AWS Weekly Roundup – CloudFront security dashboard, EBS snapshots improvements, and more – November 13, 2023

This week, it was really difficult to choose what to recap here because, as we’re getting closer to AWS re:Invent, service teams are delivering new capabilities at an incredible pace.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my attention last week:

Amazon Aurora – Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now generally available. Get a walk-through in our AWS News Blog post. Here’s a recap of data integration innovations at AWS. Optimized reads for Aurora PostgreSQL provide up to 8x improved query latency and up to 30 percent cost savings for I/O-intensive applications. Here’s more of a deep dive from the AWS Database Blog.

Amazon EBS – You can now block public sharing of EBS snapshots. Read more about how that works in the launch post.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager – Support for pre- and post-script automation of EBS snapshots simplifies application-consistent snapshots. Here’s how to use it with Windows applications.

AWS Health – There’s now improved visibility into planned lifecycle events like end of standard support of a Kubernetes version in Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS certificate rotations, and end of support for other open source software. Here’s how it works.

Amazon CloudFront – Unified security dashboard to enable, monitor, and manage common security protections for your web applications directly from the CloudFront console. Read more at Introducing CloudFront Security Dashboard, a Unified CDN and Security Experience.

Amazon Connect – Reduced outbound telephony pricing across Europe and South America. It’s also easier now to deliver persistent chat experiences for end users.

AWS Lambda – Busy week for the Lambda team! There is now support for Amazon Linux 2023 as both a managed runtime and a container base image. More details in this Compute Blog post. There’s also enhanced auto scaling for Kafka event sources (the Compute Blog has a post with more details) and faster polling scale-up rate for Amazon SQS events when AWS Lambda functions are configured with SQS.

AWS CodeBuild – Now supports AWS Lambda compute to build and test software packages. Read about how it works in this post.

Amazon SQS – Now supports JSON protocol to reduce latency and client-side CPU usage. More in the launch post. There’s also a new integration for Amazon SQS in the Amazon EventBridge Pipes console (the week before that, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams was also integrated into the EventBridge Pipes console).

Amazon SNS –  FIFO topics now support 3,000 messages per second by default.

Amazon EventBridge – There are 22 additional Amazon CloudWatch metrics to help you monitor the performance of your event buses. More info in this post from the AWS Compute Blog.

Amazon OpenSearch Service – Neural search makes it easier to create and manage semantic search applications.

Amazon Timestream – The UNLOAD statement simplifies exporting time-series data for additional insights.

Amazon Comprehend – New trust and safety features with toxicity detection and prompt safety classification. Read how to apply that to generative AI applications using LangChain.

AWS App Runner – Now available in London, Mumbai, and Paris AWS Regions.

AWS Application Migration Service – Support for AWS App2Container replatforming  of .NET and Java based applications.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS – Now available in ten additional AWS Regions with support for additional deployment types in seven Regions.

AWS Global Accelerator – There’s now IPv6 support for Network Load Balancer (NLB) endpoints. It was already available for Application Load Balancers (ALBs) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

Amazon GuardDuty – New machine learning (ML) capability enhances threat detection for Amazon EKS.

Other AWS news
Some other news and blog posts that you might have missed:

AWS Local Zones Credit Program – If you have low-latency or data residency requirements for your application, our Local Zones Credit Program can get you started. Fill out our form to receive $500 in AWS credits and apply it to a Local Zones workload.

Amazon CodeWhisperer – Customizing coding companions for organizations and optimizing for sustainability.

Sharing what we have learned – Creating a correction of errors document to understand what went wrong and what would be done to prevent it from happening again.

Good tips for containers – Securing API endpoints using Amazon API Gateway and Amazon VPC Lattice.

Another post in this amazing series – Let’s Architect! Tools for developers.

A few highlights from Community.AWS:

• From MVC to Modern Web Frameworks
• Reduce Stress and Get Your Fridays Back with Observability and OpenTelemetry
• Sustainable Software Development Life Cycle (S-SDLC)

Don’t miss the latest AWS open source newsletter by my colleague Ricardo.

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

AWS Community Days – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Uruguay (November 14), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia on November 17–18), and Guatemala (November 18).

AWS re:Invent (November 27 – December 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Browse the session catalog and attendee guides and check out the highlights for generative AI. In the AWS re:Invent Builder Hub you can find developer-focused sessions, events, competitions, and content.

Here you can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

And that’s all from me for this week. We’re now taking a break. The next weekly roundup will be after re:Invent!

— Danilo

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!