Category Archives: AWS

Today we are announcing the availability of two new CloudWatch metrics for capacity monitoring on AWS Outposts. The new metrics are UsedInstanceType_Count and AvailableInstanceType_Count. These new metrics provide insight into the number of instance types that are currently in use and available on Outposts. These metrics are available along with the other CloudWatch capacity monitoring metrics for Outposts on the AWS management console and CLI.

Amazon WorkSpaces released a self-guided workshop that helps customers use AWS services to build and deploy the End User Computing dashboard. You can provide the dashboard to your help desk staff so that they can send the registration code email to a user, or stop, start, restart, and restore a user’s WorkSpace without having to access the WorkSpaces console. To get started, see Create End User Computing Dashboard in the Hands-On Tutorials for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), increases the default service quotas (also commonly known as limits) for On-Demand and Spot resource counts. You can now launch up to 500 concurrent ECS tasks and EKS pods running on Fargate On-Demand and 500 concurrent ECS tasks running on Fargate Spot, up from 100 and 250 respectively. These are default quotas for an account in a given AWS Region, but you can always raise these values by requesting a service quota increase.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 released a self-guided workshop that enables customers to use AWS services to build and deploy the End User Computing dashboard. You can provide the dashboard to your help desk staff so that they can view details for your AppStream 2.0 fleets, monitor autoscaling activities, and manage user streaming sessions without having to access the AppStream 2.0 console. To get started, see Create End User Computing Dashboard in the Hands-On Tutorials for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) version 3.0 logs agent start and update events, and you can make these events trigger actions via alarms in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, in SSM Agent version 3.0, you can elect to have SSM Agent self-upgrade when the previously installed version of the agent is deprecated. 

Newer patches 2.5.4 / 2.6.1 / 3.2.4 / 3.3.1 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation. You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the CloudFormation Registry to include the StackSets resource type. StackSets is a CloudFormation feature that allows you to centrally manage deployment of cloud resources to multiple AWS accounts and regions in a single operation. You can now model, provision, and manage your stack sets resources alongside other AWS resources through CloudFormation in a predictable and reliable way.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now authenticate Apache Kafka clients using usernames and passwords for new clusters, secured by AWS Secrets Manager. Username and password authentication uses SASL/SCRAM (Simple Authentication and Security Layer/Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism), a popular authentication mechanism supported by Apache Kafka. By storing credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, you can reduce the overhead of maintaining a traditional Apache Kafka authentication system, including: auditing, updating, and rotating client credentials. You can also centrally and securely manage credentials for multiple clusters directly from the AWS Management console. SASL/SCRAM authentication can be used in all AWS regions where MSK is available.

Host Recovery automatically recovers instances in the event of unexpected failures (hardware failures, power or network outages etc.) on EC2 Dedicated Hosts making your instances more resilient. You can enable Host Recovery for your EC2 Dedicated Hosts using AWS Management Console, CLI or API. Additionally, the built-in integration of EC2 Dedicated Hosts with AWS License Manager helps automatically track licenses in the event of host recovery.

AWS Secrets Manager has been assessed for Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report (OSPAR). This assessment demonstrates that AWS Secrets Manager has a system of controls in place that meet the Association of Banks in Singapore’s (ABS) Guidelines on Control Objectives and Procedures for Outsourced Service Providers. Secrets Manager’s alignment with the ABS guidelines demonstrates to customers AWS’s commitment to meet the security expectations for cloud service providers set by the financial services industry in Singapore. This support for OSPAR is in addition to compliance with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) announced by AWS Secrets Manager previously.  

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on SQL Server 2016 (13.0058220.21.v1 and above), giving you the ability to host the report server web portal on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. There is no additional cost to install SSRS directly on your Amazon RDS DB instance.

You can now identify and mask personally identifiable information (PII) from text documents using Amazon Comprehend. Amazon Comprehend uses machine learning to detect PII information that can be used to identify any individual such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses. You can use Amazon Comprehend’s PII API synchronously and asynchronously to detect PII and mask it from text documents.