April was another month of a lot of announcements from AWS. So we’re back with our recap of the changes, some themes, and an analysis of how things are evolving at AWS. Some themes in the April releases:
Updates around default security and increased controls in Guard Duty and Inspector
A number of new competencies being rolled out to AWS partners
Agent improvements in the Connect service
At over 200 updates this was the second largest month of updates this year after March. We’ll start by taking a look at the overall update metrics for the month.
April by the Numbers:
Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in April.
Total Updates: 202
Total Services With Feature Updates: 81
Average Daily Updates: 10
Average Updates Per Service: 2
Regional Service Expansions: 111
Graph 1: Monthly Actual and Projected Updates
Services Specifics:
Let’s analyze the updates to services and examine the details of the service updates that were released this month. The following are the top 5 services that received updates in April 2023:
Amazon SageMaker: 8
Amazon EC2: 7
Amazon RDS: 7
Amazon Connect: 5
Amazon Redshift: 4
Amazon released a number of new services and programs in April.
AWS Supply Chain: This service was previously in preview, and uses ML data and insights to help supply chain managers mitigate risks and reduce costs
AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for Amazon MemoryDB: Simplifies provisioning MemoryDB database instances so they can be managed and spun up fro within your Kubernetes cluster rather than as an external resource
AWS Cloud Operations Competency: This new program validates partners for their expertise across five areas of best practice cloud operations - Cloud Governance, Cloud Financial Management, Monitoring and Observability, Compliance and Auditing, and Operations Management
Amazon CodeWhisperer: This is Amazon’s offering to provide AI based on input and guidance to developers while writing software
Media and Entertainment Competency: Highlights partners who have experience and can help customers move their media and entertainment workloads to the cloud
Manufacturing and Industrial Competency: formerly the Industrial Software Competency this revised program expands the focus areas for partners in this program
AWS WAF Ready Partner Offerings: A program for partners who have software products that work with the AWS WAF service
Amazon CodeCatalyst: A streamlined service that allows for faster delivery of projects by removing the need for project setup of things like CI/CD pipelines and other application configuration
Some services get more attention each month. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during April.
Graph 2: Update Counts Per Service
Notable Service Updates:
When reviewing the April updates, the following items stood out to us as notable and worth calling out based on their potential to improve how AWS customers utilize these services.
Security Position
S3 now applies default best practices from a security standpoint to all new buckets. This includes enabling Block Public Access and disabling Access Control Lists (ACL).
GuardDuty added support for lambda to it’s infrastructure security monitoring
GuardDuty added three new threat detections related to suspicious DNS traffic
Inspector adds the ability to scan custom EC2 images for vulnerabilities which is hugely beneficial for users who use Golden AMI pipelines
Rekognition added the ability to detect facial recognition fakes or fraud by implementing facial liveness checking
Cloud and Application Management
Cloudwatch added new console abilities and data visualizations to allow for better understanding and insights into the logs of your applications
S3 added metrics object replication to allow for increase visibility and monitoring of the status and any potential issues with S3 replication between buckets
RDS added the ability to enable Elasticache for an RDS instance directly from the AWS console to simplify the performance of database access for an application
General Updates
Connect added the ability for call center agents to concurrently work on voice calls, task and chats
Connect added the ability for customers to manage multiple fraudster lists expanding customers ability to protect their call centers from known bad actors
Lambda has added the ability to progressively stream payloads back to clients even for workloads over 6 MB allowing for building more responsive serverless applications
Fault Injection Simulator has added the ability to simulate a disk being filled completely in order to test application resilience in this scenario
Conclusions:
April saw another large set of updates from AWS. This month featured a number of updates to security tools for clients, observability and monitoring for workloads, and improvements in the cost and capabilities of the Connect call center service. Additionally Redshift added functionality around data access and some performance improvements. One of the other general themes was updates and the roll out of new partner competencies in industry focused areas. The complete announcement list is included below for anyone looking at specific update headlines for a service. We’ll be back next month with our analysis of April’s updates.
Total Announcement List:
04/03/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Distributor supports New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring agent
04/03/2023 - Amazon Textract announces updates to the AnalyzeDocument - Tables feature
04/03/2023 - AWS Trusted Advisor now includes fault tolerance checks for Amazon ECS
04/03/2023 - Announcing Utilization Notifications for EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations
04/03/2023 - Amazon MWAA now supports Shell Launch Scripts
04/03/2023 - The sixth generation of Amazon EC2 instances powered by AMD processors now support faster Amazon EBS-optimized instance performance
04/03/2023 - Announcing policies validations during synthesis time with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
04/03/2023 - Amazon Textract announces Bulk Document Uploader to test Textract on multiple documents
04/03/2023 - AWS Config now supports 23 new resource types
04/03/2023 - Amazon ElastiCache for Redis simplifies creating new clusters in the AWS Management Console
04/03/2023 - Amazon SWF now supports AWS PrivateLink
04/03/2023 - AWS Billing Conductor pricing change
04/03/2023 - Import data from 45+ sources for no-code ML with Amazon SageMaker Canvas
04/03/2023 - AWS Service Catalog announces support for Terraform open source
04/04/2023 - AWS Supply Chain is now generally available
04/04/2023 - Amplify Studio is now available in the Europe South (Milan) Region
04/04/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Microsoft OneDrive Connector
04/04/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Feature Store now supports hard deletion in online store
04/04/2023 - AWS CodePipeline is now available in three additional regions
04/04/2023 - Announcing general availability for macOS Support on Amplify Library for Swift
04/04/2023 - Amazon Athena adds view support for external data sources
04/04/2023 - AWS Migration Hub now supports High Availability SAP HANA systems
04/04/2023 - AWS CodeBuild is now available in three additional AWS Regions
04/05/2023 - Amazon SageMaker is now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
04/05/2023 - AWS App Runner adds 7 new compute configurations
04/05/2023 - Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in additional AWS regions
04/05/2023 - AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for Amazon MemoryDB is now generally available
04/05/2023 - Amazon S3 adds new visibility into object replication status
04/05/2023 - Announcing CSV Export for AWS Resource Explorer Search Results
04/05/2023 - AWS Glue now available in AWS Europe (Spain) and AWS Europe (Zurich)
04/05/2023 - AWS Network Firewall now supports IPv6-only subnets
04/05/2023 - Amazon AppStream 2.0 Is Now Available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region
04/05/2023 - Amazon S3 beginning to apply two security best practices to all new buckets by default
04/05/2023 - Amazon CloudFront supports S3 Object Lambda Access Point origin
04/05/2023 - Amazon HealthLake now available in Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) AWS region
04/05/2023 - Amazon Polly offers full support in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region
04/05/2023 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud now supports Bring your own IP in two additional AWS Regions
04/05/2023 - AWS CloudFormation StackSets is now available in 2 additional AWS Regions
04/06/2023 - Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments now supports GitHub repositories
04/06/2023 - Introducing AWS Cloud Operations Competency Partners
04/06/2023 - AWS Proton introduces Git management of service configurations
04/06/2023 - Amazon Monitron extends data stream with closure codes and status from sensors
04/06/2023 - AWS Security Hub launches 4 new security best practice controls
04/06/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces Core introduces Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus bundle
04/07/2023 - Add an Amazon ElastiCache cache to Amazon RDS databases in the RDS console
04/07/2023 - AWS Trusted Advisor introduces Engage for AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support customers (Preview)
04/07/2023 - NICE DCV announces the general availability of the DCV Extension SDK
04/07/2023 - AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances are available in additional regions
04/07/2023 - AWS CloudTrail Lake is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
04/07/2023 - AWS Lambda introduces response payload streaming
04/07/2023 - Amazon SageMaker now supports sharing predictions with Amazon QuickSight
04/07/2023 - Amazon RDS for MySQL supports inbound replication for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby DB instances
04/07/2023 - EMR on EKS now supports Apache Spark with Java 11
04/07/2023 - Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports up to 15 read replicas for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances
04/07/2023 - Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 15
04/07/2023 - RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ deployments
04/07/2023 - Amazon Aurora supports PostgreSQL 14.7, 13.10, 12.14, and 11.19 versions
04/10/2023 - Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now supports FIPS 140-2 on AWS Fargate in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
04/10/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager adds support for six additional AWS WAF features
04/10/2023 - Amazon Connect Voice ID now supports multiple fraudster watchlists per Voice ID domain
04/10/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty Adds Three New Threat Detections to Alert Customers on Suspicious DNS Traffic
04/10/2023 - Amazon Connect now enables agents to handle voice calls, chats, and tasks concurrently
04/10/2023 - Amazon QuickSight now supports Row Level Security tags with OR condition
04/10/2023 - Announcing media metrics for AWS Elemental MediaConvert
04/10/2023 - Amazon RDS Optimized Reads now offers up to 2X faster queries on RDS for PostgreSQL
04/10/2023 - AWS Glue visual ETL now supports new native Amazon Redshift capabilities
04/10/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender improves usability and launches new features
04/10/2023 - AWS Well-Architected Framework strengthens prescriptive guidance
04/11/2023 - AWS Ground Station now supports Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency
04/11/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager is now available in three more regions
04/11/2023 - Amazon AppFlow announces 6 new connectors
04/11/2023 - AWS WAF increases web ACL capacity units limits
04/11/2023 - AWS Lambda supports Maximum Concurrency for Amazon SQS as an event source in AWS GovCloud (US)
04/11/2023 - Amazon EC2 Serial Console is now available on EC2 bare metal instances
04/11/2023 - AWS AppSync now supports publishing events to Amazon EventBridge
04/11/2023 - Amazon Pinpoint now supports AWS PrivateLink
04/11/2023 - Amazon MWAA now supports Apache Airflow version 2.5
04/11/2023 - AWS WAF supports larger request body inspections for Amazon CloudFront distributions
04/11/2023 - Amazon Rekognition launches Face Liveness to deter fraud in facial verification
04/11/2023 - AWS Config advanced queries supports 27 new resource types
04/12/2023 - AWS Lake Formation is now available in AWS Europe (Spain) Region
04/12/2023 - AWS launches Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS and AWS Batch
04/12/2023 - EC2 Image Builder supports vulnerability detection with Amazon Inspector for custom images
04/12/2023 - Amazon EFS is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region
04/12/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 18 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
04/12/2023 - Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.26
04/12/2023 - AWS Lake Formation is now available in AWS Europe (Zurich) Region
04/13/2023 - Announcing AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway
04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances, optimized for generative AI, are now generally available
04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 I4i instances available in additional regions
04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances, optimized for network-intensive generative AI models, are now generally available
04/13/2023 - Amazon CodeWhisperer is now generally available
04/13/2023 - Amazon Redshift enhances string query performance by up to 63x
04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in three additional regions
04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available in three additional regions
04/13/2023 - Amazon MSK is now available in Hyderabad, Spain, and Zurich Regions
04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the three additional regions
04/13/2023 - AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions in 6 additional regions
04/13/2023 - Amazon Chime SDK updates Service Level Agreement
04/13/2023 - Announcing updated video background blur and replacement in Amazon Chime SDK
04/13/2023 - AWS Service Management Connector introduces AWS Support and Automation integrations in Jira Cloud
04/13/2023 - Amazon GameLift adds support for Unreal Engine 5
04/13/2023 - AWS IoT Core announces general availability for MQTT5 Shared Subscriptions and new CloudWatch metrics
04/14/2023 - AWS Backup now available in 3 new Regions
04/14/2023 - AWS Transit Gateway is now available in Europe (Spain) Region
04/14/2023 - Announcing availability of AL2023 and gMSA support on Amazon ECS Linux containers
04/14/2023 - Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate supports extensible ephemeral storage for Windows Tasks
04/14/2023 - AWS Transit Gateway is now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
04/14/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS is now available in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions
04/14/2023 - Introducing the Media & Entertainment Competency
04/14/2023 - AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD and AD Connector available in (Melbourne)
04/17/2023 - Prepare data easily with Amazon Personalize and Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler integration
04/17/2023 - Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 50 concurrent table restores
04/17/2023 - AWS announces the Manufacturing and Industrial Competency
04/17/2023 - Amazon EFS now supports up to 10 GiB/s of throughput
04/17/2023 - Amazon EMR Studio now available in Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Regions
04/17/2023 - Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) provides ODBC driver to connect from BI tools
04/17/2023 - AWS Glue launches new capability to monitor usage of Glue resources
04/17/2023 - AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now simplifies launch settings management
04/17/2023 - Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now shows cases information in the agent workspace
04/17/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Collections is a new capability to organize models in the Model Registry
04/17/2023 - Introducing the AWS CloudFormation Template Sync Controller for Flux
04/17/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager now supports Microsoft Teams for Collaboration
04/18/2023 - Amazon EMR now makes troubleshooting easier with enhanced error details
04/18/2023 - AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN supports public LoRaWAN network and roaming with Everynet (Preview)
04/18/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.10
04/18/2023 - AWS Backup announces support for SAP HANA databases on Amazon EC2
04/18/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless adds job-level billed resources for efficient cost management
04/18/2023 - Amazon RDS events now include tags for filtering and routing
04/19/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab combats bots with CAPTCHA
04/19/2023 - Amazon VPC Prefix Lists now available in three additional regions
04/19/2023 - AWS Control Tower is now available in 7 additional Regions
04/19/2023 - Amazon Corretto April, 2023 Quarterly Updates
04/19/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces Web Access with WSP is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region
04/19/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
04/19/2023 - Amazon Comprehend improves accuracy of document classification using layout data
04/19/2023 - AWS Lake Formation and Glue Data Catalog now manage Apache Hive Metastore resources
04/19/2023 - AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
04/19/2023 - AWS Amplify supports Push Notifications for mobile and cross platform apps
04/19/2023 - Announcing Dev Environment dashboard for Amazon CodeCatalyst (Preview)
04/19/2023 - Amazon Inspector now supports deep inspection of EC2 instances
04/20/2023 - Introducing AWS WAF Ready Partner Offerings
04/20/2023 - Announcing Amazon GuardDuty support for AWS Lambda
04/20/2023 - Amazon ECS Service Connect now available in the Middle East (UAE) and Europe (Zurich) Regions
04/20/2023 - AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized now supports Amazon S3 compatible storage
04/20/2023 - AWS SAM CLI announces local testing support for API Gateway Lambda authorizers
04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces general availability of MERGE SQL command
04/20/2023 - Announcing the general availability of Amazon CodeCatalyst
04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces centralized access control for data sharing with AWS Lake Formation
04/20/2023 - Redesigned opportunity management experience in AWS Partner Central
04/20/2023 - Amazon EC2 supports Ubuntu Pro operating system in a subscription-included model
04/20/2023 - AWS Amplify Flutter announces general availability for web and desktop support
04/20/2023 - Amazon Chime SDK now supports Hindi and Thai languages for live transcription
04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces general availability of Dynamic Data Masking
04/21/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Querétaro, Mexico
04/21/2023 - AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is now available in 7 additional regions
04/21/2023 - AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is now available in South America (São Paulo) Region
04/21/2023 - AWS WAF Captcha launches JavaScript API support
04/21/2023 - Apache Kafka support now available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
04/21/2023 - Amazon Personalize now supports Kafka Sink connector to ingest real-time data with ease
04/21/2023 - AWS Backup is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne)
04/21/2023 - Amazon Personalize enables popularity tuning for similar item recommendations
04/24/2023 - AWS Glue Crawlers now support creating partition indexes
04/24/2023 - AWS Support in Korean is now generally available
04/24/2023 - AWS IoT TwinMaker now supports data overlays and text annotations in 3D scenes
04/24/2023 - AWS License Manager now supports upgrading of EC2 Instances from Ubuntu to Ubuntu Pro operating system
04/24/2023 - Amazon EC2 High Memory instances are now available in the Europe (Zurich) Region
04/24/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager adds support for multiple administrators
04/24/2023 - AWS Systems Manager now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications
04/25/2023 - Announcing AWS DataSync Discovery general availability (GA)
04/25/2023 - AWS Resource Access Manager supports fine-grained customer managed permissions
04/25/2023 - AWS Elemental Link UHD now supports Dolby Digital and Digital Plus
04/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker accelerates local ML code conversion to remote jobs
04/25/2023 - Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) supports IN operator for SELECT queries
04/25/2023 - AWS IoT Core Device Advisor announces support for MQTT over WebSocket
04/26/2023 - Contact Lens for Amazon Connect evaluation capabilities is now generally available
04/26/2023 - AWS Global Accelerator launches two new edge locations
04/26/2023 - Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Africa (Cape Town) region
04/27/2023 - Amazon Location Service adds support for long distance matrix routing
04/27/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Java 17
04/27/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager console based access to Windows instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
04/27/2023 - AWS Network Firewall ingress TLS inspection is now available in 8 additional regions
04/27/2023 - Amazon QuickSight launches two suites of data ingestion APIs
04/27/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection is now available in all AWS Commercial Regions
04/27/2023 - AWS AppSync supports TypeScript and source maps in JavaScript resolvers
04/27/2023 - Amazon SageMaker now supports a hosted TensorBoard experience
04/27/2023 - Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion
04/27/2023 - Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.10.20 and 3.9.27
04/28/2023 - Amazon RDS now supports M7g and R7g database instances
04/28/2023 - Amazon Connect reduces South Korea DID rates
04/28/2023 - Amazon Managed Grafana now supports workspace configuration with version 9.4 option
04/28/2023 - AWS Verified Access is now generally available
04/28/2023 - AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports Amazon EC2 Instance disk fill
04/28/2023 - Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud are now available in three new AWS Regions
04/28/2023 - Amazon Connect reduces Japan toll-free inbound minute rate
04/28/2023 - Amazon MSK now offers multi-VPC private connectivity and cross-account access
04/28/2023 - Amazon S3 now applies two security best practices to all new buckets by default
04/28/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch adds new console capabilities and data visualizations
04/28/2023 - Amazon EC2 C6id, M6id, R6id instances are now available in additional regions
04/28/2023 - Announcing Provisioned Capacity for Amazon Athena
04/28/2023 - Amazon EC2 now supports AMD SEV-SNP
04/28/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in Bahrain and Hong Kong Regions