2025 - Week 2 (6 Jan - 12 Jan)

Amazon Connect Contact Lens launches agent performance evaluations for email contacts

Published Date: 2025-01-10 20:00:00

You can now evaluate agent performance on emails in Amazon Connect, enabling managers to assess agent performance across contact channels (voice, chat, email, and tasks) in a single easy-to-use web interface, and get aggregated insights across cohorts of agents over time. With this launch, managers can evaluate agent performance by reviewing email threads and additional details of the email interaction (e.g., handle time) in a single UI. Contact centers can also use public APIs to incorporate data from third-party systems (e.g., CSAT, sales volumes, customer retention, etc.) into performance evaluations of email contacts, providing managers with comprehensive insights on agent performance. This feature is available in all regions where Contact Lens performance evaluations is already available. To learn more, please visit our documentation and our webpage. For information about Contact Lens pricing, please visit our pricing page.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB supports Innovation Release 11.7 in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Published Date: 2025-01-10 18:00:00

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB Innovation Release 11.7 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the latest Innovation Release on Amazon RDS for MariaDB. You can deploy MariaDB 11.7 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment that has the benefits of a fully managed database, making it simpler to set up, operate, and monitor databases. MariaDB 11.7 is the latest Innovation Release from the MariaDB community, and includes support for vector datatype, indexing, and search capabilities. MariaDB Innovation releases are supported by the community until the next Innovation release, whereas MariaDB Long Term Maintenance Releases, such as MariaDB 10.11 and MariaDB 11.4, are supported by the community for up to five years. Please refer to the MariaDB 11.7 release notes for more details about this release. The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.

AWS End User Messaging expands self-service sender ID registration support in 19 new countries

Published Date: 2025-01-10 18:00:00

Today, AWS End User Messaging launched self-service Sender ID registrations for 19 additional countries, helping developers correctly configure SMS messaging for their applications. The new countries include Australia, Belarus, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Zambia. Phone numbers and sender IDs act as an extension of a business's brand, and mobile carriers and governments worldwide have implemented SMS registrations as a form of "know your customer" check to protect end-users from unwanted and spam messages. By registering, application developers ensure a higher level of deliverability and ensure their use-cases comply with local rules and regulations, avoiding message filtering. Previously, customers needed to open a support case to request these sender IDs, but now they can self-service via the AWS Management Console or programmatically via the APIs, saving time-to-onboard. The registration support is available in all commercial regions where AWS End User Messaging is generally available. ?

AWS CodeBuild now supports batch builds with reserved capacity and Lambda compute

Published Date: 2025-01-10 18:00:00

AWS CodeBuild has expanded its batch build capabilities to include support for reserved capacity fleets and Lambda compute. This enhancement allows you to select a mix of on-demand instances, reserved capacity fleets, or Lambda compute resources for your build batches. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. Batch builds in CodeBuild enable the simultaneous execution of multiple, coordinated builds within a project. This feature is particularly beneficial for developers working on multi-platform projects or those with interdependent build processes. You can define the build sequence using various methods, such as a build list, a build matrix, or a dependency graph of build definitions. CodeBuild then manages the orchestration of these builds, streamlining the overall development and integration process. The new compute options are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Frankfurt). For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page. To learn more about running batch builds in CodeBuild, please visit our documentation. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page. ?

AWS Marketplace launches disbursement pause notifications

Published Date: 2025-01-09 22:00:00

AWS Marketplace launched email notification and Amazon EventBridge event that informs AWS Marketplace selling partners, including ISVs and Channel Partners, when their disbursements have been paused due to invalid bank account information. With this launch, selling partners can be alerted to these events and take immediate action to update their banking details so they receive their disbursements promptly. Until now, AWS Marketplace selling partners had to check disbursement status in Insights tab in AMMP. With this release, disbursement paused events that are caused by invalid bank accounts will be sent to Amazon EventBridge and AWS Marketplace sellers can subscribe to these events by defining appropriate rule patterns. Each event will contain a failure reason, payment instrument ARN that is invalid, and a link to the remediation steps. The source for these EventBridge events is aws.marketplace and the possible detail-type value is Disbursement Paused. To learn more about this new email notification, see Managing email notifications for AWS Marketplace events - AWS Marketplace and to get started with creating event rules in Amazon EventBridge, see Amazon EventBridge events - AWS Marketplace.

AWS Compute Optimizer now expands idle and rightsizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups

Published Date: 2025-01-09 21:20:00

AWS Compute Optimizer now expands idle and rightsizing recommendations to Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups with scaling policies and multiple instance types. With the new recommendations, you can take actions to optimize cost and performance of these groups without requiring specialized knowledge or engineering resources to analyze them. Compute Optimizer analyzes EC2 Auto Scaling groups' scaling policies, instance configurations, and utilization metrics to understand their usage patterns and identify opportunities for cost and performance optimization. For EC2 Auto Scaling groups using multiple instance types, Compute Optimizer helps identify the most cost-efficient instance types, enabling you to prioritize them in your groups. When EC2 Auto Scaling groups use scaling policies to scale based on CPU utilization, Compute Optimizer recommends optimizing the CPU-to-memory ratio by considering only instance types with identical vCPU counts. Compute Optimizer also identifies and flags EC2 Auto Scaling groups that demonstrate consistently low CPU and network usage throughout the lookback period as idle, recommending that you scale them down to save costs. This new feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Compute Optimizer is available, except the AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China Regions. To learn more about the new feature updates, please visit Compute Optimizer’s product page and user guide.

Amazon EC2 C8g instances now available in additional regions

Published Date: 2025-01-09 18:00:00

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8g instances are available in AWS Europe (Ireland) and AWS Europe (Spain) regions. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances. Amazon EC2 C8g instances are built for general-purpose workloads, such as application servers, microservices, gaming servers, midsize data stores, and caching fleets. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which o?oads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 instances deliver the best performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3-based Amazon C7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors. C8g instances are available in 12 different instance sizes, including two bare metal sizes. They offer up to 50 Gbps enhanced networking bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). To learn more, see Amazon EC2 C8g Instances. To explore how to migrate your workloads to Graviton-based instances, see AWS Graviton Fast Start program and Porting Advisor for Graviton. To get started, see the AWS Management Console. ?

Announcing the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in New York City

Published Date: 2025-01-08 22:00:00

Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in New York City, supporting a wide range of workloads at the edge. This new Local Zone offers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7i, R7i, M6i, and M6in instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types gp2, gp3, io1, sc1, and st1. You can also access Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Application Load Balancer, AWS Direct Connect, and the microsecond-accurate time of Amazon Time Sync in this new Local Zone to support your workloads at the edge.

Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that place compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can use Local Zones to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency for use cases such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, media and entertainment content creation, live video streaming, engineering simulations, financial services payment processing, capital market operations, and AR/VR.

Local Zones are available in the US in 17 metro areas and globally in an additional 17 metro areas, allowing you to deliver low-latency applications to end users worldwide. For more information about where other Local Zones are available, visit Local Zones locations.

You can enable the new Local Zone in New York City from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings or the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. Check out Local Zones pricing for information on Amazon EC2 instances available as On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, or part of Savings Plans in the new Local Zone in New York City. To learn more, visit Local Zones.

Amazon EC2 C7i instances now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region

Published Date: 2025-01-08 21:50:00

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers. C7i instances deliver up to 15% better price-performance versus C6i instances and are a great choice for all compute-intensive workloads, such as batch processing, distributed analytics, ad-serving, and video encoding. C7i instances offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge, and two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl, metal-48xl). These bare-metal sizes support built-in Intel accelerators: Data Streaming Accelerator, In-Memory Analytics Accelerator, and QuickAssist Technology that are used to facilitate efficient offload and acceleration of data operations and optimize performance for workloads. C7i instances also support new Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) that accelerate matrix multiplication operations for applications such as CPU-based ML. Customers can attach up to 128 EBS volumes to a C7i instance vs. up to 28 EBS volumes to a C6i instance. This allows processing of larger amounts of data, scale workloads, and improved performance over C6i instances. To learn more, visit the EC2 C7i instances Page.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides free trials for conversational analytics and performance evaluations

Published Date: 2025-01-08 18:20:00

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides free trials for first-time users of conversational analytics and performance evaluations. New conversational analytics for voice customers will receive a free trial with no charge for the first 100,000 voice minutes per month for the first two months. In addition, customers using Contact Lens performance evaluations for the first time will receive a 30-day free trial, that begins the day that they submit their first performance evaluation. The free trials will enable first-time customers to pilot Contact Lens conversational analytics and evaluations in their environment without incurring additional costs. With this launch, the new Contact Lens free trial are available in all AWS regions supported by Contact Lens. To learn more, please visit our documentation and our webpage. For information about Contact Lens pricing, please visit our pricing page.

Amazon Q Developer is now available in Amazon SageMaker Code Editor IDE

Published Date: 2025-01-08 18:00:00

Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service, announces the general availability of Amazon Q Developer in SageMaker Studio Code Editor. SageMaker Studio customers now get generative AI assistance powered by Q Developer right within their Code Editor (Visual Studio Code – Open Source) IDE. With Q Developer, data scientists and ML engineers can access expert guidance on SageMaker features, code generation, and troubleshooting. This allows for more productivity by eliminating the need for tedious online searches and documentation review, and ensuring more time delivering differentiated business value. Data scientists and ML engineers using Code Editor in SageMaker Studio can kick off their model development lifecycle with Amazon Q Developer. They can use the chat capability to discover and learn how to leverage SageMaker features for their use case without having to sift through extensive documentation. As well, users can generate code tailored to their needs and jump-start the development process. Further, they can use Q Developer to get in-line code suggestions and conversational assistance to edit, explain, and document their code in Code Editor. Users can also leverage Q Developer to receive step by step guidance for troubleshooting when running into errors. This integration empowers data scientists and ML engineers to accelerate their workflow, enhance productivity, and deliver ML models more efficiently, streamlining the machine learning development process. This feature is available in all commercial AWS regions where SageMaker Studio is available. For additional details, see our product page and documentation. ?

AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location and expansion in Bangkok, Thailand

Published Date: 2025-01-08 18:00:00

Today, AWS announced the opening of a new AWS Direct Connect location within the Telehouse Bangkok, Thailand data center. By connecting your network to AWS at the new Bangkok location, you gain private, direct access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This site is the second AWS Direct Connect location within Thailand. The new Direct Connect location offers dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption available. AWS also announced the addition of 10Gbps and 100Gbps MACsec services in the existing TCC, Bangkok Direct Connect location. The Direct Connect service enables you to establish a private, physical network connection between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment. These private connections can provide a more consistent network experience than those made over the public internet. For more information on the over 145 Direct Connect locations worldwide, visit the locations section of the Direct Connect product detail pages. Or, visit our getting started page to learn more about how to purchase and deploy Direct Connect. ?

Amazon MSK Connect APIs now support AWS PrivateLink

Published Date: 2025-01-08 18:00:00

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect (Amazon MSK Connect) APIs now come with AWS PrivateLink support, allowing you to invoke Amazon MSK Connect APIs from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without traversing the public internet. By default, all communication between your MSK Clusters and your Amazon MSK Connect connectors is private, and your data never traverses the internet. Similar to AWS PrivateLink support for Amazon MSK APIs, this launch enables clients to invoke MSK Connect APIs via a private endpoint. This allows client applications with strict security requirements to perform MSK Connect specific actions such as creating connectors from new or existing custom plugins, listing and describing connector details, or updating connectors, without the need to communicate over a public connection. AWS PrivateLink support for Amazon MSK Connect is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK Connect is available. To get started, follow the directions provided in the AWS PrivateLink documentation. To learn more about Amazon MSK Connect, visit the Amazon MSK Connect documentation.

Announcing 20 additional AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations in AWS Chatbot

Published Date: 2025-01-07 19:00:00

AWS announces general availability of 20 additional AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations as contextual action buttons on event notifications in AWS Chatbot. This launch enables customers to run AWS Systems Manager automations from Microsoft Teams and Slack channels to address AWS Security Hub and Amazon ECS-related events. With this launch, customers can run AWS Systems Manager automations to resolve issues when they receive AWS Security Hub and Amazon ECS event notifications in chat channels. AWS Chatbot displays contextual action buttons on Security Hub and ECS event notifications and customers can click on them to run automations to resolve the finding. For example, they can run the automation to disable public accessibility of Amazon RDS database instances or run the automation to troubleshoot why an Amazon ECS task in an Amazon ECS cluster failed to start. Get started with using AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations in chat channels by installing the AWS Chatbot apps for Microsoft Teams and Slack. You can use AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook action recommendations at no additional cost. This feature is available in all public AWS Regions where AWS Chatbot service is offered. To learn more about custom actions in AWS Chatbot, visit the AWS Chatbot documentation or the AWS Chatbot product page.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports configurable point-in-time-recovery periods

Published Date: 2025-01-07 18:00:00

Amazon DynamoDB now supports a configurable period for point-in-time-recovery (PITR). You can specify the duration for data recoverability using PITR on a per-table basis, ranging from 1 to 35 days. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) protects your DynamoDB data from accidental writes and deletes, allowing you to restore your data to any second within your recovery period. With this launch, a configurable backup recovery period can help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements that necessitate shorter data recovery periods. Point-in-time-recovery is now configurable in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions. You pay based on the table size that has point-in-time-recovery enabled. For details on pricing, see the DynamoDB pricing page. To get started, see the DynamoDB developer guide. ?