS for RDS PostgreSQL supports both reactive insights, anomalous behavior that has already occurred, as well as proactive insights, informing you of impending database performance and availability issues before they become critical.

Today, AWS Site-to-Site VPN announces Tunnel Endpoint Lifecycle Control, a new capability that provides better visibility and control of your VPN tunnel maintenance updates.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now provides ready-to-use models so you can generate insights from thousands of documents, images, and lines of text in minutes. Additionally, you can now create custom models to address natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) use cases. SageMaker Canvas is a visual interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate machine learning (ML) predictions on their own—without requiring any ML experience or having to write a single line of code. 

Amazon Omics now supports batch import of variant data into Omics variant stores. You can now import up to 1,000 variant call format (VCF) and genome VCF (gVCF) files in a single variant import job. This simplifies how you bring population scale variant data into Omics and make it available for analysis.

AWS Compute Optimizer no longer requires EC2 instances to have 30 consecutive hours of utilization data to generate recommendations. EC2 instances that have non-consecutive 30 hours of utilization data during the 14 days period (for EC2 instances without enhanced infrastructure metrics) or up to 93 days (for EC2 instances with enhanced infrastructure metrics) can get cost and performance optimization recommendations.

Amazon GuardDuty expands threat detection coverage to continuously monitor and profile Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) container runtime activity to identify malicious or suspicious behavior within container workloads. GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring introduces a new lightweight, fully-managed security agent that monitors on-host operating system-level behavior, such as file access, process execution, and network connections. Once a potential threat is detected, GuardDuty generates a security finding that pinpoints the specific container, and includes details such as pod ID, image ID, EKS cluster tags, executable path, and process lineage. GuardDuty EKS Runtime monitoring includes over two dozen new detections at launch, which when combined with GuardDuty EKS Audit Log Monitoring, amounts to more than 50 detections that are tailored to identify threats to Amazon EKS deployments.

Starting today, you can use AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) to migrate and modernize your applications in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

Starting today, you can use AWS WAF in the Europe (Zurich), Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and Australia (Melbourne) regions. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps you protect your web application resources against common web exploits and bots that can affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. You can protect the following resource types: Amazon CloudFront distributions, Amazon API Gateway REST APIs, Application Load Balancer, AWS AppSync GraphQL API, and Amazon Cognito user pools. 

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) C6in instances are available in Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Mumbai, Sydney), Africa (Cape Town), South America (Sao Paulo), Canada (Central), and AWS GovCloud (US-East) Regions. These instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.5 GHz, and are the first x86-based Amazon EC2 instances to offer up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth.

Amazon DataZone is a new data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data across organizational boundaries. Visibility of and access to data are key drivers of innovation and value for business. To provide visibility and access between organizations, Amazon DataZone creates a usage flywheel. The flywheel is driven by data producers, who securely share data and its context, and data consumers, who find answers to business questions in the data.

Today, AWS announces the migration of AWS Knowledge Center articles and videos to AWS re:Post (re:Post) and provides AWS builders a unified experience to access AWS knowledge. With this launch, builders can access trusted, authoritative Knowledge Center content on re:Post to get answers to technical questions. AWS re:Post is a cloud knowledge service that helps builders remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and operate efficiently.

The AWS Toolkits enables easier development faster by supporting AWS SAM Accelerate in the IDEs letting you edit, deploy, and test your code iteratively. This update is supported in Visual Studio Code or JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, Rider, WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion, RubyMine, GoLand and PhpStorm.

AWS DataSync supports copying data from Azure Blob Storage to AWS Storage in preview. Using DataSync, you can move your object data at scale from Azure Blob Storage to AWS Storage services such as Amazon S3. AWS DataSync supports all blob types within Azure Blob Storage and can also be used with Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2.

Starting today, you can use CloudFront Functions to further customize responses to viewers, including changing the HTTP status code and replacing the HTTP body of the response. CloudFront Functions is a serverless edge computing feature on CloudFront built for lightweight HTTP transformations that runs in the 450+ CloudFront edge locations globally. 

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate asynchronous Batch Translation is now available in eight additional regions - US West (Northern California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Paris) and Europe (Stockholm). With this expansion, Amazon Translate asynchronous Batch Translation is supported in 15 regions. Now, AWS customers can reach a wider set of users in many geographies that are increasingly expecting to consume media and interact with organizations in the language of their choice.

Starting today, you can build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models in Europe (Spain) Region.

AWS Service Catalog is now available to customers in four additional AWS Regions: Europe (Zurich), Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and Asia Pacific (Melbourne). 

Amazon SageMaker Python SDK is an open source library for training and deploying machine-learning models on Amazon SageMaker. Amazon SageMaker Python SDK users can now configure default values for parameters such as IAM roles, VPC, and KMS keys. For the full list of supported parameters and APIs, see the SageMaker SDK defaults documentation page.

Starting today, you can build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models in Europe (Zurich) Region.

AWS CodeBuild’s support for Arm using AWS Graviton2 is now available in: Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Asia Pacific (Jakarta).

Today, AWS released new version 1.27 of AWS Copilot that enables customers to fully customize AWS Cloud Formation templates, which AWS Copilot uses to provision the service, environment, pipeline, and job resources. Customers can now use AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) or YAML patches to change any property of those AWS resources. AWS Copilot is a command-line interface (CLI) that makes it easier for customers to build, deploy, and operate containerized applications on AWS by providing common application architecture and infrastructure patterns, user-friendly operational workflows, and configuring deployment pipelines.

Amazon GuardDuty has added new functionality to its integration with AWS Organizations to make it even simpler to enforce threat detection across all accounts in an organization. Since April 2020, GuardDuty customers can leverage its integrations with AWS Organizations to manage GuardDuty for up to 5,000 AWS accounts, as well as automatically apply threat detection coverage to new accounts added to the organization. In some case, this could still result in coverage gaps, for example, if GuardDuty was not applied to all existing accounts, or if it was unintentionally suspended in individual accounts. Now with a few steps in the GuardDuty console, or one API call, delegated administrators can enforce GuardDuty threat detection coverage for their organization by automatically applying the service to all existing and new accounts, as well as automatically identifying and remediating potential coverage drift. To learn more, see the Amazon GuardDuty account management User Guide.

We are excited to announce that Incident Manager now provides on-call schedules, to help you have 24/7 coverage and responsiveness for critical issue. This extends Incident Manager’s capabilities for incident response, helping operations teams more quickly engage, respond, and resolve application availability and performance issues when they occur.

AWS IoT Core, a cloud service that connects billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and routes trillions of messages to AWS services, announce a deeper integration with Amazon Sidewalk. With AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk, customers can now easily provision, onboard, and monitor their Amazon Sidewalk devices. 

Amazon Athena has expanded its encryption settings to improve the security of your query results. With today’s launch, you can now ensure all query results are encrypted at or above a level of encryption that you specify.

NICE DCV version 2023.0 introduces multiple enhancements and features, such as support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and monitor selection for a full-screen remote session on Linux and macOS clients. NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that is designed to help customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system that is purpose built to host container workloads, now supports FireLens. Customers using Bottlerocket with Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) can now benefit from a simpler way to collect logs from Bottlerocket nodes.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) now supports new migration and modernization features, including import/export of source environment inventory lists, a server migration status dashboard, and new application modernization actions. Application Migration Service helps minimize manual processes by automating the conversion of your source servers to run natively on AWS with optional modernization features.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows you to automate deployment of the SAP NetWeaver JAVA Stack application. This launch expands on existing Launch Wizard capabilities that allow you to automate deployment of solutions including SAP HANA database, SAP NetWeaver, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP S/4HANA in accordance with AWS, SAP, and operating system vendor best practices.

Amazon Connect agent workspace now provides programmatic step-by-step guidance that agents can use to identify customer issues and then recommends which actions to take to resolve them. Using Flows, the Amazon Connect no-code/low-code drag-and-drop design interface, you can design a guide that presents what the agent should review or do at a given moment during a customer interaction. This guidance helps decrease the time it takes to train new agents and helps all agents become more productive.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) announces domainless Group Managed Service Account (gMSA) support for Windows containers. This helps customers to easily authenticate applications hosted on Amazon EKS with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) using a portable user identity and a plug-in mechanism to retrieve the gMSA credentials for their Windows containers. Now, customers can run containers that require AD authentication without joining the EKS nodes to the domain, even in case of autoscaling events.

We are pleased to announce that as of today, new Cost Explorer users will automatically receive the benefit of Cost Anomaly Detection. Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to continuously monitor, detect, and alert customers of unexpected cost increases. The default configuration allows new Cost Explorer users to quickly improve cost controls with zero effort.

Amazon Chime SDK now offers real-time call analytics to help businesses extract insights from voice conversations. Machine learning (ML) powers call insights include speaker search and voice tone analysis. Customers can gain additional ML-powered intelligence such as turn-by-turn transcripts, customer and agent sentiment, through integrations with Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics. These insights can be consumed in real-time and after completion of a call, by accessing a data lake, and they can be visualized using tools such as Amazon QuickSight. Additionally, businesses can record voice conversations to the S3 bucket of their choice.

AWS Glue Crawler now supports enhanced crawl capabilities in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, simplifying running Crawlers with AWS Lake Formation, discovering datasets, and populating schema in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Today we are launching the Amazon Chime SDK integration with Amazon Lex for chatbots, enabling builders to develop persistent conversational chat interfaces using a simplified architecture. The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and chat capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Amazon Lex provides automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies so you can build conversational interfaces. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 3TiB (u-3tb1.56xlarge) of memory are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region and instances with 9TiB (u-9tb1.112xlarge) of memory are now available in the 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 support for defining where a Jupyter Enterprise Gateway (JEG) pod can be deployed when running interactive Spark workloads using managed endpoints. Amazon EMR on EKS enables customers to run open-source big data frameworks such as Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. Amazon EMR on EKS customers setup and use a managed endpoint (available in preview) to run interactive workloads using integrated development environments (IDEs) such as EMR Studio.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.3.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 3.3.2 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include enhancements to fetch from the closest replica and metrics. Amazon MSK will continue to use and manage Zookeeper for quorum management in this release. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 3.3.2.

Today we launched new observability features including log patterns, metrics analytics and support for Jaeger traces with OpenSearch 2.5 in Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Amazon Detective has increased the daily quota limits for behavior graph data volumes. With the increased limits, Detective can now ingest up to 10 TB per day to help you conduct more comprehensive security investigations and provide broader summaries and visualizations of behaviors in your AWS accounts.

We are excited to announce the support for EKS clusters with both managed and self-managed node groups when using interactive Spark workloads via managed managed endpoints. Amazon EMR on EKS enables  customers to run open-source big data frameworks such as Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. Amazon EMR on EKS customers setup and use a managed endpoint (available in preview) to run interactive workloads using integrated development environments (IDEs) such as EMR Studio.

Amazon Connect now allows you to use custom task templates using the “Create task” block in Connect Flows, making it easier for agents to capture the right information to create and complete tasks. Amazon Connect Tasks empowers you to prioritize, assign, and track all contact center agent tasks to completion, improving agent productivity and ensuring customer issues are quickly resolved. For example, you can create tasks for scenarios such as investigating billing issues or new insurance claims using pre-defined task templates in flows and pre-populate data for agents with the information needed to quickly resolve the issue. Task templates are supported out-of-the box with no need for manual configuration for the Amazon Connect agent workspace.

Today we are excited to announce the availability of AWS Service Catalog in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region. AWS Service Catalog enables customers to create, govern, and manage a catalog of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates that are approved for use on AWS. These IaC templates can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. Service Catalog helps you centrally curate and share commonly deployed templates across teams to achieve consistent governance and meet compliance requirements. End-users such as engineers, database administrators, and data scientists can then quickly discover and self-service approved AWS resources that they need to use to perform their daily job functions.

Today, AWS announces the release of an allow listing feature that helps you test and enable the new fine-grained IAM permissions for AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account services.

We are excited to announce that Amazon GameLift now supports per-second billing for both Linux and Windows instances. Amazon GameLift is a fully managed solution that allows you to manage and scale dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. With this update, customers will only pay for Amazon GameLift usage in one second increments, with a minimum of 1 minute. 

Deadline 10.2.1 is now generally available and adds new functionality with support for launching and managing Spot Fleets in multiple AWS regions from the same Spot Event Plugin and a new worker version tag for instances running on Amazon EC2.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports setting content-type request headers for HTTP/S notifications. This enables your topic subscribers to create a DeliveryPolicy that specifies the content-type value that Amazon SNS assigns to their HTTP/S notifications, such as application/json, application/xml, or text/plain. With this launch, applications can receive their notifications in a more predictable format.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now lets developers combine video from multiple hosts into the source for a live stream. With this feature, Amazon IVS adds a new resource called a stage. A stage is a virtual space where participants can exchange audio and video in real time. You then broadcast a stage to Amazon IVS channels to reach a larger audience. You can also build applications where audience members can be brought “on stage” to contribute to the live conversation.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Elastic Clusters are now available in 3 Asia Pacific regions - Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. DocumentDB Elastic Clusters are a new type of DocumentDB cluster that enables you to elastically scale your document database to handle millions of reads and writes per second with petabytes of storage.

AWS IoT TwinMaker is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, extending the service footprint to seven AWS Regions.

Amazon Aurora now supports disaster recovery capabilities of Global Database and Cross-Region database cluster snapshot copying in Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region.

Amazon Redshift launched a new getting started experience with the Amazon Redshift Serverless free trial. This will be the recommended path for first time users in regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is already available, and will replace the Redshift DC2.large based free trial for provisioned clusters. In regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is not yet available, customers can continue to use the two-month free trial of DC2.large node in provisioned clusters. 

Today, we are announcing the availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and Middle East (UAE) Regions. AWS Backup is a policy-based, fully managed, cost-effective solution that enables you to centralize and automate data protection of Amazon S3 along with other AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) and third-party applications. Together with AWS Organizations, AWS Backup enables you to centrally deploy policies to configure, manage, and govern your data protection activity. 

Starting today, Amazon Security Lake (Preview) is available in AWS Regions Asia Pacific (Singapore), Europe (London), and South America (Sao Paulo). You can now automatically centralize your security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account. 

AWS Resilience Hub has added Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) as a supported resource. Resilience Hub provides a single place to define, validate, and track the resilience of your applications so that you can avoid unnecessary downtime caused by software, infrastructure, or operational disruptions. Amazon EKS is a managed service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Europe (Spain), and Europe (Zurich) AWS Regions. You can now use Security Hub to centrally view and manage the security posture of your AWS accounts in those Regions and take advantage of more than 80 security controls to automatically check your security posture.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler now supports OAuth based authentication with identity providers including Okta, Microsoft Azure AD, and Ping Federate to access data in Snowflake for machine learning (ML). Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for ML from weeks to minutes using a visual interface in Amazon SageMaker Studio.

Today, we are announcing the availability of Route 53 Resolver Query Logging in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. Route 53 Resolver Query Logging enables you log DNS queries that originate in your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs). With query logging enabled, you can see which domain names have been queried, the AWS resources from which the queries originated - including source IP and instance ID - and the responses that were received.

Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) now provides contextual failure reasons that make it easier to troubleshoot task launch failures when customers use capacity providers for auto scaling the compute capacity in their cluster.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports PostgreSQL major version 15. PostgreSQL 15 includes new features such as the SQL standard "MERGE" command for conditional SQL queries, performance improvements for both in-memory and disk-based sorting, support for two-phase commit, and row/column filtering for logical replication. The PostgreSQL 15 release also adds support for server-side compression with Gzip, LZ4, or Zstandard (zstd) using pg_basebackup. For more details about this release, refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement. You can also enforce SCRAM (Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism) password-based authentication for your proxy. 

AWS Batch now enables you to configure ephemeral storage up to 200 GiB in size on AWS Fargate type jobs. This means that you can expand the available ephemeral storage beyond the default value of 20 GiB for your jobs when using Fargate as the compute platform on AWS Batch. With this launch, you no longer need to limit the size of the Docker images to run machine learning inferences or the size of the data sets in the container for data processing to be under 20GiB. You can configure the ephemeral storage to be as large as 200GiB to run larger sized workloads. 

Application Load Balancer (ALB) now supports version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, enabling you to optimize the performance of your backend application servers while helping to keep your workloads secure. TLS 1.3 on ALB works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the load balancer. TLS 1.3 is optimized for performance and security by using one round trip (1-RTT) TLS handshakes, and only supporting ciphers that provide perfect forward secrecy.

Today, AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of language Transform called ‘AWS::LanguageExtensions' to Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), and Middle East (UAE) Regions. When declared in a template, the transform enables extensions to the template language in AWS CloudFormation. The language extensions transform expands the functionality of the base CloudFormation JSON/YAML template language.

You can now use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to build, scale, and deploy event-driven applications based on changes to the data you store in Amazon S3. This makes it easier to act on new data in Amazon S3, build multiple applications that react to object changes simultaneously, and replay past events, all without creating additional copies of objects or developing new software. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces Amazon CloudFront expansion in Peru by launching a new edge location in Lima. Customers in Perú can expect up to 50 percent improvement in latency, on average, for data delivered through the new edge location to provide end users faster, more responsive applications. The new AWS edge location brings the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront, a highly distributed and scalable content delivery network (CDN) that delivers static and dynamic content, APIs, and live and on-demand video. Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of 450+ points of presence (POPs) and 13 regional edge caches in 90+ cities across 49 countries to deliver content to end users.

Amazon WorkDocs now offers Search Resources API for builders to programmatically search files and folders that you have permissions for. The new Search Resources API provides keyword search and a wide array of search result filtering capabilities. Customers can apply filters such as content type, last modified date range, file owner, and labels. The new WorkDocs Search Resources API is available via AWS CLI, SDK and REST endpoints. 

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Clean Rooms, a fully managed analytics service that helps customers collaborate with their partners without sharing or copying one another’s raw data. Companies can create a clean room in minutes, removing the need to build, manage, or maintain their own solutions or move data outside of AWS. 

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Equinix MC1 data center in Muscat, Oman. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except China Beijing, operated by Sinnet), and China (Ningxia, operated by NWCD), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. 

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6in instances, Amazon EC2 M6in and M6idn instances, and Amazon EC2 R6in and R6idn instances are available in bare metal size. These sixth-generation network optimized instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. They are the first x86-based instances offering up to 200 Gbps of network bandwidth. These instances deliver up to 2x more network bandwidth and up to 2x higher packet-processing performance over comparable fifth-generation instances. The instances are built on 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 Web Services announces the ability to run Windows 11 operating system on your Amazon Workspaces hosted on hardware that is dedicated to you in the AWS Cloud. To do this, you must Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and provide a Windows 11 license. You can now offer a consistent desktop experience to your users when they switch between on-premise and virtual desktop deployments. Earlier, BYOL option was only available for Windows 10 operating system. While Windows Server 10 BYOL WorkSpaces are still supported, you can now choose to run WorkSpaces powered by Windows 11 and benefit from new features such as Trust Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0), and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot. Windows 11 is supported for Standard, Performance, Power and PowerPro bundles. For the best experience with video conferencing we recommend using Power or PowerPro bundles only.

Starting today, Application Auto Scaling customers can use tags to manage the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions related to their auto scaled resources. Prior to this launch there was no way for customers to control IAM permissions based on custom resource tags. Now, permissions can be centrally managed for all resources tagged with the same key-value pairs.

Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer now allows you to view the network reachability between your source and destination in your virtual private clouds (VPCs) through Gateway Load Balancers, AWS Network Firewalls, and AWS PrivateLink services. In addition, you can also check network reachability between a source resource and your specified destination IP address. 

You can now download Corretto 20 from our downloads page. This latest version supports the most recent OpenJDK feature release and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

We are excited to announce the support for Graviton3-based instances in Amazon EMR. You can now use Amazon EC2 C7G instances with EMR on EC2 and Amazon EKS. AWS Graviton3 processors are the latest in the AWS Graviton processor family. They provide better compute performance, floating point performance and support DDR5 memory that provides 50% more memory bandwidth as compared to DDR4. Amazon EMR launches support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud C7g (Graviton3) instances which improve cost-performance for Apache Spark workloads by up to 13%. You can improve cost-performance of Spark workloads running on EMR on EKS by up to 15% by migrating to Graviton3-based instances. The benchmark used in this post to arrive at the cost-performance improvement is derived from the industry-standard TPC-DS benchmark, and uses queries from the Spark SQL Performance Tests GitHub repo with the following fixes applied. Performance on your workloads may vary and therefore not yield similar cost savings.

Amazon Connect now provides the ability to configure multiple IAM roles that can be assigned to a single user when using SAML 2.0, enabling you to support user access from multiple identity providers simultaneously. For example, if you are migrating identity providers, you can configure multiple IAM roles associated to a single user and that user will be able to access Amazon Connect from both providers. To learn more about configuring IAM roles for SAML 2.0 in Amazon Connect, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide.

AWS Transfer Family, a service that provides fully managed file transfers for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), in now available in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations now allows you to analyze application binaries, detect incompatibilities, and identify viable modernization pathways such as refactoring and replatforming without assessing your application source code. Strategy Recommendations can now help inspect web application binaries on Windows and Linux Servers and generate incompatibility report that you can leverage to implement viable modernization pathways.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded support of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a target by adding the ability to create an AWS Glue Data Catalog from the Amazon S3 data files generated by AWS DMS. With this integration, you no longer need to run a crawler or additional extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs to create the catalog, and the Amazon S3 data is ready to be queried through other AWS services such as Amazon Athena.

AWS CodeBuild’s support for GPU-based workloads now run on an additional 4vCPU 1GPU machine type suited for less-resource intensive workloads.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports ingesting enriched metadata introduced in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs as part of versions 3 to 5 additional to the default fields. This launch includes metadata fields that provide more insights about the network interface, traffic type, and the path of egress traffic to the destination.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) now supports validation to ensure that data is migrated accurately to S3. 

AWS Backup customers can now back up and restore their virtual machines running on VMware vSphere 8. Virtual machines compatible with ESX 3.x and later can use vSphere 8.0. Additionally, AWS Backup gateway now supports backups and restores of virtual machines configured with multiple vNICs (virtual network interface cards).

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams that enables AWS customers to securely monitor their AWS resources, and respond to operation events in their AWS infrastructure from Microsoft Teams channels where their entire team can quickly review, collaboratively diagnose, and securely run common DevOps commands.

Amazon GuardDuty broadens threat detection coverage to help you protect your data residing in Amazon Aurora databases. GuardDuty RDS Protection is designed to profile and monitor access activity to Aurora databases in your AWS account without impacting database performance. Using tailored machine learning models and integrated threat intelligence, GuardDuty can detect potential threats such as high severity brute force attacks, suspicious logins, and access by known threat actors.

AWS Cloud Map is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne) 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 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 Storage Gateway expands availability to the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Regions enabling customers to deploy and manage hybrid cloud storage for their on-premises workloads.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), our new Linux-based operating system for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run your cloud applications. AL2023 provides seamless integration with various AWS services and development tools and offers optimized performance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Graviton-based instances and AWS Support at no additional licensing cost. Starting with AL2023, a new Amazon Linux major release will be available every 2 years. This cadence provides you with a more predictable release cycle and up to 5 years of support, making it easier for you to plan your upgrades. 

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 Microsoft SharePoint Cloud Connector to index and search documents from SharePoint Cloud.

Starting today, the general-purpose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6a instances and compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances are available in South America (Sao Paulo) region. These instances are powered by third-generation AMD EPYC processors with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.6 GHz, and they are built on the AWS Nitro System. 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 instances offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

We are pleased to announce the alpha release of Mountpoint for Amazon S3, a new open source file client that delivers high throughput access, lowering compute costs for data lakes on Amazon S3. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a file client that translates local file system API calls to S3 object API calls like GET and LIST. It is ideal for read-heavy data lake workloads that process petabytes of data and need Amazon S3’s high elastic throughput to scale up and down across thousands of instances.

Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points now support datasets that are replicated across multiple AWS accounts. Cross-account Multi-Region Access Points simplify object storage access for applications that span both AWS Regions and accounts, avoiding the need for complex request routing logic in your applications. They provide a single global endpoint for your multi-region applications, and dynamically route S3 requests based on policies that you define. This helps you to more easily implement multi-region resilience, latency-based routing, and active-passive failover, even when data is stored in multiple accounts.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports S3 Replication on Outposts. This extends S3’s fully managed approach to replication to S3 on Outposts buckets, helping you meet data residency and data redundancy requirements. With local S3 Replication on Outposts, you can create and configure replication rules to automatically replicate your S3 objects to another Outpost, or to another bucket on the same Outpost. During replication, your S3 on Outposts objects are always sent over your local gateway (LGW), and objects do not travel back to the AWS Region. S3 Replication on Outposts provides an easy and flexible way to automatically replicate data within a specific data perimeter to address your data redundancy and compliance requirements.

We are excited to announce the launch of the updated Amazon GameLift console experience to help customers more intuitively and efficiently manage and scale their game servers. Amazon GameLift is a fully managed solution that allows you to manage and scale dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. With this release, customers can more easily monitor and manage their game server instances and settings from a single interface.

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 Confluence Server Connector to index and search documents from Confluence Server.

Amazon EMR is excited to announce a new capability that enables users to apply AWS Lake Formation based table and column level permissions on Amazon S3 data lake for write operations (i.e., INSERT INTO, INSERT OVERWRITE) with Apache Hive jobs submitted using Amazon EMR Steps API. This feature allows data administrators to define and enforce fine-grained table and column level security for customers accessing data via Apache Hive running on Amazon EMR.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) interface endpoints for Amazon S3 now offer private DNS options that can help you more easily route S3 requests to the lowest-cost endpoint in your VPC. With private DNS for S3, your on-premises applications can use AWS PrivateLink to access S3 over an interface endpoint, while requests from your in-VPC applications access S3 using gateway endpoints. Routing requests like this helps you take advantage of the lowest-cost private network path without having to make code or configuration changes to your clients.

Using Amazon S3 Object Lambda, you can add your own code to S3 GET, HEAD, and LIST API requests to modify data as it is returned to an application. You can now use an S3 Object Lambda Access Point alias as an origin for your Amazon CloudFront distribution to tailor or customize data to end users. For example, you can resize an image depending on the device that an end user is visiting from.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, serverless, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service.

AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3 is now generally available, helping customers easily find, subscribe to, and use third-party data files for faster time to insight, storage cost optimization, simplified data licensing management, and more. This feature is intended for subscribers who want to use third-party data files directly from data providers’ Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, without needing to create or manage data copies, as well as data providers who want to offer in-place access to data hosted in their Amazon S3 buckets.

Application Auto Scaling customers can now use arithmetic operations and mathematical functions to customize the metrics used with Target Tracking policies. Target Tracking works like a thermostat - it continuously changes the capacity of the scaled resource to maintain the scaling metric at the customer-defined target level.  

Amazon Chime SDK now supports Amazon Voice Focus background noise reduction for telephone carrier deployments. Amazon Voice Focus is an award-winning, machine-learning based noise suppression algorithm that reduces unwanted environmental noises like wind, barking dogs, keyboard typing, and car horns from phone calls. Now telecom providers can deploy background noise reduction, at scale, across their voice network for both landline and mobile subscribers.

Amazon OpenSearch Service announces security analytics that provides new threat monitoring, detection, and alerting features. These capabilities help you to detect and investigate potential security threats that may disrupt your business operations or pose a threat to sensitive organizational data. 

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 Confluence Cloud Connector to index and search documents from Confluence Cloud.

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 SharePoint OnPrem Connectors (2013, 2016, 2019) and Subscription Edition to index and search messages from SharePoint OnPrem.

Starting today, customers can update Apple macOS operating system from within the guest environment on their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M1 Mac instances. With this capability, customers can now update their guest environments to a specific or latest macOS (non-beta) version without having to tear down their existing macOS environments, launch new instances, and reinstall libraries, tooling, and dependencies such as Apple Xcode.

Amazon Connect Wisdom now enables agents to receive knowledge recommendations from PDF, Word, HTML, and text documents stored in Microsoft SharePoint Online. In addition to existing connectors for Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk, companies that use SharePoint to store information such as policies and product information can now use Microsoft SharePoint Online with Wisdom. Wisdom analyzes contact center calls in real-time and proactively delivers agents the information they need to help solve customer issues, and help improve agent productivity and caller satisfaction.

Starting today, customers can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) AWS Region.

You can now run OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards version 2.5 in Amazon OpenSearch Service. With OpenSearch 2.5, OpenSearch Service adds several new features and enhancements such as support for Security Analytics, support for Point in Time Search, improvements to observability and geospatial functionality.

Amazon QuickSight now offers the hide collapsed column control to help users better manage collapsed columns in their pivot tables. Authors can use this control to automatically hide collapsed row header fields, eliminating the need for unnecessary scrolling and making pivot tables look more compact and organized. To learn more, click here.

Starting today, Amazon Neptune supports R6i instances powered by 3rd generation Xeon Scalable processors. R6i instances are the 6th generation of Amazon EC2 memory optimized instances, designed for memory-intensive workloads. R6i instances provide up to 50 Gbps of networking speed, 2x that of R5 instances, and up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to R5 instances.

Amazon Neptune now supports graph summary API to help you understand important metadata about your property graphs (PG) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs. Starting with engine version 1.2.1.0, you can use the graph summary API for fast access to summary data about your graph.

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Europe (Zurich) Region.

Today, Amazon Neptune adds support for Slow Query Logs to help identify queries that need performance tuning. You can now identify slow-running queries and log runtime details for these queries’ key performance indicators such as query execution time, and response codes to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Today, we are excited to announce Systems Manager Favorites, a quick way for customers to find and execute their most important and frequently used documents and runbooks. Documents and runbooks define the actions that Systems Manager performs on your managed instances and other AWS resources. Now, you can select up to 20 of your favorite documents or runbooks per category that will appear in a centralized favorites tab in the Systems Manager Automation or Documents consoles.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) announces the addition of two new metrics to its Email Receiving service without additional charges, providing customers with greater visibility into message processing workflows. The move is inspired by valuable customer feedback, which highlighted the desire for a more comprehensive set of metrics, empowering customers to effectively test their setup and pinpoint potential issues.

We are excited to announce support for customer-level metrics when running interactive Spark workloads via managed endpoints. Amazon EMR on EKS enables customers to run open-source big data frameworks such as Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. Amazon EMR on EKS customers can setup and use a managed endpoint (available in preview) to run interactive workloads using integrated development environments (IDEs) such as EMR Studio.

AWS License Manager extends support for delegated administrator to Linux subscriptions discovery and governance capabilities. Using delegated administrator, your management account can give access to another account in your organization to track Linux subscriptions on AWS. Delegated administrator gives you the flexibility to separate subscription management from billing and other central management tasks.

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. Data Wrangler enables you to access data from a wide variety of popular sources (Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR Presto, Snowflake) and over 40 other third-party sources. Starting today, you can connect to Amazon EMR Hive as a big data query engine to bring in very large datasets for ML.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers can now create and manage clusters in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region.

Starting today, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can create their own Prefix Lists in two additional AWS Regions: Europe (Zurich) and Middle East (UAE) Region.

Amazon Connect now provides a new API to programmatically access trailing 14 days of historical agent and contact metrics data. This new API extends the capabilities of current GetMetricData API, that provides historical metrics data only for the last 24 hours, provides new metrics (e.g., number of contacts disconnected or callbacks attempted) and the ability to filter metrics with more granularity. For example, using the GetMetricDataV2 API, businesses can now build custom analytics dashboards to understand how many contacts were disconnected by an agent or because the customer hung up. 

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location in Auckland, New Zealand. By connecting your network to AWS at the new Auckland location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones.

Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints now supports IPv6, allowing you to forward traffic to and resolve traffic from on-premises Domain Name System (DNS) servers with IPv6 addresses. 

Amazon Redshift now allows you to get started with Amazon Redshift Serverless with a lower data warehouse base capacity configuration of 8 Redshift Processing Units (RPU). Amazon Redshift Serverless measures data warehouse capacity in RPU and you pay only for the duration of workloads you run in RPU-hours on a per-second basis. Previously the minimum base capacity required to run serverless was 32 RPU. With the new lowered base capacity minimum of 8 RPU, you now have even more flexibility to support diverse set of workloads of small to large complexity based on your price performance requirements.

Amazon MQ now provides support for RabbitMQ version 3.10.17, which includes several important fixes and performance optimizations to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.10.10. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easier to set up and operate message brokers on AWS. You can reduce your operational burden by using Amazon MQ to manage the provisioning, setup, and maintenance of message brokers. Amazon MQ connects to your current applications with industry-standard APIs and protocols to help you easily migrate to AWS without having to rewrite code.

QuickSight Embedding SDK is a Javascript library that allows developers to integrate analytics functionality into their products and applications. The SDK version 2.0 supports TypeScript, ES6 (async/await) syntax, and utility features that enable developers to quickly build analytics experiences within their applications. 

AWS Glue now displays continuous logs on the job run details page of AWS Glue Studio. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration and ETL service that helps discover, prepare, move, and integrate data for analytics and machine learning (ML). As your ETL and data integration jobs run, you can now see the logs update in real-time.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports the latest minor versions PostgreSQL 14.7, 13.10, 12.14, and 11.19. We recommend you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the PostgreSQL community. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement for more details about the release.

AWS Glue now offers guided permissions setup in AWS Console. AWS Glue is a serverless data integration and ETL service that helps discover, prepare, move, and integrate data for analytics and machine learning (ML). Administrators can use the new setup tool to grant IAM roles and users access to AWS Glue and their data, as well as a default role for running jobs.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports Amazon RDS Optimized Writes enabling up to 2x higher write throughput at no additional cost. This is especially useful for RDS for MariaDB customers with write-intensive database workloads, commonly found in applications such as digital payments, financial trading, and online gaming.

Today, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) announces the general availability of Fleet Advisor target recommendations, which gathers performance metrics and usage patterns of self-managed databases to recommend potential database engine and instance options for migration to AWS. Target recommendations can help to quickly identify the best migration option, based on estimated costs and limitations for each migration path.

Amazon Redshift now supports up to 200K tables for Redshift Serverless and for data warehouse clusters with ra3.4xlarge, ra3.16xlarge, and dc2.8xlarge node types. This feature is intended for customers with workloads that require a large number of tables to run with Amazon Redshift without having to split the tables across multiple warehouses.

AWS Security Hub now supports automated security checks aligned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53 Revision 5 (NIST SP 800-53 r5). Security Hub’s NIST SP 800-53 r5 standard includes up to 224 automated controls that conduct continual checks against 121 NIST SP 800-53 r5 requirements across 36 AWS services. This includes 10 new security controls that are unique to this standard.

AWS announces the general availability of the Open Data Maps feature for Amazon Location Service. Open Data Maps is a new data provider option for the Maps feature based on 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 commercial data provider options from Esri, HERE, and GrabMaps, Open Data Maps now gives developers more choices to integrate maps into their applications, enabling them to leverage OSM’s flexible licensing terms and continuously improving data quality.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports streaming data delivery to Elastic. With this integration, Elastic users have an easier way to ingest streaming data to Elastic and consume the Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) solutions for enterprise search, observability, and security without having to manage applications or write code. 

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now supports authentication of database users using Microsoft Active Directory. You can use Active Directory to authenticate with Amazon Aurora using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory or with your on-premise Active Directory by establishing a trusted domain relationship.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region. RDS Proxy is a fully managed and a highly available database proxy for RDS and Amazon Aurora databases. RDS Proxy helps improve application scalability, resiliency, and security. 

AWS Config now supports 18 more resource types for services, including AWS Device Farm, AWS Budgets, Amazon Lex, Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, AWS IoT Core, Amazon Route 53 Resolver, AWS RoboMaker, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS IoT SiteWise, Amazon Lookout for Metrics, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Elemental MediaPackage.

Deletion protection is now available for Amazon DynamoDB tables in all AWS Regions. DynamoDB now makes it possible for you to protect your tables from accidental deletion when performing regular table management operations. When creating new tables or managing existing tables, authorized administrators can set the deletion protection property for each table, which will govern whether a table can be deleted. The default setting for the deletion protection property is disabled. When the deletion protection property is enabled for a table, the table cannot be deleted, irrespective of whether any AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions policies allow deletion of the table. When deletion protection is disabled for a table, authorized administrators can delete the table if allowed by IAM permissions policies. The deletion protection property can be set through the AWS Management Console, AWS API, AWS CLI, AWS SDK, or AWS CloudFormation.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now has enhanced color processing features along with support for new color formats. As High Dynamic Range (HDR) content becomes more common, the ability to convert between Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) and HDR has also become important. While high-value content is commonly created using HDR color, most legacy, user-generated, and mass-produced content is created in SDR.

We are excited to launch delegated administrator for AWS Organizations to help you delegate the management of your Organizations policies, enabling you to govern your AWS organization and member accounts with increased agility and decentralization. You can now allow member accounts to manage policy types specific to their needs. By specifying fine-grained permissions, you can balance flexibility with limiting access to your highly privileged management accounts.

AWS Glue now supports Streaming ETL in version 4.0, a new version of AWS Glue that accelerates data integration workloads in AWS. AWS Glue 4.0 upgrades data integration engines, including an upgrade to Apache Spark 3.3.0 and to Python 3.10.

AWS Resource Explorer supports 12 more resource types from services including Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon ElastiCache.

AWS Application Composer helps you simplify and accelerate architecting, configuring, and building serverless applications. You can drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture by using the AWS Application Composer 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.

Starting today, storage optimized Amazon EC2 I3 bare metal instance is now also available in Middle East (Bahrain) region. Amazon EC2 I3 instances (i3.metal) provides your applications with direct access to the compute and memory resources of the underlying next generation AWS hardware and software infrastructure.

Today, AWS launches the 2023 season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League - where developers of all skill levels advance their knowledge of machine learning (ML) and compete in the world’s first global autonomous racing league!

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 with Amazon Redshift clusters in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 makes data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse and data lake more accessible with a web-based tool for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, and database developers. With Query Editor V2, users can explore, analyze, and collaborate on data. It reduces the operational costs of managing query tools by providing a web-based application that allows you to focus on exploring your data without managing your infrastructure.

AWS Snowball Edge devices are now available in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

AWS Lambda now supports configuring up to 10,240 MB of ephemeral storage for functions in 6 additional regions - Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich) and Middle East (UAE). This feature makes it easier to build and run data intensive workloads with Lambda functions.

Amazon Aurora now extends the disaster recovery capabilities of Global Database and Cross-Region database cluster snapshot copying in nine additional AWS Regions, including Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta ), Europe (Milan, Spain, Zurich) and Middle East (Bahrain, UAE).

You can now use Credential Control Properties to more easily restrict the usage of your IAM Roles for EC2.

AWS IoT Device Management Jobs add the capability for customers to schedule their remote actions within a maintenance window. Job scheduling allowed customers to define the start and end time of a job rollout. Following today's launch, Customers can configure the maintenance window recurrence on daily, weekly or monthly schedule (e.g. “Monday-Wednesday-Friday”) or define a customized recurrence for Continuous Jobs . Devices that are added to target groups receive job execution notifications only within the pre-configured maintenance window duration without requiring any changes on device-side software. Customers with devices located in different time zones can also utilize this feature in combination with Dynamic Thing Groups and Device Shadow to schedule Job executions according to the local time of their devices (see this blog). With Maintenance Window configuration, customers can automate device software updates to their enterprise or industrial assets based on devices' software deployment cycles.  

Starting today, AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces supports creating refactor environments without an AWS Transit Gateway based network bridge. This feature lets you safely and incrementally refactor your application while using your existing network infrastructure. You can now create refactor environments with your network infrastructure in minutes while benefiting from Refactor Spaces’ orchestration and management of policies, routing, API Gateway, and Network Load Balancer.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now available in the Middle East (UAE) AWS Region. Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka as a data store. Amazon MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka, which enables you to quickly migrate your existing Apache Kafka workloads to Amazon MSK with confidence or build new ones from scratch. With Amazon MSK, you spend more time building innovative streaming applications and less time managing Kafka clusters. 

You can now create a single AMI that can boot on both Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Legacy BIOS.

AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easier for you to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. CloudShell uses your AWS Console credentials for pre-authentication. Common development tools are pre-installed so that no local installation or configuration is required. With CloudShell, you can run scripts with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), define infrastructure with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), experiment with AWS service APIs using the AWS SDKs, or use a range of other tools to help you increase your productivity. 

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports time-weighted average (timeweightedavg) and time-weighted standard deviation (timeweightedstdev) functions that make it easier to automatically factor in the numerical levels of a particular variable, as well as the amount of time spent in that variable. With the new time-series functions, process engineers can define metrics for time-series data that isn’t regularly sampled and get a representative view of their operations.

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location in Hamburg, Germany. By connecting your network to AWS at the new location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones.

Starting today, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you add a VPC endpoint using AWS PrivateLink that connects through the AWS KMS Regional endpoint that has been validated under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 program. With this new launch, you can easily use AWS PrivateLink with AWS KMS for those regulated workloads that require a secure connection using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module.

We are excited to announce support for the Amazon Graviton2 instance family in four additional regions. Supported instance types include compute optimized (C6g), general purpose (M6g), and memory optimized (R6g) instances. Support for C6g, M6g, and R6g is available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), and Europe (Milan) regions.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, enabling customers to deploy essential network protections for all their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

Today Amazon Timestream launched Batch Load, a new feature for ingesting batched time series data into Timestream. Batch Load provides customers with a robust, serverless, and scalable solution to migrate data from CSV files stored in S3 directly into Timestream. With Batch Load, customers specify one or more source files, the target Timestream database and table, and a data model to apply. Batch Load then automatically and reliably ingests the data in parallel. Learn more by visiting the 5-minute Batch Load demo video or the developer guide below.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) continues to increase compatibility with MongoDB, and now offers added support for MongoDB 5.0 drivers with Amazon DocumentDB 5.0. Amazon DocumentDB is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB API based workloads. Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy and intuitive to store, index, and query JSON data.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.3.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 3.3.2 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include enhancements to fetch from the closest replica and metrics. Amazon MSK will continue to use and manage Zookeeper for quorum management in this release. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 3.3.2.

AWS Step Functions Distributed Map is now available in Middle East (UAE), Europe (Spain and Zurich), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and Australia (Melbourne) Regions.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad and Melbourne) regions. Blue/Green Deployments help you with safer, simpler, and faster updates to your Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS databases. 

AWS Control Tower announces a new progress tracker that depicts milestones and related statuses of the landing zone setup and upgrade process. A landing zone is a well-architected, multi-account AWS environment that is a starting point from which you can deploy workloads and applications. AWS Control Tower automates the setup of a new landing zone using AWS best-practices blueprints for identity, federated access, logging, monitoring, and account structure. 

Amazon Lightsail now offers Amazon Lightsail for Research, a new offering that makes it simple for you to accelerate your research using the power of the cloud. Lightsail for Research provides access to analytical applications such as Scilab, RStudio, and Jupyter running on powerful virtual computers in just a few clicks.

Amazon Detective finding groups now include a dynamic visual representation of the behavior graph of Detective to emphasize the relationships between security findings and the associated entities within a finding group. This addition makes it easier for customers to triage potential security issues with at-a-glance visuals that include finding types, severity levels, associated account(s), and linkages within the Detective behavioral graph that can be used to investigate related activity within a finding group.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) Token-Based Access (TBA) for fully managed Ethereum nodes. TBA provides a more convenient way for customers to connect to their Ethereum nodes from popular blockchain development tools.  

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS now supports Proactive Insights, a new set of findings that inform you of impending database performance and availability issues before they become critical. With Proactive Insights, Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS continuously monitors database instances for potential issues that can lead to degraded database health in the future. When such conditions are detected, Proactive Insights will generate a finding that describes the nature of the impending problem, and specific actions you can take to mitigate it. Proactive Insights are available for Amazon DevOps Guru customers, with no additional setup or configuration needed. Proactive Insights are supported for Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL database engines at the moment.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server now supports Cross Region Automated Backups with encryption. The Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups feature enables disaster recovery capability for mission-critical databases by providing you the ability to restore your database to a specific point in time within your backup retention period. This allows you to quickly resume operations in the event that the primary AWS Region becomes unavailable. If you've enabled encryption on the source RDS for SQL Server DB instance, you can use this feature to copy encrypted DB snapshots to regions outside of the primary AWS region.

Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option in Amazon EMR that makes it easy for data engineers and data scientists to run open-source big data analytics frameworks without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters or servers. Today, we are excited to announce that you can use your own Customer Managed Keys (CMK) with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt EMR Serverless application logs when stored in managed storage and in Amazon S3 buckets.

Amazon Comprehend announced self-service flywheel APIs to simplify the retraining and version management of custom Comprehend models. 

AWS App Runner expands availability to the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore), AWS Europe (Frankfurt), and AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions, enabling customers to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and API services in AWS cloud, at scale, and without managing infrastructure.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports an increased On-Demand write throughput limit to 1 GB/s, a 5x increase from the current limit of 200 MB/s. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store streaming data at any scale. On-Demand is a capacity mode for Kinesis Data Streams that automates capacity management, so that you never have to provision and manage the scaling of resources. In the On-Demand mode you pay for throughput consumed rather than for provisioned resources, making it easier to balance costs and performance.

Starting today, Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition 3 (with MySQL 8.0 compatibility) supports MySQL 8.0.26. In addition to several security enhancements and bug fixes, MySQL 8.0.26 includes several changes, such as enhanced tablespace file segment page configuration and new aliases for certain identifier names. For more details, please review Aurora MySQL 3 and MySQL 8.0.26 release notes.

Starting today, Amazon Neptune Serverless has lowered its minimum scaling requirements to 1 Neptune Capacity Unit (NCU) from 2.5 NCUs. This brings down the cost of running Neptune Serverless by reducing the resources used by up to 2.5X when the graph database is not actively responding to user queries. With a 1 NCU minimum, you could save on your graph database by using Neptune Serverless.