What’s New in November and at re:Invent 2021

Pull your podcast player out of instant retrieval, because we're discussing re:Invent 2021 as well as the weeks before it. Lots of announcements; big, small, weird, awesome, and anything in between. We had fun with this episode and hope you do too.

Find us at melb.awsug.org.au or as @AWSMelb on Twitter.

News Finally in Sydney

• AWS Snowcone SSD is now available in the US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions
• Amazon EC2 M6i instances are now available in 5 additional regions

Serverless

• Introducing Amazon EMR Serverless in preview
• Announcing Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand
• Announcing Amazon Redshift Serverless (Preview)
• Introducing Amazon MSK Serverless in public preview
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference (preview)
• Simplify CI/CD Configuration for AWS Serverless Applications and your favorite CI/CD system – General Availability
• Amazon AppStream 2.0 launches Elastic fleets, a serverless fleet type
• AWS Chatbot now supports management of AWS resources in Slack (Preview)

Lambda

• AWS Lambda now supports partial batch response for SQS as an event source
• AWS Lambda now supports cross-account container image pulling from Amazon Elastic Container Registry
• AWS Lambda now supports mTLS Authentication for Amazon MSK as an event source
• AWS Lambda now logs Hyperplane Elastic Network Interface (ENI) ID in AWS CloudTrail data events

Step Functions

• AWS Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows now supports AWS PrivateLink

Amplify

• Introducing AWS Amplify Studio
• AWS Amplify announces the ability to override Amplify-generated resources using CDK
• AWS Amplify announces the ability to add custom AWS resources to Amplify-created backends using CDK and CloudFormation
• AWS Amplify UI launches new Authenticator component for React, Angular, and Vue
• AWS Amplify announces the ability to export Amplify backends as CDK stacks to integrate into CDK-based pipelines
• AWS Amplify expands its Notifications category to include in-app messaging (Developer Preview)
• AWS Amplify announces a redesigned, more extensible GraphQL Transformer for creating app backends quickly

Containers Fargate

• Announcing AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors

ECS

• Amazon ECS now adds container instance health information
• Amazon ECS has improved Capacity Providers to deliver faster Cluster Auto Scaling
• Amazon ECS-optimized AMI is now available as an open-source project
• Amazon ECS announces a new integration with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

EKS

• Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate now Supports the Fluent Bit Kubernetes Filter
• Amazon EKS adds support for additional cluster configuration options using AWS CloudFormation
• Visualize all your Kubernetes clusters in one place with Amazon EKS Connector, now generally available
• AWS Karpenter v0.5 Now Generally Available
• AWS customers can now find, subscribe to, and deploy third-party applications that run in any Kubernetes environment from AWS Marketplace

Other

• Amazon ECR announces pull through cache repositories
• AWS App Mesh now supports ARM64-based Envoy Images

EC2 & VPC Instances

• New – EC2 Instances (G5) with NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs | AWS News Blog
• Announcing new Amazon EC2 G5g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors
• Introducing Amazon EC2 R6i instances
• Introducing two new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances
• Amazon EC2 Mac Instances now support hot attach and detach of EBS volumes
• Amazon EC2 Mac Instances now support macOS Monterey
• Announcing Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances for macOS
• Announcing preview of Amazon Linux 2022
• Elastic Beanstalk supports AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instance types
• Announcing preview of Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances
• Announcing new Amazon EC2 C7g instances powered by AWS Graviton3 processors
• Announcing new Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors
• Introducing the AWS Graviton Ready Program
• Introducing Amazon EC2 M6a instances
• AWS Compute Optimizer now offers enhanced infrastructure metrics, a new feature for EC2 recommendations
• AWS Compute Optimizer now offers resource efficiency metrics

Networking

• AWS price reduction for data transfers out to the internet
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now create IPv6-only subnets and EC2 instances
• Application Load Balancer and Network Load Balancer end-to-end IPv6 support
• AWS Transit Gateway introduces intra-region peering for simplified cloud operations and network connectivity
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces IP Address Manager (IPAM) to help simplify IP address management on AWS
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces Network Access Analyzer to help you easily identify unintended network access
• Introducing AWS Cloud WAN Preview
• Introducing AWS Direct Connect SiteLink

Other

• Recover from accidental deletions of your snapshots using Recycle Bin
• Amazon EBS Snapshots introduces a new tier, Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, to reduce the cost of long-term retention of EBS Snapshots by up to 75%
• Amazon CloudFront now supports configurable CORS, security, and custom HTTP response headers
• Amazon EC2 now supports access to Red Hat Knowledgebase
• Amazon EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet now support automatic instance termination with Capacity Rebalancing
• AWS announces a new capability to switch license types for Windows Server and SQL Server applications on Amazon EC2
• AWS Batch introduces fair-share scheduling
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Now Supports Predictive Scaling with Custom Metrics

Dev & Ops New services

• Measure and Improve Your Application Resilience with AWS Resilience Hub | AWS News Blog
• Scalable, Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery in the Cloud | AWS News Blog
• Announcing general availability of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
• AWS announces the launch of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags in preview
• Announcing Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS, an ML-powered capability that automatically detects and diagnoses performance and operational issues within Amazon Aurora
• Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights (Preview)
• Introducing Amazon CloudWatch RUM for monitoring applications’ client-side performance

IaC

• AWS announces Construct Hub general availability
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 is now generally available
• You can now import your AWS CloudFormation stacks into a CloudFormation stack set
• You can now submit multiple operations for simultaneous execution with AWS CloudFormation StackSets
• AWS CDK releases v1.126.0 - v1.130.0 with high-level APIs for AWS App Runner and hotswap support for Amazon ECS and AWS Step Functions

SDKs

• AWS SDK for Swift (Developer Preview)
• AWS SDK for Kotlin (Developer Preview)
• AWS SDK for Rust (Developer Preview)

CICD

• AWS Proton now supports Terraform Open Source for infrastructure provisioning
• AWS Proton introduces Git management of infrastructure as code templates
• AWS App2Container now supports Jenkins for setting up a CI/CD pipeline

Other

• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now detects hardcoded secrets in Java and Python repositories
• EC2 Image Builder enables sharing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with AWS Organizations and Organization Units
• Amazon Corretto 17 Support Roadmap Announced
• Amazon DevOps Guru now Supports Multi-Account Insight Aggregation with AWS Organizations
• AWS Toolkits for Cloud9, JetBrains and VS Code now support interaction with over 200 new resource types
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports Amazon CloudWatch Alarms and AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbooks.
• AWS Device Farm announces support for testing web applications hosted in an Amazon VPC
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports anomaly detection on metric math expressions
• Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Evidently for feature experimentation and safer launches
• New – Amazon CloudWatch Evidently – Experiments and Feature Management | AWS News Blog
• Introducing AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET

Security

• AWS Secrets Manager increases secrets limit to 500K per account
• AWS CloudTrail announces ErrorRate Insights
• AWS announces the new Amazon Inspector for continual vulnerability management
• Amazon SQS Announces Server-Side Encryption with Amazon SQS-managed encryption keys (SSE-SQS)
• AWS WAF adds support for Captcha
• AWS Shield Advanced introduces automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation

Security Hub

• AWS Security Hub adds support for AWS PrivateLink for private access to Security Hub APIs
• AWS Security Hub adds three new FSBP controls and three new partners

SSO

• Manage Access Centrally for CyberArk Users with AWS Single Sign-On
• Manage Access Centrally for JumpCloud Users with AWS Single Sign-On
• AWS Single Sign-On now provides one-click login to Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows
• AWS Single Sign-On is now in scope for AWS SOC reporting

Control Tower

• AWS Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for detective guardrails
• AWS Control Tower now supports nested organizational units
• AWS Control Tower now provides controls to meet data residency requirements
• Deny services and operations for AWS Regions of your choice with AWS Control Tower
• AWS Control Tower introduces Terraform account provisioning and customization

Data Storage & Processing Databases Relational databases

• Announcing Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server
• New Multi-AZ deployment option for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and for MySQL; increased read capacity, lower and more consistent write transaction latency, and shorter failover time (Preview)
• Amazon RDS now supports cross account KMS keys for exporting RDS Snapshots
• Amazon Aurora supports MySQL 8.0
• Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts now supports backups on AWS Outposts

Athena

• Amazon Athena adds cost details to query execution plans
• Amazon Athena announces cross-account federated query
• New and improved Amazon Athena console is now generally available
• Amazon Athena now supports new Lake Formation fine-grained security and reliable table features
• Announcing Amazon Athena ACID transactions, powered by Apache Iceberg (Preview)

Redshift

• Announcing preview for write queries with Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling
• Amazon Redshift announces native support for SQLAlchemy and Apache Airflow open-source frameworks
• Amazon Redshift simplifies the use of other AWS services by introducing the default IAM role
• Announcing Amazon Redshift cross-region data sharing (preview)
• Announcing preview of SQL Notebooks support in Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2

Neptune

• Announcing AWS Graviton2-based instances for Amazon Neptune
• AWS releases open source JDBC driver to connect to Amazon Neptune

MemoryDB

• Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4g instances and a 2-month Free Trial

Database Migration Service

• AWS Database Migration Service now supports parallel load for partitioned data to S3
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Kafka multi-topic
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Azure SQL Managed Instance as a source
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Google Cloud SQL for MySQL as a source
• Introducing AWS DMS Fleet Advisor for automated discovery and analysis of database and analytics workloads (Preview)
• AWS Database Migration Service now offers a new console experience, AWS DMS Studio
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Time Travel, an improved logging mechanism

Other

• Database Activity Streams now supports Graviton2-based instances
• Amazon Timestream now offers faster and more cost-effective time series data processing through scheduled queries, multi-measure records, and magnetic storage writes
• Amazon DynamoDB announces the new Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access table class, which helps you reduce your DynamoDB costs by up to 60 percent
• Achieve up to 30% better performance with Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) using new Graviton2 instances

S3

• Amazon S3 on Outposts now delivers strong consistency automatically for all applications
• Amazon S3 Lifecycle further optimizes storage cost savings with new actions and filters
• Announcing the new Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class - the lowest cost archive storage with milliseconds retrieval
• Amazon S3 Object Ownership can now disable access control lists to simplify access management for data in S3
• Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval; storage price reduced by 10% and bulk retrievals are now free
• Announcing the new S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Instant Access tier - Automatically save up to 68% on storage costs
• Amazon S3 Event Notifications with Amazon EventBridge help you build advanced serverless applications faster
• Amazon S3 console now reports security warnings, errors, and suggestions from IAM Access Analyzer as you author your S3 policies
• Amazon S3 adds new S3 Event Notifications for S3 Lifecycle, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, object tags, and object access control lists

Glue

• AWS Glue DataBrew announces native console integration with Amazon AppFlow
• AWS Glue DataBrew now supports custom SQL statements to retrieve data from Amazon Redshift and Snowflake
• AWS Glue DataBrew now allows customers to create data quality rules to define and validate their business requirements

FSx

• Introducing Amazon FSx for OpenZFS
• Amazon FSx for Lustre now supports linking multiple Amazon S3 buckets to a file system
• Amazon FSx for Lustre can now automatically update file system contents as data is deleted and moved in Amazon S3
• Announcing the next generation of Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems

Backup

• Announcing preview of AWS Backup for Amazon S3
• AWS Backup adds support for Amazon Neptune
• AWS Backup adds support for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
• AWS Backup provides new resource assignment rules for your data protection policies
• AWS Backup adds support for VMware workloads

Other

• AWS Lake Formation now supports AWS PrivateLink
• AWS Transfer Family adds identity provider options and enhanced monitoring capabilities
• Introducing ability to connect to EMR clusters in different subnets in EMR Studio
• AWS Snow Family now supports external NTP server configuration
• Announcing data tiering for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
• Now execute python files and notebooks from another notebook in EMR Studio
• AWS Snow Family launches offline tape data migration capability

AI & ML SageMaker

• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Canvas - a visual, no-code interface to build accurate machine learning models
• Announcing Fully Managed RStudio on Amazon SageMaker for Data Scientists | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SageMaker now supports inference testing with custom domains and headers from SageMaker Studio
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now supports retry policies and resume
• Announcing new deployment guardrails for Amazon SageMaker Inference endpoints
• Amazon announces new NVIDIA Triton Inference Server on Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines now integrates with SageMaker Model Monitor and SageMaker Clarify
• Amazon SageMaker now supports cross-account lineage tracking and multi-hop lineage querying
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus: Create high-quality training datasets without having to build labeling applications or manage the labeling workforce on your own
• Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab (currently in preview), a free, no-configuration ML service
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now enables interactive data preparation and machine learning at scale within a single universal notebook through built-in integration with Amazon EMR

Other

• General Availability of Syne Tune, an open-source library for distributed hyperparameter and neural architecture optimization
• Amazon Translate now supports AWS KMS Encryption
• Amazon Kendra releases AWS Single Sign-On integration for secure search
• Amazon Transcribe now supports automatic language identification for streaming transcriptions
• AWS AI for data analytics (AIDA) partner solutions
• Introducing Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer (Preview)
• Amazon Kendra launches Experience Builder, Search Analytics Dashboard, and Custom Document Enrichment

Other Cool Stuff

• In The Works – AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region | AWS News Blog
• Unified Search in the AWS Management Console now includes blogs, knowledge articles, events, and tutorials
• AWS DeepRacer introduces multi-user account management
• Amazon Pinpoint launches in-app messaging as a new communications channel
• Amazon AppStream 2.0 Introduces Linux Application Streaming
• Amazon SNS now supports publishing batches of up to 10 messages in a single API request
• Announcing usability improvements in the navigation bar of the AWS Management Console
• Announcing General Availability of Enterprise On-Ramp
• Announcing preview of AWS Private 5G
• AWS Outposts is Now Available in Two Smaller Form Factors
• Introducing AWS Mainframe Modernization - Preview
• Introducing the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency
• Announcing AWS Data Exchange for APIs
• Amazon WorkSpaces introduces Amazon WorkSpaces Web
• Amazon SQS Enhances Dead-letter Queue Management Experience For Standard Queues
• Introducing AWS re:Post, a new, community-driven, questions-and-answers service
• AWS Resource Access Manager enables support for global resource types
• AWS Ground Station launches expanded support for Software Defined Radios in Preview
• Announcing Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs for running hybrid quantum-classical workloads on Amazon Braket
• Introducing AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces - Preview

Well-Architected Framework

• Customize your AWS Well-Architected Review using Custom Lenses
• New Sustainability Pillar for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

IoT

• Announcing AWS IoT RoboRunner, Now Available in Preview
• AWS IoT Greengrass now supports Microsoft Windows devices
• AWS IoT Core now supports Multi-Account Registration certificates on IoT Credential Provider endpoint
• Announcing AWS IoT FleetWise (Preview), a new service for transferring vehicle data to the cloud more efficiently
• Announcing AWS IoT TwinMaker (Preview), a service that makes it easier to build digital twins
• AWS IoT SiteWise now supports hot and cold storage tiers for industrial data
• New connectivity software, AWS IoT ExpressLink, accelerates IoT development (Preview)
• AWS IoT Device Management Fleet Indexing now supports two additional data sources (Preview)

Connect

• Amazon Connect now enables you to create and orchestrate tasks directly from Flows
• Amazon Connect launches scheduled tasks
• Amazon Connect launches Contact APIs to fetch and update contact details programmatically
• Amazon Connect launches API to configure security profiles programmatically
• Amazon Connect launches APIs to archive and delete contact flows
• Amazon Connect now supports contact flow modules to simplify repeatable logic

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