December 2023

Amazon EMR Release 7.0 ships with Amazon Linux 2023 and features Apache Spark 3.5 running on Amazon Corretto Release 17 (built on OpenJDK) by default. It supports the latest versions of Python 3.9, glibc 2.34, and enables you to ensure consistency of package versions and updates across your environment. The latest release ships with AWS SDK for Java 2.20.160, and upgrades to the latest versions for Apache Flink 1.18 and latest open table formats (Apache Iceberg 1.4.2, Apache Hudi 0.14 and Delta 3.0).

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch metrics support in AWS CodeArtifact, expanding the monitoring options available to CodeArtifact users. Customers can use CloudWatch metrics to monitor all requests made to CodeArtifact per account to better understand their usage.

Today, we would like to announce expansion of AWS Mainframe Modernization service to four additional regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), and Europe (Stockholm). 

Starting today, the EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Europe (Zurich), and Europe (Spain) AWS Regions. Hibernation is an Amazon EC2 feature that helps lower costs and achieve faster startup times by enabling customers to pause and resume their running instances at scale. Customers are not billed for compute time while instances are suspended, only their storage volumes, and applications will resume from right where they left off. 

Amazon SageMaker Studio offers integrated development environments (IDEs) for machine learning (ML) development. Studio provides tools for data preparation, experimentation and production to boost productivity. Studio users can now run SageMaker processing, training, inference and batch transform jobs locally on their Studio IDE instance. Users can also build and test SageMaker compatible Docker images locally in Studio IDEs. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now surfaces cluster-related health issues in the EKS console and API, providing administrators enhanced visibility into the health of their clusters. Cluster health status information helps customers to quickly diagnose, troubleshoot, and remedy issues with their clusters, enabling them to run more up-to-date and secure application environments.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region. You may now configure and operate MediaPackage using the console or API endpoints in this region.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers can now leverage EC2 security groups to secure applications in clusters using Internet Protocol version 6(IPv6) address space.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the Security Improvement Program (SIP) for Enterprise On-Ramp (EOP) customers. SIP empowers you to understand best practices in securing your AWS environment in addition to internal system checks. SIP measures your AWS environment against 90+ critical security best practices and provides tactical level improvement recommendations to improve your security posture.

You can now use projects from your GitLab self-managed instance (GitLab Enterprise Edition, GitLab Community Edition) to build, test, and deploy code changes using AWS CodePipeline. You can connect your GitLab self-managed instance that is in a VPC or directly accessible using AWS CodeStar Connections, and use the connection in your pipeline to automatically start a pipeline execution on changes in your repository.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically update the priority of contacts (e.g., voice calls, callbacks, chats, tasks). With this API, you can now update the position of a contact in a queue directly from your custom monitoring dashboards. You can already change a contact’s priority and/or customers position in queue using the ”Change routing priority/age“ flow block in the Amazon Connect web UI. To learn more about the new UpdateContactRoutingData API, see the Amazon Connect API reference guide and UpdateContactRoutingData help documentation.

We are excited to announce the launch of a new easy and secure way to remotely connect to the model training environment in Amazon SageMaker for improved observability and quick debugging.

With AWS Elemental Mediatailor, you can now begin playback of a Standard Channel Assembly channel outside of the current live window using the time shifting feature.

Amazon EC2 Console is announcing that its new and improved launch experience is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This experience gives console users an easier and faster way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout allowing users to view settings in a single location. With this update, AWS GovCloud (US) customers do not need to navigate between multiple steps to ensure their configuration is correct. It also introduces a summary panel which provides an overview and improves page navigation.

Starting today, remediating non-compliant resources with AWS Config rules is available in Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. This feature gives you the ability to associate and execute remediation actions with AWS Config rules to address noncompliant resources. You can choose from a list of available remediation actions. For example, you can create an AWS Config rule to check that your Amazon S3 buckets does not allow public read access. You can then associate a remediation action to disable public access for noncompliant S3 buckets.

With zero buffering, customers can deliver data to Amazon S3, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and third-party HTTP destinations within seconds enabling real time use cases. 

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), Israel (Tel Aviv), and Middle East (UAE) AWS Regions. IAM Roles Anywhere enables workloads that run outside of AWS to use X.509 digital certificates to obtain temporary AWS credentials using the same IAM roles and policies that you have configured for your AWS workloads to access AWS resources.

Amazon EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics applications written in PySpark, Python, Scala, and R. Today, we are excited to announce that you can set user level permissions for Git repositories in Amazon EMR Studio.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports the HypoPG extension for creating hypothetical indexes, which lets you test the performance impact of an index on query plans before you build it.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports the h3-pg extension, which provides an API to H3, an open-source hexagonal, hierarchical geospatial indexing system. With this extension, you can perform different kinds of spatial analysis over large datasets, including efficient indexing and lookups, modeling flow through a grid, and applying machine learning models over your geospatial data stored in Aurora PostgreSQL.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R7iz instances are available in AWS Region Europe (Frankfurt) and AWS Region Asia Pacific (Tokyo). R7iz instances are powered by 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Sapphire Rapids) with an all core turbo frequency up to 3.9 GHz, and built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS-designed hardware and software innovations that enables the delivery of efficient and flexible cloud services with enhanced security, isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch Network Monitor, as a new feature of Amazon CloudWatch that helps monitor network availability and performance between AWS and your on-premises environments.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports the rds_extension database role which provides a cluster administrator the ability to delegate create, alter, or drop extension operations to lower privileged users. The cluster administrator can use the new rds.allowed_delegated_extensions DB parameter to limit which extensions a member of the rds_extension role can manage. To get started, take a look at our Working with extensions and foreign data wrappers page.

AWS Launch Wizard now allows you to automate deployment of single-node SAP NetWeaver-based applications running on SAP ASE databases in addition to SAP HANA. Additionally, you can now choose to configure EC2 instances deployed through Launch Wizard with additional Virtual IP/Hostnames. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)15 SP5; SLES for SAP 15 SP5, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.8 and RHEL 9.0 are now also supported by Launch Wizard for ASE and HANA deployments.

Starting today, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Traffic Mirroring is available in four new regions, including AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka), AWS Europe (Milan), AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and AWS Africa (Cape Town).

Amazon CloudFront announces support for 4096-bit RSA TLS certificates (4K certs). Customers can now use 4K certs with their CloudFront distributions to increase the security of HTTPS connection negotiations between viewers and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon RDS for Db2 now supports memory optimized X2iedn DB instances that are well-suited for memory-intensive, read-heavy and high-throughput write operations.

Amazon EMR Serverless now supports AWS Lake Formation for fine-grained data access control with Apache Spark. This enables you to enforce database, table, column, row and cell-level policies for data stored in Amazon S3 from your EMR Serverless Spark jobs. Policies that you define in Lake Formation take effect when you run Spark applications using EMR Studio, AWS CLI, or job orchestrators such as Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions.

Today, Amazon CloudWatch alarms support AWS Lambda functions as an alarm state change action. Customers can now choose to invoke a Lambda function directly when a CloudWatch alarm changes to an OK, ALARM or INSUFFICIENT_DATA state. This makes it easier for customers to automate custom actions on alarm state changes.

AWS Neuron is the SDK for Amazon EC2 Inferentia and Trainium based instances purpose-built for generative AI. Today, with Neuron 2.16 release, we are announcing support for Llama-2 70b model inference on Inf2 instances. 

Amazon Connect Tasks now makes it easier for you to link and track tasks with associated contacts using related contact ID in Connect flows or from the Connect agent workspace. 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. With this new feature, for example, outbound calls made by an agent while resolving a customer follow-up task are now automatically linked providing contact center managers visibility into the agent actions to resolve customer needs. You can now also link tasks with other tasks and contacts using the “Create task” block in Connect flows or the StartTaskContact API by providing the “RelatedContactId” attribute during task creation. 

Starting today, you can build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models in Canada West (Calgary) Region.

In the Amazon Connect agent workspace, customers can now use information from the current contact, such as the customer's phone number, to automatically look up data or take certain actions in a third-party application. For example, when the contact comes in, the agent could see a list of the current customer’s orders in a third-party agent workspace app without needing to do manual searches. This feature helps automate data entry and reduce mistakes, decreasing average handle time and improving customer satisfaction.

Amazon Connect now provides the ability to create and use agent proficiencies for routing a contact to the best available agent in a queue. Each proficiency indicates an agent’s level of expertise in an attribute such as language fluency, skillset, or customer issue types they support. Using agent proficiencies, you can create custom routing requirements so that each customer contact is matched to the available agent best able to drive your desired business outcome. You can also create a series of timed routing steps, so that if your targeted set of agents is not available, you can progressively expand routing to target a wider pool of agents to find the best match. For example, you can set routing criteria where a customer with credit card and auto loans issues can talk to a specialist in both credit card and auto loans (e.g., credit card level 4+ and auto loans 4+). If a match is not found in sufficient time, you can relax the credit card requirement and ensure the matching agent can support the customer’s priority of auto loans (e.g., auto loans 4+).

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides an API to programmatically search for contacts using filters such as contact attributes (time range, agent, channel, queue, etc.) and keywords within a conversation. Using this API, you can build custom user interfaces that enable managers and agents to search for completed or in progress contacts. For example, if you want to discover insights to help lower average handle time for contacts, you can build custom reporting to identify the longest running contacts. 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3 processors that provide up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors, and built on top of the the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed innovations that deliver efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services. Starting today, these instances are available in AWS Region Europe (London).

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB now supports AWS Graviton2-based M6gd database instances in Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Osaka) and Europe (Stockholm) regions, and R6gd database instances in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.

Today, AWS announces two methods to integrate Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL databases with Amazon Bedrock to power generative AI applications. First, Amazon Aurora ML now provides access to foundation models available through Amazon Bedrock directly through SQL. Second, Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports Amazon Aurora as a vector store for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). 

AWS Config now supports 1000 AWS Config rules per Region per account. AWS Config rules, available as predefined managed rules and or as user created custom rules, enable you to define policies that govern cloud resource configurations to meet your compliance requirements. AWS Config continuously tracks the configuration changes that occur among your resources and reports if these changes do not comply with the conditions in your rules.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL versions 15.5, 14.10, 13.13, 12.17. These releases contain product improvements and bug fixes made by the PostgreSQL community, along with Aurora-specific improvements. This release also contains new features and improvements such as group role authentication support using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory with the new pg_ad_mapping extension, Amazon Bedrock integration for Generative AI , and Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL version 3.4. As a reminder, if you are running any version of Amazon Aurora. PostgreSQL 11, you must upgrade to a newer major version by February 29, 2024.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Customer Managed Key (CMK) support in AWS CodeCommit as part of the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Customer managed keys are KMS keys that customers create, manage and own. This capability allows customers to use customer managed keys instead of AWS KMS keys to encrypt CodeCommit repositories at rest.

Today, AWS Backup announces support for SAP HANA High Availability (HA) databases. With this launch, you can now backup and restore your SAP HANA HA databases running on Amazon EC2 instances, alongside single node SAP HANA databases and other currently supported resources. AWS Backup is a fully managed service that centralizes and automates data protection across AWS services and hybrid workloads.

Today we’re excited to announce the latest release of the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) installer with support for Open MPI 5.0.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports a redesigned RDS Data API for Aurora Serverless v2 (ASv2) and Aurora provisioned database instances. You can now access these Aurora clusters via a secure HTTP endpoint and run SQL statements without the use of database drivers and without managing connections.

Starting today, customers can use Amazon Bedrock in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region to easily build and scale generative AI applications. 

Customers can now use customer managed keys defined in AWS Key Management Service to encrypt data residing in their Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspaces. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor and alarm on operational metrics at scale. Prometheus is a popular Cloud Native Computing Foundation open-source project for monitoring and alerting on metrics from compute environments such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. 

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) in the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region.

The Amazon Chime SDK now offers high-definition WebRTC sessions with support for 1080p webcam video and 4K screen share. Developers can choose video encoding bitrates up to 2.5Mbps, frame rates up to 30fps, and the codec, including new options VP9, AV1, and scalable video coding (SVC).

Amazon CodeCatalyst users can now securely access their Dev Environments using SSH over AWS Systems Manager Session Manager. This feature allows users to perform actions on Dev Environments such as port forwarding, and uploading and downloading files that were not possible while using AWS Cloud9. CodeCatalyst is a unified software development service that makes it faster to build and deliver software on AWS. Dev Environments, a feature of CodeCatalyst, are preconfigured, scalable cloud development environments accessible from popular IDEs.

Starting today, you can enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) on Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints to encrypt DNS queries that pass through the endpoints and improve privacy by minimizing the visibility of the information exchanged through the queries. DoH is a protocol that protects DNS traffic by passing the queries through an encrypted HTTPS session. DoH can help enhance privacy by protecting DNS queries from eavesdropping and manipulation from unauthorized users.

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

AWS Clean Rooms has added certification for International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and System and Organization Controls (SOC) reports. Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed.

Today, AWS announced the opening of two new AWS Direct Connect locations within the Equinix CL1 and CL3 data centers in Calgary, Canada. By connecting your network to AWS at the new Calgary locations, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. These sites are the seventh and eighth AWS Direct Connect sites within Canada.

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Canada West (Calgary) Region.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a service that provides fully managed shared storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system, now supports using NetApp System Manager to manage your file systems. 

You can now use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) FIFO topics in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions in combination with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queues, to build applications that require messages to be sent and processed in a strict sequence and without duplicates. SNS FIFO is intended for customer use cases where it is critical to maintain the consistency in processing messages across multiple independent services in a strictly ordered manner. Example use cases include bank transaction logging, stock tickers, flight trackers, news broadcasting, inventory management, vote tabulation, and price updates.

Today, Amazon EKS announces the general availability of upgrade insights, a new feature that surfaces insights about issues that may impact your ability to successfully upgrade a cluster to newer versions of Kubernetes. Upgrade insights are built upon best practices learned by EKS over the course of managing hundreds of thousands of Kubernetes clusters. You can use the EKS APIs and Console to check for upgrade readiness issues detected in your environment at any time against all future Kubernetes versions supported by EKS.

Amazon Connect now provides granular access controls using resource tags configured for hours of operation in the Connect admin website. For example, you can tag hours of operation with Division:HumanResources, and then only let HR administrators see and edit those work hours.

AWS DataSync is now available in the Canada West (Calgary) region. You can now use DataSync to copy data between on-premises, edge, or other cloud storage and AWS Storage services, as well as between AWS Storage services in the Canada West (Calgary) region.

Today, AWS announces a major version release of the Amazon SageMaker model parallel library (SMP), which now is compatible with PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) APIs and can accelerate deep learning model training by up to 20%. SMP enables you to accelerate training of large models with billions of parameters by automatically partitioning and distributing the model across multiple accelerators and compute instances. You can get started with SMP in minutes and speed up your existing PyTorch FSDP training scripts with just a few lines of code.

AWS Marketplace launched BatchDescribeEntities API for users of Catalog API. With this launch, private marketplace admins and sellers, including ISVs, Channel Partners, and Aggregators can get detailed information on multiple entities at once, thereby improving ease of integration, decreasing latency and increasing performance of the applications built on top of Catalog APIs.

Amazon Connect now provides granular access controls using resource tags configured for prompts in the Connect admin website. Prompts are audio files like on-hold music that can be customized and configured to play within call flows. For example, you can now tag celebrity prompts with Department:Insurance, and then only let administrators from your insurance line of business access those prompts.

Amazon Cognito is now available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) 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.

Starting today, you can bring your public IPv4 addresses to AWS, in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Dallas AWS Local Zones using Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP). You can provision your public IPv4 addresses in these Local Zones and advertise them to the internet using BYOIP.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of AWS Ground Station in US West (Alaska) region. This is the 12th AWS Ground Station antenna location connected to the AWS Global Network. Global expansion to Alaska enables increased opportunities for satellite operators to connect with their satellites and process their space workloads. Governments, businesses, and universities can benefit from more timely satellite data to make data-driven decisions.

Amazon Cognito is now available in Africa (Cape Town) 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.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, serverless, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service that offers 99.999% availability. Today, Amazon Keyspaces added query auditing support for Keyspaces Data Manipulation Language (DML) operations with AWS CloudTrail. 

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Canada West (Calgary) AWS Region. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the AWS Canada West (Calgary) region. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. You can capture, transform, and deliver streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and third party analytics applications such as Splunk and Datadog, enabling real-time analytics use cases. 

Today, AWS announces on-demand data replication for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS across AWS Regions and/or AWS accounts, enabling you to easily and efficiently transfer incremental point-in-time snapshots of your volumes to a different AWS Region or account. On-demand data replication now provides a simple and resilient way to implement disaster recovery, replicate production data to a different region or account, and enable lower latency data access for your global customer base or workforce.

AWS AppSync is a fully managed service that allows customers to connect applications to data and events with GraphQL APIs. AppSync allows customers to create APIs that connect to multiple data sources like microservice APIs, relational databases, and NoSQL databases. With AppSync APIs, applications can efficiently fetch data from different sources in one request.

Today, AWS announces the availability of AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), and Middle East (UAE) AWS Regions, allowing you to ingest, transport, and process your high-quality video in the cloud in more locations globally.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now provides an enhanced experience for RDS Recommendations that consolidates configuration best practices, threshold-based proactive performance recommendations, and machine learning (ML) powered performance anomalies.

Today, Amazon launched support for wildcards in the lifecycle policy feature (LCP) of Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). With this launch, customers can now create lifecycle policies using wildcards in their filters. Wildcards can be used to match image tags that contain one or more specific string in any position.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) Performance Insights now generates recommendations that inform you of impending database performance and availability issues before they become critical. RDS Performance Insights continuously monitors database instances for potential issues that can lead to degraded database health in the future. When it detects such conditions, it generates new recommendations that describe the nature of the impending problem, and includes specific actions you can take to mitigate that problem. These recommendations are available to Performance Insights paid tier customers.

Today, AWS Audit Manager announces support for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard v4.0 (PCI DSS v4.0) for automated evidence collection. This new standard framework can be leveraged by customers that store, process, or transmit cardholder data or sensitive authentication data to help them prepare for audits using a prebuilt collection of controls and automated evidence sources.

Egress Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection for AWS Network Firewall is now available in all AWS Regions where AWS Network Firewall is available today, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This launch allows you to use AWS Network Firewall to decrypt TLS sessions and inspect inbound and outbound VPC traffic without the need to deploy or manage any additional network security infrastructure. Encryption and decryption happen on the same firewall instance natively, so traffic doesn’t cross any network boundaries.

Today, we are announcing a new capability of the AWS Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector to monitor the free disk space of virtual machines running on VMware vCenter 7.0 or newer. This allows you to predict the minimum size of block storage your virtual machines will require as part of your migration plan.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6in instances are available in AWS Region Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Melbourne). These sixth-generation network optimized instances, powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built on the AWS Nitro System, deliver up to 200Gbps network bandwidth, 2x more network bandwidth and up to 2x higher packet-processing performance over comparable fifth-generation instances. 

Starting today, AWS India customers can securely save their India issued credit or debit card as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines.

Today, AWS AppFabric announces support for seven new software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications: Atlassian Confluence, Genesys Cloud, HubSpot, OneLogin by One Identity, PagerDuty, Ping Identity, and Barracuda XDR. Starting now, IT administrators and security analysts can use AWS AppFabric to aggregate enriched and normalized SaaS audit logs from 20 total applications, or audit end-user access of each application. This launch expands AWS AppFabric’s supported applications.

AWS ParallelCluster 3.8 is now generally available. Key features in this release are support for Rocky Linux 8 and Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, allowing you to reserve highly sought-after GPU instances on a future date to support your short duration machine learning (ML) workloads. Other important features in this release include:

• Scaling strategies to help you meet your scaling and cost requirements, ranging from strict all-or-nothing, that avoid launching idle instances, to best-effort, which prioritizes throughput scaling over avoiding idle instances.
• Support for mounting user-defined file systems in AWS to the /home directory of the head node, helping you simplify cluster storage management. 
• Custom Munge key to help you simplify integration of additional cluster resources that require the Scheduler Munge key.

Starting today, AWS Verified Access that allows allows you to provide secure access to your corporate applications without using VPNs is available in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), Israel (Tel Aviv), and the AWS GovCloud (US-West and US East) Regions. Built  using AWS Zero Trust guiding principles, Verified Access helps you implement a work-from-anywhere model in a secure and scalable manner.

You can now launch AWS Cloud9 environments with Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023). AL2023 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AL2023 provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With AL2023, you get an application environment that offers long-term support with access to the latest innovations in Linux. AL2023 is provided at no additional charge.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing an integrated mobile experience for AWS services in the AWS Console Mobile App for iOS. AWS customers using the AWS Console Mobile App for iOS can now access the full breadth of AWS resource information and management functionality that’s available to them on the AWS Console for natively supported services including EC2, RDS, and S3 via an integrated mobile web browser experience in the Console Mobile App.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports simplified configuration of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles with Kubernetes clusters, through a new set of APIs that tightly integrate IAM identities with Kubernetes authentication and authorization controls.

Amazon OpenSearch Service adds multimodal support on Neural Search for OpenSearch 2.11 deployments. This empowers builders to create and operationalize multimodal search applications with significantly reduced undifferentiated heavy-lifting. For years, customers have been building vector search applications on OpenSearch k-NN, but they’ve been burdened with building middleware to integrate text embedding models into search and ingest pipelines. OpenSearch builders can now power multimodal search through out-of-the-box integrations with Amazon Bedrock text and image multimodal APIs to power search pipelines that run on-cluster.

Amazon Cognito user pools now support the ability to enrich access tokens with custom attributes in the form of OAuth 2.0 scopes and claims. You can make application-specific advanced authorization decisions using custom attributes in the access token. This feature also allows you to personalize end-user experiences and improve customer engagement. 

Amazon Redshift customers can now use the identities in their identity provider (IdP), such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, OneLogin, etc., to access Amazon Redshift in a single sign-on experience from Amazon QuickSight or Amazon Redshift Query Editor. Administrators can manage fine grained access to data in Redshift using the users and groups in the organization IdP, and can audit user access in AWS CloudTrail.

Today, AWS announces support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) within Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments. This launch allows you to connect to a VPC from your Dev Environment, extending the number of developer scenarios supported by CodeCatalyst.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc7a instances are available in Europe (Stockholm) Region, and EC2 Hpc6a instances are available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.

Amazon DynamoDB local now supports table deletion protection and the ReturnValuesOnConditionCheckFailure parameter. With DynamoDB local, you can develop and test applications by running DynamoDB in your local development environment without incurring any costs. DynamoDB local does not require an internet connection, and it works with your existing DynamoDB API calls. 

AWS Security Hub has released 15 new security controls, increasing the number of controls offered to 307. Security Hub now supports additional AWS services such as Amazon FSx and AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA). Security Hub also released new controls against previously supported services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). For the full list of recently released controls and the AWS Regions in which they are available, visit the Security Hub user guide.

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights launches cross-account observability across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to help you monitor and troubleshoot applications that span across multiple AWS accounts within an AWS Region. Central Operational Teams managing container administration can now monitor and analyze container health and performance across their organization from a consolidated view and maintain the overall application health status to achieve the best business results.

Today, AWS Backup Audit Manager adds a new control allowing you to audit restore time targets against your resources. With this launch, you can help your organizations recovery preparations by specifying restore time targets for your resources, and evaluating whether they meet your business or compliance requirements.

Amazon Connect Cases now allows you to programmatically manage your cases and set up escalation workflows using the rules designer in the Amazon Connect UI. With this launch, you can create rules to automatically create a task, update a case, or send email alerts to a manager whenever a case is created or updated. In addition, you can create rules leveraging Amazon Connect Contact Lens to automatically create a case for post-conversation follow-up, such as when negative customer sentiment or specific key words are detected in a conversation.

A new minor version of Microsoft SQL Server is now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, offering performance and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports the new minor version for SQL Server 2022 on the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions.

Amazon MQ is now available in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. With this launch, Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 32 regions.

Today, AWS Control Tower launched landing zone version 3.3 which includes updates to AWS Control Tower-managed resources, resource-based policies, and controls. AWS Control Tower now supports the new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) launched global condition key, aws:SourceOrgID, which enables you to scalably allow AWS services to access your resources only on your behalf. With this new IAM capability, you can simplify management of your resource-based policies to require that AWS services access your resources only when the request originates from your organization or organizational unit (OU). For example, you can use the aws:SourceOrgID condition key and set the value to your organization ID in the condition element of your S3 bucket policy. This ensures that CloudTrail can only write logs on behalf of accounts within your organization to your S3 bucket, preventing CloudTrail logs outside your organization from writing to your S3 bucket. Landing zone version 3.3 also includes a new version of the Region Deny control and improved KMS drift reporting.

Customers can now use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region to 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.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3 processors that provide up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors, and built on top of the the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed innovations that deliver efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services. Starting today, these instances are available in AWS Region Middle East (Bahrain), AWS Region Europe (Paris) and AWS Region South America (São Paulo).

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now delivers decompressed CloudWatch Logs to S3 and Splunk destinations.  

Amazon Connect Tasks now supports pausing/resuming of tasks, making it easier for agents to stay more organized and deliver exceptional customer experiences without losing track of work. 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. With this launch, agents can now pause/resume tasks in the Amazon Connect agent workspace when they need to switch context to focus on more urgent customer needs, or when they are awaiting external inputs (e.g,. information from the customer) and/or manager approvals, freeing up their capacity to handle new customers issues. Supervisors can monitor and track paused tasks across their agents, along with new metrics to better understand the active time spent by a agent on a task and/or total tasks paused or actively being worked on by agents. Additionally, supervisors can automate task processing in Connect flows to automatically reprioritize and/or reassign the task to an agent based on service level or external inputs. Tasks can also be paused and resumed programmatically through the new pauseContact and resumeContact APIs.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports 1-click EC2 connectivity with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), providing Amazon DocumentDB customers the option to easily set up connectivity with an Amazon EC2 instance using the AWS DocumentDB Console. 1-click EC2 connectivity automatically configures your VPC and related network settings to enable a secure connection between the Amazon EC2 instance and the Amazon DocumentDB cluster within minutes.

Today, AWS announces the Auto Query feature in AWS IoT TwinMaker Scene Viewer which automates data query configurations that aid in visualizing IoT data in customers’ 3D scenes. 

Amazon Connect now provides more granular access controls by enabling you to tag your instances in the AWS console or through APIs. For example, you can now tag instances with a tag such as “Division:ConsumerCredit” and define associated Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to only let contact center administrators from the Consumer Credit division see or manage these instances. To learn more about how to add tags to a new or existing instance, see our documentation.

Today we are announcing the availability of Amazon Linux 2023 images for KVM and VMWare with the third quarterly update.

Amazon Connect now provides detailed billing reports and insights in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Reports aggregated and/or filtered by tags (key:value pairs). Companies can now gain more insights into their Amazon Connect bill and better organize their bill by lines of business/departments (e.g., support, banking, sales, claims), types of issues, phone numbers, environments and more. 

We are excited to announce that high-availability EMR on EC2 clusters are now also available with instance fleets configuration. Your high-availability instance fleet EMR cluster will have three on-demand primary nodes and support Hadoop applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, and Spark. In the event a primary node fails or critical processes like Yarn Resource Manager and NameNode crash, EMR fails over to one of the remaining primary nodes in the cluster.

Starting today, AWS Billing Conductor (ABC) customers can analyze the margins (realized savings) for each AWS service their accounts are using. ABC calculates margin by evaluating the difference between the proforma “charged amount” calculated by the service, and the invoiced costs for accounts in billing groups. Margin values can be positive or negative. For example, customers purchasing Compute Savings Plans within their management account can evaluate the savings rate of those purchases for each covered service relative to their AWS invoiced amount. This analysis will simplify customers’ chargeback method and drive deeper understanding of where they are achieving savings.  

Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to continuously monitor, detect, and alert customers to anomalous spend patterns. Starting today, customers can provision anomaly monitors and anomaly alert subscriptions with CloudFormation in all AWS Regions, except GovCloud.

AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager now provides a new toolset that aims to streamline on-instance volume management by providing an easy GUI based way to manage EBS volumes on your Windows Instances. With this new Fleet Manager capability, customers can readily browse the set of volumes attached to an instance identify volume mount points in the instance file system, view metadata for attached disks and mount as well as format unused EBS volumes.

Block Public Access for EBS Snapshots provides an additional layer of security for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots and helps prevent unauthorized access and potential misuse of snapshot data. Starting today, you can manage Block Public Access for EBS Snapshots settings for your account using AWS CloudFormation templates.

Today AWS announces the general availability of data grants in AWS Data Exchange, a new feature enabling any AWS customer to grant time-bounded, read-only data access to any other AWS customer. This feature is intended for customers who want to exchange data across organizations easily and securely. Data grants work seamlessly with all five AWS Data Exchange supported delivery types: Data Files, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, AWS Lake Formation (Preview), and Amazon API Gateway.

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) can now host their applications in Jakarta region, and send text messages (SMS) to consumers in more than 200 countries and territories. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to one phone number, or multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. 

Amazon DevOps Guru has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate authorization, approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB), for the AWS US East / West Region which includes US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) Regions. 

Today, AWS IoT Core—a managed service that connects billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to AWS—announces the capability of using your own Certificate Authority (CA) certificates when provisioning fleets with AWS IoT Core. Using AWS IoT Core, you can provision your devices with various techniques, such as just-in-time provisioning, just-in-time registration, and fleet provisioning, where each technique serves a dedicated purpose. For example, with fleet provisioning, you can generate and securely deliver X.509 client certificates to your devices when they connect to AWS for the first time. The updated fleet provisioning capability enables you to issue and customize X.509 client certificates using CAs hosted on popular CA services, such as AWS Private CA, external CAs, or your own public key infrastructure (PKI).

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6id instances are available in AWS Regions Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). 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 M5d instances, M6id instances deliver up to 15% better price performance, offer up to 58% higher TB storage per vCPU, and 34% lower cost per TB.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces a new update to Synthetics NodeJS runtime version syn-nodejs-puppeteer-6.1 and recommends that customers update Synthetics Canaries to the latest runtime version. This update includes security fixes, bug fixes, and UI Canaries stability improvements. To learn more, see release notes.

Amazon MQ now provides support for RabbitMQ version 3.10.25, which includes several fixes and performance improvements to the previous versions of RabbitMQ supported by Amazon MQ. If you are running earlier versions of RabbitMQ, such as 3.10, 3.9 or 3.8, we strongly encourage you to upgrade to RabbitMQ 3.10.20 or higher. This can be accomplished with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. We also encourage you to enable automatic minor version upgrades on RabbitMQ 3.10.25 to help ensure your brokers take advantage of future fixes and improvements.

AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications using Python 3.12. Developers can use Python 3.12 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, and AWS will automatically apply updates as they become available. You can use Python 3.12 with Lambda@Edge, allowing you to customize low-latency content delivered through Amazon CloudFront. Powertools for AWS Lambda (Python), a developer toolkit to implement serverless best practices and increase developer velocity, also supports Python 3.12. 

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now offers new images powered by Microsoft Windows Server 2022. With these images, customers can launch Microsoft Windows Server 2022 streaming instances and take advantage of the latest Microsoft Windows Server operating systems features. It also enables customers to run applications that require recent Microsoft Windows operating system versions.

AWS Amplify now supports using existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for GraphQL APIs created with Amplify’s Cloud Development Kit (CDK) construct, enabling you to create a backend-for-frontend API layer for web and mobile apps with ease. Developers often have data spread across various databases and sources. With Amplify's new feature, you can now leverage your existing relational data for GraphQL APIs in addition to Amazon DynamoDB.

Today, we are excited to launch the ability for Amazon Monitron customers to visualize software billing at the project and site levels through the familiar AWS Cost Explorer console. Monitron's intuitive hierarchical framework, comprising projects and sites, facilitates resource management across diverse divisions and facilities. In response to valuable feedback from our customers, we have identified a common challenge they face — accurately allocating costs to downstream customers and sites. With this update, we aim to address and streamline this crucial aspect of cost management.

EC2 Image Builder now allows customers to modify processes in their image pipelines, including build and test phases, to better suit their cloud environment requirements. Customers no longer have to conduct bespoke tasks, such as post-build usability tests, external vulnerability scans, or security approval before distribution, outside their image pipeline automation. With this launch, Image Builder enables customization to its image creation process, allowing customers to enhance their automation and reduce operational overhead directly within Image Builder. This feature is available for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and Container images via the Console, CLI, API, CloudFormation, and CDK.

Adding a new credit or debit card to your AWS Inc. account will now require Card Verification Value (CVV) in addition to your card number, card expiry date, name and billing address.

 Data protection is a feature that leverages pattern matching and machine learning capabilities to detect and protect sensitive log data in-transit. Data protection already supported over 100 managed data identifiers that cover common patterns of sensitive data. With custom data identifiers, now you are able to extend detection and protection of sensitive data tailored to data within your logs.

Starting today, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Inf2 instances are generally available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Frankfurt) regions. These instances deliver high performance at the lowest cost in Amazon EC2 for generative AI models. 

Amazon EventBridge Pipes now supports generating CloudFormation templates in the AWS console to help you provision and manage the configuration of your pipes in a centralized and repeatable manner. You can generate templates from your existing pipes to provision the same pipes in other regions or accounts, or, jump-start the creation of different pipes by customizing the generated templates. Combine the templates you generate with those of other services to create AWS CloudFormation stacks, which allows you to provision the AWS services your application requires with pipes connecting them together.

Amazon EMR is excited to announce that Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in the Middle East (UAE) Region.

We are excited to announce streaming API support for Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, making it possible to programmatically view, search and filter relevant log events in real-time. You can now view your logs interactively in real-time as they’re ingested within your own custom applications or dashboards inside or outside of AWS.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.11.6, 10.6.16, 10.5.23, and 10.4.32. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of managed package repositories in Amazon CodeCatalyst. CodeCatalyst customers can now securely store, publish, and share npm packages. Through your CodeCatalyst package repositories, you can also access open source npm packages from the npm registry. Your packages remain available for your development teams, should public package registries become unavailable from other service providers. To increase security and help protect organizations against dependency substitution attacks, CodeCatalyst also provides package origin controls to limit how new package versions can enter CodeCatalyst package repositories.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)’s Identity and and Access Management feature now supports all programming languages. Administrators can simplify and standardize access control to Kafka resources using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Amazon MSK’s IAM support is based on SASL/OAUTHBEARER, an open standard for authorization and authentication. Both MSK Provisioned and Serverless cluster types support MSK IAM expansion to all programming languages.

AWS CloudShell, previously based on Amazon Linux 2 (AL2), has migrated to Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023). You can continue to use your existing CloudShell environment with all its pre-installed tools. For more information, please visit the CloudShell AL2023 migration documentation page.

Today, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) launched a new way to improve email delivery and engagement rates. SES’ Virtual Deliverability Manager will now proactively alert customers of gaps in sending configuration through Amazon EventBridge notifications. This helps customers quickly respond when sending configuration is incomplete, which helps increase email delivery and engagement rates.

Amazon Web Services Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. (AWS Malaysia) now supports 3D-Secure authentication of credit and debit cards. 3D-Secure protects you from payments fraud and prevents unauthorized use of your card. When this authentication is needed, you will be redirected to your bank’s page to complete additional steps such as entering a code sent by your bank.

Scaling Groups, a new feature of Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights, enables you to run multiple kdb Clusters on a single compute instance. This feature allows you to optimize the infrastructure spend for your kdb applications.

Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights now supports the creation of Tickerplant (TP) clusters that are used to receive real-time data from feed handlers, and enable resilient real-time cluster restart.

CodeDeploy can now call your application’s stop hook during ASG scale-ins so that you can complete ongoing tasks, release application resources, or close outgoing connections. Your application’s stop hooks can also be invoked during ASG instance refresh operations, allowing you to patch your instances without impacting your application’s availability.

Dataviews, a new feature of Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights, enable customers to create high-performance database caches which can be shared by multiple clusters and reduce overall infrastructure costs for kdb environments.

AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.3.1 is generally available with support for Keyshot Network Rendering on Deadline workers, and updated support for MongoDB 5 and DocumentDB 5.

Amazon Athena now supports trusted identity propagation with AWS IAM Identity Center to manage and audit access to data and resources based on user identity. This new capability passes identity information between connected business intelligence and data analytics applications, providing data analysts with a seamless single sign-on experience and admins with end-to-end data access traceability. Administrators define access via AWS Lake Formation to their data sets in Glue Data Catalog based on a common set of users and groups in the customer’s chosen identity provider. Auditors can track users’ data access across their Athena query workflows. 

AWS AppConfig now supports AWS PrivateLink, which allows customers to leverage feature flags and dynamic configuration from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the public internet.

AWS Lambda now offers additional concurrency metric, ClaimedAccountConcurrency, that reports the sum of used unreserved concurrency, allocated reserved concurrency and provisioned concurrency. With this launch, AWS Lambda customers can now track the amount of overall concurrency in their account that is available for on-demand executions. 

Amazon Redshift announces enhancements to Redshift Advisor to generate smarter and faster sort and distribution key recommendations. With the enhancements, Redshift Advisor uses new machine learning models to make these recommendations sooner, without needing to observe minimum necessary workload. Both sort and distribution key recommendations continue to be applied through Redshift automatic table optimizations, making it easier and faster to achieve better query performance. 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7g and M7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3 processors that provide up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors, and built on top of the the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed innovations that deliver efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services. Starting today, these instances are available in AWS Region Europe (London).

Amazon CloudWatch announces support for the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) 1.0.0 specification as a new output format in CloudWatch Metric Streams. With Metric Streams, you can create a continuous, near real-time stream of metrics to a destination of your choice.

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Cologix VAN3 data center in Vancouver, Canada. By connecting your network to AWS at the new Vancouver location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This is the sixth AWS Direct Connect site within Canada and the second site in the Vancouver area.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gn instances powered by AWS Graviton2 server processors and featuring up to 100Gbps network bandwidth are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region.

Amazon Textract is a managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from any document or image. We regularly improve the underlying machine learning models based on customer feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce quality enhancements to our Forms feature available via the AnalyzeDocument API.

Amazon CloudWatch now supports Metrics Insights in Cross-Account observability. With Amazon CloudWatch cross-account observability, you can use Metrics Insights to monitor and troubleshoot applications that span multiple accounts within a Region.

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

AWS CodeDeploy now provides the ability to deploy your application one Availability Zone (AZ) at a time. Known as zonal deployment, it isolates the blast radius of any adverse in-place application deployments to a single AZ without impacting other AZs within an AWS Region.

AWS Mainframe Modernization is now available with new capabilities for enhanced control, visibility, and operational management of the service’s cloud native and fully-managed runtimes. The capabilities include transaction configuration display, import of data sets and display of their metadata, additional monitoring metrics, ad-hoc batch submission, and additional batch utilities. Customers will find them beneficial for use cases related to transaction management, performance monitoring, data set management, and batch operations.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) enables you to log the delivery status of messages sent from your topic to subscribers. Once configured, log entries are sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Logging message delivery status helps you determine whether a message was delivered to an endpoint, what the endpoint response was, and the message dwell time. Now, you can configure your delivery status logging with AWS CloudFormation for new and existing Amazon SNS topics.

Starting today, customers can run kdb applications built using the TorQ framework directly on Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights.

Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness enables application providers to detect in real time if a user accessing a service is a real person or a bad actor attempting to spoof faces to impersonate another identity or evade being recognized. Face spoofs can be presentation attacks (e.g., printed photos presented to a camera) or digital injection attacks (e.g., deep fake videos using software to bypass the camera). Amazon has launched a new version of Rekognition Face Liveness, which improves the model accuracy in detecting attacks and provides a new user interface (UI) to streamline the experience for genuine users.

Today, we are announcing a new open sourced IoT dashboard application built on top of IoT Application Kit. The new IoT dashboard application allows you to visualize and interact with operational data from AWS IoT SiteWise with a drag-and-drop dashboard building experience. 

AWS Lambda now allows customers to connect Lambda functions to both Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) and Amazon RDS Proxy directly from the Lambda console. Customers can now use a guided workflow to connect their Lambda function to a new or existing RDS database instance or RDS proxy. As part of the setup, AWS Lambda will now also automatically set up related network settings to enable a secure and scalable connection.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7gd and R7gd instances with up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage are available in Europe (Stockholm) and Europe (Spain) regions. Additionally, C7gd instances are now available in Europe (Stockholm). 

The Migration Assistant for Amazon OpenSearch Service is an open-source AWS solution designed for the effortless migration of self-managed OpenSearch and Elasticsearch clusters to Amazon OpenSearch Service (Managed clusters and Serverless collections).

AWS CloudTrail now supports data plane API logging to monitor, alarm, and archive item-level activity in your Amazon DynamoDB tables, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, AWS Lambda functions now scale up at a 12x faster rate. With this improvement each function can scale up to a rate of 1,000 concurrent executions every 10 seconds, up to your account concurrency limit. 

AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator adds support for replatforming .NET and Java applications to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate to make it easy for you to containerize applications with a guided experience. You can now create an orchestration workflow based on the predefined replatforming template, select the Amazon EC2 instances or application artifacts from Amazon S3, and run the workflow to containerize and deploy your applications on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate for better agility and operational efficiency.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now supports authentication of database users using Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East) regions. 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.

We are excited to announce regular expression support for Amazon CloudWatch Logs filter pattern syntax, making it easier to search and match relevant logs in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Customers use filter pattern syntax today to search logs, extract metrics using metric filters, and send specific logs to other destinations with subscription filters. With today’s launch, customers will be able to further customize these operations to meet their needs with flexible and powerful regular expressions within filter patterns. Now customers can define one filter to match multiple IP subnets or HTTP status codes using a regular expression such as ‘{ $.statusCode=%4[0-9]{2}% }’ rather than having to define multiple filters to cater to each variation, reducing the configuration and management overhead on their logs.

Amazon QuickSight is excited to announce the enhancement of SPICE ingestion performance. Given SPICE's support for datasets as large as 1TB or 1 billion rows, previously the ingestion process for large datasets could extend over several hours. The enhancement in ingestion performance leverages the parallel ingestion mechanism to significantly decrease the data refresh time for such large datasets. Users can anticipate a noticeable improvement, with an overall reduction in ingestion time of up to 75%, or 4x improvement in performance, for datasets that previously took more than three hours. Datasets utilizing Customer Managed Key will experience even greater performance enhancements. No alterations to the customer interface are required; the benefits of this feature will be seamlessly activated on the backend upon its launch.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gd and R6gd instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and are built on the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro System is a collection of AWS designed hardware and software innovations that enables the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. C6gd instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, and CPU-based machine learning inference. R6gd instances are built for running memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. The local SSD storage provided on these instances will benefit applications that need access to high-speed, low latency storage, as well as for temporary storage of data such as batch and log processing, and for high-speed caches and scratch files. These instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth, and up to 19 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). C6gd and R6gd instances offer up to 3.8 TB of NVMe-based SSD storage.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7i-flex and M7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Sydney) regions. These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Instance Connect, a simple and secure way to connect to your instances using Secure Shell (SSH), will support RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, and macOS in addition to Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.

Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (Route 53 ARC) zonal shift is now generally available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. AWS customers and AWS Partners who operate in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions can now use zonal shift, a capability in Route 53 ARC that helps you to quickly recover from an issue in an Availability Zone (AZ). 

Today, AWS announces an updated Service Level Agreement (SLA) for AWS Secrets Manager, which promises a stronger availability commitment. AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make AWS Secrets Manager available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage for each AWS Region, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.99% (the “Service Commitment”). In the event AWS Secrets Manager does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the AWS Secrets Manager SLA.

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaLive to apply custom color space conversion to your live video.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has added Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Db2 to its supported target endpoints. This update streamlines the migration of self managed Db2 workloads to Amazon RDS for Db2. As a managed service, Amazon RDS for Db2 simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of Db2 databases in the cloud.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now enables contact center managers to create calculated attributes that turn customer behavior data (e.g., contacts, orders, web visits) into actionable customer insights such as a customer’s preferred channel to drive dynamic routing, personalize IVRs, and provide agents with more relevant customer context. In the Amazon Connect admin website, contact center managers can create calculated attributes in a few clicks to identify recent customer actions (e.g., last order status), patterns of behavior (e.g., preferred channel, frequency of contact), and customer value (e.g., total orders value) without depending on engineering resources. Contact center managers can use calculated attributes with the Customer Profiles Flows block to design personalized customer experiences such as IVRs (e.g., use the last order to pre-emptively offer an IVR menu to check order status), routing (e.g., route to a different queue with the lower wait time for repeat callers), and surface them to agents through step-by-step guides. Calculated attributes are always kept up-to-date based on the latest customer data that Customer Profiles syncs and merges from across Amazon Connect, SaaS applications such as Salesforce, and databases.

Amazon Rekognition’s face-based features enable customers to analyze faces in images and videos at scale. Customers can use these features to support their various use cases, such as identity verification and media analysis. Today, Amazon Rekognition has launched Faces version 7. This version further improves accuracy and lowers latencies for near real-time face detection, compare, and search features. 

Amazon Connect now provides the ability for businesses to define custom time thresholds between 1 second and 7 days for measuring the number of contacts answered or abandoned within a certain time duration in the real-time metrics page. For example, with these thresholds you can measure the number of contacts that abandoned within 4 seconds (also known as short abandons) to identify customers who picked the wrong IVR option or dialed the wrong number.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the public preview of Amazon Q in the AWS Console Mobile Application. AWS customers using the AWS Console Mobile App for iOS can now use Amazon Q, the generative AI assistant in the AWS Console Mobile App to ask questions about AWS services, and receive concise, reliable answers in a mobile-friendly user interface with voice input and output capabilities. Amazon Q in the AWS Console Mobile App is also available for Android (announced on 11/28/23).

Amazon Connect now provides an additional 24 contact and agent performance metrics (e.g., agent answer rate, idle time, contact handle time) in the GetMetricDataV2 API, which were previously only available in the historical metrics UI. With these contact and agent metrics, businesses can create custom dashboards to help supervisors identify coaching opportunities for agents such as high hold times, low contact answer rate, etc.

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaLive to apply image overlays to individual outputs from a MediaLive channel.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now supports comprehensive data preparation capabilities powered by Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. You can now import tabular, timeseries, image, and text data from 50+ data sources, generate Data Quality and Insights reports, and transform data using 300+ built-in operators to build and use machine learning (ML) models all without writing any code. Through this integration, you can accelerate data preparation for ML from weeks to minutes using SageMaker Canvas.

AWS Compute Optimizer now supports the ability to filter your rightsizing recommendations by tags in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This includes tag keys, tag key and value pairs, or combinations of both. Tag filtering will be available on these rightsizing recommendations pages: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) services on AWS Fargate.

AWS Resilience Hub has added certification for International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and System and Organization Controls (SOC). Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed.

Amazon FinSpace with Managed kdb Insights customers can now create kdb clusters of type General Purpose, featuring support for an increased set of kdb functions and data storage configurations from within a single kdb process. This enables a wider set of customer applications and process to run directly on Managed kdb Insights.

Amazon Redshift now supports storing large objects, up to 16MB in size, in SUPER data type. When ingesting from JSON, PARQUET, TEXT, and CSV source files, you can load semi-structured data or documents as values in SUPER data type up to 16MB. Before this enhancement, you could load semi-structured data or documents in SUPER data type only up to 1MB.

AWS AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, announces four new features available in the latest release of the AWS AppConfig Agent. The Agent now supports writing feature flags and configuration data to a file on local disk in a location that the customer specifies. Secondly, to improve resiliency, the Agent can be configured to write its own local backup of the latest version of configuration data, and use that backup if there is a network issue or outage that prevents the Agent from reaching the AWS AppConfig service. Also, the Agent now allows engineers to test configuration changes in their local environments. Finally, this version of the Agent allows a customer to map different AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions for different Configuration Profiles, which enables fine-grained security for configuration data.

Starting today, you can now hibernate Amazon EC2 C7a, C7i, R7a, R7i and R7iz instances. Hibernation is an Amazon EC2 feature that helps lower costs and achieve faster startup times by enabling customers to pause and resume their running instances at scale. Customers are not billed for compute time while instances are suspended, and your applications will resume from right where they left off.

Today, FreeRTOS announces the availability of modular and composable Over-The-Air update (OTA) libraries that make it easy for you to configure and customize the system update process for your Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Using FreeRTOS OTA libraries, you can quickly build connected products capable of seamlessly processing remote firmware update tasks, thus allowing you to manage and maintain your device fleet to be up to date. With the new update, you can now configure FreeRTOS open source OTA libraries in small batches for better flexibility as compared to using a large library that may require base-code modification. For example, to retain operational integrity and continuity of your deployed IoT devices, you can now configure your modular FreeRTOS libraries to first require the device to be in a ‘safe’ or ‘commissioning’ mode and only then accept and process software update messages.