Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Today, we are excited to announce a new capability in Amazon QuickSight called Amazon QuickSight Q. Q is a machine learning-powered natural language capability that empowers business users to ask questions about all of their data using everyday business language and get answers in seconds. For example, users simply type “what is our year-over-year growth rate” and get an instant answer in QuickSight as a visualization. View the full article

AWS has open-sourced Amazon Neptune’s Jupyter Notebook components for querying and visualizing graphs as a Python package under the Apache 2.0 license. The graph notebook is a Python library for Jupyter Notebooks that can run on local desktops and be used with databases that support either the RDF/SPARQL open standard or the open-source Apache TinkerPop graphs. You can use graph notebook to visualize nodes, edges, and properties along your graph to analyze relationships and graph patterns in your data. View the full article

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 native support for Ogg opus and FLAC encoded audio in Amazon Transcribe for streaming transcription. Previously, you were required to transcode audio streams with these encodings to PCM encoding which added extra costs and scaling challenges for large workloads. View the full article

AWS CloudHSM automatically takes a backup of your HSM cluster once a day and whenever an HSM is added to or removed from your cluster. Until today, however, customers were responsible for deleting old backups. Deleting out of date backups is important to prevent inactive users and expired login credentials from being used to access sensitive data on the HSM. View the full article

You can now create richer customer experiences and resolve issues faster by using interactive messages in Amazon Connect Chat. Interactive messages enable you to send prompts and pre-configured response options, eliminating the need for a customer to manually type in their reply. For example, customers can choose a recent order they need help with or select their preferred appointment time from a list of options simply by clicking on it. Powered by Amazon Lex, interactive messages allow you to create personalized, self-service experiences for your customers using the same chatbots that you’re already using for Amazon Connect Voice and Chat. Interactive messages help to i…

AWS Config lets you assess, audit, and evaluate how your AWS resources are configured, and helps you determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. You can use AWS Config aggregators to collect your configuration and compliance data from the below sources, and aggregate that data into a single account and AWS Region to get a centralized view of your resource inventory and compliance. Multiple accounts and multiple AWS Regions. A single account and multiple AWS Regions. An organization in AWS Organizations and all the accounts in the organization that have AWS Config enabled. View the full article

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to create fine-grained permissions for your workforce in AWS using attributes, such as cost center and department, defined in your AWS SSO identity source. Your administrators can now implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) with AWS SSO to centrally manage access to your AWS accounts and simplify permissions management at scale. View the full article

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a HIPAA-eligible automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe Medical can transcribe speech for medical specialties under the broader Primary Care umbrella such as internal medicine, family medicine, obstetrics-gynecology (OB-GYN), and pediatrics. Starting today, the service expands streaming transcription support for five new medical specialties covering cardiology, oncology, neurology, radiology, and urology. View the full article

Amazon Translate is a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate now adds support to the following more languages and variants - Armenian, Catalan, Gujarati, Haitian, Icelandic, Kannada, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Macedonian, Maltese, Mongolian, Sinhala, Telugu, Uzbek, and Welsh. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce the addition of German and Latin American Spanish language support to Amazon Lex. 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, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. View the full article

AWS App2Container (A2C) is a command-line tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications. A2C analyzes and builds an inventory of all applications running in virtual machines, on-premises or in the cloud. You simply select the application you want to containerize, and A2C packages the application artifact and identified dependencies into container images, configures the network ports, and generates the ECS task and Kubernetes pod definitions. View the full article

AWS Step Functions now supports the synchronous executions of Express Workflows, allowing you to easily build web-based applications and orchestrate high-volume, short-duration microservices. View the full article

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 launch Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Korean language support for Transcribe streaming. To deliver streaming transcriptions with low latency for these languages, we are also announcing availability of Amazon Transcribe streaming in the South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions. Now you can transcribe live media content in these languages with ease. View the full article

Location-Based Notifications Using Amazon Pinpoint is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps you easily add a new geographic dimension to personalized and targeted messaging for end users. Personalized customer engagements can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. This solution reduces that heavy-lifting by configuring and provisioning a reference architecture. The solution leverages Amazon Pinpoint and AWS AppSync APIs to enable near real-time notifications based on an end-users' location. It quickly registers locations and adds a geofence markup for geographic boundaries around any point of interest. These geofences can be used for more personalized engag…

Amazon EventBridge now provides Server-Side Encryption (SSE) using AWS Owned Keys for protection of sensitive data. SSE is enabled by default and lets you transmit sensitive data more securely with EventBridge. View the full article

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now provides convenient IDE functionality to interact with SQS queues and search through CloudWatch Logs. View the full article

AWS now offers Amazon Comprehend Events, which extracts real world events and the associated arguments from text documents. For example, consider a news article that announces that Amazon acquired WholeFoods Market. Comprehend Events will identify the event as an ‘acquisition’ and detect the acquirer (Amazon), acquiree (WholeFoods Market), the deal amount and the date and time of the deal. Customers can use Comprehend Events to understand relationships from natural language text documents between entities such as organizations, people, and dates to build applications such as analytics on financial data and knowledge graphs. View the full article

AWS Secrets Manager now supports higher request rates for the GetSecretValue API operation of up to 5000 requests per second. This increased API limit will be applied to your accounts automatically. No further action required on your end. View the full article

Customers can now explicitly specify which qubits are going to be used when they use Amazon Braket to run a quantum circuit on quantum computers from Rigetti. This allows researchers and advanced users to optimize their circuit design based on the latest device calibration data to get more accurate results. View the full article

AWS Storage Gateway has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization, approved by the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB), for the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. FedRAMP compliance enables you to use AWS Storage Gateway to store and manage your critical workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region’s authorization boundary with data up to the high impact level. View the full article

AWS Lambda now allows customers using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as an event source to define a wait period, called MaximumBatchingWindowInSeconds, to allow messages to accumulate in their SQS queue before invoking a Lambda function. In addition to Batch Size, this is a second option to send records in batches, to reduce the number of Lambda invokes. This option is ideal for workloads that are not time-sensitive, and can choose to wait to optimize cost. View the full article

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, now enables you to increase the storage capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to easily respond to your evolving storage needs by increasing file system size in a matter of minutes. View the full article

Errors in Spark applications commonly arise from inefficient Spark scripts, distributed in-memory execution of large-scale transformations, and dataset abnormalities. AWS Glue workload partitioning is the newest offering from AWS Glue to address these issues and improve the reliability of Spark applications and consistency of run-time. Workload partitioning enables you to specify how much data to process in each job-run and, using AWS Glue job bookmarks, track how much of the data AWS Glue processed. View the full article

Amazon Pinpoint Preference Center is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps Amazon Pinpoint customers quickly deploy a ready-to-use mobile-optimized preference center allowing end users to manage their communication preferences and attributes. Previously, customers had no mechanism to collect end user preferences. As a result, they would develop their own preference centers or work to extract preference data from other systems, which resulted in costly custom development. Reducing the heavy-lifting, this solution allows Amazon Pinpoint customers to send highly targeted communications to their end users based on their preferred channel and interests. View the full …

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides high-performance shared storage, now enables you to increase the storage capacity of your file systems with the click of a button, providing you the flexibility to easily respond to your evolving storage needs by increasing file system size in a matter of minutes. View the full article

AWS Storage Gateway now supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from IBM Spectrum Protect to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.6 or later, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 12, Service Pack 2 or later, and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016. View the full article

Today, AWS Marketplace announced a new self-service experience in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP) that enables AWS Marketplace Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to add new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) versions, restrict versions, and update product information on their AMI software listings quickly and easily. AWS Marketplace is consistently improving the way that sellers can keep their AMI products up-to-date. With this release, AWS Marketplace has automated the steps to publish changes to the thousands of AMI product listings in AWS Marketplace, enabling ISVs to rapidly update and adjust their listings on their own. View the full article

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain) AWS Region. This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in the Middle East where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES. View the full article

Amazon Translate is a fully managed, neural machine translation service that delivers high quality and affordable language translation in seventy-one languages. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Active Custom Translation (ACT). ACT gives you greater control and enables you to customize the machine translation output to your needs and preferences. For example, you can influence whether the machine translation output should be “How are you?” or “How do you do?” To use ACT, simply provide translation examples called parallel data (PD) along with your batch translation job request and Amazon Translate will use these examples to customize the transl…

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) administrators can now require users to self-enroll multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices during sign-in. For your users without a registered MFA device, you can require them to complete a self-guided MFA enrollment process following a successful password authentication. This allows administrators to secure their organization’s AWS environments with MFA without having to individually enroll and distribute authentication devices to users. View the full article

You can now ensure that only trusted and verified code is deployed in your AWS Lambda functions. With Code Signing for Lambda, administrators can configure Lambda functions to only accept signed code on deployment. When developers deploy signed code to such functions, Lambda checks the signatures to ensure the code is not altered or tampered. Additionally, Lambda ensures the code is signed by trusted developers before accepting the deployment. View the full article

Starting today, EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet (further referred to as Fleet) are integrated with Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) to notify you about important Fleet events, state changes, and errors. This allows you to automate actions in response to Fleet state changes as well as monitor the state of your Fleet from a central place without a need to continuously poll Fleet APIs. Amazon EventBridge enables you to collect monitoring data from AWS resources and applications, and allows you to build loosely coupled and distributed event-driven architectures. View the full article

AWS License Manager allows administrators to create customized licensing rules in license configurations to emulate the terms of their vendor agreements. Administrators can use License Manager to enforce these rules by attaching license configurations to their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Administrators can now attach license configurations to their AMIs to make the enforcement effective across all their AWS accounts. License Manager evaluates licensing rules at the time of instance launch from AMIs to prevent overages and notify administrators in an event of any licensing rule violation. License Manager also allows administrators to track instance launches from AMIs sha…

The AWS Snowball service is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. AWS Snowball, a member of the AWS Snow Family, is an edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device that comes in two options. Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices provide 80 TB of Amazon S3 object storage and optional compute with 40 vCPUs. They are well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices provide 52 vCPUs, 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage, 42 TB of HDD storage, 256 GB of RAM, and an optional GPU for use cases like advanced machine learning and full motion video analysis in disconnected environments. You can use these devices …

AWS CodeArtifact now supports NuGet packages for .NET development. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) customers can discover a curated collection of third-party software built for Amazon S3 from within the S3 Management Console. Customers can choose from free or paid software products across SaaS, AMI, CFT, and Container product types, spanning across a wide range of popular categories including Storage, Back-up and Recovery, Data Integration and Analytics, Observability and Monitoring, Security and Threat Detection, and Permissions. View the full article

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. You can now synthesize over 15 NTTS voices, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio. View the full article

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) as a target. Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your application's needs. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) with minimal downtime. View the full article

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Amazon DynamoDB. Estimate the cost of DynamoDB workloads before you build them, including the cost of features such as on-demand capacity mode, backup and restore, DynamoDB Streams, and DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). View the full article

With Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Amazon DynamoDB, you can capture item-level changes in your DynamoDB tables as a Kinesis data stream. You can enable streaming to a Kinesis data stream on your table with a single click in the DynamoDB console, or via the AWS API or AWS CLI. View the full article

You now can use PartiQL (a SQL-compatible query language)—in addition to already-available DynamoDB operations—to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB. PartiQL makes it easier to interact with DynamoDB and run queries in the AWS Management Console. Because PartiQL is supported for all DynamoDB data-plane operations, it can help improve the productivity of developers by enabling them to use a familiar, structured query language to perform these operations. View the full article

Amazon SageMaker Studio is now available in thirteen more AWS regions, bringing its total available regions to twenty-two. Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps, giving you complete access, control, and visibility required to build, train, and deploy models. Within the unified SageMaker Studio visual interface, you can perform all ML development activities including notebooks, experiment management, automatic model creation, debugging, and model drift detection. View the full article

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with AWS Organizations to simplify security posture management across all of your existing and future AWS accounts in an organization. With this launch, new and existing Security Hub customers can delegate any account in their organization as the Security Hub administrator and centrally view security findings from up to 5,000 AWS accounts. The integration with AWS Organizations allows you to automatically enable Security Hub and its automated security checks in any existing and newly created accounts in the organization. You can also now see AWS account names alongside account IDs in the Security Hub console. Customers using Security Hub…

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that enables customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, now supports import of all standard and custom tables from ServiceNow into Amazon S3. View the full article

You now can restore Amazon DynamoDB tables even faster when recovering from data loss or corruption. The increased efficiency of restores and their ability to better accommodate workloads with imbalanced write patterns reduce table restore times across base tables of all sizes and data distributions. To accelerate the speed of restores for tables with secondary indexes, you can exclude some or all secondary indexes from being created with the restored tables. View the full article

AWS Copilot CLI for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now generally available with v1.0.0. The AWS Copilot CLI makes it easy to build, release, and operate production-ready containerized applications on Amazon ECS with the Fargate launch type. AWS Copilot incorporates AWS’s best practices, from infrastructure-as-code to continuous delivery, and makes them available to customers from the comfort of their terminal. With AWS Copilot, you can focus on building your applications instead of setting up infrastructure. View the full article

AWS Systems Manager now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint policies, which allow you to configure access to the Systems Manager API. When you create Amazon VPC endpoints for Systems Manager, you can attach AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource policies that restrict user access to Systems Manager API operations, when these operations are accessed via the Amazon VPC endpoint. For example, you can limit certain users to only be able to list Systems Manager Run Command invocations but not to send any command invocations. You can also restrict specific users’ ability to start a Systems Manager Session Manager session. View the full arti…

AWS Client VPN is now available in the Paris, Milan, Cape Town, Bahrain, and Hong Kong Regions. This increases global coverage of AWS Client VPN and brings the total number of available Regions to twenty. View the full article

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to secure user access to AWS accounts and business applications using multi-factor authentication (MFA) with FIDO-enabled security keys, such as YubiKey, and built-in biometric authenticators, such as Touch ID on Apple MacBooks and facial recognition on PCs. With this release, AWS SSO now supports the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) specification to provide strongly attestable and phishing-resistant authentication across all supported browsers, using interoperable FIDO2 and U2F authenticators. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce additional capabilities with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. You can now add tags to associated repositories to better identify, organize, and manage your AWS resources. View the full article

Starting today, you can access additional call attributes in your contact flow to build integrations that can authenticate incoming phone calls more accurately, reduce handle times, and enable greater personalization. Additional call attributes from telephony carriers, such as the geographic location of the voice equipment where the call originated, type of phone devices such as a landline or mobile, the number of network segments the call traversed, and other call origination information can be used to improve fraud detection and determine call treatment. For example, you can route trusted incoming calls to your typical agents while routing phone calls with potential fra…

AWS Cloud Map now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints in the US and Canada commercial Regions to help you protect sensitive information. These endpoints terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module, making it easier for you to use AWS Cloud Map for certain regulated workloads. View the full article

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports ingestion of data that is up to 7 days old (extended from 15 mins). Late data may be ingested in to AWS IoT SiteWise using the AWS IoT SiteWise connector (which runs on your edge devices), AWS IoT Core or the BatchPutAssetPropertyValue API directly. This would enable you to transmit any accumulated data to AWS IoT SiteWise when recovering from intermittent connectivity issues. To get the most out of this feature, please upgrade to version 8 (latest) of IoT SiteWise connector that runs on AWS IoT Greengrass. AWS IoT SiteWise automatically calculates (or recalculates) related transforms or metrics on arrival of late data. To learn more, visit t…

Starting today, you can now switch the color theme of your Amazon WorkDocs Android application for a darker appearance. With Dark Mode, the appearance of the app is inverted so that instead of black text on a white background, you see white text on a black background. The design reduces the light emitted by your device’s screen while maintaining the minimum color contrast ratios required for readability. Dark mode is not only a user preference and personalization feature but also a supplemental accessibility setting that may improve visibility and reduce eye strain while preserving battery life. View the full article

Amazon EventBridge announces improvements to event bus resource policies that make it easier to build applications that work across accounts. With this change, you can now send events to, and create rules on event buses in another account while relying on the event bus resource policy to manage your permissions. View the full article

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now provides access to the Apache Flink Dashboard, giving you greater visibility into your applications and advanced monitoring capabilities. You can now view your Apache Flink application’s environment variables, over 120 metrics, logs, and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of the Apache Flink application in a simple, contextualized user interface. View the full article

You can now build and run streaming applications using Apache Flink version 1.11 in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink. Apache Flink v1.11 provides improvements to the Table and SQL API, which is a unified, relational API for stream and batch processing and acts as a superset of the SQL language specially designed for working with Apache Flink. Apache Flink v1.11 capabilities also include an improved memory model and RocksDB optimizations for increased application stability, and support for task manager stack traces in the Apache Flink Dashboard. View the full article

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE EnginFrame version 2020.0. NICE EnginFrame is a powerful and easy to use web front-end for accessing technical and scientific applications on-premises and in the cloud. View the full article

Today we are announcing the availability of License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server version 20H2 for Amazon EC2, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest version of Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. Windows Server 20H2 provides the latest fixes and performance enhancements for Windows Server. View the full article

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul), and Middle East (Bahrain). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud. View the full article

We are excited to announce the availability of Context Management on Amazon Lex. Conversations involve managing context across multiple turns as the interaction evolves. Similarly, bots need to understand the progression of a conversation’s context in order to respond appropriately. Previously, you had to write code to manage context via session attributes. Depending on the intent fulfilled, the code had to orchestrate invocation of the next intent. Starting today, Lex supports context management natively so you can manage the context directly from the console. With the context management capability, you can easily control when an intent should be activated. For example, …

Amazon QuickSight launched enhancements to dashboard filtering experience. When readers slice and dice dashboards with filters, QuickSight will now persist filter selection until they return to the dashboard. Readers can pick up where they left off and do not have to re-select filters. Dashboard persistence is applicable to both QuickSight Web and the Mobile app. Persistence is an optional setting on embedded dashboards where QuickSight admins can choose to make dashboards persist using the getDashboardEmbedURL API. Persistence on web and mobile dashboards is available by default. To learn how to set up persistence on embedded dashboards, see here. View the full articl…

AWS Glue Schema Registry, a serverless feature of AWS Glue, enables you to validate and control the evolution of streaming data using registered Apache Avro schemas, at no additional charge. Through Apache-licensed serializers and deserializers, the Schema Registry integrates with Java applications developed for Apache Kafka/Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Apache Flink/Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink, and AWS Lambda. View the full article

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now supports automated, multi-region replication of your directory. Now you can deploy and use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD (Enterprise Edition) directory across multiple AWS Regions. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows and Linux workloads globally. With the automated multi-region replication capability you get higher resiliency, while your applications use a local directory for optimal performance. View the full article

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now introduces new policy defaults for passwords of IAM users. This policy improves the default security for all AWS customers by ensuring customers set stronger passwords for IAM users in their AWS accounts. View the full article

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract printed text, handwriting, and data from virtually any document. Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon Textract supports encryption of its asynchronous API output stored in your Amazon S3 buckets using your own AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Customer Master Keys (CMKs). With this feature, you have the flexibility to manage which encryption keys are used to protect your data and text extracted by Amazon Textract. For more information on how to accomplish this, please read our newest blog post. View the full article

AWS Backup now supports cross-account backup, enabling AWS customers to securely copy backups across accounts within their AWS Organizations. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in Europe (London) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances for a broad spectrum of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, CPU-based machine learning inference, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. View the full article

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you configure your Auto Scaling group with multiple launch templates when you use a MixedInstancesPolicy and specify multiple instance types. After EC2 Auto Scaling released support for multiple instance types within a single Auto Scaling group, customers have been looking for ways to launch different instance types using different Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) so that instances with incompatible CPU architectures can exist in the same Auto Scaling group. With this enhancement you can now specify a launch template alongside the instance type in the overrides of your MixedInstancesPolicy, and that launch template will be used whenever launch…

You can now configure your Amazon Lex chatbot to improve engagement with customers who speak French, Spanish, Italian, or Canadian French. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that can be used with Amazon Connect to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like press 1 for sales, or press 2 for appointments. View the full …

AWS Network Firewall is a new AWS-managed service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all of your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The service can be set up with just a few clicks and scales automatically with your network traffic, so you don't have to worry about deploying and managing any infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall is for customers who want to inspect and filter traffic to, from, or between their Amazon VPCs. View the full article

AWS IoT Greengrass is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while still using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage. With AWS IoT Greengrass, connected devices can run AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, or both, execute predictions based on machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet. View the full article

Amazon Honeycode now supports single sign-on with identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory, Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin, PingFederate, or any SAML-based identity provider, including Google Workspace. Honeycode customers or the IT administrators of organizations using Honeycode can set up single sign-on so that Honeycode users can log in using their corporate credentials instead of Honeycode-specific credentials. View the full article

The Amazon Chime SDK now supports noise suppression, 48kHz audio, and client-side video inspection and manipulation. View the full article

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads. View the full article

Amazon S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into your object storage usage and activity trends, and makes actionable recommendations to improve cost-efficiency and apply data protection best practices. S3 Storage Lens is the first cloud storage analytics solution to provide a single view of object storage usage and activity across tens to hundreds of accounts in an AWS organization, with drill-downs to generate insights at the account, bucket, or even prefix level. Drawing from more than 14 years of experience helping customers optimize storage, S3 Storage Lens analyzes organization-wide metrics to deliver contextual recommendations to find ways to reduce…

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities to their applications. Starting today, the service connects to the global phone network so that attendees can dial into an Amazon Chime SDK meeting using a telephone. The feature also lets you programmatically place an outbound call to a phone number and connect the call to a meeting session. Previously, attendees were able to join Amazon Chime SDK meeting audio using voice over IP (VoIP) in mobile and web applications. View the full article

Starting today, you can launch R5, C5, and T3 instance types when using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to migrate your databases. You can easily scale up to these new instance classes by modifying your existing replication instance through the AWS DMS, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. View the full article

AWS IQ has released two new features to support firms: Project Manager role and group chat. The project manager role allows any US based individual in a firm to view requests, speak with customers, submit proposals, and request payments, without requiring an AWS Certification. Project Managers can then add an AWS Certified expert to the conversation to complete the hands on work in the customer’s account. View the full article

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Network Firewall, making it easy for security administrators to centrally configure and deploy Network Firewall rules across their organization. AWS recently launched AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed firewall service that gives customers enhanced control and visibility of all traffic leaving and entering their network. With Firewall Manager support, customers can centrally manage the deployment of Network Firewall rules across accounts, organizational units (OUs), and Amazon virtual private clouds (VPCs) in their organization. View the full article

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone 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 A…

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage user hierarchies. User hierarchies are a way for you to organize users into groups such as what location they work in or which department they are a part of. With this launch, you can now programmatically mirror your organization's hierarchy in Amazon Connect as changes are made in your internal systems of record, such as HR systems. Additionally, you can extract all hierarchy and agent data as a point-in-time snapshot and copy it into a different instance. To learn more, see the API documentation. View the full article

AWS works on the basis of active regions. Certain areas are provided data centers using which developers can run their computations on the AWS server. While there are numerous AWS regions and local zones available all across the world, several new ones are in the works of being set up and launched. In North America alone, there are seven AWS regions with a total of over 25 availability zones.These AWS regions are also up and running in Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Bahrain, Ireland, Milan, Stockholm, Cape Town, Beijing, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Ningxia, Osaka, Mumbai, and Hong Kong. Out of these, the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region was one of the most recently establishe…

AWS Launch Wizard now enables you to deploy scripts before and after the AWS resource configuration process to customize your SAP environments. View the full article

Starting today, you can easily move your database migration tasks from one replication instance to another. To move, select the migration task and provide the target replication instance details. You can access this feature using AWS DMS Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. Once the migration task is moved to the target replication instance, you can resume your migration from where you left off. View the full article

Video on Demand on AWS Foundation solution provisions the AWS services required to build scalable, distributed VOD processing and delivery workflows. This solution is designed to help you quickly get started encoding video files with AWS Elemental MediaConvert. It can be easily customized and used as the starting point to create a more complex workflow. View the full article

Customers using the AWS Migration Hub to discover, plan, and track their migrations now have access to Migration Hub network visualization. Migration Hub network visualization is for migration experts and non-experts who want to quickly organize and validate their on-premises discovery data, and to build their migration plan. View the full article

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 build, train, tune, debug, deploy, and monitor models. Starting today, you can encrypt your Amazon SageMaker Studio storage volumes with customer master keys (CMKs) managed by you in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). View the full article

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through the new AWS edge location in Bangkok, Thailand. With this new edge location, AWS Global Accelerator further improves Internet performance for users in Thailand. AWS Global Accelerator is now available in more than 90 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in 20 AWS Regions. View the full article

You can now hibernate newly-launched EBS-backed Amazon EC2 T3 and T3a instances. Hibernation provides you with the convenience of pausing your workloads and resuming them later from the saved state. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid — your application will start right from where it left off. View the full article

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon API Gateway REST and HTTP APIs, making it faster and easier to build application workflows including microservices created by API Gateway. You can use the API Gateway integration to create a workflow that orchestrates HTTP and REST APIs acting as the ‘front door’ for business logic running on AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service or Amazon Elastic Container Service, fully managed container orchestration service. View the full article

Starting today, you can use the console to aggregate AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations across all accounts in your organization with AWS Organizations. The new Organizational View feature in Trusted Advisor allows you to generate reports with detailed check results across multiple accounts in your AWS organization. In addition, you can view a high level summary of check status within the console. View the full article

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions. View the full article

AWS Training and Certification has launched a major update to the classroom course AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Machine Learning on AWS (Business). This four-hour, intermediate-level course is designed for account owners and pre-sales representatives at AWS Partner organizations. View the full article

Amazon CloudFront announces its first two edge locations in Thailand. These new edge locations in Bangkok will provide viewers as much as a 30% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s Asia Pacific geographic region. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure. View the full article

This new on-demand digital course provides a deep dive into AWS IAM and best practices for using IAM policies. The advanced course is designed for security professionals with a working knowledge of AWS and it includes five learning modules, video demonstrations, assessments, and three optional self-paced labs. View the full article

AWS IoT Device Management customers use Secure Tunneling to securely access and troubleshoot remote devices located behind a restricted firewall. Now, customers can make concurrent client connections to a single device over a secure tunnel using the new multiplexing capability. Multiplexing enables customers to perform more advanced device troubleshooting, such as modifying parameters via a web application on the device while simultaneously issuing remote shell commands to verify the device is working properly. View the full article

AWS X-Ray now supports trace context propagation for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) enabling customers to view end-to-end requests when using Amazon S3. AWS X-Ray traces user requests as they travel through your entire application. It aggregates the data generated by the individual services like AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 and the many resources that make up your application, providing you an end-to-end view of how your application is performing. View the full article

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. It features secure connectivity, fast and robust data ingestion and highly reliable and durable storage of factory equipment data. This solution is easy to deploy, can help reduce machine downtime and increase factory efficiency. View the full article

AWS Shield Advanced now allows you to bundling resources into protection groups, giving you a self-service way to customize the scope of detection and mitigation for your application by treating multiple resources as a single unit. Resource grouping improves the accuracy of detection, reduces false positives, eases automatic protection of newly created resources, and accelerates the time to mitigate attacks against multiple resources. For example, if an application consists of four CloudFront distributions, you can add them to one protection group to receive detection and protection for the collection of resources as a whole. Reporting can be consumed at the protection gr…