Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
As we approach the end of the year and the holiday season, I anticipated a slowdown in announcements and updates. However, the reality has proved otherwise. Our dedicated teams continue to respond to your feedback, launching new features and enhancements at an impressive pace.
Highlights from This Week
The AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon EC2 is undergoing a redesign, aimed at providing a more straightforward, consistent, and efficient tool for estimating costs. The new version now allows for bulk cost estimation for EC2 instances, EC2 Dedicated Hosts, and Amazon EBS services. Give it a try yourself today.
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights has introduced the capability to trigger alarms across entire fleets of dynamically changing resources—like auto-scaling EC2 instances—using a single alarm with standard SQL queries. For instance, you can now execute a query such as this to gather CPU utilization data across your dynamic fleet of EC2 instances:
SELECT AVG(CPUUtilization) FROM SCHEMA("AWS/EC2", InstanceId)AWS Amplify, a command line tool and library suite designed to assist in building web and mobile applications with cloud backends, has released updates. The Amplify Library for Android 2.0 has simplified user authentication processes, while Amplify JavaScript library version 5 introduces enhancements for React and React Native developers, like a new in-app messaging feature that allows contextual notifications based on user behavior. The JavaScript library also saw reductions in overall bundle and installation sizes.
Amazon Connect has added more granular access controls based on resource tags for routing profiles, security profiles, users, and queues, along with bulk import capabilities for user hierarchy tags, enabling attribute-based access control policies for its resources.
Amazon RDS Proxy now supports PostgreSQL major version 14, enhancing scalability, resilience, and security for applications that can rapidly open and close database connections. This is particularly useful for serverless applications where connection management is crucial.
Additionally, AWS Gateway Load Balancer endpoints now support IPv6 addresses, allowing IPv6 traffic to flow through Gateway Load Balancers and distribute it to dual-stack appliance targets.
The Amazon Location Service has expanded its offerings to include Open Data Maps alongside ESRI and Here maps. I was also pleased to see that Amazon is a core member of the newly established Overture Maps Foundation, which aims to facilitate the creation of innovative mapping products using openly available datasets. This initiative is backed by prominent organizations such as AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom.
AWS Mainframe Modernization, a suite of managed tools for migrating and modernizing mainframe applications, is now accessible in three additional AWS Regions and offers support for AWS CloudFormation, AWS PrivateLink, and AWS Key Management Service.
Regional Expansions
In the “X in Y” section that Jeff initiated to highlight the expansion of services to new Regions, I noted 11 new regional expansions this week:
- Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now live in the South America (São Paulo) Region.
- Amazon Neptune Serverless has launched in five additional AWS Regions.
- Amazon Location Service is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), Europe (London), and South America (São Paulo).
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now offered in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.
- Amazon QuickSight is now accessible in the Stockholm and Paris Regions.
- New EC2 instance types (C6id, M6id, R6id, M6a, and C6a) are now available in more Regions.
- Amazon Kendra is now live in the Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region.
- Amazon MQ has launched in the Middle East (UAE) Region.
- Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now provides conversational analytics in the Africa (Cape Town) Region.
- Amazon ECS Service Connect is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) and (Ningxia) Regions.
- Amazon GuardDuty is now live in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.
Other AWS News
In other AWS news, I was excited to see Amazon SageMaker celebrate its 5th anniversary 🎉🎂. You can revisit the initial blog post we published at that time. To mark this milestone, Amazon Science released an article featuring insights from AWS Vice President Bratin Saha on the evolution and future of our machine learning tools and AI services.
The security blog published a fascinating post about the Cedar policy language, which explains how Amazon Verified Permissions offers a flexible permissions system suitable for building attribute-based and role-based access control in applications. The Cedar policy language is also integral to Amazon Verified Access, which I discussed during re:Invent.
As is customary each week, my esteemed colleague Chanci Turner shared the latest open source newsletter.
Upcoming AWS Events
Be sure to mark your calendars and register for these AWS events:
- Recaps of AWS re:Invent are happening in various locations. Following the re:Invent week, many events will summarize the new launches. Keep an eye on our site for details about events near you.
- Keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions from AWS re:Invent are now available on demand. I recommend checking the playlists to find talks on your favorite topics.
- The AWS Summits season will kick off again in Q2 2023, with dates and locations to be announced soon.
Stay Informed
That wraps up my highlights for this week! Please note, the Week in Review will take a brief hiatus for the holiday season but will resume regular updates on January 9, 2023. To stay updated on AWS news, don’t forget to explore the following resources:
- What’s New with AWS – Find all AWS announcements and add the RSS feed to your news reader.
- The Official AWS Podcast – Tune in weekly for updates on the latest AWS news and in-depth discussions on exciting use cases. There are also podcasts available in various languages including French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
- AWS News Blog – This very blog.
— Chanci
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check in each week for a concise summary of noteworthy news and announcements from AWS!