What‘s New in July and August 2021

July and August were very boring months for announcements, so Arjen, JM, and Guy decided to discuss them both in a single episode. They also decided to record before the month actually ended, which doesn’t really behoove them as they missed out on a couple of actually interesting announcements. So those will be discussed in our September episode.

News Finally in Sydney

• Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are now available on Amazon SageMaker in 4 additional AWS Regions
• Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups Regional Expansion
• AWS Directory Service now supports smart card authentication with AD Connector for Amazon WorkSpaces in 5 additional AWS Regions

Serverless Lambda

• AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.9
• AWS Lambda now supports Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ as an event source

Amplify

• AWS Amplify launches new full-stack CI/CD capabilities
• Complete guide to full-stack CI/CD workflows with AWS Amplify | Front-End Web & Mobile
• AWS Amplify CLI adds support for storing environment variables and secrets accessed by AWS Lambda functions
• AWS Amplify allows you to mix and match authorization modes in DataStore
• AWS Amplify now supports Sign in with Apple
• Announcing Amplify Geo (Developer Preview) for AWS Amplify

Other

• Amazon API Gateway now supports mutual TLS with certificates from third-party CAs and ACM Private CA
• Simplify CI/CD configuration for serverless applications and your favorite CI/CD system — Public Preview
• AWS AppSync now supports custom authorization with AWS Lambda for GraphQL APIs

Containers

• Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.21
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.21 | Containers
• Amazon EKS managed node groups now supports parallel node upgrades
• Amazon EKS now supports Multus
• Amazon ECS supports additional configurations for scheduled and event-driven tasks
• AWS Cloud Map supports configuring negative caching for DNS queries
• AWS App Mesh Constructs for AWS CDK are now generally available
• AWS Private Certificate Authority introduces integration with Kubernetes
• Amazon VPC CNI plugin increases pods per node limits

EC2 & VPC Instances

• Introducing new Amazon EC2 G4ad instance sizes
• New – Amazon EC2 M6i Instances Powered by the Latest-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors | AWS News Blog
• Amazon EC2 customers can now use ED25519 keys for authentication during instance connectivity operations
• Amazon EC2 Hibernation adds support for C5d, M5d, and R5d Instances
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now assign IP prefixes to their EC2 instances
• Assigning prefixes to Amazon EC2 network interfaces - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• Amazon EC2 now supports custom time windows for Scheduled Events

Auto Scaling

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling enhances Instance Refresh with configuration checks, Launch Template validation, and Amazon EventBridge notifications
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you control which instances to terminate on scale-in

Other

• Amazon EC2 adds Resource Identifiers and Tags for VPC Security Group Rules
• Amazon CloudFront announces new APIs to locate and move alternate domain names (CNAMEs)
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports Capacity Rebalancing for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances
• AWS lowers data processing charges for AWS PrivateLink
• AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports VPC endpoints
• AWS IoT Core now supports VPC Endpoints

Dev & Ops Dev Tooling

• EC2 Image Builder now supports parameters in components for creating custom images
• AWS Cloud9 introduces new features to browse CloudWatch Logs, S3, and use EC2 instance profiles
• Introducing AWS App Runner integration in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler adds recommendation support for Python applications
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler extends visualizations capability with a new compare option for application profile
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler announces new automated onboarding process for AWS Lambda functions
• CodeBuild Supports Publicly Viewable Build Results
• AWS AppConfig now enables customers to compare two application configuration versions
• AWS App2Container now supports containerization of complex multi-tier Windows applications

CDK/CloudFormation

• Announcing CDK Pipelines GA, CI/CD for CDK Apps
• AWS CDK releases v1.111.0 - v1.116.0 with updates for unit testing and CDK Pipelines support
• AWS CloudFormation now supports more stacks per AWS account
• You can now import your AWS CloudFormation stacks into a CloudFormation stack set

Systems Manager

• AWS Systems Manager Application Manager now supports full lifecycle management of AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks
• Now view inventory and patch compliance of stopped instances using AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Systems Manager Automation now supports upgrade of SQL Server 2012
• AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter launches operational insights to identify duplicate items and event sources with unusual activity
• Now enable auto-approval of change requests and expedite changes with AWS Systems Manager Change Manager
• AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports AWS IAM roles as approvers
• AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager now offers report generation for Managed Instances

Other

• AWS Control Tower announces improvements to guardrail naming and descriptions
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch cross account alarms
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports visual monitoring
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports Usage Metrics

Security

• AWS Firewall Manager now supports central monitoring of VPC routes for AWS Network Firewall
• AWS Shield Advanced no longer requires AWS WAF logging for web-application layer event response
• AWS Certificate Manager provides expanded usage of imported ECDSA and RSA Certificates
• Amazon QLDB supports customer managed KMS keys
• AWS Control Tower now provides support for KMS Encryption
• AWS Security Hub adds 10 new controls to its Foundational Security Best Practices standard for enhanced cloud security posture monitoring
• AWS License Manager now supports Delegated Administrator
• AWS WAF now offers managed rule group versioning
• AWS Security Hub adds 18 new controls to its Foundational Security Best Practices standard and 8 new partners for enhanced cloud security posture monitoring

Data Storage & Processing

• AWS DataSync can now copy system access control lists (SACLs) to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
• Amazon Lightsail now offers object storage for storing static content
• Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager launches new console experience
• Announcing availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft SQL Server for Amazon EC2
• Amazon Neptune now supports the openCypher query language
• Amazon RDS Proxy can now be created in a shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Automatic Minor Version Upgrades
• Introducing Amazon MemoryDB for Redis – A Redis-Compatible, Durable, In-Memory Database Service | AWS News Blog
• AWS Transfer Family expands compatibility for FTPS/FTP clients and increases limit for number of servers
• Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto scaling

EBS

• AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EBS io2 Block Express Volumes
• Amazon Elastic Block Store now supports idempotent volume creation
• AWS CloudTrail now supports logging of data events for Amazon EBS direct APIs

Athena

• Amazon Athena adds parameterized queries to improve reusability and security
• Amazon Athena announces data source connector for Power BI

S3

• AWS Storage Gateway adds support for AWS Privatelink for Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Access Points
• Amazon S3 Access Points aliases allow any application that requires an S3 bucket name to easily use an access point
• Amazon S3 on Outposts supports direct access for applications running outside the Outposts VPC
• Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports sharing across multiple accounts
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon S3 Access Points to simplify access control

Redshift

• Amazon Redshift simplifies the use of JDBC/ODBC with authentication profile
• Cross-Account Data Sharing for Amazon Redshift | AWS News Blog
• Redshift spatial performance enhancements and new spatial functions

Glue

• AWS Glue Studio now provides data previews during visual job authoring
• AWS Glue DataBrew now supports writing prepared data directly into JDBC-supported destinations
• AWS Glue DataBrew adds the ability to specify which data quality statistics are generated for your datasets
• AWS Glue DataBrew now supports numerical format transformations
• AWS Glue DataBrew now supports writing prepared data into AWS Lake Formation-based AWS Glue Data Catalog S3 tables

Snow Family

• AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices now supports high performance NFS data transfer
• AWS Snow Family now enables you to remotely monitor and operate your connected Snowcone devices
• AWS Snowball now supports multicast streams and routing by providing instances with direct access to external networks
• AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams and routing by providing instances with direct access to external networks

AI & ML

• Amazon Textract announces improvements to detection of handwritten text, digits, dates, and phone numbers
• Amazon Textract announces specialized support for automated processing of invoices and receipts
• Announcing Model Variable Importance for Amazon Fraud Detector
• AWS customers can now view all the labels supported by Amazon Rekognition
• Amazon Neptune ML is now generally available with support for edge predictions, automation, and more
• Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances now supports TensorFlow 2

SageMaker

• Amazon announces new AWS Deep Learning Containers to deploy Hugging Face models faster on Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon SageMaker Pipeline introduces a automatic hyperparameter tuning step
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot and Automatic Model Tuning now support more refined access control using Condition Key Policies
• Amazon SageMaker now supports M5d, R5, P3dn, and G4dn instances for SageMaker Notebook Instances
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports invoking AWS Lambda Functions
• Amazon SageMaker notebook instance now supports Amazon Linux 2
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Asynchronous Inference, a new inference option for workloads with large payload sizes and long inference processing times

Kendra

• Announcing Amazon Kendra Smaller Units and Price Drop
• Amazon Kendra releases Web Crawler to enable web site search
• Amazon Kendra releases Principal Store for secure search
• Amazon Kendra releases WorkDocs Connector

Other Cool Stuff IoT

• AWS IoT SiteWise is expanding its transforms and formula expressions capabilities
• AWS IoT SiteWise Edge now generally available
• AWS SiteWise now supports custom time intervals for metric aggregations
• Announcing support for new Timestamp function, PreTrigger function and ability to write nested expressions within aggregation functions (SiteWise)
• Announcing support for exporting data from AWS IoT SiteWise to Amazon S3

The rest

• The Amazon Chime SDK adds media capture pipelines to enable capture of meeting video, audio, and content streams
• Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for real-time audio-video using a web browser
• AWS Now Allows Customers To Pay For Their Usage in Advance
• AWS Organizations increases quotas for tag policies
• AWS DeepRacer announces DeepRacer LIVE races
• Amazon HealthLake is now Generally Available
• Introducing AWS for Health
• Introducing Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller | AWS News Blog
• CloudFormation templates for Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller (ARC) - GitHub
• Amazon CloudWatch adds support for trimmed mean statistics
• Amazon WorkSpaces now offers web access with WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP)
• Amazon WorkSpaces Renews Windows Desktop Experience with Windows Server 2019 bundles and 64-bit Microsoft Office 2019
• Fully customizable action space now available in AWS DeepRacer Console

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