AWS

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, a fully-managed agentless collector for Prometheus metrics, now offers customers the option to collect metrics from an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters using Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in a dual stack VPC setup.

The continued growth of the internet is exhausting available Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. IPv6 increases the number of available addresses by several orders of magnitude so customers will no longer need to manage overlapping address spaces in their VPCs. Customers can now use the managed service to collect IPv6 Prometheus metrics endpoints in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters.

To learn more on best practices for configuring IPv6 in your environment, visit the white paper on IPv6 in AWS. Support for IPv6 on Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector is available in all regions where Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is GA. To learn more about Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, visit the user guide or product page.
 

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AWS Systems Manager for SAP includes capabilities to now support registration of SAP NetWeaver ABAP-based applications, deployed in distributed and Highly Available (HA) topologies. This enhancement covers a wide range of applications, including S/4HANA and BW/4HANA, and extends support to additional application servers and web dispatcher components. With this launch, customers can automate start and stop operations for ABAP based SAP applications running on distributed and HA architectures. This new functionality simplifies the management of complex SAP landscapes, improves operational efficiency through automation, and provides enhanced support for high-availability configurations.

AWS Systems Manager for SAP is an automation capability to manage and operate your SAP applications on AWS. It provides a seamless integration between AWS services and SAP applications running on AWS. Registering SAP applications to AWS Systems Manager for SAP allows automation such as enabling backup, start/stop for the applications and associated EC2 instances. In addition, as part of the SSM Application Manager console integration, customers can get details of the resources being consumed by the SAP applications such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes and the associated costs incurred at an application level.

AWS Systems Manager for SAP is available in all commercial regions. To learn about the key features, check out the product documentation page. To learn why thousands of SAP customers trust AWS, visit the SAP on AWS page.

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Amazon Connect now offers the ability to target a range of agent proficiency levels, such as from levels 1 to 3 for French. You can ensure each contact is matched to an agent with the right skill level to handle it, resulting in reduced contact transfers and lower handle times. You can assign simpler contacts to new hires while reserving your tenured agents for the difficult contacts that require their knowledge and expertise.

This feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about routing criteria, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
 

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Amazon Connect now offers the ability to exclude certain proficiencies from consideration when using routing criteria for routing. You can use this to exclude or reserve niche skills. For example, you can exclude dual-skilled Spanish and English speaking agents from English language contacts to reserve them for contacts in Spanish. You can include the dual-skilled agents when required by removing the exclusion condition.

This feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about routing criteria, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
 

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Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the general availability of notification actions in the AWS Console Mobile Application for iOS. Notification action buttons are displayed on the notification details screen when you receive a push notification from AWS User Notifications on your mobile device. AWS customers can take actions like view logs, start, stop, or reboot an EC2 instance on an event notification to shorten incident response diagnosis and resolution times.

With notification actions, you can quickly run common DevOps tasks based on your IAM permissions using notification action buttons. Notification actions are displayed automatically on notifications based on the state of the AWS resource. Using notification actions for event notifications, you can restart an EC2 instance the moment you receive an EC2 instance terminated push notification on your mobile device or get more information about an event notification without needing to return to your computer.

The Console Mobile App lets users view and manage a select set of resources to stay informed and connected with their AWS resources while on-the-go. Visit the product page for more information about the Console Mobile Application.

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Today, AWS announces the release of Neuron 2.21, introducing support for AWS Trainium2 chips and Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances, including the trn2.48xlarge instance type and Trn2 UltraServer. This release also adds support for PyTorch 2.5 and introduces NxD Inference and Neuron Profiler 2.0 (beta). NxD Inference, is a new PyTorch-based library integrated with vLLM, simplifies the deployment of large language and multi-modality models and enables PyTorch model onboarding with minimal code changes, and Neuron Profiler 2.0 (beta), is new profiler that enhances capabilities and usability, including support for distributed workloads.

Neuron 2.21 also introduces Llama 3.1 405B model inference support using NxD Inference on a single trn2.48xlarge instance. The release updates Deep Learning Containers (DLCs) and Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMIs), and adds support for various model architectures, including Llama 3.2, Llama 3.3, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. New inference features include FP8 weight quantization and flash decoding for speculative decoding in Transformers NeuronX (TNx). Additionally, new training examples and features have been added, such as support for HuggingFace Llama 3/3.1 70B on Trn2 instances and DPO support for post-training model alignment.

AWS Neuron SDK supports training and deploying models on Trn1, Trn2, and Inf2 instances, available in AWS Regions as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, or part of Savings Plan.

For a full list of new features and enhancements in Neuron 2.21 and to get started with Neuron, see:

• AWS Neuron
• Trn2 Instances
• Trn1 Instances
• Inf2 Instances

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AWS has launched new Guides on AWS Partner Central providing detailed resources with step-by-step guidance on AWS Partner Network and Marketplace topics. The new guides provide introductory and advanced resources for every stage of your AWS journey, giving you the guidance you need to move up and across the AWS Partner Profitability Framework. In addition, guides provide enablement materials for Managed Service Provider, Solution Provider and ISV Accelerate Program, guidance on using AWS Co-sell Experience (ACE) and AWS Partner Funding Portal (APFP), and information on key topics, such as Generative AI and migration and modernization. These improvements provide Partners with structured, actionable information and quick access to resources, making it easier to navigate their AWS partnership.

Partners can access guides in AWS Partner Central while completing assigned Tasks or by using Partner Assistant, the generative AI virtual assistant. From Task descriptions or Partner Assistant responses, partners can navigate directly to relevant guides for in-depth information and related resources. This integrated experience helps partners to find answers quickly, progress through their AWS Partner journey more efficiently and unlock benefits faster.

Guides are available to all partners. To get started, log into AWS Partner Central, navigate to the “Resources” menu, and select “Guides”. Learn more about becoming an AWS Partner.
 

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AWS CloudTrail introduces dual stack support for the CloudTrail API endpoints, enabling you to connect using Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), or dual stack clients. Dual stack support is also available when you privately access the CloudTrail API endpoint from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using AWS PrivateLink.

The urgency to transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is driven by the continued growth of internet, which is exhausting available Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. With simultaneous support for both IPv4 and IPv6 clients on CloudTrail endpoints, you are able to gradually transition from IPv4 to IPv6 based systems and applications, without needing to switch all over at once. This enables you to meet IPv6 compliance requirements and removes the need for expensive networking equipment to handle the address translation between IPv4 and IPv6

To learn more on best practices for configuring IPv6 in your environment, visit the whitepaper on IPv6 in AWS. Support for IPv6 on AWS CloudTrail is available in all commercial regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

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SES Mail Manager now offers end to end logging for ingress endpoints and rules engine actions. Customers have the ability to configure a wide range of monitoring options to the three standard logging destinations: CloudWatch, S3, and Firehose.

Mail Manager by design interoperates with external systems on both incoming and outgoing email flows. Customers expect to use it to gain visibility on email volumes as well as to troubleshoot configuration problems at every step in the email delivery paths. These new logging features enable both ad hoc investigations and automated alarming via standard CloudWatch tooling, ensuring that the overall integrity of Mail Manager configurations can be tracked programmatically alongside other customer infrastructure. The logging features also help troubleshooting in the event of a configuration change on a connected system, reducing the support burden and enabling more customer self-service solutions.

Mail Manager logging is available in every AWS Region where Mail Manager is launched. Customers can learn more about Mail Manager by clicking here.
 

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You can now create Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) provisioned clusters running on AWS Graviton3-based M7g instances or upgrade your existing x-86 based based M5 or T3 instances and replace them with AWS Graviton3-based M7G instances with a single click of a button in the Europe (Paris) AWS Region.

AWS Graviton3 processor based M7G instances on Amazon MSK provisioned clusters allows you to achieve up to 24% compute cost savings and up to 29% higher write and read throughput over comparable MSK clusters running on M5 instances. Additionally, these instances lower energy consumption by up to 60% than comparable instances, making your Kafka clusters more environmentally sustainable.

Please refer to our blog for more information on the price/ performance improvements of M7g instances and the Amazon MSK pricing page for information on pricing. To get started, you can create new clusters using M7G instances or update your existing clusters to M7G brokers using the AWS Management Console, and read our developer guide for more information.
 

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Amazon Lightsail API endpoints now support the IPv6 protocol, allowing you to connect over IPv6. To use this new capability, point your applications to use Amazon Lightsail’s new dual-stack endpoints. When you make a request to a dual-stack endpoint, the endpoint URL resolves to an IPv6 or an IPv4 address, depending on the protocol used by your network and client.

Public IPv4 addresses are being exhausted with the growth of the Internet. Earlier this year, Lightsail launched IPv6-only instance plans to support IPv6 adoption. With the introduction of dual-stack Lightsail API endpoints, you can now make requests to the Lightsail API from your Lightsail IPv6-only instances, or any IPv6 client.

You can use this capability with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs in all AWS Regions supporting Lightsail. To learn more, please see AWS Service Endpoints documentation and Lightsail Service Endpoints documentation.

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Amazon Bedrock Agents, Flows, and Knowledge Bases now offers support for the recently announced, in-preview, latency-optimized models via the SDK. This enhancement brings faster response times and improved responsiveness to AI applications built with Amazon Bedrock Tooling. Currently, this optimization is available for Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Haiku model and Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B and 70B models, delivering reduced latency compared to standard models without compromising accuracy.

This update is particularly beneficial for customers developing latency-sensitive applications such as real-time customer service chatbots and interactive coding assistants. By leveraging purpose-built AI chips like AWS Trainium2 and advanced software optimizations in Amazon Bedrock, customers can now access more options to optimize their inference for specific use cases. Importantly, these capabilities can be integrated immediately into existing applications without additional setup or model fine-tuning, resulting in enhanced performance and faster response times.

The latency-optimized inference support for Amazon Bedrock Agents, Flows, and Knowledge Bases is available in the US East (Ohio) Region via cross-region inference. Customers can access these new capabilities through the Amazon Bedrock SDK via a runtime configuration, enabling them to programmatically incorporate these optimized models into their workflows and applications.

To learn more about Amazon Bedrock and its capabilities, including this new latency-optimized inference support, visit the Amazon Bedrock product page, pricing page, and documentation.
 

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Today, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) announces new enhancements to upgrade insights, a feature that surfaces cluster configuration issues that may impact your ability to successfully upgrade a cluster to a newer version of Kubernetes. With these new enhancements, EKS upgrade insights will scan and warn on cluster health and version compatibility issues between different Kubernetes and EKS components such as kubelet, kube-proxy and EKS add-ons.

Kubernetes is a fast-paced, evolving open source project with 3 releases per year, making upgrades a routine part of running Kubernetes clusters. EKS upgrade insights automatically scan clusters against a list of potential Kubernetes version upgrade impacting issues. EKS periodically updates the list of insight checks to perform, based on evaluations of changes in the Kubernetes project, as well as changes introduced in the EKS service along with new versions. EKS upgrade insights surface issues and provide remediation recommendations, accelerating the testing and verification process for upgrades to newer versions of Kubernetes.

EKS upgrade insights is available for all EKS clusters in all AWS Regions, except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, China (Beijing, operated by Sinnet) Region, and China (Ningxia, operated by NWCD) Region. To learn more visit the EKS documentation.

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AWS announces the general availability of custom billing view, a new feature within AWS Billing and Cost Management that enables customers to grant member accounts access to cost management data spanning multiple accounts within their organization. Custom billing view allows you to provide application and business unit owners with access to relevant cost management data across multiple AWS accounts using a single view in AWS Cost Explorer, without granting access to the management account.

With custom billing view, you can create filtered views of cost management data based on cost allocation tags or specific AWS accounts. These views can be shared with member accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager, empowering teams to monitor, analyze and forecast their AWS spend across multiple accounts using AWS Cost Explorer, Cost Explorer reports, and the AWS Billing and Cost Management console homepage. This allows you to reduce the number of users that require access to the management account, while enabling more users to have visibility into their AWS spend. Custom billing views is ideal for customers who implement decentralized cost management practices, or provide business unit owners with comprehensive spend oversight across their accounts.

Support for custom billing views is available in all AWS Regions, excluding AWS GovCloud Regions and the AWS China Regions. To get started with custom billing views, visit Billing View within the Cost Management Preferences page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and create a new custom billing view. To get started visit the Billing View user guide.

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Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect (Amazon MSK Connect) now supports Apache Kafka Connect version 3.7 for new connectors. Apache Kafka Connect version 3.7 includes several bug fixes and performance improvements. For more details and a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for version 3.7.

Amazon MSK Connect is a feature of Amazon MSK that allows you to run fully managed Apache Kafka Connect workloads on AWS. This feature makes it easy to deploy, monitor, and automatically scale connectors that move data between Apache Kafka clusters and external systems such as databases, file systems, and search indices. MSK Connect is fully compatible with Kafka Connect, enabling you to lift and shift your Kafka Connect applications with zero code changes. With MSK Connect, you only pay for connectors you are running, without the need for cluster infrastructure. To learn how to get started, see the Amazon MSK Connect Developer Guide.

Support for Apache Kafka Connect version 3.7 is offered in all AWS regions where Amazon MSK Connect is available.

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Amazon RDS for Db2 now enables the creation of multiple Db2 databases within a database instance. This enhanced capability offers greater flexibility in managing databases and optimizing licenses for various enterprise workloads.

Customers can now provision and manage up to 50 Db2 databases within a single RDS for Db2 instance, eliminating the need to deploy and license databases individually for each RDS instance. Customers using multiple databases can quickly create, activate, deactivate or drop databases, enabling them to reduce the overhead of managing separate RDS for Db2 instances. To create multiple databases within an Amazon RDS for Db2 instance, simply set up an RDS instance in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI, then use the create_database stored procedure to create multiple Db2 databases on that RDS instance.

Amazon RDS makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale Db2 deployments in the cloud. To learn more about Amazon RDS for Db2, check Amazon RDS for Db2 User Guide and Amazon RDS for Db2 pricing page for pricing details and regional availability.
 

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Amazon WorkSpaces Personal now integrates with AWS Global Accelerator (AGA) to enhance WorkSpaces connection performance by optimizing streaming traffic through the AWS Global Network and edge locations. This feature particularly benefits customers whose end users connect to WorkSpaces across long distances.

The AGA feature can be enabled at either the WorkSpaces directory level or for individual WorkSpaces running DCV protocol. When advantageous, the service automatically routes the streaming traffic through the nearest AWS edge location and across AWS’s congestion-free, redundant global network, delivering a more responsive and stable streaming experience. The WorkSpaces service fully manages AGA usage, subject to outbound data volume limits detailed in WorkSpaces documentation.

This enhancement is available at no additional cost for Personal WorkSpaces running DCV protocol in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkSpaces is supported, except Africa (Cape Town), Israel (Tel Aviv), AWS GovCloud (US), and China Regions.

Customers can configure this feature through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or Amazon WorkSpaces APIs. For detailed configuration instructions and best practices, please refer to the Amazon WorkSpaces documentation.

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Amazon Q Business is now SOC (System and Organization Controls) eligible. Amazon Q Business is a generative AI–powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.

With the Amazon Q Business SOC certification, customers, can now use Amazon Q Business for use cases that are subject to Service Organization Control (SOC) requirements. Amazon Q Business is now SOC 1, 2 and 3 compliant, allowing you to get deep insight into the security processes and controls that protect customer data. AWS maintains SOC compliance through extensive third-party audits of AWS controls. These audits ensure that the appropriate safeguards and procedures are in place to protect against security risks that may affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer and company data.

Amazon Q Business is SOC compliant in all of the AWS Regions where Amazon Q Business is supported. See the AWS Regional Services List for the most up-to-date availability information. To learn more about SOC eligible services, visit the webpage. To get started with Amazon Q Business, visit the product page to learn more.
 

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Amazon QuickSight is excited to announce the launch of Unique Key for Dataset, enabling users to define additional aspects of their data semantics. The unique key will be used to improve performance for QuickSight visuals, especially un-aggregated table charts. Previously, to maintain table pagination stability, all columns in the table visual were sorted, which was an expensive query causing performance latency. Now, with the unique key defined in the dataset, once the column is used in the visual, users will automatically experience improved sorting performance without compromising user behavior. For some cases, the new approach can increase the performance up to 60% decrease of the visual rendering time. For further details, visit here.

The new Unique Key for Dataset feature is now available in Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Editions in all QuickSight regions – US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada, Sao Paulo, Europe (Frankfurt, Stockholm, Paris, Ireland and London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo), and the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.
 

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Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 11.4.4, 10.11.10, 10.6.20, and 10.5.27. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

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 MariaDB 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 MariaDB makes it straightforward to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB deployments in the cloud. Learn more about pricing details and regional availability at Amazon RDS for MariaDB. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.
 

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