What's New in July 2020

July was a busy month with many (small) releases, and even an announcement about re:Invent! So it's up to Arjen, Jean-Manuel, and Guy to try to make sense of it all.

The News Finally in Sydney

• AWS IoT Analytics is now available in the Sydney AWS Region
• AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is now available in 11 additional AWS Regions
• AWS Secrets Manager has been IRAP assessed and accepted for PROTECTED level

Serverless

• Amazon RDS Proxy – Now Generally Available | AWS News Blog
• Announcing AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now generally available for production use
• Amplify CLI adds support for Lambda layers to easily share code  assets across Lambda functions
• Amazon Athena adds support for Partition Projection

Containers

• AWS App2Container – A New Containerizing Tool for Java and .NET Applications | AWS News Blog
• Amazon ECS announces AWS Copilot, a new CLI to deploy and operate containers in AWS
• Docker and AWS collaborate to help deploy applications to Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.17
• AWS App Mesh launches ingress support with virtual gateways
• Introducing Ingress support in AWS App Mesh | Containers (detailed blogpost)
• Amazon EFS CSI Driver is now generally available
• Amazon ECS announces increased service quotas
• Fluent bit container logs to Elastcsearch
• ECR now supports encryption of images using AWS KMS keys

EC2 & VPC

• Kernel Live Patching for Amazon Linux 2 is now generally available
• Introducing EC2 Launch v2 to simplify customizing Windows instances
• AWS Transit Gateway now supports more granular CloudWatch Metrics for improved network monitoring
• EC2 Image Builder can now produce and distribute encrypted AMIs
• EC2 Image Builder can now stream logs to CloudWatch
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations
• AWS Global Accelerator launches One-Click Acceleration for Application Load Balancers
• Amazon VPC Resources Now Support Tag on Create
• New – Amazon EC2 Instances based on AWS Graviton2 with local NVMe-based SSD storage | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Lightsail now offers cPanel  WHM instance blueprint
• AWS Cloud Map simplifies Amazon EC2 instance registration

Dev & Ops

• Find Your Most Expensive Lines of Code – Amazon CodeGuru Is Now Generally Available | AWS News Blog
• Announcing the Porting Assistant for .NET | AWS News Blog
• AWS CodeDeploy now enables automated installation and scheduled updates of the CodeDeploy Agent
• Announcing CDK Pipelines Preview, continuous delivery for AWS CDK applications
• CDK Pipelines: Continuous delivery for AWS CDK applications | AWS Developer Blog (detailed blogpost)
• CDK for Terraform: Enabling Python & TypeScript Support
• AWS CodeBuild now supports accessing Build Environments with AWS Session Manager
• AWS CodeBuild supports code coverage reporting
• AWS CodeBuild now supports parallel and coordinated executions of a build project
• Amazon S3 features now available in the AWS Toolkits for Visual Studio Code

Security

• Amazon Fraud Detector is now Generally Available | AWS News Blog
• Easily manage your content policies for AI services with AWS Organizations
• AWS Firewall Manager launches managed rules to audit VPC security groups
• AWS WAF Security Automations now supports WAFv2 API
• AWS Config Launches 28 Additional Managed rules  
• AWS Secrets Manager now enables you to attach resource-based policies to secrets from the AWS Secrets Manager console and uses Zelkova to validate these policies
• Identify, arrange, and manage secrets easily using enhanced search in AWS Secrets Manager
• Amazon CloudFront announces new TLS1.2 security policy for viewer connections
• Amazon Detective enhances VPC flow visibility
• Now gain longer access to your AWS resources when switching roles in the AWS Management Console
• Amazon MQ Adds Support for LDAP Authentication And Authorization
• AWS Security Hub launches new automated security controls
• AWS Firewall Manager now supports centralized logging of AWS WAF logs

Storage & Databases

• Amazon Elastic File System increases file system minimum throughput
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports T3 medium instances
• AWS Storage Gateway simplifies cache management for File Gateway
• AWS Storage Gateway increases local cache storage by 4x for File Gateway
• Amazon RDS Application Programming Interface supports AWS PrivateLink
• Amazon Keyspaces now enables you to back up your table data continuously by using point-in-time-recovery (PITR)
• Create Snapshots From Any Block Storage Using EBS Direct APIs | AWS News Blog
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for cross-region snapshot copy
• Announcing automatic backups for Amazon Elastic File System
• New Amazon Elastic File System console simplifies file system creation and management
• Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore for Shared EBS Snapshots | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Elastic File System increases per-client throughput by 100%
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Learning to Rank to improve search relevancy ranking
• AWS DataSync adds support for on-premises object storage | AWS News Blog
• HTTP compression support now available in Amazon Elasticsearch Service
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server lowers the cost for High Availability DB Instances
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports enhanced premigration assessments
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to New Relic, Datadog, HTTP endpoints, and MongoDB Cloud

AI & ML

• AWS DeepRacer Evo and Sensor Kit now available for purchase
• Amazon Comprehend Medical adds relationship extraction to medical condition
• Amazon Personalize adds improved handling of missing metadata
• Amazon EMR now supports encrypting log files using Customer-managed CMKs in AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
• Amazon Forecast now supports generating predictions for 10X more items
• Amazon EMR now supports Managed Scaling – automatically resizing clusters to lower cost
• New – Label Videos with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth | AWS News Blog
• Announcing AWS PrivateLink Support for Amazon Kendra
• AWS RoboMaker releases rosbag upload cloud extension for Robot Operating System (ROS) 
• Amazon Comprehend launches real time Custom Entity Recognition
• Amazon Forecast now supports resource tagging
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 G4 Instances which provides up to 4.5X faster and 5.4X cheaper XGBoost Training
• Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI add support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication of private workers
• Amazon Translate now supports Office documents | AWS News Blog

Other cool stuff

• New – Create Amazon RDS DB Instances on AWS Outposts | AWS News Blog
• Announcing the New AWS Community Builders Program! | AWS News Blog
• AWS IoT SiteWise – Now Generally Available | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Interactive Video Service – Add Live Video to Your Apps and Websites | AWS News Blog
• Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is now generally available
• Recording of the Connect/Contact Lens talk by Rian Brooks-Kane at the User Group (starts around 50 minutes)
• AWS IoT Core now supports multiple shadows for a single IoT device
• Amazon Connect allows you to continue engaging with your customer after an agent hangs-up
• Amazon Chime SDK supports audio and video calling from mobile browsers
• AWS Marketplace now offers integrated third-party software solutions for AWS Control Tower
• Updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the AWS Well-Architected Tool
• Amazon Connect adds call recording APIs
• Introducing AWS Purchase Order Management (Preview)

 

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