Oct 2018

You can now specify two new docker flags as parameters in your Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Task Definition. These flags are pidMode and ipcMode.

The pidMode parameter allows you to configure your containers to share their process ID (PID) namespace with other containers in the task, or with the host. Sharing the PID namespace enables for example monitoring applications deployed as containers to access information about other applications running in the same task or host.

The ipcMode parameter allows you to configure your containers to share their inter-process communication (IPC) namespace with the other containers in the task, or with the host. The IPC namespace allows containers to communicate directly through shared-memory with other containers running in the same task or host.

This feature is currently supported with EC2 launch-type. For more information about using Docker parameters in task definitions, visit the Amazon ECS documentation.

To view where Amazon ECS is avaiable, please visit our region table.

You can now enable AWS WAF for your APIs in Amazon API Gateway, making it easier to protect your APIs against common web exploits.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications and APIs from attacks by allowing you to configure rules that allow, block, or monitor (count) web requests based on customizable rules and conditions that you define.

You can use AWS WAF for your Amazon API Gateway APIs to protect from attacks such as SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Additionally, you can filter web requests based on IP address, geographic area, request size, and/or string or regular expression patterns using the rules. You can put these conditions on HTTP headers or body of the request itself, allowing you to create complex rules to block attacks from specific user-agents, bad bots, or content scrapers. You can also take advantage of Managed Rules from AWS Marketplace to get immediate protections for your APIs from common threats, such as OWASP Top 10 security risks and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE).

Support for AWS WAF with Amazon API Gateway is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. For more information on Amazon API Gateway visit our product page. To learn about AWS WAF, please click here.

You can learn more about how to enable AWS WAF for Amazon API Gateway in our documentation.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Java through the use of the JVM option. Oracle Java provides a SQL schema and functions that facilitate Oracle Java features in an Oracle database.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for Oracle. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.

This Quick Start deploys a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 15 minutes, to automatically test AWS CloudFormation templates from a GitHub repository.

Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Oracle now allow you to stop and start database instances that are running in a Multi-AZ configuration. This makes it easy and affordable to use databases for development and test purposes that match the configuration of your production databases but are not required to be running all of the time.

Stopping and starting a database instance requires just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or a single call using the AWS API or AWS Command Line Interface, and takes just a few minutes. While your database instance is stopped, you are charged for provisioned database storage and backup storage, but not for database instance hours.

While a database instance is stopped, Amazon RDS does not delete any of your automatic backups or transaction logs. This means you can do a point-in-time restore to any point within your specified automated backup retention window, even after an instance is re-started. Starting an instance restores it to the same configuration as it had when stopped, including its endpoint, DB parameter group, security group, and option group membership.

You can stop a database instance for up to 7 days at a time. After 7 days, it will be automatically started. For more details on stopping and starting a database instance, please refer to Stopping and Starting a DB Instance in the Amazon RDS User Guide.  

Starting today, you can add multiple RuleGroups to your AWS Firewall Manager policy. This allows you to use AWS WAF managed rules in conjunction with custom WAF rules consistently across all your AWS accounts. For instance, you can now deploy the OWASP Top 10 managed rule group from AWS Marketplace, with a set of your own custom WAF rules that meets your specific security needs such as blacklisting of IP addresses.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server is announcing new enhancements to its backup and restore capabilities. You can restore a backup file to the same DB instance that was used to create the file, and you can restore the same backup file to a DB instance multiple times. To learn more, visit our documentation on importing a SQL Server Database into Amazon RDS.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are launching 113 new language pairs. Customers can now translate between currently supported languages, such as French to Spanish for example, with a single API request. With this update, we are expanding the number of supported language pairs from 24 to 137. All supported language pairs are based on state-of-the-art neural machine translation algorithms. See the full list of supported language pairs on this documentation page. 

Amazon API Gateway launched the Serverless Developer Portal, a hub that empowers API publishers to connect with API subscribers who want to discover and quickly leverage APIs in the applications they build.

AWS Fargate is now available in the EU (London) Region.  

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that lets you run containers in production without deploying or managing servers. Fargate lets you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.

For a full list of AWS Regions where Fargate is available, please visit our Region table.
 

This updated Quick Start automatically deploys Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 or Exchange Server 2016 in a highly available architecture on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 90 minutes. The deployment includes Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for directory services and Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) for remote administration over the internet.

You can now reserve Amazon EC2 capacity for any duration with On-Demand Capacity Reservations. Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types as well as over 50 global Availability Zones where you can run your applications. Some customers however have very specific requirements for portions of their applications around instance type, size, and capability, as well as the Availability Zone the instance needs to run in, and need very high levels of assurance that they will always be able to launch that specific capacity. Previously in order to achieve a capacity reservation, customers had to leverage Zonal Reserved Instances and commit to that capacity for a minimum of one year. Now with On-Demand Capacity Reservations, customers can reserve the exact capacity they need, in the location they need, and can keep it only for as long as they need it.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations are activated as soon as they are requested, and they stay active until cancelled. A Capacity Reservation is tied to a specific Availability Zone and, by default automatically utilized by running instances in that Availability Zone. Instances you have placed Capacity Reservations for are charged at the normal instance rate for as long as you maintain the reservation. Should you no longer need them, you can cancel your Capacity Reservation at any time to stop paying.

If you have Regional RI discounts, they will automatically apply to any matching Capacity Reservation. This gives you the flexibility to selectively add capacity reservations and still get the Regional RI discounts for that usage.

To get started, you can create an On-Demand Capacity Reservation by simply choosing an Availability Zone and quantity (number of instances) along with other instance specifications such as instance type and tenancy. Once created, the Capacity Reservation will ensure that you will always be able to launch that specific EC2 configuration.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations are now available in all public Regions. You can create and manage Capacity Reservations through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDK and CLI. To learn more about Capacity Reservations and how to use them, visit FAQs, Linux or Windows technical documentations.

This Quick Start builds an Autodesk Forge environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud for customizable building blocks in the form of web service application programming interfaces (APIs), tools, and services. The deployment takes about 15 minutes.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now allows clusters to be created in a Amazon VPC addressed with additional IPv4 CIDR blocks in the 100.64.0.0/10 and 198.19.0.0/16 ranges. This allows customers additional flexibility in configuring the networking for their EKS clusters.

You can now use the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Command Line Interface (Amazon ECS-CLI) to create AWS secrets for your private registry credentials.

Previously, in order to use the ECS-CLI to run tasks that used images from a private registry, you had to first create AWS Secrets for your registry credentials.
Now you can provide the ECS-CLI with an input file that includes the the registry names and associated credentials, and the ECS-CLI will create the AWS Secrets  as well as an IAM role for you that can be used by ECS to access the secrets.

To learn more about how ECS-CLI supports creating AWS secrets for private registry credentials, read our documentation.To see where ECS is available, visit our region table.

Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, makes it easier for you to monitor and analyze security events of your directory. Now, you can forward security event logs from your directory to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. This helps you to meet your security monitoring, audit, and log retention policy requirements by providing transparency of the security events in your directory. 

Amazon WorkDocs Drive is now available for macOS users. You can use Amazon WorkDocs Drive as a user drive to access to all of your files on-demand. You can also easily access any file on Amazon WorkDocs through your Mac Finder. All of your files are available on-demand from your device without consuming valuable disk space.

With Amazon WorkDocs Drive, many of the capabilities of WorkDocs are accessible without opening your browser. You can now share, mark favorites, and see real-time status icons from your Mac Finder. All changes that you make with Amazon WorkDocs Drive are automatically synced with your Amazon WorkDocs site and can be accessed from any device or offline.

You can download Amazon WorkDocs Drive for Mac here. Amazon WorkDocs Drive for Mac is supported in all AWS regions where Amazon WorkDocs is available, and it is compatible with macOS version 10.11 or later. Please visit Amazon WorkDocs to learn more.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink in AWS GovCloud (US) Region. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS, in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet.

AWS PrivateLink is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (London), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (São Paulo) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, view the AWS PrivateLink documentation.

Starting today, you can pay your AWS invoices with any bank account supporting the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) standard. Adding a bank account is easy. Simply go to the Payment Methods page on the AWS Billing Console and provide your IBAN, BIC/SWIFT and billing address.

PostgreSQL 11 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the early production version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS including 40+ extensions like PostGIS and support for hash partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 can now be deployed for development and performance testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 11 on October 18, 2018. PostgreSQL 11 provides users with improvements to overall performance of the database system, particularly for very large databases and high computational workloads. Further, PostgreSQL 11 makes significant improvements to the table partitioning system, adds support for stored procedures capable of transaction management, improves query parallelism, adds parallelized data definition capabilities, and introduces just-in-time (JIT) compilation for accelerating the execution of expressions in queries.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region. The RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. To move data in and out of the preview environment, customers can either use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality or use native PostgreSQL logical replication.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the early production versions of PostgreSQL 11 and the RDS Database Preview Environment. For details on Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. The Translate API is now an AWS HIPAA Eligible Service. If you have a Business Associate Addendum (BAA) in place with AWS, you can immediately start using Amazon Translate to translate texts containing protected health information (PHI). If you do not have a BAA in place with AWS or have any other questions about running HIPAA-regulated workloads on AWS, please contact us.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds two new features to simplify development with AppStream 2.0. You can provision AppStream 2.0 resources using AWS CloudFormation and automate user pool management using new APIs.

With CloudFormation, you can automate creating fleets, deploying stacks, adding and managing user pool users, launching image builders, and creating directory configurations alongside your other AWS resources. To learn how to get started, read AWS CloudFormation support for Amazon AppStream 2.0 resources and API enhancements

You can get started with these updates in all AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is offered. AppStream 2.0 offers pay-as-you-go pricing. Please see Amazon AppStream 2.0 Pricing for more information, and try our sample applications.

 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Starting today, device makers building with Alexa Voice Service (AVS) can integrate their products with Alexa for Business. Alexa for Business customers can then manage these third party devices as shared devices and make private skills available through their Alexa for Business console. This will provide Alexa for Business customers with an expanded choice of Alexa built-in devices to use in their organizations - from conference rooms to shared workspaces. 

The new AWS Budgets console provides simplified budget creation workflows, contextual AWS Cost Explorer integration, and an enhanced Budgets dashboard.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB 10.3, which is the latest major version release of the popular open source database from the original developers of MySQL. MariaDB 10.3 offers improved Oracle compatibility, support for querying historical states of the database, features that increase flexibility for developers and DBAs, and improved manageability. Highlights in MariaDB 10.3 include:

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition major version 8.0 in all AWS Regions. MySQL 8.0 is the latest major version release and offers new query functionality and enhancements for better performance, reliability, security, manageability, and international and mobile support. Highlights in MySQL 8.0 include:

Amazon WorkDocs now provides you with the ability to control the IP addresses from which your WorkDocs site can be accessed. Using IP address-based allow lists, you can define and manage groups of trusted IP addresses, and only permit users to access your WorkDocs site when they're connected to a trusted network, like corporate networks or an Amazon WorkSpaces environment.

IP address-based allow lists can be added in the WorkDocs Admin Console. You can set the IP address ranges from which you wish to provide access. When a user tries to connect to your WorkDocs site from their browser, WorkDocs drive, mobile device, sync, or companion app, the IP address from which the request originated is evaluated against your allow list. If it is not on the allow list, access will be denied. If you do not filter user access by IP address with an allow list, access will be open to all IP addresses.

This feature is available today in all AWS Regions where WorkDocs is available. To learn more about IP address-based allow lists in WorkDocs, visit our documentation site. To start using IP address-based allow lists, log in to the WorkDocs Admin Console.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports the next generation general-purpose and memory-optimized Amazon EC2 M5 and R5 nodes for high-performance applications. Both M5 and R5 nodes are based on the AWS Nitro System and feature Enhanced Networking based on Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), to deliver up to 25 Gbps of aggregate network bandwidth. M5 and R5 nodes are powered by custom Intel® Xeon Scalable processors with a sustained all core frequency of up to 3.1 GHz. These processors also feature Intel’s newest vector processing instruction set, Advanced Vector Extension 512 (AVX-512), for faster processing of high-performance workloads. The general-purpose M5 nodes offer memory size flexibility ranging from 6.38 GiB to 314.32 GiB. The memory optimized R5 nodes offer memory size flexibility of 13.07 GiB to 635.61 GiB. 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to bring your own publicly-routable IP address prefixes to AWS and advertise them on to the Internet. You can create Elastic IP addresses from your Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) address prefix and use them with AWS resources such as EC2 instances, Network Load Balancers, and NAT Gateways. The Elastic IP addresses you create from BYOIP address prefix work exactly the same as Elastic IP addresses you get from Amazon. With control on advertising your BYOIP address prefixes, you can minimize your downtime during migration by simultaneously advertising your IP address prefix from AWS and withdrawing it from the current location.

If your applications are using trusted IP addresses that your partners and customers have whitelisted in their firewalls, you can now move these applications to AWS without requiring your partners and customers to change their IP address whitelists. BYOIP is also useful for applications such as commercial email services that rely on IP address reputation to allow traffic from your endpoints to reach intended recipients. Some legacy applications have hard-coded IP address dependencies. Bring Your Own IP enables you to migrate such applications to AWS with minimal disruptions.

There is no additional charge to use the BYOIP feature. Also, you don’t have to pay for Elastic IP addresses that you create from BYOIP address prefixes.

This feature is now publicly available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions. For more information about this feature, visit the Bring Your Own IP documentation.

This Quick Start deploys Tableau Server on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, into an environment that can help organizations with workloads that fall within the scope of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  

You can now connect to Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 instances in other AWS regions using an inter-region VPC peering connection, and from on-premises servers using an AWS VPN connection. 

You can now specify an organization to easily setup sharing of CloudWatch Events across all accounts in an organization. This removes the maintenance burden of specifying multiple accounts in the event bus policy statements. 

Today, Amazon Connect is introducing support for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles, a new type of IAM role that allows you to easily delegate permissions to AWS services.

Starting today, it's even easier for you and your users to find the content you need in Amazon WorkDocs with Smart Search. WorkDocs Smart Search lets you query across content, comments, and document labels in addition to searching for files and folders by name.

To get started, access WorkDocs in your web browser and enter the desired search term in the search box in the top navigation bar. Hitting 'Enter' or clicking the magnifying glass search icon will automatically search all content to which you have access across file names, content types, comments, and labels. Results will display as a sorted list, with folders listed before files.

You can use the Advanced button in the search bar to further refine your search. Advanced search can scope your search by location of files, limit the time and date range, and specifying file types. Results will display as they would with a regular search, but with your additional parameters applied.

This new search experience is immediately available to all WorkDocs customers. No user or administrator action is required to activate it. Discover more about WorkDocs, or sign up for a 30-day trial today.

AWS Config now allows you to record and retrieve the history of changes to resource compliance as evaluated by AWS Config rules. This can help you collect useful historical data for compliance auditing.

The Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Command Line Interface (Amazon ECS CLI) now supports service discovery.

Amazon ECS service discovery makes it easy for your containerized services to discover and connect with each other. Amazon ECS creates and manages a registry of service names using the Route53 Auto Naming API so you can refer to a service by name in your code and write DNS queries to have the service name resolve to the service’s endpoint at runtime.

Service discovery is available for all networking modes for EC2 launch type or with AWS Fargate.

To learn more about Amazon ECS CLI, visit the Amazon ECS CLI documentation.

Today we are announcing Amazon WorkSpaces GraphicsPro bundles for high-end graphics applications. GraphicsPro bundles come with a dedicated NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU and 8 GB of GPU memory with flexible storage ranging from a 100 GB root and 100 GB user volume sizes to 1 TB volumes each.

Today we are announcing Amazon WorkSpaces PowerPro bundles that provide customers even more powerful cloud desktops to run resource-intensive Linux and Windows desktop workloads. PowerPro bundles come with 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB RAM. PowerPro bundles are available with flexible volume storage ranging from an 80 GB root and 100 GB user volume configuration to 1 TB volumes each.

You can now use an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) optimized for Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) based on Amazon Linux 2 (AL2).

Previously, the latest version of the ECS-optimized AMI was based on Amazon Linux 2018.03, which is the previous generation of Amazon Linux. Therefore, ECS customers had to customize their own AMIs in order to take advantage of the stability and security of AL2.

Now, with the new ECS-optimized AL2 AMI, ECS customers can automatically provision and run ECS AL2 instances with no additional work. The AMI includes all of the software and configuration necessary to run ECS, including the ECS Agent, which runs on all ECS instances and is used to manage ECS tasks and services.

To learn more about the the ECS-optimized AL2 AMI, read our documentation.

The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin version 1.2.1 is now available. All new clusters managed by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now launch with CNI plugin version 1.2.1.

AWS CloudHSM is now available in the EU (Paris) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

CloudHSM provides fully managed hardware security module (HSM) instances in the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can manage and use your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. Applications can be built using using industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11, Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE) and Windows Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG).  

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.6 release 5.6.41 and higher. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.

Today, Infineon’s XMC4800 IoT Connectivity Kit is qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can now take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits for microcontrollers using the development board from Infineon.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now provides a directory by default that you can use to create users and organize them in groups within AWS SSO. Within minutes, you can grant your users and groups permissions to AWS resources in all your AWS accounts as well as many business applications. Your users sign in to a user portal with a single set of credentials configured in AWS SSO to access all of their assigned accounts and applications in a single place. AWS SSO as well as this new directory is available at no additional cost.

AWS Marketplace, which lists over 4,200 software listings from more than 1,400 Independent Software Vendors, has announced a new pricing option that enables you to pay-as-you-go if you need additional usage from your original contract. With this new feature, you can combine the discounts from committed usage and the flexibility of on-demand usage. You can select the SaaS product you need in AWS Marketplace, configure the usage and duration you’ve estimated, and review the rate you will pay if your usage goes over the contracted terms.

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises to organize and govern cloud resources on AWS, now enables your end users to perform self-service actions on your provisioned products, without needing to grant end users full access to AWS services.

AWS Service Catalog has announced new features to the AWS Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow. The connector allows you to use your existing AWS Service Catalog configuration, including curated products, portfolios, constraints, and tagging, and expose this to your ServiceNow administrators and users.

With AWS Elemental MediaStore, you can now write objects up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size. This means you can originate higher bitrate content and support Ultra High Definition (UHD) 4K quality live video streams with predictable latency and scaling to the demand of audience size while providing consistent quality and viewing experience.

AWS Service Catalog, a service to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS, now supports AWS CodePipeline. AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery (CD) service that helps you automate release pipelines for fast and reliable updates. Now you can use continuous delivery practices to publish and update product versions in AWS Service Catalog. You can configure a CodePipeline pipeline to automatically trigger based off an update to your code in AWS CodeCommit, Amazon S3, or GitHub.

AWS Glue Data Catalog is a managed metadata repository integrated with Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Glue ETL. The Data Catalog simplifies metadata management and provides automatic schema discovery and schema version history. With Amazon EMR, you can use the Data Catalog as the default metastore for Spark, Presto, and Hive instead of using an on-cluster or self-managed Hive Metastore. With the recent release of resource-based policies and resource-level permissions for the Data Catalog, you can restrict or allow EMR access to catalog objects such as databases and tables. The release also allows EMR clusters in different accounts to access a single Data Catalog, enabling cross-account access. Amazon S3 policies continue to govern access to data stored in Amazon S3, with Data Catalog policies adding another layer of protection. Learn more

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Athena uses the Glue Data Catalog, a managed repository, integrated with Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Glue ETL, to store metadata information, and automate schema discovery and schema version history. With the recent release of resource-based policies and resource-level permissions for the AWS Glue Data Catalog, you can restrict or allow Athena access to Data Catalog Objects such as databases and tables. Please note that you still need S3 policies to govern access to data stored in Amazon S3. Click here to learn more

19 new AWS Public Datasets are now available for researchers and developers interested in life sciences, environmental science, machine learning, multimedia, civic tech, and cyber security.

AWS Marketplace announces the launch of Flexible Payment Scheduler, a new feature that enables you to negotiate details such as the number of units, payment amounts, payment dates, and end-user licensing in their payment schedule.

Today, Amazon Lightsail announces the addition of managed databases to its easy-to-use cloud platform, allowing you to create a fully configured database in minutes for a low, predictable price. Lightsail databases bundle together a database instance, SSD-backed storage, a data transfer allocation, and management tools, starting at $15/month.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now gives you an additional option to implement the principle of least privilege by reducing the scope of access through the Active Directory (AD) trusts between AWS Managed Microsoft AD and your existing Microsoft AD. As an alternative to forest-wide trust, you can now use external trusts to connect to specific child or tree domains in your existing Microsoft AD forest.

You can now easily encrypt a previously unencrypted Amazon Redshift cluster with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption key. 

Starting today, you can specify a database parameter group when you restore an Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora database from a snapshot or restore a database to a specific point in in time. Previously, restoring a database used the default parameter group and you had to wait until the restore was finished before changing it to the desired configuration.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with optimized builds of TensorFlow 1.11, Chainer 4.5, Keras 2.2.4, and Theano 1.0.3.

You can now restrict access to specific AWS Glue Data Catalog objects with resource-based policies and resource-level permissions. You can set up a resource-based policy on your AWS Glue Data Catalog to give AWS Identify and Access Management (IAM) users and roles granular access to metadata definitions of databases, tables, connections, and user-defined functions. You can also restrict access to specific objects in the AWS Glue Data Catalog using resource-level permissions in identity-based policies (IAM policies).

Amazon WorkMail now provides real-time diagnostic checks for configuring custom domains, making using your own domain with Amazon WorkMail even easier. Customers can already use their own domain for their WorkMail organization. To do so, you need to configure your DNS records with your DNS hosting provider, which can be difficult to do and is sometimes error prone. Now, Amazon WorkMail lets you verify your DNS settings directly from the Amazon WorkMail console. If the DNS settings are incorrect, Amazon WorkMail will prompt you with the information you need to correct the errors.

In addition, we are also providing deeper, automated checks for Autodiscover configuration, so administrators can verify that their endpoint is working correctly before asking their users to configure their email clients. This immediate feedback can save customers hours of debugging email domain issues due to typos, missing records, and differences between DNS hosting providers.

These troubleshooting features are available today for Amazon WorkMail domains hosted by any provider and available in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkMail is offered. To learn more about Amazon WorkMail, or to start your trial, please visit Amazon WorkMail.

AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Window now allows you to set start and end dates, create Maintenance Windows in a specific time zone, and query the occurrence of the next Maintenance Window. With these improvements, you have greater control and visibility into your Maintenance Windows.

Amazon S3 Select is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. 

Amazon S3 Select is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) now supports dynamic admission controllers, allowing customers to deploy custom webhooks that enable additional open source tools for controlling network traffic and monitoring Kubernetes clusters on AWS.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces two new Edge locations: Fujairah, United Arab Emirates and Paris, France. Fujairah is our second Edge location in the United Arab Emirates; the first, Dubai, was launched last month. Customers delivering content within the United Arab Emirates can expect to see up to 90% latency improvements on average. The addition of a new Edge location in Paris, France increases our capacity by 50% within the area. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Details webpage.

AWS Systems Manager now provides more control on the patching workflow by adding the ability to define exactly what patches are approved for deployment and for how long those approved patches should be used for patching operations.

AWS Certification exams validate skills and expertise with an industry-recognized credential. We’re updating our AWS Certification Program to give you more flexibility by removing exam pre-requisites. You can now choose the exam that’s right for you based on your expertise and goals.

We offer a total of 9 exams at the Foundational, Associate, and Professional level. In the past, we required you to pass an Associate or Foundational level exam before pursuing a Professional or Specialty certification. We listened to our customers, and heard you wanted more flexibility, so we are eliminating these requirements. You are no longer required to have an Associate certification before pursuing a Professional certification, and you are no longer required to hold a Foundational or Associate certification before pursuing Specialty certification.

Explore our recommended learning paths for guidance on how you can advance and validate your cloud skills. We offer digital and classroom training to help you build cloud skills and prepare for certification exams.

We’re making these updates in our system beginning on Thursday, October 11, and all candidates will be able to register for any exam by the end of the month. You can review our FAQ or contact us with questions.
 

Customers can now use Jumbo Frames for traffic between their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and on-premises networks over AWS Direct Connect.

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network connection is the size, in bytes, of the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. The larger the MTU of a connection, the more data can be passed in a single packet. Until now, traffic over AWS Direct Connect was limited to 1,500 MTU.

With this release, customers can use Jumbo Frames for their AWS Direct Connect traffic. Jumbo Frames allow more than 1,500 bytes (up to 9,001 bytes) of data by increasing the payload size per packet, and thus lowering the packet overhead. As a result, you need fewer packets to send the same amount of data, which improves the end-to-end network performance. In addition, this release enables new use cases, such as supporting network overlay protocols, for on-premises connectivity over AWS Direct Connect.

Support for Jumbo Frames over AWS Direct Connect is available in all AWS Regions. For more information see the AWS Direct Connect documentation.

You can now use the Resource Groups Tagging API to centrally manage tags and search resources for 6 additional AWS Services: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Certificate Manager Private CA, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Service Catalog.

Starting today, you can create Amazon RDS for Oracle database instances with up to 32TiB of storage. Existing database instances using SSD-backed storage can also be scaled up to 32TiB storage without any downtime

Starting today, you can launch a smaller G3 instance - g3s.xlarge. Like other G3 instances, this new size is powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs but is designed to be cost-effective for workloads that don’t need the high vCPU and RAM that current larger G3 instance sizes provide. The g3s.xlarge size has 4 vCPUs and 30.5 GiB of memory and is 50% lower in price compared to g3.4xlarge for Windows and 34% lower in price compared to g3.4xlarge for Linux. The below table shows all of the currently available G3 instance sizes.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Today, we are releasing support for creating tables using the results of a Select query or support for Create Table As Select (CTAS) statement. Analysts can use CTAS statements to create new tables from existing tables on a subset of data, or a subset of columns, with options to convert the data into columnar formats, such as Apache Parquet and Apache ORC, and partition it. Athena automatically adds the resultant table and partitions to the Glue Data Catalog, making them immediately available for subsequent queries. By default, CTAS statements in Athena write data in Parquet format. Other supported formats include Apache ORC, AVRO, JSON, and Text, with options to use Gzip or Snappy as compression formats. You can also bucket your data by columns or choose to encrypt it.

AWS Direct Connect is now live with two new locations in India and one additional in the Netherlands. In India, AWS Direct Connect launched first locations in Delhi, at STT Delhi DC2 and in Hyderabad, at STT Hyderabad DC1. Customers in these cities can now locally establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. These locations can be found in the Management Console under their home region of Asia Pacific (Mumbai). In the Netherlands, AWS Direct Connect launched its second location at Interxion AMS7 in Amsterdam. Customers in Amsterdam can now obtain highly resilient location redundant connectivity locally. This location can be found under its home region of EU (Frankfurt). With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region from any of the above locations using global public VIFs and Direct Connect Gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the home region if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports creating Network Load Balancers through the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console.

AD Connector enables you to use your existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory (AD) identities to access compatible AWS applications, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Connect, and Amazon Chime and to single sign-on (SSO) to multiple AWS accounts and business applications. AD Connector provides a proxy that directs AD requests from these applications to your on-premises Microsoft AD, without caching information in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.5.61, 5.6.41, and 5.7.23 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include functionality improvements and fixes for the MySQL database engine.

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports global transaction identifiers (GTIDs), which uniquely identify each transaction on the server and within a replication setup.

AWS Cost Explorer’s Reserved Instance (RI) Utilization and Coverage reports provide you with the ability to visualize your utilization and coverage trends both at a high level (e.g., utilization across all Amazon RDS reservations) or for highly-specific requests (e.g., utilization of all regional Amazon EC2 reservations owned by a particular linked account).

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Starting today, you have the ability to conveniently delete completed transcription jobs. This gives you end-to-end control over your transcription jobs and for how long your output transcripts are stored.

Applications in an AWS VPC can now securely access AWS PrivateLink endpoints across AWS Regions using Inter-Region VPC Peering. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. This release makes it possible for customers to privately connect to a service even if the service endpoint resides in a different AWS Region. Traffic using Inter-Region VPC Peering stays on the global AWS backbone and never traverses the public Internet.

AWS PrivateLink is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (London), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo) AWS Regions. To learn more, visit the AWS PrivateLink documentation.

You can now configure your AWS Lambda functions to run up to 15 minutes per execution. Previously, the maximum execution time (timeout) for a Lambda function was 5 minutes. Now, it is easier than ever to perform big data analysis, bulk data transformation, batch event processing, and statistical computations using longer running functions.

Amazon SageMaker now includes an improved Pipe Mode implementation that accelerates the speed at which data can be streamed from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) into SageMaker, while training machine learning (ML) models. The latest implementation of Pipe Mode provides up to 9 times better data streaming throughput compared to File Mode.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to configure additional settings that allow you to customize the user experience to business applications. By setting relay state, you can configure the specific page in the application that you expect your users to navigate to when they select the application in AWS SSO user portal. You can also configure the session duration for business applications so that your users have appropriate time to complete tasks within the application using a single session. To learn more about how to configure these settings, see Manage SSO to Your Applications.

Network Load Balancers now support connections from clients to IP-based targets in peered VPCs across different AWS Regions. Previously, access to Network Load Balancers from an inter-region peered VPC was not possible. With this launch, you can now have clients access Network Load Balancers over an inter-region peered VPC. Network Load Balancers can also load balance to IP-based targets that are deployed in an inter-region peered VPC. This support on Network Load Balancers is available in all AWS Regions. To learn more, visit the Network Load Balancer documentation.

This Quick Start deploys Spotinst Elastigroup for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Starting today, Alexa for Business lets users check availability and reserve conference rooms using Alexa. Finding and booking a conference room for a last minute meeting is frequently a stressful, time-consuming task for many people. With Alexa for Business, users can check the current or future availability of the conference room they are in by asking, “Alexa, is this room free?”, or “Alexa, is this room free at 4?”. Or, they can reserve the room by saying “Alexa, book this room for half an hour”, or “Alexa, reserve this room at 2”. Conference rooms that are open might actually be reserved for a meeting, so users can identify who owns the current reservation by asking, “Alexa, who booked this room?”, and then find out if the meeting is actually happening or not.

Amazon Connect will be available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region in the coming months, which lets businesses in Japan offer the best possible customer service experience to their customers.  The expansion into Tokyo provides  you more options to provision your Amazon Connect cloud contact center with the other AWS services you use.  

Amazon GuardDuty customers can now customize the notification frequency to Amazon CloudWatch Events for subsequent occurrences of an existing finding. Prior to this feature, recurring GuardDuty findings generated a CloudWatch Event every 6 hours. Now, customers can customize this to recur in 15 minute, 1 hour or the default 6 hour intervals. Unique/first time findings still generate a CloudWatch Event close to real time.

AWS IoT Device Management now provides two new jobs timeout configurations, in progress timeouts and step timeouts, which provide additional mechanisms to control and track executions for jobs running on devices. Jobs let you send remote actions to one or many devices at once, control the deployment of your jobs to your devices, and track the current and historical status of your jobs running on each device.

You can now assign tags to your Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts upon allocation, using the AllocateHost APIs. Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources in different ways such as by purpose, by owner, or by environment. You can quickly identify a host based on the tags you have assigned to it.

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses. By tagging hosts at the time of allocation, you can eliminate the need to run custom scripts later on.

To learn more about tagging your Amazon EC2 Dedicated hosts, visit the EC2 user guide.

 

AWS Marketplace, which lists over 4,200 software listings from 1,400 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), has announced that customers can now purchase software solutions directly from their preferred Consulting Partner in AWS Marketplace. This new feature helps you benefit from Consulting Partners who have knowledge of your business, localized support, and expertise and expands the ways you can purchase in AWS Marketplace. You can also negotiate with Consulting Partners who are authorized by an ISV on offer details such as pricing, end-user licensing terms, and add professional services before an offer is created. When offer details are finalized, Consulting Partners work with an AWS Marketplace representative to create and extend an offer with Seller Private Offers.

Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based image and video analysis service that can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect unsafe content. Amazon Rekognition now comes with an improved image moderation model that reduces false positive rates by 40% on average without any reduction in detection rates for truly unsafe content. Lower false positive rates imply lower volumes of flagged images to be reviewed further, leading to higher efficiency of human moderators and more cost savings.

We are happy to announce the release of NICE DCV (Desktop Cloud Visualization) version 2017.2.

You can now create an Amazon SageMaker notebook from the AWS Glue Console and connect it to an AWS Glue development endpoint. With this integration, you can now use Amazon SageMaker’s fully managed notebooks instead of provisioning and managing your own notebook servers, making it easier and faster to start developing your AWS Glue ETL scripts. An AWS Glue development endpoint is a serverless Apache Spark environment that you can use to develop, debug, and test your AWS Glue ETL scripts in an interactive manner. To learn more, please visit our documentation.

The built-in Image Classification algorithm that comes with Amazon SageMaker now supports additional enhancements. The algorithm now supports multi-label inputs and mixed-precision mode for faster training.

Starting today, Amazon API Gateway supports multiple headers and query string parameters with the same name in the API Request.

Amazon API Gateway gives you the capability to quickly create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at scale. You can now pass multiple values for the same key in the header and query string when calling the API. This feature also supports returning multiple headers with the same name in the API response, for example sending multiple “Set-Cookie” headers.

This feature is available in all regions where API Gateway is available. To see all regions where API Gateway is available, see the AWS region table.

To learn more about this feature, please visit the documentation here.

Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon API Gateway.

Starting today, the AWS Management Console in AWS GovCloud (US) makes it easier to find services and access them quickly.

When you visit the new and improved AWS Management Console in AWS GovCloud (US), you can search for AWS services using keywords that describe what the service does, even if you don't remember the actual service name. You can create shortcuts to your favorite services by clicking on the “pin” on the top of the Management Console, or you can let the Management Console create shortcuts for you automatically each time you visit a service.

If you are new to AWS, the “Build a Solution” feature helps you get started with popular AWS services.

These improvements are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. To start using these features, login to the AWS Management Console.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams now enables you to easily add metadata to and retrieve from individual fragments in a Kinesis Video stream to build richer applications in the AWS cloud. For example, you can now send GPS values as metadata with each video fragment from an on-person camera, or send temperature values with videos fragments from a baby monitor, and then use both the metadata and video fragments in your consuming applications to create richer user experiences.

A fragment represents a segment of video, audio, or other time-encoded data. Metadata in Kinesis Video Streams is a mutable key-value pair that can be used to describe the content of the fragment, embed associated sensor readings, or any other custom data that needs to be transferred along with the actual fragment.

Fragment-level metadata gives you granular control over passing and processing additional information with each video fragment. The metadata is stored along with the video fragment for the entire duration of the stream's retention period. You can use it to embed GPS or temperature sensor values to video fragments that your consuming application can then use for creating meaningful correlations, or you can use it to mark exactly those video fragments that contain motion detected by your edge device, like a camera. Your deep-learning cloud application can then use this metadata to inform the next stage of processing such as identifying faces or objects.

Your stream producing application or device can use the Kinesis Video Producer SDK to add metadata to a video fragment. Your consuming application can use the Kinesis Video Stream Parser Library to easily retrieve the metadata for each fragment via the GetMedia or GetMediaForFragmentList API operations for further processing. To learn more, please see the developer documentation.

Refer to the AWS global region table for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams availability.

AWS Config now supports multi-account, multi-Region data aggregation capability in six additional AWS Regions. This feature enables you to aggregate AWS Config rule compliance data into a single account and Region, which reduces the time and overhead needed to gather an enterprise-wide view of your compliance status for governance.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT) version 12.2.180331 through the use of the SQLT option. You can improve SQL query performance by using the Oracle EXPLAIN PLAN statement, and looking at diagnostic information on the execution plan of a SQL statement.

Starting today, Amazon Pinpoint customers will see an updated web-based console experience. This updated user interface helps you start engaging with your customers in as few as three clicks. The new Amazon Pinpoint console also includes advanced segmentation capabilities that help you create high-impact email, SMS, and push notification campaigns. It also includes features that help you more effectively manage transactional messaging workloads, such as 2-factor authentication (2FA) and order confirmations.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.14, 9.4.19, and 9.3.24. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in current and previous minor releases by the PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

With this update, we have also added support for extensions pglogical version 2.2.0 and pg_similarity version 1.0 in PostgreSQL 10.5 and 9.6.10; pageinspect version 1.6 extension is supported with PostgreSQL 10.5; Map Box Vector Tiles in PostGIS with libprotobuf-c is supported with PostgreSQL 10.5; wal2json has been updated to 01c5c1ec in PostgreSQL 10.5 and 9.6.10; and pg_hint_plan has been updated to 1.3.1 and 1.2.3.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for regional availability.

You can now query data in your Amazon Redshift cluster directly from your AWS Management console, using the new Query Editor. This provides an easier way for admins and end users to run SQL queries without having to install and setup an external JDBC/ODBC client. Query results are instantly visible within the console.

Amazon CloudWatch now enables you to aggregate metric data on the client-side and publish it in a single PutMetricData API call. This allows you to efficiently ingest high volumes of metric data whilst reducing costs with fewer API calls.

Oracle Patch Set Updates contain critical security updates and other important updates. The July 2018 PSUs are now available for 12c on Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about the Oracle PSUs supported on Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS patch update documentation.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Europe (London) region.

We've updated two of our AWS training courses to map to the latest AWS service updates and current best practices: Architecting on AWS and Security Engineering on AWS. Classes are taught by accredited AWS instructors so you can learn best practices and get live feedback to your questions.

You can now use Amazon MQ to build HIPAA-compliant applications, and store and transmit messages between healthcare systems, including messages containing protected health information (PHI).  

AWS Migration Hub provides a single location to track the progress of servers and database migrations as applications across multiple AWS and partner migration tools. Using Migration Hub, your application’s migration status now automatically updates when the app’s server or database migrations start. When you’re migrating hundreds or thousands of servers to AWS, it is a best practice to track your server and database migrations as application groupings.

This Quick Start deploys Dynamic Read Analysis for GENomics Complete Suite (DRAGEN CS), a data analysis platform by Illumina, on the AWS Cloud in about 15 minutes.

AWS Cloud9 now supports the TypeScript programming language. You can begin to develop using TypeScript on Cloud9 environments.

AWS CodeBuild now allows you to build Atlassian Bitbucket pull requests, making it easier to collaborate across your team while editing and building your application code with CodeBuild.

AWS Organizations now supports AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, making it easy for Directory Service customers to securely share a Managed AD directory across multiple accounts in their organization. This simplifies and makes it more cost-effective for customers to deploy directory-aware applications in accounts in their organization.

AWS Systems Manager simplifies compliance workflow by enabling you to monitor patching and configuration compliance by user-defined logical groupings such as patch groups or environment. Additionally, you can now drill down into non-compliant items for more details using the same screen.

Starting today, it's even easier for you and your users to find the content you need in Amazon WorkDocs with Smart Search. WorkDocs Smart Search lets you query across content, comments, and document labels in addition to searching for files and folders by name.

To get started, access WorkDocs in your web browser and enter the desired search term in the search box in the top navigation bar. Hitting 'Enter' or clicking the magnifying glass search icon will automatically search all content to which you have access across file names, content types, comments, and labels. Results will display as a sorted list, with folders listed before files.

You can use the Advanced button in the search bar to further refine your search. Advanced search can scope your search by location of files, limit the time and date range, and specifying file types. Results will display as they would with a regular search, but with your additional parameters applied.

This new search experience is immediately available to all WorkDocs customers. No user or administrator action is required to activate it. Discover more about WorkDocs, or sign up for a 30-day trial today.