As one of the industry leaders in cloud computing, AWS is a constantly evolving ecosystem. Trying to track the updates that happen on an ongoing basis within AWS can be incredibly daunting. In this article, we will look at the AWS updates announced in January and provide some analysis and our take on some of the more notable updates for the month.
January Numbers:
Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in January.
Total Updates: 107
Total Services With Feature Updates: 55
Average Daily Updates: 5
Average Updates Per Service: 2
Regional Service Expansions: 134
Graph 1: Monthly Actual and Projected Updates
Services Specifics:
Let’s look at what services were updated and some details of what kind of service updates were released in January 2023. The top 5 services with updates in January 2023 are as follows:
Amazon Kendra: 7
Amazon RDS: 7
Amazon EC2: 6
Amazon CloudWatch: 4
Amazon SageMaker: 4
The following services received updates that make them applicable in compliance environments.
AWS CloudShell is now HIPAA compatible
Amazon Managed Workflow for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is now PCI compatible
One new service was released in preview during January.
AWS Clean Rooms (preview): Allows customers to quickly set up data clean rooms to support audits, financial transactions, or partner data investigation. This allows for sharing data insights with partners in a secure way without needing to share the underlying datasets.
The following graph shows a count of updates per service.
Notable Service Updates:
When reviewing the January updates, the following items stood out to us as notable and worth calling out separately, as they may impact a broad base of users or get lost in the large number of updates.
Amazon S3 now encrypts all new objects by default when they are created at no cost
AWS Lambda runtimes can now be updated based on user preference for Amazon Linux. Runtime updates are now visible to customers as distinct version numbers.
Amazon Kendra intelligence search service has extended its data input ecosystem significantly. Can now index and search data from Microsoft Yammer, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, and S3 (including VPC support). Additionally, Kendra can now be used to improve OpenSearch search results.
Amazon EC2 compute services have several updates to allow for prediction and insights around when autoscaling should occur. These automated recommendations can help improve auto-scaled solutions’ performance and cost optimization.
The Amazon AppFlow data integration service added 14 new data sources this month. New sources include Asana, Delightful, Google Calendar, Intercom, JDBC, PayPal, Pendo, Smartsheet, Snapchat Ads, WooCommerce, BrainTree, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle HCM, and Zoho CRM.
Amazon CloudFront has added some increased controls and the ability to work with HTTP headers. Header policies can now be used to remove headers from responses that should not be sent back to the caller. Additionally, CloudFront can now send a header to track the total number of headers in a request and the header order in a request.
The Amazon Detective security and compliance service can now visualize VPC flow logs within EKS clusters. The networking interactions within Kubernetes can be a complicated and opaque aspect of running workloads, and this visualization should allow for an improved understanding of cluster functions.
Conclusions:
Hopefully this article provides some high-level insights into the large number of announcements AWS made in January. We would love to hear from you if this information is helpful or if there is additional information and view of these announcements that you would find valuable in the future. The complete announcement list is included below for anyone looking at specific update headlines for a service.
Total Announcement List:
01/03/2023 Amazon CloudFront - Removal of Response Headers
01/03/2023 Amazon Neptune - graph-explorer visual exploration open source tool
01/04/2023 Amazon Aurora - Backtrack support for MySQL Version 3
01/04/2023 Amazon CloudWatch - Logs removes log stream transaction quotas and SequenceToken requirements
01/05/2023 Amazon MWAA - Supports Apache AirFlow version 2.4 with Python 3.10
01/05/2023 Amazon S3 - Now encrypts all new objects
01/06/2023 Amazon EC2 - Autoscaling forecasts frequently for more accurate predictive scaling
01/06/2023 Amazon EMR - Serverless now supports custom images
01/06/2023 AWS App Runner - Supports secrets and configuration from Secrets Manager and Systems Manager
01/09/2023 Amazon Kendra - Intelligent Ranking for self-managed Open Search
01/09/2023 Amazon S3 - Storage Lens adds tiered pricing for cost-effective monitoring at scale
01/09/2023 AWS Elemental MediaLive - Adds POIS signal conditioning
01/09/2023 AWS Network Firewall - Add support for reject action for TCP traffic
01/10/2023 Amazon Kendra - S3 connect with VPC support for indexing and searching S3 content
01/10/2023 Amazon Kendra - Google Driver Connector for indexing and searching Google Drive
01/10/2023 Amazon Location Service - Adds GrabMaps in Southwest Asia
01/10/2023 Amazon Personalize - New "Trending-Now" recipe
01/10/2023 Amazon Personalize - Supports tag based resource authorization
01/10/2023 Amazon RDS - Supports restoring database snapshots from Multi-AZ with two readable standbys
01/10/2023 Amazon Route 53 - GA of Application Recovery Controller zonal shift
01/10/2023 AWS CloudShell - HIPAA eligible
01/11/2023 Amazon Pinpoint - Singapore Sender ID registration workflow
01/11/2023 Amazon RDS - Optimized Read is now up to 2x faster for queries in MariaDB
01/11/2023 Amazon Sagemaker - Canvas supports up to 3x faster training of ML models
01/11/2023 AWS CloudFormation - Enhances Fn::FindInMap
01/11/2023 AWS Management Console - Permissions changes in AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account
01/12/2023 Amazon Kendra - MS Teams connect for searching Teams messages
01/12/2023 Amazon Kendra - MS Exchange connector for email messaging search
01/12/2023 AWS Clean Rooms - Available in preview
01/12/2023 AWS Config - Add support for 22 new resource types
01/12/2023 AWS Lambda - Supports maximum concurrency for SQS event sources
01/12/2023 AWS Resource Groups - Now emits lifecycle events
01/12/2023 AWS Systems Manager - AppConfig allows for tracking stale feature flags
01/13/2023 Amazon CloudFront - Supports the request header order and header count headers
01/13/2023 Amazon RDS - New SSL/TLS certificates and certificate controls
01/13/2023 Amazon EC2 - Nitro Enclaves supports multiple enclaves
01/17/2023 Amazon CloudWatch - Enhanced error visibility for Embedded Metric Format (EMF)
01/17/2023 Amazon Detective - New AWS managed IAM policies for improved secure access for security analysts
01/17/2023 Amazon EC2 - Adds support for ConnTrack Utilization network performance metric
01/17/2023 Amazon EFS - Increases maximum number of Access Points per file system
01/17/2023 AWS Network Firewall - IPv6 support
01/17/2023 AWS Systems Manager - Patch policies to support cross account and cross region patching
01/17/2023 EC2 Image Builder - Can include Marketplace subscriptions in your custom AMIs
01/17/2023 EC2 Image Builder - Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks for security hardening of AMIs
01/18/2023 Amazon Chime - SDK now supports 250 webcam video streams
01/18/2023 Amazon EC2 - Autoscaling now gives recommendations about activating predictive scaling policy
01/18/2023 Amazon ElastiCache - Support Memcached 1.6.17
01/18/2023 Amazon EMR - EC2 clusters launch up to 30% faster in private subnets
01/18/2023 Amazon EMR - Serverless introduces account-level vCPU based service quota
01/18/2023 AWS CloudFormation - SAM templates can now be linted to speed up development
01/19/2023 Amazon CloudWatch - Cross-account Metric streams
01/19/2023 Amazon ECS - New default console experience
01/19/2023 Amazon Kendra - MS Yammer connect for messaging search
01/19/2023 Amazon MWAA - PCI DSS compliant
01/19/2023 Amazon OpenSearch Service - Enhanced dry run for configuration changes
01/19/2023 Amazon RDS - MariaDB now supports enforcing SSL/TLS connections
01/19/2023 AWS Fault Injection Simulator - Increased quotas for target resources
01/19/2023 AWS Storage Gateway - S3 File Gateway Supports DOS attributes
01/19/2023 AWS Storage Gateway - S3 File Gateway increases maximum file shares per gateway from 10 to 50
01/20/2023 Amazon Connect - Long lasting persistent chat experiences
01/20/2023 Amazon EC2 - Launch templates support AWS systems manager parameters for AMIs
01/20/2023 Amazon Marketplace - Private offer pages for customer view of private offers on their accounts
01/23/2023 Amazon AppFlow - 10 new connectors: Asana, Delighted, Google Calendar, Intercom, JDBC, PayPal, Pendo, Smartsheet, Snapchat Ads, WooCommerce
01/23/2023 Amazon Aurora - PostgreSQL 14.6, 13.9, 12.13, 11.18 version support
01/23/2023 Amazon Detective - VPC Flow logs visualization for Amazon EKS workloads available
01/23/2023 Amazon RDS - Multi-AZ with two readable standbys for RDS PostgreSQL supports inbound replication
01/23/2023 AWS Elemental MediaLive - Added timecode burn-in
01/24/2023 Amazon MQ - Supports RabbitMQ 3.8.34
01/24/2023 Amazon Polly - Launches 5 new male NTTS voices
01/24/2023 Amazon RDS - Blue/Green deployments supports Aurora MySQL 3 as a source cluster
01/24/2023 Amazon Sagemaker - Automatic Model Tuning now allows environment variables for tuning jobs
01/24/2023 AWS Control Tower - Comprehensive controls management available in Control Tower
01/24/2023 AWS Lambda - Runtime management controls (better visibility and control on when runtimes are updates for Lambdas)
01/25/2023 Amazon OpenSearch Service - Serverless is now GA
01/25/2023 Amazon Quicksight - Adds data bars for tables
01/25/2023 Amazon Quicksight - Increased field limits and performance improvements for Pivot Tables
01/25/2023 Amazon VPC - IP Address Manager now manages IP Addresses in your network outside your AWS organization
01/25/2023 AWS Managed Services - Customers can change responses for Config Rules that are show up with issues
01/25/2023 AWS Pricing Calculator - Supports optimized pricing estimates for EC2 Dedicated Hosts
01/26/2023 Amazon Personalize - Simplified onboarding with data insights
01/26/2023 AWS Managed Services - Achieves FedRAMP High Authorization
01/27/2023 Amazon Sagemaker - Preview of ml.p4de instances for model deployment
01/27/2023 AWS Direct Connect - Three additional locations
01/27/2023 AWS Fault Injection Simulator - Adds Pause I/O action for EBS volumes
01/27/2023 AWS Pricing Calculator - Can access simple monthly calculator estimates in calculator
01/30/2023 Amazon Kendra - Expands data formats support
01/30/2023 Amazon Quicksight - Launches radar chart
01/30/2023 Amazon RDS - Supports increasing storage size when creating read replicas and restoring database snapshots
01/30/2023 AWS Glue - Studio Visual ETL now supports 5 new transforms
01/30/2023 AWS Outposts - Rack local gateway now supports improved VPC routing policy management
01/30/2023 AWS Snow Family - Supports Ubuntu 20 and 22 OS
01/30/2023 AWS Snow Family - Supports Instance Metadata Service Version 2 for EC2 instances on Snow
01/30/2023 AWS Snow Family - Supports software updates for AWS Snowcone
01/30/2023 Bottlerocket - Supports network bonding and VLAN tagging
01/31/2023 Amazon AppFlow - Adds 4 data connectors
01/31/2023 Amazon Athena - Adds data source connector for Google Cloud Storage
01/31/2023 Amazon CloudWatch - Simplifies metric extraction from structured logs
01/31/2023 Amazon EC2 - Hibernate now supports EC2 C6i, C5id, M6i, M6id, and I3en instances
01/31/2023 Amazon EC2 - Credential Guard support for Windows Instances
01/31/2023 Amazon ElastiCache - ElastiCache for Redis announces 99.99% availability SLA
01/31/2023 Amazon MemoryDB for Redis - MemoryDB announces 99.99% availability SLA
01/31/2023 Amazon OpenSearch Service - Simplies remote reindex for VPC domains
01/31/2023 Amazon Polly - Launches two new US English NTTS voices
01/31/2023 Amazon Sagemaker - Automatic Model Tuning now adds three new completion criteria for tuning jobs
01/31/2023 AWS Artifact - On-demand access to third-party compliance reports now generally available
01/31/2023 AWS CloudTrail - Lake now supports ingestion of activity events from non-AWS sources
01/31/2023 AWS Systems Manager - Integration of automation with Change Calendar
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