July 2023

Amazon Connect scheduling now allows contact center managers to automatically generate agent schedules with a combination of fixed and flexible working days each week, i.e. agents will have certain mandatory work days while other days are scheduled based on demand. Before this launch, managers had to manually adjust a subset of agent schedules to align with their flexible work contracts and regional labor laws. With this launch, the system automatically proposes flexible schedules allowing managers to create more optimized labor/union compliant agent schedules, freeing up valuable time for more important tasks.

Amazon Connect scheduling now offers new time off balance and group allowance features empowering contact center managers and agents to handle time offs more efficiently. Before this launch, managers had to manually cross-verify time off balances before approving or declining requests, and agents had to contact their managers via email or third party tools to request or change their time off schedule. With this launch, managers can easily import agent time off balances and group allowances in bulk from third party HR systems (for e.g., 120 hours vacation time, 40 hours sick time), and select either an automated or manual approval workflow for their groups. Agents can request time off and receive automatic approvals (or declines) based on their time off balances and group allowances in addition to other time off rules.

Today, AWS Clean Rooms launches two new capabilities that give customers flexibility to generate richer insights: custom analysis rule and analysis templates. These capabilities enable customers to bring their own custom SQL queries into an AWS Clean Rooms collaboration based on their specific use cases. With the custom analysis rule, customers can create their own queries using advanced SQL constructs, as well as review queries prior to their collaboration partners running them. This workflow gives customers built-in control of how their data is used in collaborations upfront, in addition to reviewing query logs after analyses are complete. Using analysis templates, customers can create queries with parameters that provide reusability and flexibility to those running queries in a collaboration. This helps customers expand and automate types of analyses they run frequently with multiple partners, minimize the need to write new SQL code when analyzing collective data sets. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon EMR on EKS is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan).

AWS Launch Wizard now supports deployment of SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server workloads in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)and Middle East (UAE) Regions. We are also announcing support for additional languages within AWS Launch Wizard, including Chinese (traditional and simplified), Portuguese (Brazil), German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Korean.

Amazon SageMaker Studio launched support for the ml.G5 GPU instance family in the South America region (São Paulo). Customers using ml.G5 instances in Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks can leverage up to 3.3x faster performance for machine learning training compared to ml.G4dn instances. This makes them a high performance and cost-efficient solution for interactive model training for use cases such as generative AI foundation model tuning, natural language processing, computer vision, and recommender engines.

Today, we are announcing the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS in AWS Europe (Zurich) region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region. The addition of these 2 regions expands the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS to a total of 25 regions globally, enabling customers to have a faster and more efficient way to migrate to the cloud.  

Amazon EC2 adds templates for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to the Spot Blueprints portfolio. With Spot Blueprints, you can generate a reusable quick start template as CloudFormation or Terraform, based on your workload, and use the template to configure a compute environment using EC2 Spot Instances. This saves you time learning to use Spot Instances with services like Amazon ECS and start accessing the savings and scale that Spot Instances offer for interruptible workloads. 

Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new Local Zone in Phoenix, Arizona. This new AWS Local Zone comes with Amazon EC2C6i, M6i, R6i and C6gn instances and Amazon EBS volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1. You can also access Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, AWS Direct Connect and NAT Gateway in this new Local Zone to support a broad set of workloads at the edge.

Today, we launched an in-line editing experience for partner originated opportunities imported to the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) pipeline manager via the bulk channel. Bulk import helps AWS Partners maximize efficiency when utilizing the ACE Pipeline Manager by allowing users to submit up to 250 opportunities at a time.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Entity Resolution, a configurable, machine learning (ML)–powered service that helps organizations match and link related records stored across multiple applications, channels, and data stores. You can get started in minutes using entity resolution workflows that are flexible, scalable, and seamlessly connectable to your existing applications, without any expertise in entity resolution or ML.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P5 instances, powered by the latest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. These instances deliver the highest performance in Amazon EC2 for deep learning and high performance computing (HPC) applications. They help you accelerate your time to solution by up to 6x and lower cost to train ML models by up to 40% compared to previous-generation GPU-based instances.

Starting today, customers can easily understand and validate their Savings Plans recommendations through new visual graphs. The new hourly graphs show On-Demand spend alongside the recommended Savings Plans commitment, providing insight into estimated savings, Savings Plans coverage, and Savings Plans utilization. This helps customers understand how their Savings Plans apply to each hour of spend without having to invest time and resources in building models to analyze their spend.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces a new update to Synthetics NodeJS runtime version syn-nodejs-puppeteer-5.0 and recommends that customers migrate Synthetics canaries to the latest runtime version. Runtime version syn-nodejs-puppeteer-5.0 includes updates to third-party dependency packages (Puppeteer v19.7.0 and Chromium v111.0.5563.146).

Starting today, users can experience a simplified visual layout when they access AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning from their browser. This new user interface features an enhanced onboarding experience, simplified forecast settings, a unified demand plan, and streamlined workflows for forecast overrides and demand plan finalization. This reduces the time it takes for new users to onboard and finalize forecast.

We are excited to announce the launch of 28 new proactive controls in AWS Control Tower. This launch enhances AWS Control Tower’s governance capabilities, allowing you to implement controls at scale across your multi-account AWS environments by blocking non-compliant resources before they are provisioned for services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Neptune, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon DocumentDB. These new controls help you meet control objectives such as establish logging and monitoring, encrypt data at rest, or improve resiliency. To see a full list of the new controls, see the controls reference guide.

Starting today, you can enable Amazon Route 53 Resolver on AWS Outpost rack, allowing you to resolve Domain Name Server (DNS) queries locally and enhance the availability and performance of applications running on Outposts rack.

AWS CodeBuild customers can now use GitHub Actions during the building and testing of software packages. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages. Customers’ CodeBuild projects are now able to leverage many of the pre-built actions available in GitHub’s marketplace. GitHub Actions are open source applications for the GitHub Actions platform that perform a complex but frequently repeated task.