Apr 2019

You can now create Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations through AWS CloudFormation. You can make Capacity Reservations part of the provisioning strategy as you set up your cloud environments. Take advantage of On-Demand Capacity Reservations if you have specific requirements around instance type, instance size, instance capability, and Availability Zones, and if you need higher levels of assurance that you will be able to launch (or relaunch) into a specific capacity.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations let you reserve Amazon EC2 capacity for any duration. You can reserve the exact capacity you need, in the location you need, and can keep it only for as long as you need it. On-Demand Capacity Reservations are activated as soon as they are requested, and they stay active until cancelled. Once created, the EC2 capacity is held for you regardless of whether you run the instances or not. 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.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations are available in all public Regions. Visit AWS CloudFormation user guide to learn more about adding Capacity Reservations to your CloudFormation template. To learn more about Capacity Reservations and how to use them, visit FAQs, Linux or Windows user guides. You can also create and manage Capacity Reservations through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDK and CLI.
 

Today, AWS Amplify launched a community site to provide developers building fullstack serverless web or mobile applications an easy way to access community-generated content. The community site is fully open source allowing developers to contribute blog posts, videos, sample projects, and tutorials through GitHub pull requests. Developers interested in hosting an Amplify event or meetup will get an event starter pack that includes presentation templates, AWS credits, and free swag. Join our community today at https://amplify.aws/community.

You can now launch an EMR cluster with three master nodes and support high availability of applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, Spark, Hive, and Ganglia. Amazon EMR automatically fails over to a standby master node if the primary master node fails or if critical processes, like Resource Manager or Name Node, crash. Since the master node is no longer a potential single point of failure with this feature, you can run your long-lived EMR clusters without interruption. In the event of a failover, Amazon EMR automatically replaces the failed master node with a new master node with the same configuration and boot-strap actions.

Please visit Plan and Configure Master nodes to learn more about this feature.

This feature is now available from EMR release 5.23.0 in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) has increased the limits per account for certificate creation and certificate revocation. The limits on the lifetime total certificates generated and revoked by a single CA has been increased from 50,000 to 1,000,000. This applies to all regions for which ACM Private CA is available. This limit increase is intended for organizations doing large scale certificate deployment to IOT, endpoints, and devices.

AWS IoT Greengrass Core 1.9.0 is now available. With this release, IoT Greengrass adds two new supported language versions for AWS Lambda functions and adds elliptic-curve cryptography support for attached devices.

AWS X-Ray now includes Analytics, an interactive approach to analyzing user request paths (i.e., traces). Analytics will allow you to easily understand how your application and its underlying services are performing. With X-Ray Analytics, you can quickly detect application issues, pinpoint the root cause of the issue, determine the severity of the issues, and identify which end users were impacted. 

You can now use a single property setting in the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to control access using IAM permissions for all paths and methods of an Amazon API Gateway API. In addition, you can now configure custom responses for your APIs using simple AWS SAM syntax.  

Today, we are announcing AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway. With this feature, customers can connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) in multiple AWS Regions to their on-premises networks using 1/2/5/10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections. Until today, AWS Transit Gateway only supported AWS Site-to-Site VPN and Amazon VPC attachments. You can now use Direct Connect gateway as an attachment with your Transit Gateways.

We are excited to announce AWS Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections can now be moved from a virtual private gateway to an AWS Transit Gateway without having to make any changes on your customer gateway. Transit Gateways enable you to easily scale connectivity across thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), AWS accounts, and on-premises networks. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool was introduced in Nov 2018 to help you review your workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve your cloud architectures.  

Today, we are excited to announce the new VMware Cloud on AWS Navigate track. 

Together, VMware Cloud on AWS delivers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud solution that extends on-premises VMware environments to AWS elastic, bare-metal infrastructure that is fully integrated as part of the AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS will bring the capabilities of VMware’s enterprise class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies to the AWS Cloud, and enable customers to run any application across vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

The VMware Cloud on AWS Navigate track creates a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in supporting AWS Customer projects for VMware Cloud solutions on AWS.

Learn more about the AWS Navigate Program, and all the AWS Navigate tracks available on the APN blog. 

At AWS re:Invent 2018 we announced preview availability for S3 Batch Operations and today we are announcing general availability. S3 Batch Operations is a new feature that makes it simple for customers to manage billions of objects stored in Amazon S3, with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. Now, all AWS customers can make changes to object properties and metadata, and perform other storage management tasks – such as copying objects between buckets, replacing tag sets, modifying access controls, and restoring archived objects from Amazon S3 Glacier – for any number of S3 objects in minutes instead of months.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of Amazon Managed Blockchain, which is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Hyperledger Fabric is available today. Ethereum is coming soon.

AWS has updated AWS WAF Security Automations, a solution that automatically deploys a single web access control list (web ACL) with a set of AWS WAF rules designed to filter common web-based attacks.

This Quick Start builds a serverless CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, to provide an enterprise-ready, dynamic deployment pipeline. 

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has support for AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. 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 a AWS PrivateLink endpoint for Amazon ECR, the service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), a low-latency network adapter for Amazon EC2 Instances, is now Generally Available for production use.  EFA was first announced as a preview in November 2018.  

EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run High Performance Computing (HPC) applications requiring high levels of inter-instance communications, like computational fluid dynamics, weather modeling, and reservoir simulation, at scale on AWS. It uses a custom-built operating system bypass technique to enhance the performance of inter-instance communications, which is critical to scaling HPC applications. With EFA, HPC applications using popular HPC technologies like Message Passing Interface (MPI) can scale to thousands of CPU cores. EFA supports industry-standard libfabric APIs, so applications that use a supported MPI library can be migrated to AWS with little or no modification. EFA is available as an optional EC2 networking feature that you can enable on C5n.18xl and P3dn.24xl instances at no additional cost. EFA is currently available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and AWS GovCloud (US). Support for additional instances and regions will be added in the coming months.

Learn more about using EFA for your HPC workloads here.
 

You can now set the minimum capacity of your Aurora Serverless DB clusters with MySQL compatibility to 1 Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU). With Aurora Serverless, you specify the minimum and maximum ACUs for your Aurora Serverless DB cluster instead of provisioning and managing database instances. Each ACU is a combination of processing and memory capacity. By setting the minimum capacity to 1 ACU, you can keep your Aurora Serverless DB cluster running at a lower cost.

Starting today, developers of all skill levels can join the AWS DeepRacer League from anywhere in the world via the AWS DeepRacer console. Developers can put their skills to the test by competing in the Virtual Circuit World Tour, on virtual tracks inspired by famous raceways to be revealed each month. They will race for prizes and glory and a chance to win an expenses paid trip to the AWS DeepRacer Championship Cup at re:Invent 2019.

You can now define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to specify fine-grained permissions for specific brokers based on resource names and tags, improving the security of broker management. 

Customers who need to run Amazon EC2 workloads on AWS Snowball Edge devices can now attach multiple persistent block storage volumes to their Amazon EC2 instances. With both block and object storage options on Snowball Edge, you have flexibility to deploy a wider set of applications in rugged, temporary or mobile environments that have limited or no network connectivity.

AWS Security Token Service (STS) now enables you to request session tokens from the global STS endpoint that work in all AWS Regions. Using your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users or roles, you can configure the global STS endpoint to vend session tokens that are compatible with all AWS Regions.  

Starting today, AWS IoT Analytics customers can now refresh their SQL data sets in customizable intervals as low as one minute. Prior to this capability, customers could only refresh their SQL data sets with a minimum interval of 15 minutes, which enabled a plethora of batched analysis operations but limited their ability to do near real-time analysis. With this new feature, customers can address their need for more timely analyses such as getting minute updates to operational dashboards or deriving more actionable insights on customer usage trends and equipment telemetry using their IoT data.

DynamoDBMapper now supports Amazon DynamoDB transactional API calls, enabling developers who use DynamoDBMapper to simplify their code when making coordinated, all-or-nothing changes to multiple items both within and across DynamoDB tables.

You can now tag Amazon DynamoDB tables when you create them. Tags are labels you can attach to AWS resources to make them easier to manage, search, and filter.

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store today introduces advanced parameters that provide three enhanced capabilities. Advanced parameters enable you to create more than 10,000 parameters, use larger parameter value size (up to 8 KB) and add policies to your parameter.  

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store now supports up to 1,000 requests per second. This lets you run applications that require higher concurrent access to a large number of parameters. You can enable the higher throughput limit from the Parameter Store Settings tab. Once the higher throughput is enabled for your account, you incur charges per API interaction. See the pricing page for details.  

Starting today, Amazon RDS is billed in one-second increments for database instances and attached storage. Pricing is still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are now calculated down to the second and show usage in decimal form. There is a 10 minute minimum charge when an instance is created, restored or started.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale, has expanded its cloud extensions to ROS-Melodic users. AWS RoboMaker now provides the cloud extensions for Amazon Cloudwatch Logs for logging, Amazon Cloudwatch Metrics for monitoring, Amazon Lex for speech recognition, Amazon Polly for speech generation, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for video streaming. For the latest ROS-Melodic packages, please visit here. 

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud sharing (VPC sharing) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. VPC sharing is also available in all commercial AWS Regions except in South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local), and China regions.

AWS now specifies the IP address ranges for Amazon DynamoDB endpoints. You can use these IP address ranges in your routing and firewall policies to control outbound application traffic. If you have an application that uses DynamoDB and need to lock down outbound access to the DynamoDB endpoints, you can use these IP address ranges. You also can use these ranges to control outbound traffic for applications in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, behind AWS Virtual Private Network or AWS Direct Connect.

Starting today, you can assign tags to GraphQL APIs in AWS AppSync. Tags are an easy and convenient way to categorize and track cost allocation for operations such as queries, mutations, and real-time updates.  

AWS IoT Analytics today announced support for single step setup of IoT Analytics resources from AWS IoT Core, which allows you to create your IoT Analytics resources of channel, pipeline, data store, and SQL data set from IoT Core’s Rules console with just a click of a button, without manually configuring IAM role or permissions. This support comes in addition to the support of single step setup of IoT Analytics resources from the IoT Analytics console, which launched last month. Customers can now easily create IoT Analytics resources with a single step from both the IoT Analytics console and IoT Core console.

The Amplify Console now supports custom headers for hosted websites. With custom headers, developers can specify headers for every HTTP response. Response headers can be used for debugging, security, and informational purposes. For example, developers can set security headers such as Strict-Transport-Security and Content-Security-Policy to force every end-user to use HTTPS. Developers can get started by adding custom headers to their build settings YAML file. Learn more by visiting the documentation.

After being announced in preview at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019, Amazon GameLift Realtime Servers is now available to help game developers create and customize affordable game servers.

AWS Service Catalog now enables updating of tags on provisioned products and associated resources. With this feature you can now update tags on provisioned products to ensure that your current tagging taxonomy is applied to provisioned resources. Administrators can enable tag updating on provisioned products via a Resource Update constraint, and owners can then update their provisioned products and adjust tags. Tag-only updates will not affect running resources.

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog is used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS.

To learn more about Service Catalog Tag Update administration, please see the AWS Service Catalog Administrator Guide. To learn about how end users can now maintain tags, please see the AWS Service Catalog User Guide. 

Amazon Pinpoint is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions.

This regional expansion is especially useful for customers in South Asia and Oceania. Customers in these Regions were previously unable to use Amazon Pinpoint because of concerns related to latency and data residency. Now, you can use these additional Regions to increase the availability and redundancy of your services and applications.

With Amazon Pinpoint, you can engage your customers by sending them marketing campaigns and transactional messages through the email, SMS, push notification, and voice channels. Amazon Pinpoint's built-in analytics suite helps you develop a deeper understanding of your customers' demographics and behaviors. Additionally, its analytics tools help you monitor and track the ways that your customers interact with your engagements and applications.

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

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an 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 SageMaker Ground Truth offers easy access to public and private human labelers and provides them with built-in workflows and interfaces for common labeling tasks to provide significant speed and cost benefits to labeling data for machine learning. SageMaker Ground Truth now offers simplified labeling workflows, support for additional labeling vendors, and has been extended to a sixth AWS region, making it even easier to build highly accurate training datasets. Successful machine learning models are built on the shoulders of large volumes of high-quality training data.

AWS is announcing the immediate availability of the new AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. The Hong Kong Region joins Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Ningxia, Seoul, and Mumbai as the eighth active AWS Region in Asia Pacific and mainland China, and the 21st AWS Region worldwide. The AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region consists of three Availability Zones and with this launch, the AWS Global Infrastructure now offers 64 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region adds to the existing infrastructure AWS already has in Hong Kong SAR, which includes three Edge Network Locations, for customers looking to securely deliver data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a massively scalable and durable real-time data streaming service.

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) now enables you to customize the certificate it uses when you access applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365. AWS SSO uses a certificate to sign and send an authentication token to the applications you access. Through the AWS SSO console, you can now customize the certificate validity period, signing algorithm type, and the key size to match your corporate security policies. To learn more, see Manage AWS SSO Certificates. 

AWS Device Farm’s Remote Access feature allows developers to swipe, gesture, and interact with a real device through their web browser to test the functionality and usability of their mobile applications.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. AWS RoboMaker extends the most widely used open-source robotics software framework, Robot Operating System (ROS), with connectivity to cloud service. Now you can build highly-available applications for your APAC-based simulations and deployments.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. AWS RoboMaker extends the most widely used open-source robotics software framework, Robot Operating System (ROS), with connectivity to cloud service. Now you can build highly-available applications for your APAC-based simulations and deployments.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of Amazon EC2 T3a instances. T3a instances are variants of T3 instances and feature AMD EPYC processors with an all core turbo clock speed of up to 2.5 GHz. T3a instances provide additional options for customers who are looking to achieve a 10% cost savings on their Amazon EC2 compute environment for applications with moderate CPU usage that may experience temporary spikes in use.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) to run containers on Amazon EC2 A1 Instances as part of a public developer preview. This preview lets you take advantage of the latest EC2 functionality and start validating performance and stability of containerized applications running on the Arm processor architecture.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports importing of data stored in a Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket into a PostgreSQL table. A new extension aws_s3 has been added and will be used to perform the import operations. You can import any data format that is supported by the PostgreSQL COPY command using ARN role association method or using Amazon S3 credentials.

PostgreSQL versions 11.1 and above are supported with this feature. To learn more, please visit the documentation page.

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

AWS Global Accelerator is now available in Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. Previously, AWS Global Accelerator was already available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the latest C5 (compute-optimized), M5 (general-purpose), and R5 (memory-optimized) instances, all of which offer superior performance at lower costs compared to previous-generation instances.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe becomes available in two new AWS regions, Asia Pacific (Seoul) and EU (Frankfurt). Additionally, new language support for Spanish (ES) is now available in all regions where Amazon Transcribe is available.

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. AWS Glue automates much of the effort to build, maintain, and run extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs.

AWS License Manager is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions: AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

You can now share snapshots of Aurora Serverless DB clusters with other AWS accounts or publicly. We are also giving you the ability to copy Aurora Serverless DB cluster snapshots across AWS regions.  

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) now offers support for migrating virtual machines (VMs) running in Microsoft Azure to the AWS cloud. The new capability makes it easier for you to migrate existing applications running in Microsoft Azure to the AWS cloud to take advantage of greater reliability, faster performance, more security capabilities, and lower costs.  

You can now restore MySQL 5.7 backups stored in Amazon S3 to Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon RDS for MySQL.  

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. It allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts.

AWS CodeCommit, a fully-managed source control service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. CodeCommit makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories. 

Customers using AWS ParallelCluster to set up their High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters can now take advantage of an optimized scaling algorithm designed for use with Slurm Workload Manager. Other enhancements in the new release of AWS ParallelCluster release include features to prevent cluster scale-up when job dependencies are not satisfied, and support for the latest version of Slurm Workload Manager (v18). The complete list of enhancement in AWS ParallelCluster 2.3.1 can be found here.

HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. 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 HPC clusters on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster reduces the operational overhead of cluster management and simplifies running HPC workloads on AWS. AWS ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications. Slurm is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels used by many of the world's supercomputers and HPC clusters. Learn how to launch an HPC cluster using AWS ParallelCluster here.

You can now use AWS Organizations to centrally govern and manage your environment as you grow and scale your workloads across AWS accounts in AWS GovCloud (US), Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements. AWS Organizations helps you control access, compliance, and security; and share resources across your AWS accounts.

Amazon Comprehend helps you solve a variety of use cases with custom classification. For example, you can build classifiers to organize your daily customer feedback into categories like “loyalty”, “sales” or “product defect”. Amazon Comprehend removes the complexity to create custom classification models, requiring only a CSV file with labels and example text.

A confusion matrix helps you understand how your labels are performing based on the training data you provided. For example, if you have two labels with similar training content, the custom classification model may not be able to clearly distinguish between these labels. Using the confusion matrix, you can focus on creating better training content, so each label is more distinct from the other.

Get started with Amazon Comprehend custom classification models here and learn more about how to use a confusion matrix as part of training your model here.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Flow Logs (VPC Flow Logs) can now be delivered directly to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or through your Amazon EC2 or VPC console, in the EU (Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Osaka) AWS Regions. You can deliver VPC Flow Logs to both S3 and CloudWatch Logs.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 P3dn instances are available in the Europe (Dublin) AWS region. P3dn instances were first introduced in December of 2018 and feature eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs with 32GB of GPU memory each, 100 Gbps networking, 96 Intel Skylake-based vCPUs, and 768 GB of system memory that expands the P3 portfolio on the top end for faster distributed machine learning (ML) training workloads.

This Quick Start automatically deploys Duo multi-factor authentication (MFA) for AWS Directory Service on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes. The Quick Start uses the Duo Authentication Proxy for Directory Service to provide MFA functionality.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.  

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now available in open preview in seven AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and AP (Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo).

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce Zeina, the first Arabic voice for Amazon Polly. Zeina is a clear and natural-sounding female voice.

Used by over 400 million people, Arabic is one of the most spoken languages in the world. It consists of 30 dialects, including its universal form, which is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Zeina follows the MSA pronunciation, which is the common broadcasting standard across the region. MSA might sometimes sound formal because it differs from day-to-day speaking style. However, it’s the linguistic thread that links the Arabic native-speakers worldwide.

Amazon Polly customers who plan to use Zeina’s voice include Emirates NBD - a leading bank in the Middle East who has introduced an AI powered virtual assistant, Duolingo - a globally operating eLearning platform offering a portfolio of 84 language courses for more than 30 distinct languages, and iTranslate - a leading translation and dictionary app that offers text translation as well as voice-to-voice conversations in over 100 languages.

With the addition of Arabic language support, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 59 voices across 29 languages. You can check out the full list in the Voices in Amazon Polly section of our documentation.

Starting today, Amplify Framework includes support for adding Amazon Aurora Serverless as a data source for your AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs when building mobile and web applications. This enables developers to use the Amplify CLI, part of the Amplify Framework, to generate a GraphQL API with auto-generated schema and resolvers that works with an existing Aurora Serverless database. Previously, developers had to setup an AWS Lambda function to use Aurora Serverless as a data source for a GraphQL API.

The GraphQL Transform library, included in the Amplify CLI, provides a simple abstraction that helps developers quickly create scalable web and mobile backends on AWS. This release adds features to the GraphQL Transform Library that enable developers to provide fine-grained access control across their APIs by configuring authorization rules for top level and individual fields. In addition, developers can configure access to connected fields inside a model, or those that represent relationships between data. Previously, access rules were only applied to top-level fields and there was no way to configure access to individual and connected fields.

This release also allows developers using the Amplify JavaScript library to trigger OAuth flows in their web applications with a single line of code. Developers can choose between using Amazon Cognito Hosted UI or their own UI while still having the ability to federate with User Pools and get AWS credentials to access their resources.

To learn more about AWS Amplify, please visit our documentation. For more details about these features, refer to our blog post.

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Cherwell Service Management connector on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, to provide a reliable and fault-tolerant integration point between your AWS account and your Cherwell Service Management system. 

You can now assign tags to Amazon FreeRTOS Over-The-Air (OTA) update and customer configuration resources. This helps to search and manage access control of these resource based on resource tagging. This support builds upon previously-released support for resource tagging in AWS IoT Core.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the availability of the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder - Specialty certification, the industry's first and only certification that validates your ability to build, test, and publish Amazon Alexa skills. With the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty certification, Alexa developers can more confidently publish skills that have the potential to reach customers through over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices in use globally.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Multi Major Version Upgrades for PostgreSQL which allows you to perform major version upgrades across multiple different major versions.

Previously, major version upgrades could only be done to one higher version at a time. For example, PostgreSQL version 9.6 could only be upgraded to PostgreSQL 10, and PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 9.5. So, if you wanted to upgrade your older instances to the latest major version, you would have to perform multiple major version upgrades until you reached your target version. For example, upgrading PostgreSQL 9.4 to PostgreSQL 11 involved upgrading from version 9.4 to 9.5, then 9.5 to 9.6, and then 9.6 to 10 and finally from 10 to 11. This caused extended downtime for each of the upgrade operations.

With the new multi major version upgrade feature you can perform any of the following upgrades seamlessly in a single step, thus reducing downtime substantially.

• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 11
• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.5 to PostgreSQL version 11
• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.6. to PostgreSQL version 11

In addition, if you are still running any PostgreSQL version 9.3 which has already been out of support, you can upgrade your instance(s) to 9.5 or 9.6 directly.

Please refer to the major version upgrade documentation on details around the PostgreSQL versions that are supported as source and target versions and also any limitations associated with the upgrade process.

With this release, RDS for PostgreSQL now also supports upgrading from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 11.

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 pricing details and regional availability.

Starting today, you can create an approval workflow to route documents and other files stored in WorkDocs to one or more users for their approval. Approval workflow enables users to build workflows to track and manage their document approval processes in an automated manner. Approval workflow helps you adhere to business processes in your organization.

Approval Workflow automatically routes the files, assigns review tasks to approvers and sends reminders and notifications. You can also track the status of your approval requests as well as those awaiting your approval.

To get started, access WorkDocs in your web browser, click on Apps in the top navigation bar and click on Launch for Approvals. You will see the Approvals welcome screen where you can create an approval workflow by clicking on Create Approval. You can add files, invite approvers, specify a completion date and submit the workflow by clicking the Send button.

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

AWS Client VPN is now available in the EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. AWS Client VPN was already available in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS Regions. Support for other AWS Regions is coming soon.

Amazon WorkDocs is launching a migration service to help you migrate your organization's files to Amazon WorkDocs. This service is currently in a private preview.

The Amazon WorkDocs migration service helps you move your users' files and your departmental file shares to Amazon WorkDocs. The service can migrate large amounts of data, from tens of gigabytes to mutiple terabytes.

Using the Amazon WorkDocs migration service portal, you can configure migration tasks, and select the source and target WorkDocs account and site to migrate data to. You can schedule the migration task to execute during a specific period as a one-time data transfer operation or have periodic syncs so as to minimize downtime for your users. The Amazon WorkDocs migration service portal provides up-to-date information and status on migration jobs including detailed reports once migration has successfully completed.

The Amazon WorkDocs migration service leverages AWS DataSync that automatically handles many of the tasks related to data transfers such as network optimization and data integrity validation, which can slow down migrations or burden your IT operations.

You can participate in the limited preview by filling out the signup form. Customers who are accepted in the preview will be notified of next steps. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can now utilize AWS PrivateLink to securely ingest data.

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE DCV version 2017.4.

The DCV 2017.4 release introduces the following features:

• New native client for MacOS devices
• Hardware decoding support for Windows client

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Enhanced Monitoring, which provides visibility into the health of your Amazon RDS instances, now reports physical storage device metrics and secondary instance host metrics.

18 new or updated AWS Public Datasets are now available in the following categories: 

Amazon QuickSight is now localized in 10 major languages! With support for these languages across the entire product, Amazon QuickSight now makes it easier than ever for everyone to get deeper insights from their data. Languages supported are English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.   

Amazon SageMaker now lets you enable and disable root access to notebook instances in order to ensure a separation of notebook users and root users, enabling compliance with security policies.

Starting April 1st, 2019, the pricing for Amazon SageMaker P3 instances has been reduced by 20% in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region and by 15% in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.9 brokers on Amazon MQ. This minor update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.8.

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Amazon MQ manages the administration and maintenance of ActiveMQ, which means the underlying infrastructure is automatically provisioned for high availability and message durability to support the reliability of your applications.

We encourage you to consider upgrading ActiveMQ with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. If your broker has automatic minor version upgrade enabled, it will be automatically upgraded during your next maintenance window. To learn more about upgrading, please see: Editing Broker Engine Version, CloudWatch Logs, and Maintenance Preferences in the Amazon MQ Developer Guide.

Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.9 includes the fixes and features of all previous releases of ActiveMQ. Amazon MQ now provides support for versions 5.15.0, 5.15.6, 5.15.8, and 5.15.9. To learn more, read the ActiveMQ 5.15.9 Release Notes.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint is launching a new dashboard for transactional SMS messages. This dashboard includes information about the number of SMS messages that you sent, the number of messages that were received, and your average delivery rate. It also includes a section that breaks out your message deliveries by country. This data makes it easy to see how many messages you sent to each country or region, as well as the average price that you paid for sending those messages. This information enables you to optimize both your costs and delivery performance for transactional SMS messages.

For more information about the new transactional SMS message dashboards, see the Amazon Pinpoint User Guide.

The Amplify Console is now available in five new AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and EU (Frankfurt). This expands the number of AWS regions where Amplify Console is available to 11.

The Amplify Console is a fully managed hosting service for fullstack serverless web applications. Learn more about hosting your web app on our Product and Getting Started pages.

You can now use Apache HBase 1.4.9, Apache Flink 1.7.1, and Apache Oozie 5.1.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.22.0. These releases include various bug fixes and stability improvements.

Also, with this release, we have increased the default EBS storage size of EC2 instances that have EBS-only storage. The size increase is proportional to the size of the EC2 instance and we have spread the increase over multiple EBS volumes. This change allows applications such as Spark to take better advantage of the IOPS performance of the EBS volumes when writing intermediate data to disk which in turn results in better job performance.

Additionally, with this release, you can use the upgraded version of Apache Phoenix 4.14.1 and Apache Zeppelin 0.8.1.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.22.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.22.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can choose HBase, Oozie, Flink, Phoenix, and Zeppelin to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.22.0, HBase 1.4.9, Oozie 5.1.0, Flink 1.7.1, Phoenix 4.14.1, and Zeppelin 0.8.1.

Amazon EMR release 5.22.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the RSS feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS icon at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

 

Amazon Web Services today announced the availability of a replatforming assistant for Microsoft SQL Server, a new scripting tool that makes it easier to modernize existing SQL Server workloads from Windows to Linux and save on Windows licensing costs.

Amazon CloudFront announces the launch of CloudFront in China with three new Edge locations (POPs) located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhongwei, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Co. Ltd. (NWCD). Customers can now serve content to end viewers in Mainland China with improved latency, availability and security.

Pearson VUE, a global leader in computer-based testing, now delivers AWS Certification exams through its extensive network of over 5,000 testing centers in 180 countries worldwide. Now, you have even more choices and flexibility for deciding when and where to take an AWS Certification exam.

AWS Certification helps learners build credibility and confidence with the AWS Cloud by validating their cloud expertise with an industry-recognized certification. The program offers a portfolio of certifications which address the most critical roles to support customer success in the cloud, including cloud practitioner, solutions architect, developer, and operations. AWS role-based certifications are complemented with targeted certifications evaluating technical expertise in specialized areas, including machine learning and security.

Learn more here.

We’re here to help. Take a look below for some common questions.

How does a second exam delivery provider affect me?
Your AWS Certification exam experience should mostly remain the same, with an increase in availability and accessibility. You can now take your exam at either PSI test centers or Pearson VUE test centers.

Are there any differences between the test center experiences?
Both PSI and Pearson VUE strive to offer consistent experiences across their own network of test centers, and the experience at a test center should be largely the same, regardless of the vendor you scheduled with. Some test centers will request an electronic signature and take your photo during the check-in process.

Are the exams the same with both PSI and Pearson VUE?
The exams delivered, including the exam length and passing standards, will be the same with both vendors.

How can my organization become a test center for PSI or Pearson VUE?
To apply for your organization to become a PSI test center, go here.
To apply for your organization to become a Pearson VUE test center, go here.

 

 

AWS Elemental MediaStore now supports chunked object transfer, a standard that lets you build ultra-low latency end-to-end workflows for over-the-top (OTT) video. When using chunked object transfer to deliver segmented objects, your video segments are split into smaller chunks that can be played before the complete segment is delivered. Video players can begin playback by requesting video from CDNs such as Amazon CloudFront, which in turn can start downloading the beginning of a video segment from MediaStore while the encoder is still in the process of writing the end of that same segment.

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise now supports Puppet Enterprise version 2018.1.7. With this version, the Puppet Enterprise Console has been rebranded and platform support for Ubuntu version 18.04 is available. This is important for customers upgrading from soon to be end-of-life Ubunto 14.04. See Puppet Enterprise's release documentation for a complete list of the enhancements introduced with Puppet Enterprise 2018.1.7.

Starting today, Amazon CloudFront has made the process of adding an alternate domain name to a distribution even more secure than before. Now, when you add an alternate domain name, like www.example.com, to a distribution, you must also attach a SSL/TLS certificate to that distribution that covers the alternate domain name. With today's release, only those with authorized access to your domain's certificate can add your domain to a CloudFront distribution as an alternate domain name.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now provides built-in event monitoring and alerting, enabling you to monitor the data stored in your domain and automatically send notifications based on pre-configured thresholds. For example, if you are storing HTTP server logs in your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, you can now monitor the response codes and alert your team if there are too many errors, right from your domain. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 6.5 and Kibana 6.5. The new version of Elasticsearch and Kibana offers several new features and improvements, including auto-interval date histogram, conditional token filters, and early termination support for min/max aggregations. 

Today, AWS launched Accelerated Transcoding, a new feature in AWS Elemental MediaConvert that increases the processing speed of file-based video encoding jobs by up to 25 times. With Accelerated Transcoding, you can meet the most demanding turnaround times for processing the highest quality video with confidence. MediaConvert automatically analyzes job characteristics and applies optimal processing to complete the job with maximum efficiency. Accelerated Transcoding is available in the on-demand professional pricing tier with no additional charge.

We are excited to announce that AWS DeepLens has a new project template for Bird Classification which enables classification of 200 species of birds.

This project yields the top 5 predictions on bird species from a static bird photo captured by the AWS DeepLens camera. The model uses ResNet-18 neural network architecture, and has been trained using CUB-200 dataset to identify 200 different bird species. To learn more, visit the AWS DeepLens documentation. To dive deep into another method on how you can implement 'Bird Classification' by modifying Amazon SageMaker’s built-in Object Detection algorithm to classify birds using AWS DeepLens, read this blog. 

Starting today, you can create Amazon RDS for Oracle database instances with up to 64 TiB of storage and provisioned I/O performance of up to 80,000 IOPS.

You can now specify a worker type for Apache Spark jobs in AWS Glue for memory intensive workloads.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage and AWS Elemental MediaTailor now support a broad range of variant DASH outputs and features. This added functionality enables support for live streams on more devices. It also continues to allow personalized, dynamic ad insertion to monetize live streams.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds tagging and tag-based access control for four Elastic Beanstalk resources: applications, application versions, saved configurations, and custom platform versions.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports real-time transcription of audio in the following new languages: British English, French, and Canadian French. These languages expand upon the existing two languages already available in Amazon Transcribe’s streaming service: US English and Mexican Spanish.

The new set of languages expands the markets served by Amazon Transcribe to enable use cases in contact centers, media and entertainment, education, among others, to reach a broader global audience.

British English, French, and Canadian French support for streaming transcription are available in all AWS Regions that Amazon Transcribe is available at no additional cost. Learn more about streaming transcription using this documentation page. For more information on language support, visit this documentation page.

The Amplify CLI, part of the Amplify Framework, now includes support for configuring OAuth 2.0 Authorization Flows and enabling the Amazon Cognito Hosted UI. This enables you to setup federation between social identity providers such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google with Amazon Cognito User Pools. The federation is achieved using OAuth 2.0 flows, which can be performed through Hosted UI or your application code (using the endpoints directly). Previously, developers had to go to the Amazon Cognito console to set this up and construct the proper application configurations manually in their web or mobile applications.

In addition, new commands in the Amplify CLI make it easier to configure Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) scenes from Amazon Sumerian for your mobile and web applications. The commands enable you to add authorization for your scenes using Amazon Cognito and IAM.

This release also adds options to the Storage and API categories for setting up fine-grained CRUD style permissions on Amazon S3 and Amazon API Gateway, respectively. This functionality supports both authenticated and unauthenticated application workflows. Previously, developers could add only read/write permissions for these categories.

 

The AWS Amplify Console now has a ‘Deploy to Amplify Console’ button that allows GitHub users to automatically deploy fullstack serverless web apps with a single click.

A fullstack serverless app consists of backend resources such as GraphQL APIs and Lambda functions, and a frontend built with frameworks such as React, Angular, or Gatsby. On clicking the ‘Deploy to Amplify Console’ button, the Amplify Console first forks the repository into your GitHub account, then deploys the backend and frontend in a single workflow. The ‘Deploy to Amplify’ button allows you to share your web projects publicly or within your team so all contributors can deploy the app to their individual AWS accounts with a single click.

Visit our Getting Started page to deploy example projects or learn how to add the deploy button to your own project.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (Paris), US West (N. California), and EU (Stockholm). This regional expansion extends the availability of ACM Private CA across the globe increasing the number of regions from 10 to 15.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) can now send log data from the Kubernetes control plane to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. These logs make it easier to monitor changes made to and performance of your Amazon EKS clusters.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to encrypt session interaction data with your own encryption key, managed by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

The AWS Serverless Application Repository is now available in EU (Paris) and EU (Stockholm) regions. The addition of the EU (Paris) and EU (Stockholm) regions increases the availability of the AWS Serverless Application Repository, which offers region support for Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris), South America (São Paulo), US West (N. California, Oregon), and US East (N. Virginia, Ohio). The AWS Serverless Application Repository is now available in 16 regions.

Starting today, you can tag Amazon WorkSpaces registered directories, images, custom bundles, and IP Access Control Groups, in addition to each user's WorkSpace. These tags make it easy to organize your WorkSpaces deployments, create cost allocation reports for billing, and enable granular access control for your WorkSpaces resources.

Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning models, now supports random search as a tuning strategy and multiple hyperparameter scaling options when using Automatic Model Tuning.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

Amazon DocumentDB continues to increase compatibility with MongoDB and today added support for additional aggregation pipeline operators that allow you to compose powerful aggregations your documents. The new capabilities include seven aggregation string operators ($indexOfCP, $indexOfBytes, $strLenCP, $strLenBytes, $toLower, $toUpper, $split), nine date time operators ($dayOfYear, $dayOfMonth, $dayOfWeek, $year, $month, $hour, $minute, $second, and $millisecond), and the $sample aggregation pipeline stage.

To use the new features, you can create a new Amazon DocumentDB cluster with just a few clicks in the Amazon DocumentDB Management Console or you can upgrade your existing cluster.

For more information, please see the AWS Database Blog: Using new aggregation pipeline capabilities in Amazon DocumentDB to build powerful aggregation queries

AWS customers can now seamlessly accelerate their High Performance Computing (HPC), machine-learning, and other batch jobs through AWS Batch simply by specifying the number of GPUs each job requires. Starting today, you can use AWS Batch to specify the number and type of accelerators your jobs require as job definition input variables, alongside the current options of vCPU and memory. AWS Batch will scale up instances appropriate for your jobs based on the required number of GPUs and isolate the accelerators according to each job’s needs, so only the appropriate containers can access them.

Hardware-based compute accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) enable users to increase application throughput and decrease latency with purpose-built hardware. Until now, AWS Batch users wanting to take advantage of accelerators needed to build a custom AMI and install the appropriate drivers, and have AWS Batch scale GPU accelerated EC2 P-type instances based on their vCPU and memory characteristics. Now, customers can simply specify the desired number and type of GPUs, similar to how they can specify vCPU and memory, and Batch will launch the EC2 P-type instances needed to run the jobs. Additionally, Batch isolates the GPU to the container, so each container gets the appropriate amount of resources it needs.

Learn more about GPU support on AWS Batch here.
 

Customers in the EU (Paris) Region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources. 

Starting today, Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) is available in EU (Dublin), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), and Canada (Central) AWS Regions in addition to AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions.

AWS Cloud9 is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.  

Amazon Connect now supports claiming phone numbers in Puerto Rico. This enables you to provide local telephony support to end-customers in Puerto Rico. Additionally, outbound dialing rates to Puerto Rico have been reduced by 59% in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions.

You can now develop your Elastic Beanstalk applications using Go 1.12. The latest Go 1.12 comes with numerous performance improvements and new features such as opt-in support for TLS 1.3 and improved modules support. For the complete list of Go 1.12 features, visit the official Go 1.12 release announcement. You can upgrade your existing Elastic Beanstalk Go environment to Go 1.12 using the Elastic Beanstalk console or through the EB CLI and Elastic Beanstalk API. See Updating Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment's Platform Version for additional details.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. 

AWS RoboMaker makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale. Today we have added support for the Gazebo 9 engine, a leading robotics simulator. Running simulation jobs on Gazebo 9 provides new features and benefits such as .obj mesh support, GUI plotting utility, improved actor animation, and improved shadow. For a full list of Gazebo 9 features, visit the Gazebo home page.

AWS RoboMaker is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions. To get started, run a sample simulation job in the RoboMaker console or explore the RoboMaker webpage.
 

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. Starting today, you can assign tags to custom classifier and entity type resources. This enables you to allocate costs and get detailed billing reports across your custom models.

Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value that can make it easier to manage, search for, and filter resources. You can allocate costs by creating tagged Billing Groups and mapping individual “Things” to those groups.

All usage and cost for a model will inherit the tags of the Billing Group to which it belongs. IAM policies also support tag-based conditions, enabling you to constrain IAM permissions based on specific tags or tag values (when leveraging tag-based conditions for access control, make sure to also define and restrict who can modify those tags).

These features are provided at no additional cost. Click here to learn more about how to create and use tags in Amazon Comprehend. See AWS Tagging Strategies for general best practices for using tags with AWS resources.

AWS Backup is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) and EU (Frankfurt) Regions.

The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora has added support for R5 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instances.

R5 instances are based on the Amazon EC2 Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and a lightweight hypervisor that delivers practically all the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your database instance. With a 1:8 vCPU to memory ratio, R5 instances are well suited for running memory-intensive database workloads such as transaction processing, data warehousing and analytics. Depending on your workload, you may be able to achieve up to a 70% performance boost as compared to R4 instances.

You can easily create a new R5 instance, or modify your existing Aurora database instance to scale up to R5, in the Amazon RDS Management Console. Please refer to the Amazon Aurora User Guide for more details, and to find out which Aurora versions are supported. For pricing and regional availability, see Amazon Aurora Pricing.

Amazon Aurora combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides up to three times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database, together with increased scalability, durability, and security. For more information, please visit the Amazon Aurora product page.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now lets you attach access control policies to your VPC endpoints, allowing you to restrict access to your Amazon SQS queues. For each VPC endpoint, these policies define the Amazon SQS actions that can be performed, the Amazon SQS queue these actions can be performed on, and the IAM user or role that can perform the actions.

Amazon Redshift automatically takes incremental snapshots (backups) of your data every 8 hours or 5 GB per node of data change. You now get more information and control over a snapshot including the ability to control the automatic snapshot's schedule.

Amazon Simple Notification Services (SNS) now supports VPC endpoint policies to control access to your Amazon SNS resources. When you create a VPC endpoint for Amazon SNS, you can attach an endpoint policy to define the SNS actions that can be performed, the IAM user or role that can perform the actions, and the SNS resources these actions can be performed on.

This Quick Start deploys an example Linux architecture for visual effects (VFX) burst rendering on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, using content security recommendations from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) and AWS.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Flow Logs (VPC Flow Logs) can now be delivered directly to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or through your Amazon EC2 or VPC console in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now deliver VPC Flow Logs to both S3 and CloudWatch Logs.

AWS Secrets Manager support to specify sensitive information

You can now reference sensitive information in AWS Secrets Manager when using AWS Fargate PV 1.3. This means you can store sensitive information in either AWS Secrets manager or AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. You can learn more about about it here: Specifying sensitive information to containers.

As you build applications, you need to reference sensitive information such as database credentials, tokens, configuration variables or SSH keys. Previously, you had to directly reference this sensitive information in the task definition or manage your own run-time secrets with custom solutions to decouple secrets from core application logic stored in container images. AWS Fargate now supports task definition conventions for accessing sensitive information stored in either AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store.

AWS has updated Video on Demand on AWS, a solution that automatically provisions the AWS services necessary to build a scalable, distributed video-on-demand workflow. The solution now leverages AWS Elemental MediaConvert Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR) encoding mode which ensures consistent, high-quality video transcoding with the smallest file size for any type of source video content. With QVBR, the encoder determines the right number of bits to use for each part of the video to maintain the video quality that you specify.

The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and Amazon FSx for Lustre Container Storage Interface (CSI) Drivers are now available as open-source alpha projects. These CSI drivers make it easy for developers to use AWS managed file system services with their Kubernetes services running on Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) or on EC2.

AWS Cloud9 now supports Amazon EC2 development environments that use Ubuntu Server 18.04. AWS Cloud9 also supports Amazon Linux development environments. 

You can now use search expressions to define Amazon CloudWatch dashboards. This enables you to create dashboards that update automatically as new resources are created that match the search query, providing up-to-the-minute visibility with reduced operational overhead.

The search function is an enhancement of Amazon CloudWatch metric math and can be combined within math functions like SUM, AVG, MIN, and MAX. For example, you can combine SUM with SEARCH to track the count of failed health checks across all EC2 instances in an account.

It's easy to get started with search expressions through the Amazon CloudWatch console, or the GetMetricData API. From the metrics tab, just search for metrics then click the Graph Search button and a search expression will be automatically generated on your chart.

Search expressions are now available in all AWS public regions, including AWS GovCloud. Learn more about how to use search expressions in graphs. 

Today, we are excited to announce the new AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Navigate Track. The AWS MSP Partner Program is designed for AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners who are skilled at cloud infrastructure and application migration, and deliver value to customers by offering proactive monitoring, automation, and management of their customer's environment.

The new AWS MSP Navigate track creates a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in delivering full life cycle solutions from planning and designing to building and optimizing workloads for AWS customers.  

Learn more about the AWS Navigate Program, and all the AWS Navigate tracks available on the APN blog. 

You can now create tags in CloudWatch alarms that let you define policy controls for your AWS resources. This enables you to specify fine grained permissions, improving security for monitoring resources and cost allocation.

You can add tags to CloudWatch alarms to create groups of resources and categorize them by purpose, owner, or environment. You can also view of your resources organized by common tags. And finally, you can define IAM policies in your AWS account that when attached to a resource, grants or denies access based on a tag. For example, you can create a PROD tag for your alarms in production environment, and attach an IAM policy so that only specific users can delete your alarms in that environment. For cost management, you can allocate and track costs by tagging groups of resources, get detailed billing reports across your groups, as well as define IAM permissions on these tagged groups.

Resource level policies for CloudWatch alarms is now available at no extra cost in all AWS public regions, including AWS GovCloud. You can learn more about how to create tags on your resources and use them to define permissions using the CloudWatch CLI and SDK.

This Quick Start automatically deploys SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which is a fully containerized implementation of Cloud Foundry, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. 

Amazon DynamoDB has reduced the price of global tables by eliminating associated charges for DynamoDB Streams. Previously, cross-region replication performed by global tables incurred charges for streams. Now, you are no longer billed for streams resources used by global tables for replicating changes from one replica table to all other replicas. You still are billed for any streams usage performed by your applications that read from a replica table’s stream.

At AWS re:Invent 2018, we announced updates to the overall AWS Partner Network (APN) program that will further recognize and support the growth, investment, and innovation of our evolving APN Partner community, and better align APN Partners to more structured program benefits. Changes to the APN Program include: 1) renaming the Standard tier to Select tier, 2) Structured benefits for APN Consulting & Technology Partners, 3) New program critera.

Today, the APN team officially launched the 2019 program enhancements. beginning today, you will experience a new look and feel upon logging in to your APN Partner Central account, including a newly refreshed Partner Scorecard referencing new APN tier requirements. 

Learn more about the new APN Program in the APN Blog Posts below: 

2019 APN Benefits  |  2019 APN Requirements 

Scenario-based learning on Coursera, from the experts at AWS, develops skills in building and deploying serverless solutions.Using real-world examples of a serverless website and chat bot, the learner builds on their knowledge of the cloud to take advantage of the benefits of modern architectures for greater agility, innovation, and lower total cost of ownership across a range of AWS services, including AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. On-demand and digital, the courses are convenient and available to audit for free with a completion certificate available for $49. 

Learn more

We are excited to announce a new python script that makes it easy to get started with Amazon Elastic Inference.