What's New in May 2021

Once again Arjen, Jean-Manuel, and Guy discuss the latest and greatest announcements from AWS in this roundup of the news of May. Also once again, this was recorded 2 months before it went up, but luckily it's all still relevant. Even the comments about being in lockdown.

News Finally in Sydney

😢

Serverless Lambda

• Getting Started with Your Favorite Operational Tools on AWS Lambda – Extensions Are Now Generally Available | AWS News Blog
• AWS Compute Optimizer Now Supports Exporting Amazon EBS and AWS Lambda Recommendations to Amazon S3

EventBridge

• Amazon EventBridge now supports sharing events between event buses in the same account and Region
• AWS Step Functions now supports custom events to Amazon EventBridge

Other

• AWS Amplify Hosting announces server-side rendering (SSR) support for Next.js web apps
• Introducing CloudFront Functions – Run Your Code at the Edge with Low Latency at Any Scale | AWS News Blog
• Amazon API Gateway REST APIs integrates with Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows

Containers EKS

• Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.20
• Amazon EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is now generally available
• Use Kubernetes Pod Templates with Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS to simplify running Spark workloads and control costs
• Amazon EKS managed node groups adds support for Kubernetes node taints
• EKS Add-Ons Now Supports CoreDNS and kube-proxy

Other

• New – AWS App Runner: From Code to a Scalable, Secure Web Application in Minutes | AWS News Blog
• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now allows you to configure the size of ephemeral storage for your Tasks
• AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP)
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports container monitoring

EC2 & VPC

• Four new EC2 High Memory instances with up to 12TB of memory are now available with On-Demand and Savings Plan purchase options
• EC2 Image Builder supports Auto Scaling launch template
• Amazon VPC Announces Pricing Change for VPC Peering
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Introduces Predictive Scaling as a Native Scaling Policy
• AWS Compute Optimizer enhances EC2 instance type recommendations
• AWS Outposts launches support for EC2 Capacity Reservations
• Amazon Lightsail DNS now supports pointing root domains to Lightsail Container Services

Dev & Ops Dev

• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) v2 and Go CDK is now available for Developer Preview
• Porting Assistant for .NET now available as a Visual Studio IDE extension
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now supports customer-managed customer master keys
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports cron expression for scheduling
• AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code adds Java and Go Support for Serverless Applications
• AWS X-Ray now supports VPC endpoints

Ops

• Resolve IT Incidents Faster with Incident Manager, a New Capability of AWS Systems Manager | AWS News Blog (Ian's scathing review of this on Twitter)
• Amazon DevOps Guru now generally available with additional capabilities
• Now use AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar to prevent desired-state updates during critical events
• AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0 is now generally available
• Customizations for AWS Control Tower v2.1 adds more scaling optimizations and improves compatibility with AWS CodeBuild

Security

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources
• AWS Audit Manager now offers three new frameworks - NIST Cybersecurity Framework version 1.1, AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, and AWS Well-Architected framework
• AWS WAF adds support for log filtering
• Amazon Macie supports criteria-based bucket selection for sensitive data discovery jobs
• Introducing IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK
• AWS License Manager now provides historical license usage reporting
• AWS Security Hub now supports bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management
• AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority now supports storing CRLs in private S3 buckets

Data Storage & Processing

• Amazon Redshift announces preview of cross-account data sharing
• Amazon DynamoDB local now supports the AWS SDK for Java 2.x
• Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now support Amazon RDS Encrypted Cross-Region Automated Backups
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers AWS Graviton2 (M6g, C6g, R6g, and R6gd) instances
• AWS Data Provider for SAP Version 4.0 now available
• Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Managed Disaster Recovery (DR) with Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups
• New – Create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts | AWS News Blog
• AWS Lake Formation now supports Tag-based access control (TBAC)
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now supports RollbackApplication, ListApplicationVersions, and DescribeApplicationVersion APIs in preview
• Amazon Athena adds built-in support for cross-account AWS Glue Data Catalogs
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new lower cost storage tier
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Apache Kafka TLS and Authentication
• Amazon Elastic File System now supports longer resource identifiers
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations
• AWS Transfer Family now supports Microsoft Active Directory
• Amazon RDS for Oracle supports multitenant container database
• Amazon Aurora MySQL Improves Availability of Read Replicas
• Amazon Aurora with MySQL Compatibility Supports T3.large Instances
• Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports Apache Airflow version 2.0
• AWS announces general availability of Amazon Redshift ML
• Amazon FSx for Lustre now supports data compression
• AWS Launch Wizard adds support for SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances deployed on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

AI & ML

• Prepare data for machine learning faster and easier on Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler with support for more data sources and distributed jobs
• Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports up to 10x faster tuning and enables exploring up to 20X more models
• Support for Kantar watermarking is now available with AWS Elemental MediaConvert
• Amazon Transcribe improves live subtitling with partial results stabilization
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds automatic deployment support for the best trained model
• Amazon SageMaker now offers new flexibility in configuring the model building pipelines
• Amazon Forecast now supports generating predictions for 5X more items using 3X more historic data points
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is now integrated with Amazon SageMaker Experiments
• Amazon Kendra releases Query Suggestions
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds automatic cross validation to improve model quality on smaller datasets by up to 35%

Other Cool Stuff

• New Amazon FinSpace Simplifies Data Management and Analytics for Financial Services | AWS News Blog
• New Developer Desktop Feature in AWS RoboMaker Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• AWS Organizations launches new console experience
• Migration Evaluator announces a faster way to project AWS cloud costs with Quick Insights
• AWS Local Zones Are Now Open in Boston, Miami, and Houston | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Connect adds near real-time insights into voice call, chat, and task activity
• How to Use the New AWS Application Migration Service for Lift-and-Shift Migrations | AWS News Blog
• AWS Elemental MediaConnect adds CDI and JPEG XS support
• Announcing the general availability of AWS IoT Core Device Advisor
• AWS Application Cost Profiler
• AWS customers can now self opt-in to AWS Wavelength Zones
• Amazon WorkDocs adds filtering to the activity feed for both iOS and Android
• Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management, a new, easy way to monitor & interact with IoT device fleets, is now generally available
• In the Works – AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SQS Now Supports a High Throughput Mode for FIFO Queues
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces Dimension support for Metric Filters
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Resource Health

The Nanos

• Amazon Elastic File System now supports longer resource identifiers(Arjen)
• Amazon WorkDocs adds filtering to the activity feed for both iOS and Android (Guy)

Sponsors Gold Sponsor Innablr Silver Sponsors

• AC3
• CMD Solutions
• DoIT International