While July broke the trend of increasing update numbers every month, AWS still made almost 200 changes to their various services. Amazon Connect was a focus area with the largest number of updates during the month. There also continues to be a focus on ML/AI technology and the data storage systems that back that for training and model evaluation. We noted that there was significantly less regional expansion of AWS services this month than in previous periods. Let’s start by looking at some of the metrics around the announcements for July.
July by the Numbers
Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in July.
Total Updates: 194
Total Services With Feature Updates: 70
Average Daily Updates: 10
Average Updates Per Service: 3
Regional Service Expansions: 86
The following graph shows how many monthly announcements AWS has made this year and a projection for the year’s balance.
Services Specifics
Next, let’s look at the service updates released this month. The following are the top 5 services that received updates in July 2023:
Amazon Connect 14
Amazon SageMaker 10
Amazon RDS 7
AWS Glue 6
Amazon Cloudwatch 5
There were a couple of changes in the compliance profile for AWS in July, with Amazon Omics getting approved for FedRAMP Moderate authorization and AWS Mainframe Modernization service is now PCI DSS compliant.
Amazon released a couple of new services and programs that may be interesting to customers in July.
AWS HealthImaging is now Generally Available and is intended to provide petabyte-scale HIPAA-eligible services for storing and working with health imaging data
AWS HealthScribe is available in preview and allows for the creation of clinical notes from a combination of conversation transcription and generative AI
AWS Entity Resolution is now Generally Available and provides ML-backed services that can be used to link related records stored across a disparate set of storage and channels
AWS announced a new Service Delivery program around ECS implementations
AWS also announced a new Amazon Connect program for partners who excel in implementing that service
Some services get more attention each month than others. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during July.
Notable Service Updates
When reviewing the July 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.
The largest group of changes occurred around Amazon Connect, so we’ll first look at the changes and new capabilities there.
Call flow can now be run automatically based on agent activities.
Connect APIs have been extended to allow programmatically deleting Routing Profiles and Queues.
Connect Wisdom, which provides agents ML-based real-time recommended information related to the contact, is now available for chat agents.
Pre-defined Contact Lens for conversational analytics metrics was launched.
Connect Cases now provides case assignments to associate cases with queue or agents for resolution.
CloudFormation support for routing profiles and queues has been added.
Support was added for custom flow block titles.
Automatic activity scheduling based on shift duration is now available.
Scheduling agent time-off balance and group allowance support was added.
Launched flow UI toolbar and ability to add notes.
Support was added for archiving and deleting flows from the UI
These changes added additional capabilities for call center administrators, quality of life changes, and capabilities for agents. Overall, a nice set of improvements to this call center platform.
There were, of course, several updates outside of Connect, and some of the notable changes in other areas were:
Amazon Textract increased the accuracy and flexibility of the AnalyzeDocument - Form aspect of the service to allow for improved form processing in workflows.
A distributed cache provider for DynamoDB has been released in preview to allow .NET applications to take advantage of the performance improvements associated with caching.
AWS CodeBuild now supports GitHub actions to trigger CI/CD pipelines
The SQL Server flavor of Amazon RDS added support for a self-managed Active Directory.
AWS Lambda can now detect and stop recursive loops in functions
Amazon Quicksight has a new unified color experience for analysis and dashboards.
Amazon Cloudfront has added support for 3072-bit RSA certificates.
Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports CI/CD being triggered from GitHub pull requests.
Amazon CloudWatch now has a log insights pattern query command that leverages ML.
Amazon Redshift ML can now integrate into Amazon Forecast
OpenSearch can now integrate with the Personalize service.
Amazon Quicksight now supports Snapshot Export APIs
Conclusion
July continued to see improvements and enhancements to several AWS services. Connect saw some significant changes to support a more seamless call center experience. Additionally, AWS launched several healthcare-focused services and continued to build up the use of ML and AI in their product lines. While not the largest update month of the year, there were still some interesting changes that may be very valuable to AWS customers. We’ll return in a month to break down what is launched or announced in August.
Complete Announcement List
07/03/2023 - AWS Wickr is now available in the Canada (Central) Region
07/03/2023 - Amazon Personalize improves quality for batch recommendations by using the latest streamed data
07/03/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store increases API throughput limit
07/05/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch now supports Cross-Account Service Quotas
07/05/2023 - Announcing DynamoDB local version 2.0
07/05/2023 - AWS Backup expands cross-account backup AWS Region coverage
07/05/2023 - AWS Application Migration Service now supports multi-account migrations
07/05/2023 - Amazon OpenSearch Service now lets you provision higher IOPS and throughput for gp3 volumes
07/05/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Model Cards now integrated with model versions in Registry
07/05/2023 - Amazon Connect now allows flows to automatically run based on agent activity
07/06/2023 - Amazon EKS increases pod density limits for Windows containers
07/06/2023 - Amazon Textract announces updates to AnalyzeDocument - Forms
07/06/2023 - Amazon SQS announces support for dead-letter queue redrive via AWS SDK or CLI in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
07/06/2023 - PostgreSQL 16 Beta 2 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment
07/06/2023 - AWS Backup support for Amazon S3 is now available in 4 additional AWS Regions
07/06/2023 - AWS Network Firewall is now available in four additional AWS Regions
07/06/2023 - AWS Blu Age runtime is now available packaged for easier Amazon EC2 deployment
07/06/2023 - AWS Config now supports 16 new resource types
07/06/2023 - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployment with two readable standbys supports logical replication
07/07/2023 - AWS Glue Crawlers now supports Apache Iceberg Tables
07/07/2023 - AWS Transfer Family is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
07/07/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring expands operating systems and processor support
07/07/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaLive adds support for input thumbnail images
07/07/2023 - Introducing the AWS .NET Distributed Cache Provider for DynamoDB
07/07/2023 - AWS CodeBuild now supports GitHub Actions
07/10/2023 - Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch version 2.7
07/10/2023 - Amazon Location Service now supports API Keys for Maps, Places, and Routes
07/10/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaLive now publishes 1-second metrics
07/10/2023 - Amazon Omics achieves FedRAMP Moderate authorization
07/10/2023 - Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports self-managed Active Directory
07/11/2023 - Amazon Location Service now supports publishing device position updates on EventBridge
07/13/2023 - AWS Lambda now detects and stops recursive loops in Lambda functions
07/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP announces two additional monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities
07/13/2023 - Amazon Aurora supports PostgreSQL 15.3, 14.8, 13.11, 12.15, and 11.20 versions
07/13/2023 - Amazon QuickSight adds axis customization options for small multiples and radar chart
07/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP supports write once, read many (WORM) protection with SnapLock
07/13/2023 - Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) launches index improvements
07/13/2023 - AWS Karpenter now supports Windows containers
07/13/2023 - Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports pgvector for vector storage and similarity search
07/13/2023 - Amazon QuickSight launches unified color experience for analysis and dashboards
07/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports IPSec encryption of data in transit
07/13/2023 - AWS Mainframe Modernization expands control and visibility of runtime environments
07/14/2023 - Amazon Connect launches APIs to programmatically delete Routing Profiles and Queues
07/14/2023 - AWS Proton introduces deployment history
07/14/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS adds programmatic execution for managed endpoints
07/14/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaTailor introduces alert categories in Channel Assembly
07/14/2023 - Amazon CloudFront announces support for 3072-bit RSA certificates
07/14/2023 - Amazon Personalize now makes it easier to add columns to existing datasets
07/14/2023 - AWS Batch on AWS Fargate now supports Linux ARM64 and Windows x86 containers in CLI/SDK
07/14/2023 - Amazon S3 Inventory can include ACLs as object metadata in inventory reports
07/14/2023 - Amazon EC2 M7g and R7g instances are now available in additional regions
07/14/2023 - AWS DMS now supports Amazon Redshift Serverless as a target
07/17/2023 - Amazon ECS adds domainless gMSA authentication for Linux and Windows containers
07/17/2023 - AWS Fargate enables faster container startup using Seekable OCI
07/17/2023 - Amazon Connect Wisdom is now available for chat agents
07/17/2023 - AWS simplifies writing .NET 6 Lambda functions
07/17/2023 - Amazon IVS now supports rendition filtering and higher frequency thumbnails for the Record to S3 feature
07/17/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaPackage now available in AWS Canada (Central) region
07/17/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces support of QUALIFY clause in SELECT SQL statement
07/17/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports cue ad tags in Channel Assembly
07/17/2023 - AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge Pipes now support enhanced filtering
07/18/2023 - Llama 2 foundation models from Meta now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
07/18/2023 - Amazon Corretto July, 2023 Quarterly Updates
07/18/2023 - Introducing Analytics on Amazon Lex
07/18/2023 - Amazon Connect launches pre-defined Contact Lens conversational analytics metrics
07/18/2023 - Amazon EC2 C6in instances are now available in additional regions
07/18/2023 - Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports Microsoft AD authentication in AWS GovCloud (US) regions
07/18/2023 - AWS Mainframe Modernization service is now PCI DSS Compliant
07/18/2023 - Karpenter now supports Windows containers
07/19/2023 - Amazon Translate enables real time translation of Docx files
07/19/2023 - Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports workflows triggered by GitHub pull requests
07/19/2023 - Amazon EC2 X2idn instances now available in Middle East (Dubai) region
07/19/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch announces ML backed Logs Insights pattern query command
07/19/2023 - Amazon Managed Grafana now supports in-place update for version 9.4
07/19/2023 - AWS Amplify JavaScript library enhances the performance of Auth, Storage, Notifications, and Analytics
07/19/2023 - Amazon QuickSight introduces Analysis file menu
07/20/2023 - Amazon Connect Cases now provides case assignment
07/20/2023 - AWS IoT Device Defender now supports monitoring of device disconnect durations
07/20/2023 - AWS WAF now supports URI path aggregation key for rate-based rules
07/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift ML announces integration with Amazon Forecast
07/20/2023 - Amazon SNS now supports mobile push notifications in twelve new AWS regions
07/21/2023 - AWS Lake Formation now supports delegation of LF-Tag management
07/21/2023 - AWS Supply Chain extends availability in two additional AWS Regions
07/21/2023 - AWS Glue Crawlers now supports Apache Hudi Tables
07/21/2023 - Amazon Route 53 Resolver now available on AWS Outposts rack
07/21/2023 - AWS AppConfig Agent simplifies feature flag and configuration use for Amazon EC2
07/21/2023 - AWS Config advanced queries support 65 new resource types
07/21/2023 - EMR on EKS now supports Apache Spark with Java 17
07/21/2023 - AWS PrivateLink announces integration with Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights
07/21/2023 - Amazon Connect launches CloudFormation support for routing profiles and queues
07/24/2023 - Announcing enhanced user interface for AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning
07/24/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces new Synthetics NodeJS runtime version 5.0
07/24/2023 - AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning announces AWS CloudTrail support for event history
07/24/2023 - Amazon Omics now provides workflow run queuing
07/24/2023 - Access resource and stack drift information directly in AWS CloudFormation StackSets
07/24/2023 - Amazon EMR launches new capabilities to enhance EMR on EC2 cluster scaling experience
07/24/2023 - AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning supports multiple override management
07/24/2023 - Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports document compression
07/24/2023 - AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights now includes PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR certifications
07/24/2023 - AWS Control Tower launches additional proactive controls
07/24/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Feature Store now supports cross account sharing, discovery and access
07/25/2023 - AWS Cost Management introduces visual Savings Plans recommendations
07/25/2023 - Amazon Chime SDK provides additional compositing options for live connector and media capture
07/25/2023 - CloudWatch Application Insights adds monitoring for multi-app instance deployments
07/25/2023 - Announcing the general availability of AWS HealthImaging
07/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports training ML models with different objective metrics
07/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports sharing ML models with Amazon QuickSight
07/25/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless now supports storing logs in Amazon CloudWatch
07/25/2023 - Personalize your search results with Amazon Personalize and OpenSearch integration
07/25/2023 - AWS IoT Core announces MQTT support for Device Location feature
07/25/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaLive now available in additional AWS Regions
07/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas announces Document Queries powered by Amazon Textract
07/25/2023 - Snowflake connectivity for AWS Glue for Apache Spark is now generally available
07/25/2023 - AWS Glue Studio now supports Amazon Redshift Serverless
07/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas expands data preparation with five new capabilities
07/25/2023 - AWS Transfer Family launches SFTP connectors
07/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports custom Amazon S3 output location for ML artifacts
07/25/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces automatic mounting of AWS Glue Data Catalog
07/25/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor now supports Network Load Balancers as a resource type
07/25/2023 - Amazon EMR on EC2 announces support for native LDAP authentication
07/25/2023 - Announcing auto-account association for AWS Billing Conductor billing groups
07/25/2023 - AWS DataSync now supports copying data to and from Azure Blob Storage
07/25/2023 - AWS Glue jobs can now include AWS Glue DataBrew Recipes
07/25/2023 - Amazon QuickSight now supports Snapshot Export APIs
07/25/2023 - Amazon Redshift now supports querying Apache Iceberg tables
07/26/2023 - Amazon RDS now has a progress indicator for the storage optimization process
07/26/2023 - Accelerate your CloudFormation authoring experience with looping function
07/26/2023 - Amazon Aurora MySQL 2.12 (compatible with MySQL 5.7.40) is generally available
07/26/2023 - SDXL 1.0 foundation model from Stability AI now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
07/26/2023 - Announcing AWS HealthScribe (Preview)
07/26/2023 - Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Application Express version 23.1
07/26/2023 - Introducing the Connect Ready Program
07/26/2023 - AWS Entity Resolution is now generally available
07/26/2023 - Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
07/26/2023 - AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is now available in 5 additional Regions
07/26/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Lima, Peru
07/26/2023 - Enable generative AI applications to complete tasks in just a few clicks
07/26/2023 - IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper adds support for OS certificate stores
07/26/2023 - Amazon Transcribe supports Toxicity Detection for spoken conversations
07/26/2023 - AWS Glue Studio now supports Amazon CodeWhisperer
07/26/2023 - Amazon ECS Service Discovery is now available in five additional AWS Regions
07/26/2023 - Introducing the Amazon ECS Delivery Specialization Partners
07/26/2023 - Amazon EC2 P5 instances, optimized for generative AI and HPC, are generally available
07/26/2023 - Vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now in preview
07/26/2023 - Amazon AppStream 2.0 launches Graphics G5 instances
07/27/2023 - AWS SimSpace Weaver now supports custom container images and new clock
07/27/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.11
07/27/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless now supports retrieving secrets from AWS Secrets Manager
07/27/2023 - Amazon GameLift expands SDK support for Unity based game developers
07/27/2023 - Amazon ECS console now has enhanced support for task definition workflows
07/27/2023 - ACE Pipeline Manager now includes an opportunity bulk import in-line editing experience
07/27/2023 - Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle now supports AWS CloudFormation Templates
07/27/2023 - AWS launches a new Local Zone in Phoenix, Arizona
07/27/2023 - AWS SimSpace Weaver now supports multiple spatial domains per simulation
07/27/2023 - AWS Health now supports delegated administrator
07/27/2023 - AWS Glue now available in 2 new regions
07/27/2023 - Access and Query are now generally available for Amazon Managed Blockchain
07/27/2023 - Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.11 and new operator policies
07/27/2023 - Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now supports rule-based identity resolution
07/27/2023 - Amazon EC2 M6a instances now available in Hyderabad region
07/27/2023 - AWS Enterprise On-Ramp now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
07/27/2023 - Amazon MQ now supports customer managed configuration for RabbitMQ brokers
07/27/2023 - Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports minor version 2019 CU21
07/27/2023 - Amazon EC2 G5g instances now available in Spain region
07/28/2023 - AWS Wickr offers federated data retention for internal and external conversations
07/28/2023 - Amazon CodeCatalyst supports deployments to Elastic Kubernetes Service
07/28/2023 - AWS Launch Wizard now available in Hyderabad and Dubai Regions
07/28/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks now support the G5 instance family in the South America (São Paulo region
07/28/2023 - Amazon Route 53 adds support for 14 additional Top-Level Domains
07/28/2023 - Introducing Amazon EC2 C7gd, M7gd, and R7gd Instances
07/28/2023 - AWS announces Public IP Insights, a new feature of VPC IP Address Manager
07/28/2023 - Announcing preview of JSON protocol support for Amazon SQS
07/28/2023 - AWS Lake Formation launches Read-Only Administrator role
07/28/2023 - Announcing Amazon ECS templates for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Blueprints
07/28/2023 - AWS Database Encryption SDK for Amazon DynamoDB now generally available
07/28/2023 - VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in 2 additional regions
07/31/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless adds API support for Application UIs
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect scheduling now offers automated flexible days scheduling
07/31/2023 - AWS enables the invoice balance due information and invoice amount on Billing Console
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect now supports flow-only attributes
07/31/2023 - Amazon Aurora supports Local Write Forwarding for Amazon Aurora MySQL
07/31/2023 - AWS IoT Core announces new certificate signing & key generation algorithms
07/31/2023 - Amazon Aurora MySQL 3.04 (compatible with MySQL 8.0.28) is generally available
07/31/2023 - AWS NAT Gateway is now available in the AWS US West Phoenix Local Zone
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect now supports custom flow block titles
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect now offers automatic activity scheduling based on shift duration
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect scheduling agent time-off balance and group allowance support
07/31/2023 - Amazon Inspector adds enhanced vulnerability intelligence to its findings
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect launches flows UI toolbar and ability to add notes
07/31/2023 - Amazon Connect now supports archiving and deleting flows from the UI
07/31/2023 - Introducing custom query and template capabilities for AWS Clean Rooms
07/31/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS is now available in Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan)
07/31/2023 - AWS CloudFormation enhances deletion policies to accelerate dev-test cycle
07/31/2023 - Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region