Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to store your static content such as images, videos or HTML files in an object storage that can be used for your websites and applications. Lightsail object storage can be associated to your Lightsail CDN distribution with a few simple clicks, making it quick and easy to accelerate the delivery of your content to a global audience. It can also be used as a low cost, secure backup solution. Lightsail object storage comes with the same predicable pricing as its other offerings with three different flat rate bundles starting at $1/month. View the full article

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. View the full article

Image Builder components, which are a set of documents that enable image customization in EC2 Image Builder, now support parameters as an input in the image build process. You can now reuse your existing component investments in EC2 Image Builder to create different custom images by easily passing component parameters, such as installation directory or software version, in the image recipe. View the full article

Amazon Lex is a service for building natural language conversational interfaces using voice and text into your application. Earlier this year, we launched an enhanced V2 management console and APIs. The V2 API is makes it easier for bot developers to add new languages to a bot and also deliver natural conversational experiences such as wait and continue (“Can you wait while I get my credit card?”). Today, we introduce tooling to automate migration of bots from Lex V1 Console to the Lex V2 Console. The migration tool uses existing intents and slot types to create corresponding resources in the Lex V2 Console. View the full article

Starting today, racers from anywhere in the world can compete with each other virtually and in real-time from within the AWS DeepRacer Console while colleagues, friends, and family watch a LIVE broadcast of the event online. Previously only available to qualifiers in the AWS DeepRacer League’s monthly Pro Division finale, this new LIVE event option for Community Races gives every participant a chance to post fastest lap time while manually managing their agent’s speed within the AWS DeepRacer simulation. View the full article

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. For a list of regions where AWS Glue DataBrew is available, see the AWS Region Table. View the full article

Patch Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, now provides a more holistic view of the patch compliance and inventory of your fleet of instances by additionally reporting on stopped instances. This feature helps you to further simplify patch compliance and inventory reporting because information is now readily available for stopped instances. View the full article

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with SageMaker's automatic model tuning capability. Customers can add a model tuning step (TuningStep) in their SageMaker Pipelines which will automatically invoke a hyperparameter tuning job. The hyperparameter tuning finds the best version of a model by running many training jobs on the dataset using the algorithm and the ranges of hyperparameters specified by the customer. They can then register the best version of the model into the model registry using the RegisterModel step. View the full article

NoSQL Workbench for DynamoDB, a client-side tool that helps you design, visualize, and query nonrelational data models by using a point-and-click interface, now helps you run frequent data-plane operations more easily to modify and access table data. Now, you can save or bookmark as many as 50 DynamoDB data-plane operations in the NoSQL Workbench operation builder. View the full article

On 6th July 2021, Amazon Pinpoint lowered the Transaction Per Second (TPS) sending limits to 1 TPS for campaigns and journeys. The new limit allows customer to execute slower sends through email, push and SMS channels. This will optimize delivery rates, and allow for easier testing and monitoring. A campaign is a messaging initiative that engages a specific audience segment with a single tailored message, while journeys are multi-step campaigns to guide a user through an experience with multiple messages. Campaigns and journeys are intended for customers with user engagement use cases, and who want to send targeted messages to their users and drive high value actions. Vi…

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports customer endpoints in VPCs. With this feature, your IoT devices and applications can communicate with IoT Core for LoRaWAN from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without the need to allow traffic from the VPC to public IP addresses. VPC endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, like AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, on the private AWS network. View the full article

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Data API in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region to access Amazon Redshift. The Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with the AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++. View the full article

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting and data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on your feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce an accuracy enhancement update to the handwriting extraction feature. Starting today, you will see improved accuracy of handwritten transcriptions, specifically for numerals, dates, phone numbers, and website address across many documents in finance, healthcare, legal, public s…

Amazon ECS today announced a new feature that provides greater configurability for Amazon ECS Tasks that run on a periodic or scheduled basis, or are triggered by Amazon EventBridge (EventBridge) events. Customers now have access to the same rich configurations for scheduled and event-driven Tasks as they do for Tasks launched directly using the Amazon ECS run-Task API. View the full article

We are excited to announce that Amazon Fraud Detector now includes model variable importance values with every new fraud detection machine learning (ML) model to provide customers with more insight into their model’s performance. View the full article

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With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. View the full article

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the South America (São Paulo) region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Region Table. View the full article

Today, we’re announcing that we have updated AWS Amplify’s tools and libraries for Flutter to support null safety for all of our use cases. Flutter developers can now enjoy all the easy-to-integrate Amplify functionality with higher reliability and improved developer ergonomics. Sound null safety is a Dart language feature in which code is non-nullable by default and turns runtime null-dereference errors into edit-time analysis errors. This enables developers to reduce bugs in their code and benefit from performance improvements through smaller binaries and faster execution. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce AWS Deep Learning Containers (DLCs) with integrated SDKs for inference that enable customers to easily deploy Hugging Face models in Amazon SageMaker at scale. This was the number one requirement from customers that have been leveraging the Hugging Face AWS DLCs for training (Hugging Face training DLCs) that released in March 2021. View the full article

Starting today, AWS AppSync is available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. View the full article

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. To deploy ML models for real-time predictions, Amazon SageMaker provides you with a large selection of AWS compute instances, so you can find the right cost to performance ratio depending on your requirements. The Amazon Inf1 instance is powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate ML inference workloads. Starting today, Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are additionally available on Amazon SageMaker in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), a…

Tag policies help you govern tag consistency across resources in your organization's accounts. For example, with tag policies, you can define rules on tag keys, including how they should be capitalized and their allowed values. With this release, the maximum size of a tag policy document has been increased from 2.5k to 10k characters for both new and existing tag policies. The number of allowed policies has also been increased from 5 to 10. View the full article

Amazon Rekognition content moderation is a deep learning-based service 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 of moderation categories such as 'Explicit Nudity', 'Suggestive', ‘Violence’, and 'Visually Disturbing'. Starting today, customers can detect 6 new categories - 'Drugs', ‘Tobacco’, ‘Alcohol’, ‘Gambling’, ‘Rude Gestures’, and ‘Hate Symbols’. In addition, customers also get improved detection rates for already supported categories. Using Amazon Rekognition moderation APIs, social media, broadcast media, advertising, and e-comme…

Today, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announces support for Amazon DevOps Guru, enabling you to set up Amazon DevOps Guru across the accounts and Regions in your organization with a few clicks. By setting up Amazon DevOps Guru across your organization, you can identify any operational issue long before it impacts your customers. View the full article

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager allows customers to centrally monitor route configurations for AWS Network Firewall, and get alerts on routes non-compliant with their configuration. With this launch, customers can now monitor VPC routes to ensure traffic egressing through Internet Gateway (IGW) is inspected by the Network Firewall deployed by Firewall Manager in each VPC. Customers get alerted on route configurations that are non-compliant, such as, routes that bypass firewall inspection, or routes that lead to asymmetric traffic, and get suggestions to remediate the routes. View the full article

Effective July 1, 2021, AWS is reducing data processing charges for VPC Interface Endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink). The new tiered pricing will reduce the costs for accessing high-volume, data intensive services over AWS PrivateLink. AWS PrivateLink enables customers to access AWS services or any other service hosted on AWS in a secure and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. View the full article

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 5 AWS Regions. This is in addition to the IoT Core for LoRaWAN availability in US East (N. Virginia) and EU (Ireland) AWS regions. View the full article

With today’s release, Amplify DataStore now supports multiple authorization modes, making it easy for developers to control how their users can access app data. 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. Customers can configure authorization rules visually using Amplify Admin UI or by editing a GraphQL schema file using the Amplify CLI. View the full article

Today, AWS announces a new feature of Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, which customers can use to manage and provision their AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks without leaving the Application Manager console. With Application Manager, customers can discover and manage applications across multiple AWS services like AWS Launch Wizard, AWS Service Catalog App Registry, AWS Resource Groups, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This new feature provides customers with a ready-to-use solution to manage the lifecycle of CloudFormation templates and stacks without having to set up Amazon S…

AWS Training and Certification is pleased to introduce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This advanced, 50-minute course will help you learn how to implement a business continuity and disaster recovery plan for your Amazon S3 implementation. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and a quiz to check your knowledge. View the full article

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports real-time audio-video (AV) by seamlessly redirecting local webcam video input to AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions using a web browser. Previously, this feature was available only for the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. With real-time AV support available in the web browser, your users can use AV collaboration and media applications within their AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions, and connect from a broad range of client devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, and thin clients. Your users can collaborate without having to leave their AppStream 2.0 sessions, and without additional client software to manage. View the full artic…

Amazon CloudFront announces two new APIs, ListConflictingAliases and AssociateAlias, that help locate and move Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) if you encounter the CNAMEAlreadyExists error code. These new APIs let you see which distribution has the CNAME and move the CNAME to a target distribution as long as the source distribution is in the same account or if the source distribution in another account is disabled. To move a CNAME between accounts where the source distribution is still enabled, you must contact AWS Support and follow these steps. View the full article

AWS Storage Gateway adds support for AWS Privatelink for Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Access Points. If you use Amazon S3 File Gateway for your on-premises gateway (VMware, Microsoft Hyper V, Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) or AWS Storage Gateway Hardware Appliance), you can now create a private connection from your gateway directly to Amazon S3 without the need for an HTTP proxy. View the full article

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Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports resource identifiers and tags for security group rules. You can now manage VPC security group rules using the assigned rule IDs and resource tags. View the full article

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Starting today, developers can capture the contents of their Amazon Chime SDK meeting and save them to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice with media capture pipelines. This new feature captures meeting audio, video, and content share streams in 5 second segments and directly delivers them, along with meeting events and data messages, to developer’s designated S3 bucket. View the full article

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ as an event source, allowing customers to quickly and easily build applications that are triggered from messages in their RabbitMQ queue. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Customers can build applications quickly and easily with Lambda functions that are invoked based on messages posted to Amazon MQ message brokers without needing to worry about provisioning or managing servers. View the full article

Today we are announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Dallas and Philadelphia. Customers can now use these new AWS Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations in Dallas and Philadelphia metro areas. View the full article

AWS customers can now compare any two application configuration versions side by side within AWS AppConfig, a feature of AWS Systems Manager. This new functionality highlights the differences between the changed configuration values in the two versions, and helps Developers and Devops professionals to understand how their configuration data has changed over time. This adds additional safety features when deploying the intended configuration values to mitigate the risk of any application outages. View the full article

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 use the Amazon Kendra web crawler to index and search webpages. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, R6g, and T4g instances are available in EU (Paris, Milan) regions. Additionally, Amazon EC2 M6g instances are also available in Middle East (Bahrain) regions. View the full article

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is now available in four additional AWS Regions: US West (Northern California), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), and South America (São Paulo). View the full article

Workflow Studio is a new visual workflow designer for AWS Step Functions that makes it faster and easier to build workflows using a drag and drop interface in the AWS console. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) region. Using Container Insights, DevOps and systems engineers can monitor, isolate, and diagnose containerized applications and microservices environments through automated dashboards. This helps you visualize the performance and health of Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate resources including clusters, tasks, containers, and services. View the full article

AWS Elemental MediaPackage now supports timed ID3 metadata passthrough for live and VOD streams in HLS, CMAF, and DASH formats. ID3 metadata tags enable data to be embedded into video streams at specified timecodes and used by downstream systems or clients to enhance the playback experience. By dynamically adding metadata to a stream, you can enable use cases such as ad-insertion beaconing, client-side dynamic graphical overlays, content chapters, and audio track listing. View the full article

AWS Glue Studio now allows you to preview your data at each step of the visual job authoring process. AWS Glue Studio automatically samples your data, then runs each transform in your job so you can test and debug your transformations without having to save or run the job. Data previews are available for each source, target, and transform node in the visual editor, so you can verify the results step by step. View the full article

We are excited to announce that Kendra Enterprise Edition is now offered in smaller more granular units to enable smaller workloads. The base Kendra Enterprise Edition (KEE) now starts at $1.40/h ($1,008/mo), offering the same functionality and availability at a smaller scale and cost. The base KEE now supports up to 100,000 documents and 8,000 searches per day, with adaptive bursting capability to better handle unpredictable query spikes. Similarly, the Virtual Storage Capacity units now offer scaling in increments of 100,000 documents (up to 30GB) per unit at $0.7/h. Our Virtual Query Units offer scaling increments of 8,000 queries per day at $0.7/h. View the full art…

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

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports the ability to write datasets created from jobs that run your data preparation recipes directly to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can choose to store datasets in Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS (Aurora, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL) tables in the Data Catalog. View the full article

With this launch, AWS Amplify now supports conditional backend builds, automatic build-time aws-exports.js generation, and a simpler console workflow to re-use backends across multiple frontend branches. AWS Amplify’s continuous deployment service offers frontend developers the fastest way to build and deploy full-stack apps (both the frontend and backend) on every code commit. View the full article

Amplify CLI now supports storing environment variables and secrets to be used in AWS Lambda functions to help separate environment-specific configurations from business logic. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud that often include business logic powered by AWS Lambda functions. Customers use environment variables to store environment-specific values, such as API endpoints, and secrets to securely store sensitive information, such as API keys. View the full article

AWS now supports three additional Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types in the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones: General Purpose SSD (gp3), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), and Cold HDD (sc1) volumes. With this expansion, you can now use gp3, st1, and sc1 volume types in addition to your existing gp2 and io1 volumes in the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones. View the full article

AWS Glue DataBrew adds support for creating datasets with .csv files that have the backslash or escape (\) delimiter. The full list of supported delimiters for .csv files can be found here. View the full article

AWS Glue Schema Registry now supports defining schemas in JSON Schema format in addition to Apache Avro, allowing customers who choose JSON Schema as the format for their streaming data to centrally control the evolution of data streams and avoid having to manage their own registries. Through Apache-licensed serializers and deserializers, Glue Schema Registry integrates with Java applications developed for Apache Kafka/Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Apache Flink/Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink, and AWS Lambda. View the full article

Self-service features and trusted device support are now available on the WorkSpaces Android Client app on Google Play that runs on Android and Android-compatible Chrome OS devices. The new features are intended for customers who use Android or Android-compatible Chrome OS devices as primary WorkSpaces client endpoint devices. View the full article

As you prepare your data, AWS Glue DataBrew adds support to automatically identify and mark advanced data types for columns, making it easy to normalize columns containing data of types: Social Security Number (SSN), Email Address, Phone Number, Gender, Credit Card, URL, IP Address, Date and Time, Currency, Zip Code, Country, Region, State, and City. Additionally, DataBrew visually marks columns containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), allowing you to easily scan for all PII columns in your dataset and apply transformations. Learn more about all supported advanced datatypes. View the full article

You can now deploy Amazon AppStream 2.0 in the AWS Europe (London) Region. Deploying AppStream 2.0 in your local region provides users with a more responsive experience and helps support your local data residency obligations. With this launch, you can deploy General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Memory Optimized, Graphics Design, Graphics Pro and Graphics G4 instances to meet the needs of your users. View the full article

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the General Availability of the Amazon ECS-optimized Bottlerocket Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Bottlerocket is an open source Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket includes only the software needed to run containers and comes with a single step update mechanism. This enables you to improve security posture and reduce maintenance overhead for your Amazon ECS clusters. With this release, Amazon ECS also helps you automate OS updates for Bottlerocket, helping you improve application availability and reduce disruption during updates. View the full article

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. View the full article

You can now share files directly with specific experts in AWS IQ chat interface. Experts can also share files in the chat, attach files to a proposal, or to a payment request after completing work. View the full article

We are excited to announce an update to Amazon GameLift, an AWS managed service. Trusted by game companies from all over the world like Wargaming, Metalhead Software, and Illfonic, GameLift FlexMatch launched in 2017 as a feature that uses a powerful matchmaking algorithm and flexible developer-defined rules to create high-quality matches at AWS scale. View the full article

We are excited to announce that AWS now offers new framework-specific Deep Learning AMI (DLAMI). Today we launched framework-specific DLAMIs for PyTorch 1.9.0 and TensorFlow 2.5.0, with support for Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 20.04. The AWS DLAMIs provide machine learning practitioners and researchers with the infrastructure and tools to accelerate deep learning in the cloud, at any scale. These optimized new images are up to 60% smaller in size, accelerating the time for machine learning practitioners to launch DLAMIs on AWS. We will continue to release and support DLAMI in the previous format that includes multiple frameworks and operating systems within a …

When using AWS DataSync to copy data between Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems and Server Message Block (SMB) shares, you can now copy object metadata describing NTFS system access control lists typically used by administrators to define the operations on files and folders that generate audit logs. With this launch, DataSync can now copy all access control entries (ACEs) for files and folders between your SMB shares and FSx for Windows File Server file systems as well as between FSx for Windows File Server file systems. View the full article

Starting today, AWS Firewall Manager is available in Asia Pacific (Osaka). View the full article

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer makes it easier for customers to author secure and functional permissions by providing over 100 policy checks with actionable recommendations during policy authoring. Now, IAM Access Analyzer extended policy validation by adding new policy checks that validate conditions included in IAM policies. These checks analyze the condition block in your policy statement and report security warnings, errors, and suggestions along with actionable recommendations. These checks help you set fine-grained permissions by guiding you to apply conditions in a secure and functional way. For example, IAM Access Analyzer validates that …

AWS CloudFormation Modules are now available in AWS GovCloud (US). A Module encapsulates one or more AWS or Non-AWS resources and their configurations for reuse across your organization. View the full article

AWS Lambda functions that are triggered from self-managed Apache Kafka topics can now access usernames and passwords secured by AWS Secrets Manager using SASL/PLAIN, a simple username/password authentication mechanism that is typically used with TLS for encryption to implement secure authentication. This is in addition to SASL/SCRAM, which is already supported on Lambda. To get started, customers who select Apache Kafka as the event source for their Lambda function can choose SASL/PLAIN as their authentication mechanism, and select their credentials from Secrets Manager on the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI or AWS SDK for Lambda. This feature requires no additional charg…

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added support for HDR10+ metadata analysis and insertion. HDR10+ is a technology that further enhances HDR video with dynamic color metadata for viewing devices to adjust automatically on a scene-by-scene basis. Using MediaConvert you now have the option to perform a HDR10+ analysis on your HDR10 content and then to insert the resulting metadata into the encoded outputs for consumption on HDR10+ enabled devices. This metadata is treated like an enhancement layer to the base HDR10 metadata and allows for backwards compatibility with HDR10 compliant devices. View the full article

Session Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now supports free text search for nodes in the search bar of the Session Manager console. Customers can easily locate the node to connect to without knowing the exact value of a property such as Name or Instance ID. The free text search is supported for multiple properties of a managed node, including Instance ID, Name, Agent Version, Platform, Status, and many more. View the full article

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports creating AVC-Intra, VC3, and XAVC mezzanine formats carried in the MXF container. Often referred to as “intermediate” or “editing” file formats, these lightly compressed video codecs balance quality and performance by providing visually lossless compression, lightweight decoding requirements, and native editing and playback support in non-linear editing tools. View the full article

AWS WAF now supports 15 additional text transformations, allowing you to reformat web requests to remove any unusual formatting, or sanitize input before rule evaluation. It can be used to identify threats that may be obscured by attackers in an effort to bypass detection. You can use these new text transformations with WAF rule statements, such as SQLi detection, string match, and regex pattern set. You can chain up to 10 text transformations together in a single rule statement. Once configured, AWS WAF will apply the transformations first before evaluating the rule statement. View the full article

With the Apple Business Chat integration in Amazon Connect, your customers can interact with you using the Apple Messages application on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Your customers can now have an experience that is as familiar and convenient as chatting with a friend, while using rich customer service features like interactive messages to do things like schedule appointments. Apple Business Chat makes it easy for your customers to chat with you anytime they click on your registered phone number on an Apple device. The Apple Business Chat integration allows you to use the same configuration, analytics, routing, and agent UI that you're already using for Amazon Connect Voic…

You can use Amazon Neptune resources tags to add metadata and apply access policies to your Amazon Neptune resources. Now, you can allow resource tags set on your Neptune clusters to be automatically copied to any automated or manual database snapshots that are created from your clusters. Tags can be used with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to manage access to Neptune resources and control what actions can be applied to those resources. View the full article

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels supports the ability to use an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key, to encrypt the image data delivered to the Rekognition Custom Labels service to train your custom machine learning model. By default, Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels encrypts the image data at rest using server-side encryption. With this release, if you provide Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels with your KMS key or alias ARN, Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels will use that KMS key instead to encrypt your training and test images. View the full article

Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances and AWS Neuron now support YOLOv5 and ResNext deep learning models as well as the latest open-source Hugging Face Transformers. We have also optimized the Neuron compiler to enhance performance and you can now achieve an out-of-the box 12X higher throughput than comparable GPU-based instances for pre-trained BERT base models. These enhancements enable you to effectively meet your high-performance inference requirements and deploy state of the art deep learning models at low cost. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math now supports 14 new functions including RUNNING_SUM, TIME_SERIES, and DATAPOINT_COUNT. Two new FILL variants, two logarithmic functions, two functions for calculating the difference between each datapoint, and five time functions are also now supported. With CloudWatch Metric Math, you can aggregate and transform metrics to create custom visualizations of your health and performance metrics. The new functions announced today allow you to view the logarithmic values of your metric, better visualize the change in latency over time, and calculate the cumulative sales of a product. View the full article

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage quick connects. Quick connects are a way for you to create preconfigured destinations for common transfers and make them available for agents to use. Using this API, you can programmatically configure thousands of quick connects to agents, queues, and phone numbers. Additionally, you can now delete quick connects that are no longer required using the delete API. To learn more, see the API documentation. The quick connects API also comes with support for AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide. View the full article

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) framework launches four new templates for building machine learning inference-based applications on AWS Lambda. Now, customers can leverage these templates as a starting point to build, test, and deploy their container-based Serverless ML applications. View the full article

We recently updated AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement. View the full article

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS announced support for Custom Images, a new capability that enables customers to customize the Docker container images used for running Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR on EKS. Custom images enables you to install and configure packages specific to your workload that are not available in the public distribution of EMR’s Spark runtime into a single immutable container. An immutable container promotes portability and simplifies dependency management for each workload and enables you to integrate developing applications for EMR on EKS with your own continuous integration (CI) pipeline. View the full article

You can now build serverless applications with new AWS-supported container images that simplify continuous integration tasks. Container images work natively with continuous integration systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and AWS CodeBuild. These make it easier to build and package serverless applications using Serverless Application Model CLI (AWS SAM CLI) – a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications. View the full article

With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. View the full article

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in three additional AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). View the full article

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential defects that are difficult to find in your code and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are announcing a new CI/CD experience for CodeGuru Reviewer that allows you to trigger code quality and security analysis as a step within your CI workflow using GitHub Actions. Additionally, we are also introducing 20+ new detectors for CodeGuru Reviewer to help identify security vulnerabilities and check for security best practices in your Java code. View the full article

You can now specify up to 30 EC2 instance types for each of your master, core, and task node groups when using EMR Instance Fleets with allocation strategy. Previously, this was limited to 15 for tasks nodes, and only 5 for master and core nodes. This increase allows you to specify a broader range of instance sizes, generations, and families that your workloads can operate across to improve your access to both Spot and On-Demand capacity. View the full article

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You can now use Tax Registration Numbers (TRN) as an additional filter for mapping your purchase orders to your invoices with AWS Purchase Order Management. AWS Purchase Order Management allows you to easily manage your purchase orders (POs) in a self-service manner, define PO-invoice association rules, track PO balance and expiration, and receive email alerts for POs approaching expiration or running out of balance. View the full article

You can now simplify the process of configuring GitHub Actions workflows for building serverless applications with a single line. The new AWS-supported setup-sam GitHub Action makes it easier to keep consistency across GitHub Actions runners, stay up-to-date with AWS Serverless Application Model CLI (AWS SAM CLI) tooling, and select its versions. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications. GitHub Actions is a service that helps automate tasks within the software development lifecycle. GitHub Actions runner is the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow. View the full ar…

Database Activity Streams (DAS) for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle provides a near real-time stream of all audited statements (SELECT, DML, DDL, DCL, TCL) executed in your DB instance. The audit data is collected from the unified database audit, while the storage and processing of database activity is managed outside your database. This prevents database users and administrators from modifying the audit stream. View the full article

Amazon SageMaker customers can now select ml.G4dn instances to run Batch Transform and Processing Jobs. Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform enables you to run predictions on datasets stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for scenarios where you are working with large batches of data and don’t need sub-second latency. Amazon SageMaker Processing enables you to run your pre- or post-processing workloads, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation with a fully managed experience. View the full article

AWS Lambda customers can now enable functions to access Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. With AWS Lambda support for Amazon EFS, customers can easily share data across function invocations, read large reference data files, and write function output to a persistent and shared data store. View the full article

AWS Client VPN now supports SAML based federated authentication for opening a VPN connection from a Linux Desktop Operating system (Ubuntu 64bit 18.04 and 20.04 LTS). The Linux Desktop client has feature parity with the existing Windows and macOS Desktop clients. AWS Client VPN Desktop Clients are available free of charge, and can be downloaded here. View the full article

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you monitor and improve application read/write performance and throughput by using new Amazon CloudWatch metrics. View the full article

AWS Gateway Load Balancer is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions enables U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by helping them to address certain regulatory and compliance requirements. With this launch, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is now available in 25 regions. View the full article

AWS EC2 F1 instances have been used by customers to accelerate a growing set of applications from genomic processing, data analytics, security, image/video analytics, machine learning and more. Developers have taken advantage of the FPGA developer kit and current standard F1.X.1.4 shells to easily build and deploy their applications. View the full article

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is introducing multi-Region keys, a new capability that lets you replicate keys from one AWS Region into another. With multi-Region keys, you can more easily move encrypted data between Regions without having to decrypt and re-encrypt with different keys in each Region. Multi-Region keys are supported for client-side encryption in the AWS Encryption SDK, AWS S3 Encryption Client, and AWS DynamoDB Encryption Client. They simplify any process that copies protected data into multiple Regions, such as disaster recovery/backup, DynamoDB global tables, or for digital signature applications that require the same signing key in multiple Region…

AWS Amplify CLI now supports IAM permission boundaries to limit Amplify-generated IAM roles. The AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend developers create app backends in the cloud that include IAM roles controlling access to AWS resources. With IAM permissions boundaries, Amplify-generated IAM roles can perform only the actions that are allowed by both the roles’ policies and permissions boundary. View the full article