Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now supports MySQL minor versions 8.0.42 and 8.4.5, the latest minors released by the MySQL community. We recommend upgrading to the newer minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL and to benefit from bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about the enhancements in RDS for MySQL 8.0.42 and 8.4.5 in the Amazon RDS user guide.
You can leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. You can also leverage Amazon RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer, simpler, and faster updates to your MySQL instances. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including automatic minor version upgrades and Blue/Green Deployments, in the Amazon RDS User Guide.
Amazon RDS for MySQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale MySQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about pricing details and regional availability at Amazon RDS for MySQL. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS for MySQL database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.
AWS HealthImaging announces two enhancements that make it easier to manage diverse medical imaging data in the cloud.
First, HealthImaging now supports video data, encoded per the DICOM standard. With this launch, video data can be stored in a HealthImaging data store, alongside still image data. The service supports the DICOM video formats: MPEG2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, corresponding to DICOM transfer syntax UIDs 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.100 through 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.108. This data can be retrieved as DICOM instances (.dcm files) and directly as video objects. For more information, see the documentation.
Second, HealthImaging has added support for retrieving lossless images in the JPEG 2000 lossless format (transfer syntax UID 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.90). The service supports retrieving both DICOM instances (.dcm files) and image frames in the JPEG 2000 lossless format. HealthImaging’s transcoding to JPEG 2000 makes it easier to interoperate with external applications that consume data in this widely adopted format.
AWS HealthImaging is a HIPAA-eligible service that empowers healthcare providers and their software partners to store, analyze, and share medical images at petabyte scale. With AWS HealthImaging, you can run your medical imaging applications at scale from a single, authoritative copy of each medical image in the cloud, while reducing total cost of ownership. To learn more, see the AWS HealthImaging Developer Guide.
AWS HealthImaging is generally available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Ireland).
We’re thrilled to share that Google Cloud Spanner has been recognized by Gartner in the Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Operational Use Cases report, where it was ranked #1 in the Lightweight Transactions Use Case and was ranked #3 in the OLTP Transactions Use Case and the Application State Management Use Case.This recognition showcases Spanner’s strength and versatility to handle the most demanding workloads.
Beyond traditional transactions: Expanding capabilities
We believe the Gartner recognition isn’t just about raw performance. We feel it’s about Spanner’s comprehensive feature set, which is designed to address the complex needs of modern enterprises. Beyond its renowned transactional consistency and global scalability, Spanner offers a powerful multi-model experience, seamlessly integrating the graph, full-text, and vector search functionality required by modern applications.
Graph database functionality: Spanner’s ability to model and query relationships makes it a strong fit for applications requiring graph analysis, such as social networks, fraud detection, and recommendation engines.
Full-text search: Integrated full-text search capabilities enable efficient retrieval of unstructured data, powering features like product catalogs, content management systems, and knowledge bases.
Vector search: With the rise of AI and machine learning, Spanner’s vector search capabilities facilitate similarity searches, enabling applications like image recognition, semantic search, and personalized recommendations.
This flexibility allows developers to build diverse applications on a single platform that provides dynamic elasticity combined with operational efficiency without the complexity of managing multiple specialized databases.
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A truly global service: Transactions and analytics combined
Spanner’s global footprint helps ensure low latency and high availability for transactional workloads, regardless of a user’s location. But its power extends beyond transactions. Spanner’s deep integration with BigQuery allows for federated queries, enabling real-time analytics on transactional data without the need for complex ETL processes. This integration also supports reverse ETL from BigQuery, allowing you to push analytical insights back into Spanner for operational use.
Real-world impact: Customer success stories
The true testament to Spanner’s capabilities is its impact on our customers. Here’s a sampling of how it’s being used in the field:
Spanner’s high availability, external consistency, and infinite horizontal scalability made it the ideal choice for Deutsche Bank’s business critical application for online banking.
By consolidating all user data with the exception of logs to a single database for development, COLOPL has eliminated the scalability constraints that occurred when using horizontally and vertically partitioned databases for large-scale services.
With Spanner’s fully-managed relational database, Kroger has been able to build a true event-driven ledger, which enables the company to capture unique events to make better-informed decisions about how to direct associates to be more productive.
Looking ahead
We believe Spanner’s recognition in the Gartner Critical Capabilities report reinforces Google’s position in the Cloud Database Management Systems market. We’re committed to continuing to innovate and expand Spanner’s capabilities, empowering our customers to build the next generation of mission-critical applications.
Whether you need a database for global transactions, multi-model applications or real-time analytics, Spanner is the solution you can rely on. Sign up for a free Spanner trial account and experience the power of multi-model Spanner today.
Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Operational Use Cases, Ramke Ramakrishnan, Henry Cook, Xingyu Gu, Masud Miraz, Aaron Rosenbaum, 18 December, 2024.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Google. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL major version 17 (17.4). This release contains product improvements and bug fixes from the PostgreSQL community along with Aurora- specific feature improvements such as enhanced memory management, faster storage metadata initialization during failovers, and optimized write-heavy workloads on new Graviton 4 high-end instances. This release also includes new features for Babelfish, Aurora-specific security fixes, and updates to key extensions including pgvector 0.8.0 and postgis 3.5.1. Please refer to the PostgreSQL community announcement and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL updates for more details about the release.
To use the new version, create a new Aurora PostgreSQL-compatible database with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console. Please review the Aurora documentation to learn more about upgrading and refer the Aurora version policy to help decide how often to upgrade and plan your upgrade process. PostgreSQL 17.4 is available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
Amazon Aurora is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services. To get started with Amazon Aurora, take a look at our getting started page.
AWS B2B Data Interchange now offers customers the option to use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) while accessing the AWS B2B Data Interchange Service APIs.
More and more customers are adopting IPv6 to mitigate IPv4 address exhaustion in their private networks or to satisfy government mandates such as the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) M-21-07 memorandum. With this launch, customers can standardize their applications and workflows for managing their AWS B2B Data Interchange resources on the new version of Internet Protocol by using the new dual-stack AWS B2B Data Interchange Service endpoints.
IPv6 support for AWS B2B Data Interchange Service APIs is available in all commercial regions where AWS B2B Data Interchange is available. To learn more, visit the AWS B2B Data Interchange user guide.
Amazon Connect Contact Lens now include a pre-configured agent adherence widget which supports filtering and sorting on agent adherence metrics, making day-to-day adherence management more efficient for supervisors. With this launch, supervisors can apply filters on adherence status, duration, and percentage; sort by duration or percentage; and apply conditional formatting within the agent adherence widget on the queue and agent performance dashboard. For example, a supervisor can highlight agents who have been falling behind schedule for more than 5 minutes, quickly identify breaches, and notify the agents accordingly. With this widget, supervisors can simplify the process of monitoring adherence, improving productivity, and enabling faster response times to adherence issues.
Amazon Connect outbound campaigns now offers reporting on recipients and campaign executions along with additional metrics for tracking progress and troubleshooting issues. These capabilities are available in the Contact Lens dashboards and allow you to easily monitor campaign engagement by tracking total outreach against the total number of recipients targeted. You can drill down into your campaign and examine performance data for each campaign execution – for example, if you run a campaign every week for a month, you can drill down to view campaign performance for each week. You can also identify and resolve any delivery issues against each campaign – for example, out of the 20 delivery issues, you now know 12 had ineligible timezones, and 8 reached communication limit thresholds. The real-time campaigns dashboard shows the journey of your campaign, from how many recipients you targeted to how many you reached. All new metrics are also available through the GetMetricDataV2 API and Zero-ETL data lake for custom reporting or integrations with other data sources.
These enhanced outbound campaign analytics are available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect outbound campaigns is available. For more information about outbound campaign analytics, consult the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide and Amazon Connect API Reference. To learn more about Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns, please visit the outbound campaigns webpage.
Model Distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a more capable model (teacher) to a less capable one (student) with the goal to make the faster and cost-efficient student model as performant as the teacher for a specific use-case. With general availability, we now add support for the following new models: Amazon Nova Premier (teacher) and Nova Pro (student), Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 (teacher), Llama 3.3 70B (teacher) and Llama 3.2 1B/3B (student). Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation now enables smaller models to accurately predict function calling for Agents use cases while helping to deliver substantially faster response times and lower operational costs. Distilled models in Amazon Bedrock are up to 500% faster and 75% less expensive than original models, with less than 2% accuracy loss for use cases like RAG. In addition to RAG use cases, Model Distillation also adds support for data augmentation for Agents use cases for function calling prediction.
Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation offers a single workflow that automates the process needed to generate teacher responses, adds data synthesis to improve teacher responses, and then trains the student model. Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation may choose to apply different data synthesis methods that are best suited for your use-case to create a distilled model that approximately matches the advanced model for the specific use-case.
Amazon Q Developer in chat applications now supports AWS Systems Manager just-in-time node access approvals from Microsoft Teams and Slack. AWS customers can now monitor node access requests and approvals from chat channels to enhance security posture and meet compliance requirements.
The Just-in-time node access provides customers policy-based time-bound access to nodes and helps them comply with zero-standing privileges operations model. This launch provides a seamless integration for managing Just-in-time access request approvals in chat applications.
When configuring Just-in-time approval policies, customers can designate Amazon SNS topics associated with Amazon Q Developer in chat applications configurations for managing node access approval requests. As operators make new node access requests, approvers are notified about the requests in the chat channels. They can then approve or reject access requests directly from the chat channel.
Systems Manager node access approval management in chat applications is available at no additional cost in AWS Regions where Amazon Q Developer and System Manager Just-in-time node access are offered. Visit the user guide and Systems Manager pricing to get started.
Today, AWS announced managed support for Energy Data Insights (EDI) on AWS – delivered through AWS Managed Service (AMS), which enables energy customers to easily deploy, manage, and operate their subsurface data management platform on AWS, in compliance with the (OSDU®) standard. Now, you can automatically deploy EDI on AWS and accelerate your data ingestion from weeks to hours, and intelligently process and organize your subsurface data with minimal manual effort. AWS extends your team with operational capabilities, allowing you to focus on innovation and accelerating time to value with your subsurface data.
With AWS-provided managed support, EDI on AWS removes the undifferentiated heavy-lifting and the complexities of deploying, operating, and maintaining an OSDU Data Platform on AWS, optimizing your EDI operations and security while ensuring round-the-clock availability and protection of the service. AWS handles critical operations on your behalf such as incident management, and backup and restore, significantly improving the resilience of your OSDU Data Platform on AWS. You also receive timely support for application upgrades and patches, allowing you to stay current with the latest features and improvements.
EDI on AWS is available with pay-as-you-go pricing in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo).
Starting today, you can use Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall and DNS Firewall Advanced in the Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) Regions, to govern and filter outbound DNS traffic for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall is a managed service that enables you to block DNS queries made for domains identified as low-reputation or suspected to be malicious, and to allow queries for trusted domains. In addition, Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall Advanced is a capability of DNS Firewall that allows you to detect and block DNS traffic associated with Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA) and DNS Tunneling threats. DNS Firewall can be enabled only for Route 53 Resolver, which is a recursive DNS server that is available by default in all Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The Route 53 Resolver responds to DNS queries from AWS resources within a VPC for public DNS records, VPC-specific domain names, and Route 53 private hosted zones.
See here for the list of AWS Regions where Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall is available. Visit our product page and documentation to learn more about Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall and its pricing.
Amazon Neptune Database now supports Graviton3-based R7g and Graviton4-based R8g database instances for Amazon Neptune engine versions 1.4.5 or above, and priced -16% vs R6g.
Graviton3-based R7g are the first AWS database instances to feature the latest DDR5 memory, which provides 50% more memory bandwidth compared to DDR4, enabling high-speed access to data in memory. R7g database instances offer up to 30Gbps enhanced networking bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Graviton4-based R8g instances offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge and features an 8:1 ratio of memory to vCPU, and the latest DDR5 memory.
R7g instances for Neptune are now available US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Spain), and South America (São Paulo). R8g instances for Neptune are now available in: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), and Europe (Spain). You can launch R7g and R8g instances for Neptune using the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Upgrading a Neptune cluster to R7g or R8g instances requires a simple instance type modification for Neptune engine versions 1.4.5 or higher. For more information on pricing and regional availability, refer to the Amazon Neptune pricing page.
It’s a core part of our mission at Google Cloud to help you meet your evolving policy, compliance, and business objectives. To help further strengthen the security of your cloud environment, we continue regular delivery of new security controls and capabilities on our cloud platform.
We announced at Google Cloud Next multiple new capabilities in our IAM, Access Risk, and Cloud Governance portfolio. Our announcements covered a wide range of new product capabilities and security enhancements in Google Cloud, including:
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Access Risk products including VPC Service Controls, Context-Aware Access and Identity Threat Detection and Response
Cloud Governance with Organization Policy Service
Resource Management
We also announced new AI capabilities to help cloud developers and operators at every step of the application lifecycle. These new capabilities take an application-centered approach and embed AI assistance throughout the application development lifecycle, driven by new features in Gemini Code Assist and Gemini Cloud Assist.
IAM, Access Risk, and Cloud Governance portfolio.
What’s new in Identity and Access Management
Workforce Identity Federation
Workforce Identity Federation extends Google Cloud’s identity capabilities to support syncless, attribute-based single sign on. Over 95% of Google Cloud products now support Workforce Identity Federation.We also released support for FedRAMP High government requirements to help manage and satisfy compliance mandates.
Enhanced security for non-human identities
With the rise of microservices and the popularity of multicloud deployments, non-human and workload identities are growing rapidly, much faster than human identities. Many large enterprises now have between 10 and 45 times more non-human identities than human (user) identities, often with expansive permissions and privileges.
Securing non-human identities is a key goal for Google Cloud, and we are announcing two new capabilities to enhance authorization and access protection:
Keyless access to Google Cloud APIs using X.509 certificates, to further strengthen workload authentication.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) for multicloud
Across the security landscape, we are contending with the problem of excessive and often unnecessary widely-granted permissions. At Google Cloud, we work to proactively address the permission problem with tools that can help you control permission proliferation, while also providing comprehensive defense across all layers.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), our key tool for addressing permission issues, is now available for Azure (in preview) and generally available for Google Cloud and AWS.
IAM Admin Center
We also announced IAM Admin Center , a single pane of glass experience that is customized to your role, showcasing recommendations, notifications, and active tasks. You can also launch into other services directly from the console.
IAM Admin Center will provide organization administrators and project administrators a unified view to discover, learn, test, and use IAM capabilities. It’ll provide contextual discovery of features, enable focus on day to day tasks, and offer curated guides for getting started and resources for continuous learning.
Additionally, other IAM features grew in coverage and in feature depth.
Previously, we announced IAM Deny and Principal access boundary (PAB) policies, powerful mechanisms to set policy-based guardrails on access to resources. As these important controls continue to grow in service coverage and adoption, now there is a need for tooling to simplify planning and visualize impact.
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What’s new with Access Risk
Comprehensive security demands continuous monitoring and control even with authenticated users and workloads equipped with the right permissions and engaged in active sessions. Google Cloud’s access risk portfolio brings dynamic capabilities that layer additional security controls around users, workloads, and data.
Enhanced access and session security
Today, you can use Context-Aware Access (CAA) to secure access to Google Cloud based on attributes including user identity, network, location, and corporate-managed devices.
Coming soon, CAA will be further enhanced with Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capabilities, using numerous activity signals, such as activity from a suspicious source or a new geo location, to automatically identify risky behavior, and trigger further security validations using mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), re-authentication, or denials.
We also announced automatic re-authentication, which triggers a re-authentication request when users perform highly-sensitive actions such as updating billing accounts. This will be enabled by default, and while you can opt-out we strongly recommend you keep it turned on.
Expanded coverage for VPC Service Controls
VPC Service Controls lets you create perimeters that protect your resources and data, and for services that you explicitly specify. To speed up diagnosis and troubleshooting when using VPC Service Controls, we launched Violation Analyzer and Violation Dashboard to help you diagnose an access denial event.
What’s new in Cloud Governance with Organization Policy Service
Expanded coverage for Custom Organization Policy
Google Cloud’s Organization Policy Service gives you centralized, programmatic control over your organization’s resources. Organization Policy already provides predefined constraints, but for greater control you can create custom organization policies. Custom organization policy has now expanded service coverage, with 62 services supported.
Google Cloud Security Baseline
Google Cloud strives to make good security outcomes easier for customers to achieve. As part of this continued effort, we are releasing an updated and stronger set of security defaults, our Google Cloud Security Baseline. These were rolled out to all new customers last year — enabled by default — and based on positive feedback, we are now recommending them to all existing customers.
Starting this year, existing customers are seeing recommendations in their console to adopt the Google Cloud Security Baseline. You also have access to a simulator that tests how these constraints will impact your current environment.
What’s new with resource management
App-enablement with Resource Manager
We also extended our application centric approach to Google Cloud’s Resource Manager. App-enabled folders, now in preview, streamline application management by organizing services and workloads into a single manageable unit, providing centralized monitoring and management, simplifying administration, and providing an application-centric view.
You can now enable application management on folders in a single step.
Learn more
To learn more, you can view the Next ‘25 session recording with an overview of these announcements.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Nova Premier, our most capable multimodal foundation model for complex tasks such as processing long documents, videos, large codebases, and executing multistep agentic workflows. It is also our most capable teacher model and can be used with Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation to create custom distilled models for specific needs.
Nova Premier extends the capabilities available from Amazon Nova understanding models with several key improvements, including:
Superior intelligence: The model scores 87.4% in the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark for undergraduate-level knowledge, 82.0% on Math500 for mathematic problems, and 84.6% on the CharXiv benchmark for chart understanding.
Improved agentic capabilities: Nova Premier can perform end-to-end actions on behalf of the user, enabling more complex workflows such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), function calling, and agentic coding. The model scores 86.3% on SimpleQA with RAG, 63.7% on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL), and 42.4% on SWE-bench Verified for software engineering tasks.
Longer context: The model offers a context window of one million tokens. This enables analysis of bigger data sets like large codebases, multiple documents and images, documents longer than 400 pages, or 90-minute-long videos.
Nova Premier is also the fastest and most cost-effective proprietary model in its intelligence tier in Amazon Bedrock. With Nova Premier and Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, you can now create highly capable, cost-effective, and low-latency versions of Nova Pro, Lite, and Micro for your specific needs. For example, we used Nova Premier to distill Nova Pro for complex tool selection and API calling. The distilled Nova Pro had a 20% higher accuracy for API invocations compared to the base model and consistently matched the performance of the teacher, with the speed and cost benefits of Nova Pro.
Nova Premier is available in Amazon Bedrock in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) through cross-Region inference.
Today, AWS Resource Explorer has expanded the availability of resource search and discovery to 3 additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central).
With AWS Resource Explorer you can search for and discover your AWS resources across AWS Regions and accounts in your organization, either using the AWS Resource Explorer console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), the AWS SDKs, or the unified search bar from wherever you are in the AWS Management Console.
For more information about the AWS Regions where AWS Resource Explorer is available, see the AWS Region table.
Amazon SageMaker now offers a unified scheduling experience for visual ETL flows and queries. The next generation of Amazon SageMaker is the center for all your data, analytics, and AI, and includes SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment. Visual ETL in Amazon SageMaker provides a drag-and-drop interface for building ETL flows and authoring flows with Amazon Q. The query editor tool provides a place to write and run queries, view results, and share your work with your team. This new scheduling experience simplifies the scheduling process for Visual ETL and Query editor users.
With unified scheduling you can now schedule your workloads with Amazon EventBridge Scheduler from the same visual interface you use to author your query or visual ETL flow. Previously, you needed to create a code-based workflow in order to run a single flow or query on schedule. You can also view, modify or pause/resume these schedules and monitor the runs they invoked.
This new feature is now available in all AWS regions where Amazon SageMaker is available. Access the supported region list for the most up-to-date availability information.
To learn more, visit our Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio documentation, blog post and Amazon EventBridge Scheduler pricing page.
Cross-Region Automated Backup replication for Amazon RDS is now available in five additional AWS Regions. This launch allows you to setup automated backup replication between Australia (Melbourne) and Australia (Sydney); between Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) or Asia Pacific (Tokyo); between Asia Pacific (Malaysia) and Asia Pacific (Singapore); between Canada (Central) and Canada West (Calgary); and between Europe (Zurich) and Europe (Frankfurt) or Europe (Ireland) Regions.
Automated Backups enable recovery capability for mission-critical databases by providing you the ability to restore your database to a specific point in time within your backup retention period. With Cross-Region Automated Backup replication, RDS will replicate snapshots and transaction logs to the chosen destination AWS Region. In the event that your primary AWS Region becomes unavailable, you can restore the automated backup to a point in time in the secondary AWS Region and quickly resume operations. As transaction logs are uploaded to the target AWS Region frequently, you can achieve a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of within the last few minutes.
You can setup Cross-Region Automated Backup replication with just a few clicks on the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS SDK or CLI. Cross-Region Automated Backup replication is available on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for MariaDB, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for Oracle, and Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server. For more information, including instructions on getting started, read the Amazon RDS documentation.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now gives customers the option to use default security groups or their own custom security groups when deploying applications. This new feature provides greater control over network access and security configurations.
With this update, customers can use custom security groups instead of default security groups for both new and existing Elastic Beanstalk environments. This applies to the EC2 instances within the environment and, for load-balanced environments, to the load balancer as well. Previously, Elastic Beanstalk would automatically add a default security group. This enhancement enables customized security policies and simplifies security management.
This feature is available in all of the AWS Commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions that Elastic Beanstalk supports. For a complete list of regions and service offerings, see AWS Regions.
Amazon Connect now lets you grant administrator access to agent schedules, making it easier to address key operational needs with minimal configuration. With this launch, you can now give certain users access to all published agent schedules without being added as a supervisor to every staff group. For example, users such as centralized schedulers or auditors who require a broad view of agent schedules across the organization can now be granted this access in a few clicks, thus reducing time spent on access management and improving overall operational efficiency.
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is available. To learn more about Amazon Connect agent scheduling, click here.
You can now run OpenSearch version 2.19 in Amazon OpenSearch Service which introduces several improvements in the areas of Vector Search, Observability and OpenSearch Dashboards.
We have introduced four key capabilities for vector search applications. The Faiss engine now supports AVX512 SIMD instructions, to accelerate vector similarity computations. The ML inference search response processor can now rank search hits and update scores based on model predictions, enabling sophisticated and context-aware document ranking and result augmentation. Lucene binary vectors, now complement existing Faiss engine binary vector support offering greater flexibility for vector search applications. Hybrid search now includes pagination support , reciprocal rank fusion to improve result ranking along with a debugging tool for score and rank normalization process.
The launch also introduces query insights dashboards that lets users monitor and analyze the top queries collected by the query Insights plugin. Anomaly detection now offers two key improvements. First, enhanced anomaly definition capabilities allow users to specify multiple criteria to identify both spikes and dips in data patterns. Second, a new dedicated index for flattened results improves query performance and dashboard visualization experience. Finally, you can now use template query to create search queries that contain placeholder variables allowing for more flexible, efficient, and secure search operations.
For information on upgrading to OpenSearch 2.19, please see the documentation. OpenSearch 2.19 is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon OpenSearch Service is available.
