Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
As we find ourselves in the midst of the re:Invent conference and the upcoming year-end festivities, I anticipated a slowdown in announcements and updates, but the reality is quite the opposite. Our teams remain dedicated to your feedback, continuously rolling out new features and enhancements.
This week, several updates stood out to me. Here’s a brief overview:
AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon EC2
The AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon EC2 has undergone a redesign, offering a more streamlined, consistent, and efficient tool for estimating costs. It now includes a feature for bulk cost estimation for EC2 instances, Dedicated Hosts, and Amazon EBS services. Give it a try today.
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights alarms now allow you to set alarms for entire fleets of dynamically changing resources, like auto-scaling EC2 instances, with a single alarm using standard SQL queries. For instance, you can execute a query like this to gather CPU utilization data across your dynamic fleet of EC2 instances:
SELECT AVG(CPUUtilization) FROM SCHEMA("AWS/EC2", InstanceId)AWS Amplify Updates
AWS Amplify, a command line tool and library suite for building web and mobile apps connected to cloud backends, has released Amplify Library for Android 2.0, which simplifies user authentication. Additionally, the Amplify JavaScript library version 5 offers enhancements for React and React Native developers, including a new in-app messaging feature that allows contextual messages based on user behavior. The Amplify JavaScript library also saw improvements that reduce overall bundle and installation sizes.
Amazon Connect Enhancements
Amazon Connect has introduced granular access control based on resource tags for routing profiles, security profiles, users, and queues, along with bulk import capabilities for user hierarchy tags. This enables attribute-based access control policies for Amazon Connect resources.
Amazon RDS Proxy
Now supporting PostgreSQL major version 14, Amazon RDS Proxy is a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon RDS, enhancing application scalability, resilience to database failures, and security. It’s particularly beneficial for serverless applications that may have numerous open connections to the database, which can deplete resources.
AWS Gateway Load Balancer
AWS Gateway Load Balancer endpoints have added support for IPv6 addresses, allowing you to route IPv6 traffic through Gateway Load Balancers and distribute it to dual stack appliance targets.
Amazon Location Service
Amazon Location Service has expanded its offerings to include Open Data Maps alongside ESRI and Here maps. I also noticed Amazon is a founding member of the newly established Overture Maps Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation. This foundation aims to create new map products using openly available datasets for various applications and businesses. The initiative is led by AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom.
AWS Mainframe Modernization
AWS Mainframe Modernization provides a suite of managed tools for migrating, modernizing, and running mainframe applications. It is now accessible in three additional AWS Regions and supports AWS CloudFormation, AWS PrivateLink, and AWS Key Management Service.
Regional Expansions
In the “X in Y” section started by Jeff, which highlights the expansion of services to new Regions, we observed 11 regional expansions this week:
- Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now available in the South America (São Paulo) Region
- Amazon Neptune Serverless has been launched in 5 additional AWS Regions
- Amazon Location Service is now accessible in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), Europe (London), and South America (São Paulo)
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
- Amazon QuickSight is now available in the Stockholm and Paris Regions
- Amazon EC2 C6id, M6id, and R6id, along with M6a and C6a, are now offered in more Regions
- Amazon Kendra is now available in Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Region
- Amazon MQ is now accessible 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 AWS China (Ningxia) Regions
- Amazon GuardDuty is now in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
Other AWS News
In other AWS news this week:
- Amazon SageMaker celebrated its 5th anniversary 🎉🎂. You can read the initial blog post we published at that time. To commemorate this milestone, Amazon Science released an article featuring insights from AWS VP Bratin Saha, reflecting on the past and future of AWS machine learning and AI services.
- The security blog published a comprehensive post about the Cedar policy language, explaining how Amazon Verified Permissions offers a pre-built, flexible permissions system that enables you to create permissions based on both ABAC and RBAC in your applications. Cedar policy language is also integral to Amazon Verified Access, which I discussed during re:Invent.
- As always, my fantastic colleague Ricardo has published the latest open-source newsletter.
Upcoming AWS Events
Mark your calendars for these upcoming AWS events:
- Recaps of AWS re:Invent will be taking place in various locations. During re:Invent week, we had numerous announcements, and in the coming weeks, you can find a recap of all these launches near you. Be sure to check the events posted on this site regularly.
- AWS re:Invent keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions are now available on demand. I encourage you to explore the playlists and find discussions on your favorite topics.
- The AWS Summits season will recommence in Q2 2023. Dates and locations will be announced here.
Stay Informed
That wraps up my selection for this week! Just a heads up – the Week in Review will take a brief hiatus for the holidays, but we will resume regular updates starting January 9, 2023. To stay updated on all the latest news, don’t forget to check out the following resources:
- What’s New with AWS – All AWS announcements. You can add the RSS feed to your news reader.
- The Official AWS Podcast – Tune in weekly for updates on the latest AWS news and insightful discussions on exciting use cases. There are also official AWS podcasts available in languages such as French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
- AWS News Blog – This blog.
- If you are considering a career change, check out this informative blog post about providing two weeks notice.
- For insights into employee benefits, you can refer to the authority on this topic.
- Also, if you are looking for employment opportunities, this is an excellent resource.
— Chanci
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Be sure to return each week for a quick summary of noteworthy news and announcements from AWS!