This week at AWS
We are close to mid-August, many are already on vacation, others will go there shortly but AWS continues to work to release new services and features for its customers. Here are the news for this week:
AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 C6g, C6gd, and M6gd are now available in additional regions
Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6g and C6gd instances are available in Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. Additionally, M6gd instances are now available in Europe (Stockholm) region. C6g and C6gd instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. M6gd instances are ideal for general purpose applications such as application servers, microservices, mid-size data stores, and caching fleets. C6gd and M6gd instances offer up to 50% more NVMe storage GB/vCPU over comparable x86-based instances and are ideal for applications that need high-speed, low latency local storage.
AWS IoT Greengrass v2 updates Stream Manager to report new telemetry metrics and more
AWS IoT Greengrass is an Internet of Things (IoT) edge runtime and cloud service that helps customers build, deploy, and manage device software. We are excited to announce our version 2.7 release with the following features: * System Telemetry Enhancements — The Stream Manager agent component now has the ability (enabled by default) to send system telemetry metrics to Amazon EventBridge. System telemetry data is diagnostic data that can help you monitor the performance of critical operations on your AWS IoT Greengrass core devices. You can create projects and applications to retrieve, analyze, transform, and report telemetry data from your edge devices. Domain experts, such as process engineers, can use these applications to gain insights into their fleet health based on device data uploaded through Stream Manager to AWS Services such as Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS IoT Analytics, AWS IoT SiteWise, and more. For more information, see Gathering System Telemetry section in the developer guide.
* Local Deployment Improvements — The new improvements now enable AWS IoT Greengrass nucleus to send near real time deployment status updates to AWS IoT Greengrass cloud service. For instance, using the ListInstalledComponents API, customers can now observe the status of locally deployed components for a connected device.
* Additional Support for Client Certificates — Certificate signed by a custom certificate authority (CA), where the CA isn’t registered with AWS IoT, is now supported. This allows customer the flexibility to use a custom certificate authority that is not registered with AWS IoT. To use this feature, you can set the new greengrassDataPlaneEndpoint configuration option to iotdata. For more information, see Use a device certificate signed by a private CA.
Amazon QuickSight launches redesigned dashboard experience
Amazon QuickSight launched a new look and feel for the dashboard experience. The new interface enhances the reader experience by improving the discoverability, predictability, and the overall polish of the dashboards. The new dashboard experience includes: * Simplified toolbar with updated icons for key actions for better visual clarity
* Discoverable visual menu visible on-hover to improve the discoverability of drills, export, and filter restatements
* New controls, menu, and submenus to provide a better visual experience
* Non-blocking right pane for secondary experiences like filters, threshold alerts, and downloads to improve focus on the content of the dashboard
Amazon S3 adds a new policy condition key to require or restrict server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C)
The new Amazon S3 condition key enables you to write policies that help you control the use of server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C). Using Amazon S3 condition keys, you can specify conditions when granting permissions in the optional ‘Condition’ element of a bucket or an IAM policy. One such condition is to require server-side encryption (SSE) using your preferred encryption method.
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports DML query auditing with Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.
Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle now supports promotion of managed in-region read replica
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for Oracle now supports the promotion of a managed replica that was created using the replica function. When you promote a managed replica, it is converted from a physical standby database and activated as a standalone read/write primary database instance.
AWS Direct Connect expands AWS Transit Gateway support at more connection speeds
AWS Direct Connect now supports connections to AWS Transit Gateway at speeds of 500 megabits per second (Mbps) and lower, providing more cost-effective choices for Transit Gateway users when higher speed connections are not required. With this change, customers using Direct Connect at connection speeds of 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 Mbps can now can connect to their Transit Gateway.
AWS Glue now supports Flex execution option
AWS Glue now supports a new execution option that allows customers to reduce the costs of their pre-production, test, and non-urgent data integration workloads by up to 34%. With Flex, Glue jobs run on spare capacity in AWS.
Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports sharing of pipeline entities across accounts
You can now use Amazon SageMaker Model Building Pipelines with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to securely share pipeline entities across AWS accounts and access shared pipelines through direct API calls. A multi-account strategy helps achieve data, project, and team isolation while supporting software development lifecycle steps. Cross-account pipeline sharing can support a multi-account strategy without the added hassle of logging in and out of multiple accounts. For example, cross-account pipeline sharing can improve machine learning testing and deployment workflows by sharing resources across staging and production accounts.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports PostgreSQL 11 and In-Place upgrade from PostgreSQL 10
Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports PostgreSQL major version 11. PostgreSQL 11 includes improvements to partitioning, parallelism, and performance enhancements such as faster column additions with a non-null default.
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports the Decimal128 data type
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.
Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports alternate SageMaker training instance types for more robust tuning
Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports specifying multiple alternate SageMaker training instance types to make tuning jobs more robust when the preferred instance type is not available due to insufficient capacity.
Amazon SageMaker Canvas expands capabilities to better prepare and analyze data for machine learning
We’re excited to announce expanded capabilities for data preparation and analysis in Amazon SageMaker Canvas including replacing missing values, replacing outliers, and the flexibility to choose different sample sizes for your datasets. Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a visual point-and-click interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate ML predictions on their own — without requiring any machine learning (ML) experience or having to write a single line of code. SageMaker Canvas makes it easy to access and combine data from a variety of sources, automatically clean data, and build ML models to generate accurate predictions with a few clicks.
Amazon EBS adds the ability to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance
In May 2019, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) launched the ability for customers to take crash-consistent snapshots of all Amazon EBS volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance with a single API call. Now you can choose to take crash-consistent snapshots of a subset of Amazon EBS data volumes attached to an Amazon EC2 instance. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate taking crash-consistent snapshots of the same subset of Amazon EBS volumes on a retention schedule defined by DLM policies.
Introducing the AWS Transfer Family Delivery Program
We are excited to announce the new AWS Transfer Family Delivery Program for AWS Partners that help customers build sophisticated Managed File Transfer (MFT) and Business-to-Business (B2B) file exchange solutions with AWS Transfer Family. AWS Transfer Family enables you to migrate, automate, and monitor your file transfer workflows into and out of Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS using the SFTP, AS2, FTPS, and FTP protocols. With your data in AWS, you can leverage a rich set of data analytics and processing services. AWS Transfer Family is the only fully managed cloud-native file transfer service currently available, enabling AWS Partners to build customized, validated solutions such as integrating the customer’s identity provider of choice, enhancing file transfer monitoring, and securing endpoints.
Application Insights adds AppRegistry support and faster problem reporting
AWS has further enhanced the monitoring set up experience through Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights’ integration with AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry. With this feature, you can now easily select a registered AWS application or register a new one with AppRegistry directly from Application Insights and automatically set up monitoring for the newly registered applications. Registered applications are available for other services that make use of registered applications so you can seamlessly interact with your applications in these AWS services as well.
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for Cost Explorer service
AWS Console Mobile Application users can now use AWS Cost Explorer on both the iOS and Android applications. The Console Mobile Application provides a secure on-the-go solution to visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time. Customers can analyze total costs and usage across all regions and services for preceding eight weeks, identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies.
Amazon AppFlow now supports data transfers from SAP applications to AWS Services using SAP Operational Data Provisioning (ODP)
Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in just a few clicks, now supports data transfers from SAP applications to AWS Services using SAP Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) framework. With this launch AppFlow customers can use the AppFlow SAP OData connector to perform full and incremental data transfers, including Change Data Capture using SAP Operational Delta Queue, from SAP ERP/BW applications (including ECC, BW, BW/4HANA and S/4HANA) to AWS services such as Amazon S3.
Amazon EventBridge now supports receiving events from GitHub, Stripe and Twilio using Webhooks
Amazon EventBridge now supports integrations with GitHub, Stripe, and Twilio via webhooks using Quicks Starts. You can subscribe to events from these SaaS applications and receive them on an Amazon EventBridge event bus for further processing. With Quick Starts, you can use AWS CloudFormation templates to create HTTP endpoints for your event bus that are configured with security best practices for GitHub, Stripe, and Twilio. You can configure your GitHub, Stripe, and Twilio webhooks from the respective accounts; simply select the types of events you want to send to the newly generated endpoint and begin securely receiving events on your event bus.
Introducing the AWS Supply Chain Competency Partner Program
We are excited to announce the new AWS Supply Chain Competency, featuring top AWS Partners who provide cloud-native supply chain solutions on AWS and professional services for companies of every size and segment to enhance their responsiveness to customers, increase the speed of decision making and operation through automation and AI, strengthen their resilience to disruptions and become more responsible to the environment and global community.
Amazon Location Service now supports circular geofences
Amazon Location Service now supports circular geofences, allowing developers to draw virtual boundaries by specifying a point and a radius on a map. Developers can use Amazon Location geofencing to initiate actions when devices enter or leave a specific area of interest by evaluating positions against tens of thousands of geofences in near-real time.
Amazon AppFlow now supports Zendesk Chat and Zendesk Sell as sources
Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in just a few clicks, now supports Zendesk Chat and Zendesk Sell as sources.
Amazon Cognito enables native support for AWS WAF
You can now enable AWS WAF protections for Amazon Cognito, making it even easier to protect Amazon Cognito user pools and hosted UI from common web exploits.
Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.23
You can now use Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro to run Kubernetes version 1.23. Highlights of Kubernetes version 1.23 release include graduation of PodSecurity and Ephemeral containers to beta, and graduation of HorizontalPodAutoscaler to GA. Additionally, Kubernetes version 1.23 turns on CSI migration feature for Amazon EBS by default. You can find more details about Kubernetes 1.23 release in the EKS blog post, EKS release notes, and in the Kubernetes project release notes. Support for version 1.23 will be available in Amazon EKS Anywhere in the next couple of weeks.
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics adds support for custom canary groups with group-level availability metrics
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.
AWS Private 5G is now generally available
Today, we are announcing the general availability of AWS Private 5G, a managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months. With only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can specify where to build a mobile network and the number of devices you want to connect. AWS then delivers and maintains the small cell radio unit, the mobile network core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private mobile network and connect devices. AWS Private 5G automates the setup and deployment of the network. No upfront fees or per-device costs are incurred with AWS Private 5G, and you pay only for the network capacity that you request.
