July 2019

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to specify AWS IoT Events resources. This improvement enables you to use CloudFormation to deploy AWS IoT Events resources—along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. You can use CloudFormation templates to specify IoT Events Inputs and Detector Models.

You can now view pipeline status from the pipeline listing in AWS CodePipeline. Previously, you had to look at the detail page of a pipeline to obtain its status. Now, you can see the status of the most recent execution for each pipeline directly on the pipeline listing. You are now able to monitor status across multiple pipelines in a unified interface.

The Amplify Framework is an open source project for building cloud-enabled mobile and web applications.  

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, now enables end-users to easily view and restore previous versions of files using Windows shadow copies.

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

AWS CodeBuild is now available to customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service in the cloud. CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. For more information, visit the CodeBuild product page.

To learn more about AWS CodeBuild, visit our documentation. To see all regions where AWS CodeBuild is available, see the AWS region table. 

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.2.1 for new clusters. With the addition of EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul), Amazon MSK is now offered in 13 AWS Regions.

Amazon Sumerian, the AWS service that makes it easy to create and run browser-based 3D, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) applications, now supports physically-based rendering (PBR), enabling you to create scenes that appear more realistic, accurate, and consistent with their real-world counterparts.  

AWS Marketplace now enables customers to discover and subscribe to software that supports regulated workloads through the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, assisting customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology, which delivers ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. The 8 US English and 3 UK English voices in the Polly portfolio are now available in both the previous Standard technology, as well as in the new Neural TTS technology. In addition, 2 of the US English voices also feature a Newscaster speaking style, which sounds like a TV or radio newscaster. 

Amazon EC2 expands Hibernation support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. You can now hibernate newly launched EC2 Instances running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, in addition to Amazon Linux 1 OS.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotic applications, now supports offline logs and metrics for its CloudWatch cloud extension.

The EBS default volume type has been updated to gp2 when a block storage volume type is not specified within AWS API calls for volume, image, and instance creation.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added the ability to prioritize transcoding jobs. You can now specify a priority setting when submitting jobs in either on-demand or reserved queues. With this feature, you have more control over the order in which jobs are processed, so that jobs that require shorter turnaround times can be added to the queue with a higher priority and started before other jobs with a lower priority. To learn more, please see the documentation.

You can now attach multiple target groups to your Amazon ECS services that are running on either Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. Target groups are used to route requests to one or more registered targets when using a load balancer. Attaching multiple target groups to your service allows you to simplify infrastructure code, reduce costs and increase manageability of your ECS services.  

You can now share Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations with another AWS account or within your AWS Organization. When a Capacity Reservation is shared, EC2 instances launched by one AWS account can utilize EC2 capacity reserved by another account. This feature is enabled by AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), a service that allows you to easily and securely share AWS resources.

Starting today, you can now add tags to your AWS Elemental MediaStore containers. MediaStore tags allow you to categorize your containers in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation for live origination and endpoints.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the immediate availability of the Middle East (Bahrain) Region, which is the first AWS Region in the Middle East and consists of three Availability Zones. With this launch, AWS now offers 22 Regions and 69 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries.  

AWS Training and Certification has launched AWS Fundamentals: Addressing Security Risk, a new self-paced digital course available exclusively on Coursera. This course provides an overview of security best practices when developing and managing applications on AWS.

Today, Amazon Pinpoint announces the release of the Campaign Metrics and Application Metrics APIs. By using these APIs, you can programmatically access a subset of the campaign metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), that appear on the analytics pages of the Amazon Pinpoint console. This means that you can display, monitor, and assess the performance of your campaigns without needing to analyze raw event data or sign into the Amazon Pinpoint console. These APIs also make it easy to integrate campaign metrics into your existing reporting tools and share them with your team.

Amazon Aurora Serverless (MySQL-compatible edition) is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD.  

We've launched a new AWS Training and Certification for Enterprise website, in addition to other new resources, to enable our enterprise customers to build cloud skills within their organization and achieve their business objectives faster.

AWS is expanding the Extras catalog in Amazon Linux 2 to include AWS-optimized variants of new Linux Kernel releases. Starting today, an AWS-optimized Linux Kernel 4.19 is now available in Amazon Linux 2 in the Extras channel. The new kernel includes enhancements such as improved performance on A1 instances and higher bandwidth with lower latency on smaller instance types. The Linux Kernel 4.14 continues to be available as the pre-installed and default kernel in Amazon Linux 2 and receives long-term support. 

CloudWatch Logs Insights is an interactive log analytics service in CloudWatch that helps developers, engineers, and operators easily explore, analyze, and visualize logs when debugging applications or when troubleshooting operational problems. Users can get answers in seconds from system and application logs using a log query language, whether they are searching for specific errors across millions of log events, summarizing values across log events to better understand a system or application, or visualizing log data as time series to better understand behavior over time.

AWS ParallelCluster is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region.  

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports immutable tags, a capability that prevents image tags from being overwritten. Previously, tags could be overwritten requiring manual methodologies to uniquely identify an image, but now with tag immutability you can use a common, intuitive approach which easily integrates with your CI/CD build options.  

You can now launch M5 and T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for Oracle in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD, and the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet.  

Amazon Transcribe now supports WebSocket protocol for streaming transcription. Users can open a bidirectional connection to send an audio stream to the service, and in return, receive a stream of text in real time. Prior to this launch, streaming transcription was available via HTTP/2 streams. WebSocket protocol support makes integrations easier for customers with WebSocket-based clients. Support for WebSocket is available in all the regions where streaming service is available today. For a list of regions in which Amazon Transcribe is available, see this documentation.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant. PCI DSS is a security standard for organizations that process credit card information. For additional information about PCI DSS, visit AWS Compliance.  

Starting today, you can maintain job bookmarks for Parquet and ORC formats in Glue ETL jobs (using Glue Version 1.0). AWS Glue tracks data that has been processed during a previous run of an ETL job by storing state information from the job run. This persisted state information is called a job bookmark. Job bookmarks help AWS Glue maintain state information and prevent the reprocessing of old data.  

This integration configures a set of Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources to seamlessly use ChoiceView from Radish Systems with Amazon Connect. ChoiceView can transform ordinary phone calls into “voice with visual” calls while maintaining compatibility with existing phones, dialing plans, business phone systems, and contact centers. 

AWS Secrets Manager now supports VPC endpoint policies, making it easier for you to restrict egress of secrets from your Amazon VPC. When you create a VPC endpoint for Secrets Manager, you can attach an endpoint policy to define the Secrets Manager actions that can be performed, the secrets these actions can be performed on, the IAM users or roles that can perform these actions, and the accounts that can be accessed via the VPC endpoint. 

The Temporary Queue Client for Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is now available. The client supports common messaging patterns such as request-response, and helps you save development time and deployment costs when creating application-managed temporary queues.

When using AWS IoT Events, you now have the option to define actions to invoke AWS Lambda functions, publish messages to the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue or an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, and republish messages to IoT Events. Previously, you could only define actions to publish messages to SNS and MQTT. These expanded actions make it easier to build monitoring applications that help you quickly understand the state of your devices by providing more options to process messages created by IoT Events.

Starting today, you can launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on base Red Hat Enterprise Linux Images (AMIs). Previously, only customers with existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium subscriptions could launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running RHEL (i.e. the bring your own license model). Spot Instances can now be launched through RHEL’s basic subscription model and are included in the hourly Spot Instance price.

Amazon S3 announced support for percentiles on Amazon CloudWatch Metrics. This feature allows customers to visualize and alarm on p90, p95, p99, p99.9 or any other percentile (including p100) of an S3 request metric. This provides customers with more granularity about their request patterns on S3 and helps them observe and diagnose anomalies in request patterns on S3. 

We’re excited to announce Lumberyard Beta 1.20, which reduces the time it takes Amazon Lumberyard to scan assets by 90%. This release contains over 200 improvements, fixes, and features.

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

You can now specify additional worker types when you use AWS Glue development endpoints. An AWS Glue development endpoint is a serverless Apache Spark environment that you can use to develop, debug, and test your AWS Glue ETL scripts in an interactive manner.

AWS Glue has updated its Apache Spark infrastructure to support Apache Spark 2.4.3 (in addition to Apache Spark 2.2.1) for ETL jobs, enabling you to take advantage of stability fixes and new features available in this version of Apache Spark.  

Amplify Console now supports branch pattern deployments, allowing developers to automatically deploy branches that match a specific pattern without any extra configuration.

Amazon SES is now a HIPAA Eligible Service. HIPAA eligibility applies to all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is available.

Amazon Pinpoint is now a HIPAA Eligible Service. HIPAA eligibility applies to all AWS Regions where Amazon Pinpoint is available.

AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add tags to – or edit or delete tags of – multiple AWS resources at once. Starting today, AWS Resource Groups, and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor are available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) AWS Region.

AWS Snowball and AWS Snowball Edge are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. Snowball and Snowball Edge are data transfer services that use secure, ruggedized devices to move up to petabytes of data into and out of Amazon S3 for migration, edge computing, machine learning and analytics.

AWS Chatbot is a new service that makes it easy to set up ChatOps for AWS in your Amazon Chime chat rooms or Slack channels. AWS Chatbot provides an interactive agent that enables you to monitor and interact with your AWS resources from team chat rooms. You can receive alerts and execute commands to return diagnostic information so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot is in beta with support for receiving notifications in your chat room.

Predictive Maintenance Using Machine Learning is a solution that automates the detection of potential equipment failures, and provides recommended actions to take. The solution is easy to deploy and contains an example dataset of a turbofan degradation simulation from NASA. But, you can modify the solution to use your own dataset.

Starting today, you can leverage AWS Budgets’ integration with the newly released AWS Chatbot service to receive AWS Budgets alerts via Slack and Amazon Chime. To enable AWS Chatbot integration, simply configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic during the budget alert creation process. From there, navigate to the AWS Chatbot console and map your Amazon SNS topic to the appropriate Slack channel or Chime room. Once configured, your AWS Budgets alerts will be sent directly to the Slack channel or Chime room of your choice.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale, is now available in the EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), US East (Ohio) regions. With these additions, RoboMaker is now available in seven regions globally.  

It’s now easier than ever for organizations to develop and validate their teams’ skills by providing them with AWS Certification exam vouchers. These vouchers conveniently eliminate the need for candidates to pay when registering for their exam.

You can now enable AWS X-Ray for your messages passing through Amazon SNS, making it easier to trace and analyze messages as they travel through to the downstream services. AWS X-Ray provides more insights to developers troubleshooting performance issues and errors for their distributed applications and microservices. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS Europe (London) region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve your cloud architectures.  

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS US West (N. California) Region.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS US West (N. California) Region. 

AWS Client VPN now supports split-tunnel, which gives customers the flexibility to cherry pick the traffic that traverses over the VPN tunnel.  

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. This regional expansion extends the global availability of ACM Private CA, increasing the number of regions to 18.

You can now tag launch templates at the time they are created, eliminating the need to run custom tagging scripts after creation. In addition, you can now set resource-level permissions on the CreateLaunchTemplate API, allowing you to implement stronger security policies by giving more granular control over who has access to that API. Resource-level permissions and tagging your launch templates on creation simplifies management and ensures that your launch templates are secured upon creation.

AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows enable you to define a time window for performing potentially disruptive actions on your instances. You can now use maintenance windows to select a resource group as the target. Resource groups make it easier to organize, manage, and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time. By selecting a resource group as the target of a maintenance window, you can perform routine tasks across different resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets within the same recurring time window.  

We’ve updated the default configuration for the Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) mount helper package when using encryption of data in transit. Starting today, use of the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is not enabled by default. 

Starting today, you can access custom-generated Amazon EC2 resource optimization recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer. These recommendations identify idle and underutilized instances across your accounts and regions. To generate these recommendations, AWS analyzes your historical EC2 resource usage, your Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and your existing reservation footprint to identify opportunities for cost savings (e.g., by terminating idle instances or downsizing active instances to lower-cost options). For example, if your m5.2xlarge has a maximum utilization of 20% over the last 14 days, AWS may recommended downsizing that instance to m5.xlarge or m5.large and show you how much you can save based on your usage and your applicable m5 family reservations.

AWS Backup now provides customers a more seamless way to manage their backups, by automatically copying tags from their resources to their backups. For customers using tags to manage their AWS resources, AWS Backup will enable them to more effectively search for source resources or conduct billing for their backups. See AWS Tagging Strategies for tagging best practices.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has expanded support for audio formats and improved overall transcode performance. With new audio-only outputs for HLS, AAC with MP4, and WAV with PCM, you have more options for delivering audio-only content to users for music, podcasting, radio, audio books, and more. In addition, MediaConvert has significantly improved performance for non-accelerated jobs, reducing the time required for creating VOD assets so you can make your media available to end users even faster and start monetizing new content sooner.

Customers can now use Amazon EC2 P3 and P3dn instances for graphics applications such as remote workstations and 3D visualization using NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstation software made available using new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) accessible on the AWS Marketplace.

Amazon MQ now supports the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to create and manage keys for at-rest encryption of customer data in Amazon MQ. Amazon MQ handles the encryption and decryption seamlessly, so you don’t have to change your applications to access your data. When you create a broker, you can now select the KMS key used to encrypt your data from the following three options: a KMS key in the Amazon MQ service account, a KMS key in your account that Amazon MQ creates and manages, or a KMS key in your account that you create and manage. In addition to encryption at rest, all data transferred between Amazon MQ and client applications is securely transmitted using TLS/SSL. 

AI-Driven Social Media Dashboard is a solution that monitors and ingests specified tweets using stream processing and leverages a serverless architecture and machine learning services to translate and extract insights from those tweets. The solution is easy to deploy and contains a data lake you can use to quickly and easily perform additional analytics on tweet data.

AWS Systems Manager Distributor provides simplified package creation, enabling you to deploy your software packages across instances quickly. Distributor will package your installers so they can be easily used to install and update your software across multiple operating systems.

AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway is now available in AWS EU (Ireland) region. 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.  

When creating or updating an ECS task definition in the ECS console, you now have the ability to add the task to a mesh in AWS App Mesh. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure.

AWS IoT Device Tester, a Windows/Linux/Mac test automation tool for connected devices, is now available for Amazon FreeRTOS 201906.00 Major.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. With Comprehend’s Custom Entity Recognition API, you can easily build models to extract custom entities (policy numbers, part codes, serial numbers, etc.) that are tailored to your organization’s needs.

AWS Device Farm is an app testing service that lets you test your Android, iOS, and web apps , on a massive collection of real mobile devices hosted in the AWS Cloud. You can use one of the supported automation test frameworks to parallelly test your app on many devices, or you can use Device Farm’s Remote Access (manual testing) feature to gesture, swipe, and interact, with the device in real time directly from your web browser.  

The Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) provider is officially integrated into the Libfabric 1.8 release. Customers can directly use Libfabric 1.8 without needing to install the EFA provider separately.

Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform enables you to run predictions on datasets stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for scenarios where you are working with large batches of data and don’t need sub-second latency. You can now configure your Batch Transform Jobs to exclude certain data attributes from prediction requests, and to join some or all of the input data attributes with prediction results. As a result, you no longer need additional pre-processing or post-processing when running batch predictions on data that is in CSV or JSON format.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the EU (London) region. 

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports increased number of repositories per region and images per repository. Previously, the default limit was 1,000 repositories per region and 1,000 images per repository, and required an extra step to increase limits. Now, the default limit has been increased to 10,000 repositories per region and 10,000 images per repository to better align with your requirements and growth.

Starting today, Amazon Inspector is available to customers in the Europe (Stockholm) region. With the addition of this region, Inspector is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).  

AWS CodePipeline is now a HIPAA Eligible Service. If you have a HIPAA Business Associate Addendum (BAA) in place with AWS, you can now start using AWS CodePipeline for your HIPAA eligible workloads. If you do not have a BAA in place with AWS or have any other questions about running HIPAA-regulated workloads on AWS, please contact us.

Today, AWS Systems Manager updated the layout for the documents selection screen. Now, documents published by AWS are organized by use case so you can easily navigate and discover them. This update also includes the ability to view custom documents owned by you or shared with you, allowing you to quickly find your custom documents.  

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5a, M5ad, R5a, R5ad, and T3a instances are available in additional regions.

• M5a and R5a instances are now available in AWS Europe (Paris), US West (San Francisco), Canada (Montreal) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
• M5ad and R5ad instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Montreal) and AWS GovCloud(US-West) Regions
• T3a instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo), Europe (Paris, London, Frankfurt), US West (San Francisco), Canada (Montreal) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

AWS Migration Hub now supports import of on-premises server and application data exported directly from RISC Networks, an AWS Migration Competency Partner.  

Starting today, you can create custom usage forecasts using AWS Cost Explorer to gain a line of sight into your future usage patterns. Cost Explorer’s usage forecasts use a machine learning algorithm that learns your historical usage trends and uses that information to provide a forecast of your future usage. Using these forecasts, you can better understand your expected cost trends and monitor your key usage patterns (for example, storage, data transfer, or running hours). Please note that you can generate your usage forecasts and explore your cost and usage data programmatically via the AWS Cost Explorer API.

Today AWS Elemental MediaConnect added support for Zixi pull. With this feature, you can now use MediaConnect to send video to devices on-premises that are behind corporate firewalls or in network address translation (NAT) environments. With the addition to existing Zixi push support, Zixi pull allows MediaConnect to support a broader range of off-the-shelf integrated receiver/decoders (IRDs).

The EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions. Hibernation gives you the ability to launch EC2 instances, set them up as desired, hibernate them, and then quickly bring them back to life when you need them. Applications pick up exactly where they left off instead of rebuilding their memory footprint. Using hibernate, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster, and you can do this without modifying your existing applications.

AWS Direct Connect is a cloud service solution that makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. 

The Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider (ACCP), a cryptography performance improvement for Amazon Corretto, is now available. Historically, Java cryptography has been CPU-intensive resulting in slow performance and elevated operational costs. ACCP updates dozens of cryptographic algorithms, accelerating cryptographic workloads.

AWS Resource Groups makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add tags to – or edit or delete tags of – multiple AWS resources at once. With Tag Editor, you can search for the resources that you want to tag, and then manage tags for the resources in your search results. Starting today, AWS Resource Groups supports 26 additional AWS resources including AWS Config Rules, AWS ElasticBeanstalk Applications, and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor supports 6 additional AWS resources including AWS CloudWatch Alarms, AWS CloudFormation Stacks.

AWS VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.5 is now the default CNI for new Kubernetes clusters launched by Amazon EKS.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) capability enables developers to playback their ingested video streams using the industry-standard, HTTP-based media streaming protocol.

New AWS Public Datasets Available from Facebook, Yale, Allen Institute for Brain Science, NOAA, and others. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en instances are available in US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Regions. I3en global availability now includes the Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (Oregon, N. California) AWS regions. 

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams producer SDKs are free and open software libraries for building applications that can stream audio and video data directly from an edge device to the AWS cloud for durable storage, playback, and machine learning based processing. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams producer SDK is now available in C. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale, announces the support for ROS-Melodic Morenia, which is the latest long term support (LTS) release for ROS. Now with AWS RoboMaker, customers can build robotics applications with ROS-Melodic, in addition to the existing ROS-Kinetic distribution.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert can now ingest video files from HTTP and HTTPS sources. With the ability to transcode content from sources other than Amazon S3, you are no longer required to build logic to copy files into S3 in order to use MediaConvert. This feature is available at no additional charge. To learn, more please read the documentation.

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS South America (Sao Paulo) Region.

Customers have been running Windows workloads on AWS for over a decade. We run nearly 2x more Windows Server instances than the next largest cloud provider, according to an IDC report. Our experience running Windows applications has earned our customers’ trust and the number of AWS enterprise customers using Amazon EC2 for Windows Server has grown 5x since 2015.

Today, we are excited to announce the AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency for APN Advanced Technology Partners, offering products based on varying phases of a customer’s journey to the AWS Cloud including migration assessment, migration, post-migration operational optimization, enhancement through analytics and Machine Learning, and modernization. The AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency reduces a customer’s time and effort in finding a capable and trusted APN Technology Partner for their Microsoft Workloads environment on AWS.

Interested in becoming an AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Partner? See the requirements and next steps here.

Interested in working with an AWS Microsoft Workloads Technology Partner? See the validated AWS Microsoft Workload Technology Partners here.  

Learn more on the APN Blog. 

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available in TypeScript and Python. AWS CDK is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. With AWS CDK, you can define your infrastructure as code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. AWS CDK is also available in Java and C# in developer preview.

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources, such Zendesk, Datadog, or Pagerduty, and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real time to all of your data sources. EventBridge allows you to build event-driven architectures, which are loosely coupled and distributed. This improves developer agility as well as application resiliency. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error-handling for you. EventBridge leverages the CloudWatch Events API, so CloudWatch Events users can access their existing default bus, rules, and events in the new EventBridge console, as well as in the CloudWatch Events console.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, an open source plug-in that makes it easier to create, step-through debug, build, and deploy applications, is now Generally Available. The toolkit supports .NET, node.js and Python applications and provides deep support for serverless applications at launch with other AWS services planned for the future. The toolkit had previously been in developer preview. 

AWS Direct Connect is now live at Equinix NY5, Secaucus, NJ. This location offers logical redundancy over a single virtual interface (VIF) on a Direct Connect connection. Logical redundancy can reduce downtime when a BGP peering session goes down due to a device failure or maintenance activity on the AWS side. With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region using global public VIFs and Direct Connect gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the home region if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region.

AWS Resource Groups, a service that makes it easier to manage and automate tasks on large numbers of AWS resources at one time, is now a Service Organization Control (SOC) compliant service. This compliance certification applies to all AWS Regions where AWS Resource Groups is available.

The open source ecs-cli tool now has improved capabilities for testing ECS task definitions locally. Using the ecs-cli, you can run ECS task definitions in a local development environment, such as a laptop or virtual machine.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available in TypeScript and Python. AWS CDK is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. With AWS CDK, you can define your infrastructure as code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. AWS CDK is also available in Java and C# in developer preview.

Players expect multiplayer game sessions to be fast and full. But with the rise of Battle Royale games and other player-intensive games, ensuring a consistent and fulfilling matchmaking experience can be a challenge for developers.

That’s why today we’re excited to announce Large Match Support for Amazon GameLift. With this update, you can now match and connect up to 200 players to a single game session on the lowest latency server instance available—all based upon a custom rule you define. We’ve also added some other new functionality that makes it even easier to support games with larger player counts, including:

• Create multiple teams from one definition. Rather than defining team compositions separately, you can now easily create teams by specifying one team template for creating as many teams as needed for your game.

• Easier backfilling of open player slots. We’ve automated backfilling, so you can keep matches full without causing long player wait times. Matchmaking backfill will automatically add a new player to a match even after a game has started and will prioritize filling a match before creating a new match.

GameLift is available in the following 15 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon and N. California), Central Canada (Montreal), EU Central (Frankfurt), EU West (London and Ireland), Asia Pacific South (Mumbai), Asia Pacific Northeast (Seoul and Tokyo), Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore and Sydney), South America East (São Paulo), and China (Beijing).

To learn more about GameLift and Large Match Support, visit the Amazon GameLift Product detail page and read the Game Tech blog. 

AWS Cloud Map is now available in the AWS South America (São Paulo) Region. 

AWS Container Services launches AWS Fluent Bit, a container image pre-installed with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose plugins that helps customers route container logs to multiple destinations such as CloudWatch, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.  

AWS License Manager is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. See the AWS Region Table for the list of regions where License Manager is currently available. AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charges. To learn more about this service, visit the product documentation, and FAQ page.

Starting today, the Amplify CLI (part of the open source Amplify Framework) includes support for adding and configuring AWS Lambda triggers for events when using Amazon Cognito, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and Amazon DynamoDB as event sources. This enables developers to setup customized authentication flows for their mobile and web applications from the Amplify CLI using Amazon Cognito User Pool as an authentication provider.  

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is now available in preview to monitor, isolate, and diagnose your containerized applications and microservices environments. With this preview, DevOps and systems engineers have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of their Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Fargate clusters by tasks, containers, and services.  

AWS CodeBuild now supports polyglot builds in CodeBuild’s managed images. Previously, you could only specify a single programming language runtime in these CodeBuild managed images. In order to perform a polyglot build, you either had to rely on a self-managed build images with various runtimes pre-installed or you had to install these additional runtimes inline in your buildspec.

Now, you can simply specify one or more programming language versions in your buildspec for your build needs. This is made possible by a concept called "runtime-versions". With runtime-versions, you can also specify which major version of the runtime should be enabled for your builds.

To learn more about "runtime-versions" please visit our documentation. Please visit our product page or the console to learn more about how to get started with AWS CodeBuild. 

Amplify Console now provides developers the ability to host a web app by simply uploading a folder from their desktop, or linking to a zip file stored in an S3 bucket or external server.  

You can now choose from four Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Lifecycle Management policies to automatically move files into the EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class and save up to 85% as your access patterns change. Additionally, you can now enable Lifecycle Management for all EFS file systems. 

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you provision and automatically scale instances across purchase options, Availability Zones (AZ), and instance families in a single Auto Scaling group (ASG), to optimize scale, performance, and cost. Now you can include Spot Instances with On-Demand and RIs in a single ASG, to save up to 90% on compute in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS EU (London) Region. 

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS EU (London) Region.

AWS Config now supports a new set of APIs to manage AWS Config rules across your organization in AWS Organizations. Using this capability, you can centrally create, update, and delete AWS Config rules across all accounts in your organization. This capability is particularly useful if you have a need to deploy a common set of AWS Config rules across all accounts. You can also specify accounts where AWS Config rules should not be created. In addition, you can use these APIs from the master account in AWS Organizations to enforce governance by ensuring that the underlying AWS Config rules are not modifiable by your organization’s member accounts. 

Starting today, you can create and send daily, weekly, or monthly reports to monitor the performance of your AWS Budgets. Using the new AWS Budgets Reports console, you can easily select the subset of budgets that you would like to include in your report, define the delivery frequency, and specify your email recipients. For example, you can create a report that monitors all budgets for linked accounts belonging to a particular business unit and have that report delivered each morning to that business unit’s engineering, product, and finance leaders.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to tunnel SSH (Secure Shell) and SCP (Secure Copy) traffic between a client and a server. 

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager now lets you define the operating system user account that an interactive shell uses on an instance. You can associate an operating system user with your IAM principal (user or role) for Session Manager. You can also set the operating system user in your Session Manager preferences. This enables you to better manage shell privileges for multiple users that need interactive access to instances. 

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection applies machine-learning algorithms to continuously analyze system and application metrics, determine a normal baseline, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention. You can use Anomaly Detection to isolate and troubleshoot unexpected changes in your metric behavior.

AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Management, and AWS IoT Device Defender are now available in multiple additional regions.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is now available for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. It is a new deployment option that automatically starts, scales, and shuts down an Amazon Aurora database, and it offers database capacity without the need to provision, scale, and manage any database servers.

Many applications have intermittent or cyclical usage patterns. For example, retail applications experience seasonal spikes, development and test workloads require database access only at certain times of the day or week, and new applications face unknown usage demands. This creates a capacity planning dilemma, since you must either over-provision database capacity upfront and pay for resources you won’t use, or under-provision resources and risk performance problems and a poor user experience.

With Amazon Aurora Serverless, you no longer have to provision or manage database capacity. The database automatically and quickly starts, scales, shuts down, and starts up again in seconds, based on the needs of the workload. You simply create an endpoint through the Amazon RDS Management Console, and Amazon Aurora Serverless handles the rest. You pay by the second, and only when the database is in use.

Read about Aurora Serverless on the AWS Blog, the Aurora Serverless product page, and in the Aurora documentation.

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, and will expand to additional regions in the coming year.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service has increased its snapshot frequency from daily to hourly, providing more granular recovery points. If you need to restore your cluster, you now have numerous, recent snapshots to choose from. These automated snapshots are retained for 14 days at no extra charge.

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions. This release contains an important security fix and also bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. 

With this release, pg_hint_plan extension has been updated for PostgreSQL versions 11, 10, 9.6 and 9.5.

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.

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

AWS now supports China based customers, who use services in US commercial regions, to pay their invoices from Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS Inc.”) in Chinese Yuan through a China UnionPay credit card.  

Starting today, AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced are available in four new regions: EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and South America (Sao Paulo). 

Today, the Amplify Console launched several updates to the build service including SAM CLI and custom container support. The Amplify Console offers a Git-based workflow for continuously deploying and hosting fullstack serverless web apps.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) launched the AWS Industrial Software Competency in 2018 that verifies, validates, and vets top APN Technology Partners with solutions for an end-to-end Industrial Software value chain. These Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) provide technology offerings targeting one or more of the primary steps in discrete manufacturing or process industries: Product Design, Production Design, and Production/Operations.

Launching soon, a correlative track for best-in-class APN Consulting Partners designed to connect customers with highly-specialized Industrial Software System Integrators. These APN Partners can help customers achieve meaningful outcomes and support exploration and integration with top solutions designed specifically for this industry.

To receive the AWS Industrial Software Competency designation, APN Partners must undergo rigorous technical validation related to industry-specific technology, as well as an assessment of the security, performance, and reliability of their AWS solutions. This validation gives customers complete confidence in choosing top APN Partner solutions from the tens of thousands in the AWS Partner Network.

APN Consulting Partners with the AWS Industrial Software Competency will support the following categories:

• Product Design: Applications and services used in the design phase, including Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Data Management (PDM), and Civil Engineering
• Production Design: Applications for factory layout and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Data Management (PDM)
• Production & Operations: Discrete and process industry applications like Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), Plant Information Management System (PIMS), supply chain logistics, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), analytic applications for industrial use, and manufacturing specific Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions

Congratulations to the Advanced and Premier tier APN Partners that are paving the way for this new AWS Competency designation:

Storm Reply

Premier APN Consulting Partner based in Italy
With a deep knowledge of the business processes of industrial and manufacturing companies, Storm Reply supports customers to build Industrial IoT solutions and provides digital platform to process real time data coming from factories, providing services on top like Machine Learning training and computation, big data processing, data warehousing and business logic.

Deloitte

Premier APN Consulting Partner based in US
The manufacturing industry is ever changing. Rapid globalization, technological advancements, changing consumer preferences, and evolving government policies are reshaping the manufacturing industry, exponentially accelerating the pace of competition and continually raising the bar on company performance. Deloitte serves more than 95% of the Fortune 500 Industrial Manufacturing companies and can help anticipate, plan for, and manage the dramatic swings that characterize this market.

Accenture 

Premier APN Consulting Partner based in US
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Accenture helps help Industrial Equipment companies digitally transform their business through smart, connected and living technologies, to become Industry X.0 businesses.

Wipro 

Premier APN Consulting Partner based in India
Wipro helps Industrial and Manufacturing businesses in their digital transformation journey of achieving operational excellence and superior customer experience across the entire value chain through continuous innovation, leveraging a combination of its own IPs and Platforms and the power of an unparalleled ecosystem of partners like AWS.

Contact your Partner Development Manager (PDM) to learn more about becoming an AWS Industrial Software Competency Partner! 

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

You can now assign tags to AWS CodeCommit repositories. With tags, you can group and find repositories with a common tag as well as define AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions based on tags. You can tag existing repositories as well as add tags to new repositories when you create them. 

Now, you can use the Amazon DynamoDB console or the UpdateTable API/CLI to delete a global secondary index even as it’s being created. Previously, you could not cancel the creation of a global secondary index—indexes could only be deleted once they finished building. This can help you save time if you no longer want a global secondary index or if you want a new global secondary index with different attribute projections. To learn more, see Deleting a Global Secondary Index From a Table in the DynamoDB Developer Guide.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now performs checks to confirm compatibility of your MySQL 5.7 database with MySQL 8.0, and stops the upgrade if incompatibilities are found.  

You can now share your Amazon Aurora DB clusters with other AWS accounts for quick and efficient database cloning.

Amazon API Gateway now offers tag-based access control for WebSocket APIs using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, enabling you to easily categorize API Gateway resources for WebSocket APIs by purpose, owner, or other criteria.  

Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 25 unique items and 4 MB of data per transactional request in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, Operated by Sinnet, and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. Transactions enable developers to simplify their code and support workflows and business logic that require adding, updating, or deleting multiple items as a single, all-or-nothing operation. 

AWS CodeBuild is now available to customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service in the cloud. CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. For more information, visit the CodeBuild product page.

AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon's isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

To learn more about AWS CodeBuild, visit our documentation. To see all regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS region table.