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May 2023 Amazon Web Services Announcements

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.


May Monthly Actual and Projected Updates

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.


May Update Counts per Service

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


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