What’s New in February 2021

February was a slow month for AWS releases, but Arjen, JM, and Guy did their best to make it fun anyway. Except for those times where Arjen tried to convince everyone to fall asleep to his new podcast.

The News The shameless plug

• Arjen Without Sleep

Finally in Sydney

• AWS Graviton2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul, Hong Kong) regions, and M6gd, C6gd, and R6gd instances now available in EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney) regions
• Amazon EC2 M5zn instances, with high frequency processors and 100 Gbps networking are now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore and Sydney)
• AWS Direct Connect Announces Native 100 Gbps Dedicated Connections at Select Locations

Serverless

• AWS Lambda now supports Node.js 14
• Announcing General Availability of Amplify Flutter, with new data and authentication support

Containers

• AWS App Mesh now supports mutual TLS authentication
• Amazon EKS clusters now support user authentication with OIDC compatible identity providers
• Introducing OIDC identity provider authentication for Amazon EKS | Containers
• Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now supports Kubernetes version 1.19
• AWS Fargate increases default resource count service quotas to 1000
• AWS Config now supports Amazon container services

EC2 & VPC

• Introducing Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn Bare Metal Instances
• Amazon Elastic File System triples read throughput
• AWS Elemental MediaLive adds support for VPC outputs
• AWS Backup Events and Metrics now available in Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now customize reverse DNS for their Elastic IP addresses
• Application Load Balancer now supports Application Cookie Stickiness
• Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring is now supported on select non-Nitro instance types
• Scheduled Actions of Application Auto Scaling now support Local Time Zone
• Access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now shows scaling history for deleted groups

Dev & Ops

• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports Amazon API Gateway in API blueprint
• Insights is now generally available for AWS X-Ray
• AWS Cloud9 launches visual source control integration for Git
• Assign a Delegated Administrator to manage AWS CloudFormation StackSets across your AWS Organization
• AWS CodeBuild supports Arm-based workloads using AWS Graviton2

Security

• Amazon GuardDuty introduces machine learning domain reputation model to expand threat detection and improve accuracy
• Amazon Macie announces a slew of new capabilities including support for cross-account sensitive data discovery, scanning by Amazon S3 object prefix, improved pre-scan cost estimation, and added location detail in findings
• Introducing Amazon VPC Endpoints for AWS CloudHSM
• AWS WAF adds support for JSON parsing and inspection
• Support for KMS encryption on S3 buckets used by AWS Config

Data Storage & Processing

• Amazon S3 now supports AWS PrivateLink
• Introducing Amazon EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts
• You now can use PartiQL with DynamoDB local to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Timestream now offers cross table queries, query execution statistics, and more
• Amazon Aurora Global Database supports managed planned failover
• Managed planned failovers with Amazon Aurora Global Database | AWS Database Blog
• Amazon RDS for MySQL and MariaDB support replication filtering
• Amazon S3 on Outposts adds a smaller storage tier
• Amazon Redshift Query Editor now supports clusters with enhanced VPC routing, longer query run times, and all node types
• Amazon RDS Publishes New Events for Multi-AZ Deployments
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for Standard Edition
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports rollups, reducing storage costs for extended retention
• Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL 13

AI & ML

• Now create Amazon SageMaker Studio presigned URL with custom expiration time
• AWS DeepComposer launches Transformer Notebook on GitHub
• Automate quality inspection with Amazon Lookout for Vision — now generally available

Other cool stuff

• Introducing Amazon CloudFront Security Savings Bundle
• Amazon SNS now supports 1-minute CloudWatch metrics
• Update content of inbound and outbound emails using AWS Lambda in Amazon WorkMail
• AWS Control Tower now provides region selection

The Nanos

• AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for new regions
• Amazon Pinpoint now supports 10DLC and toll-free numbers
• Amazon SNS now supports 1-minute CloudWatch metrics

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