In Cloud Computing This Week [Dec 3rd 2021]

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) now supports global resource types, enabling you to provision a global resource once and share that resource across your accounts. A global resource is a resource that can be used in multiple AWS Regions. For example, you can now create a RAM resource share with an AWS Cloud WAN core network, which is a managed network containing AWS and on-premises networks, and share it across your organization. As a result, you can use the Cloud WAN core network to centrally operate a unified global network across Regions and across accounts.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go (preview) is now generally available in a single package, making it easier for you to use the CDK and stay up-to-date with new versions as we evolve it going forwards. AWS CDK v2 consolidates the AWS Construct Library  into a single package called aws-cdk-lib, and eliminates the need to download individual packages for each AWS service used. If you write your own CDK construct libraries, you only need to take a minimum dependency on this single package and let library consumers choose which exact AWS CDK version to use.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers improve their cloud workloads since 2015. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization. This week AWS are introducing a new AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar to help organizations learn, measure, and improve workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.

This week AWS announced the preview release of AWS Cloud WAN, a new wide area networking (WAN) service that helps you build, manage, and monitor a unified global network that manages traffic running between resources in your cloud and on-premises environments.

AWS are excited to announce the AWS SDK for Rust is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Rust empowers developers to interact with AWS services and enjoy APIs that follow Rust idioms and best practices. It utilizes modern Rust language features like async/await, non-blocking IO, and builders. The SDK also integrates with popular libraries in the Rust ecosystem like Tokio , Tracing , and Hyper.

Starting this week, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M1 Mac instances for macOS are available in preview. Built on Apple silicon Mac mini computers and powered by AWS Nitro System, EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads. EC2 M1 Mac instances also enable native ARM64 macOS environments for the first time in AWS to develop, build, test, deploy, and run Apple applications. Developers rearchitecting their macOS applications to natively support Apple silicon Macs can now provision ARM64 macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to enjoy faster builds and convenient distributed testing. Learn more and get started with EC2 M1 Mac instances preview here.

This week, AWS and the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) announced the first stable release of Open 3D Engine (O3DE), an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds for video production, and simulations for non-gaming use-cases unencumbered by licensing fees or commercial terms. Since the formation of O3DF and launch of the O3DE Developer Preview in July, over 250 developers from a wide range of industries have contributed thousands of pull requests, issues, and millions of lines of code changes to add developer features, improve stability, and increase performance to ensure that O3DE is ready for use in live games and simulations. As the successor to Amazon Lumberyard, O3DE offers developers and content creators a wide set of 3D content creation tools and a growing community of developers and foundation partners including AccelByte, Adobe, Apocalypse Studios, Audiokinetic, AWS, Backtrace.io, Carbonated, Futurewei, GAMEPOCH, Genvid Technologies, Hadean, HERE Technologies, Huawei, Intel, International Game Developers Association, KitBash3D, Kythera AI, Niantic, Open Robotics, PopcornFX, Red Hat, Rochester Institute of Technology, SideFX, Tafi, TLM Partners and Wargaming.

This week, AWS are announcing Extended Maintenance Plan for FreeRTOS - a real-time operating system for microcontrollers. FreeRTOS Extended Maintenance Plan (EMP) allows embedded developers to receive critical bug fixes and security patches on their chosen FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) version for up to 10 years beyond the expiry of the initial LTS period. FreeRTOS EMP helps customers secure their microcontroller-based devices for years, save operating system upgrade costs, and reduce risks associated with patching their devices. FreeRTOS EMP applies to libraries covered by FreeRTOS LTS, so developers can continue using a version that provides feature stability, security patches, and critical bug fixes, without having to plan a costly version upgrade.

This week AWS are announcing the general availability of Construct Hub , a registry of open-source construct libraries for simplifying cloud development. Constructs are reusable building blocks of the Cloud Development Kits (CDKs). Discover and share CDK constructs for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s)  and CDK for Terraform  (CDKtf) and other construct-based tools.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of AWS re:Post (re:Post), a new, community-driven, questions-and-answers service to help AWS customers remove technical roadblocks, accelerate innovation, and enhance operation. AWS re:Post enables you to ask questions about anything related to designing, building, deploying, and operating workloads on AWS, and get answers from community experts, including AWS customers, Partners, and employees.

AWS Amplify announces AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features (public preview) to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating Amplify’s powerful backend configuration and management capabilities. Amplify Studio automatically translates designs made in Figma to human-readable React UI component code. Within Amplify Studio, developers can visually connect the UI components to app backend data. For configuring and managing backends, Amplify Admin UI’s existing capabilities will be part of Amplify Studio going forward, providing a unified interface to enable developers to build full-stack apps faster. Learn more.

AWS are happy to announce that the AWS SDK for Swift is now in developer preview. The AWS SDK for Swift has been designed from the ground-up to provide idiomatic support for Swift’s concise syntax, multi platform capabilities, and features extensions to take advantage of Swift’s new concurrency features. This initial release supports iOS, macOS and Linux, with support for other platforms such as tvOS, watchOS, Catalyst, and Windows coming in the future.

AWS were pleased to announce that the AWS SDK for Kotlin is now in developer preview this week. The AWS SDK for Kotlin allows developers to interact with AWS services using idiomatic Kotlin, including native coroutine support for concurrent usage.

This week, AWS are excited to announce a new and simplified out-of-box AWS IoT connectivity experience  that can be implemented on two partner-provided FreeRTOS Reference Integration boards: the STM32L4+ and the ESP32-C3. 

Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a new Machine Learning (ML) powered capability for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that automatically detects and diagnoses database performance and operational issues, enabling you to resolve bottlenecks in minutes rather than days. Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS is a feature of Amazon DevOps Guru, which detects operational and performance related issues for all Amazon RDS engines and dozens of other resource types. DevOps Guru for RDS expands upon the existing capabilities of DevOps Guru to detect, diagnose, and provide remediation recommendations for a wide variety of database-related performance issues, such as resource over-utilization and misbehavior of SQL queries. When an issue occurs, DevOps Guru for RDS immediately notifies developers and DevOps engineers and provides diagnostic information, details on the extent of the problem, and intelligent remediation recommendations to help customers quickly resolve the issue.

Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). It provides a single, web-based visual interface where you can perform all ML development steps required to prepare data, as well as to build, train, and deploy models. AWS recently introduced  the ability to visually browse and connect to Amazon EMR clusters right from the SageMaker Studio notebook. Starting today, you can now monitor and debug your Apache Spark jobs running on EMR right from SageMaker Studio notebooks with just a click. Additionally, you can now discover, connect to, create, terminate and manage EMR clusters directly from SageMaker Studio. The built-in integration with EMR therefore enables you to do interactive data preparation and machine learning at peta-byte scale right within the single universal SageMaker Studio notebook.

AWS DeepRacer Student Presented by Intel is a new service for students enrolled in high schools and colleges globally. AWS DeepRacer Student builds on the success of of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer service, which educates aspiring developers on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), while removing barriers to entry faced by students. AWS DeepRacer Student provides an all-in-one solution with free learning modules, model training, and competition.

The AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Scholarship program, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, provides students who self-identify as underserved and underrepresented in tech educational content, career mentorship programs, and 2,500 scholarships annually as part of a commitment to a more diverse future AI & ML workforce.

Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender helps you choose the best available compute instance and configuration to deploy machine learning models for optimal inference performance and cost.

Starting this week, AWS Transit Gateway supports intra-region peering, giving you the ability to establish peering connections between multiple Transit Gateways in the same AWS Region. With this change, different units in your organization can deploy their own Transit Gateways, and easily interconnect them resulting in less administrative overhead and greater autonomy of operation.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support of dead-letter queue (DLQ) redrive to source queue, giving you better control over the life cycle of unconsumed messages. Dead-letter queues are an existing feature of Amazon SQS that allows customers to store messages that applications could not successfully consume. You can now efficiently redrive messages from your dead-letter queue to your source queue on the Amazon SQS console. DLQ redrive augments the dead-letter queue management experience for developers and enables them to build applications with the confidence that they can examine their unconsumed messages, recover from errors in their code, and reprocess messages in their dead-letter queues.

Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to identify unintended network access to your resources on AWS. Using Network Access Analyzer, you can verify whether network access for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources meets your security and compliance guidelines. With Network Access Analyzer, you can assess and identify improvements to your cloud security posture. Additionally, Network Access Analyzer makes it easier for you to demonstrate that your network meets certain regulatory requirements.

Amazon DynamoDB announces the new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (DynamoDB Standard-IA) table class, which helps you reduce your DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent for tables that store infrequently accessed data. The DynamoDB Standard-IA table class is ideal for use cases that require long-term storage of data that is infrequently accessed, such as application logs, old social media posts, e-commerce order history, and past gaming achievements.

This week, AWS are excited to announce Amazon SageMaker Training Compiler, a new feature of SageMaker that can accelerate the training of deep learning (DL) models by up to 50% through more efficient use of GPU instances.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a new feature of AWS DMS that allows you to quickly build a database and analytics migration plan by automating the discovery and analysis of your fleet. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is intended for users looking to migrate a large number of database and analytic servers to AWS.

Amazon SageMaker now offers enhancements to the machine learning (ML) lineage tracking capability  that enables customers to track and query the lineage of artifacts such as data, features, and models across an ML workflow. Now, customers can retrieve the end-to-end lineage graph spanning the entire workflow from data preparation to model deployment through a single query. This feature eliminates undifferentiated heavy lifting needed to retrieve lineage information one workflow step at a time and manually stitch them all together. Customers can also retrieve lineage information for segments of the workflow by defining a step as the focal point and querying the lineage of the steps that are upstream or downstream of that focal point. For instance, customers can define a model as the focal entity and retrieve the location of the raw data set from which features were extracted to train that model.

This week AWS announced a new structure for the 2022 Season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League. The AWS DeepRacer League is the world’s first global autonomous racing league, including an autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning and a 3D racing simulator where developers can get hands-on experience with Machine Learning (ML). 2022 introduces more opportunities to race LIVE for everyone via the return of physical racing on the Summit Circuit and a new LIVE head-to-head format in the Virtual Circuit, plus a new student-only division dubbed the AWS DeepRacer Student League.

AWS are excited to announce the preview of automatic chatbot designer in Amazon Lex, enabling developers to automatically design chatbots from conversation transcripts in hours rather than weeks. Amazon Lex helps you build, test, and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants on contact center services (such as Amazon Connect), websites, and messaging channels (such as Facebook Messenger). The automatic chatbot designer enhances the usability of Amazon Lex by automating conversational design, minimizing developer effort and reducing the time it takes to design a chatbot.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom is a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying OS and DB environment. Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the SQL Server database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install drivers, and enable native features to meet the dependent application's requirements.

This week AWS Introduced Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a free, no-configuration service that allows developers, academics, and data scientists to learn and experiment with machine learning.

Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference is a new inference option that enables you to easily deploy machine learning models for inference without having to configure or manage the underlying infrastructure. Simply select the serverless option when deploying your machine learning model, and Amazon SageMaker automatically provisions, scales, and turns off compute capacity based on the volume of inference requests. With SageMaker Serverless Inference, you pay only for the duration of running the inference code and the amount of data processed, not for idle time.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) now helps optimize scaling decisions for improved performance and resilience with Amazon CloudWatch. Starting today, AWS Managed Microsoft AD provides domain controller and directory utilization metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for new and existing directories automatically. Analyzing these utilization metrics helps you quantify your average and peak load times to identify the need for additional domain controllers. With this, you can define the number of domain controllers to meet your performance, resilience, and cost requirements.

Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is a new feature that makes it easier for you to plan, track, and monitor IP addresses for your AWS workloads. With IPAM's automated workflows, network administrators can more efficiently manage IP addresses.

AWS Shield Advanced now automatically protects web applications by blocking application layer (Layer 7) DDoS events with no manual intervention needed by you or the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT). When you protect your resources with AWS Shield Advanced and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced will identify patterns associated with layer 7 DDoS events and isolate this anomalous traffic by automatically creating AWS WAF rules in your web access control lists (ACLs). These rules can be implemented in count mode to observe how they will impact resource traffic and then deployed in block mode. These capabilities enable you to quickly respond to and mitigate DDoS events that threaten the availability of your applications.

This week AWS announced the general release of AWS Direct Connect SiteLink. SiteLink makes it easy to create private network connections between your on-premises locations, such as offices and data centers, by connecting them to Direct Connect locations throughout the world.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a fully managed service that enables you to create, automate, and manage end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflows, now supports integration with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and Amazon SageMaker Clarify. With these integrations, you can easily incorporate model quality and bias detection in your ML workflow. The increased automation can help reduce your operational burden in building and managing ML models.

This week, AWS are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus, a new turnkey data labeling service that enables you to create high-quality training datasets quickly and reduces costs by up to 40%.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that makes it easy to extract text and data from any document or image, now offers specialized support to extract data from identity documents, such U.S. Driver Licenses and U.S. Passports. You can extract implied fields like name and address, as well as explicit fields like Date of Birth, Date of Issue, Date of Expiry, ID #, ID Type, and more in the form of key-value pairs. Until today, current OCR based solutions were limited, and did not offer the ability to extract all the required fields accurately due to rich background images or the ability to recognize names and addresses, as well as the fields associated with them (e.g., Washington state ID lists home address with the key "8"), or support ID designs and formats that varied by country or state.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. This week, we are excited to announce the launch of three new features: (1) Experience Builder to create fully functional search applications in a few clicks, (2) Search Analytics Dashboard for search insights and metrics, and (3) Custom Document Enrichment for document pre-processing and enrichment during ingestion.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is pleased to announce the launch of AWS DMS Studio, a new service console that makes it easy to manage database migrations from start to finish. AWS DMS Studio accelerates and simplifies migrations by integrating tools for each phase of the migration journey from assessment to conversion to migration. AWS DMS Studio integrates AWS DMS Fleet Advisor to inventory and analyzes your database and analytics fleet, AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to convert database schema and application code, and AWS DMS to migrate your data. At each step of the migration, AWS DMS Studio assists you by providing contextual resources such as documentation and guidance on engaging migration experts where needed.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas is a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that enables business analysts to create accurate machine learning (ML) models and generate predictions using a visual, point-and-click interface, no coding required.

Amazon S3 introduces a new S3 Object Ownership setting, Bucket owner enforced, that disables access control lists (ACLs), simplifying access management for data stored in S3. When you apply this bucket-level setting, every object in an S3 bucket is owned by the bucket owner, and ACLs are no longer used to grant permissions. As a result, access to your data is based on policies, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies applied to IAM identities , session policies, Amazon S3 bucket and access point policies, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoint policies. This setting applies to both new and existing objects in a bucket, and you can control access to this setting using IAM policies. With the new S3 Object Ownership setting, you can easily review, manage, and modify access to your shared data sets in Amazon S3 using only policies.

AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization. It allows customers to migrate and modernize their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns – replatforming and automated refactoring – allowing customers to select their best-fit migration path and associated toolchains based on their migration assessment results.

You can now use AWS Control Tower to deny services and operations in your Control Tower environments for the AWS Region(s) of your choice. Region deny capabilities complement existing AWS Control Tower Region selection and Region deselection features, providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory requirements while improving cost efficiency of expanding into additional Regions.

This week, Contact Lens for Amazon Connect announced a new machine learning (ML) capability called call summarization that helps businesses improve the productivity of contact center agents and managers, so they can focus on providing excellent customer experiences.

This week, AWS are announcing the preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months. With just a few clicks in the AWS console, customers specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices. AWS then delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices. AWS Private 5G automates the setup and deployment of the network and scales capacity on demand to support additional devices and increased network traffic. There are no upfront fees or per-device costs with AWS Private 5G, and customers pay only for the network capacity and throughput they request.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS enables you to launch, run, and scale fully managed file systems on AWS that replace the ZFS or other Linux-based file servers you run on premises while helping to provide better agility and lower costs. FSx for OpenZFS is the newest member of the Amazon FSx family of services, which provides fully-featured and highly-performant file storage powered by your choice of widely-used file systems that include NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, and Lustre. FSx for OpenZFS file systems are accessible from Linux, Windows, and macOS compute instances and containers via the industry-standard NFS protocol (v3, v4.0, v4.1, v4.2).

The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class now automatically includes a new Archive Instant Access tier with cost savings of up to 68% for rarely accessed data that needs millisecond retrieval and high throughput performance. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the first cloud storage that automatically reduces your storage costs on a granular object level by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier based on access frequency, without performance impact, retrieval fees, or operational overhead. S3 Intelligent-Tiering delivers milliseconds latency and high throughput performance for frequently, infrequently, and now rarely accessed data in the Frequent, Infrequent, and new Archive Instant Access tiers. Now, you can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for virtually any workload, especially data lakes, data analytics, new applications, and user-generated content.

This week, AWS are announcing AWS IoT TwinMaker, a new service that makes it faster and easier for developers to create and use digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems such as buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state, and behavior of the systems they represent. Although digital twin use cases are many and diverse, most customers want to get started by easily using their existing data to get a deeper understanding of their operations.

AWS IoT Device Management Fleet Indexing  now provides integration with two additional data sources, AWS IoT Core named shadows and AWS IoT Device Defender detect violations. With this release, supported data sources for Fleet Indexing increased to 5 from 3 (AWS IoT Core registry, shadows, and connectivity lifecycle events). These two additional data sources will help IoT customers who store IoT fleet data across different services and systems and regularly access the data for fleet monitoring, health checks, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and troubleshooting.

Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is a new archive storage class that delivers the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, you can save up to 68% on storage costs compared to using the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage class, when your data is accessed once per quarter. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes. In addition, the existing S3 Glacier storage class is renamed to be S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and now includes free bulk retrievals and a 10% storage price reduction, making it optimized for backup and disaster recovery use cases. 

AWS are happy to announce the preview of Amazon EMR Serverless, a new serverless option in Amazon EMR that makes it easy and cost-effective for data engineers and analysts to run petabyte-scale data analytics in the cloud. Amazon EMR is a cloud big data platform used by customers to run large-scale distributed data processing jobs, interactive SQL queries, and machine learning applications using open-source analytics frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto. With EMR Serverless, customers can run applications built using these frameworks with a few clicks, without having to configure, optimize, or secure clusters. EMR Serverless automatically provisions and scales the compute and memory resources required by the application, and customers only pay for the resources they use.

AWS are excited to announce that Amazon S3 has reduced storage prices by up to 31% in three S3 storage classes. Specifically we are reducing the storage price for S3 Standard-Infrequent Access and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access by up to 31% in 9 AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), US West (Northern California), and South America (Sao Paulo).

Amazon Connect now provides an agent application for managing contacts and resolving customer issues. In the contact center, agents need a way to easily handle multiple contacts (voice, chat, tasks) while viewing the right customer information and having knowledge articles surfaced in the context of the customer’s issue they are trying to solve. After launching the agent application in their browser, agents are immediately able to sign-in and manage customer authentication, calls, and chats alongside viewing key customer insights and knowledge articles. For example, when an agent receives a call or chat, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles shares customer information, such as name, phone number, and email address. While the agent is talking to the customer, Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes the caller's unique voice characteristics using machine learning to verify the caller's identity in real-time, displaying a confidence score and status. Then throughout the contact, Amazon Connect Wisdom detects customer issues and proactively provides knowledge article recommendations in real-time. With the Amazon Connect agent application, you can help give your agents the right information to solve customer issues, deliver a personal experience, and improve customer satisfaction. 

This week, AWS Snow Family launches a secure, offline tape data migration capability for AWS Snowball Edge, enabling you to migrate petabytes of data stored on physical tapes to AWS without changing your existing tape-based backup workflows. Using this capability, you can migrate tape data to AWS from environments, where you have network connectivity limitations, bandwidth constraints, and high network connection costs. Moving tape data to AWS helps you eliminate physical tape infrastructure expenses and gain online access to your tape data.

AWS IoT ExpressLink  (Preview) is connectivity software that powers a range of hardware modules developed and offered by AWS Partners, such as Espressif, Infineon, and u-blox. These connectivity modules include AWS-validated software, making it faster and easier for you to securely connect almost any product to the cloud in a fraction of the time and cost, including medical devices, industrial sensors, and consumer products.

This week, AWS are announcing the public preview of AWS Backup for Amazon S3. You can now create a single policy in AWS Backup to automate the protection of application data stored in S3 alone or alongside 11 other AWS services for storage, compute, and database. Using AWS Backup’s seamless integration with AWS Organizations, you can create independent, immutable, and encrypted backups and centrally manage backups and restore of S3 buckets and objects across your AWS accounts.

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET simplifies the process of re-architecting applications into smaller code projects. Modernize and transform your .NET applications with an assistive tool that analyzes source code and runtime metrics to create a visual representation of your application and its dependencies. This tool delivers a holistic visualization of an applications source code, helps code refactoring and assists in extraction of the codebase into separate code projects that teams can develop, build, and operate independently to improve agility, uptime, and scalability.

This week, AWS are announcing AWS IoT FleetWise, a new service that makes it easier and more cost effective for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. Once the data is in the cloud, automakers can use it for tasks like remotely diagnosing issues in individual vehicles, analyzing vehicle fleet health to help prevent potential warranty claims and recalls, and collecting rich sensor data for training machine learning models that improve autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling your FSx for Lustre file system’s contents to be updated automatically as data is deleted or moved in S3.

This week, AWS are announcing the preview of AWS Trainium-based Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances. AWS Trainium, is the second machine learning chip built by AWS that is optimized for high-performance deep learning training.

This week, AWS are announcing the next generation storage optimized Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. They feature up to 30TB of storage with the new AWS Nitro SSDs that are custom-designed by AWS to maximize the storage performance of I/O intensive workloads such as SQL/NoSQL databases, search engines, distributed file systems and data analytics which continuously read and write from the SSDs in a sustained manner. AWS Nitro SSDs enable up to 60% lower latency and up to 75% reduced latency variability in Im4gn and Is4gen instances compared to the third generation of storage optimized instances. These instances maximize the number of transactions processed per second (TPS) for I/O intensive workloads such as relational databases (e.g. MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL), and NoSQL databases (KeyDB, ScyllaDB, Cassandra) which have medium-large size data sets and can benefit from high compute performance and high network throughput. They are also an ideal fit for search engines, and data analytics workloads that require very fast access to data sets on local storage.

The Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now named Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and now includes free bulk retrievals in addition to a 10% price reduction, making it optimized for use cases such as backup and disaster recovery. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is now even more cost-effective, and the free bulk retrievals make it ideal for when you need to retrieve large data sets once or twice per year and do not want to worry about the retrieval cost.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store streaming data at any scale. Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand is a new capacity mode for Kinesis Data Streams, capable of serving gigabytes of write and read throughput per minute without capacity planning. You can create a new on-demand data stream or convert an existing data stream into the on-demand mode with a single-click and never have to provision and manage servers, storage, or throughput. In the on-demand mode you pay for throughput consumed rather than for provisioned resources, making it easy to balance costs and performance.

This week AWS announced the General Availability of Amazon WorkSpaces Web. WorkSpaces Web is a new capability from our End User Computing suite - a low cost, fully managed WorkSpace built specifically to facilitate secure, web-based workloads. WorkSpaces Web makes it easy for customers to safely provide their employees with access to internal websites and SaaS web applications without the administrative burden of appliances or specialized client software. WorkSpaces Web provides simple policy tools tailored for user interactions, while offloading common tasks like capacity management, scaling, and maintaining browser images.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) console now reports security warnings, errors, and suggestions from Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer as you author your S3 policies. The console automatically runs more than 100 policy checks to validate your policies. These checks save you time, guide you to resolve errors, and help you apply security best practices. By resolving errors and security warnings reported by the S3 console, you can validate that your policies are functional before you attach them to your S3 buckets or access points.

Amazon Redshift now provides a serverless option (preview) to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters. With Amazon Redshift Serverless, all users including data analysts, developers, and data scientists can now use Amazon Redshift to get insights from data in seconds. Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and intelligently scales data warehouse capacity to deliver best-in-class performance for all your analytics. You only pay for the compute used for the duration of the workloads on a per-second basis. You can benefit from this simplicity without making any changes to your existing analytics and business intelligence applications.

This week AWS announced Amazon MSK Serverless in public preview, a new type of Amazon MSK cluster that makes it easier for developers to run Apache Kafka without having to manage its capacity. MSK Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute and storage resources and offers throughput-based pricing, so you can use Apache Kafka on demand and pay for the data you stream and retain.

Starting this week, the new Amazon EC2 C7g instances powered by the latest generation custom-designed AWS Graviton3 processors are available in preview. Amazon EC2 C7g instances will provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), gaming, video encoding, and CPU-based machine learning inference. These instances are the first in the cloud to feature the cutting edge DDR5 memory technology, which provides 50% more bandwidth compared to DDR4 memory. C7g instances provide 20% higher networking bandwidth compared to previous generation C6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors. They also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for applications such as high performance computing that require high levels of inter-node communication.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling your S3 bucket’s contents to be updated automatically as data is updated in an FSx for Lustre file system.

The next generation of Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems, built on AWS Graviton processors, provide three improvements to performance and price. First, the new file systems provide up to 5x higher throughput per terabyte (up to 1 GB/s per terabyte) compared to previous generation file systems. Second, with support for client instances with multiple network interfaces, you can now drive up to 400 Gbps of network bandwidth on Amazon EC2 instances such as P4d and DL1. Third, the next generation of FSx for Lustre file systems reduce your cost of throughput by up to 60% compared to previous generation file systems.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file systems for compute workloads, is making it even easier to process data residing in Amazon S3 by enabling an FSx for Lustre file system to be linked to multiple S3 buckets.

AWS Lake Formation is excited to announce the general availability of three new capabilities that simplify building, securing, and managing data lakes. First, Lake Formation Governed Tables, a new type of table on Amazon S3, that simplifies building resilient data pipelines with multi-table transaction support. As data is added or changed, Lake Formation automatically manages conflicts and errors to ensure that all users see a consistent view of the data. This eliminates the need for customers to create custom error handling code or batch their updates. Second, Governed Tables monitor and automatically optimize how data is stored so query times are consistent and fast. Third, in addition to table and columns, Lake Formation now supports row and cell-level permissions, making it more easily to restrict access to sensitive information by granting users access to only the portions of the data they are allowed to see. Governed Tables, row and cell-level permissions are now supported through Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, AWS Glue, and Amazon QuickSight.

Amazon Athena users can now use AWS Lake Formation to configure fine-grained access permissions and read from ACID-compliant tables. Amazon Athena makes it simple for users to analyze data in Amazon S3-based data lakes to help ensure that users only have access to data to which they're authorized and that their queries are reliable in the face of changes to the underlying data can be a complex task.

AWS Backup now allows you to centrally protect VMware workloads, on premises and in the cloud as VMware Cloud^TM on AWS, helping you meet your business and regulatory compliance needs. You can now use a single policy in AWS Backup to centrally protect your hybrid VMware environments alongside the 12 AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) already supported by AWS Backup. AWS Backup enables you to demonstrate compliance status of your organizational data protection policies by monitoring backup, copy, and restore operations, and allowing you to generate unified auditor-ready reports to help satisfy your data governance and regulatory requirements.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service to collect, store, organize, and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. AWS IoT SiteWise now supports two storage tiers for equipment data: a hot tier optimized for real-time applications, and a cold tier optimized for analytical applications. The hot tier stores frequently accessed data with lower write-to-read latency. You can store data in the hot tier for industrial applications that need fast access to the latest measurement values from your equipment, such as applications that visualize real-time metrics with an interactive dashboard, or applications that monitor operations and trigger alarms to identify equipment performance issues. The cold tier stores less-frequently accessed data that can tolerate higher read latency. Use data from the cold tier to create applications that need access to historical data, such as business intelligence (BI) dashboards, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) training, historical reports, and backups. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of general purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances. M6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (code named Milan) processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, deliver up to 35% better price performance compared to M5a instances, and 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6a instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases), web servers, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.

This week, AWS announced AI for data analytics (AIDA), a set of AWS Partners solutions that embed predictive analytics into mainstream analytics workspaces. AIDA partners solutions make it easy for business experts to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive better insights from data and take action. AIDA features solutions from the following AWS Partners: Amplitude, Anaplan, Causality Link, Domo, Exasol, Interworks, Pegasystems, Provectus, Qlik, Snowflake, Tableau, TIBCO, and Workato. 

AWS are excited to announce the new AWS Graviton Ready Program for AWS Partners with software products that support AWS Graviton-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.  As customers adopt AWS Graviton-based instances to realize the best price performance in Amazon EC2, they need the right software solutions to help integrate, deploy, monitor, and secure their Linux-based and containerized workloads. AWS Graviton Ready Partners offer Graviton-enabled software products, including operating systems and platform services, security, monitoring and observability, CI/CD, data and analytics, and cloud devices. 

Starting this week, you can use Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots to recover from accidental snapshot deletions to meet your business continuity needs. Previously, if you accidentally deleted a snapshot, you would have to roll back to a snapshot from an earlier point in time, increasing your recovery point objective. With Recycle Bin, you can specify a retention time period and recover a deleted snapshot before the expiration of the retention period. A recovered snapshot retains its attributes such as tags, permissions, and encryption status, which it had prior to deletion, and can be used immediately for creating volumes. Snapshots that are not recovered from the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted upon expiration of the retention time.

Amazon Timestream has added three new capabilities, namely, scheduled queries, multi-measure records, and magnetic storage writes, to make time series data processing faster, cost-effective, and therefore more accessible to many more customers. These features enable customers to write, store, and access their time series data more economically and efficiently, so they can continue to derive insights from their data and drive better data-driven business decisions.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool now offers the ability for customers to create their own custom lenses.

Ready to fast-track application refactoring? AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is the new starting point for incremental app refactor that makes it easy to manage the refactor process while operating in production. Using Refactor Spaces, customers focus on the refactor of their applications, and not the creation and management of the underlying infrastructure that makes refactoring possible. This new Migration Hub feature reduces the business risk of evolving applications into microservices or extending existing applications with new features written in microservices. Refactor Spaces orchestrates AWS services across multiple accounts to create a refactor environment for incrementally evolving an application that helps customers realize value earlier.

AWS customers can now find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party Kubernetes applications from AWS Marketplace on any Kubernetes cluster, in any environment. This extends the existing AWS Marketplace for Containers capabilities. Previously, customers could find and buy containerized third-party applications from AWS Marketplace, and deploy them in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Customers can now deploy third-party Kubernetes applications to on-premises environments using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (EKS-Anywhere), or any customer self-managed Kubernetes clusters in on-premises environments or in EC2.

AWS are excited to announce you can now use Terraform to provision and customize accounts through AWS Control Tower with AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT). Your developers can now enjoy a streamlined process which automates the provisioning of fully functional accounts, providing your users with faster access to the resources they need to be successful.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) support for Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to help customers downlink more data in less time, saving cost. AWS Ground Station currently supports SDRs for narrowband (less than 54MHz), but in the past did not support SDRs for wideband (greater than 54Mhz). Expanding SDR support to 400Mhz for wideband enables SDR partners to provide new modulation and encoding schemes, helping Earth Imaging businesses, universities, and governments to optimize their operational costs. 

This week, AWS IoT Greengrass announced a new integration with AWS Systems Manager that helps IT and edge device administrators to securely manage their edge devices, such as industrial equipment and industrial PCs, alongside their IT assets, such as EC2 instances, AWS Outposts, and on-premises servers. 

AWS are committed to supporting the global energy industry in safely meeting the energy demands the world needs today, while accelerating their transition to a more balanced and sustainable energy future. During re:invent’s Global Partner Summit Keynote on November 29th in Las Vegas, AWS announced the new AWS Energy Competency Program that differentiates AWS Partners for their technical expertise and repeat customer success with energy customers worldwide.

This week, AWS are announcing the public preview of a new feature that allows you to use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads by running AWS CLI commands from Slack channels. Previously, you could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot.

This week, AWS announced the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency. These AWS Partners have deep domain expertise in offering software products that enable customers to migrate and modernize applications while customers move to the cloud. AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partners can help customers optimize cost and reduce TCO, modernize legacy applications and data, and reduce operational burden.

You can now build event-driven applications using Amazon S3 Event Notifications that trigger when objects are transitioned or expired (deleted) with S3 Lifecycle, or moved within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class to its Archive Access or Deep Archive Access tiers. You can also trigger S3 Event Notifications for any changes to object tags or access control lists (ACLs). You can generate these new notifications for your entire bucket, or for a subset of your objects using prefixes or suffixes, and choose to deliver them to Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or an AWS Lambda function.

This week, AWS announced that Karpenter, a new open-source Kubernetes cluster autoscaling project, is now Generally Available with version 0.5 and ready for use in production environments. Karpenter is a flexible, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler that helps improve application availability and resource utilization. Karpenter launches right-sized EC2 instances in response to changing application load in under a minute. These EC2 instances are based on the specific needs of a cluster’s workloads, such as compute, storage, acceleration, and scheduling requirements. Today, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) supports clusters using Karpenter on AWS, although Karpenter is designed to work with any conformant Kubernetes cluster.

This week, AWS are excited to announce the First Annual AWS BugBust re:Invent  challenge. Java and Python developers of all skill levels, can compete to fix as many software bugs as possible to earn points and climb the global leaderboard. There will be an array of prizes, from hoodies and fly swatters to Amazon Echo Dots, available to participants who meet certain milestones in the challenge. There’s also the coveted title of “Ultimate AWS BugBuster” accompanied by a cash prize of $1500 for whomever earns the most points by squashing bugs during the event.

The new Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure is generally available, globally. Amazon Inspector has been completely rearchitected to automate vulnerability management and deliver near real-time findings to minimize the time to discover new vulnerabilities.

You can now use Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge to build, scale, and deploy event-driven applications based on changes to the data you store in S3. This makes it easier to act on new data in S3, build multiple applications that react to object changes simultaneously, and replay past events, all without creating additional copies of objects or developing new software. With increased flexibility to process events and send them to multiple targets, you can now create new serverless applications with advanced analytics and machine learning at scale more confidently without writing single-use custom code.

AWS Compute Optimizer now helps you quickly identify and prioritize top optimization opportunities through two new sets of dashboard-level metrics: savings opportunity and performance improvement opportunity.

This week, AWS are launching Greengrass Software Catalog, a collection of AWS IoT Greengrass software components developed by the Greengrass community. Instead of developing device applications from scratch, you can now choose from a list of pre-built Greengrass components on GitHub to kick-start your IoT edge application. You can easily install, use, and modify these components to accelerate your IoT project. As part of this launch, we are also offering Greengrass Development Kit Command Line Interface (CLI) that you can use to configure and build the catalog components in your local development environment.

AWS are excited to announce the public preview of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds write, delete, update, and time travel operations to Athena's SQL data manipulation language (DML). Athena ACID transactions enables multiple concurrent users to make reliable, row-level modifications to their Amazon S3 data from Athena's console, API, and ODBC and JDBC drivers. Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are compatible with other services and engines such as Amazon EMR and Apache Spark that support the Iceberg table format.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at your datacenter and on-premises locations in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Morocco, Nigeria, and Vietnam.

AWS are pleased to announce that AWS Control Tower now offers new guardrails to provide more control over the physical location of where customer data is stored and processed, a concept known as data residency. Control Tower data residency guardrails help ensure customer data, the personal data you upload to the AWS services under your AWS account, is not stored or processed outside a specific AWS Region or Regions.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports pull through cache repositories, a new feature designed to automatically sync images from publicly accessible registries. With today’s release, customers now benefit from the download performance, security, and availability of Amazon ECR for the public images.

This week, AWS are announcing the new Amazon EC2 G5g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and featuring NVIDIA T4G Tensor Core GPUs. G5g are the first Arm-based instances in a major cloud to feature GPU acceleration and provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for Android game streaming. With G5g instances, Android game developers can run natively on Arm-based GPU instances, encode the rendered graphics, and stream the game over network to a mobile device. This helps simplify development effort and lowers the cost per stream per hour by up to 30%. G5g instances are also ideal for machine learning developers who are looking for cost-effective inference, have ML models that are sensitive to CPU performance, and leverage NVIDIA’s AI libraries.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM is a real-user monitoring capability that helps you identify and debug issues in the client-side on web applications and enhance end user’s digital experience. CloudWatch RUM enables application developers and DevOps engineers reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) client-side performance issues by enabling a quicker resolution. Amazon CloudWatch RUM is part of CloudWatch’s Digital Experience Monitoring along with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently.

AWS Compute Optimizer now offers enhanced infrastructure metrics, a paid feature that when activated, enhances your Amazon EC2 instance and Auto Scaling group recommendations by capturing monthly or quarterly utilization patterns. Compute Optimizer does this by ingesting and analyzing up to six times more Amazon CloudWatch utilization metrics history than the default Compute Optimizer option (up to 3 months of history vs. 14 days). You can activate the feature at the organization, account, or resource level via the Compute Optimizer console  or API for all existing and newly created EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups.

Metrics Insights is a new feature from Amazon CloudWatch that is in preview. As a fast, flexible, SQL based query engine, Metrics Insights enables developers, operators, systems engineers, and cloud solutions architects to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution. With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations. Use Metrics Insights and other CloudWatch features to monitor your AWS and hybrid environments, and to respond to operational problems promptly.

The AWS Partner Network (APN) introduces AWS GameDay Benefits for AWS Partners in Differentiation Programs: AWS Service Delivery, AWS Service Ready, AWS Competency, and AWS Managed Service Provider Programs. Through AWS GameDay Benefits, partners can choose AWS GameDay League, AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK), or both, as benefits of their AWS Partner Differentiation Program achievements! Elevated levels of technical enablement, direct connections with AWS experts, and quality leads are the top benefit asks of AWS Partners who participate in Differentiation Programs. AWS GameDay Benefits for Partners delivers all three. AWS GameDay Benefits provide tangible value-added opportunities for partners in return for their work to attain technical validation through our programs.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations to detect security vulnerabilities, improve code quality and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code.

AWS IoT RoboRunner is a new robotics service that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy applications that help fleets of robots work together seamlessly. With AWS IoT RoboRunner, it is easier to build applications that make it possible to interoperate and orchestrate robots from a single view by reducing the complex development work required to connect robots to each other and the rest of your industrial software systems.

Amazon Personalize now offers intelligent user segmentation which allows you to run more effective prospecting campaigns through your marketing channels. Traditionally, user segmentation has relied on demographic information and manually curated business rules to make assumptions about users’ intentions and assign them to pre-defined audience segments. Amazon Personalize uses machine learning techniques to learn about your items, users, and how your users interact with your items. Amazon Personalize segments users based on their preferences for different products, categories, brands, and more. This can help you drive higher engagement with marketing campaigns, increase retention through targeted messaging, and improve the return on investment for your marketing spend.

AWS are announcing the launch of AWS Data Exchange for APIs, a new feature that enables customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party API products from providers on AWS Data Exchange. With AWS Data Exchange for APIs, customers can leverage AWS-native authentication and governance, explore consistent API documentation, and utilize supported AWS SDKs to make API calls. Data providers can now reach millions of AWS customers that consume API-based data by adding their APIs to the AWS Data Exchange catalog, and more easily manage subscriber authentication, entitlement, and billing.

Starting this week, you can use Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots, to save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access. EBS Snapshots are incremental, storing only the changes since the last snapshot and making them cost effective for daily and weekly backups that need to be accessed frequently. You might also have snapshots that you access every few months or years and do not need fast access to data, such as snapshots created at the end of a project or snapshots that need to be retained long-term for regulatory reasons. For such use cases, you can now use EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a storage cost of $0.0125/GB-month*. Snapshots in the archive tier have a minimum retention period of 90 days. Retrievals from the archive tier will incur a charge of $0.03/GB* of data transferred.

This week, Amazon Personalize is excited to announce recommenders which are optimized to deliver personalized experiences for common use cases in Media & Entertainment and Retail. It is now faster and easier to deliver high performing personalized user experiences in your applications without any ML expertise required. Recommenders reduce the time needed to build and deliver personalized experiences and fully manage the lifecycle of the experience to help ensure you recommend what is most relevant to your users.

Amazon CloudWatch Evidently is a new capability which helps application developers safely validate new features across the full application stack. Developers can use Evidently to conduct experiments on new application features and identify unintended consequences, thereby reducing risk. When launching new features, developers can expose the features to a subset of users, monitor key metrics such as page load times and conversions, then safely dial up traffic for general use. Amazon CloudWatch Evidently is part of CloudWatch’s Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities along with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and Amazon CloudWatch RUM.

Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs enables you to easily run hybrid quantum-classical algorithms such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), that combine classical compute resources with quantum computing devices to optimize the performance of today’s quantum systems. With this new feature, you only have to provide your algorithm script and choose a target device — a quantum processing unit (QPU) or quantum circuit simulator. Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs is designed to spin up the requested classical resources when your target quantum device is available, run your algorithm, and release the instances after completion so you only pay for what you use. Braket Hybrid Jobs can provide live insights into algorithm metrics to monitor your algorithm as it progresses, enabling you to make adjustments more quickly. Most importantly, your jobs have priority access to the selected QPU for the duration of your experiment, putting you in control, and helping to provide faster and more predictable execution.

Effective December 1, 2021, AWS is making two pricing changes for data transfer out to the internet. Each month, the first terabyte of data transfer out of Amazon Cloudfront, the first 10 million HTTP/S requests, and the first 2 million CloudFront Functions invocations will be free. Free data transfer out of CloudFront is no longer limited to the first 12 months. In addition, the first 100 gigabytes per month of data transfer out from all AWS Regions (except China and GovCoud) will be free. Free data transfer out from AWS Regions is also no longer limited to the first 12 months. These changes will replace the existing data transfer and CloudFront AWS Free Tier offerings, and AWS customers will see these changes automatically reflected in their AWS bills going forward. All AWS customers will benefit from these pricing changes, and millions of customers will see no data transfer charges as a result.

AWS Lambda now provides content filtering options for SQS, DynamoDB and Kinesis as event sources. With event pattern content filtering, customers can write complex rules so that their Lambda function is only triggered by SQS, DynamoDB, or Kinesis under filtering criteria you specify. This helps reduce traffic to customers’ Lambda functions, simplifies code, and reduces overall cost.

AWS App2Container(A2C) now supports Jenkins for setting up a CI/CD pipeline to automate building and deploying application in containers on AWS. With this new integration, customers can configure their existing Jenkins pipeline in the current Jenkins environment for managing automated build and deployment of containerized applications. 

Public preview: FSLogix profiles support for Azure AD-joined VMs for Azure Virtual Desktop

Create an Azure Files share to store FSLogix profiles and configure it to support Azure AD authentication.

Public preview: Measure product effectiveness with new user analytics experience in Application Insights

A new experience based on Google’s “HEART framework” helps you measure product effectiveness.

IaaS Agent extension full mode no restart for SQL VMs generally available

SQL Server IaaS Agent extension can now be upgraded to full mode from lightweight mode without any service disruptions.

SQL Server IaaS Agent extension for Linux SQL VMs generally available

SQL Server IaaS Agent extension license management capabilities are now available for Ubuntu Linux virtual machines.

Public preview: Azure Monitor action rules are now 'alert processing rules'

We are enhancing the preview of alert processing rules with capabilities for richer at-scale management.

General availability: Audit Logs of Azure Monitor log queries

Azure Monitor logs is announcing a new capability to collect audit logs about query execution

General availability: Create AKS clusters without local user accounts

Disable local accounts for AKS cluster and use AAD only for more secure cluster access.

General availability: AKS auto-certificate rotation

You no longer need to monitor and manually rotate non-CA certificates on the AKS control plane and agent nodes for compliance or policy reasons.

General availability: AKS node image auto-upgrade

AKS now handles the routine task of node image upgrade for you.

Azure Communication Services: Short code functionality for SMS now available in public preview

Execute high-volume SMS campaigns in seconds with easy, automated short code functionality.

General availability: New capabilities in Network Watcher Diagnostic tools to evaluate AVNM Security rules

Through updates to Network Watcher Diagnostic tools, you now have the ability to view and evaluate AVNM security rules in addition to the existing support of NSG security rules.

Public preview: Azure NetApp Files application volume group for SAP HANA

With Azure NetApp Files application volume group (AVG) for SAP HANA, you are able to deploy all volumes required to install and operate an SAP HANA system according to best practices.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server now generally available

Use the Flexible Server deployment option allowing better control, flexibility, zone-redundant high availability, and cost optimization on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a managed service running the open source PostgreSQL database.

Azure Load Testing now available in public preview

You can now generate high scale load with ease and integrate it into existing CI/CD workflows.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server: Geo-redundant backup and restore in public preview

Strengthen your business continuity and disaster recovery plan with geo-redundant backup and restore for Flexible Server on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a managed service running the open source Postgres database.

General availability: Azure HDInsight API version updated

New HDInsight API adds new networking and availability features that help you build more resilient and secure networks.

General availability: Data transformation at Export in Azure IoT Central

This update allows the ability for you to transform device data in IoT Central into your preferred structure and export that transformed data to an external destination.

General availability: Secure Data Egress via Managed Identity in Azure IoT Central

Azure IoT Central now supports System Assigned Managed Identity allowing you to configure secure data exports.

General availability: VPN Gateway NAT

Azure VPN Gateway NAT (Network Address Translation) can be used to connect on-premises networks or branch offices to an Azure virtual network with overlapping IP addresses.

General availability: Wildcard listener on Application Gateways

Application Gateway now supports wildcard characters for multi-site listeners.