8/27/2024, 12:00:00 AM ~ 8/28/2024, 12:00:00 AM (UTC)

Recent Announcements

Amazon EC2 status checks now support reachability health of attached EBS volumes

Starting today, you can leverage Amazon EC2 status checks to directly monitor if the EBS volumes attached to your instances are reachable and able to complete I/O operations. You can use this new status check to quickly detect attachment issues or volume impairments that may impact the performance of your applications running on Amazon EC2 instances. You can further integrate these status checks within Auto Scaling groups to monitor the health of EC2 instances and replace impacted instances to ensure high availability and reliability of your applications. Attached EBS status checks can be used along with the instance status and system status checks to monitor the health of your instances.\n Prior to today, you could only monitor the health of your EBS volume attachments by configuring and enabling a specific CloudWatch metric. Now with this capability, you can monitor the health of EBS volume attachments to your instance directly from EC2 Console or describe-instance-status API without any additional configuration or action from your side.

Polly Voices for two new locales: Czechia and Switzerland

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of two female-sounding Amazon Polly voices for two new locales: Czechia and Switzerland.\n Amazon Polly is a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk and to build speech-enabled products depending on your business needs. We have developed a Swiss Standard German voice Sabrina and a Czech voice Jitka using a well-established neural TTS technology allowing our customers to synthesize natural human-like speech. With these voices, we bring Polly to two new countries and expand our language offerings. Sabrina and Jitka are conversational voices that can be used in Interactive Voice Response technology and more. Sabrina and Jitka voices are accessible in all Polly regions and complement the other types of voices that are already available for developing speech products for a variety of use cases. For more details, please read the Amazon Polly documentation and visit our pricing page.

Amazon EC2 C6gd and R6gd instances are now available in AWS Europe (Spain) region

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6gd and R6gd instances are available in the AWS Europe (Spain) region. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and are built on the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro System is a collection of AWS designed hardware and software innovations that enables the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage.\n C6gd instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, and CPU-based machine learning inference. R6gd instances are built for running memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. The local SSD storage provided on these instances will benefit applications that need access to high-speed, low latency storage, as well as for temporary storage of data such as batch and log processing, and for high-speed caches and scratch files. These instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth, and up to 19 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). C6gd and R6gd instances offer up to 3.8 TB of NVMe-based SSD storage. To learn more about the instances, see Amazon EC2 C6gd and R6gd. To get started with AWS Graviton2-based instances, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL announces Extended Support minor 11.22-RDS.20240808

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL announces Amazon RDS Extended Support minor version 11.22-RDS.20240808. We recommend that you upgrade to this version to fix known security vulnerabilities and bugs in prior versions of PostgreSQL. Learn more about the updates and patches in this Extended Support minor version in the Amazon RDS User Guide.\n Amazon RDS Extended Support provides you more time, up to three years, to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements. During Extended Support, Amazon RDS will provide critical security and bug fixes for your RDS for PostgreSQL databases after the community ends support for a major version. You can run your PostgreSQL databases on Amazon RDS with Extended Support for up to three years beyond a major version’s end of standard support date. Learn more about Extended Support in the Amazon RDS User Guide. You are able to leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including minor and major version upgrades, in the Amazon RDS User Guide. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for pricing details and regional availability. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

Amazon Bedrock now supports cross-region inference

Today, Amazon Bedrock announces support for cross-region inference, an optional feature that enables developers to seamlessly manage traffic bursts by utilizing compute across different AWS Regions. By using cross-region inference, Bedrock customers using on-demand mode will be able to get higher throughput limits (up to 2x their allocated in-region quotas) and enhanced resilience during periods of peak demand. By opting in, developers no longer have to spend time and effort predicting demand fluctuations. Instead, cross-region inference dynamically routes traffic across multiple regions, ensuring optimal availability for each request and smoother performance during high-usage periods.\n Customers can control where their inference data flows by selecting from a pre-defined set of regions, helping them comply with applicable data residency requirements and sovereignty laws. Moreover, this capability prioritizes the connected Bedrock API source region when possible, helping to minimize latency and improve responsiveness. As a result, customers can enhance their applications’ reliability, performance, and efficiency. There’s no additional routing cost for using cross-region inference and you will be charged based on the region you made the request in (source region). Please find the list of supported models and pre-defined regions here. To learn more about the feature and how to get started, refer to the Amazon Bedrock documentation or this blog.

AWS announces support for Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Intune on Amazon WorkSpaces Personal

Amazon WorkSpaces Personal now supports Microsoft Entra ID and Intune. With this launch, customers using Amazon WorkSpaces Personal can now provision virtual desktops joined with Entra ID and enrolled in Intune, without requiring Microsoft Active Directory. By integrating with AWS IAM Identity Center, the launch also allows customers the flexibility to use other cloud-based identity and endpoint management solutions with WorkSpaces including JumpCloud.\n With the launch, WorkSpaces Personal now supports both AD and non-AD domain joined virtual desktops. For customers who want to use Entra ID for identity management, AWS IAM Identity Center is used to ensure user identity data is automatically synchronized from Entra ID to AWS. Leveraging Windows Autopilot user-driven mode, Windows 10 and 11 virtual desktops are automatically enrolled to Intune during provisioning and joined to Entra ID during Windows Out of Box Experience (OOBE). End users log into their virtual desktops as Entra ID users, so they can access Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise without another Entra ID login. In addition, with non-AD domain joined WorkSpaces, customers now have the option to use JumpCloud which is a native cloud directory platform which provides identity, access, and device management. The feature is generally available today in all regions where Amazon WorkSpaces Personal is offered, except for Africa (Cape Town), Israel (Tel Aviv), and China regions. There is no extra cost for using the feature and IAM Identity Center. To learn more about the feature, see Amazon WorkSpaces Administration Guide. To get started with the feature, log on to AWS Management Console.

Amazon Q Business launches IAM federation for user identity authentication

Amazon Q Business is a fully managed, generative AI–powered assistant that enhances workforce productivity by answering questions, providing summaries, generating content, and completing tasks based on customers’ enterprise data. Customers create and manage their workforce user identity using identity providers of their choice. Previously, customers had to sync their user identity information from their identity provider into AWS IAM Identity Center, and then connect their Amazon Q Business applications to IAM Identity Center for user authentication.\n Starting today, customers can use the Amazon Q Business IAM federation feature to connect their applications directly to their identity provider to source user identity and user attributes for these applications. At launch, Amazon Q Business IAM federation will support the OpenID Connect (OIDC) and SAML2.0 protocols for identity provider connectivity. Amazon Q Business applications built using IAM federation will support advanced features including custom plugins, Amazon Q Apps, and personalization. Amazon Q Business IAM federation is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Q Business is available. To learn more, visit the documentation. To explore Amazon Q Business, visit the website.

AWS Blogs

AWS Japan Blog (Japanese)

AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

AWS Big Data Blog

AWS Database Blog

Desktop and Application Streaming

AWS Machine Learning Blog

Open Source Project

AWS CLI

Amazon EKS Anywhere