This week at AWS
Let’s continue with our weekly appointment to discover the new services and new features released by AWS this week:
Amazon Connect launches historical actuals in the forecasting UI
Amazon Connect now enables contact center managers to view historical contact volumes and average handling time (AHT) in the forecasting UI. This new feature is part of Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling (preview) that helps contact center managers predict contact volumes and AHT, determine optimal staffing levels, and plan agent schedules to ensure they have the right agents at the right time. The ability to view historical contact volumes in the forecasting UI provides a quick way for contact center managers to identify any abnormality within forecasts and actuals.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/08/amazon-connect-historical-actuals-forecasting-ui/
AWS Support launches a new AWS Support Center console domain
AWS Support launches a new AWS Support Center console URL https://support.console.aws.amazon.com/. Using this new URL ensures you can always contact AWS Support via the AWS Support Center Console, which is built using the latest architecture standards for high availability and region redundancy.
AWS Application Migration Service now supports automated tagging for MAP 2.0 credits
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) now supports automatically tagging your migrated resources for AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) 2.0 credits for general workloads. AWS Application Migration Service allows you to quickly migrate and modernize applications on AWS. MAP 2.0 is a comprehensive program that offers tools, services, guidance, training, and incentives to accelerate cloud migration and modernization and helps offset initial migration costs.
Bottlerocket is now available in Amazon Web Services China Regions
Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed to run container workloads, is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.
Amazon OpenSearch Service now includes advanced log and application analytics
Amazon OpenSearch Service, with the availability of OpenSearch 1.3., now gives customers the ability to organize their logs, traces and visualizations in an application-centric view. Customers can also benefit from enhanced log monitoring support with live tailing of logs, the ability to see surrounding log data, and the ability to do powerful ad-hoc analysis of unformatted log data at query time.
Amazon QuickSight launches new base maps for geospatial visualizations
QuickSight Authors can now customize the look and feel of their maps by changing to any of the new base maps supported by Amazon QuickSight. * Streets — Authors can now add location details with streets base map. This base map emphasizes legible styling for highways, major roads, minor roads, railways, water features, cities, parks, landmarks, building footprints, and administrative boundaries.
* Dark gray canvas — Authors can now choose between light (existing base) and dark (new) gray canvas letting them align maps to the overall style of the dashboard. With minimal colors, labels, and features, dark gray canvas base map is designed to draw attention to your data.
* Imagery — Authors can choose to add more visual context to their map by choosing the Imagery base map. The satellite view of the world will help authors increase the understanding of the location data.
Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports enforcing SSL/TLS connections
Amazon RDS for MySQL supports encrypted SSL/TLS connections to the database instances. Starting today, you can enforce SSL/TLS client connections to your RDS for MySQL database instance for enhanced transport layer security. To enforce SSL/TLS, simply enable the require_secure_transport parameter (disabled by default) through the Amazon RDS Management Console, the AWS CLI or the API. When the require_secure_transport parameter is enabled, a database client will be able to connect to the RDS for MySQL instance only if it can establish an encrypted connection. To learn more about enforcing encrypted client connections using require_secure_transport parameter, please refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide.
AWS Training and Certification announces AWS Skill Builder subscriptions
AWS Training and Certification announces AWS Skill Builder subscriptions to help learners and organizations advance cloud skills with exclusive, self-paced, digital training. According to the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report, 76% of IT decision-makers report an IT skills gap, up from 31% in 2016. Gartner predicts global public cloud spending will grow 22% in 2022, from $396 billion to $482 billion. This demand creates cloud career opportunities for learners, and AWS Training and Certification can support their journey. To help close the IT skills gap, we have expanded our Skill Builder free offering of 500+ self-paced training courses to also offer Individual and Team subscriptions that provide hands-on, real-world learning content, created by AWS experts.
AWS Amplify Flutter announces web and desktop support (Developer Preview) for Authentication
AWS Amplify is announcing a developer preview to expand Flutter support to web and desktop, starting with the Authentication category. With this release, developers can use Amplify to create new Flutter apps that support web and desktop in addition to mobile platforms. Developers can also extend existing mobile Amplify Flutter projects to support web and desktop.
Now in Preview — Amazon WorkSpaces Integration with SAML 2.0
We are happy to announce the preview of Amazon WorkSpaces integration with SAML 2.0. WorkSpaces is a fully managed desktop virtualization service for Windows and Linux that enables you to access resources from any supported device. As an administrator, you can now enable SAML 2.0 authentication on your WorkSpaces directory to control end user access to desktops by using your SAML 2.0 identity provider (IdP).
Amazon Connect schedule adherence, now available in preview.
Amazon Connect now includes the ability to report on agent schedule adherence, adding to the existing forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling capabilities already in preview. With schedule adherence, you can measure how closely agents follow their planned schedule, providing insights that help you take action to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. For example, if agents were busier than expected, supervisors can use Amazon Connect schedule adherence to identify agents who forgot to take their breaks and remind them do so in the future to maintain performance and avoid burn out.
Build AWS Config rules using AWS CloudFormation Guard
AWS Config now supports an easier way to author custom AWS Config rules using AWS CloudFormation Guard (cfn-guard). With this release, users with limited programming experience can use Guard to define and review custom policies that check your resources have desired configurations. AWS Config rules are a way of creating and implementing compliance policies against resource configurations. Currently, AWS Config offers both managed rules, which AWS builds and maintains to meet common compliance use cases, and custom rules, which users create to meet their specific compliance needs. Guard is an open source tool offering policy-as-code, such that users can define policies to validate JSON- or YAML-formatted data using a domain-specific language (DSL).
Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports April 2022 patch set update (PSU) for 12.1 and release updates (RU) for 19c & 21c
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports the April 2022 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1 and Release Updates (RU) for Oracle Database 19c and 21c.
Announcing Amazon Pinpoint toll-free number registration workflow
Today we added features to the AWS console to help users register their toll-free numbers. In an effort to curb spam SMS and calling, United States toll-free numbers now must be registered with carriers. A new workflow will now enable Amazon Pinpoint users to submit a toll-free number registration directly from the AWS console in a few easy steps.
VM Import/Export now supports Windows 11
VM Import/Export now supports migration of virtual machines that use Windows 11 operating system on AWS and launch instances using the imported images on EC2 Dedicated Hosts, and EC2 Dedicated Instances.
AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET now provides automated refactoring recommendations
AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET simplifies the process of refactoring older monolithic applications into smaller code projects to build a microservices-based architecture. Modernize and transform your applications with an assistive tool that analyzes source code and runtime metrics to create a visual representation of your application and its dependencies. With Microservice Extractor providing automated recommendations, developers get guided experience to refactor legacy applications. Instead of the developer needing to identify and group classes in source code manually for extraction, Microservice Extractor now identifies common extraction candidates using heuristics-based techniques, and highlights those in visualization. These recommendations can be used as is or used as a starting point to extract microservices off of monolithic codebase. Thus, automated recommendations from Microservice Extractor helps to speed up refactoring large applications even if the developer is unfamiliar with the codebase.
AWS Security Hub now supports cross-Region aggregation of findings in AWS GovCloud (US)
AWS Security Hub now allows you to designate an aggregation Region in AWS GovCloud (US) and link some or all regions to that aggregation region. This gives you a centralized view of all your security findings across your accounts and linked regions. After you link a region to the aggregation region, your findings are continuously synchronized between the regions. Any update to a finding in a linked region is replicated to the aggregation region, and any update to a finding in the aggregation region is replicated to the linked region where the finding originated.
Announcing the availability of license included Microsoft Visual Studio Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon EC2
AWS now offers fully-compliant, Amazon-provided licenses for Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 and Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). These AMIs are now available on the Amazon EC2 console and on AWS Marketplace, to launch instances on-demand without any long-term licensing commitments. Amazon EC2 provides a broach choice of instances and you not only have the flexibility of paying for what your end users use, you can also provide the capacity and right hardware to your end-users. For enterprises that employ large teams of contractors, you can easily provision standardized development machines managed by your IT with no compromises on security and compliance.
AWS Secrets Manager connections now support the latest hybrid post-quantum TLS with Kyber
Connections to AWS Secrets Manager now support hybrid post-quantum key establishment using Kyber for transport layer security (TLS) from Round 3 of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) selection process. This allows you to measure the potential performance impact of the post-quantum algorithm. You can also benefit from the longer-term confidentiality afforded by hybrid post-quantum TLS.
Amazon CloudWatch metrics increases throughput by 150x
Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics now supports a 50x higher capacity allowing you to send up to 1,000 metrics per call at a 3x faster default call rate and specify 3x more dimensions (up to 30) per metric. Customers rely on CloudWatch custom metrics to capture application-specific data that complements the automatic metrics provided by CloudWatch based on the AWS services you are using. With these improvements, customers can send the same volume of data with fewer API requests, leading to reduced costs.
AWS Compute Optimizer is now available in 5 additional AWS Regions
We’re excited to announce the general availability of AWS Compute Optimizer in 5 additional regions — Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), and Europe (Milan).
AWS Comprehend lowers annotation limits for training custom entity recognition models
Amazon Comprehend is making it easier for customers to get started with custom entity recognition by reducing the annotation requirements for training their models. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that provides APIs to extract key phrases, contextual entities, events, and sentiment from text. Entities refer to things in your document such as people, places, organizations, credit card numbers, and so on. Custom entity recognition (CER) in Amazon Comprehend enables you to train models with entities unique to your business in just a few easy steps. You can identify almost any kind of entity, simply by providing a sufficient number of details to train your model effectively.
AWS Lookout for Metrics announcing increased quota from 50K to 500K metrics
Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to automatically monitor the metrics critical to your businesses with greater speed and accuracy than traditional methods used for anomaly detection. The service makes it easier to diagnose the root cause of anomalies such as unexpected dips in revenue, high rates of abandoned shopping carts, spikes in payment transaction failures, increases in new user sign-ups, and many more.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports new minor versions 14.3, 13.7, 12.11, 11.16, and 10.21
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports PostgreSQL minor versions 14.3, 13.7, 12.11, 11.16, and 10.21. We recommend you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the PostgreSQL community. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement for more details about the release.
Amazon ElastiCache now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4g, M6g, R6g instances in the Europe (Paris, Milan) regions and R6gd instances in the Europe (Paris) region
Amazon ElastiCache now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4g, M6g and R6g node types in the Europe (Paris) and Europe (Milan) regions. Customers choose Amazon ElastiCache for workloads that require blazing-fast performance with sub-millisecond latency and high throughput. Now, with Graviton2 T4g, M6g and R6g instances, customers can enjoy up to a 45% price/performance improvement over previous generation instances.
Amazon QuickSight launches API-based domain allow listing for developers to scale embedded analytics across different applications
Amazon QuickSight now supports API-based allow listing of domains where QuickSight data visualizations can be embedded. With this new capability, developers can scale their embedded analytics offerings including visuals, dashboards, QuickSight Q (natural language querying), and authoring experience across different applications for their different customers quickly. All of this is done without any infrastructure setup or management, while scaling to millions of users. For further details, visit the blog and the documentation.
AWS Data Exchange increases the asset size limit to 100GB
Third-party data providers on AWS Data Exchange can now import Amazon S3 assets up to 100GB in size, an increase from the former limit of 10GB. The increased asset size unlocks new use cases in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Retail among other industries, because providers can now license genomics data, high volume financial data, and satellite imagery, which are often stored as assets that exceed 10GB.
Amazon Keyspaces is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
AWS Lambda announces tiered pricing
AWS Lambda now provides tiered pricing for monthly Lambda function duration i.e. GB-Seconds of usage. The two additional pricing tiers provide discounts on your aggregate monthly on-demand function duration. Tiered pricing takes effect in the monthly billing cycle starting on Aug 1st, 2022.
AWS IoT Core launches a new device provisioning console experience
AWS IoT Core now offers a new device provisioning console experience that enables customers a more intuitive way to select the best provisioning option for their IoT solution. You can now more easily navigate the device provisioning scenarios and follow a simple flow to create a provisioning template and configure permissions for a single or many devices. The updated user interface also gives you access to documentation, product information, and resources to assist you in choosing, creating, and managing your device provisioning flows in the same place.
