AWS

AWS Batch on EKS now supports configurable Kubernetes namespaces, Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs), subPath to Kubernetes pod container volumes, and Kubernetes pod annotations. Using different Kubernetes namespaces for your AWS Batch jobs, you can improve workload isolation by defining job permission boundaries both within EKS cluster and for access to other AWS services. With Kubernetes PVCs and subPath you can give your AWS Batch jobs access only to the right data or particular subPath within a data volume. Finally, EKS pod annotations make it easier to integrate with external tools and other AWS services such as AWS Secrets Manager by allowing you to attach necessary metadata directly to your AWS Batch job.

You can configure Kubernetes namespaces, PVCs, subPath, and annotations while registering a new AWS Batch job definition or making a revision to an existing job definition. You can also override the namespace and annotations from your job definition when you submit the job. For more information, see Register Job Definition and Submit Job pages in the AWS Batch API reference and our AWS HPC Blog post.

AWS Batch supports developers, scientists, and engineers in running efficient batch processing for ML model training, simulations, and analysis at any scale. Configurable Kubernetes namespaces, PVCs, subPath, and annotations are available in any AWS Region where AWS Batch is available.
 

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Amazon EC2 now supports automated recovery of Microsoft SQL Server databases from Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) based EBS snapshots. Customers can use an AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbook and specify a restore point of time to automate the recovery process without needing to stop a running Microsoft SQL Server database.

Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) allows application data to be backed up while applications are still running. This new feature allows customers to automate the recovery from VSS-based EBS snapshots and ensure rapid recovery of large databases within minutes. This feature also offers customers the flexibility to restore to a new database or achieve point-in-time recovery.

This feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

To learn more, visit this technical document in the Microsoft SQL Server on Amazon EC2 User Guide.

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AWS CodeBuild now offers native support for self-hosted Buildkite runners, enabling you to execute Buildkite pipeline jobs within the CodeBuild environment. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment.

Buildkite is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform. With this feature, your Buildkite jobs can access CodeBuild’s comprehensive suite of instance types and managed images, and utilize native integrations with AWS services. You have control over the build environment, without the overhead of manually provisioning and scaling the compute resources.

The Buildkite runner feature is available in all regions where CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page.

To use the self-hosted Buildkite runners, follow the tutorial to set up a runner project in CodeBuild. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page.

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A new minor version of Microsoft SQL Server is now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, providing performance enhancements and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports this latest minor version of SQL Server 2019 across the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise editions.

We encourage you to upgrade your Amazon RDS for SQL Server database instances at your convenience. You can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console or by using the AWS CLI. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide. The new minor version is SQL Server 2019 CU30 – 15.0.4415.2.

This minor version is available in all AWS commercial regions where Amazon RDS for SQL Server databases are available, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale SQL Server deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing for pricing details and regional availability.

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Amazon Connect now provides the ability to choose which states an agent can be in when adhering to their schedule, making it easier for you to customize adherence tracking to match your unique operational needs. With this launch, you can now define custom mappings between agent statuses and schedule activities. For example, schedule activity “Work” can be mapped to multiple agent statuses such as “Available” and “Back-office work.” An agent scheduled for “Work” from 8 AM to 10 AM will be considered adherent if they are either in “Available” or “Back-office work” status. Additionally, you can now view the actual name of the scheduled activity in the real-time adherence dashboard (as opposed to only Productive/Non-productive). With custom mappings and enhanced real-time dashboard, this launch provides more accurate and flexible agent adherence monitoring.

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.
 

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AWS Transfer Family web apps are now available in the following additional Regions: North America (N. California, Canada West, Canada Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Milan, Spain), Africa (Cape Town), Israel (Tel Aviv), Middle East (Bahrain, UAE), and Asia Pacific (Osaka, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Melbourne, Seoul, Mumbai). This expansion allows you to create Transfer Family web apps in additional commercial Regions where Transfer Family is available.

AWS Transfer Family web apps provide a simple interface for accessing your data in Amazon S3 through a web browser. With Transfer Family web apps, you can provide your workforce with a fully managed, branded, and secure portal for your end users to browse, upload, and download data in S3.

To learn more about AWS Transfer Family web apps, read our blog and visit the Transfer Family User Guide. For complete regional availability information, see the AWS Region Table.

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Dashboard Q&A by Amazon Q in QuickSight enables QuickSight Authors to add Data Q&A to their dashboards in one-click. With dashboard Q&A, QuickSight users can ask and answer questions about their data using natural language.

Dashboard Q&A capabilities of Q in QuickSight automatically extract semantic information presented in dashboards and use it to enable Q&A over specific data and improves existing Topic based Q&A experiences by automatically using semantics from dashboards to improve Q&A answers. With Dashboard Q&A Authors can quickly deliver self-service access to customized data insights for the entire organization.

Dashboard Q&A is launching to all regions in which QuickSight’s generative data Q&A is available today, as documented here.

To learn more, visit our documentation.

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Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) now supports additional resource-level permissions for creating EBS volumes from snapshots. With this launch, you now have more granular controls to set resource-level permissions for the creation of a volume and selection of the source snapshot when calling the CreateVolume action in your IAM policy. This allows you to control the IAM identities that can create EBS volumes from source snapshots, and the conditions that they can use these snapshots to create EBS volumes.

To meet your specific permission needs on the source snapshots, you can also specify any of 5 EC2-specific condition keys in your IAM policy: ec2:Encrypted, ec2:VolumeSize, ec2:Owner, ec2:ParentVolume, and ec2:SnapshotTime. Additionally, you can use global condition keys for the source snapshot.

This new resource-level permission model is available in all AWS Regions where EBS volumes are available. To learn more about using resource-level permissions to create EBS volume, or transitioning to the new resource-level permission model from previous permission model, please visit the launch blog. For more information about Amazon EBS, please visit the product page.

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Today, Amazon Q Developer announces an improved software development agent capable of running build and test scripts on generated code to validate the code before the developers review. This new capability detects errors, ensures generated code is in sync with the project’s current state, and accelerates the development process by producing higher quality code on the first iteration.

With the developer’s natural language input request and project-specific context, the Amazon Q Developer agent is designed to assist in implementing complex multi-file features and bug fixes. The agent will analyze the existing codebase, make necessary code changes, and run the selected build and test commands to ensure the code is working as expected. Where errors are found, the agent will iterate on the code prior to requesting the developer’s review. Throughout the process, the agent maintains a real-time connection with the developer, providing updates as changes are made. With control over what commands Amazon Q runs through a Devfile, you can customize the development process for better accuracy.

The Amazon Q Developer agent for software development is available for JetBrains and Visual Studio Code IDEs in all AWS regions where Q Developer is available.

To learn more about Amazon Q Developer, visit the service overview page. For more details about this announcement and how to get started using the Amazon Q Developer agent for software development, read the AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity blog.

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AWS Deadline Cloud now includes the ability to specify a limit for a specific resource, like a floating license, and also constrain the maximum number of workers that work on a job. AWS Deadline Cloud is a fully managed service that simplifies render management for teams creating computer-generated graphics and visual effects, for films, television and broadcasting, web content, and design.

By adding a limit to your Deadline Cloud farm, you can specify a maximum amount of concurrent usage of resources by workers in your farm. Capping resource usage ensures tasks don’t start until the resources needed to run are available. For example, if you have 50 floating licenses for a particular plugin required by your rendering workflow, a Deadline Cloud limit allows you to ensure no more than 50 tasks requiring that limit are started, preventing tasks from failing due to the license being unavailable. Additionally, setting a maximum number of workers on a job enables you to prevent any single job from consuming all the available workers so that you can efficiently run multiple jobs concurrently when there are a limited number of workers available.

Limits are available in all AWS Regions where Deadline Cloud is available.

To learn more, visit the AWS Deadline Cloud documentation.
 

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Amazon Connect now includes the ability for agents to schedule time off up to 24 months in the future, making it easier for managers and agents to plan ahead of time. With this launch, agents can now book time off in Connect up to 24 months ahead of time (an increase from 13 months). Additionally, you can now upload pre-approved time off windows for a scheduling group (group allowance) for up to 27 months at a time (an increase from 13 months). These increased limits provide agents more flexibility to plan their personal time and also provide managers better visibility into future staffing needs, thus enabling more efficient resource allocation.

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.

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Amazon AppStream 2.0 now allows administrator to control whether admin consent is required when users link their OneDrive for Business accounts as a persistent storage option.

The new capability simplifies the management of AppStream 2.0 persistent storage and the admin consent process. After enabling OneDrive for Business for an AppStream 2.0 stack and specifying the OneDrive domains, administrators can now configure whether admin consent is needed for each OneDrive domain. If admin consent is required, administrators must approve users’ OneDrive connections within their Azure Active Directory environment when users attempt to link their account to AppStream 2.0.

This feature is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where AppStream 2.0 is offered. It is supported only on AppStream stacks using single-session Windows fleets.

To get started, open the AppStream 2.0 console and create a stack. In the Enable storage step, enable OneDrive for business and configure the admin consent settings. For more details, refer to Administer OneDrive for business. You can also programmatically manage the setting using AppStream 2.0 APIs. For API details, see the CreateStack API documentation.

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AWS Glue announces 14 new connectors for applications, expanding its connectivity portfolio. Customers can now use AWS Glue native connectors to ingest data from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, CircleCI, Docusign Monitor, Domo, Dynatrace, Kustomer, Mailchimp, Microsoft Teams, Monday, Okta, Pendo, Pipedrive, Productboard and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

As enterprises increasingly rely on data-driven decisions, they need to integrate with data from various applications. With 14 new connectors, customers have more options to easily establish a connection to their applications using the AWS Glue console or AWS Glue APIs without the need to learn application-specific APIs. Glue native connectors provide the scalability and performance of the AWS Glue Spark engine along with support for standard authorization and authentication methods like OAuth 2. With these connectors, customers can test connections, validate their connection credentials, preview data, and browse metadata.

AWS Glue native connectors to Blackbaud, CircleCI, Docusign Monitor, Domo, Dynatrace, Kustomer, Mailchimp, Microsoft Teams, Monday, Okta, Pendo, Pipedrive, Productboard, Salesforce Commerce Cloud are available in all AWS commercial regions.

To get started, create new AWS Glue connections with these connectors and use them as source in AWS Glue studio. To learn more, visit AWS Glue documentation for connectors.

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Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server now offers enhanced storage and performance capabilities, supporting up to 64TiB of storage and 256,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) with io2 Block Express volumes. This represents an improvement from the previous limit of 16 TiB and 64,000 IOPS with io2 Block Express. These enhancements enable transactional databases and data warehouses to handle larger workloads on a single Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server database instance.

The support for 64TiB and 256,000 IOPS with io2 Block Express for Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server is now generally available in all AWS regions where both Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes and Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server are currently supported.

Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server is a managed database service that allows customization of the underlying operating system and includes the ability to bring your own licensed SQL Server media or use SQL Server Developer Edition while providing the time-savings, durability, and scalability benefits of a managed database service. To get started, visit the Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server User Guide. See Amazon RDS Custom Pricing for up-to-date pricing of instances, storage, data transfer and regional availability.
 

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Amazon Connect Cases now allows agents and supervisors to filter cases in the agent workspace by custom field values, making it easier to narrow down search results and find relevant cases. Users can also customize the case list view and search results layout by adding custom columns, hiding or rearranging existing columns, and adjusting the number of cases per page. These enhancements enable users to tailor the case list view to meet their needs and manage their case workloads more effectively.

For region availability, please see the availability of Amazon Connect features by Region. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon Connect Cases webpage and documentation.
 

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The Amazon EventBridge console now displays the source and detail type of all available AWS service events when you create a rule in the EventBridge console. This makes it easier for customers to discover and utilize the full range of AWS service events when building event-driven architectures. Additionally, the EventBridge documentation now includes an automatically updated list of all AWS service events, facilitating access to the most current information.

Amazon EventBridge Event Bus is a serverless event router that enables you to create highly scalable event-driven applications by routing events between your own applications, third-party SaaS applications, and other AWS services. With this update, developers can quickly search and filter through all available AWS service events, including event types, within the EventBridge console, when configuring event patterns in the sandbox and rules, and in the documentation, enabling customers to more efficiently create event-driven integrations and reduce misconfiguration.

This feature in the EventBridge console is available in all commercial AWS Regions. To learn more about discovering and using AWS service events in Amazon EventBridge, see the updated list of AWS service events in the documentation here.
 

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Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, a fully-managed agentless collector for Prometheus metrics, adds support for cross-account ingestion. Starting today, you can agentlessly scrape metrics from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters in different accounts than your Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace.

While it was previously possible to apply AWS multi-account best practices for centralized observability with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspaces, you had to use self-managed collection. This meant that you had to run, scale, and patch telemetry agents yourself to scrape metrics from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters in various accounts in order to ingest them into a central Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspaces in a different account. With this launch, you can now use the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector to get rid of this heavy lifting and ingest metrics in a cross-account setup without having to self-run a collector. In addition, you can now also use the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector to scrape metrics from for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters to ingest them into Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspaces created with customer managed keys.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector is available in all regions where Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is available. To learn more about Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector, visit the user guide or product page.
 

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Amazon S3 announces schema definition support for the CreateTable API to programmatically create tables with pre-defined columns. This enhancement simplifies table creation for data analytics applications, making it easier to get started and ingest data in S3 table buckets.

To use this feature, you can specify column names and their data types as new request headers in the CreateTable API to define a table’s schema in an S3 table bucket. You can also define a table’s schema when you create tables using the AWS CLI or the AWS SDK.

To create tables with a pre-defined schema, upgrade to the latest version of the AWS CLI and AWS SDKs. This support is available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables is available. To learn more, visit the Amazon S3 Tables overview page and documentation.

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Amazon S3 Tables now support creating up to 10,000 tables in each S3 table bucket. With this higher quota, you can scale up to 100,000 tables across 10 table buckets within an AWS Region per AWS Account. The higher table quota is available by default on all table buckets at no additional cost.

S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. You can use S3 Tables with AWS Analytics services through the preview integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, as well as Apache Iceberg-compatible open source engines like Apache Spark and Apache Flink.

S3 Tables support 10,000 tables in each S3 table bucket in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables is available. To learn more, visit the Amazon S3 Tables overview page and documentation.
 

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The Amazon Q Developer Pro tier now offers automated email notifications for newly subscribed users. When a new user is subscribed by an administrator, users will now automatically receive a welcome email within 24 hours containing important information to help them get started quickly and efficiently with their new subscription. This automation streamlines the onboarding process and saves administrators valuable time by eliminating the need for them to manually notify each new user.

In the welcome email, users will find guidance on accessing the Q Console chat and details on downloading and installing the Q Developer plugin in their Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The email includes their unique Start URL and AWS region for authentication. Additionally, it provides quick-start steps for using Q Developer in their IDE.

To learn more about this new feature and other Amazon Q Developer Pro tier subscription management features, visit the AWS Console.

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