February 2024

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports an in-place major version upgrade (MVU) from Amazon DocumentDB versions 3.6 and 4.0 to version 5.0 in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. Instead of backing up and restoring the database to the new version or relying on database migration tools, you can perform an in-place major version upgrade with a few clicks using the AWS console, the latest AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), or Command Line Interface (CLI). With in-place MVU, no new clusters are created in the process and you can continue using the existing cluster endpoints for your applications.

Today, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams adds the ability for you to run SQL queries with one click in the AWS Management Console using Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. With this new capability, you can easily analyze and visualize the data in your streams in real-time.

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 m7i.metal-24xl instance for VMware Cloud on AWS. This offering features a disaggregated storage architecture from compute, supporting both Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage as primary storage options for customers. With this new offering, customers can now choose among three instance types for VMware Cloud on AWS: i3en.metal, i4i.metal and m7i.metal-24xl.

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Aloha NAP data center in Honolulu, Hawaii. By connecting your network to AWS at the new Hawaii location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This is the first AWS Direct Connect site within Hawaii and the 42nd site in the United States. 

Today, AWS Resource Groups is adding support for an additional 161 resource types for tag-based Resource Groups. Customers can use Resource Groups to group and manage resources from services such as AWS Backup, AWS Media Connect, and AWS Network Manager. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon Q for Business now supports metadata boosting for Q applications. This feature allows customers to easily fine-tune the underlying ranking of retrieved RAG passages in order to optimize Q&A answer relevance in their Q applications. 

Today, AWS announces the expansion in the log coverage support for Amazon Security Lake, which includes Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) audit logs. This enhancement allows you to automatically centralize and normalize your Amazon EKS audit logs in Security Lake, making it easier to monitor and investigate potential suspicious activities in your Amazon EKS clusters.

Amazon Data Firehose (Firehose) decompression for CloudWatch Logs now supports message extraction, so customers can automatically filter out header information and deliver only the message content from their CloudWatch logs to destinations such as Amazon S3 and Splunk for analytics.

The Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class can now accelerate Amazon SageMaker Model Training with faster load times for training data, checkpoints, and model outputs. S3 Express One Zone is purpose-built to deliver the fastest cloud object storage for performance-critical applications and delivers consistent single-digit millisecond request latency and high throughput to reduce the time and cost to train and tune machine learning models through Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon Location Service has released authentication libraries for iOS and Android platforms, simplifying the integration of Amazon Location Service into mobile apps. Along with the existing Javascript library, these provide a consistent authentication experience across web and mobile platforms.

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB, a client-side application that helps you visualize and build scalable, high-performance data models, now supports cloning tables between development environments. With this feature, you can quickly develop and test your application with your DynamoDB tables across multiple environments.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling customers in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions can now hibernate their Warm Pool instances. With Warm Pools, customers can scale out faster by bringing instances into service from a pre-initialized pool of EC2 instances. Warm Pools are a good fit for applications that have time consuming initialization steps — like loading gigabytes of data, provisioning services, or running custom scripts — that can take several minutes or longer before those EC2 instances are ready to serve traffic.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Elastic Clusters now support readable secondaries, ability to configure the shard instance count, and ability start and stop clusters. These new features help you scale read workloads and improve usage efficiency of your Elastic Clusters. 

Amazon EMR is excited to announce that Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in Europe (Spain) Region.

Amazon CloudFront embedded Points of Presence (POPs) are a new type of CloudFront infrastructure deployed closest to end viewers, within internet service provider (ISP) and mobile network operator (MNO) networks. Embedded POPs are custom built to deliver large scale live-stream video, video-on-demand (VOD), and game downloads. Today, CloudFront has 600+ embedded POPs deployed across 200+ cities globally.

Starting today, remediating non-compliant resources with AWS Config rules is available in Canada West (Calgary) Region. This feature gives you the ability to associate and execute remediation actions with AWS Config rules to address noncompliant resources. You can choose from a list of available remediation actions. For example, you can create an AWS Config rule to check that your Amazon S3 buckets does not allow public read access. You can then associate a remediation action to disable public access for noncompliant S3 buckets.

AWS HealthOmics now provides customers with more detailed information about their workflow runs. Customers can now see detailed performance metrics in their CloudWatch log streams and use this information to quickly right size their workloads. Additionally, customers now receive engine logs for all workflow runs in their S3 location of choice and receive detailed status messages to aid in debugging. All of this information is readily available in the revamped run details page in the HealthOmics console.

Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now available in limited preview in the US East (Virginia) region. This zero-ETL integration enables customers to run high performance analytics on their DynamoDB data and has no impact on production workloads running on DynamoDB. As data is written into a DynamoDB table, it is seamlessly made available in Amazon Redshift, eliminating the need for customers to build and maintain complex data pipelines for performing extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Neptune I/O-Optimized, a new configuration for Amazon Neptune Database that provides improved price performance and predictable pricing for customers with I/O-intensive applications. With Neptune I/O-Optimized, there are zero charges for read and write I/O operations—you only pay for your database instances and storage usage, making it easy to predict your database spend up front. Neptune I/O-Optimized offers up to 40% cost savings for I/O-intensive applications where I/O charges exceed 25% of the total Neptune database spend.

Amazon Location Service Maps SDK now supports Metal-based rendering for iOS applications. This update allows developers to render maps and geospatial visualizations using Metal, Apple's native graphics API, on iOS devices.

AWS Resource Explorer now supports 65 more resource types from services including AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon Route53, and Amazon Fraud Detector. With this launch, customers can now use AWS Resource Explorer to search for and discover resources for the following newly supported resource types:

AWS Amplify Hosting now supports custom SSL certificates for custom domains. This new feature allows developers to easily upload and use their SSL/TLS certificates for their web applications hosted on Amplify, offering improved flexibility and security. With this feature, developers can now leverage certificates they've obtained from third-party Certificate Authorities (CAs) or use certificates issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to have greater control over your domain and IT compliance needs.

Amazon CloudWatch announces a comprehensive set of enhancements to the alarm and dashboard experience. It introduces out-of-the-box, best practice alarm recommendations for 24 AWS services, streamlining your monitoring setup. You can easily view all metrics with recommended alarms using a convenient toggle. Creating alarms is simpler with pre-filled configuration in the alarm wizard or bulk downloading infrastructure-as-code templates for the recommended alarms.

You can now upgrade the Apache Kafka version of Tiered Storage enabled Amazon MSK clusters. Clusters using version v2.8.2.tiered can now upgrade in-place to the latest Apache Kafka version 3.6.0, which supports production-grade Tiered Storage in Amazon MSK. In-place upgrades use Amazon MSK’s rolling version upgrade capability, which keeps the cluster available at all times during the upgrade.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7i-flex and M7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in South America (Sao Paulo) region. These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of pull request approval rules in Amazon CodeCatalyst. CodeCatalyst customers can now configure and enforce a minimum number of pull request approvals required before source code can be merged to the destination branch. Pull request approval rules in CodeCatalyst help development teams promote a high quality bar for changes in their codebase. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon EMR Managed Scaling is now available for Amazon EMR on EC2 customers in the AWS Region in Europe (Spain).

Amazon AppStream 2.0 announces support for custom session scripts and audio out on multi-session fleets. Multi-session fleets enable IT admins to host multiple end-user sessions on a single AppStream 2.0 instance, helping to make better use of instance resources.

We’re excited to announce the release of a new Messaging API for the SimSpace Weaver app SDK. With the API, developers can communicate directly between simulation applications running on SimSpace Weaver.

Today, AWS released new tools for the Open Job Description (OpenJD) specification for describing portable render jobs. This update includes a set of three Python libraries and tools packages: openjd-cli, openjd-model, and openjd-sessions. The openjd-cli package provides a command-line tool that you can use to develop and run OpenJD jobs on your own workstation or render farm. The openjd-model and openjd-sessions packages provide functionality that you can use to integrate OpenJD into your own render farm and pipeline software. These libraries and tools packages are provided under the Apache 2.0 license and available on GitHub and the PyPI package manager for Python.

Today, Amazon EMR on EC2 announced an enhancement to the DescribeStep and ListStep API to allow customers to view up to 10,000 completed steps within the last 7 days, an increase from the previous limit of 1,000 steps. The service will also continue supporting the retrieval of 1,000 steps from the past two months. These API improvements provide greater visibility into completed steps and makes it easier for you to monitor and manage your steps workflow.

AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) now allows you to customize the resources deployed and recorded by AFT. You can now choose whether or not to deploy AFT using a virtual private cloud (VPC). You can also customize the retention periods for AWS Backup recovery points, Amazon Cloudwatch log groups, and Amazon S3 log archive buckets to meet your unique data retention needs. This release includes enhancements to AFT VPC default security group to align with AWS Foundational Security Best Practices.

Tax documents for AWS Marketplace sellers, such as independent software vendors (ISVs), consulting partners, and channel partners, are now available in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.

AWS IoT Core, a managed cloud service that lets customers securely connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud and manage them at scale, announces support for Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Stapling for TLS X.509 Server Certificates using Custom Domains and Configurable Endpoints. The new feature enables customers to add an additional layer of verification to their custom domain's server certificate validity, for example to respond to server certificate revocations more quickly. By including the OCSP response with the certificate during the TLS handshake, it eliminates the need for a separate request from the client to an OCSP server, resulting in faster connection establishment.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Public sector and commercial sector customers can now run their containerized applications on ROSA in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports delegating encryption permissions to an IAM role. Customers can configure an IAM role with Glue Data Catalog to manage KMS key permissions on behalf of calling users. Delegating the configured IAM role simplifies the management of the KMS key permissions used to encrypt the Glue Data Catalog and reduces the number of grants needed to allow users to access their catalog.

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) can now host their applications in Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), Middle East (UAE), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne) regions, and send text messages (SMS) to consumers in more than 200 countries and territories. Using Amazon SNS, customers can send a message directly to one phone number, or multiple phone numbers at once by subscribing those phone numbers to a topic and sending messages to the topic. 

Amazon Redshift now allows you to programmatically access Redshift Advisor recommendations via API, enabling you to integrate recommendations about how to improve your provisioned cluster performance into your own applications. You can now access Advisor recommendations via the ListRecommendations API to consume in your automation tools and dashboards. 

AWS AppSync is a managed service that connects applications to data. With AppSync, API developers can write resolvers and functions in JavaScript to define the business logic that connects their AppSync GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs to data.

Today, Amazon WorkSpaces Web announced support for identity provider (IdP) initiated single sign on (SSO) for standard authentication web portals. IdP-initiated SSO support provides administrators with more options in defining the sign in flow for their users.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces release of Synthetics NodeJS Runtime versions - syn-nodejs-puppeteer-6.2, syn-nodejs-puppeteer-5.2 - and Python Runtime version - syn-python-selenium-2.1. This release brings updated Chromium dependency libs for forward compatibility with Lambda OS and adds new Lambda Ephemeral Storage usage metric in customer account. To learn more, see release notes.

Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides improved visibility into the progress of domain updates. You can see granular status values representing different stages of an update, simplifying monitoring and automation of configuration changes.

Starting with today’s release of v0.34.0, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) customers using the open-source Karpenter project have a new way to control how and when disruptive changes are made to the Amazon EC2 instances in their Kubernetes clusters. You can use Karpenter with EKS to help improve application availability, lower operational overhead, and increase cost-efficiency. Disruption controls offer deeper configuration for the automatic EC2 instance management capabilities of Karpenter so that you can fine-tune them for your specific needs and use cases.

Amazon Connect now enables more efficient management of agent schedules through three new shift copy capabilities.

Today, AWS announces support for single sign-on when using JetBrains IntelliJ, GoLand and PyCharm IDEs with Amazon CodeCatalyst development environments. This launch allows customers who've setup AWS IAM Identity Center with CodeCatalyst to create, delete, pause, and resume supported JetBrains development environments from their teams' CodeCatalyst projects.

Amazon Redshift Query Editor is now available in Israel (Tel Aviv) and Asia Pacific (Melbourne) regions. Amazon Redshift Query Editor makes data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse and data lake more accessible with a web-based tool for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, and database developers. With Query Editor, users can explore, analyze, and collaborate on data. It reduces the operational costs of managing query tools by providing a web-based application that allows you to focus on exploring your data without managing your infrastructure.

Amazon Rekognition content moderation is a machine learning-based feature that can detect inappropriate, unwanted, and offensive content. Today, Amazon Rekognition has launched an enhanced machine learning model for content moderation for images. This update adds new labels, improves model accuracy, and introduces the new capability to identify animated and illustrated content.

Starting today, we are updating the AWS Free Tier for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, 12 month free, to include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month. If you are an existing or new AWS Free Tier customer for Amazon EC2, you will get 750 hours public IPv4 address usage per month free when launching any EC2 instance with a public IPv4 address. 

Today, we would like to announce expansion of AWS Mainframe Modernization service to two additional regions: Europe (Spain) and Israel (Tel Aviv).

Today, AWS announced the general availability of Windows support for Finch, an open source command line tool that allows developers to build, run, and publish Linux containers on Windows and macOS. Finch simplifies container development by bundling a minimal native client with a curated selection of open source components, allowing developers to build and manage containers without the hassle of managing intricate details.