Jan 2019

Amazon Corretto 8, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK 8, is now Generally Available for production use. Corretto had been in preview since we announced it in November, 2018. 

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT) version 12.2.180725 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.

 

The Oracle SQLT utility produces a report that includes execution plans, statistics, optimizer parameters and other information that can be used to tune a SQL statement for optimal performance. For more details on using the SQLT option, please refer to the Amazon RDS for Oracle Documentation.

 

Amazon RDS for Oracle makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Oracle Database deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for Oracle Database Pricing for complete regional availability information.

You can now use an external Kerberos KDC to authenticate applications and users running on your EMR cluster with Amazon EMR release 5.20.0 or later. This feature allows you to connect multiple Kerberized EMR clusters to a centralized external KDC and allow applications running inside these clusters that use Kerberos for authentication to cross-authenticate with each other without your needing to establish a cross-realm trust. This capability will be especially useful in scenarios where you want multiple clusters to authenticate to a central data lake cluster to access data to submit and run jobs. You can also set up a cross-realm trust between an external KDC and an Active Directory domain on premises or in Amazon EC2. This allows users in your corporate directory to more securely access all Kerberized EMR clusters that authenticate to that KDC using their familiar Active Directory domain credentials.

For more information about configuring and using an external KDC on EMR, see Using Kerberos Authentication and External KDC Architecture Options in the Amazon EMR Management Guide.

This feature is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now have support for AWS PrivateLink. AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. When you create AWS PrivateLink endpoints for ECR and ECS, these service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your VPC.

You can now launch T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Amazon T3 instances are the next generation burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. T3 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and are ideal for database workloads with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in use.

T3 instances accumulate CPU credits when a workload is operating below baseline threshold. Each earned CPU credit provides the T3 instance the opportunity to burst with the performance of a full CPU core for one minute when needed. Amazon RDS T3 instances are configured for Unlimited mode, which means they can burst beyond the baseline over a 24-hour window for an additional charge.

Amazon RDS database instances running PostgreSQL versions 9.6.9 (and higher) and 10.4 (and higher) are supported with T3 instance types. You can easily scale up to these new instance classes by modifying your existing DB instance in the AWS RDS Management Console.

Please refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide for more details and refer to Amazon RDS Pricing for pricing details and regional availability.

AWS Systems Manager Distributor is a recently released feature that you can use to securely store and distribute software packages, such as software agents, in your accounts. Distributor integrates with existing Systems Manager features to simplify and scale the package distribution, installation, and update process. 

You can now launch T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for Oracle. Amazon T3 instances are the next generation of the Amazon burstable general-purpose instance type that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. T3 instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and are ideal for database workloads with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in use.

T3 instances accumulate CPU credits when a workload is operating below baseline threshold. Each earned CPU credit provides the T3 instance the opportunity to burst with the performance of a full CPU core for one minute when needed. Amazon RDS T3 instances are configured for Unlimited mode, which means they can burst beyond the baseline over a 24-hour window for an additional charge. T3 instances are suitable for small and medium database workloads.

You can easily scale up to this new instance type by modifying your existing DB instance in the AWS Management Console. Please refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide for more details. Refer to Amazon RDS Pricing for pricing and regional availability.

The Media2Cloud solution helps customers streamline, automate, and set up a serverless end-to-end ingest workflow to establish the necessary metadata, proxy video, and image thumbnails to manage large video content, and migrate your video assets and associated metadata to the cloud. The solution leverages the Media Analysis Solution to analyze and extract valuable metadata from your video archives using Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Comprehend. Media2Cloud also includes a simple web interface that enables you to immediately start ingesting your archives and extracting metadata.

Amazon Transcribe is now available in the AWS EU (Paris), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add a speech-to-text capability to applications. Organizations can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files quickly.

Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform now supports TFRecord format as a supported SplitType, enabling datasets to be split by TFRecord boundaries. This adds to the list of supported formats including RecordIO, CSV, and Text.

You can now use the CloudWatch Agent procstat plugin to monitor system utilization of individual processes. You can also create multiple configuration files for greater flexibility in defining core and custom configurations to collect metrics and logs from your Amazon EC2 instances and on-premise servers. 

Elastic Load Balancing now supports TLS termination on Network Load Balancers. With this new feature, you can offload the decryption/encryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the Network Load Balancer, which helps you optimize the performance of your backend application servers while keeping your workloads secure. Additionally, Network Load Balancers preserve the source IP of the clients to the back-end applications, while terminating TLS on the load balancer.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Step Functions. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to make AWS Step Functions available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage for each AWS region, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.9%. In the event AWS Step Functions does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the AWS Step Functions Service Level Agreement.

You can now develop your Elastic Beanstalk applications using .NET Core 2.2. The latest .NET Core 2.2 comes with diagnostic improvements to the runtime and several performance improvements. For a complete list of .NET Core 2.2 features, visit the official .NET Core 2.2 release announcement.

AWS CodeBuild now allows you to access Docker images from any private registry as the build environment. Previously, you could only use Docker images from public DockerHub or Amazon ECR in CodeBuild.  

Now, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) makes it easier for IAM users to view, update and understand all their security credentials from one place using the My Security Credentials page in the AWS Management Console.  

AWS CodeBuild now allows you to use Docker images stored in another AWS account as your build environment. Previously, you couldn’t access Docker images stored in Amazon ECR in one account and use them as the build environment across all your accounts, making it difficult to automate.

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in the Europe (Stockholm) AWS Region.

Nine new AWS Public Datasets are now available for researchers and developers interested in machine learning, environmental science, geospatial, astronomy, cybersecurity, and housing. 

You can now run Amazon WorkSpaces in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements. With this launch, you can now use Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktops to better meet data sovereignty requirements without the cost and complexity of building on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). You can quickly add or remove WorkSpaces to meet the need of your dynamic workforce and still provide a more responsive experience to end users. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS Europe (London) Region. 

You can now specify how AWS CloudFormation manages your resources when they need to be replaced during an update operation. Using the UpdateReplacePolicy attribute, you can specify if CloudFormation should delete, retain, or create a snapshot of old resources once the new ones have been created. The behavior defaults to delete when UpdateReplacePolicy is not specified.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

You can now develop your Elastic Beanstalk applications using Ruby 2.6. The latest Ruby 2.6 comes with numerous performance improvements and new features such as a new JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler and endless ranges. For a complete list of Ruby 2.6 features, visit the official Ruby 2.6 release announcement. You can upgrade your existing Elastic Beanstalk Ruby environment to Ruby 2.6 using the Elastic Beanstalk console or through the AWS CLI and Elastic Beanstalk API. See Updating Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment's Platform Version for additional details.

Provide secure mobile access to your internal websites and web apps.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 6.4 and Kibana 6.4. The new version of Elasticsearch and Kibana offers several new features and improvements, including weighted average aggregation, option to multiplex token filters, support for field aliases, and improved workflow for inspecting the data behind a visualization. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports 200 node Elasticsearch clusters, allowing you to run large analytics applications with high throughput and large data volume requirements on a single cluster. Using I3 instances that can store up to 15 terabytes of data per node, you can store up to 3 petabytes of data in a single cluster. 

Amazon Cognito is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Cognito, which provides availability guarantees.

AWS Config is pleased to announce increased default limits for AWS Config rules for all customers in all Regions. Customers can now create 150 AWS Config rules per account per Region by default, increased from 50 AWS Config rules per account per Region. The full list of AWS service limits can be found on the AWS Service Limits page.

You can now use Python scripts in AWS Glue to run small to medium-sized generic tasks that are often part of an ETL (extract, transform, and load) workflow. Previously, AWS Glue jobs were limited to those that ran in a serverless Apache Spark environment. You can now use Python shell jobs, for example, to submit SQL queries to services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, or Amazon EMR, or run machine-learning and scientific analyses.

The AWS Storage Gateway’s Tape Gateway configuration now provides increased throughput performance for virtual tape backups to AWS. Your on-premises backup applications can now write data to the local gateway cache at up to 2.7 Gbps, and read data from the cloud at up to 0.7 Gbps, by following published best practices.

AWS Storage Gateway customers using the Volume Gateway configuration for block storage can now detach and attach volumes, from and to a Volume Gateway. You can use this feature to migrate volumes between gateways to refresh underlying server hardware, switch between virtual machine types, and move volumes to better host platforms or newer Amazon EC2 instances, as your data and performance demands grow.

AWS Systems Manager, which enables your desired state configuration through State Manager, now enforces configuration at the instance level, enabling configuration management on resources such as instance profiles, security groups, and images through integration with AWS Systems Manager Automation. You can safely schedule configurations inside and outside of your instances while applying those changes at a controlled velocity.  

Amazon EKS Achieves ISO and PCI Amazon Elastic Container Service For Kubernetes (EKS) now meets the criteria for ISO and PCI DSS Level 1 compliance in AMER, EMEA, and APAC. 

AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser, is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail, enabling you to more easily track changes made to Cloud9. CloudTrail captures these changes and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket you specify, giving you visibility into Cloud9 environment creation and deletion.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon MQ. The SLA provides availability guarantees for Amazon MQ active/standby message brokers. 

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now support Amazon Elastic Inference with the latest version of TensorFlow-1.12. With this release, Amazon Elastic Inference (Amazon EI) on Deep Learning AMIs now provides EIPredictor, a new, easy-to-use Python API function for deploying TensorFlow models using EI accelerators to enable easier experimentation. With EIPredictor, developers now have have an alternative to TensorServing when running TensorFlow models on Amazon Elastic Inference. This release also adds a new Conda environment for Amazon Elastic Inference with TensorFlow on Python 3.6, an upgrade to TensorBoard 1.12.1, and an upgrade to MXNet Model Server 1.0.1.

AWS IoT Core extends support of the Custom Authentication feature to the AWS Mobile SDK for iOS. Now, you can reuse existing authentication mechanisms that you have already invested in to connect iOS devices to AWS IoT Core. You can utilize bearer token authentication strategies, such as OAuth, to connect to AWS IoT Core, and not rely on a X.509 certificate as the means to connect iOS devices.

Analyze operations now run automatically on your Amazon Redshift tables in the background to deliver improved query performance and optimal use of system resources.

Amazon ElastiCache adds support for Standard Reserved Instances (RI) for M5 and R5 nodes, providing flexible payment options and cost savings to meet your business needs. RIs give you the option to reserve an ElastiCache node for a one- or three-year term including No Upfront, Partial Upfront and All Upfront payment options. 

AWS Migration Hub, which provides a single location to discover and track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions, launched the import feature. This new feature allows you to import information about your on-premises servers into AWS Migration Hub, including server specifications, utilization data, and the applications the servers are part of, giving you the opportunity to track the status of your application migrations as you migrate them to AWS.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an application that draws upon best practices learned from AWS’ aggregated operational history of serving millions of AWS customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance, and closing security gaps.

Recently, AWS Trusted Advisor has released nine new checks to help keep you operating efficiently, securely, and up-to-date with AWS best practices.

• DynamoDB Read Capacity: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the DynamoDB Provisioned Throughput Limit for Reads per Account.
• DynamoDB Write Capacity: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the DynamoDB Provisioned Throughput Limit for Writes per Account.
• Route53 Hosted Zones: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the Route 53 Hosted Zones Limit per account.
• Route53 Max Health Checks: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the Route 53 Health Checks Limit per account.
• Route53 Reusable Delegation Sets: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the Route 53 Reusable Delegation Sets Limit per account.
• Route53 Traffic Policies: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the Route 53 Traffic Policies Limit per account.
• Route53 Traffic Policy Instances: Checks for usage that is more than 80% of the Route 53 Traffic Policy Instances Limit per account.
• ENA Driver Version for EC2 Windows Instances: Checks the version of the ENA driver for Amazon EC2 Windows instances, and then alerts you if the driver (a) is deprecated and no longer supported; (b) is deprecated with identified issues; or (c) has an available upgrade.
• NVMe Driver Version for EC2 Windows Instances: Checks the version of the NVMe driver for Amazon EC2 Windows instances, and then alerts you if the driver (a) is deprecated and no longer supported; (b) is deprecated with identified issues; or (c) has an available upgrade.

AWS strives to continuously add more checks to allow you to ensure operational health and optimal performance. For a full set of Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks, click here. 

Amazon Elastic Inference is a service that lets you attach accelerators to any Amazon SageMaker or Amazon EC2 instance type to speed up deep learning inference workloads. Elastic Inference accelerators provide you with the low latency, high throughput benefits of GPU acceleration at a much lower cost (up to 75%). You can use Elastic Inference to deploy TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and ONNX models for inference.  

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. Starting today, asynchronous Amazon Comprehend API calls are recorded with AWS CloudTrail. With AWS CloudTrail, you can simplify security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting your Amazon Comprehend requests, like monitoring your Comprehend batch analytics job status.

Amazon Rekognition Video is a deep learning-based video analysis service that can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect unsafe content. Object and Scene detection - also called label detection - can identify thousands of common objects and scenes in a video, as well as the timestamp for when each label appears. Amazon Rekognition Video has been updated to provide significantly improved accuracy for all existing labels across a variety of use cases. In addition, label detection can now specify the location of objects such as dogs, people, and cars in a video by returning bounding box for each object. A bounding box is a set of coordinates that precisely indicates a specific object location in a video frame. Customers can use the bounding box information to count objects ("3 cars"), and to understand the relationship between objects ("person next to a car") at a particular timestamp in a video. Lastly, for each label found, Amazon Rekognition Video now returns its parent labels in a hierarchical list. For example, the label 'Dog' has the parents 'Mammal', 'Canine', and 'Animal'. This metadata allows customers to group labels related by parent-child relationships to improve categorization and facilitates easier mapping to in-house taxonomies. No machine learning experience is required to get started.

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery (CD) service that lets you automate your software release process for fast and reliable updates. You can now use CodePipeline to deploy files, such as static website content or artifacts from your build process, to Amazon S3.

We have published a service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Secrets Manager. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to make AWS Secrets Manager available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage for each AWS region, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.9% (the “Service Commitment”). In the event AWS Secrets Manager does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the AWS Secrets Manager Service Level Agreement.

This Quick Start automatically deploys Micro Focus Enterprise Server into a new or existing virtual private cloud (VPC) on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 1 hour and 15 minutes. The Quick Start includes an optional BankDemo demonstration application for testing the deployment.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), which provides availability guarantees for Amazon ECR.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), which provides availability guarantees for Amazon EKS.

AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EKS available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage, during any monthly billing cycle, of at least 99.9% (the “Service Commitment”). In the event Amazon EKS does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described in the Amazon EKS Service Level Agreement.  

This SLA is now available in all regions where Amazon EKS is available. For more information on where Amazon EKS is available, see the AWS region table. Please visit our product page to learn more about Amazon EKS.

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) now enables you to configure additional settings that allow you to enable email-based verification for the improved security of your users when they sign in to the user portal. You can enable email-based verification in a user-friendly context-aware mode or a compliance-friendly always-on mode.

You can now use AWS Backup, an automated and centralized backup service, to protect EBS volumes and your other AWS resources. With AWS Backup, you can configure backups for EBS volumes, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor backup and restore activity.

AWS Backup was launched today, and it is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS, and AWS Storage Gateway to give you a fully managed AWS backup solution.

Alexa for Business now offers a simplified setup process for shared Echo devices. Shared devices are usually setup using the Alexa for Business Desktop Setup tool. To enable customers to try out the service quickly, Alexa for Business now offers the ability for IT admins to also use the Alexa companion app to setup the devices. Once it is setup in the companion app, IT admins can import the devices as shared devices onto the Alexa for Business console.

AWS Step Functions is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Ningxia and AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. AWS Step Functions makes it easier to coordinate the components of distributed systems, serverless applications, and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly.

You can now use AWS Backup, an automated and centralized backup service, to protect volumes stored with the AWS Storage Gateway service’s block storage option, the Volume Gateway. With AWS Backup, you can configure backups for Volume Gateway volumes, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor backup and restore activity.

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the back up of data across AWS services in the cloud as well as on premises. With AWS Backup, protecting your AWS resources, such as Amazon EFS file systems, is as easy as a few clicks in the AWS Backup console. Customers can configure and audit the AWS resources they want to back up, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor all recent backup and restore activity. 

Backup Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) with AWS Backup.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. It can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added a new feature, IMF (Interoperable Master Format) package ingest, and enhanced an existing feature, caption burn-in, with the addition of several languages. Using MediaConvert, you can now ingest packages with JPEG-2000 video, up to 10 bit UHD format, with IMSC1 text captions. You can pass through HDR (High Dynamic Range) metadata from a CPL (Composition Playlist) to outputs. By taking advantage of IMF, you can reduce asset storage and management costs, and simplify business-to-business distribution workflows for your file-based content. This release of MediaConvert also includes a new high-quality dithering engine, which accepts RGB source files up to 16 bits and is optimized for premium content workflows.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, which provides availability guarantees for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which provides availability guarantees for Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, which provides availability guarantees for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

Amazon QuickSight launches support for additional functionality on pivot table charts. Pivot tables now have an updated look and feel with consistent shading, support copy and pasting cell values, provide formatting options to auto fit to screen size to reduce empty spaces and more. Most importantly, you can add totals and sub-totals on rows and columns, expand/collapse all rows/columns with a single click. Additionally, with increase in row/column field limits, authors can now add up to 20 values in each of the row and column field wells. With pagination enabled, users can now scroll down and across infinitely. For more information on new pivot table enhancements, see here.

You can now use AWS Config to record configuration changes to AWS Service Catalog, a service that allows customers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS. With AWS Config, you can track changes to the configuration of an AWS Service Catalog portfolio, such as addition or removal of launch constraints, tags and accounts with which the portfolio has been shared.

Amazon EC2 Spot makes it easier to operate Spot Instances at scale by publishing the results for the “Describe Spot Instance Request” in a multi-page format. You can check the status of your Spot request and receive the results in multiple pages by setting the MaxResults parameter to a value between 5 and 1000. You can receive up to a maximum of 1000 results in a single page. If there are more than 1000 results to display, you will receive a Next Token. Use the Next Token to receive the next set of results until the Next Token is null. This enables you to get all the results from your describe request in multiple pages. We recommend you to use paginated describes instead of getting all the results in a single request.

Pagination support for the Describe Spot Instance requests API is now available in all public AWS Regions. You can learn more about this feature in the docs here.

With AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), you can now enable your users to get to the AWS resources they manage quickly. You can now configure relay state for AWS accounts to direct your users to a specific AWS console page, such as the Amazon EC2 console, instead of going to AWS console home page when they choose AWS account in the user portal. You can configure relay state for each permission set that you manage in AWS SSO, allowing you to set the AWS console page corresponding to the AWS resource defined in the permission set. To learn more about how to direct your users to a specific AWS Management Console page, see Manage SSO to Your AWS Accounts.

Beginning today you can start connecting your devices to AWS IoT Core using Persistent Sessions. Persistent Sessions store subscription information and pending Quality of Service (QoS) 1 messages should the devices become disconnected. When a device reconnects and resumes a Persistent Session, its subscriptions will be automatically reinstated and any stored messages will be delivered.

You can now run Appium tests written in Ruby or Node.js against your native, hybrid and browser-based apps on AWS Device Farm. Device Farm supports tests written in any JavaScript and Ruby frameworks such as Mocha and RSpec. You can also specify the dependencies your project needs and the exact commands to be run during test execution, to ensure your tests run precisely like they do in your local environment.

AWS Device Farm is an app testing service that lets you run automated tests and interact with your Android, iOS, and web apps on real devices. Device Farm supports running automated tests written in most of the popular test frameworks including Espresso, XCTest, Appium Python and Appium Java. Starting today, you can use Device Farm to execute your tests written in Appium Node.js and Appium Ruby against real devices. You can customize any step in the test process using these frameworks through a simple configuration file.

To learn more about how to use Appium Node.js for Android AWS Device Farm please review our documentation.

For more information on AWS Device Farm please visit our product page. 

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS EU (Paris) Region.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. 

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a target. Using DMS, you can now perform live migrations to Amazon DocumentDB from MongoDB replica sets, sharded clusters, or any AWS DMS supported source including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SAP ASE and Microsoft SQL Server databases with minimal downtime.

To learn more about migrating data to Amazon DocumentDB with DMS, see the documentation for the Amazon DocumentDB target. The Amazon DocumentDB target in DMS is available in all regions in which Amazon DocumentDB is available. For AWS DMS and Amazon DocumentDB availability, see the AWS Region Table.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Customers can use AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for free (for six months) to easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) MongoDB databases to Amazon DocumentDB with virtually no downtime. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon DocumentDB, and customers only pay for the capacity they use.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks now supports Amazon Linux 2 and Ubuntu 18.04 for Chef 12 stacks and Amazon Linux 2018.03 for both Chef 11 and Chef 12 stacks. Previously, the latest supported versions of Amazon Linux and Ubuntu were Amazon Linux 2017.09 and Ubuntu 16.04, which required customized AMIs or Chef recipes in order to take advantage of the stability and security of Amazon Linux 2 and Ubuntu 18.04. Now, you can select Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04, or Amazon Linux 2018.03 as the default operating system for instances created in your stack with a few clicks. Amazon Linux 2 will offer extended availability of software updates for the core operating system through 5 years of long-term support.

Amazon Pinpoint is now available in the US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (Ireland) regions in addition to the US East (Virginia) region. You can now use Amazon Pinpoint to power your digital user engagement without having to transfer your customer data across regions.

This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in certain regions of the EU, where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for many customers to use Amazon Pinpoint. It also creates a global infrastructure that helps to improve availability and redundancy while reducing latency.

With Amazon Pinpoint, you can engage your customers by sending them marketing campaigns and transactional messages across email, SMS, push notifications, and voice messages. Amazon Pinpoint's built-in analytics suite helps you monitor and analyze the performance of your engagement efforts and develop a deeper understanding of your users demographics and behaviors. Additionally, the application analytics tools enable you to track the ways that your customers interact with your mobile and web applications.

To learn more about Amazon Pinpoint, please visit https://aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/.

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. Built as an enhancement to and replacement for the popular open source CfnCluster project, AWS ParallelCluster enables customers to quickly build an HPC cluster on AWS. It automatically sets up the required compute resources and shared file systems and offers a variety of batch scheduler options, including Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Torque, and Slurm.

AWS ParallelCluster reduces the operational overhead of cluster management and simplifies running HPC workloads on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster facilitates both quick-start proof of concepts (POCs) and production deployments. AWS ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications. AWS ParallelCluster is released via the Python Package Index (PyPI). AWS ParallelCluster’s source code is hosted under the Amazon Web Services repository on GitHub at https://github.com/aws/aws-parallelcluster

AWS ParallelCluster is now available in AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Learn how to launch an HPC cluster using AWS ParallelCluster here.
 

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. Built as an enhancement to and replacement for the popular open source CfnCluster project, AWS ParallelCluster enables customers to quickly build an HPC cluster on AWS. It automatically sets up the required compute resources and shared file systems and offers a variety of batch scheduler options, including AWS Batch, Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Torque, and Slurm.

AWS ParallelCluster reduces the operational overhead of cluster management and simplifies running HPC workloads on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster facilitates both quick-start proof of concepts (POCs) and production deployments. AWS ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications. AWS ParallelCluster is released via the Python Package Index (PyPI). AWS ParallelCluster’s source code is hosted under the Amazon Web Services repository on GitHub at https://github.com/aws/aws-parallelcluster

AWS ParallelCluster is now available in AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. Learn how to launch an HPC cluster using AWS ParallelCluster here.
 

You can now assign AWS tags to your AWS Step Functions resources.

Amazon EC2 now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2019 with several new License Included (LI) AMIs, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest version of Windows Server. By running Windows Server 2019 on Amazon EC2, you can take advantage of the reliability, performance, and elasticity of AWS with the new capabilities of Windows Server.

Windows Server 2019 comes loaded with a variety of new features including smaller and more efficient Windows containers, support for Linux containers for application modernization and App Compatibility Feature on Demand. Click here for more on Windows Server 2019.

Windows Server 2019 AMIs are available in all public AWS regions and GovCloud. Customers can launch instances directly from the Amazon EC2 console and all instances running Windows Server 2019 AMIs are billed under the standard Windows pricing. For details about Windows Server 2019 on Amazon EC2, check out the FAQ and User Guide for Windows Instances.

This Quick Start automatically deploys Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 90 minutes. The deployment includes a hosted shared desktop and two sample published applications. 

Effective Jan 07, 2019, we are reducing the price for AWS Fargate by 20% for vCPU and 65% for memory across all regions where Fargate is currently available. Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. Read more about the pricing update on the Fargate pricing detail page or on our blog.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon EMR, which provides availability guarantees for Amazon EMR.

The Renesas RX65N System on Chip (SoC) is now qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits using the Renesas Starter Kit+ for RX65N-2MB available from Renesas.

We are excited to announce the availability of our beta for the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty exam and free, digital, self-paced training. Beta candidates have the opportunity to take the newest exams first for 150 USD. Be among the first to verify your knowledge and skills in Alexa Skill Building.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon EFS, which provides availability guarantees for Amazon EFS file systems.