AWS Week in Review – April 11, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick round up of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

As spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, tulips, sunshine, and cherry blossoms finally appear to be in bloom—surely signs of warmer days to come in North America, Asia, and Europe. I hope you enjoy the spring and, in the Southern Hemisphere, fall season with your family.

Let’s look the second edition of the AWS Week in Review for the month of April!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

New Amazon EC2 Single Page Instance Launching Console – As Jeff introduced, the Amazon EC2 console introduces the new and improved launch experience—a quicker and easier way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout, allowing you to view all your settings in one location. You no longer need to navigate back and forth between steps to ensure your configuration is correct. The new design also introduces a summary panel that provides an overview and helps navigate the page. Quickly get started by following the simple steps and see the EC2 documentation to learn more.

Unified Settings in the AWS Management Console – New Unified Settings will persist across devices, browsers, and services. It supports settings called default language, Region, visual theme such as either light or dark mode, and favorites bar with either the service icon and full name or only the service icon. You can access Unified Settings by signing in to the AWS Management Console, navigating to the account menu, and selecting Settings in all AWS Regions.

AWS Lambda Function URLs – This is really big news! AWS Lambda Function URLs is a new feature that makes it easier to invoke functions through an HTTPS endpoint as a built-in capability of the AWS Lambda service. You can add Function URLs to new and existing functions easily from the Lambda console. Function URLs are ideal for getting started with building web services on Lambda or for common tasks like building webhooks. To get started quickly and learn more, see Alex’s blog post.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights is Now Generally Available – As a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine, Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights enables you to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution. With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large-scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations. To get started, select the All metrics link under Metrics on the left navigation panel of the CloudWatch console and browse to the Query tab. To learn more, see the Metrics Insights documentation.

AWS Amplify Studio’s New File Storage and File Management – This new feature makes it easy to store and serve user-generated content (such as photos and videos) from web or mobile apps. With Amplify Studio, you can easily create an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, configure file access levels, integrate storage client libraries into your web or mobile app, and manage files in Studio’s drag-and-drop file explorer. Get started by reading Nikhil’s blog post on how to provision Storage directly from your Amplify Studio.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some featured news items about open-source and community support at AWS in the last week:

Amazon Athena ACID Transactions Powered by Apache Iceberg – We announced the general availability of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds insert, update, delete, and time travel operations to Athena’s SQL data manipulation language (DML). Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are optimized for Amazon S3 storage, support seamless schema evolution, and ensure atomic operations across other services and engines that support the Iceberg table format. To learn more, see Using Amazon Athena Transactions and Using Iceberg Tables in the Athena User Guide.

Amazon OpenSearch Service Now Supports OpenSearch 1.2 – We launched support for OpenSearch 1.0 on Amazon OpenSearch Service in September 2021 and for OpenSearch 1.1 in January 2022. The support included features of OpenSearch 1.2 such as transforms, data streams, notebooks, cross-cluster replication, and improvements to anomaly detection and alerting.

Amazon EKS Now Supports Kubernetes 1.22 – Customers can start taking advantage of the numerous enhancements and new generally available APIs in Kubernetes 1.22. In line with the Kubernetes community support for Kubernetes versions, Amazon EKS is committed to supporting at least four production-ready versions of Kubernetes at any given time. You can learn about how to upgrade your EKS version in our blog posts Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 and Planning Kubernetes Upgrades with Amazon EKS.

The New AWS Community Builders Directory – You can find over 800 AWS Community Builders in the global directory. Community Builders are technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community. You can contact all Community Builders in the directory to engage the AWS Community in your Region. To see created and shared content by them, check them out on dev.to.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Summits in the Asia-Pacific Are Back – I am happy to announce newly scheduled AWS Summits Online in the Asia-Pacific Regions such as Korea (on May 10–11), ASEAN (on May 18), and Australia & New Zealand (on May 18–19). More in-person summits in May are coming in Madrid (on May 4), Stockholm (on May 11), Berlin (on May 11–12), Tel Aviv (on May 18), and Atlanta (on May 18–19). Find an AWS Summit near you!

AWS Online Tech Talks for April – These talks cover a range of topics and expertise levels and features technical deep dives, demonstrations, customer examples, and live Q&A with AWS experts. Over 20 virtual or on-demand seminars have been scheduled from April 18–29. You can also find archived on-demand videos from previous AWS Online Tech Talks.

AWS Solutions-Focused Immersion Days – This is a series of events that are designed to educate you about AWS products and services and help you develop the skills needed to build, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications in the cloud. Hands on labs provide you with an immersive experience in the AWS console. Join us to learn how to build on AWS.

To find more about AWS events and webinars, explore the all AWS Events page.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy