AWS re:Invent Announcements

The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers improve their cloud workloads since 2015. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.

Today we are introducing a new AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of AWS re:Post (re:Post), a new, community-driven, questions-and-answers service to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and enhance operation. AWS re:Post enables you to ask questions about anything related to designing, building, deploying, and operating workloads on AWS, and get answers from community experts, including AWS customers, Partners, and employees.

Today AWS announced the preview release of AWS Cloud WAN, a new wide area networking (WAN) service that helps you build, manage, and monitor a unified global network that manages traffic running between resources in your cloud and on-premises environments.

AWS Amplify announces AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features (public preview) to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Amplify Studio automatically translates designs made in Figma to human-readable React UI component code. Within Amplify Studio, developers can visually connect the UI components to app backend data.

For configuring and managing backends, Amplify Admin UI’s existing capabilities will be part of Amplify Studio going forward, providing a unified interface to enable developers to build full-stack apps faster.

Learn more.

We’re happy to announce that the AWS SDK for Swift is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Swift has been designed from the ground-up to provide idiomatic support for Swift’s concise syntax, multi platform capabilities, and features extensions to take advantage of Swift’s new concurrency features.

This initial release supports iOS, macOS and Linux, with support for other platforms such as tvOS, watchOS, Catalyst, and Windows coming in the future.

We’re excited to announce the AWS SDK for Rust is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Rust empowers developers to interact with AWS services and enjoy APIs that follow Rust idioms and best practices. It utilizes modern Rust language features like async/await, non-blocking IO, and builders.

The SDK also integrates with popular libraries in the Rust ecosystem like Tokio, Tracing, and Hyper.

We’re pleased to announce that the AWS SDK for Kotlin is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Kotlin allows developers to interact with AWS services using idiomatic Kotlin, including native coroutine support for concurrent usage.

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) now supports global resource types, enabling you to provision a global resource once and share that resource across your accounts. A global resource is a resource that can be used in multiple AWS Regions. For example, you can now create a RAM resource share with an AWS Cloud WAN core network, which is a managed network containing AWS and on-premises networks, and share it across your organization.

As a result, you can use the Cloud WAN core network to centrally operate a unified global network across Regions and across accounts.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go (preview) is now generally available in a single package, making it easier for you to use the CDK and stay up-to-date with new versions as we evolve it going forwards. AWS CDK v2 consolidates the AWS Construct Library into a single package called aws-cdk-lib, and eliminates the need to download individual packages for each AWS service used.

If you write your own CDK construct libraries, you only need to take a minimum dependency on this single package and let library consumers choose which exact AWS CDK version to use.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Construct Hub, a registry of open-source construct libraries for simplifying cloud development. Constructs are reusable building blocks of the Cloud Development Kits (CDKs). Discover and share CDK constructs for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s) and CDK for Terraform (CDKtf) and other construct-based tools.

Today, AWS and the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) announced the first stable release of Open 3D Engine (O3DE), an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds for video production, and simulations for non-gaming use-cases unencumbered by licensing fees or commercial terms. Since the formation of O3DF and launch of the O3DE Developer Preview in July, over 250 developers from a wide range of industries have contributed thousands of pull requests, issues, and millions of lines of code changes to add developer features, improve stability, and increase performance to ensure that O3DE is ready for use in live games and simulations.

As the successor to Amazon Lumberyard, O3DE offers developers and content creators a wide set of 3D content creation tools and a growing community of developers and foundation partners including AccelByte, Adobe, Apocalypse Studios, Audiokinetic, AWS, Backtrace.io, Carbonated, Futurewei, GAMEPOCH, Genvid Technologies, Hadean, HERE Technologies, Huawei, Intel, International Game Developers Association, KitBash3D, Kythera AI, Niantic, Open Robotics, PopcornFX, Red Hat, Rochester Institute of Technology, SideFX, Tafi, TLM Partners and Wargaming.

Today, we are announcing Extended Maintenance Plan for FreeRTOS - a real-time operating system for microcontrollers. FreeRTOS Extended Maintenance Plan (EMP) allows embedded developers to receive critical bug fixes and security patches on their chosen FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) version for up to 10 years beyond the expiry of the initial LTS period.

FreeRTOS EMP helps customers secure their microcontroller-based devices for years, save operating system upgrade costs, and reduce risks associated with patching their devices.

FreeRTOS EMP applies to libraries covered by FreeRTOS LTS, so developers can continue using a version that provides feature stability, security patches, and critical bug fixes, without having to plan a costly version upgrade.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M1 Mac instances for macOS are available in preview. Built on Apple silicon Mac mini computers and powered by AWS Nitro System, EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads.

EC2 M1 Mac instances also enable native ARM64 macOS environments for the first time in AWS to develop, build, test, deploy, and run Apple applications.

Developers rearchitecting their macOS applications to natively support Apple silicon Macs can now provision ARM64 macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to enjoy faster builds and convenient distributed testing.

Learn more and get started with EC2 M1 Mac instances preview here.

My take: This is a cool feature to help move your traditional databases into a data-specific data store in the AWS Cloud. It's smart move that helps teams get to a cloud native solution faster.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a new feature of AWS DMS that allows you to quickly build a database and analytics migration plan by automating the discovery and analysis of your fleet.

AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is intended for users looking to migrate a large number of database and analytic servers to AWS.

Today AWS announced the general release of AWS Direct Connect SiteLink. SiteLink makes it easy to create private network connections between your on-premises locations, such as offices and data centers, by connecting them to Direct Connect locations throughout the world.

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler, a new feature of SageMaker that can accelerate the training of deep learning (DL) models by up to 50% through more efficient use of GPU instances.

Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference is a new inference option that enables you to easily deploy machine learning models for inference without having to configure or manage the underlying infrastructure. Simply select the serverless option when deploying your machine learning model, and Amazon SageMaker automatically provisions, scales, and turns off compute capacity based on the volume of inference requests.

With SageMaker Serverless Inference, you pay only for the duration of running the inference code and the amount of data processed, not for idle time.

Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender helps you choose the best available compute instance and configuration to deploy machine learning models for optimal inference performance and cost.

My take: This will help reduce the time to label data at scale and speed up machine learning projects.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus, a new turnkey data labeling servicethat enables you to create high-quality training datasets quickly and reduces costs by up to 40%.

We are excited to announce the preview of automatic chatbot designer in Amazon Lex, enabling developers to automatically design chatbots from conversation transcripts in hours rather than weeks. Amazon Lex helps you build, test, and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants on contact center services (such as Amazon Connect), websites, and messaging channels (such as Facebook Messenger).

The automatic chatbot designer enhances the usability of Amazon Lex by automating conversational design, minimizing developer effort and reducing the time it takes to design a chatbot.

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway supports intra-region peering, giving you the ability to establish peering connections between multiple Transit Gateways in the same AWS Region. With this change, different units in your organization can deploy their own Transit Gateways, and easily interconnect them resulting in less administrative overhead and greater autonomy of operation.

AWS Shield Advanced now automatically protects web applications by blocking application layer (Layer 7) DDoS events with no manual intervention needed by you or the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT). When you protect your resources with AWS Shield Advanced and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced will identify patterns associated with layer 7 DDoS events and isolate this anomalous traffic by automatically creating AWS WAF rules in your web access control lists (ACLs).

These rules can be implemented in count mode to observe how they will impact resource traffic and then deployed in block mode.

These capabilities enable you to quickly respond to and mitigate DDoS events that threaten the availability of your applications.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) now helps optimize scaling decisions for improved performance and resilience with Amazon CloudWatch. Starting today, AWS Managed Microsoft AD provides domain controller and directory utilization metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for new and existing directories automatically.

Analyzing these utilization metrics helps you quantify your average and peak load times to identify the need for additional domain controllers.

With this, you can define the number of domain controllers to meet your performance, resilience, and cost requirements.

Today AWS announces a new structure for the 2022 Season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League. The AWS DeepRacer League is the world’s first global autonomous racing league, including an autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning and a 3D racing simulator where developers can get hands-on experience with Machine Learning (ML).

2022 introduces more opportunities to race LIVE for everyone via the return of physical racing on the Summit Circuit and a new LIVE head-to-head format in the Virtual Circuit, plus a new student-only division dubbed the AWS DeepRacer Student League.

My take: A nice user experience improvement to help get you off those proprietary databases.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is pleased to announce the launch of AWS DMS Studio, a new service console that makes it easy to manage database migrations from start to finish. AWS DMS Studio accelerates and simplifies migrations by integrating tools for each phase of the migration journey from assessment to conversion to migration.

AWS DMS Studio integrates AWS DMS Fleet Advisor to inventory and analyzes your database and analytics fleet, AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to convert database schema and application code, and AWS DMS to migrate your data.

At each step of the migration, AWS DMS Studio assists you by providing contextual resources such as documentation and guidance on engaging migration experts where needed.

My take: A great move helping people get the education needed to start a career in machine learning.

The AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Scholarship program, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, provides students who self-identify as underserved and underrepresented in tech educational content, career mentorship programs, and 2,500 scholarships annually as part of a commitment to a more diverse future AI & ML workforce.

AWS DeepRacer Student Presented by Intel is a new service for students enrolled in high schools and colleges globally. AWS DeepRacer Student builds on the success of of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer service, which educates aspiring developers on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), while removing barriers to entry faced by students.

AWS DeepRacer Student provides an all-in-one solution with free learning modules, model training, and competition.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom is a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying OS and DB environment. Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the SQL Server database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install drivers, and enable native features to meet the dependent application's requirements.

My take: DevOps Guru continues to improve. This time extending into the database sphere.

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a new Machine Learning (ML) powered capability for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that automatically detects and diagnoses database performance and operational issues, enabling you to resolve bottlenecks in minutes rather than days. Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a feature of Amazon DevOps Guru, which detects operational and performance related issues for all Amazon RDS engines and dozens of other resource types.

DevOps Guru for RDS expands upon the existing capabilities of DevOps Guru to detect, diagnose, and provide remediation recommendations for a wide variety of database-related performance issues, such as resource over-utilization and misbehavior of SQL queries.

When an issue occurs, DevOps Guru for RDS immediately notifies developers and DevOps engineers and provides diagnostic information, details on the extent of the problem, and intelligent remediation recommendations to help customers quickly resolve the issue.

Today, we are excited to announce a new and simplified out-of-box AWS IoT connectivity experience that can be implemented on two partner-provided FreeRTOS Reference Integration boards: the STM32L4+ and the ESP32-C3.

My take: This expansion of access analyzer will help improve your overall network security posture within your VPC.

Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to identify unintended network access to your resources on AWS. Using Network Access Analyzer, you can verify whether network access for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources meets your security and compliance guidelines.

With Network Access Analyzer, you can assess and identify improvements to your cloud security posture.

Additionally, Network Access Analyzer makes it easier for you to demonstrate that your network meets certain regulatory requirements.

Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is a new feature that makes it easier for you to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for your AWS workloads. With IPAM's automated workflows, network administrators can more efficiently manage IP addresses.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from any document or image, now offers specialized support to extract data from identity documents, such U.S. Driver Licenses and U.S. Passports. You can extract implied fields like name and address, as well as explicit fields like Date of Birth, Date of Issue, Date of Expiry, ID #, ID Type, and more in the form of key-value pairs.

Until today, current OCR based solutions were limited, and did not offer the ability to extract all the required fields accurately due to rich background images or the ability to recognize names and addresses, as well as the fields associated with them (e.g., Washington state ID lists home address with the key "8"), or support ID designs and formats that varied by country or state.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support of dead-letter queue (DLQ) redrive to source queue, giving you better control over the life cycle of unconsumed messages. Dead-letter queues are an existing feature of Amazon SQS that allows customers to store messages that applications could not successfully consume. You can now efficiently redrive messages from your dead-letter queue to your source queue on the Amazon SQS console.

DLQ redrive augments the dead-letter queue management experience for developers and enables them to build applications with the confidence that they can examine their unconsumed messages, recover from errors in their code, and reprocess messages in their dead-letter queues.

My take: More functionality into an already jam packed tool for machine learning. Excellent.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). It provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data, as well as to build, train, and deploy models.

We recently introduced the ability to visually browse and connect to Amazon EMR clusters right from the SageMaker Studio notebook.

Starting today, you can now monitor and debug your Apache Spark jobs running on EMR right from SageMaker Studio notebooks with just a click.

Additionally, you can now discover, connect to, create, terminate and manage EMR clusters directly from SageMaker Studio.

The built-in integration with EMR therefore enables you to do interactive data preparation and machine learning at peta-byte scale right within the single universal SageMaker Studio notebook.

My take: Sign up with your email and you can start learning machine learning tools and techniques right away. This greatly reduces the barriers to accessing this technology.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a free, no-configuration service that allows developers, academics, and data scientists to learn and experiment with machine learning.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a fully managed service that enables you to create, automate, and manage end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflows, now supports integration with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and Amazon SageMaker Clarify. With these integrations, you can easily incorporate model quality and bias detection in your ML workflow. The increased automation can help reduce your operational burden in building and managing ML models.

Amazon SageMaker now offers enhancements to the machine learning (ML) lineage tracking capability that enables customers to track and query the lineage of artifacts such as data, features, and models across an ML workflow. Now, customers can retrieve the end-to-end lineage graph spanning the entire workflow from data preparation to model deployment through a single query.

This feature eliminates undifferentiated heavy lifting needed to retrieve lineage information one workflow step at a time and manually stitch them all together.

Customers can also retrieve lineage information for segments of the workflow by defining a step as the focal point and querying the lineage of the steps that are upstream or downstream of that focal point.

For instance, customers can define a model as the focal entity and retrieve the location of the raw data set from which features were extracted to train that model.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of three new features: (1) Experience Builder to create fully functional search applications in a few clicks, (2) Search Analytics Dashboard for search insights and metrics, and (3) Custom Document Enrichment for document pre-processing and enrichment during ingestion.

My take: This new tier makes it easier to keep data in DynamoDB for longer. No more need to shuffle it out to reduce costs while increasing operational overhead.

Amazon DynamoDB announces the new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (DynamoDB Standard-IA) table class, which helps you reduce your DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent for tables that store infrequently accessed data. The DynamoDB Standard-IA table class is ideal for use cases that require long-term storage of data that is infrequently accessed, such as application logs, old social media posts, e-commerce order history, and past gaming achievements.

AWS IoT ExpressLink (Preview) is connectivity software that powers a range of hardware modules developed and offered by AWS Partners, such as Espressif, Infineon, and u-blox. These connectivity modules include AWS-validated software, making it faster and easier for you to securely connect almost any product to the cloud in a fraction of the time and cost, including medical devices, industrial sensors, and consumer products.

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET simplifies the process of re-architecting applications into smaller code projects. Modernize and transform your .NET applications with an assistive tool that analyzes source code and runtime metrics to create a visual representation of your application and its dependencies.

This tool delivers a holistic visualization of an applications source code, helps code refactoring and assists in extraction of the codebase into separate code projects that teams can develop, build, and operate independently to improve agility, uptime, and scalability.

AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization. It allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns – replatforming and automated refactoring – allowing customers to select their best-fit migration path and associated toolchains based on their migration assessment results.

My take: SMart business move by AWS. This will help larger organizations (like governments) move & modernize some critical workloads...finally.

AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization. It allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns – replatforming and automated refactoring – allowing customers to select their best-fit migration path and associated toolchains based on their migration assessment results.

My take: This opens up Amazon SageMaker to a lot more audiences. This could be THE launch of AWS re:Invent 2021.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that enables business analysts to create accurate machine learning (ML) models and generate predictions using a visual, point-and-click interface, no coding required.

My take: This is how I want to interact with Kafka. Honestly, should've been this way from the start. Super excited about this one.

Today we announced Amazon MSK Serverless in public preview, a new type of Amazon MSK cluster that makes it easier for developers to run Apache Kafka without having to manage its capacity. MSK Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute and storage resources and offers throughput-based pricing, so you can use Apache Kafka on demand and pay for the data you stream and retain.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS enables you to launch, run, and scale fully managed file systems on AWS that replace the ZFS or other Linux-based file servers you run on premises while helping to provide better agility and lower costs. FSx for OpenZFS is the newest member of the Amazon FSx family of services, which provides fully-featured and highly-performant file storage powered by your choice of widely-used file systems that include NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, and Lustre.

FSx for OpenZFS file systems are accessible from Linux, Windows, and macOS compute instances and containers via the industry-standard NFS protocol (v3, v4.0, v4.1, v4.2).

My take: All the power of EMR without worrying about the infrastructure? Yes, please.

We are happy to announce the preview of Amazon EMR Serverless, a new serverless option in Amazon EMR that makes it easy and cost-effective for data engineers and analysts to run petabyte-scale data analytics in the cloud. Amazon EMR is a cloud big data platform used by customers to run large-scale distributed data processing jobs, interactive SQL queries, and machine learning applications using open-source analytics frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto.

With EMR Serverless, customers can run applications built using these frameworks with a few clicks, without having to configure, optimize, or secure clusters.

EMR Serverless automatically provisions and scales the compute and memory resources required by the application, and customers only pay for the resources they use.

My take: About time, this actually solves a common problem in service sprawl.

You can now use AWS Control Tower to deny services and operations in your Control Tower environments for the AWS Region(s) of your choice. Region deny capabilities complement existing AWS Control Tower Region selection and Region deselection features, providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory requirements while improving cost efficiency of expanding into additional Regions.

Today, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect announced a new machine learning (ML) capability called call summarization that helps businesses improve the productivity of contact center agents and managers, so they can focus on providing excellent customer experiences.

Today, AWS Snow Family launches a secure, offline tape data migration capability for AWS Snowball Edge, enabling you to migrate petabytes of data stored on physical tapes to AWS without changing your existing tape-based backup workflows. Using this capability, you can migrate tape data to AWS from environments, where you have network connectivity limitations, bandwidth constraints, and high network connection costs.

Moving tape data to AWS helps you eliminate physical tape infrastructure expenses and gain online access to your tape data.

My take: Sounds super simple, it's probably a nightmare behind the scenes. Thankfully, builders don't have to worry about that and can just enjoyed the added safety & security!

AWS Lake Formation is excited to announce the general availability of three new capabilities that simplify building, securing, and managing data lakes. First, Lake Formation Governed Tables, a new type of table on Amazon S3, that simplifies building resilient data pipelines with multi-table transaction support.

As data is added or changed, Lake Formation automatically manages conflicts and errors to ensure that all users see a consistent view of the data.

This eliminates the need for customers to create custom error handling code or batch their updates.

Second, Governed Tables monitor and automatically optimize how data is stored so query times are consistent and fast.

Third, in addition to table and columns, Lake Formation now supports row and cell-level permissions, making it more easily to restrict access to sensitive information by granting users access to only the portions of the data they are allowed to see.

Governed Tables, row and cell-level permissions are now supported through Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, AWS Glue, and Amazon QuickSight.

AWS IoT Device Management Fleet Indexing now provides integration with two additional data sources, AWS IoT Core named shadows and AWS IoT Device Defender detect violations. With this release, supported data sources for Fleet Indexing increased to 5 from 3 (AWS IoT Core registry, shadows, and connectivity lifecycle events).

These two additional data sources will help IoT customers who store IoT fleet data across different services and systems and regularly access the data for fleet monitoring, health checks, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and troubleshooting.

AWS Backup now allows you to centrally protect VMware workloads, on premises and in the cloud as VMware Cloud^TM on AWS, helping you meet your business and regulatory compliance needs. You can now use a single policy in AWS Backup to centrally protect your hybrid VMware environments alongside the 12 AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) already supported by AWS Backup.

AWS Backup enables you to demonstrate compliance status of your organizational data protection policies by monitoring backup, copy, and restore operations, and allowing you to generate unified auditor-ready reports to help satisfy your data governance and regulatory requirements.

The next generation of Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems, built on AWS Graviton processors, provide three improvements to performance and price. First, the new file systems provide up to 5x higher throughput per terabyte (up to 1 GB/s per terabyte) compared to previous generation file systems. Second, with support for client instances with multiple network interfaces, you can now drive up to 400 Gbps of network bandwidth on Amazon EC2 instances such as P4d and DL1.

Third, the next generation of FSx for Lustre file systems reduce your cost of throughput by up to 60% compared to previous generation file systems.

The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class now automatically includes a new Archive Instant Access tier with cost savings of up to 68% for rarely accessed data that needs millisecond retrieval and high throughput performance. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the first cloud storage that automatically reduces your storage costs on a granular object level by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier based on access frequency, without performance impact, retrieval fees, or operational overhead.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering delivers milliseconds latency and high throughput performance for frequently, infrequently, and now rarely accessed data in the Frequent, Infrequent, and new Archive Instant Access tiers.

Now, you can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for virtually any workload, especially data lakes, data analytics, new applications, and user-generated content.

Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is a new archive storage class that delivers the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, you can save up to 68% on storage costs compared to using the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage class, when your data is accessed once per quarter.

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes.

In addition, the existing S3 Glacier storage class is renamed to be S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and now includes free bulk retrievals and a 10% storage price reduction, making it optimized for backup and disaster recovery use cases.

My take: This service is intriguing. It could be a revolutionary way to deploy customized 5G solutions for organizations. Time will tell...

Today, we are announcing the preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months. With just a few clicks in the AWS console, customers specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices.

AWS then delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices.

AWS Private 5G automates the setup and deployment of the network and scales capacity on demand to support additional devices and increased network traffic.

There are no upfront fees or per-device costs with AWS Private 5G, and customers pay only for the network capacity and throughput they request.

Today, we are announcing the public preview of AWS Backup for Amazon S3. You can now create a single policy in AWS Backup to automate the protection of application data stored in S3 alone or alongside 11 other AWS services for storage, compute, and database.

Using AWS Backup’s seamless integration with AWS Organizations, you can create independent, immutable, and encrypted backups and centrally manage backups and restore of S3 buckets and objects across your AWS accounts.

Today, we are announcing the preview of AWS Trainium-based Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances. AWS Trainium, is the second machine learning chip built by AWS that is optimized for high-performance deep learning training.

Today, we are announcing the next generation storage optimized Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. They feature up to 30TB of storage with the new AWS Nitro SSDs that are custom-designed by AWS to maximize the storage performance of I/O intensive workloads such as SQL/NoSQL databases, search engines, distributed file systems and data analytics which continuously read and write from the SSDs in a sustained manner.

AWS Nitro SSDs enable up to 60% lower latency and up to 75% reduced latency variability in Im4gn and Is4gen instances compared to the third generation of storage optimized instances.

These instances maximize the number of transactions processed per second (TPS) for I/O intensive workloads such as relational databases (e.g.

MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL), and NoSQL databases (KeyDB, ScyllaDB, Cassandra) which have medium-large size data sets and can benefit from high compute performance and high network throughput.

They are also an ideal fit for search engines, and data analytics workloads that require very fast access to data sets on local storage.

My take: Woohoo, Graviton 3!

Starting today, the new Amazon EC2 C7g instances powered by the latest generation custom-designed AWS Graviton3 processors are available in preview. Amazon EC2 C7g instances will provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), gaming, video encoding, and CPU-based machine learning inference.

These instances are the first in the cloud to feature the cutting edge DDR5 memory technology, which provides 50% more bandwidth compared to DDR4 memory.

C7g instances provide 20% higher networking bandwidth compared to previous generation C6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors.

They also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for applications such as high performance computing that require high levels of inter-node communication.

My take: This service has a lot of potential and could help IoT services innovate faster. However, like any new AWS service, it'll take a while to full hit it's stride.

Today, we are announcing AWS IoT TwinMaker, a new service that makes it faster and easier for developers to create and use digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems such as buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state, and behavior of the systems they represent.

Although digital twin use cases are many and diverse, most customers want to get started by easily using their existing data to get a deeper understanding of their operations.

Today, we are announcing AWS IoT FleetWise, a new service that makes it easier and more cost effective for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. Once the data is in the cloud, automakers can use it for tasks like remotely diagnosing issues in individual vehicles, analyzing vehicle fleet health to help prevent potential warranty claims and recalls, and collecting rich sensor data for training machine learning models that improve autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

My take: Redshift going serverless is probably more impactful than any other data store. Redshift is traditionally quite weighty, this will help open up this powerful tool to even more builders.

Amazon Redshift now provides a serverless option (preview) to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters. With Amazon Redshift Serverless, all users including data analysts, developers, and data scientists can now use Amazon Redshift to get insights from data in seconds.

Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and intelligently scales data warehouse capacity to deliver best-in-class performance for all your analytics.

You only pay for the compute used for the duration of the workloads on a per-second basis.

You can benefit from this simplicity without making any changes to your existing analytics and business intelligence applications.

My take: Kinesis was already great, now having a serverless version make it even more flexible as a tool for builders.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store streaming data at any scale. Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand is a new capacity mode for Kinesis Data Streams, capable of serving gigabytes of write and read throughput per minute without capacity planning.

You can create a new on-demand data stream or convert an existing data stream into the on-demand mode with a single-click and never have to provision and manage servers, storage, or throughput.

In the on-demand mode you pay for throughput consumed rather than for provisioned resources, making it easy to balance costs and performance.

Today we announced the General Availability of Amazon WorkSpaces Web. WorkSpaces Web is a new capability from our End User Computing suite - a low cost, fully managed WorkSpace built specifically to facilitate secure, web-based workloads.

WorkSpaces Web makes it easy for customers to safely provide their employees with access to internal websites and SaaS web applications without the administrative burden of appliances or specialized client software.

WorkSpaces Web provides simple policy tools tailored for user interactions, while offloading common tasks like capacity management, scaling, and maintaining browser images.

Amazon S3 introduces a new S3 Object Ownership setting, Bucket owner enforced, that disables access control lists (ACLs), simplifying access management for data stored in S3. When you apply this bucket-level setting, every object in an S3 bucket is owned by the bucket owner, and ACLs are no longer used to grant permissions.

As a result, access to your data is based on policies, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies applied to IAM identities, session policies, Amazon S3 bucket and access point policies, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoint policies.

This setting applies to both new and existing objects in a bucket, and you can control access to this setting using IAM policies.

With the new S3 Object Ownership setting, you can easily review, manage, and modify access to your shared data sets in Amazon S3 using only policies.

The Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now named Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and now includes free bulk retrievals in addition to a 10% price reduction, making it optimized for use cases such as backup and disaster recovery. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is now even more cost-effective, and the free bulk retrievals make it ideal for when you need to retrieve large data sets once or twice per year and do not want to worry about the retrieval cost.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) console now reports security warnings, errors, and suggestions from Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer as you author your S3 policies. The console automatically runs more than 100 policy checks to validate your policies. These checks save you time, guide you to resolve errors, and help you apply security best practices.

By resolving errors and security warnings reported by the S3 console, you can validate that your policies are functional before you attach them to your S3 buckets or access points.

We are excited to announce that Amazon S3 has reduced storage prices by up to 31% in three S3 storage classes. Specifically we are reducing the storage price for S3 Standard-Infrequent Access and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access by up to 31% in 9 AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US West (Northern California), and South America (Sao Paulo).

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling an FSx for Lustre file system to be linked to multiple S3 buckets.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling your S3 bucket’s contents to be updated automatically as data is updated in an FSx for Lustre file system.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling your FSx for Lustre file system’s contents to be updated automatically as data is deleted or moved in S3.

Amazon Connect now provides an agent application for managing contacts and resolving customer issues. In the contact center, agents need a way to easily handle multiple contacts (voice, chat, tasks) while viewing the right customer information and having knowledge articles surfaced in the context of the customer’s issue they are trying to solve.

After launching the agent application in their browser, agents are immediately able to sign-in and manage customer authentication, calls, and chats alongside viewing key customer insights and knowledge articles.

For example, when an agent receives a call or chat, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles shares customer information, such as name, phone number, and email address.

While the agent is talking to the customer, Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes the caller's unique voice characteristics using machine learning to verify the caller's identity in real-time, displaying a confidence score and status.

Then throughout the contact, Amazon Connect Wisdom detects customer issues and proactively provides knowledge article recommendations in real-time.

With the Amazon Connect agent application, you can help give your agents the right information to solve customer issues, deliver a personal experience, and improve customer satisfaction.

Amazon Athena users can now use AWS Lake Formation to configure fine-grained access permissions and read from ACID-compliant tables. Amazon Athena makes it simple for users to analyze data in Amazon S3-based data lakes to help ensure that users only have access to data to which they're authorized and that their queries are reliable in the face of changes to the underlying data can be a complex task.

Today, AWS IoT Greengrass announced a new integration with AWS Systems Manager that helps IT and edge device administrators to securely manage their edge devices, such as industrial equipment and industrial PCs, alongside their IT assets, such as EC2 instances, AWS Outposts, and on-premises servers.

Starting today, you can use Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots to recover from accidental snapshot deletions to meet your business continuity needs. Previously, if you accidentally deleted a snapshot, you would have to roll back to a snapshot from an earlier point in time, increasing your recovery point objective.

With Recycle Bin, you can specify a retention time period and recover a deleted snapshot before the expiration of the retention period.

A recovered snapshot retains its attributes such as tags, permissions, and encryption status, which it had prior to deletion, and can be used immediately for creating volumes.

Snapshots that are not recovered from the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted upon expiration of the retention time.

Today, we are launching Greengrass Software Catalog, a collection of AWS IoT Greengrass software components developed by the Greengrass community. Instead of developing device applications from scratch, you can now choose from a list of pre-built Greengrass components on GitHub to kick-start your IoT edge application.

You can easily install, use, and modify these components to accelerate your IoT project.

As part of this launch, we are also offering Greengrass Development Kit Command Line Interface (CLI) that you can use to configure and build the catalog components in your local development environment.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) introduces AWS GameDay Benefits for AWS Partners in Differentiation Programs: AWS Service Delivery, AWS Service Ready, AWS Competency, and AWS Managed Service Provider Programs. Through AWS GameDay Benefits, partners can choose AWS GameDay League, AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK), or both, as benefits of their AWS Partner Differentiation Program achievements! Elevated levels of technical enablement, direct connections with AWS experts, and quality leads are the top benefit asks of AWS Partners who participate in Differentiation Programs.

AWS GameDay Benefits for Partners delivers all three.

AWS GameDay Benefits provide tangible value-added opportunities for partners in return for their work to attain technical validation through our programs.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are committed to supporting the global energy industry in safely meeting the energy demands the world needs today, while accelerating their transition to a more balanced and sustainable energy future. During re:invent’s Global Partner Summit Keynote on November 29th in Las Vegas, AWS announced the new AWS Energy Competency Program that differentiates AWS Partners for their technical expertise and repeat customer success with energy customers worldwide.

Today, we announced the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency. These AWS Partners have deep domain expertise in offering software products that enable customers to migrate and modernize applications while customers move to the cloud. AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partners can help customers optimize cost and reduce TCO, modernize legacy applications and data, and reduce operational burden.

We are excited to announce the new AWS Graviton Ready Program for AWS Partners with software products that support AWS Graviton-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. As customers adopt AWS Graviton-based instances to realize the best price performance in Amazon EC2, they need the right software solutions to help integrate, deploy, monitor, and secure their Linux-based and containerized workloads. AWS Graviton Ready Partners offer Graviton-enabled software products, including operating systems and platform services, security, monitoring and observability, CI/CD, data and analytics, and cloud devices.

Today, Amazon Personalize is excited to announce recommenders which are optimized to deliver personalized experiences for common use cases in Media & Entertainment and Retail. It is now faster and easier to deliver high performing personalized user experiences in your applications without any ML expertise required. Recommenders reduce the time needed to build and deliver personalized experiences and fully manage the lifecycle of the experience to help ensure you recommend what is most relevant to your users.

Ready to fast-track application refactoring? AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is the new starting point for incremental app refactor that makes it easy to manage the refactor process while operating in production. Using Refactor Spaces, customers focus on the refactor of their applications, and not the creation and management of the underlying infrastructure that makes refactoring possible.

This new Migration Hub feature reduces the business risk of evolving applications into microservices or extending existing applications with new features written in microservices.

Refactor Spaces orchestrates AWS services across multiple accounts to create a refactor environment for incrementally evolving an application that helps customers realize value earlier.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of general purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances. M6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, and 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6a instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.

These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g.

Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), web servers, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM is a real-user monitoring capability that helps you identify and debug issues in the client-side on web applications and enhance end user’s digital experience. CloudWatch RUM enables application developers and DevOps engineers reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) client-side performance issues by enabling a quicker resolution.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM is part of CloudWatch’s Digital Experience Monitoring along with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently.

Metrics Insights is a new feature from Amazon CloudWatch that is in preview. As a fast, flexible, SQL based query engine, Metrics Insights enables developers, operators, systems engineers, and cloud solutions architects to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution.

With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations.

Use Metrics Insights and other CloudWatch features to monitor your AWS and hybrid environments, and to respond to operational problems promptly.

Amazon CloudWatch Evidently is a new capability which helps application developers safely validate new features across the full application stack. Developers can use Evidently to conduct experiments on new application features and identify unintended consequences, thereby reducing risk. When launching new features, developers can expose the features to a subset of users, monitor key metrics such as page load times and conversions, then safely dial up traffic for general use.

Amazon CloudWatch Evidently is part of CloudWatch’s Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities along with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and Amazon CloudWatch RUM.

My take: The ability to add your own lens to this tool will really open up it's use. This feature allows you to define what you want your teams to be asking and investigating about their builds. A lot of power here...

The AWS Well-Architected Tool now offers the ability for customers to create their own custom lenses.

Today, AWS announced that Karpenter, a new open-source Kubernetes cluster autoscaling project, is now Generally Availble with version 0.5 and ready for use in production environments. Karpenter is a flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler that helps improve application availability and resource utilization. Karpenter launches right-sized EC2 instances in response to changing application load in under a minute.

These EC2 instances are based on the specific needs of a cluster’s workloads, such as compute, storage, acceleration, and scheduling requirements.

Today, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) supports clusters using Karpenter on AWS, although Karpenter is designed to work with any conformant Kubernetes cluster.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service to collect, store, organize, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. AWS IoT SiteWise now supports two storage tiers for equipment data: a hot tier optimized for real-time applications, and a cold tier optimized for analytical applications.

The hot tier stores frequently accessed data with lower write-to-read latency.

You can store data in the hot tier for industrial applications that need fast access to the latest measurement values from your equipment, such as applications that visualize real-time metrics with an interactive dashboard, or applications that monitor operations and trigger alarms to identify equipment performance issues.

The cold tier stores less-frequently accessed data that can tolerate higher read latency.

Use data from the cold tier to create applications that need access to historical data, such as business intelligence (BI) dashboards, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training, historical reports, and backups.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) support for Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to help customers downlink more data in less time, saving cost. AWS Ground Station currently supports SDRs for narrowband (less than 54MHz), but in the past did not support SDRs for wideband (greater than 54Mhz). Expanding SDR support to 400Mhz for wideband enables SDR partners to provide new modulation and encoding schemes, helping Earth Imaging businesses, universities, and governments to optimize their operational costs.

AWS customers can now find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes applications from AWS Marketplace on any Kubernetes cluster, in any environment. This extends the existing AWS Marketplace for Containers capabilities. Previously, customers could find and buy containerized third-party applications from AWS Marketplace, and deploy them in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).

Customers can now deploy third-party Kubernetes applications to on-premises environments using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (EKS-Anywhere), or any customer self-managed Kubernetes clusters in on-premises environments or in EC2.

We’re pleased to announce that AWS Control Tower now offers new guardrails to provide more control over the physical location of where customer data is stored and processed, a concept known as data residency. Control Tower data residency guardrails help ensure customer data, the personal data you upload to the AWS services under your AWS account, is not stored or processed outside a specific AWS Region or Regions.

We are excited to announce you can now use Terraform to provision and customize accounts through AWS Control Tower with AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT). Your developers can now enjoy a streamlined process which automates the provisioning of fully functional accounts, providing your users with faster access to the resources they need to be successful.

AWS Compute Optimizer now helps you quickly identify and prioritize top optimization opportunities through two new sets of dashboard-level metrics: savings opportunity and performance improvement opportunity.

AWS Compute Optimizer now offers enhanced infrastructure metrics, a paid feature that when activated, enhances your Amazon EC2 instance and Auto Scaling group recommendations by capturing monthly or quarterly utilization patterns. Compute Optimizer does this by ingesting and analyzing up to six times more Amazon CloudWatch utilization metrics history than the default Compute Optimizer option (up to 3 months of history vs.

14 days).

You can activate the feature at the organization, account, or resource level via the Compute Optimizer console or API for all existing and newly created EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups.

Today, we are announcing the public preview of a new feature that allows you to use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads by running AWS CLI commands from Slack channels. Previously, you could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot.

My take: This functionality is enabled by a complete re-architecting of the Amazon Inspector service. The near real-time results will be a game changer for most builders.

The new Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure is generally available, globally. Amazon Inspector has been completely rearchitected to automate vulnerability management and deliver near real-time findings to minimize the time to discover new vulnerabilities.

Today, we announce AI for data analytics (AIDA), a set of AWS Partners solutions that embed predictive analytics into mainstream analytics workspaces. AIDA partners solutions make it easy for business experts to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive better insights from data and take action.

AIDA features solutions from the following AWS Partners: Amplitude, Anaplan, Causality Link, Domo, Exasol, Interworks, Pegasystems, Provectus, Qlik, Snowflake, Tableau, TIBCO, and Workato.

Today, we are announcing the new Amazon EC2 G5g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and featuring NVIDIA T4G Tensor Core GPUs. G5g are the first Arm-based instances in a major cloud to feature GPU acceleration and provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for Android game streaming.

With G5g instances, Android game developers can run natively on Arm-based GPU instances, encode the rendered graphics, and stream the game over network to a mobile device.

This helps simplify development effort and lowers the cost per stream per hour by up to 30%.

G5g instances are also ideal for machine learning developers who are looking for cost-effective inference, have ML models that are sensitive to CPU performance, and leverage NVIDIA’s AI libraries.

My take: Is AWS trying to bring about the robot apocalypse?

AWS IoT RoboRunner is a new robotics service that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy applications that help fleets of robots work together seamlessly. With AWS IoT RoboRunner, it is easier to build applications that make it possible to interoperate and orchestrate robots from a single view by reducing the complex development work required to connect robots to each other and the rest of your industrial software systems.

We are announcing the launch of AWS Data Exchange for APIs, a new feature that enables customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party API products from providers on AWS Data Exchange. With AWS Data Exchange for APIs, customers can leverage AWS-native authentication and governance, explore consistent API documentation, and utilize supported AWS SDKs to make API calls.

Data providers can now reach millions of AWS customers that consume API-based data by adding their APIs to the AWS Data Exchange catalog, and more easily manage subscriber authentication, entitlement, and billing.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at your datacenter and on-premises locations in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Morocco, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs enables you to easily run hybrid quantum-classical algorithms such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), that combine classical compute resources with quantum computing devices to optimize the performance of today’s quantum systems. With this new feature, you only have to provide your algorithm script and choose a target device — a quantum processing unit (QPU) or quantum circuit simulator.

Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs is designed to spin up the requested classical resources when your target quantum device is available, run your algorithm, and release the instances after completion so you only pay for what you use.

Braket Hybrid Jobs can provide live insights into algorithm metrics to monitor your algorithm as it progresses, enabling you to make adjustments more quickly.

Most importantly, your jobs have priority access to the selected QPU for the duration of your experiment, putting you in control, and helping to provide faster and more predictable execution.

We are excited to announce the public preview of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds write, delete, update, and time travel operations to Athena's SQL data manipulation language (DML). Athena ACID transactions enables multiple concurrent users to make reliable, row-level modifications to their Amazon S3 data from Athena's console, API, and ODBC and JDBC drivers.

Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are compatible with other services and engines such as Amazon EMR and Apache Spark that support the Iceberg table format.

Amazon Timestream has added three new capabilities, namely, scheduled queries, multi-measure records, and magnetic storage writes, to make time series data processing faster, cost-effective, and therefore more accessible to many more customers. These features enable customers to write, store, and access their time series data more economically and efficiently, so they can continue to derive insights from their data and drive better data-driven business decisions.

You can now use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge to build, scale, and deploy event-driven applications based on changes to the data you store in S3. This makes it easier to act on new data in S3, build multiple applications that react to object changes simultaneously, and replay past events, all without creating additional copies of objects or developing new software.

With increased flexibility to process events and send them to multiple targets, you can now create new serverless applications with advanced analytics and machine learning at scale more confidently without writing single-use custom code.

You can now build event-driven applications using Amazon S3 Event Notifications that trigger when objects are transitioned or expired (deleted) with S3 Lifecycle, or moved within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class to its Archive Access or Deep Archive Access tiers. You can also trigger S3 Event Notifications for any changes to object tags or access control lists (ACLs). You can generate these new notifications for your entire bucket, or for a subset of your objects using prefixes or suffixes, and choose to deliver them to Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or an AWS Lambda function.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports pull through cache repositories, a new feature designed to automatically sync images from publicly accessible registries. With today’s release, customers now benefit from the download performance, security, and availability of Amazon ECR for the public images.

Starting today, you can use Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots, to save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access. EBS Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot and making them cost effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently.

You might also have snapshots that you access every few months or years and do not need fast access to data, such as snapshots created at the end of a project or snapshots that need to be retained long-term for regulatory reasons.

For such use cases, you can now use EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a storage cost of $0.0125/GB-month*.

Snapshots in the archive tier have a minimum retention period of 90 days.

Retrievals from the archive tier will incur a charge of $0.03/GB* of data transferred.

^{*us-east-1 pricing}

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations to detect security vulnerabilities, improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code.

Today, we are excited to announce the First Annual AWS BugBust re:Invent challenge. Java and Python developers of all skill levels, can compete to fix as many software bugs as possible to earn points and climb the global leaderboard. There will be an array of prizes, from hoodies and fly swatters to Amazon Echo Dots, available to participants who meet certain milestones in the challenge.

There’s also the coveted title of “Ultimate AWS BugBuster” accompanied by a cash prize of $1500 for whomever earns the most points by squashing bugs during the event.

Amazon Personalize now offers intelligent user segmentation which allows you to run more effective prospecting campaigns through your marketing channels. Traditionally, user segmentation has relied on demographic information and manually curated business rules to make assumptions about users’ intentions and assign them to pre-defined audience segments.

Amazon Personalize uses machine learning techniques to learn about your items, users, and how your users interact with your items.

Amazon Personalize segments users based on their preferences for different products, categories, brands, and more.

This can help you drive higher engagement with marketing campaigns, increase retention through targeted messaging, and improve the return on investment for your marketing spend.

My take: ABOUT TIME...and sadly, still not enough of a change.

Effective December 1, 2021, AWS is making two pricing changes for data transfer out to the internet. Each month, the first terabyte of data transfer out of Amazon Cloudfront, the first 10 million HTTP/S requests, and the first 2 million CloudFront Functions invocations will be free.

Free data transfer out of CloudFront is no longer limited to the first 12 months.

In addition, the first 100 gigabytes per month of data transfer out from all AWS Regions (except China and GovCoud) will be free.

Free data transfer out from AWS Regions is also no longer limited to the first 12 months.

These changes will replace the existing data transfer and CloudFront AWS Free Tier offerings, and AWS customers will see these changes automatically reflected in their AWS bills going forward.

All AWS customers will benefit from these pricing changes, and millions of customers will see no data transfer charges as a result.

AWS Lambda now provides content filtering options for SQS, DynamoDB and Kinesis as event sources. With event pattern content filtering, customers can write complex rules so that their Lambda function is only triggered by SQS, DynamoDB, or Kinesis under filtering criteria you specify.

This helps reduce traffic to customers’ Lambda functions, simplifies code, and reduces overall cost.

AWS App2Container(A2C) now supports Jenkins for setting up a CI/CD pipeline to automate building and deploying application in containers on AWS. With this new integration, customers can configure their existing Jenkins pipeline in the current Jenkins environment for managing automated build and deployment of containerized applications.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen-sharing, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. The Amazon Chime SDK now offers machine learning (ML) based echo reduction to help improve audio experiences. Acoustic echoes disrupt meetings or conference calls when the sound played by the loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone and it circulates back into the call.

The new ML-based echo reduction capability is designed to reduce acoustic echoes and preserve voice quality during double-talk conditions, when two or more people speak at the same time.

EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. Today, we are excited to announce two new capabilities in EMR Studio. First, you can now more easily execute python scripts directly from the EMR Studio Notebooks. Second, you can execute other dependent Jupyter notebooks directly from a notebook in EMR Studio.

Earlier, both of these capabilities required manually copying these files from EMR Studio to the EMR Cluster.

AWS Managed Templates for IoT Jobs, a new feature of AWS IoT Device Management now gives you the ability to deploy common remote operations to fleets of IoT devices directly from the AWS IoT Console, with no incremental code, and in a standardized manner. Instead of having to manually define your remote operations in a JSON Job Document, you can select from a range of pre-built remote actions, provide relevant inputs, and quickly deploy them to your IoT fleets.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) now supports new instance sizes within the Amazon EC2 compute-optimized, GPU, and dense SSD storage instance types that support EFA. Until now, EFA could be enabled for select bare-metal instances or for the largest instance size that support EFA. Starting today, you can associate EFA with additional sizes within Amazon C5, G4, and I3 instance types.

By enabling EFA for smaller instance sizes that match the performance requirements of your application, you can lower costs.

Elastic Beanstalk now supports AWS Graviton-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types. AWS Graviton is an arm64-based processor built by Amazon that provides up to 40% better price-performance over a comparable x86-based processor. AWS Graviton on Elastic Beanstalk enables customers to benefit from the superior price-performance of arm64-based processors along with the ease-of-use of Elastic Beanstalk.

Now on EC2 Image Builder, customers can share their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with AWS Organizations and Organizational Units (OUs) in the image distribution phase of their build process. As their organization structure changes, customers no longer have to manually update AMI permissions for individual AWS accounts in their organization.

Customers can create OUs within AWS Organizations and manage AMI permissions for AWS accounts within those OUs.

AWS today announced AWS WAF Captcha to help block unwanted bot traffic by requiring users to successfully complete challenges before their web request are allowed to reach AWS WAF protected resources. Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is commonly used to distinguish between robotic and human visitors to prevent activity like web scraping, credential stuffing, and spam.

You can configure AWS WAF rules to require WAF Captcha challenges to be solved for specific resources that are frequently targeted by bots such as login, search, and form submissions.

You can also require WAF Captcha challenges for suspicious requests based on the rate, attributes, or labels generated from AWS Managed Rules, such as AWS WAF Bot Control or the Amazon IP Reputation list.

WAF Captcha challenges are simple for humans while remaining effective against bots.

WAF Captcha includes an audio version and is designed to meet WCAG accessibility requirements.

My take: A smart expansion of SOC coverage.

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now in scope for AWS SOC 1 , SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports. You can now use AWS SSO in applications requiring audited evidence of the controls in our System and Organization Controls (SOC) reporting. For example, if you use AWS to manage access to accounts and applications, you can use the SOC reports to help meet your compliance requirements for those use cases. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives.

AWS Proton now supports the definition of infrastructure in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and the provisioning of infrastructure using Terraform Open Source through a git-based workflow. Platform teams define AWS Proton templates using Terraform modules, and AWS Proton leverages the customer-managed Terraform automation to provision or update the infrastructure.

Customers can use Terraform as their infrastructure definition and provisioning tool, and AWS Proton will ensure that modules are used consistently and kept up to date.

AWS Proton now allows customers to sync their Proton templates from a git repository. Platform teams can create AWS Proton templates based on AWS CloudFormation and Terraform templates uploaded to a git repository. AWS Proton is designed to automatically sync and create a new version when changes are made and committed to the git repository.

With this new feature, platform and development teams can eliminate manual steps and and reduce the chance for human error.

Starting today, your IPv6 AWS resources in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can use NAT64 (on AWS NAT Gateway) and DNS64 (on Amazon Route 53 Resolver) to communicate with IPv4 services. As you transition your workloads to IPv6 networks, they would continue to need access to IPv4 network and services. With NAT64 and DNS64, your IPv6 resources can communicate with IPv4 services within the same VPC or connected VPCs, your on-premises networks, or the Internet.

Today, we are announcing three new enhancements for AWS IoT SiteWise that make it easier for customers to collect data from industrial equipment at scale. The new enhancements reduce the number of steps required to ingest equipment data to the cloud, and add flexibility for customers modeling their physical operations using AWS IoT SiteWise asset models and assets.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Google Cloud SQL for MySQL as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from Google Cloud SQL for MySQL to any AWS DMS supported targets.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for Azure SQL Managed Instance as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now migrate data live from Azure SQL Managed Instance to any valid supported target with minimal downtime.

AWS App Runner now supports GitHub Actions to build and deploy applications. GitHub Actions provide a way to implement complex orchestration and CI/CD functionality directly in GitHub by initiating a workflow on any GitHub event.

If you have your source code in a GitHub repository, you can use GitHub Actions to enable App Runner to build a Docker image based on the language runtime and to deploy your application based on the generated image.

For supported runtimes on App Runner, refer to the documentation.

If you already have a container image of your application in a GitHub repository, you can use GitHub Actions to directly use the image to deploy your application on App Runner.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Data sharing now adds several performance enhancements including result caching, and concurrency scaling allowing you to support broader set of analytics applications and meet critical performance SLAs when querying shared data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Enterprise On-Ramp, a new Support tier designed for production and business-critical needs to help customers that are starting their cloud journey and need expert guidance to grow and optimize on cloud. With Enterprise On-Ramp, customers can solve cloud-related challenges with 24/7 access to AWS experts whether by phone or live chat, share their screen, and get support to improve issue resolution and eliminate the frustration of back-and-forth emails.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Amazon Translate now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so you can securely initiate API calls to Amazon Translate from within your VPC and without using public IPs.

AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network, significantly simplifying your internal network architecture.

You no longer need to use an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices or firewall proxies to connect to Amazon Translate.

Improved cold query performance is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon Redshift support for GEOGRAPHY data type is now available for spatial analytics. GEOGRAPHY data type is used in queries requiring higher precision results for spatial data with geographic features that can be represented with a spheroid model of the Earth and referenced using latitude and longitude as spatial coordinate system.

Amazon QuickSight now supports dataset versioning, which allows dataset owners to understand historical changes within a dataset, preview a specific version, or revert back to a previous version if needed. Dataset versions can be viewed and tracked via the UI, allowing dataset owners to view versions and switch to a specific version via UI. Dataset Versions gives dataset authors the confidence to experiment with their content, knowing that their older versions are available and that they easily can revert back to it when required.

Amazon QuickSight now supports connectivity to Exasol, a high-performance, in-memory, MPP database designed for analytics. QuickSight’s new data connector allows business users to directly connect, analyze and report on the data in Exasol using a live connection, or import data from Exasol into QuickSight’s SPICE in-memory engine for scaling access to 1000s of users.

Amazon Managed Grafana announces new data source plugins for Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift, enabling customers to query, visualize, and alert on their Athena and Redshift data from Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces. Amazon Managed Grafana now also supports CloudFlare, Zabbix, and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring data sources as well as the Geomap panel visualization and open source Grafana version 8.2.

With Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling’s new predictive scaling policy, you can now use custom metrics to predict the EC2 instance capacity needed by an Auto Scaling group. Predictive scaling proactively increases the capacity of an Auto Scaling group to meet predicted demand. For workloads that experience recurring, steep demand changes, predictive scaling can help improve your application’s responsiveness without having to overprovision capacity, resulting in lower EC2 costs.

Custom metrics are useful when the predefined metrics (CPU Utilization, Network I/O, and ALB Request Count) are not sufficient to capture the load on your application.

Previously, you could only use custom metrics with step scaling and target tracking, but you can now use them with predictive scaling as well.

Amazon DynamoDB now helps you meet regulatory compliance and business continuity requirements through enhanced backup features, including copying on-demand backups cross-account and cross-Region, cost allocation tagging for backups, and transitioning backups to cold storage. In addition, backups managed through AWS Backup are now stored in the AWS Backup vault, which allows you to encrypt and secure your backups by using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key that is independent from your DynamoDB table encryption key.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now offers Identity Resolution that is designed to automatically detect similar customer profiles by comparing name, email address, phone number, date of birth, and address. For example, two or more profiles with spelling mistakes, such as "John Doe" and "Jhn Doe," can be detected as belonging to the same customer "John Doe" using clustering and matching machine learning (ML) algorithms.

Once a group of profiles are detected to be similar, admins can configure how profiles should be merged together by setting up consolidation rules through AWS management console or APIs.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks to interactively explore datasets and build ML models.

The notebooks come pre-configured with deep learning environments for AWS-optimized TensorFlow and PyTorch to quickly get started with building models.

Starting today you can access two new environments for TensorFlow 2.6 and PyTorch 1.8.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and for PostgreSQL now supports a new Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database instances. This deployment option optimizes write transactions and is ideal when your workloads require additional read capacity, lower write transaction latency, more resilience from network jitter (which impacts the consistency of write transaction latency), and high availability and durability.

AWS IoT Core Device Advisor now supports the capability to run multiple test suites at the same time. Device Developers can use this capability to complete testing faster by testing multiple devices simultaneously. Developers can also test their devices more comprehensively by using new MQTT test cases such as a test to validate the device behavior when the device is disconnected from the server side.

Device Advisor console also provides a new and simpler way for developers to quickly review and create an IAM role in few clicks, enabling developers to grant permissions to Device Advisor for connecting with AWS IoT Core on behalf of their test devices.

Amazon FinSpace now provides data management APIs that allow customers to work with data in their Amazon FinSpace environment using the AWS SDK and CLI. With these new APIs, customers can add steps to their automated workflows that manage their data resources in Amazon FinSpace. Using the new APIs, customers can create Amazon FinSpace datasets, load data using change sets, and create point-in-time views for analysis.

Fleet Manager, a feature in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps IT Admins streamline and scale their remote server management processes, now enables a console-based management experience for Windows instances. This new feature provides customers a full graphical interface to setup secure connections to and manage Windows instances. You no longer need to install additional software, set up additional servers, or open direct inbound access to ports on the instance.

You can now enable one-click single sign-on to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances running Microsoft Windows (Amazon EC2 Windows Instances) with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO). You can connect your instances with users from AWS SSO or any AWS SSO supported identity provider, such as Okta, Ping, and OneLogin.

This makes it easy for you to access your instance desktops from anywhere without having to enter your credentials multiple times or having to configure remote access client software.

Now, you can use your existing corporate usernames, passwords, and multi-factor authentication devices to securely access your Amazon EC2 Windows Instances, eliminating the use of shared administrator credentials.

In addition, you have visibility into individual user actions which can be viewed in the Amazon EC2 Windows event log, making it easier to meet audit and compliance requirements.

AWS Lambda now supports partial batch response for SQS as an event source. With this feature, when messages on an SQS queue fail to process, Lambda marks a batch of records in a message queue as partially successful and allows reprocessing of only the failed records.

By processing information at a record-level instead of batch-level, AWS Lambda has removed the need of repetitive data transfer, increasing throughput and making Amazon SQS message queue processing more efficient.

AWS Amplify is launching a developer preview of its expanded Notifications category for JavaScript. Powered by Amazon Pinpoint, this expansion allows developers to instrument in-app messaging to drive engagement and monetization.

AWS Amplify announces GraphQL Transformer version 2, enabling developers to develop more feature-rich, flexible, and extensible GraphQL-based app backends even with minimal cloud expertise. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. With the GraphQL Transformer, developers can model their backend data model using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, and Amplify CLI automatically transforms the the schema into a fully functioning GraphQL API with its underlying cloud infrastructure.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in two additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (London).

Application Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers now support end-to-end connectivity with Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Clients can now connect to application and network load balancers and access backend applications over IPv6.

My take: This should be rated lower but it also should've shipped a long time ago. Good upgrade, makes things easier for sure.

Today, we launched usability improvements for the navigation bar in the AWS Management Console. The improvements include a customizable favorites bar, updates to the services menu, and visual updates for consistency and accessibility. The new favorites bar appears when you have selected at least one service as a favorite in the services menu. It also supports an unlimited number of favorites that can be organized with drag and drop.

The updated services menu groups services by category and provides an A to Z listing of all services.

You can now use data tiering for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis as a lower cost way to scale your clusters to up to hundreds of terabytes of capacity. Data tiering provides a new price-performance option for Redis workloads by utilizing lower-cost solid state drives (SSDs) in each cluster node in addition to storing data in memory.

It is ideal for workloads that access up to 20% of their overall dataset regularly, and for applications that can tolerate additional latency when accessing data on SSD.

AWS Fargate for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors, is now generally available. AWS Graviton2 processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and Graviton2-powered Fargate delivers up to 40% improved price/performance at 20% lower cost over comparable Intel x86-based Fargate for a variety of workloads such as application servers, web services, high-performance computing, and media processing.

This adds even more choice to help customers optimize performance and cost for running containerized workloads on Fargate’s serverless compute.

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Ability to share data across clusters that are in the same AWS account and across accounts is already available.

Now sharing data across Redshift clusters in different AWS regions is available for preview.

Cross-region data sharing preview is supported on all Redshift RA3 node types.

Amazon Voice Focus, an industry-leading speech enhancement technology currently used for noise reduction in Amazon Chime SDK meetings, is now available packaged as an Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Machine Image (AMI). The Amazon Voice Focus AMI helps developers, media producers, and content creators reduce noise in real-time speech capture or archived speech recordings.

It is a cloud component that application builders can insert into their streaming media and content production pipelines to help reduce unwanted sounds and deliver the speech that users want to be heard.

Starting today, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows you to create IPv6-only subnets in your dual-stack VPCs and launch EC2 instances built on Nitro System in these subnets. The launch of IPv6-only subnets allows customers to scale their deployments on AWS by not requiring any IPv4 addressing in the subnet. With a /64 IPv6 CIDR assignment to the subnet, it accommodates approximately 18 quintillion IP addresses for applications.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today, we are excited to announce automatic language identification for streaming transcriptions. Until now, you were required to manually identify the dominant language in order to use Transcribe streaming APIs.

You can now simply start streaming and Transcribe will detect the dominant language from the speech signal and generate transcriptions in the identified language.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now provides managed server-side encryption using SQS owned encryption keys (SSE-SQS) to protect sensitive data. SSE-SQS helps you build security-sensitive applications to support your encryption compliance and regulatory requirements.

You can now set Amazon S3 Lifecycle rules to limit the number of versions of an object to retain to achieve greater storage savings, and to choose objects to move to other storage classes based on size to optimize your lifecycle transitions. S3 Lifecycle helps you optimize your storage costs by transitioning or expiring your objects as they get older or are replaced by newer versions. You can use these Lifecycle configurations for your whole bucket, or for a subset of your objects by filtering by prefixes, object tags, or object size.

Amazon Redshift RA3 Reserved Instance (RI) migration feature is now available in the Amazon Redshift Console, CLI and API to help migrate your DS2 RI clusters to RA3 RI clusters.

You can now check whether a configuration change will require a blue/green deployment from the Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) console or using the Amazon OpenSearch Service APIs. With this new option, you can plan and make configuration changes that require a blue/green deployment when your cluster is not at its peak traffic.

Amazon Lex now supports Amazon Polly Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices for your bots, allowing your bots to respond to your users with richer, more expressive, and natural-sounding voices than standard Polly Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices. Polly NTTS voices deliver advanced improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. Amazon Lex is natively integrated with Amazon Polly for voice interactions.

Until today, Lex developers could only configure bots to use Polly’s standard Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices.

Starting today, you can configure bots built through Lex V2 APIs and console to use Polly NTTS voices for any language that supports an NTTS option to improve user experience and boost customer engagement.

Amazon ElastiCache for supports Redis 6.2. ElastiCache for Redis 6.2 includes performance improvements for TLS-enabled clusters using x86 node types with 8 vCPUs or more or Graviton2 node types with 4 vCPUs or more.

These enhancements are designed to improve throughput and reduce client connection establishment time by offloading encryption to other CPUs.

With Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 6.2, you can also manage access to Pub/Sub channels with Access Control List (ACL) rules.

For the full list of improvements in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 6.2 (enhanced), click here.

My take: I like to see the expansion of OpenTelemetry. It's a great project and much easier to ingest data when it's all in the same format.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now enables customers to quickly get started to monitor and debug their applications with traces and custom metrics using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). This feature allows Amazon ECS customers to use the console to enable metrics and traces collection, and then export to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and AWS X-Ray with just few clicks. This experience simplifies a multi-step manual process of configuring ADOT in task definitions, and enables customers to solve application availability and performance issues.

Amazon Connect now supports modules to simplify the creation and management of repeatedly used contact flow logic. Contact flow modules are a set of user defined blocks centrally managed in an Amazon Connect instance that can be referenced in multiple contact flows.

For example, a customer may want to perform the same steps of identifying intent, authenticating the account number, and updating contact attributes across multiple different contact flows.

With contact flow modules, the customer only has to build the contact flow logic once then reference the module in the applicable contact flows.

Any time updates to a module are published, the changes will reflect directly in all the contact flows that reference the updated module.

Modules feature access, editing, and publishing is enabled through the Amazon Connect console.

Amazon Connect now provides two new APIs to archive/unarchive and delete contact flows. The new APIs provide a programmatic and flexible way to manage your library of contact flows at scale. For example, contact flows used only during certain times of the year can be archived when not in use and then unarchived when needed.

You can now also delete a contact flow so it is no longer available for use.

To learn more about the new APIs, see the API documentation.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now provides contact history and customer information together in unified customer profiles at no charge, helping contact center managers personalize the contact center experience. Previously, contact center managers needed to work with software development teams to build profiles of end customers and their contact history. Now, they can use Customer Profiles at no charge to automatically store Amazon Connect contact history in a customer-centric view along with customer information such as name, phone number, account number, and address.

Agents can access Customer Profiles to provide more personalized customer service through either the out-of-the-box Amazon Connect agent application or through their company’s custom agent applications, enabling them to provide more personalized customer service.

Contact center managers can also use the Customer Profiles contact block when designing contact flows to personalize and automate the contact center experience.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. With live transcriptions, developers can include subtitles in meetings and create transcripts using Amazon Transcribe or Amazon Transcribe Medical.

Using the service-side integration between Amazon Chime SDK and your Amazon Transcribe account, application builders can now help identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) from transcripts.

Builders can also utilize custom language models to help improve the transcription accuracy for their use cases.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now offers an option to securely connect to Amazon MSK clusters over the internet. By enabling public access, authorized clients external to a private Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can stream encrypted data in and out of specific Amazon MSK clusters.

You can enable public access for MSK clusters at no additional cost, but standard AWS data transfer costs for cluster ingress and egress apply.

Today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces the capability to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation.

You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set.

This will let you create resources, applications or environments across your AWS Organization and AWS Regions efficiently.

You can subsequently avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i and C6i bare metal instances are available. M6i and C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 and C5 instances respectively, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

M6i instances are well suited for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

C6i instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 R6i instances. Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.

R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as SQL and noSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases like SAP HANA, and real time big data analytics like Hadoop and Spark clusters.

AWS Lambda has launched a new metric, OffsetLag, to monitor the performance of Amazon MSK, Self-managed Kafka, AmazonMQ, and RabbitMQ message queueing services. Up until now, Lambda users did not have visibility into how polling runs and had to increasingly rely on the Lambda support team to resolve delays in processing, leading to inefficiencies in data streaming.

The OffsetLag metric is a measure of the total number of messages waiting in the message queue to be sent to the target Lambda function.

This metric will provide transparency into the amount of data congestion in a message queue.

Thus, developers can monitor the performance of events, set alarms and thresholds to check for undesirable congestion and quickly diagnose and solve inefficiencies in their data stream.

AWS Lambda has launched a new metric, OffsetLag, to monitor the performance of Amazon MSK and Self-managed Kafka. Up until now, Lambda users did not have visibility into how polling runs and had to increasingly rely on the Lambda support team to resolve delays in processing, leading to inefficiencies in data streaming.

The OffsetLag metric is a measure of the total number of messages waiting in the message queue to be sent to the target Lambda function.

This metric will provide transparency into the amount of data congestion in a message queue.

Thus, developers can monitor the performance of events, set alarms and thresholds to check for undesirable congestion and quickly diagnose and solve inefficiencies in their data stream.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Kafka multi-topic with a single task. Using AWS DMS, you can now replicate multiple schemas from a single database to different Kafka topics using the same task. This eliminates the need to create multiple separate tasks in situations where many tables from the same source database need to be migrated to different Kafka topics.

Today, we are announcing the public preview of Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022), Amazon's new general purpose Linux for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run your cloud applications. Starting with AL2022, a new Amazon Linux major version will be available every two years and each version will be supported for five years. Customers will also be able to take advantage of quarterly updates via minor releases and use the latest software for their applications.

Finally, AL2022 provides the ability to lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository giving customers control over how and when they absorb updates.

Amazon Redshift now scales write queries with Concurrency Scaling. Concurrency Scaling supports virtually unlimited concurrent users and concurrent queries, with consistently fast query performance. Now your write queries such as COPY, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE can run on transient Concurrency Scaling clusters when there is queueing.

Starting today, Amazon Neptune announced the general availability of general-purpose T4g and memory-optimized R6g database instances powered by the AWS Graviton2 processor. AWS Graviton2-based instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances for a variety of workloads. Customers running graph workloads using Apache TinkerPop Gremlin, openCypher, or W3C SPARQL 1.1 query languages can expect to see significant improvements in query latency at a lower cost in comparison to x86-based instances of equivalent instance size.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a cloud storage analytics feature for organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity, now includes support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can now create a unified view of your operational health to monitor any of your S3 Storage Lens metrics alongside other application metrics using CloudWatch dashboards.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL - Compatible Edition major version 12. PostgreSQL 12 includes better management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, and many other additional features.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports creating backups locally on AWS Outposts with Amazon S3 support. You can create backups of your Amazon RDS databases running on AWS Outposts to the same Outpost or to the AWS Region of your Outpost, allowing you to maintain your data residency requirements while giving you flexibility for maintaining your data recovery solutions.

CloudFormation support will be coming soon.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4 instances. T4g is the next generation burstable general-purpose DB instance type that provides a baseline level of CPU performance, with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required.

This instance type offers a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads.

Amazon EventBridge expands support to all Regions, except for AWS GovCloud (US) and China, as a destination for its cross-Region event bus as a target functionality launched in April’2021 (initially launched with 3 destination Regions - US East (N. Virgina), US West (Oregon) and Europe(Ireland)). This will allow customers to consolidate events in one central Region from any Region. This makes it easier for customers to centralize their events for auditing and monitoring purposes or replicate events from source to destinations Regions to help synchronize data across Regions.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports the AWS Graviton2-based T4g instance family in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Frankfurt), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Canada (Central), and mainland China (Ningxia, Beijing).

Customers choose ElastiCache for workloads that require accelerated performance with microsecond latency and high throughput.

T4g instances are ideal for running applications with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in usage.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today open-sourced the build scripts that Amazon ECS uses to build the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI). These build scripts are now available on GitHub as an open-source project under the Apache license 2.0.

Customers can use these build scripts to build custom AMIs with security, monitoring, and compliance controls based on their organization’s requirements while using the same components as the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Amazon ECS Exec for workloads running on Windows operating systems. Amazon ECS Exec, launched in March 2021, makes it easier for customers to troubleshoot errors, collect diagnostic information, interact with processes in containers during development, or get “break-glass” access to containers to debug critical issues encountered in production.

Starting today, customers can run macOS Monterey (12.0.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Apple macOS Monterey is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions.

macOS Monterey supports running Xcode versions 13.0 and later, which include the latest SDKs for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Starting today, customers can dynamically attach and detach Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes on their running Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Prior to today, customers attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances needed to reboot their instances for revised EBS configuration to be reflected within their macOS guest environments.

Now with this capability, customers do not need to trigger an instance reboot and wait for it to complete when attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances.

Amazon Connect now supports custom contact attributes as search filters on the contact search page. You can now add up to 15 custom contact attributes to the search filter and use them to build your search queries. For example, if you have created “AgentLocation” as a custom contact attribute, you can now use it as a search criterium, and search for contacts handled by Agents based in “Seattle”, by specifying “Seattle” as the target value.

To learn more, see the Contact Search documentation.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processor. With CloudWatch Lambda Insights you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions.

My take: Super handy if you're using Athena...and you are, right?

You can now manage AWS Step Functions workflows from the Amazon Athena console, making it easier to build scalable data processing pipelines, execute queries based on custom business logic, automate administrative and alerting tasks, and more.

My take: Finally, a speed increase for CloudFormation!

Today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces the capability to execute multiple operations for simultaneous execution. StackSets extends the functionality of CloudFormation stacks by letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and Regions with a single operation.

You can now submit more than one operation per stack set to be executed concurrently.

This capability will enable you to reduce overall processing times with StackSets.

Additionally, you can avoid the overhead of building logic to batch and queue operations submitted to StackSets.

Today we announce the general availability of Syne Tune, an open-source Python library for large-scale distributed hyperparameter and neural architecture optimization. It provides implementations of several state-of-the-art global optimizers, such as Bayesian optimization, Hyperband and population-based training. Additionally, it supports constrained and multi-objective optimization, and it allows users to bring their own global optimization algorithm.

AWS Lambda now supports mutual TLS authentication for Amazon MSK and self managed Kafka as an event source. Customers now have the option to provide a client certificate to establish a trust relationship between AWS Lambda and Amazon MSK or self managed Kafka brokers that are configured as event sources.

Lambda will support self-signed server certificates or server certificates signed by a private CA for self-managed Kafka event sources by letting customers provide a root CA certificate which allows our pollers to trust their Kafka brokers.

Support for self-signed server certificates is not required for MSK event sources because all MSK brokers use public certificates signed by Amazon Trust Services CAs, which Lambda trusts by default.

You can now use Multi-Account Registration certificates on AWS IoT Core Credential Provider endpoints. Multi-Account Registration is a feature of AWS IoT Core that makes it easy for customers to register and use the same device certificate across multiple AWS accounts and endpoints.

For example, a customer could register the same certificate with testing and production accounts.

Customers can subsequently move devices easily between these AWS accounts by specifying the account endpoint when devices connect to AWS IoT Core.

Until now, Multi-Account Registration certificates were supported only on IoT data plane and IoT Jobs endpoints.

Starting today, customers can also use Multi-Account Registration certificates on IoT Credential Provider endpoints.

See AWS IoT device data and service endpoints for more details.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for the parallel load for partitioned data to Amazon S3, improving the load times for migrating partitioned data from supported database engine source data to Amazon S3. This feature creates Amazon S3 sub-folders for each partition of the table in the database source, allowing AWS DMS to run parallel processes to populate each sub-folder.

AWS App Mesh now supports ARM64-based images with Envoy. With App Mesh-optimized ARM64 Envoy images, customers now get enhanced deployment flexibility and platform support to suit their requirements. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easier for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure.

AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

With today’s release, AWS Amplify offers a new Authenticator UI component for web apps built with React, Angular, and Vue, giving developers the easiest way to add login experiences to their app with a single line of code. The new Authenticator UI component not only gives developers the quickest way to add user login and registration workflows to their apps, but also also gives developers complete control over modifying the layout and behavior to match any designs.

Today, AWS Amplify announces the ability to export Amplify CLI-generated backends as a Cloud Development Kit (CDK) stack and incorporate into existing CDK deployment pipelines. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. This new capability allows frontend developers to build their app backend quickly and, each time it is ready to ship, hand it over to DevOps teams to deploy to production.

Amazon SageMaker Model Registry, the purpose-built service which enables customers to catalogue their ML models, now supports cross account registration of model versions.

Amazon Pinpoint now includes an SMS simulator feature that you can use to test how your application handles different SMS sending scenarios. With this feature, you can simulate deliveries by sending SMS messages to a destination phone number that Amazon Pinpoint provides. This enables you to see see examples of message delivery receipts per destination country without owning a destination phone number for that country.

You can use the SMS simulator to test that your application’s logic is functioning as intended through simulated successful or failed sending.

You can also use this feature to test your origination identity throughput without impacting your quota.

Amazon Linux 2 is now available with an updated Linux kernel (5.10) as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Kernel 5.10 brings a number of features and performance improvements, including optimizations for Intel Ice Lake processors and AWS Graviton2 processors powering the latest generation Amazon EC2 instances.

Live patching for Kernel 5.10 is supported in Amazon Linux 2 for both x86 and ARM architectures.

We’re excited to announce two new forecasting APIs for Amazon Forecast that generate up to 40% more accurate forecasts and help you understand which factors, such as price, holidays, weather, or item category, are most influencing your forecasts. Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce now helps reduce the time agents spend searching for answers with integration of Amazon Connect Wisdom. Previously, agents needed to spend valuable time manually searching across data sources for information to solve customer issues and were unable to help customers quickly.

With Wisdom, agents can search for terms such as “what is the pet policy in hotel rooms” across connected repositories, including Salesforce knowledge bases from right inside the CTI Adapter.

When used with Contact Lens real-time, Wisdom is designed to detect customer issues during calls and proactively provide knowledge article recommendations in real-time.

The Wisdom widget can be configured within the agent’s Contact Control Panel (CCP) or alongside the agent’s Salesforce Lightning screen layout for cases, contacts and accounts.

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce now simplifies the contact center authentication procedure with the integration of Amazon Connect Voice ID to make voice interactions faster and more secure. Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes caller's unique voice characteristics using machine learning to help verify identity in real-time and display a confidence score and status within the Contact Control Panel (CCP) in the CTI Adapter.

Using CTI Actions and Flows, you can automate fraud case creation or route the call to fraud agents based on the outcome of the Voice ID interaction.

Amazon CloudWatch now supports anomaly detection based on metric math expressions. Amazon CloudWatch anomaly detection allows you to apply machine-learning algorithms to continuously analyze system and application metrics, determine a normal baseline, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention.

CloudWatch metric math allows you to aggregate and transform metrics to create custom visualizations of your health and performance metrics.

Metric math supports basic arithmetic functions such as +,-,/,*, comparison and logical operators such as AND & OR, and a number of additional functions such as RATE and INSIGHT_RULE_METRIC.

For example, with AWS Lambda metrics you can divide the Errors metric by the Invocations metric to get an error rate, use anomaly detection to visualize expected values on a metric graph, and create an anomaly detection alarm to dynamically alert you when the value falls outside of the expected range.

Today, we're excited to announce that Amazon Athena supports AWS Glue Data Catalog partition indexes to optimize query planning and reduce query runtime. When you query a table containing a large number of partitions, Athena retrieves the available partitions from the AWS Glue Data Catalog and determines which are required by your query.

As new partitions are added, the time needed to retrieve the partitions increases and can cause query runtime to increase.

AWS Glue Data Catalog allows customers to create partition indexes which reduce the time required to retrieve and filter partition metadata on tables with tens and hundreds of thousands of partitions.

Starting today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 introduces Elastic fleets, a serverless fleet type that lets you stream applications to your end users from an AWS-managed pool of streaming instances without needing to predict usage, create and manage scaling policies, or create an image. Elastic fleets are designed for customers that want to stream applications to users without managing any capacity or creating AppStream 2.0 images.

Customer support conversations often require the caller to provide inputs such as first name and account ID so the agent can verify the information before handling customer requests. Starting today, you can configure your Amazon Lex bots to capture the spelling (e.g., “Z A C”) or the phonetic description (e.g., Z as in Zebra, A as in Apple, C as in Cat) for the first name, last name, email address, alphanumeric and UK postal code built-in slot types.

Callers can use the spelling support to provide names with difficult or alternative spellings (e.g., “Chris” vs.

“Kris”).

They can disambiguate confusable letters such as “N” vs.

“M” by using phonetic descriptions (e.g., to spell the name, Min: “M as in Mary, I as in Idea, N as in Nancy”).

The spelling capability expands on the built-in slot types so you can simplify the dialog management and improve the end-user experience.

AWS Audit Manager now offers a dashboard to simplify your audit preparations with at-a-glance views of your evidence collection status per control. You can instantly track the progress of your audit assessments relative to common control domains. These control domains are general categories of controls, not specific to any one framework that allow customers to quickly assess status on common themes (E.g.- track overall issues in Identity and Compliance control domain).

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect has now been included on the list of AWS Services in Scope for the FedRAMP Moderate baseline. The security and compliance of Contact Lens is assessed as part of multiple AWS compliance programs. Contact Lens is compliant with PCI and SOC, while also being a HIPAA eligible service.

For a list of AWS services in scope of specific compliance programs, see AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program.

For general information, see AWS Compliance Programs.

Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed to run container workloads is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, customers can install the AWS Service Management Connector via a guided setup in ServiceNow. This guided setup simplifies the ServiceNow scoped app configurations tasks, minimizing the expertise needed to establish the connection between AWS and ServiceNow.

ServiceNow administrators, or power users with permissions to the Connector scoped app, simply follow the guided steps and mark each task complete or skipped where applicable.

The AWS Service Management Connector documentation also includes an AWS CloudFormation baseline permissions template that sets up the AWS environment.

Thus, the ServiceNow Guide Setup and AWS baseline permissions give customers the ability to focus on developing guardrails and detective controls via integrated AWS services and validating that connection between AWS and ServiceNow.

Starting today, customers can make change requests for AWS resources/services based on templates in ServiceNow via AWS Systems Manager Change Manager. Upon approval in ServiceNow, these change requests will execute the AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks associated to the change template. AWS Systems Manager Change Manager simplifies the way you request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS .

This integration enables customers to streamline and align the maintenance, management and governance of AWS resources/services with their familiar IT Change Management (enablement) processes and tools.

My take: Yes please!

To help you quickly troubleshoot your permissions in Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now includes the policy type that’s responsible for the denied permissions in access denied error messages. Amazon Sagemaker, AWS CodeCommit and AWS Secrets Manager are among the first AWS services that now offer this additional context, with other services following in the next few months. When you troubleshoot access-related challenges, the identified policy type in the access denied error message helps you to quickly identify the root cause and unblock your developers by updating relevant policies.

AWS Glue DataBrew customers are now able to create datasets by writing Structured Query Language (SQL) statements to retrieve data from Amazon Redshift and Snowflake using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connections. You can use a purpose-built query to select the data you want and limit the data returned from large tables before cleaning, normalizing, and transforming that data with DataBrew.

For a list of supported input formats, please see the AWS Glue DataBrew input formats list.

AWS Glue DataBrew now provides customers the ability to mask Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data during data preparation. With just a few clicks, you can detect PII data as part of a data profiling job and gather statistics such as number of columns that may contain PII and potential categories, then use built-in data masking transformations including substitution, hashing, encryption, decryption, and more, all without writing any code.

You can then use the cleaned and masked datasets downstream for analytics, reporting, and machine learning tasks.

AWS Glue DataBrew users can now create data quality rules, which are customizable validation checks that define business requirements for specific data. You can create rules to check for duplicate values in certain columns, validate that one column does not match another, or define many more custom checks and conditions based on your specific data quality use cases.

You can group rules for a given dataset into a ruleset for efficiency and apply these checks as part of a standard data profile job.

Results are populated in a data quality dashboard and validation report, helping you to quickly view rule outcomes and determine whether your data is fit for use.

AWS Glue DataBrew now has native console integration with Amazon AppFlow, allowing users to connect to data from Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, ServiceNow, and other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, as well as AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. When creating a new dataset in DataBrew, you can now create a flow via Amazon AppFlow that loads data (by schedule, event, or on-demand) into Amazon S3.

Once the flow has been established to Amazon S3, you can easily clean, normalize, and transform this data in DataBrew and join it with datasets from other data stores or SaaS applications.

DataBrew also provides information about when your flow was last refreshed and allows you to trigger flows directly from the DataBrew console.

Learn more about supported AppFlow sources and destinations here.

We are excited to announce the support for AWS Organizations nested organizational units (OUs) in AWS Control Tower. An organization is an entity that you create to consolidate a collection of AWS accounts so that you can administer them as a single unit. Within each organization, you can create organizational units which help manage and govern groups of accounts in an organization.

Nested OUs provide further customization between groups of accounts within OUs, giving you more flexibility when applying policies for different workloads or applications.

For example, you can separate production workloads and non-production workloads within an OU.

With support for nested OUs, you can now easily organize accounts in your Control Tower environment in a hierarchical, tree-like structure that best reflects your business needs.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), and Middle East (Bahrain).

Today, we are announcing the launch of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, which will enable you to move faster and safer while releasing new features to your customers. Feature flags allow you to release features to your applications, independent of code deployments. Development teams often coordinate application feature releases along with a large-scale marketing event and are required to release features gradually to the users.

Similarly, DevOps teams often respond to operational events by enabling existing functionality in their application.

This launch enables Developers and DevOps teams to use AWS AppConfig to create and validate feature flag configuration data and deploy single or multiple features flags to their application in a monitored and controlled way.

AWS AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, is used as a best practice by thousands of teams within Amazon to deploy feature flags and application configuration changes to applications at run-time.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports message batching for the publish action, which let’s you publish up to 10 messages in a single batch request to either Standard Topics or FIFO Topics. Batching messages into a single API request is intended for those who want to reduce their costs associated with connecting decoupled applications with Amazon SNS.

Previously, Amazon SNS required individual API requests for every published message.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now delivers strong read-after-write and list-after-write consistency for any storage request at no additional cost.

My take: I'm always a fan of price drops!

Starting November 9, 2021, Amazon Rekognition Image APIs pricing has been reduced by up to 38% in all 14 supported regions. This price reduction will automatically reflect in customer bills starting from November 2021.

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) service that allows you to build custom computer vision models to detect objects and scenes specific to your business needs without the need of in-depth machine learning expertise. Starting today, we have updated the Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels console to introduce step-by-step directions on how to manage, train, and evaluate your custom models.

This revamped guided experience makes it even easier for you to train your own computer vision models in four simple steps with just a few clicks.

Amazon Redshift now simplifies the use of other services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Glue by allowing customers to create an IAM role from the Redshift console and assigning it as the default IAM role while creating an Amazon Redshift cluster. The default IAM role helps simplify SQL operations such as COPY, UNLOAD, CREATE, EXTERNAL FUNCTION, CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, CREATE EXTERNAL SCHEMA, CREATE MODEL, or CREATE LIBRARY that accesses other AWS services by eliminating the need to specify the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for the IAM role .

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) version of Léa, a French Polly voice. Now, Amazon Polly customers can enjoy Léa either as an NTTS or a Standard voice.

With this launch, we now offer 23 NTTS voices across 13 languages.

You can now use Amazon Pinpoint to send push notifications to your website users on their Mac desktop using Apple Push Notification service. Safari push notifications display your website icon and notification text that users can click to go to your website. This allows you to reach your end users right on their desktop to inform them of new product launches, engage them in upcoming promotions, and share events as they unfold.

Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) now offers AWS Graviton2 general purpose - M6g instance family. Customers can enjoy up to 38% improvement in indexing throughput, 50% reduction in indexing latency, and 30% improvement in query performance when compared to the corresponding x86-based instances from the current generation M5.

Today, we are announcing the launch of the Amazon Monitron Web App. The Web App joins the existing Amazon Monitron Android App and iOS App, giving customers more options for using Amazon Monitron. Customers can now use the Amazon Monitron Web App from their desktops, laptops or tablets to monitor equipment and receive reports on operating behavior and alerts to potential failures in those equipment.

They can access the Web app in a browser by clicking on the Amazon Monitron project link that can be found on the Amazon Monitron console.

To commission the sensors and gateways, users will still need the Amazon Monitron Android App or iOS App since the commissioning process requires their phone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth (BT) capabilities.

EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. Today, we are excited to announce that EMR Studio is now available in the Europe (Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.

Amazon Cognito now offers a new console experience that makes it even easier for customers to manage Amazon Cognito user pools and add sign-in and sign-up functionality to their applications. Customers that wish to opt in to the new and streamlined experience can do so by navigating to the Amazon Cognito console.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now supports MySQL major version 8.0. MySQL 8.0 includes improved performance functionality from enhancements such as instant DDL to speed up the overall process of creating and loading a table and its associated indexes and SKIP LOCKED and NOWAIT options to avoid waiting for other transactions to release row locks.

MySQL 8.0 adds developer productivity features such as window functions to more easily solve query problems and common table expressions to enable use of named temporary result sets.

It also includes JSON functionality additions, new security capabilities, and more.

MySQL 8.0 on Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition supports popular Aurora features including Global Database, RDS Proxy, Performance Insights, and Parallel Query.

With Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) you can now monitor the health of your live stream inputs using four new Amazon CloudWatch metrics and two new APIs. These metrics and APIs can help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues with live streams either as they happen or after the streams have ended. You can also use APIs from Amazon IVS and Amazon CloudWatch to embed data into your own dashboard or application.

My take: I'm all for anything that helps you get a handle on what's happening in your k8s environments.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Connector. With EKS Connector, you can now extend the EKS console to view your Kubernetes clusters outside of AWS. You can use the EKS console to visualize Kubernetes clusters including your on-premises Kubernetes clusters, self-managed clusters running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and clusters from other cloud providers.

Once connected, you can see all of your clusters’ statuses, configurations, and workloads in one place on the EKS console.

Starting today, cellular LTE-M interface library is generally available in FreeRTOS. With this launch, developers will find it easier to build IoT devices that use the cellular LTE-M protocol to connect to the cloud. The main FreeRTOS download includes AWS IoT reference integrations with cellular modules from vendors such as Sierra Wireless, u-blox, and Quectel.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is compliant with the ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and ISO 27701 standards. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed.

Today, AWS announced that customers can purchase Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and Container products from AWS Marketplace with one, two, or three-year contracts on supported products.

The FindMatches ML transform in AWS Glue now includes an option to output match scores, which indicate how closely each grouping of records match each other. The FindMatches transform allows you to identify duplicate or matching records in your dataset, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier and no fields match exactly.

FindMatches helps automate complex data cleaning and deduplication tasks.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) now supports agentless replication from VMware vCenter versions 6.7 and 7.0 to the AWS Cloud. AWS Application Migration Service is the primary service for lift-and-shift migrations to AWS.

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), a new service that enables organizations to minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is the recommended service for disaster recovery to AWS.

Starting today, Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) is available in seven additional AWS Regions. These AWS Regions are Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka, Seoul), Europe (Milan, Paris, Stockholm), and Middle East (Bahrain). This launch makes BYOIP available in all commercial regions, AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

Amazon Rekognition can detect and read text in an image, and return bounding boxes for each word found. Starting today, Amazon Rekognition supports text detection in images in 7 new languages - Arabic, Russian, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Amazon Rekognition automatically detects and extracts text in images in all supported languages, without requiring a language parameter.

In addition, Amazon Rekognition delivers higher overall accuracy, with improvements for vertical and curved text in images.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it.

You can now easily setup workload specific monitoring and view the health of these workloads via Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights problems directly from the Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights console, making it easier to dive deep into issues, troubleshoot problems and reduce mean time to resolution.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports observability for SAP HANA databases so you can troubleshoot and resolve problems impacting your SAP HANA-based workloads more easily.

My take: Woohoo!

Amazon Athena’s redesigned console is now generally available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud regions where Athena is available. The new and improved console brings a modern, more personalized experience to all of the features you enjoy in the current console and includes several new features which make analyzing data with Athena more powerful and productive.

Starting today, you can use AWS Lambda with your AWS Transfer Family server to integrate an identity provider of your choice. This results in easier ways to authenticate and authorize your users. Additionally, you can now monitor your file transfers using a centralized CloudWatch metrics dashboard in the AWS Transfer Family Management Console.

AWS Snow Family now supports external Network Time Protocol (NTP) server configuration on Snowball Edge and Snowcone devices. By providing external NTP support, customers are able to synchronize device time with the NTP servers they provide.

AWS Network Firewall is now SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 compliant. You can now use AWS Network Firewall for use cases that are subject to System and Organization Controls (SOC) reporting. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives.

The FindMatches ML transform in AWS Glue now allows you to match newly arrived data against existing matched datasets. The FindMatches transform allows you to identify duplicate or matching records in your dataset, even when the records do not have a common unique identifier and no fields match exactly.

It makes it faster and easier to clean and deduplicate data sets.

Today, AWS Amplify announces a new “amplify add custom” command to add any of the 175+ AWS services to an Amplify-created backend using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) or AWS CloudFormation. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. The new ability to add custom resources enables developers to add additional resources beyond Amplify’s built-in use cases with a single command.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Active Custom Translation (ACT) to customize your translation between any currently supported languages.

For example, you can now use ACT between German and French.

Amazon Rekognition content moderation is a deep learning-based feature that can detect inappropriate, unwanted, or offensive images and videos, making it easier to find and remove such content at scale. Amazon Rekognition provides a detailed taxonomy across 35 sub-categories and 10 distinct top-level moderation categories.

Starting today, Amazon Rekognition content moderation comes with an improved model for image moderation that significantly reduces false positive rates across all of the moderation categories, particularly ‘explicit nudity’, without reduction in detection rates for truly unsafe content.

Lower false positive rates imply lower volumes of flagged images to be reviewed further, leading to a better experience for human moderators and more cost savings.

You can now launch RabbitMQ 3.8.23 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to RabbitMQ contains several fixes and enhancements compared to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.8.22.

Today, Amazon Location Service added five new parameters to help developers filter and process search results for points of interest, addresses (known as geocoding), and geographical positions (known as reverse geocoding). With these new parameters, they can tailor and optimize location results to meet the needs of their specific applications. For example, developers can choose to only select the closest search result, personalize the results to the end-user's preferred language, or enable time-related features such as turning lights on and off in a home automation application.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Amazon Linux 2. With this launch, you can now stream Linux applications and desktops to your users, and greatly lower the total streaming cost by migrating Matlab, Eclipse, Firefox, PuTTY, and other similar applications from Windows to Linux on Amazon AppStream 2.0.

FreeRTOS now contains an example code that demonstrates a method of minimizing the time an application spends in privileged mode in FreeRTOS ports on microcontrollers (MCU) with Memory Protection Unit (MPU) support. FreeRTOS ports with MPU support enable MCU applications to be more robust and secure by running application tasks in unprivileged mode, where they have access only to their own stacks and pre-configured memory regions.

The only application code that runs in privileged mode on these MPU enabled MCUs are Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs).

The example code demonstrates an approach to keep ISRs short and defer most of the application work to unprivileged FreeRTOS tasks, which helps improve security of the application by minimizing the time it spends in privileged mode.

AWS Step Functions’ Synchronous Express Workflows now supports AWS PrivateLink allowing you to start a Synchronous Express Workflow from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without traversing the public internet.

My take: This will help with graph database adoption...not as much as a true serverless version would though.

AWS released an open source Java (JDBC) driver to connect to Amazon Neptune. This makes it easy for customers to connect to Neptune with tools and libraries that support JDBC, such as popular Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

AWS Launch Wizard supports Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) gp3, io2, and io2 Block Express volumes for Microsoft SQL Server deployments. Now you can take full advantage of the new generations of EBS volumes when you use Launch Wizard for the high availability or single node deployments of SQL Server on Amazon EC2.

AWS IoT Greengrass is an Internet of Things (IoT) edge runtime and cloud service that helps customers build, deploy, and manage device software. With this release, AWS IoT Greengrass version 2.5 adds support for Microsoft Windows devices. Windows gateway devices are commonly used in industrial IoT scenarios to automate manufacturing operations by collecting local sensor and equipment data and triggering local actions using application business logic.

For example, consider an automotive assembly line where a steel stamping press creates a complex part that is prone to defects.

Quality Control (QC) automation can be built using a video camera stream fed to a gateway device that uses local ML inference to check part dimensions and find cosmetic defects.

The gateway could then notify operators if defects are identified.

My take: I gave this is a three because it's solid functionality. It should get a zero because it should have been there at launch.

We are excited to announce that AWS IoT Device Management resources are now supported on AWS CloudFormation. With a few clicks, you can now use a CloudFormation template to pre-configure and deploy IoT fleet management infrastructure like Job Templates, Fleet Metrics, and IoT Logging settings in a standardized and repeatable way across multiple regions and accounts.

AWS App Runner now supports using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to build and deploy applications. AWS CDK enables you to compose your infrastructure across AWS from a single source using familiar programming languages such as Python and Node.js. With the AWS CDK integration, you can create App Runner services by defining your source code location as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public, Amazon ECR private, or GitHub.

You can also create the required Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles using the AWS CDK for other services your application uses, such as Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda.

AWS Amplify announces the ability for developers to override Amplify-generated IAM, Cognito, and S3 configuration to best meet app requirements. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud. With the new override capability, developers can easily configure their backend with Amplify-provided defaults but still customize fine-grained resource settings.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage security profiles. Security profiles help you manage who can access and perform actions in Amazon Connect, such as using the Contact Control Panel (CCP), adding a new agent, or viewing the built-in reports.

Using this API, you can programmatically update security profiles as your Amazon Connect access control needs change.

To learn more, see the API documentation.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now offers a contact block that enables contact center managers to personalize the contact center experience without the need to write code. Using Amazon Connect’s contact flow builder’s graphical user interface and the new Customer Profiles contact block, contact center managers can create personalized experiences that leverage customer information such as name and address.

For example, you can play a personalized greeting by using the customer name from the Customer Profiles block or route customers to different queues based on their address.

The new flow block also enables you to update customer information using inputs customer provide, helping you keep profiles up to date with the latest customer information.

My take: This makes the AWS Management Console search experience a lot more useful...still a ways to go though

We are excited to announce that blogs, knowledge articles, events, and tutorials are available in Unified Search to enable users to easily search and discover information in the AWS Management Console. AWS users can now search for blogs (e.g., Implementing Auto Scaling for EC2 Mac Instances), knowledge articles (e.g., Set Your Preferences for AWS Emails), tutorials (e.g., Remotely Run Commands on an EC2 Instance), and events (e.g., AWS Container Day) without leaving the AWS Management Console.

Amazon QuickSight now only refreshes visuals when switching sheets if required, such as when a parameter filter change is made. This creates a seamless sheet change experience for users by further enhancing QuickSight visual load time performance.

Today we are announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 G5 instances powered by NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. G5 instances can be used for a wide range of graphics intensive and machine learning use cases. They deliver up to 3x higher performance for graphics-intensive applications and machine learning inference, and up to 3.3x higher performance for training simple to moderately complex machine learning models when compared to Amazon EC2 G4dn instances.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. As a part of building models, SageMaker Autopilot automatically cleans, prepares and preprocesses data to optimize performance of machine learning models.

Starting today, Autopilot generates several additional data insights that can help you improve the quality of data and thereby build higher quality models that better meet your business needs.

Amazon Connect now allows customers to create and orchestrate tasks directly from contact flows based on customer input (e.g., Dual tone multi frequency (DTMF)) or call, chat, and task information (e.g., type, priority/urgency, category, schedule data/time) without any coding required. For example, when a customer reaches out after office hours, you can automatically create a task for an agent to follow with them when available. Amazon Connect Tasks empowers contact center managers to prioritize, assign, track, and automate customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents.

You can turn on this in a few clicks by using the Create tasks flow block in your contact flows.

Amazon Connect now allows customers to schedule tasks, up-to six days in the future to follow-up on customer issues when promised. For example, to call a customer back on a particular date/time to provide a status update on their issue or to follow up with an internal team for progress updates on a customer service issue. Additionally, customers can now update the task scheduled date/time using the UpdateContactSchedule API Amazon Connect Tasks empowers contact center managers to prioritize, assign, track, and automate customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents.

You can dynamically prioritize and assign tasks based on agent skill set, availability, information about the task (e.g., type, priority/urgency, category), and now a scheduled date/time.

Amazon Connect Tasks provides pre-built integrations with CRM applications (e.g., Zendesk, Salesforce) and APIs to more easily integrate with your homegrown and business-specific applications.

Amazon Connect now provides Contact APIs that allow you to describe contact details (e.g., queue information, chat attachments, task references) and update contact information (e.g., task name). The new APIs offer more flexible ways to interact and manage contacts and enable you to create customized experiences for your customers. For example, with these APIs, you can add or update contact details programmatically from your business applications, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

You can also retrieve contact progress timestamps (e.g., enqueued, connected with an agent, disconnected) for use in a custom reporting solution or workforce management solution.

To learn more, see the API documentation.

My take: This will make it easier to leverage Amazon Athena at scale.

If you have data in sources other than Amazon S3, you can use Amazon Athena federated query to analyze the data in-place or build pipelines that extract and store data in Amazon S3. Until today, querying this data required the data source and its connector to use the same AWS account as the user querying the data. Athena now supports cross-account federated query to enable teams of analysts, data scientists, and data engineers to query data stored in other AWS accounts.

Today, we are excited to announce NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server on Amazon SageMaker, enabling customers who choose NVIDIA Triton as their model server to bring their containers and deploy them at scale in SageMaker.

Since our last update in August 2021, AWS CloudFormation Registry has expanded to include support for 34 new resource types (refer to the complete list below) between August and October 2021. A resource type includes schema (resource properties and handler permissions) and handlers that allow API interactions with the underlying AWS or third-party services.

Customers can now configure, provision, and manage the lifecycle of these newly supported resources as part of their cloud infrastructure through CloudFormation, by treating the infrastructure as code.

Furthermore, we are pleased to announce that 4 new AWS services added CloudFormation support on the day of launch.

These services include: Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, and Amazon Connect Wisdom.

CloudFormation now supports 165 AWS services spanning over 800 resource types, along with over 40 third-party resource types.

My take: We all win when more things get added to AWS Security Hub.

AWS Security Hub has released three new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard (FSBP) to enhance customers’ Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). These controls conduct fully-automatic checks against security best practices for Elastic Load Balancing and AWS Systems Manager. If you have Security Hub set to automatically enable new controls and are already using AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, these controls are enabled by default.

Security Hub now supports 162 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

My take: Very handy to spot operational and security issues.

AWS CloudTrail announces CloudTrail error rate Insights, a new feature of CloudTrail Insights that enables customers to identify unusual activity in their AWS account based on API error codes and their rate.

With today’s release, developers can use AWS Amplify DataStore’s new observeQuery API to help open apps faster using locally stored data, and then update the app UI with real-time data using no additional code. DataStore provides frontend app developers the ability to build real-time apps with offline capabilities by storing data on-device (web browser or mobile device) and automatically synchronizing data to the cloud and across devices on an internet connection.

With the new observeQuery API, developers can retrieve both locally stored data and subscribe to subsequent data changes synced from the cloud with a single API call.

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are introducing multidirectional custom terminology, to give you more control and flexibility over your translation workflows. Custom terminology is a feature of Amazon Translate that enables you to customize your translation of named entities such that your brand names, character names, model names, and other unique content using your terminology file.

With multidirectional custom terminology, you no longer have to constrain yourself to set the first column of your terminology file as your source language.

You will be now able to use the same terminology file to translate both to and from a specific language.

Starting today, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is available in the Canada (Central) region. With this launch, QLDB is now available in 11 Regions globally: Canada (Central), US East (N.

Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

Amazon Nimble Studio today supports the ability for administrators to test their launch profile configurations directly from the console, which can reduce the number of errors artists experience when provisioning a workstation.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can index and search documents from Microsoft SharePoint 2013 or Microsoft SharePoint 2016 servers.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to configure tags, endpoint access control, and control plane logging through AWS CloudFormation.

Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) has improved Amazon ECS Capacity Providers to deliver a faster Cluster Auto Scaling experience. Customers who need to launch a large number of tasks (>100 tasks) on their Amazon ECS clusters will now see their cluster infrastructure scale faster.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i instances are available in additional AWS Regions Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Paris), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage and network resources, M6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.

These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g.

Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

My take: Nice to see more and more instance types powered by AWS Graviton2. These CPUs are fantastic.

Starting today, general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6gd instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (London). The compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6gd instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), and Europe (London).

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.

Customers can now connect their JumpCloud Directory Platform (JumpCloud) to Amazon Web Services Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using JumpCloud to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar JumpCloud experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in.

AWS SSO and JumpCloud use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, enabling customers to save administration time and increase security.

Customers can now connect their CyberArk Workforce Identity (CyberArk) to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using CyberArk Workforce Identity to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar CyberArk Workforce Identity experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in.

AWS SSO and CyberArk Workforce Identity use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security.

AWS Marketplace sellers can now submit multiple, self-service change requests simultaneously using AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP) or AWS Marketplace Catalog API. Now, AWS Marketplace sellers can start multiple self-serve change requests for AMI, Container, Professional Services, and Machine Learning products via AMMP, and via the AWS Marketplace Catalog API for AMI, and Container products.

Sellers will no longer have to wait to submit a subsequent change request for a product while prior change requests are in progress.

For example, if a seller wants to update product information and version information of their product, they can now submit these requests one after another in quick succession without having to wait for the first request to complete.

AWS Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for detective guardrails to help expedite guardrail management. You can now enable multiple detective guardrails without needing to wait for individual guardrail operations to complete. AWS Control Tower provides customers with out-of-the-box preventive and detective guardrails that you can deploy to increase your security, operational, and compliance posture.

During October, 2021, 5 new versions of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go were released (v1.126.0 through v.130.0). The AWS CDK now includes high-level APIs (L2 constructs) for AWS AppRunner, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs, at scale and with no prior infrastructure experience required.

Additionally, the CDK CLI can now perform hotswap deployments for containers in Amazon ECS tasks and AWS Step Functions.

These releases also resolve 40 issues and introduce over 50 new features that span over 50 different modules across the library.

Many of these changes were contributed by the developer community.

During October, 2021, 5 new versions of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go were released (v1.126.0 through v.130.0). The AWS CDK now includes high-level APIs (L2 constructs) for AWS App Runner, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to quickly deploy containerized web applications and APIs, at scale and with no prior infrastructure experience required.

Additionally, the CDK CLI can now perform hotswap deployments for containers in Amazon ECS tasks and AWS Step Functions.

These releases also resolve 40 issues and introduce over 50 new features that span over 50 different modules across the library.

Many of these changes were contributed by the developer community.

AWS Backup introduces new resource assignment options that help make it easier to manage data protection of your applications at scale. The new resource assignment options allow you to define your selection criteria using AWS-supported resource types, a combination of AWS tags and Resource IDs, enabling you to automatically identify the AWS resources that store data of your business critical applications and protect your data using immutable backups.

Amazon SageMaker Inference now supports new model deployment options to update your machine learning models in production. Using the new deployment guardrails, you can easily switch from the current model in production to a new one in a controlled way.

This launch introduces canary and linear traffic shifting modes so that you can have granular control over the shifting of traffic from your current model to the new one during the course of the update.

With built-in safeguards such as auto-rollbacks, you can catch issues early and automatically take corrective action before they cause significant production impact.

My take: A new service with a lot of promise. This one aims to gather all of the health metrics in one place and trigger actions based on the overview of your systems.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of AWS Resilience Hub, a new service that provides you with a single place to define, validate, and track the resilience of your applications so that you can avoid unnecessary downtime caused by software, infrastructure, or operational disruptions.

Amazon QuickSight now supports 4 new features that make it easier for AWS administrators to secure and roll out Amazon QuickSight to more users and accounts within their organizations - IP-based access restrictions, AWS Service Control Policy-based restrictions, automated email syncing for federated SSO users and bring-your-own-role during QuickSight account sign up.

Today, Amazon Lex announces language support for South African English. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.

Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text so you can build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions.

With the addition of South African English, you can build and expand your conversational experiences to better understand and engage your customer base.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on Fargate now supports the use of Kubernetes Fluent Bit filters which provide enriched Kubernetes-specific metadata to Fluent Bit logs. Customers can now more easily observe and troubleshoot their applications by using the Kubernetes pod, container, or namespace name, among other Kubernetes metadata, to associate with their applications’ logs.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now provides customers enhanced visibility into the health of their compute infrastructure. Customers running containerized workloads using Amazon ECS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere can now query the health status of the container runtime (i.e Docker) for their container instances directly from the Amazon ECS API.

This helps customers improve application resiliency.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Incident Manager from AWS Systems Manager in 7 additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), South America (Sao Paulo), US West (N. California). To learn about Incident Manager, see the Incident Manager product page.

AWS Device Farm’s Desktop Browser Testing feature lets you test your web applications on different desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge browsers. With today’s launch, we are adding support for testing web applications that are hosted in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Today AWS Batch introduced fair-share scheduling for AWS Batch job queues, making it easier to run different workloads in a single queue. Now, customers can determine whether to run jobs in first-in, first-out (FIFO) or determine a “fair-share” policy, which can allocate resources equally or based on admin-defined weights and priorities.

With fair-share scheduling of jobs, AWS Batch will handle assigning compute among multiple users and workloads based on factors other than just whichever workload showed up first, resulting in enhanced processing efficiency and better respecting user or workload priority.

AWS now offers the ability to easily switch between AWS provided licenses and bring your own licenses (BYOL) for Windows Server and SQL Server workloads using AWS License Manager. License switching capabilities can be used as your business and licensing needs evolve. Changing the license type associated with your instance will still retain the application, instance, and networking configuration associated with the workload, saving your time and effort.

You will be billed per the new license type from the next billing second.

As an optional flexibility, AWS will also provide the ability to change the tenancy from Shared to Dedicated or vice-versa.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports token-based authentication for sending mobile push notifications to Apple devices. When creating a new platform application in the Amazon SNS console or API, you can now choose between token-based (.p8 key file) or certificate-based (.p12 certificates) authentication.

Amazon Polly, a service that turns text into speech (TTS), launches 2 new neural TTS voices. You can now use Lucia for Castilian Spanish and Bianca for Italian. With this launch, we now offer 22 neural TTS voices across 12 languages. With these voices, you can create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products.

My take: A very cool service gets a little bit better with this update.

You can now create and run AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiments that check the state of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and run AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Automations. You can also now run new FIS experiment actions that inject I/O, network black hole, and packet loss faults into your Amazon EC2 instanes using pre-configured SSM Agent documents.

Because it can be difficult to predict how applications will respond to stress under real world conditions whether in testing or production environments, integrating alarm checks and automated runbooks into your FIS experiments can help you gain more confidence when injecting disruptive events such as network problems, instance termination, API throttling, or other failure conditions.

AWS Backup announces the addition of Amazon Neptune to its portfolio of supported services. This is a new functionality in AWS Backup that allows you to create automated periodic snapshots of Amazon Neptune clusters using your centralized data protection policy across the supported AWS services for database, storage, and compute.

AWS Backup announces support for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), allowing you to centrally manage data protection of your DocumentDB clusters along with other supported AWS services for database, storage, and compute.

Amazon Translate is a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate now adds supports to the following languages and variants - Irish, Marathi, Portuguese Portugal, and Punjabi.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a purpose-built service which enables customers to define and orchestrate their model building steps, now supports resuming execution of a failed/stopped pipeline, and retry policies for pipeline steps.

The Amazon Chime SDK now has meeting API endpoints in the US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions, providing customers a choice of which AWS Region they use to create and manage meetings which can be hosted in any of the 18 Amazon Chime media regions.

AWS Toolkits for JetBrains, VS Code and Cloud9 now provide customers with the ability to select and view from a list of 245 resource types across 94 services without leaving their IDEs. With this release, in addition to accessing AWS services that are listed by default in the AWS Explorer pane, customers can choose from hundreds of resources to interact with.

This feature uses the AWS Cloud Control API enabling the Toolkit to continually and rapidly add new resource types in the future.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN is a fully managed LoRaWAN Network Server (LNS) of AWS IoT Core that lets wireless devices that use low-power long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) technology connect to the AWS cloud. Now, AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN supports Firmware Over-the-Air Update (FUOTA) that allows customers to deliver secure and reliable firmware updates to the devices in the field using LoRaWAN multicast and fragmentation mechanisms defined by the LoRa Alliance.

These mechanisms aim to minimize the device’s battery consumption and handle large file transfers (few hundred KBs).

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Starting today, you can use your own encryption keys from the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt data placed in your S3 bucket.

Up until now, Amazon Translate used Amazon S3-SSE to encrypt your data.

AWS KMS makes it easy for you to create and manage keys, while controlling the use of encryption across a wide range of AWS services and in your applications.

AWS KMS is a secure and resilient service that uses FIPS 140-2 validated hardware security modules to protect your keys.

AWS KMS is integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

The feature can be configured via the AWS Management console or SDK and supports Amazon Translate’s asynchronous batch translation jobs.

Today, Amazon Lex announces language support for Austrian German. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.

Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text so you can build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions.

Now you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that understands Austrian German.

Starting today, you can configure EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet to automatically terminate a Spot Instance when using Capacity Rebalancing. With Capacity Rebalancing, EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet attempt to replace a Spot Instance when it is at an elevated risk of interruption as indicated by the EC2 Instance rebalance recommendation signal.

Until now, EC2 Fleet or Spot Fleet launched a replacement Spot Instance without terminating the Spot Instance that received a rebalance recommendation, meaning you needed to either manually terminate the instance once workload rebalancing was completed, or let the instance run until it was interrupted by EC2.

Now, you can set up EC2 Fleet or Spot Fleet to automatically terminate the instance that receives a rebalance recommendation with a specified termination delay.

We are pleased to announce that you can now view the insights generated across all the accounts in your organization from a single delegated administrator account. Insights are alerts generated when Amazon DevOps Guru detects operational issues while monitoring your applications.

These insights identify active or impending application issues, point to the likely cause of the issue, and recommend remedial steps to help you prevent customer-impacting events.

My take: Fantastic update. Athena queries pricing can be tricky. This'll help shine a light on it when you're doing it...that's key.

Amazon Athena now displays the computational cost of your queries alongside their execution plans. With the release of the EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement, Athena can now execute your specified query and return a detailed breakdown of its execution plan along with the CPU usage of each stage and the number of rows processed.

You can now create secure continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that follow your organization’s best practices with a new pipeline configuration capability for serverless applications. AWS Serverless Application Model Pipelines (AWS SAM Pipelines) is a new feature of AWS SAM CLI that gives you access to benefits of CI/CD in minutes, such as accelerating deployment frequency, shortening lead time for changes, and reducing deployment errors.

AWS SAM Pipelines comes with a set of default pipeline templates for popular CI/CD systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline that follow AWS’ deployment best practices.

The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

The AWS Snowcone solid state drive (SSD) is now available in the US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions adding to our growing list of regions already offering Snowcone SSD including, EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon). AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices.

Snowcone is available in both hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD).

Both device models are portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and are able to withstand harsh environments.

Customers use Snowcones to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline by shipping the device to AWS, or online by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network.

AWS Lambda now allows you to create or update your functions with container images stored in an Amazon ECR repository in a different AWS account than that of your AWS Lambda function. Previously, you could only access container images stored in an Amazon ECR repository in the same AWS account as your AWS Lambda functions. If you used a centralized account for your Amazon ECR repositories, you needed to copy your container images into an Amazon ECR repository in the same account as your Lambda function.

You can now simplify this workflow by accessing the container image stored in an Amazon ECR repository in a different account.

AWS DataSync now supports transferring data between Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) and Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. Using DataSync, you can quickly, easily, and securely migrate files and folders from HDFS on your Hadoop cluster to AWS Storage. You can also use DataSync to replicate data on your Hadoop cluster to AWS for business continuity, copy data to AWS to populate your data lakes, or transfer data between your cluster and AWS for analysis and processing.

AWS Amplify Admin UI now allows generating seed data with Faker, and downloading data to a CSV file. This simplifies creating and managing your data in Amplify, and allows for more realistic demo data that is quickly shareable.

Amazon SageMaker Studio now enables customers to make test inference requests to endpoints with a custom URL and endpoints that require specific headers. Amazon SageMaker helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality machine learning (ML) models quickly by bringing together a broad set of capabilities purpose-built for ML.

Amazon SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps.

Amazon EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. Today, we are excited to announce that EMR Studio Workspaces now support connecting to EMR clusters in different subnets that are associated with EMR Studio.

Database Activity Streams now supports Graviton2-based instances for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora provides a near real-time stream of database activities in your relational database for auditing and compliance purposes.

When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

My take: The more data points we can get into AWS Security Hub, the better.

AWS Security Hub now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints via AWS PrivateLink so that you can securely initiate API calls to Security Hub from within your VPC without requiring those calls to traverse across the Internet. AWS PrivateLink support for Security Hub is now available in all AWS Regions where Security Hub is available. To try the new feature, you can go to the VPC console, API, or SDK to create a VPC endpoint for Security Hub in your VPC.

This creates an elastic network interface in your specified subnets.

The interface has a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic that is destined for Security Hub.

You can read more about Security Hub’s integration with PrivateLink here.

AWS Lake Formation now support managed VPC endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink) to access a data lake in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With AWS Lake Formation-managed endpoints, you can now authorize access to the data lake for client applications and services inside of your VPC and on-premises using private IP connectivity. You can also configure VPC endpoint policies to have finer grained control over how services access AWS Lake Formation.

AWS Backup Vault Lock is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. AWS Backup enables customers to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services through a fully managed and cost-effective solution.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of RStudio on Amazon SageMaker, the industry’s first fully managed RStudio integrated development environment (IDE). You can easily bring your current RStudio license and migrate self-managed RStudio environment to Amazon SageMaker in a few simple steps.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now offers the ability to specify an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) customer managed key (CMK) from a different account when exporting an Amazon RDS Snapshot to Amazon S3. This option helps customers organize and consolidate their KMS keys by eliminating the need to create keys in each account that has snapshots.

Starting today, customers running subscription included Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 can seamlessly access Red Hat Knowledgebase at no additional cost. The Knowledgebase is a library of articles, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and best-practice guides to help customers solve technical issues.

Amazon Aurora Global Database is a feature of Amazon Aurora. It is designed for applications with a global footprint. It allows a single Aurora database to span multiple AWS Regions, with fast replication to enable low-latency global reads and disaster recovery from Region-wide outages.

With today’s launch, Amazon Aurora Global Database is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions.

Amazon Aurora Global Database customers will now be able to replicate across AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions.

My take: Not sure why you'd need this many secrets but it's nice to know that you're not going to hit a limit anymore.

AWS Secrets Manager now supports a limit of up to 500,000 secrets per account per region, up from 40,000 secrets in the past. This simplifies secrets management for software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) applications that rely on unique secrets for large numbers of end customers.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 T4g instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. T4g instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. These instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required.

They offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, including large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, and business-critical applications.

Amazon Time Sync Service now allows you to easily generate and compare timestamps from Amazon EC2 instances with ClockBound, an open source daemon and library. This information is valuable to determine order and consistency for events and transactions across EC2 instances, independent from the instances’ respective geographic locations.

ClockBound calculates your Amazon EC2 instance’s clock error bound to measure its clock accuracy and allows you to check if a given timestamp is in the past or future with respect to your instance’s current clock.

On every call, ClockBound simultaneously returns two pieces of information: the current time and the associated absolute error range.

This means that the actual time of a ClockBound timestamp is within a set range.

Native support for open source SQLAlchemy (sqlalchemy-redshift) and Apache Airflow frameworks are now available for Amazon Redshift. The updated Amazon Redshift dialect for SQLAlchemy supports the Amazon Redshift open source Python driver.

With this release you can use single sign-on with your Identity Provider (IdP) to connect to Redshift clusters and avoid credential management pains.

You can also use new Amazon Redshift features such as using TIMESTAMPTZ and TIMETZ datatypes when you migrate to the latest Redshift dialect for SQL Alchemy and Apache Airflow.

These features are available in sqlalchemy-redshift version 0.8.6 and later.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts can now export database logs to Amazon CloudWatch. You can now monitor all of your Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts database instances from the same single pane of glass as your Amazon RDS database instances in our AWS Regions.

In-app messaging enables customers to display targeted messages in mobile or web applications, and provide a personalized user experience. When an end user is engaged with a mobile or web application, customers can use in-app messaging to show relevant content to drive high-value user actions such as: repeat purchases, key content promotion, and user onboarding.

After initial implementation these messages can be created and launched through the Pinpoint console, without the need to make code changes.

Amazon DevOps Guru now supports additional metrics at the node and pod-level for clusters managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

On September 16th we announced GA of Corretto 17. Today, we are pleased to announce that we will be providing Long-Term Support (LTS) for Corretto 17 until September 2028. We will also be moving to a new 2-year cadence for Corretto LTS releases, along with the rest of the OpenJDK community, as of this release.

Please read our Corretto 17 Announcement post on the AWS Open Source blog for more details.

Corretto 17 is available from our downloads page.

My take: Awesome! This is a critical security feature for CloudFront distributions.

Today, Amazon CloudFront is launching support for response headers policies. You can now add cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), security, and custom headers to HTTP responses returned by your CloudFront distributions. You no longer need to configure your origins or use custom Lambda@Edge or CloudFront functions to insert these headers.

Today, AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launched new APIs that enable you to perform automated analysis of your global network and allow you to build your own topological views for visualization purposes. You can get an aggregated view of your global network resources, analyze routes, and retrieve telemetry data across AWS regions using the following APIs:

• Describe the network resources for the global network (GetNetworkResources)
• Get the network health information of the global network (GetNetworkTelemetry)
• Get the network routes of a specific route table (GetNetworkRoutes)
• Get the network resource relationships of a specific resource (GetNetworkResourceRelationships)
• Get the count of network resources for the global network (GetNetworkResourceCounts)

With a multi-user account set up, organizers (aka Account Administrators) can now provide racers access to the AWS DeepRacer service under their account ID, monitor spending on training and storage, enable/disable training, and view/manage models for every user in their account from the AWS DeepRacer console

My take: 'New' is here only because there was something technique before. This is a great improvement.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is pleased to announce the launch of the newly redesigned service console. With its streamlined look and feel, the new console makes it even easier for customers to leverage the speed, reliability, and flexibility that Amazon SES has to offer.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling you to manage MemoryDB resources using CloudFormation templates. Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service that delivers ultra-fast performance. AWS CloudFormation lets you model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources by treating infrastructure as code.

CloudFormation makes it easier for you to create and manage MemoryDB resources without having to configure MemoryDB separately through the console.

For example, you can create MemoryDB clusters, subnet groups, parameter groups, and users using CloudFormation templates.