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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