What's New in March 2021

Melbourne AWS User Group

Severely delayed once again, but Arjen, Jean-Manuel, and Guy did discuss the news of March once again. An episode full of good names, bad names, and complaints about services while there was also plenty to love. So, a fairly typical month.

News Finally in Sydney

• AWS Snowcone is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in Australia
• AWS Client VPN announces expanded presence inside six AWS Regions
• Amazon EMR on EKS is now available in US West (N. California), US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt and London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions
• Amazon EC2 D3 instances with dense local HDD storage now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt) regions
• Get to know the first new AWS Heroes of 2021! | AWS News Blog(Community Hero Zainab Maleki from Perth)

Serverless Lambda

• Introducing Amazon S3 Object Lambda – Use Your Code to Process Data as It Is Being Retrieved from S3 | AWS News Blog
• The AWS Lambda console now features a new navigation design
• AWS Lambda adds four Trusted Advisor checks

Step Functions

• AWS Step Functions adds tooling support for YAML
• Announcing AWS Step Functions’ integration with Amazon EMR on EKS

EventBridge

• Amazon EventBridge introduces support for API Destinations

Containers ECS

• Amazon ECS now allows you to execute commands in a container running on Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate
• AWS - Session Manager and ECS Exec | ig.nore.me
• AWS Copilot launches v1.4 with support for ECS exec and more

EKS

• Amazon EKS reduces control plane creation time for EKS clusters by 40%
• Amazon EKS now supports adding KMS envelope encryption to existing clusters to enhance security for secrets
• Amazon EKS now supports creation and management of add-ons using AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon EKS now supports P4d instances
• Amazon EKS now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter
• Amazon EFS CSI driver now supports dynamic provisioning

Other

• AWS Cloud Map now supports API-only services in namespaces configured with DNS resolution
• Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS Now GA | AWS News Blog

EC2 & VPC EC2

• Troubleshoot Boot and Networking Issues with New EC2 Serial Console | AWS News Blog
• Announcing new Amazon EC2 X2gd instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling adds support for local time zones for scheduled scaling
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh now supports phased deployments
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service v2

VPC

• Amazon VPC Flow Logs now reflects AWS Service name, Traffic Path and Flow Direction
• Amazon Timestream now supports Amazon VPC endpoints

Dev & Ops CICD

• AWS CodePipeline now supports 1000 pipelines per account
• AWS Proton now supports services without pipelines
• AWS Proton introduces deletion protection for in-use templates
• AWS Proton makes new fields available for Jinja parametrization

Systems Manager

• AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter now displays an aggregated view of all operational issues for a specified resource
• AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports multi-level approvals

Other

• Now available AWS SSO credential profile support in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code
• Amazon EventBridge now supports propagation of X-Ray trace context
• Announcing Kotlin-centric developer experience in Amplify Android
• Announcing the General Availability of Amazon Corretto 16
• AWS announces Developer Preview release of opinionated deployment tool for .NET CLI

Security Security Hub

• AWS Security Hub adds 25 new controls to its Foundational Security Best Practices standard
• AWS Security Hub integrates with Amazon Macie to automatically ingest sensitive data findings for improved centralized security posture management

Config

• AWS Config Adds 3 New Config Rules for Amazon Secrets Manager
• AWS Config adds pagination support for advanced queries that contain aggregate functions

WAF

• AWS Shield Advanced now supports resource tagging
• AWS WAF adds support for Custom Responses
• AWS WAF adds support for Request Header Insertion

Other

• AWS CloudTrail Adds Logging of Data Events for Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS Certificate Manager now provides certificate expiry monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Secrets Manager now provides support to replicate secrets in AWS Secrets Manager to multiple AWS Regions
• IAM Access Analyzer Update – Policy Validation | AWS News Blog
• New AWS SSO gallery app simplifies Azure AD set-up with AWS
• AWS Audit Manager now supports CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark v1.3.0, Level 1 and 2 as a new standard framework

Data Storage & Processing S3

• Amazon S3 Glacier Price Reduction | AWS News Blog
• AWS CloudFormation now supports Amazon S3 on Outposts

Databases

• Achieve up to 35% better price/performance with Amazon Aurora using new Graviton2 instances
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible edition supports simultaneous authentication with both Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• AWS Backup adds support for continuous backup and point-in-time recovery of Amazon RDS instances
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Cross-Region Automated Backups
• Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports rollback protection for database major version upgrades
• Amazon RDS Proxy adds read-only endpoints for Amazon Aurora Replicas
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports database connectivity from multiple Amazon VPCs
• Announcing General Availability of Amazon Redshift Cross-database queries
• Announcing General Availability of Amazon Redshift Data Sharing
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports Event Subscriptions

Other

• New – Lower Cost Storage Classes for Amazon Elastic File System | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces Auto-Tune feature for improved performance and application availability
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now publishes events to Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge for service software updates
• AWS Glue Studio now supports transforms defined in SQL
• AWS Backup adds support for bulk deletion of recovery points
• AWS Data Exchange providers can now copy product metadata from their existing products to a new product

AI & ML SageMaker

• Announcing support for multiple containers on Amazon SageMaker Inference endpoints, leading to cost savings of up to 80%
• Leverage state of the art Natural Language Processing with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker
• Amazon SageMaker now supports private Docker registry authentication
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds Model Explainability

Other

• Detect anomalies in your metrics, and diagnose issues quickly with Amazon Lookout for Metrics – now generally available
• Announcing General Availability of AWS IoT Device Defender ML Detect
• Introducing a new API allowing you to stop in-progress workflows in Amazon Forecast
• Amazon Transcribe supports word-level confidence scores for streaming transcription

Other Cool Stuff Regions

• AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region Now Open to All, with Three AZs and More Services | AWS News Blog

Connect

• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now supports data sources from Amazon S3
• Amazon Connect now supports 15 minute intervals for historical metric reporting
• Amazon Connect now provides an out-of-the-box chat user interface for your website

Other Services/Features

• AWS Fault Injection Simulator – Use Controlled Experiments to Boost Resilience | AWS News Blog
• Announcing General Availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain
• Bundle Management APIs now generally available for Amazon WorkSpaces
• AWS announces General Availability of Amazon GameLift Queue notifications

The Nanos

• AWS Fargate updates platform version 1.4.0 to be the LATEST version(Arjen)
• AWS Client VPN announces expanded presence inside six AWS Regions(Jean-Manuel)

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