2025 - Week 9 (24 Feb - 2 Mar)

Amazon Connect launches the ability for agents to exchange shifts with each other

Published Date: 2025-02-28 22:10:00

Amazon Connect now allows agents to exchange shifts with each other, providing greater schedule flexibility without compromising service levels. With this launch, agents can initiate shift trades directly, allowing them to manage unexpected life events without using time off. Additionally, contact center managers can now automate some approvals while ensuring others are approved manually — reducing admin work without sacrificing controls when needed. For example, supervisors can automate approvals for agents handling non-critical tasks, such as routine customer inquiries, while manually approving requests from agents who handle sensitive customer segments, like healthcare or high-value enterprise accounts. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon Connect agent scheduling guide or watch the Amazon Connect Enablement shift exchange videos, for a step by step walkthrough of this feature.

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports AWS PrivateLink

Published Date: 2025-02-28 22:00:00

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports AWS PrivateLink to connect directly to the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager APIs in your virtual private cloud (VPC) instead of connecting over the internet. Customers create Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies to automate the creation, retention, and management of EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). When you use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager APIs, communication between your VPC and Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager API is conducted privately within the AWS network, providing a secure pathway for your data. An AWS PrivateLink endpoint connects your VPC directly to the Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager API. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is available. You can create an AWS PrivateLink to connect to Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager using the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands. To learn more about using AWS PrivateLink, please refer to our documentation.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now offers AI-powered contact categorization in five new regions

Published Date: 2025-02-28 21:30:00

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides generative AI-powered contact categorization in five additional regions, making it easy to identify top drivers, customer experience, and agent behavior for your contacts. With this launch, you can use natural language instructions to define a criteria to automatically categorize customer contacts (e.g., “show me calls where customers attempted payment”). Contact Lens automatically labels interactions matching your criteria and extracts relevant conversation points. In addition, you can receive alerts and generate tasks on categorized contacts, and search for contacts using the automated labels. This feature helps managers easily categorize contacts for scenarios such as identifying customer interest in specific products, assessing customer satisfaction, monitoring whether agents exhibited professional behavior on calls, and more. This feature is supported in English language and is available in five additional AWS regions including Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Canada (Central). To learn more, please visit our documentation and our webpage. This feature is included within Contact Lens conversational analytics price at no additional cost. For information about Contact Lens pricing, please visit our pricing page.

Amazon Bedrock launches Session Management APIs for GenAI applications (Preview)

Published Date: 2025-02-28 19:30:00

Amazon Bedrock announces the preview launch of the Session Management APIs, a new capability that enables developers to simplify state and context management for generative AI (GenAI) applications built with popular open-source frameworks such as LangGraph and LlamaIndex. Session Management APIs provide an out-of-the-box solution that enables developers to securely manage state and conversation context across multi-step GenAI workflows, eliminating the need to build, maintain, or scale custom backend solutions. By preserving session state between interactions, Session Management APIs enhance workflow continuity, enabling GenAI applications, such as virtual assistants and multi-agent research workflows, that require persistent context across extended interactions. Developers can use this capability to checkpoint workflow stages, save intermediate states, and resume tasks from points of failure or interruption. Additionally, they can pause and replay sessions and leverage detailed traces to debug and enhance their GenAI applications. By treating session as a first-class resource, this capability enables developers to enforce granular access control through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and encrypt data using AWS Key Management Service (KMS), ensuring that data from different user sessions is securely isolated and supporting multi-tenant applications with strong privacy protections. Session Management APIs are now available in preview in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Zurich), and South America (S?o Paulo). To learn more, visit the technical documentation.

AWS CodeBuild adds support for macOS 15.2

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

AWS CodeBuild now supports macOS 15.2 as a new major version for macOS builds. This allows developers to build and test their applications in the latest macOS environment. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. The new major version includes the latest Xcode 16.2, Fastlane for iOS automation and Finch for container management in macOS environment. We have also updated our existing macOS AMI to version 14.7, ensuring customers have access to the latest security updates and improvements. The new macOS 15.2 is available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page. To learn more about the runtimes supported by macOS, please visit our documentation. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page.

AWS Network Firewall simplifies policy management with enhanced console features

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

AWS Network Firewall now provides enhanced console capabilities that improve rule management and policy configuration workflows. Key improvements include the ability to modify the priority of rules directly from the console without needing to delete and recreate them, pre-populated fields to add descriptions and signature ID in your rules, default "Alert Established" selection for comprehensive connection logging, and automatic "Reject" action selection in Stream Exception Policy configuration. These console improvements streamline the firewall administration workflow and help prevent common configuration oversights. Security teams can now efficiently adjust rule priorities through a simple point-and-click interface, accelerate rule creation with pre-configured fields, and ensure consistent security posture with smart defaults. The automatic selection of "Alert Established" and "Reject" actions helps maintain robust security logging and proper handling of midstream connection breaks without requiring manual configuration. The enhanced AWS Network Firewall console features are available in all AWS Regions where AWS Network Firewall is offered. To learn more about these new features and other AWS Network Firewall capabilities, visit the AWS Network Firewall product page and the service documentation. ?

Announcing extended support for Kubernetes versions for Amazon EKS Anywhere

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Today, AWS announced extended support for Kubernetes versions for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (Amazon EKS Anywhere). With extended support for Kubernetes versions for Amazon EKS Anywhere, you continue to receive security patches for clusters on any Kubernetes version for up to 26 months after the version is released in Amazon EKS Anywhere. Extended support for Kubernetes versions for Amazon EKS Anywhere is available for Kubernetes versions 1.28 and above. Standard support begins when a Kubernetes version becomes available in Amazon EKS Anywhere, and continues for 14 months - the same as the upstream Kubernetes project support window. After this time period, Amazon EKS Anywhere continues to include patches for Kubernetes versions for an additional 12 months. Cluster administrators and security teams using Amazon EKS Anywhere now get more time to plan Kubernetes upgrades, without compromising on the security posture of their clusters. Extended support for Kubernetes versions for Amazon EKS Anywhere is available for customers with Amazon EKS Anywhere Enterprise Subscriptions at no additional cost. To learn more about the Amazon EKS Anywhere version support lifecycle, see the EKS Anywhere and Kubernetes version lifecycle documentation. To learn more about Amazon EKS Anywhere Enterprise Subscriptions, see the pricing webpage. ?

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

With the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, your Kubernetes applications can access S3 objects through a file system interface, achieving high aggregate throughput without any changes to your application. Built on Mountpoint for Amazon S3, the CSI driver presents an S3 bucket as a volume accessible by containers in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and self-managed Kubernetes clusters. As a result, distributed machine learning training jobs in Amazon EKS and self-managed Kubernetes clusters can read data from Amazon S3 at high throughput to accelerate training times. The Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver supports sequential and random read operations on existing files and sequential write operations for creating new files. For details on supported file system operations, visit the documentation. Amazon EKS supports the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver as an EKS add-on. You can install, configure, and update the CSI driver with just a few clicks in Amazon EKS console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), EKS Application Programming Interface (API), and AWS CloudFormation. With this launch, the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver is now available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, follow the user guide. ?

Announcing new features for AWS IoT Device Defender to improve IoT certificate lifecycle management

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Today, AWS IoT Device Defender introduced two features to simplify IoT certificate lifecycle management - a new audit check for certificate age and enhancements to the existing device certificate expiring audit check. The new audit check for certificate age allows developers to monitor and receive alerts based on a certificate's age, regardless of its expiration date. Additionally, the device certificate expiring audit check now supports new configuration options, allowing developers to set custom alert durations before certificate expiration. Regularly rotating certificates is a critical security practice that mitigates risks from compromised credentials and prevents unexpected connectivity disruptions due to expired certificates in IoT devices used in various solutions, including automotive, smart home, and industrial segments. The new features facilitate scheduled certificate rotation and proactive credential management, making it easier for developers to adhere to industry regulations and security standards while maintaining greater control over the lifecycle of their IoT credentials. These features are available to AWS IoT Device Defender customers in all regions where the service is offered. For more information, please refer to the AWS IoT Device Defender documentation. ?

Amazon Nova Creative Models now available in Asia Pacific

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon Nova creative models, including Amazon Nova Canvas and Amazon Nova Reel, in Asia Pacific (Tokyo). These models are designed to generate high-quality images and videos from text and image inputs, providing customizable visual content for various applications. This expansion addresses the growing demand for automated, high-quality visual content generation, benefiting marketers, content creators, and developers who need efficient solutions for producing engaging media. Amazon Nova creative models offer built-in controls to enable the safe and responsible use of AI, including watermarking for traceability, content moderation, and indemnification. Customers can now leverage these advanced capabilities to create compelling visuals that enhance their digital presence and user engagement. To learn more about Amazon Nova creative models, see the Amazon Nova creative models and learn about Amazon Nova creative models responsible use of AI. To get started with Amazon Nova on Amazon Bedrock, visit the Amazon Bedrock console.

Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Today, we are announcing that Amazon Q Developer is generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas. Amazon Q Developer provides generative AI-powered assistance throughout the machine learning (ML) lifecycle, enabling users of all skill levels to build production-ready ML models using natural language. With this release, Amazon Q Developer introduces new capabilities including support for additional ML use cases, enhanced data analysis, and improved responsiveness. In addition to regression and classification predictive models, starting today users can build time-series models with Amazon Q Developer to support use cases such as forecasting product sales and resource demand. In addition, Amazon Q Developer now analyzes up to 25,000 rows of data for statistical computations on dataset features, while offering simplified customization of AutoML model training configurations to balance speed and accuracy. Additionally, Amazon Q Developer also delivers faster response times, resulting in more efficient guidance throughout the ML lifecycle, from data preparation to model deployment. Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas in a total of 11 AWS Regions with today's launch of five additional Regions: US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Ireland). To learn more about using Amazon Q Developer with SageMaker Canvas, visit the website or view the technical documentation.

Amazon EC2 Fleet added support for Block Device Mapping overrides

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Starting today, EC2 Fleet customers can override the Block Device Mapping specified in the Launch Template when launching a new fleet. With this release, customers save the effort of creating and associating new Launch Templates with their fleet requests, when they need to customize the Block Device Mapping but keep rest of the instance configurations the same. Customers use EC2 Fleet to access wider EC2 capacity across instance types and availability zones within a single launch request. To provide their EC2 instance configurations such as Amazon Machine Images, Key pair etc, customers associate a Launch Template with their Fleet requests. They can override the values specified for select parameters in the Launch Template for each instance type. With this release, customers can also override Block Device Mapping parameters specified in the Launch Template. With Block Device Mapping, customers can launch additional EBS volumes or instance store volumes to attach to an instance, or update the Block Device Mapping specified in the Amazon Machine Image that you use to launch the instances. The feature is available in all commercial AWS regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, refer the API references and EC2 user guide.

AWS announces Microsoft 365 for Word and Outlook integrations for Amazon Q Business

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the Amazon Q Business integrations for Microsoft 365 for Word and Outlook. These new integrations improve the usability and usefulness of Amazon Q Business by making its generative AI features available where business users do their work. Users can now get Amazon Q Business’ help in creating content, reviewing documents, and reading or drafting their emails without switching context. The Word integration helps users boost their document creation and review efficiency. Users can leverage generative AI capabilities to draft content, enhance writing quality, and analyze lengthy documents with ease. Through the Amazon Q Business interface, users can perform various AI-powered text transformations on selected text - such as improving its readability or modifying its writing style - and seamlessly incorporate these improvements directly into their Word documents. The Outlook integration helps users streamline their communication workflows and improve the effectiveness of their emails. Users can summarize lengthy email threads, identify and extract action items for follow up, get assistance with draft composition, adjust message tone, and seamlessly incorporate enhanced content directly into their emails from the Amazon Q Business window. These integrations are designed to be easy for customers to set up and distribute to their users within hours and are available to Q Business customers using AWS IAM Identity Center in all AWS Regions where Q Business is available. To learn more, visit the Amazon Q Business product page or review the documentation for detailed setup instructions and feature descriptions. ?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Ruby 3.4 on Amazon Linux 2023

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now enables customers to build and deploy Ruby 3.4 applications on the Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) platform. This latest platform support allows developers to leverage the newest Ruby features while benefiting from AL2023's enhanced security and performance features.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that provides the ability to deploy and manage applications in AWS without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. Ruby 3.4 on AL2023 delivers performance improvements and reduced memory usage. Developers can create Elastic Beanstalk environments running Ruby 3.4 on AL2023 through the Elastic Beanstalk Console, CLI, or API.

This platform is generally available in commercial regions where Elastic Beanstalk is available including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For a complete list of regions and service offerings, see AWS Regions.

For more information about Ruby 3.4 and Linux Platforms, see the Elastic Beanstalk developer guide. To learn more about Elastic Beanstalk, visit the Elastic Beanstalk product page.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Corretto 17 and 21 with Tomcat 11

Published Date: 2025-02-28 18:00:00

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now enables customers to build and deploy Tomcat 11 applications on Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) platform. This latest platform support allows developers to leverage the newest Tomcat features while benefiting from AL2023's enhanced security and performance features.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that provides the ability to deploy and manage applications in AWS without worrying about the infrastructure that runs those applications. Tomcat 11 on AL2023 allows developers to take advantage of the latest Jakarta EE specifications. Developers can create Elastic Beanstalk environments running Corretto 17 and 21 with Tomcat 11 on AL2023 through the Elastic Beanstalk Console, CLI, or API.

This platform is generally available in commercial regions where Elastic Beanstalk is available including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. For a complete list of regions and service offerings, see AWS Regions.

For more information about Corretto 17 and 21 with Tomcat 11 and Linux Platforms, see the Elastic Beanstalk developer guide. To learn more about Elastic Beanstalk, visit the Elastic Beanstalk product page.

Database Insights provides on-demand analysis for RDS MySQL and RDS MariaDB

Published Date: 2025-02-27 22:40:00

Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights expands the availability of its on-demand analysis experience to the RDS for MySQL and RDS for MariaDB database engines. This feature leverages machine learning models to help identify performance bottlenecks during the selected time period, and gives advice on what to do next. This launch allows you to analyze database performance monitoring data for a time period of your choice. You can learn how the selected time period differs from normal, what went wrong, and get advice on corrective actions. Through simple-to-understand graphs and explanations, you can identify the chief contributors to performance issues. You will also get guidance on the next steps to act on these issues. This can reduce the mean-time-to-diagnosis for database performance issues from hours to minutes. You can get started with this feature by enabling the Advanced mode of Database Insights on your RDS for MySQL or RDS for MariaDB databases using the RDS service console, AWS APIs, the AWS SDK, or AWS CloudFormation. Please refer to RDS documentation and Aurora documentation for information regarding the availability of this feature across different RDS and Aurora engines, respectively. CloudWatch Database Insights delivers database health monitoring aggregated at the fleet level, as well as instance-level dashboards for detailed database and SQL query analysis. CloudWatch Database Insights is available in all commercial AWS Regions and offers vCPU-based pricing – see the pricing page for details. For further information, visit the Database Insights User Guide.

Amazon RDS for Db2 now supports M7i and R7i instances types

Published Date: 2025-02-27 21:54:00

Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for Db2 now supports M7i and R7i database instance types. M7i and R7i are the latest Intel-based offering and are available with a new maximum instance size of 48xlarge, which brings 50% more vCPU and memory than the maximum size of M6i and R6i instance types. M7i and R7i instances are available for Amazon RDS for Db2 in Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) model and in hourly Db2 licensing model available through AWS Marketplace. You can launch the new database instance in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Amazon RDS for Db2 is a fully managed commercial database that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Db2 deployments in the cloud. To learn more about Amazon RDS for Db2, check Amazon RDS for Db2 User Guide and Amazon RDS for Db2 pricing for pricing details and regional availability.

Amazon EC2 announces Time-based Copy for AMIs

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:50:00

Amazon EC2 announces the general availability of Time-based Copy for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Similar to Time-based Copy for EBS snapshots , this feature enables customers to meet their compliance objectives by ensuring that AMIs are copied within and across AWS Regions within a specified duration. Prior to today, customers could not predict or control the duration of their AMI copy operations, making it challenging for them to meet their recovery time objectives for disaster recovery and compliance purposes. Now with this capability, customers can specify a desired completion duration, ranging from 15 minutes to 48 hours, for individual AMI copy requests. Customers can also monitor their AMI Copy operations via EventBridge and the new SnapshotCopyBytesTransferred CloudWatch metric, available by default at a 1-minute frequency for no additional charge. Time-based Copy for AMIs is available in all AWS commercial Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, through the AWS Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. For pricing information, please visit the EBS pricing page. To learn more, see the technical documentation for Time-based Copy for AMIs.

AWS Batch now supports resource aware scheduling

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:00:00

AWS Batch now supports job scheduling that takes into account consumable resources (CRs) such as third-party license tokens, database access bandwidth, budgetary limits, and more. With resource aware scheduling you can set up sets of tokens representing these resources, which will then be consumed by the running AWS Batch jobs. This will help you reduce job failures and wasted compute time caused by missing or rate-limited resources, which in turn will improve utilization of infrastructure and reduce costs. You can create, manage, and monitor consumption of your CRs using AWS Batch Management Console or the new AWS Batch consumable resource APIs such as CreateConsumableResource, DescribeConsumableResource, UpdateConsumableResource, DeleteConsumableResource, and ListJobsByConsumableResource. Once you set up your consumable resources, you can associate up to 5 CRs with your AWS Batch jobs while creating or updating AWS Batch job definitions. For more information, see Consumable Resources page in the AWS Batch User Guide, AWS Batch API Reference, and our AWS HPC Blog post. AWS Batch supports developers, scientists, and engineers in running efficient batch processing for ML model training, simulations, and analysis at any scale. Resource aware scheduling is available for all types of AWS Batch compute environments in any AWS Region where AWS Batch is available. ?

Amazon EC2 F2 instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney)

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:00:00

Starting today, the FPGA-powered Amazon EC2 F2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. F2 instances are the second generation of FPGA powered instances and are the first to feature an FPGA with 16 GB of high bandwidth memory (HBM). Compared to F1 instances, the F2 instances have up to 3x vCPUs (192 vCPUS), 2x system memory (2 TB), 2x SSD space (7.6 TiB), and 4x networking bandwidth (100 Gbps). Amazon EC2 F2 instances are ideal for FPGA-accelerated solutions in genomics, multimedia processing, big data, network acceleration, and more. With this additional region, F2 instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). These instances can be purchased as either Savings Plans or On-Demand instances. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 F2 Instances page and F2 FPGA development kit GitHub page.

Amazon Nova understanding models available in Europe and Asia Pacific

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:00:00

We are excited to announce regional inference profiles for Amazon Nova understanding models (Amazon Nova Lite, Amazon Nova Micro, and Amazon Nova Pro) in Europe and Asia Pacific. AWS Customers are now able to use cross-region inference profiles for Amazon Nova understanding models in the following regions: Europe (Stockholm, Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney). The Amazon Nova understanding models include: Amazon Nova Micro, a text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses at a very low cost; Amazon Nova Lite, a very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs to generate text outputs; and Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks. These models support over 200 languages, text and vision fine-tuning, and easy integration with proprietary data and applications through Amazon Bedrock features such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and Amazon Bedrock Agents. And with cross region inference profiles, customers can automatically route requests to Amazon Nova across multiple regions within Europe and Asia Pacific. To learn more about Amazon Nova understanding models, see the Amazon Nova understanding models page. And to get started with Amazon Nova on Amazon Bedrock, visit the Amazon Bedrock console; and implementing cross region inference, please visit our cross-region inference user guide.

Monitor and observe apps across multiple accounts with Application Signals

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:00:00

CloudWatch Application Signals, an application performance monitoring (APM) tool that simplifies health and performance monitoring for applications now supports the ability to monitor your applications' services and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) across multiple source accounts from one monitoring account. Centralized application observability across accounts in a region provides single-pane-of-glass tracking, health maintenance, and resource optimization. Customers can use Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager (OAM) to create and manage links between source accounts and monitoring accounts. Using the Application Signals Console in their monitoring account, customers can now view all services and SLOs to analyze and track broad patterns across multiple accounts. They can also set SLOs in the monitoring account. The multi account monitoring feature balances centralized monitoring with access restrictions required by their teams. Cross Account support for Application Signals is available in all regions where Application Signals is generally available. See documentation to learn more. Customers can now opt in to the new bundled pricing for Application Signals. For pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch pricing.

Amazon Connect reduces telephony pricing in Vietnam

Published Date: 2025-02-27 18:00:00

Amazon Connect has reduced prices for Vietnam in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. This includes price reductions of Direct Inward Dial (DID) minutes by 95% from $0.0815/min to $0.004/min, and Outbound minutes by 44% from $0.0896/min to $0.05/min. The new Telephony Rates are now available as part of the standard pricing for Amazon Connect service usage for the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. To see all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available, see the AWS Region table. Visit the Amazon Connect website for more information. ?

Amazon RDS now provides visibility into IAM DB Authentication metrics and logs

Published Date: 2025-02-26 22:00:00

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) IAM Database Authentication (IAM DB Auth) now provides enhanced observability through metrics and logs. It enables customers to investigate and resolve authentication issues when connecting to RDS databases. Database connection authentication issues can occur due to multiple reasons such as configuration or permission issues with your IAM policy, using expired tokens, throttling, etc. IAM DB Auth metrics and logs can help troubleshoot authentication issues caused due to all the above issues. Now you will also get visibility into error logs that help you get insights into user specific connection failures. IAM DB Auth metrics are available in Amazon CloudWatch automatically as long as IAM DB Authentication is enabled on your database instance or cluster. IAM DB Auth error logs can be exported to your CloudWatch Logs account via the RDS Export to CloudWatch Logs feature. Amazon RDS IAM DB Auth metrics and logs are supported by RDS for MySQL, RDS for MariaDB, RDS for PostgreSQL, Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition, and Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. To get started with enabling Amazon RDS IAM DB Authentication, visit: Enabling and disabling IAM database authentication - Amazon RDS and Enabling and disabling IAM database authentication - Amazon Aurora. For troubleshooting Amazon RDS database authentication issues using Amazon RDS IAM DB Auth metrics and logs visit this page for Amazon RDS and this page for Amazon Aurora. To learn more about AWS Identity and Access Management, refer the product detail page.

Amazon Connect now supports interactive welcome messages when starting chats

Published Date: 2025-02-26 19:43:00

Amazon Connect Chat now enables you to greet customers with interactive messages when starting chats, delivering contextual and personalized experiences that improve engagement and self-service resolution rates. For example, when a customer visits a product page and opens the chat widget, they receive a contextual greeting with options to compare similar products, check store availability, or learn about warranty details. To customize the interactive welcome message using Amazon Lex, check the 'Initialize bot with message' option in the 'Get customer input' block in the Amazon Connect flow designer. You can either manually enter or dynamically set the initial message sent to the chat bot to personalize your customer experience. This new feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is available. To learn more and get started, please refer to the help documentation, pricing page, or visit the Amazon Connect website.

Amazon RDS Data API for Aurora is now available in 10 additional AWS regions

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

RDS Data API for Aurora Serverless v2 and Aurora provisioned PostgreSQL-Compatible and MySQL-Compatible database clusters is now available in Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), and South America (S?o Paulo) regions. RDS Data API allows you to access these Aurora clusters via a secure HTTP endpoint and run SQL statements without the use of database drivers and without managing connections. Data API eliminates the use of drivers and improves application scalability by automatically pooling and sharing database connections (connection pooling) rather than requiring customers to manage connections. Customers can call Data API via AWS SDK and CLI. Data API also enables access to Aurora databases via AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs. API commands supported in the Data API for Aurora Serverless v2 and Aurora provisioned are backwards compatible with Data API for Aurora Serverless v1 for easy customer application migrations. Data API supports Aurora PostgreSQL 15.3, 14.8, 13.11 and higher versions, and Aurora MySQL 3.07 and higher versions. Customers currently using Data API for ASv1 are encouraged to migrate to ASv2 to take advantage of the new Data API. To learn more, read the documentation. ?

Amazon RDS for MariaDB supports minors 11.4.5, 10.11.11, 10.6.21, 10.5.28

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 11.4.5, 10.11.11, 10.6.21, and 10.5.28. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community. You can leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. You can also leverage Amazon RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer, simpler, and faster updates to your MariaDB instances. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including automatic minor version upgrades and Blue/Green Deployments, in the Amazon RDS User Guide. Amazon RDS for MariaDB makes it straightforward to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB deployments in the cloud. Learn more about pricing details and regional availability at Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database in the Amazon RDS Management Console. ?

AWS CodeBuild adds support for managed webhooks in GitHub Enterprise

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

AWS CodeBuild’s support for managed webhooks now extends to include GitHub Enterprise. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. Customers using GitHub Enterprise as their source provider previously had to manually create webhooks for CodeBuild to receive events. CodeBuild now integrates natively to create and manage webhooks on your behalf. Additionally, you can use CloudFormation to define your webhooks in a CodeBuild project. This feature is available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), GovCloud (US-East), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (S?o Paulo). Get started using GitHub Enterprise by following our sample project. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page. ?

Amazon ECS adds support for additional IAM condition keys

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today launched 8 new service-specific condition keys for Identity and Access Management (IAM). These new condition keys let you create IAM policies as well as Service Control Policies (SCPs) to better enforce your organizational policies in containerized environments. IAM condition keys allow you to author policies that enforce access control based on API request context. With today’s release, Amazon ECS has added condition keys that allow you to enforce policies related to resource configuration (ecs:task-cpu, ecs:task:memory, and ecs:compute-compatibility), container privileges (ecs:privileged), network configuration (ecs:auto-assign-public-ip and ecs:subnet), and tag propagation (ecs:propagate-tags and ecs:enable-ecs-managed-tags) for your applications deployed on Amazon ECS. For example, you can use the new ecs:auto-assign-public-ip condition key to enforce that tasks in your ECS service are not assigned public IP addresses and the ecs:privileged condition key to prevent registration of task definitions with privileges over the underlying host. The new IAM condition context keys for Amazon ECS are available in all AWS Regions. To see the full list of IAM condition context keys supported by ECS and learn more about using condition keys with Amazon ECS, please refer to our documentation.

AWS CodeBuild adds support for managed runners for GitLab Self-Managed

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

AWS CodeBuild now supports managed runners for GitLab Self-Managed. Customers can configure their CodeBuild projects to receive GitLab Self-Managed CI/CD job events and run them on CodeBuild ephemeral hosts. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. This feature allows GitLab Self-Managed jobs to integrate natively with AWS, providing security and convenience through features such as IAM, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon VPC. Customers can access all compute platforms that CodeBuild offers, including Lambda, GPU-enhanced and Arm-based instances. CodeBuild's integration with GitLab Self-Managed runners is available in all regions where CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page. Get started by setting up webhooks in a CodeBuild project, and updating your GitLab CI YAML to use self-managed runners hosted on CodeBuild machines. To learn more about runners powered by CodeBuild for GitLab or GitHub, see CodeBuild’s documentation for self-hosted runners in AWS CodeBuild.

AWS Chatbot is now named Amazon Q Developer

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

AWS Chatbot is now called Amazon Q Developer. The new name recognizes the integration of Amazon Q Developer, the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for software development, in Microsoft Teams and Slack to manage and optimize AWS resources. With Amazon Q Developer, customers can monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS resources in chat channels faster. Customers can quickly retrieve telemetry and ask questions to understand the state of their resources. Customers can leverage the existing non-generative AI features to operationalize Dev Ops and incident response processes with customizable notifications, action buttons, and command aliases. With this launch, the Microsoft Teams and Slack chat application names will change from AWS Chatbot to Amazon Q Developer. The notifications and responses received will display Amazon Q as the application name instead of AWS. Running tasks will now use “@Amazon Q” mention instead of “@aws”. Slack automation workflows that trigger AWS Chatbot messages within chat channels will continue to work after this renaming. For existing AWS Chatbot customers, there is no other change to how features work, setup, usage, and pricing. The service APIs, SDK, service endpoints, IAM permissions, and region availability are not affected by this change. Customers need to allow permissions to enable generative AI features. Amazon Q Developer generative AI features are available in chat applications at no additional cost. Amazon Q Developer is available in chat applications at no additional cost in AWS Regions where this capability is offered. Get started with using Amazon Q Developer in your chat applications with the free tier by visiting the Amazon Q Developer console. Visit the documentation & blog to learn more.

AWS CodeBuild now supports merging parallel test reports and new compute options

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

You can now automatically merge your tests reports into a consolidated report when you execute test cases in parallel. This enhancement also allows you to select a mix of on-demand instances, reserved capacity fleets, or Lambda compute resources for your parallel tests. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages. As the number of tests in a project grows, the total test execution time also increases when using a single compute resource. CodeBuild runs your tests in parallel across new compute environments and now also merges the test results into a single report. This leads to faster feedback cycles and improved developer productivity. The parallel testing feature is available in all regions where CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page. To learn more about CodeBuild’s test splitting, please visit our documentation. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page. ?

Amazon Data Firehose is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) regions

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

Amazon Data Firehose is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) regions. Amazon Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. You can capture, transform, and deliver streaming data into Amazon S3, Apache Iceberg Tables, Amazon S3 Tables, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and third party analytics applications such as Splunk and Datadog, enabling real-time analytics use cases. With Amazon Data Firehose, you don't need to write applications or manage resources. You configure your data producers to send data to Amazon Data Firehose, and it automatically delivers the data to the destination that you specified. You can also configure Amazon Data Firehose to transform your data before delivering it. To get started, you need an AWS account. Once you have an account, you can create a delivery stream in the Amazon Data Firehose Console. To learn more, explore the Amazon Data Firehose Developer Guide. For Amazon Data Firehose availability, refer to the AWS Region Table. ?

Amazon EC2 M6a instances now available in AWS Europe (Paris)

Published Date: 2025-02-26 18:00:00

Starting today, the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances are now available in AWS Europe (Paris) region. M6a instances are powered by third-generation AMD EPYC processors, and deliver up to 35% better price performance than comparable M5a instances. These instances offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. With this additional region, M6a instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo). These instances can be purchased as Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the M6a instances pages. ?

AWS CodePipeline introduces new console experience for viewing pipeline releases

Published Date: 2025-02-25 21:30:00

AWS CodePipeline now offers a redesigned console experience that helps you monitor and troubleshoot your pipeline releases more effectively. The new horizontal pipeline view displays stages and actions from left to right, results in a stronger visual hierarchy, which helps you to better locate and understand stage and action execution status. This visual update also makes it easier for you to focus on the key information, and find what you are looking for more effectively while preserving the familiar and consistent experience of the current CodePipeline console. The new layout also optimizes information density by reducing unused space, leading to more pipeline release information visible on the screen, which improves the experience to serve pipelines with a large number of stages and actions. This feature is available in all regions where AWS CodePipeline is supported, except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions. For more information about AWS CodePipeline, visit our product page.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces an increase in service quota limits

Published Date: 2025-02-25 19:00:00

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces an increase in default service quota limits enabling you to scale your generative AI applications for higher traffic. Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards to filter undesirable and harmful content across different categories and prompt attacks, topic filters to define and disallow specific topics, sensitive information filters to redact personally identifiable information (PII), word filters to block specific words, and detect model hallucinations by detecting grounding and relevance of model responses as well as identify, correct, and explain factual claims in model responses using Automated Reasoning . These policies can be tailored to your specific use cases and responsible AI policies. Guardrails can be applied across any foundation model including those hosted with Amazon Bedrock, self-hosted models, and third-party models using the ApplyGuardrail API, providing a consistent user experience and standardizing safety and privacy controls. Starting today, Bedrock Guardrails enables you to scale your generative AI applications for higher traffic loads with increased service quota limits that help process higher transactions per second (TPS) and higher text units per second (TUPS). With this increase, you can now process up to 50 calls per second using the ApplyGuardrail API, a 2x increase from the previous limit of 25 calls per second. Content filters, sensitive information filters, and word filters can now process up to 200 TUPS, a 8x increase from the previous limits of 25 TUPS. These limits are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS regions. To learn more, see the technical documentation and the Bedrock Guardrails product page.

Amazon EC2 High Memory instances now available in Europe (Zurich) region

Published Date: 2025-02-25 18:00:00

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with 3TiB of memory (u-3tb1.56xlarge) is available in the Europe (Zurich) region. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with On-Demand (OD) and Savings Plan purchase options. Amazon EC2 High Memory instances are certified by SAP for running Business Suite on HANA, SAP S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA in production environments. For details, see the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory. For information on how to get started with your SAP HANA migration to EC2 High Memory instances, view the Migrating SAP HANA on AWS to an EC2 High Memory Instance documentation. To hear from Steven Jones, GM for SAP on AWS on what this launch means for our SAP customers, you can read his launch blog. ?

Amazon Location Service now supports AWS PrivateLink

Published Date: 2025-02-25 18:00:00

We are excited to announce that Amazon Location Service now supports AWS PrivateLink integration, enabling customers to establish private connectivity between their VPCs and Amazon Location Service without data ever traversing the public internet. With this new capability, customers can now access Amazon Location Service APIs through private IP addresses within their VPC, significantly enhancing their security posture. This integration simplifies network architecture by eliminating the need for internet gateways, NAT devices, or public IP addresses, while helping customers meet strict regulatory and compliance requirements by keeping all traffic within the AWS network. Setting up AWS PrivateLink for Amazon Location Service is straightforward. Customers can create interface VPC endpoints through the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands. Once configured, applications can immediately begin accessing Amazon Location Service APIs using private IP addresses, with all traffic remaining secure within the AWS network. To learn more about using AWS PrivateLink with Amazon Location, see the Amazon Location Service developer guide. ?

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Spatial Patch Bundle for January 2025 Release Update

Published Date: 2025-02-25 18:00:00

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports the Spatial Patch Bundle (SPB) for the January 2025 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database version 19c. This update delivers important fixes for Oracle Spatial and Graph functionality, helping ensure reliable and optimal performance for your spatial operations. You can now create new DB instances or upgrade existing ones to engine version ‘19.0.0.0.ru-2025-01.spb-1.r1’. The SPB engine version will be visible in the AWS Console by selecting the "Spatial Patch Bundle Engine Versions" checkbox in the engine version selector, making it simple to identify and implement the latest spatial patches for your database environment. To learn more about Oracle SPBs supported on Amazon RDS for each engine version, see the Amazon RDS for Oracle Release notes. For more information about the AWS Regions where Amazon RDS for Oracle is available, see the AWS Region table. ?

CloudWatch Database Insights adds support for RDS databases

Published Date: 2025-02-24 21:15:00

CloudWatch Database Insights announces support of databases hosted on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Database Insights is a database observability solution that provides a curated experience designed for DevOps engineers, application developers, and database administrators (DBAs) to expedite database troubleshooting and gain a holistic view into their database fleet health. Database Insights consolidates logs and metrics from your applications, your databases, and the operating systems on which they run into a unified view in the console. Using its pre-built dashboards, recommended alarms, and automated telemetry collection, you can monitor the health of your database fleets and use a guided troubleshooting experience to drill down to individual instances for root-cause analysis. Application developers can correlate the impact of database dependencies with the performance and availability of their business-critical applications. This is because they can drill down from the context of their application performance view in Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals to the specific dependent database in Database Insights. You can get started with Database Insights by enabling it on your RDS databases using the RDS service console, AWS APIs, and SDKs. Database Insights delivers database health monitoring aggregated at the fleet level, as well as instance-level dashboards for detailed database and SQL query analysis. Database Insights is available in all public AWS Regions and applies a new vCPU-based pricing – see pricing page for details. For further information, visit the Database Insights documentation.

AWS WAF enhances integration with Service Quotas

Published Date: 2025-02-24 18:00:00

AWS WAF enhances Service Quotas capabilities, enabling organizations to proactively monitor and manage quotas for their cloud deployments. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. By leveraging AWS Service Quotas, you can quickly understand your applied service quota values for these WAF resources and request increases when needed. This enhanced integration brings three key benefits. First, you can now monitor the current utilization of your account-level quotas for WAF resources such as web ACLs, rule groups, and IP sets in the Service Quotas console. Second, certain service quota increase requests will now be auto-approved, enabling customers to access higher quotas faster. For example, smaller increases are usually automatically approved while larger requests are submitted to AWS Support. Lastly, you can now create Amazon CloudWatch alarms to notify you when your utilization of a given quota exceeds a configurable threshold. This enables you to better adapt your utilization based on your applied quota values and automate your quota increase requests. You can access AWS Service Quotas through the AWS console, AWS APIs, and CLI. Integration with AWS Service Quotas is available in all AWS regions where AWS WAF is offered. You can learn more about AWS WAF by visiting Developer Guide. ?

Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available in Amazon Bedrock

Published Date: 2025-02-24 18:00:00

Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet hybrid reasoning model, their most intelligent model to date, is now available in Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3.7 Sonnet represents a significant advancement in AI capabilities, offering both quick responses and extended, step-by-step thinking made visible to the user. This new model includes strong improvements in coding and brings enhanced performance across various tasks, like instruction following, math, and physics. Claude 3.7 Sonnet introduces a unique approach to AI reasoning by integrating it seamlessly with other capabilities. Unlike traditional models that separate quick responses from those requiring deeper thought, Claude 3.7 Sonnet allows users to toggle between standard and extended thinking modes. In standard mode, it functions as an upgraded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. While in extended thinking mode, it employs self-reflection to achieve improved results across a wide range of tasks. Amazon Bedrock users can adjust how long the model thinks, offering a flexible trade-off between speed and answer quality. Additionally, users can control the reasoning budget by specifying a token limit, enabling more precise management of cost. Anthropic has optimized Claude 3.7 Sonnet for real-world applications that align closely with typical language model use cases, rather than focusing solely on math and computer science competition problems. This approach ensures that the model is well-suited to address the diverse needs of customers across various industries and use cases. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available in Amazon Bedrock in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) regions. To get started, visit the Amazon Bedrock console. Integrate it into your applications using the Amazon Bedrock API or SDK. For more information and to learn more read the AWS News Blog and Claude in Bedrock product detail page. ?

Amazon Verified Permissions now supports the Cedar JSON entity format

Published Date: 2025-02-24 18:00:00

Amazon Verified Permissions now supports the same JSON format for entity and context data, as the Cedar SDK. Developers can use this simpler format for authorization requests. This aligns the Amazon Verified Permissions API more closely with the open source Cedar SDK, and simplifies moving from the SDK to Amazon Verified Permissions or vice versa. Amazon Verified Permissions is a permissions management and fine-grained authorization service for the applications that you build. Using Cedar, an expressive and analyzable open-source policy language, developers and admins can define policy-based access controls using roles and attributes for more granular, context-aware access control. For example, an HR application might call Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) to determine if Alice is permitted to access Bob’s performance evaluation, given that she is in the HR Managers group. Customers can use Cedar JSON format to pass entity data describing the principal (Alice) and the resource (Bob’s performance evaluation). This change is available in all AWS regions supported by Amazon Verified Permissions. The service will continue to support the old format, and so the change does not break existing application integrations. To learn more about using the Cedar JSON format, see Cedar JSON entity in the Cedar user guide and the Verified Permissions user guide. To learn more about Amazon Verified Permissions, visit the product page. For more information visit the Verified Permissions product page. ?

Amazon EC2 C7gd instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region

Published Date: 2025-02-24 18:00:00

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7gd instances with up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. These Graviton3-based instances with DDR5 memory are built on the AWS Nitro System and are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage, including those that need temporary storage of data for scratch space, temporary files, and caches. They have up to 45% improved real-time NVMe storage performance than comparable Graviton2-based instances. Graviton3-based instances also use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable EC2 instances, enabling you to reduce your carbon footprint in the cloud. C7gd instances are now available in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), Europe (Spain, Stockholm, Ireland, Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Malaysia) and AWS GovCloud (US-East). ?