Author: Jeff Barr

You can now consolidate metrics from your hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises data sources using Amazon CloudWatch and process them in a consistent, unified fashion. You can query, visualize, and alarm on any and all of the metrics, regardless of their source. In addition to giving you a unified view, this new feature will help you […]

You can now use cross-region data replication to provide business continuity for your Amazon WorkSpaces users. Snapshots are taken every 12 hours, replicated to the desired destination region, and are used to provide a recovery point objective (RPO) of 12-24 hours. Multi-Region Resilience Review In her 2022 post Advancing business continuity with Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region […]

We are launching three new voices for Polly. Powered by a new long-form engine, the voices are natural and expressive, with appropriate pauses, emphasis, and tone. New Voices The new long-form voices are perfect for blog posts, news articles, training videos, and marketing content. The underlying Machine Learning model extracts meaning from the text, learning […]

If you are ready to learn more about Generative AI while having fun and building cool stuff, check out PartyRock.aws . You can experiment, learn all about prompt engineering, build mini-apps, and share them with your friends — all without writing any code or creating an AWS account. You can also start with an app […]

You can now lock individual Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots in order to enforce better compliance with your data retention policies. Locked snapshots cannot be deleted until the lock is expired or released, giving you the power to keep critical backups safe from accidental or malicious deletion, including ransomware attacks. The Need for […]

You now have the ability to disable public sharing of new, and optionally existing, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots on a per-region, per-account basis. This provides you with another level of protection against accidental or inadvertent data leakage. EBS Snapshot Review You have had the power to create EBS snapshots since the launch […]

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports the use of pre-snapshot and post-snapshot scripts embedded in AWS Systems Manager documents. You can use these scripts to ensure that Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager are application-consistent. Scripts can pause and resume I/O operations, flush buffered data to EBS volumes, and […]

Effective mid-2024, newly released Amazon EC2 instance types will use only version 2 of the EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDSv2). We are also taking a series of steps to make IMDSv2 the default choice for AWS Management Console Quick Starts and other launch pathways. Background This service is accessible from within an EC2 instance at […]