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You can now create or associate a monitor for a distribution directly from the Amazon CloudFront console. By adding your distribution to a monitor, you can gain improved visibility into your application's internet performance and availability using Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor. You can create a monitor for the distribution, or add the distribution to an existing monitor, directly from the distribution metrics dashboard on the CloudFront console. View the full article

AWS customers can now view real-time and historical data visualizations of their critical resource and application metrics in a mobile-friendly format using CloudWatch custom dashboards in the AWS Console Mobile App. Now AWS customers have convenient access to customized views of their resource and application's health and performance metrics while on-the-go. View the full article

Welcome to March’s post announcing new training and certification updates — helping equip you and your teams with the skills to work with AWS services and solutions. This month we launched eight new digital training products on AWS Skill Builder, including four new AWS Builder Labs and a free learning plan called, Generative AI Developer Kit. We also have three new, and one updated AWS Classroom Training courses—two of which have AWS Partner versions—including Developing Generative AI Applications on AWS. A reminder: registration is now open for the new AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate exam. You can begin preparing with curated exam prep resources, created by the experts at AWS, on AWS Skill Builder. Missed our February course update? Check it out here. New AWS Skill Builder subscription features AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are available globally, including Mainland China as of this month, and unlock enhanced AWS Certification exam prep and hands-on AWS Cloud training including 1,000+ interactive learning and lab experiences like AWS Cloud Quest, AWS Industry Quest, AWS Builder Labs, and AWS Jam challenges. Select plans offer access to AWS Digital Classroom courses to dive deep with expert instruction. Try a 7-day free trail of Individual subscription. *terms and conditions apply AWS Builder Labs Migrate On-Premises Servers to AWS Using Application Migration Service (MGN) (60 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to learn how to use AWS Application Migration Service to migrate an existing workload to AWS. Migrate On-premises Databases to AWS Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) (75 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to learn how to use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate an existing database to Amazon Aurora. Data Modeling for Amazon Neptune (60 min.) is an intermediate-level lab providing you an opportunity to explore the process of modeling data with Amazon Neptune to meet prescribed use cases. Analyzing CloudWatch Logs with Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Analytics(4 hr.) is an advanced-level, challenge-based lab allowing you to learn how to use Amazon CloudWatch to collect Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) system logs and use Amazon Kinesis to analyze the collected data. AWS Certification exam preparation and updates Now available: AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate Registration is now open for the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate. Showcase your knowledge and skills in core data-related AWS services, implementing data pipelines, and providing high-quality data for business insights. Gain confidence going into exam day with trusted exam prep on AWS Skill Builder, including an Official Pretest, available now in all exam languages. Free digital courses on AWS Skill Builder The following digital courses on AWS Skill Builder are free to all learners, along with 600+ free digital courses and learning plans. Digital learning plan Generative AI Developer Kit (includes labs) (16h 30 min.) is a collection of curated courses, labs, and challenges to develop the skills needed to build generative AI applications. Software developers interested in leveraging large language models without fine-tuning will benefit from this collection. You’ll receive an overview of generative AI, learn to plan a generative AI project, get started with Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock, learn the foundations of prompt engineering, and discover the architecture patterns to build generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock and Langchain. Digital courses Decarbonization with AWS Introduction (15 min.) is a fundamental-level course that teaches you about AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool and other resources that can be used to advance your sustainability goals. You’ll learn how businesses use the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, how it helps you reduce your carbon footprint and achieve decarbonization goals with AWS, and considerations for using the tool for a variety of optimal usage and cost savings considerations. Amazon Redshift Introduction (15 min.) is a fundamental-level course that provides an introduction to Amazon Redshift, including its common uses and benefits. AWS Mainframe Modernization – Using Replatform Tools with Amazon AppStream (60 min.) is an intermediate-level course teaching the setup and usage of Micro Focus tools from OpenText, such as Enterprise Analyzer and Enterprise Developer, with Amazon AppStream 2.0. AWS Classroom Training Designing and Implementing Storage on AWS is a three-day, intermediate-level course teaching you to select, design, implement, and optimize secure storage solutions to save on time and cost, improve performance and scale, and accelerate innovation. You’ll explore AWS storage services and solutions for storing, accessing, and protecting your data. An expert AWS instructor will help you understand where, how, and when to take advantage of different storage services. Learn how to best evaluate the appropriate AWS storage service options to meet your use case and business requirements. Build Modern Applications with AWS NoSQL Databases is a one-day, intermediate-level course to help you understand how to build applications that involve complex data characteristics and millisecond performance requirements from your databases. You’ll learn to use purpose-built databases to build typical modern applications with diverse access patterns and real-time scaling needs. AnAWS Partner version is also available. Running Containers on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is an updated, three-day, intermediate-level course from an expert AWS instructor that teaches container management and orchestration for Kubernetes using Amazon EKS. You’ll build an Amazon EKS cluster, configure the environment, deploy the cluster, and add applications to your cluster. Learn how to also manage container images using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and automate application deployment. Developing Generative AI Applications on AWS is a two-day, advanced-level course that teaches you the basics, benefits, and associated terminology of generative AI. An expert AWS instructor will guide you through planning a generative AI project and the foundations of prompt engineering to develop generative AI applications with AWS services. By the end of the course, you’ll have the skills needed to build applications that can generate and summarize text, answer questions, and interact with users using a chatbot interface. An AWS Partner version is also available. View the full article

You can now obtain an aggregated picture of the performance and health of your WorkSpaces instances using the Amazon CloudWatch Automatic dashboard. This enables WorkSpaces administrators to quickly start monitoring WorkSpaces metrics and identify issues and their potential causes. You can also use CloudWatch Automatic dashboard as a starting point and create your own custom dashboards to meet your monitoring needs. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights with Enhanced Observability for EKS now auto-discovers critical health and performance metrics from your NVIDIA GPUs and delivers them in automatic dashboards to enable faster problem isolation and troubleshooting for your AI/ML workloads. Container Insights with Enhanced Observability delivers you out-of-the-box trends and patterns on your infrastructure health and removes the overhead of manual dashboard and alarm set-ups saving you time and effort. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch announces support for streaming of daily metrics on CloudWatch Metric Streams. With Metric Streams, you can create a continuous, near real-time stream of metrics to a destination of your choice. You can use Metric Streams to send metrics to your data lake on Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or AWS Partner solutions including Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace and Sumo Logic. This new capability provides additional metrics for streaming, adding daily metrics with timestamps up to two days old. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights now delivers enhanced observability for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with out-of-the-box detailed health and performance metrics, including container level EKS performance metrics, Kube-state metrics and EKS control plane metrics for faster problem isolation and troubleshooting. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch announces out-of-the box, best practice alarm recommendations for AWS service-vended metrics. It provides alarm recommendations and alarm configurations for key vended metrics, along with the ability to download pre-filled infrastructure-as-code templates for these alarms. Furthermore, you can now see in-line descriptions for AWS service metrics across the AWS console, which enables you to easily see metric details to help you troubleshoot or assess system health. View the full article

Starting today, we are introducing a new Amazon CloudWatch metric called Attached EBS Status Check to monitor if one or more Amazon EBS volumes attached to your EC2 instances are reachable and able to complete I/O operations. With this new metric, you can now quickly detect and respond to any EBS impairments that may potentially be impacting the performance of your applications running on Amazon EC2 instances. View the full article

You can now launch Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor directly from the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) console. Internet Monitor provides visibility into how internet issues impact the performance and availability for your application hosted on AWS. To use Internet Monitor, you create a monitor and associate it with one or more resources: VPCs, Network Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront distributions, or Amazon WorkSpaces directories. View the full article

Customers can now monitor and troubleshoot application environments that span multiple accounts (within a region) using Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights. CloudWatch Application Insights helps customers gain actionable insights for their application environments by making it easier for them to set up and monitor, recognize problems, and use data to make decisions. With this release, customers can analyze and correlate cross-account telemetry data and problems through a centralized view of the monitoring results across their accounts. View the full article

This week, I’m in Jakarta to support AWS User Group Indonesia and AWS Cloud Day Indonesia. Yesterday, I attended a community event – a collaboration between AWS User Group Indonesia and Hacktiv8 with “Innovating Yourself as Early-Stage Developers” as the main theme. We had a blast and I had a wonderful time connecting with speakers and developers. Next up, AWS Cloud Day Indonesia. I’ll be at the Developer Lounge, come and say hi! Last Week’s Launches Here are some of the launches that caught my attention last week: Add Your Swift Packages to AWS CodeArtifact – In this article, Seb describes how Swift developers who write code for Apple platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS or Swift) applications running on the server side can use AWS CodeArtifact to securely store and retrieve their package dependencies. What I really like is how developers can still use standard developer tools, such as Xcode, xcodebuild, and the Swift Package Manager (the swift package command) to interact with AWS CodeArtifact and facilitate integration into the development workflow. Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances Built on Apple Silicon M2 Pro Mac Mini Computers – Channy wrote how developers can use Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac to run memory intensive builds and test workloads, modernize their CI/CD and accelerate their product time to market. With 2x RAM, 1.5x CPU cores, and more than 2x GPU cores compared to EC2 M1 Mac instances, Apple developers can now run more tests in parallel using multiple Xcode simulators. Synthetics Python runtime version 2.0 for Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics – With Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, you can continually verify your customer experience and discover issues before your customers do by creating canaries. Canaries are configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. In this announcement, you can use Synthetics Python runtime version syn-python-selenium-2.0 to create canaries. Amazon QuickSight adds new layout and sparkline to KPI visual – Effortlessly design visually appealing KPIs on Amazon Quicksight with these new updates. Quicksight introduces a range of enhancements with user-friendly experience, including templated KPI layouts, support for sparklines, improvements in conditional formatting, and a revamped format pane. Amazon Location Services announces a price reduction of up to 75 percent for tracking and geofencing – Amazon Location Service just announced a four-tiered pricing model for tracking and geofencing to help you scale and cost-effectively run your operations and business. If you use geofencing, you might see your bill decrease by 20 percent to 70 percent, and tracking by up to 75 percent. Amazon Corretto 21 is now generally available – Happy news for Java developers. Amazon Coretto 21 with long term support (LTS) is generally available for Linux, Windows and macOS. AWS App Runner launches improvements for Auto-Scaling configuration management – Now you can use new APIs and parameters for AWS App Runner service to manage your App Runner services and define your auto-scaling configuration (ASC). For example, setting default ASC, update existing ASC and list all App Runner services that are using an ASC resource. Amazon SNS message data protection with redaction or masking – With Amazon SNS, now you can discover and protect certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). You can define your data protection policies and SNS will scan messages in real-time for sensitive data. Upcoming AWS and Community Events Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events: AWS On Tour – September 18 – October 6, AWS Cloud Day Indonesia – September 26, AWS Summit Johannesburg – September 26, CDK Day – September 29. And let’s learn from our fellow builders and join AWS Community Days: AWS Community Day Zimbabwe (Sept. 30), AWS Community Day Chile (Sept. 30), AWS Community Day Bulgaria Bulgaria (Oct. 7). Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days. Happy building! — Donnie This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS! View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch announces support of a new Metric Math function called DB_PERF_INSIGHTS() to create CloudWatch alarms and dashboards on Amazon RDS Performance Insights metrics. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces a new update to Synthetics Python runtime version syn-python-selenium-2.0 and recommends that customers migrate Synthetics canaries to the latest runtime version. Runtime version syn-python-selenium-2.0 includes updates to third-party dependency packages (Selenium v4.10.0 and Chromium v111.0.5563.146). View the full article

Looks like it is my turn once again to write the AWS Weekly Roundup. I wrote and published the first one on April 16, 2012 — just 4,165 short day ago! Last Week’s Launches Here are some of the launches that caught my eye last week: R7iz Instances – Optimized for high CPU performance and designed for your memory-intensive workloads, these instances are powered by the fastest 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable-based (Sapphire Rapids) instances in the cloud. They are available in eight sizes, with 2 to 128 vCPUs and 16 to 1024 GiB of memory, along with generous allocations of network and EBS bandwidth: vCPUs Memory (GiB) Network Bandwidth EBS Bandwidth r7iz.large 2 16 Up to 12.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps r7iz.xlarge 4 32 Up to 12.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps r7iz.2xlarge 8 64 Up to 12.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps r7iz.4xlarge 16 128 Up to 12.5 Gbps Up to 10 Gbps r7iz.8xlarge 32 256 12.5 Gbps 10 Gbps r7iz.12xlarge 48 384 25 Gbps 19 Gbps r7iz.16xlarge 64 512 25 Gbps 20 Gbps r7iz.32xlarge 128 1024 50 Gbps 40 Gbps As Veliswa shared in her post, the R7iz instances also include four built-in accelerators, and are available in two AWS regions. Amazon Connect APIs for View Resources – A new set of View APIs allows you to programmatically create and manage the view resources (UI templates) used in the step-by-step guides that are displayed in the agent’s UI. Daily Disbursements to Marketplace Sellers – Sellers can now set disbursement preferences and opt-in to receiving outstanding balances on a daily basis for increased flexibility, including the ability to match payments to existing accounting processes. Enhanced Error Handling for AWS Step Functions – You can now construct detailed error messages in Step Functions Fail states, and you can set a maximum limit on retry intervals. Amazon CloudWatch Logs RegEx Filtering – You can now use regular expressions in your Amazon CloudWatch Logs filter patterns. You can, for example, define a single filter that matches multiple IP subnets or HTTP status codes instead of having to use multiple filters, as was previously the case. Each filter pattern can have up to two regular expression patterns. Amazon SageMaker – There’s a new (and quick) Studio setup experience, support for Multi Model Endpoints for PyTorch, and the ability to use SageMaker’s geospatial capabilities on GPU-based instances when using Notebooks. X in Y – We launched existing services and instance types in new regions: ROSA in the Europe (Spain) Region. AWS NAT Gateway in the Los Angeles Local Zone us-west-2-lax-1a. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) email receiving service in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, London) Regions. IAM roles last used and last accessed in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Security Hub findings consolidation in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. C6id instances in the Europe (London) Region. Amazon Location Service in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, in the Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. M6i and R6i instances in the Europe (Zurich) Region. C6gd and R6gd instances in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. VPC DNS Query Logging in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Melbourne), Europe (Spain, Zurich), and Middle East (UAE) Regions. High Memory instances in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. Other AWS News Here are some other AWS updates and news: AWS Fundamentals – The second edition of this awesome book, AWS for the Real World, Not for Certifications, is now available. In addition to more than 400 pages that cover 16 vital AWS services, each chapter includes a detailed and attractive infographic. Here’s a small-scale sample: More posts from AWS blogs – Here are a few posts from some of the other AWS and cloud blogs that I follow: AWS DevOps Blog – Using AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit to provision multicloud resources. AWS Big Data Blog – Managing Amazon EBS volume throughput limits in Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. AWS Contact Center Blog – How contact center leaders can prepare for generative AI. AWS Desktop and Application Streaming Blog – Selecting the right AWS End User Computing service for your needs. AWS Containers Blog – Migrate existing Amazon ECS services from an internal Application Load Balancer to Amazon ECS Service Connect. AWS Community Builders – Level up your Lambda Game with Canary Deployments using SST. Cloudonaut – Self-hosted GitHub runners on AWS. Trek10 – How and When to Use Amazon EventBridge Pipes. Upcoming AWS Events Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events: AWS End User Computing Innovation Day, Sept. 13 – The one-day virtual event is designed to help IT teams tasked with providing the tools employees need to do their jobs, especially in today’s challenging times. Learn more. AWS Global Summits, Sept. 26 – The last in-person AWS Summit will be held in Johannesburg on Sept. 26th. You can also watch on-demand videos of the latest Summit events such as Berlin, Bogotá, Paris, Seoul, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington DC in the AWS YouTube channels. CDK Day, Sept. 29 – A community-led fully virtual event with tracks in English and Spanish about CDK and related projects. Learn more at the website. AWS re:Invent, Nov. 27-Dec. 1 – Ready to start planning your re:Invent? Browse the session catalog now. Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. AWS Community Days, multiple dates – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Munich (Sept. 14), Argentina (Sept. 16), Spain (Sept. 23), Peru (Sept. 30), and Chile (Sept. 30). Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days. You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay. — Jeff; This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS! View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, an outside-in monitoring capability to continually verify your customer experience even when you don’t have any customer traffic on your applications, introduced a new capability to create custom groups of canaries. By creating a group of canaries, you can track success/failure status at a group or application level yet with an easy drill down to the failing canary, making it easier to pinpoint the canary failures in the context of the group or application. When groups consist of canaries across multiple AWS regions, this new capability allows you to more easily isolate region-specific issues. View the full article

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, serverless, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service. View the full article

EC2 Auto Scaling now publishes predictive scaling policy’s forecasts as a CloudWatch metric, enabling you to analyze, monitor, and set alarms on the accuracy of predictive scaling. Predictive Scaling is a scaling policy that proactively increases the capacity of your Auto Scaling group ahead of predicted demand, improving the availability of your application while reducing the need to stay overprovisioned that otherwise would have increased your EC2 bill. As predictive scaling only increases the capacity for your Auto Scaling groups, applying it to your current scaling configurations strictly enhances your application availability. However, an inaccurate prediction can potentially increase your cost. Now, you can use the extensive list of CloudWatch features to measure accuracy of predictions, view forecasts using the familiar CloudWatch graphs, and also set automatic alarms and notifications when predictions are above your desired levels. View the full article

Amazon QuickSight now supports monitoring of QuickSight assets by sending metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. QuickSight developers and administrators can use these metrics to observe and respond to the availability and performance of their QuickSight ecosystem in near real time. They can monitor dataset ingestions, dashboards, and visuals to provide their readers with a consistent, performant, and uninterrupted experience on QuickSight. For more information, visit 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 your table-level storage costs through Amazon CloudWatch. View the full article

Amazon Lookout for Metrics announces the launch of backtesting when using Amazon CloudWatch as a data source connector. Backesting is a new anomaly detection mode you can now select when setting up your detector. You can seamlessly connect to your data in CloudWatch to set up a highly accurate anomaly detector across metrics, dimensions, and namespaces of your choice. Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies (outliers from the norm) without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon CloudWatch provides you with actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch now supports AWS Elemental MediaTailor logs as part of Vended Logs. Vended logs are specific AWS service logs natively published by AWS services on behalf of the customer and available at volume discount pricing. View the full article

Today, we are announcing the availability of Amazon CloudWatch metrics for usage monitoring on AWS Config. AWS Config tracks changes made to supported resources and records them as configuration items (CIs), which are then delivered to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Amazon CloudWatch metrics is a monitoring service which provides data about the usage of your systems, including the ability to search, graph, and build alarms on metrics about AWS resources. With this release, you can now use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to verify your setup and understand your usage of AWS Config. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch is introducing enhancements to the console experience, which improve dashboard data visualizations and console navigation. The enhancements include new dashboard widgets as well as more options to access frequently used dashboards, log groups and alarms. View the full article

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports deletion of underlying canary resources along with the canary deletion. When you delete a canary you can choose whether to also delete related resources created by the canary, thus making canary resources management easier and efficient. Synthetics canaries that run on a defined frequency to monitor the health and performance of your endpoints and APIs creates these resources as part of canary creation step. View the full article