May saw the most updates in a month from AWS so far this year. So we’re back with our recap of the changes, some themes, and an analysis of how things are evolving at AWS. Some themes or interesting notable items in the May announcements:
Direct Connect expanded to a eight new locations
Clean Rooms became HIPAA compliant
Kendra continues to expand the connectors to external services it supports
At 222 updates there is a ton of information to understand and absorb this month. We’ll start by taking a look at the overall update metrics for May.
May by the Numbers
Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in May.
Total Updates: 222
Total Services With Feature Updates: 90
Average Daily Updates: 10
Average Updates Per Service: 2
Regional Service Expansions: 242
The following graph shows a breakdown of how many announcements AWS has made per month this year, and a projection for the balance of the year.
Services Specifics
Next let's take a look at the service updates that were released this month. The following are the top 5 services that received updates in May 2023:
Amazon SageMaker 8
Amazon RDS 8
Amazon Kendra 6
Amazon QuickSight 6
Amazon Connect 5
Amazon released a couple of new services and expanded their geographic footprint in May.
AWS Direct Connect added new locations in Phoenix; Lagos, Nigeria; Atlanta, Georgia; Toronto, Canada; Manila, Philippines; Santiago, Chile; Inzai, Japan; Bogota, Columbia
AWS User Notifications a new service that allows AWS users to sign up for custom notifications around things like Health Dashboards, service health notifications, and CloudWatch alarms
Some services get more attention each month than others. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during May.
Notable Service Updates
When reviewing the May 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.
Amazon GuardDuty added on-demand scanning to it’s Malware Protection service allowing customers to initiate a scan of an Amazon EC2 instance at need
Amazon Rekognition has added improved detection of inappropriate, unwanted, or offensive images and videos in their scanning capabilities
Additionally Rekognition has added gaze direction detection for
AWS Network Firewall can now perform a reject action on streaming connections allowing for increased performance and capabilities in latency-sensitive applications
Amazon Kendra added connectors to additional external services including Gmail, Adobe Experience Manager, and the Alfresco content management system
Amazon Timestream now supports unloading data to S3 in either Apache Parquet or CSV formats. This is a great feature to allow IoT and other Timestream users to control query costs by unloading unused data without losing history
AWS Copilot which supports simplified pre-defined pattern implementations of solutions how supports the provisioning of single page applications with a single Copolit command
Conclusions
May was once again the largest set of updates from AWS. There were significant expansions of services and capabilities into new regions this month as well as a lot of new Direct Connect locations that were opened up. Rekognition added some excellent features around detecting unwanted content and adding high end face detection features. Timestream uses can now balance costs of online data while maintaining historical data. Overall, this month was a massive number of updates at the highest announcement count this year. A large number of the updates were adding support for very service specific features, or region expansions. The fundamental service changing updates were more limited, and hopefully we have highlighted those above.
Total Announcement Listing
05/01/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection adds on-demand scanning
05/01/2023 - AWS Config now supports 23 new resource types
05/01/2023 - AWS SimSpace Weaver Snapshots are now generally available
05/01/2023 - Amazon Redshift launches ra3.xlplus instances in additional Middle East, Europe and Asia Pacific Regions
05/01/2023 - Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Auckland
05/01/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaConnect adds support for SRT failover
05/01/2023 - AWS IoT Core announces TLS 1.3 support through Configurable Endpoints
05/01/2023 - Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports PostgreSQL 13
05/01/2023 - AWS Compute Optimizer now supports filtering by tags
05/01/2023 - AWS Compute Optimizer identifies and filters Microsoft SQL Server workloads
05/01/2023 - AWS Security Hub adds four new integration partners
05/01/2023 - Amazon Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports image data preparation
05/02/2023 - Amazon Inspector now allows customers to search its vulnerability intelligence database
05/02/2023 - Amazon SNS now supports message data protection in five additional regions
05/02/2023 - Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling is now available in Canada Central
05/02/2023 - Amazon SNS now supports FIFO topics in five additional regions
05/02/2023 - Amazon Neptune is now available in AWS Middle East (UAE) Region
05/02/2023 - Amazon EFS Replication is now available in all AWS Regions
05/03/2023 - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports pgvector for simplified ML model integration
05/03/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region
05/03/2023 - Amazon Kendra now supports content-based query suggestions
05/03/2023 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud now supports Bring Your Own IP in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
05/03/2023 - AWS announces Multi-AZ with Standby for Amazon OpenSearch Service
05/03/2023 - AWS Directory Service supports smart card authentication in AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region
05/03/2023 - AWS CloudFormation Hooks is now available in 2 additional AWS Regions
05/03/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Phoenix
05/03/2023 - AWS Network Firewall now supports Suricata HOME_NET variable override
05/03/2023 - Announcing AWS User Notifications general availability
05/03/2023 - Amazon Rekognition improves accuracy of content moderation for images and videos
05/03/2023 - Aurora Serverless v2 is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) regions
05/03/2023 - Announcing Private API support for AWS AppSync GraphQL APIs
05/03/2023 - AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Core in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
05/03/2023 - AWS Well-Architected Tool Deepens Integration with AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry
05/03/2023 - AWS Console Mobile Application launches push notifications
05/04/2023 - AWS Network Firewall now supports Reject action in stream exception policy
05/04/2023 - New in AWS Security Hub: detailed tracking of finding changes with finding history feature
05/04/2023 - SageMaker announces ml.inf2 and ml.trn1 instances for model deployment
05/04/2023 - Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region
05/04/2023 - Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.4.0
05/04/2023 - Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is now available in two additional AWS Regions
05/04/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS launches vertical autoscaling to auto-tune application resources
05/04/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports video passthrough
05/04/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS now supports self-hosted notebooks for managed endpoints
05/04/2023 - AWS Resilience Hub expands AWS Trusted Advisor and Amazon DynamoDB support
05/04/2023 - AWS CodePipeline is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East)
05/04/2023 - AWS Batch now includes dashboard customization on the console
05/04/2023 - AWS VSS application-consistent backups now supports PowerShell logging
05/04/2023 - Zonal shift for Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller now available in 18 additional Regions
05/05/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics announces new Synthetics NodeJS runtime version 4.0
05/05/2023 - Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is now available in 4 additional regions
05/05/2023 - Amazon Rekognition launches face occlusion detection to improve identity verification accuracy
05/05/2023 - Amazon QuickSight launches dataset parameters to optimize slicing and dicing experiences
05/05/2023 - AWS Backup supports cross-Region backups in four new Regions
05/05/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams adds support for filtering by metric name
05/05/2023 - AWS Device Farm announces support for Rooted Android Private Devices
05/05/2023 - AWS Health now publishes service health events to Amazon EventBridge in primary and backup Regions
05/08/2023 - Amazon QuickSight now supports State Persistence and Bookmarks for embedded dashboards
05/08/2023 - Amazon MemoryDB for Redis simplifies creating new clusters in the AWS Management Console
05/08/2023 - Amazon Redshift Data Sharing now available in AWS China Regions
05/08/2023 - Amazon QuickSight now supports VPC Connections via public APIs with Multi-AZ support
05/08/2023 - Amazon EC2 High Memory instances now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region
05/09/2023 - AWS IoT SiteWise now supports 15-minute intervals for automatically computing aggregated asset property values
05/09/2023 - AWS IoT SiteWise enhances optimized storage in hot path data for higher throughput
05/09/2023 - AWS Glue large instance types are now generally available
05/09/2023 - AWS Network Firewall ingress TLS inspection is now available in all regions
05/09/2023 - Amazon QuickSight adds new scatterplot options supporting additional use cases
05/09/2023 - Introducing Amazon EC2 I4g storage-optimized instances
05/09/2023 - Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now available in 4 additional AWS regions
05/09/2023 - AWS CloudTrail Lake enhances query support for all Presto SQL SELECT functions
05/09/2023 - Amazon Athena now supports Apache Hudi 0.12.2
05/09/2023 - AWS IoT Device Defender and secure tunneling is now available in Middle East (UAE) region
05/10/2023 - Amazon CodeGuru Security plugin for SageMaker Studio and Jupyter Notebooks now in preview
05/10/2023 - Amazon CloudFront announces one-click security protections
05/10/2023 - Introducing Cedar, an open-source language for access control
05/10/2023 - AWS Backup now supports AWS User Notifications
05/10/2023 - AWS Lambda now supports AWS X-Ray tracing for SnapStart-enabled functions
05/10/2023 - AWS Systems Manager now allows customers to optimize the compute costs of their applications
05/10/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Lagos, Nigeria
05/10/2023 - Amazon SageMaker notebooks now support ml.p4d, ml.p4de and ml.inf1 instances
05/10/2023 - Announcing Provisioned Concurrency for Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference
05/10/2023 - Amazon SNS now supports faster automatic deletion of unconfirmed subscriptions
05/10/2023 - Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports IAM Authentication
05/10/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Canvas can now operationalize ML models in production
05/10/2023 - Amazon MemoryDB for Redis adds support for Redis 7
05/10/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Atlanta, Georgia
05/10/2023 - Private Access to the AWS Management Console is generally available
05/10/2023 - SageMaker Autopilot supports training ML models with weights, eight additional objective metrics
05/11/2023 - AWS Service Management Connector now supports provisioning with Terraform
05/11/2023 - Amazon CodeWhisperer now available as extension in JupyterLab and Amazon SageMaker Studio
05/11/2023 - AWS App Mesh now supports AWS PrivateLink
05/11/2023 - AWS announces Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized
05/11/2023 - Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports enabling Cluster Mode configuration on existing clusters
05/11/2023 - Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose adds support for document ID that is auto-generated by Amazon OpenSearch Service
05/11/2023 - AWS Lambda now supports Kafka and Amazon MQ event sources in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
05/11/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in Amazon Web Services China Regions
05/11/2023 - Amazon Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL support for Graviton3 based R7g instance family
05/11/2023 - Monitor the health of your Amazon IVS channels with multiple hosts
05/11/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available in US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta)
05/12/2023 - AWS Marketplace introduces new self-service listing feature for single AMI products
05/12/2023 - AWS Glue Crawler now support custom JDBC drivers
05/12/2023 - AWS IoT Core registry adds additional AWS CloudFormation resource types
05/12/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Studio is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
05/12/2023 - Amazon Connect Contact Lens now provides supervisor alerts on agent performance
05/12/2023 - Amazon RDS now supports M6g and R6g database instances in four additional AWS regions
05/15/2023 - AWS Clean Rooms is now Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) eligible
05/15/2023 - Amazon QuickSight launches Common Sub-expression Elimination for SPICE performance optimization
05/15/2023 - Amazon Omics now supports direct upload to Omics storage and automatic variant data parsing
05/15/2023 - Amazon Omics adds pre-built bioinformatic workflows with predictable pricing
05/15/2023 - AWS Config advanced queries support 62 new resource types
05/15/2023 - Amazon Omics announces support for Graphical Processing Units for workflows
05/15/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now supports Ubuntu 22.04
05/15/2023 - Amazon Timestream now supports unloading data to Amazon S3
05/15/2023 - Amazon Textract updates its Queries feature within Analyze Document API
05/15/2023 - Advanced sampling now available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
05/16/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager now supports Alma Linux
05/16/2023 - Amazon Omics adds integration with Amazon EventBridge
05/16/2023 - AWS Cost Categories now supports “Usage Type” dimension
05/16/2023 - Amazon Braket supports new trapped-ion quantum computer named Aria from IonQ
05/16/2023 - AWS WAF enhances rate-based rules to support request headers and composite keys
05/16/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports query parameter pass through
05/16/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Gmail Connector to enable messaging search
05/16/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Connector
05/16/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Adobe Experience Manager On-Premise Connector
05/16/2023 - Amazon RDS now supports M6i and R6i database instances in 16 new regions
05/17/2023 - Amazon Rekognition launches eye gaze direction detection in Face APIs
05/17/2023 - Amazon CloudFront now supports stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error cache control directives
05/17/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Distributor now supports the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor agent
05/17/2023 - AWS Device Farm announces VPC integration for Private Devices
05/18/2023 - Amazon MQ is now available in four new regions
05/18/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Alfresco PaaS Connector
05/18/2023 - Announcing the general availability of EC2 G5 instances in Los Angeles Local Zones
05/18/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Alfresco Enterprise Connector
05/18/2023 - The new Amazon EMR Console is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
05/18/2023 - Amazon EC2 C6in instances are now available in 20 AWS regions
05/18/2023 - Amazon Athena now supports IPv6 endpoints for inbound connections
05/18/2023 - AWS DataSync can now copy data to and from Amazon S3 compatible storage on Snow
05/18/2023 - Amazon Detective now supports investigations for additional AWS services
05/18/2023 - Amazon VPC IP Address Manager is now available in Middle East (UAE) Region
05/18/2023 - AWS User Notifications is now generally available for AWS Data Exchange
05/18/2023 - Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports April 2023 Release Update for 19c
05/18/2023 - AWS Global Accelerator extends TCP termination to IPv6 traffic
05/18/2023 - Amazon Neptune announces AWS CloudFormation support for Neptune Serverless
05/19/2023 - AWS Control Tower launches 28 new proactive controls
05/19/2023 - Amazon SageMaker now supports geospatial ML (Generally Available)
05/19/2023 - AWS announces improved end-to-end latencies for Amazon EventBridge Event Buses
05/19/2023 - Amazon EC2 I4g Instances are now available in additional regions
05/19/2023 - AWS Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector now supports on-premises databases
05/19/2023 - Amazon Connect launches APIs to programmatically configure prompts
05/19/2023 - QuickSight dashboards now available for seller reporting and insights in AWS Marketplace
05/22/2023 - AWS partners bring choice of temporary elevated access capabilities to IAM Identity Center
05/22/2023 - AWS Chatbot supports access to Amazon CloudWatch dashboards and Logs Insights in chat channels
05/22/2023 - Aurora MySQL improves performance and failover recovery time when binlog is enabled
05/22/2023 - Announcing AWS ParallelCluster 3.6 with GPU instance health checks and RHEL8 support
05/22/2023 - AWS Backup now supports restoring resources with tags
05/22/2023 - Amazon Transcribe now supports streaming transcription in 3 more AWS regions
05/23/2023 - AWS re:Post now supports adding multiple email addresses to your profile
05/23/2023 - AWS Global Accelerator now supports endpoints in two additional AWS Regions
05/23/2023 - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Rust to build high performance database functions
05/23/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces support for auto-commit statements in stored procedure
05/23/2023 - AWS Wickr is now HIPAA eligible
05/23/2023 - Amazon EC2 C6i and M6i instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)
05/23/2023 - Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances now available in (Hyderabad) region
05/24/2023 - Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/24/2023 - Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/24/2023 - Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.27
05/24/2023 - Amazon MWAA is now SOC Compliant
05/24/2023 - Amazon RDS Performance Insights provides an enhanced console experience
05/24/2023 - Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances now support beta macOS versions
05/24/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/24/2023 - AWS DataSync is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region
05/24/2023 - AWS Amplify announces Authenticator UI Library for Swift and Android
05/24/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Toronto
05/24/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaPackage now supports Low-Latency HLS
05/24/2023 - AWS CodeBuild is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/24/2023 - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports up to 15 read replicas for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances
05/24/2023 - Amazon SES adds new enhancements to its dedicated IPs (managed) feature
05/24/2023 - AWS KMS HSMs upgraded to FIPS 140-2 Security Level 3
05/24/2023 - Amazon Connect Contact Lens launches theme detection
05/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now supports fine-tuning of Foundation Models with domain adaptation
05/25/2023 - Amazon Cognito launches an improved console experience for identity pools
05/25/2023 - AWS CloudFormation StackSets is now available in 3 additional AWS Regions
05/25/2023 - Amazon EC2 C7g instances are now available in additional regions
05/25/2023 - Introducing AWS Glue 4.0 for AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region
05/25/2023 - AWS Security Hub is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/25/2023 - Announcing AWS AppSync Merged APIs for GraphQL federation
05/25/2023 - Amazon Athena updates data source connectors to improve performance and reduce cost
05/25/2023 - AWS Compute Optimizer supports external performance metrics in 5 new regions
05/25/2023 - Amazon ElastiCache for Redis data tiering now supports auto scaling
05/25/2023 - Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports minor versions 15.3, 14.8, 13.11, 12.15, and 11.20
05/25/2023 - AWS Shield Advanced is now available in four additional AWS Regions
05/25/2023 - Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL improves availability of read replicas
05/25/2023 - Amazon MSK is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/25/2023 - AWS Copilot announces Static Site pattern to host single-page web applications
05/25/2023 - Amazon Translate launches real time document translation
05/26/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Manila, Philippines
05/26/2023 - PostgreSQL 16 Beta 1 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment
05/26/2023 - Amazon SageMaker is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region
05/26/2023 - Amazon GameLift improves FleetIQ game session placement logic
05/26/2023 - Amazon Connect now provides contact records and events for external third-party calls
05/26/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager is now available in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne)
05/26/2023 - AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances available in additional regions
05/26/2023 - AWS Transfer Family is now available in three additional regions
05/30/2023 - Invoice Summary is now available
05/30/2023 - AWS Shield Advanced now supports AWS CloudFormation
05/30/2023 - Amazon Security Lake is now generally available
05/30/2023 - Amazon Polly launches two new female NTTS voices in Irish English and Danish
05/30/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Santiago, Chile
05/30/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces announces support for NICE DCV Extension SDK
05/30/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Plus now supports human feedback and fine-tuning data for Generative AI
05/30/2023 - Amazon Personalize now offers more flexibility in model training
05/30/2023 - Amazon RDS for MySQL supports Optimized Reads on Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances
05/30/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Inzai, Japan
05/30/2023 - AWS Direct Connect new location in Bogotá, Colombia
05/30/2023 - Amazon AppStream 2.0 announces support for DCV Extension SDK
05/31/2023 - Amazon VPC IP Address Manager introduces a customizable dashboard with new insights
05/31/2023 - Amazon EventBridge announces open-source connector for Kafka Connect
05/31/2023 - AWS Service Catalog now supports wildcards in IAM principal name associations
05/31/2023 - AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports delivery of client-side overlay ads
05/31/2023 - AWS Pricing Calculator now offers visibility of point in time cost estimations
05/31/2023 - Amazon Route 53 now integrates with Amazon GuardDuty threat intelligence
05/31/2023 - AWS Snow Family quickens multi-PB data migration with new 210TB device
05/31/2023 - AWS Application Migration Service available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions