What's New in October 2020

Melbourne AWS User Group

In another slightly delayed episode Arjen, JM, and Guy talk about all the many things that were announced in October. But before that, they will first discuss exactly how badly Lex understands "a fair shake of the sauce bottle".

Talk to us in our Slack or on Twitter!

The News

Finally in Sydney

• Amazon Connect supports Amazon Lex bots using the Australian English dialect
• Amazon EC2 G4dn Bare Metal Instances with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, now available in 15 additional regions
• AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Snapshot Export to S3 available in additional regions

Serverless

• Introducing AWS Lambda Extensions – In preview | AWS Compute Blog
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights (preview)
• New – Use AWS PrivateLink to Access AWS Lambda Over Private AWS Network | AWS News Blog
• Amazon EventBridge announces support for Dead Letter Queues
• AWS Step Functions now supports Amazon Athena service integration
• Amazon API Gateway now supports disabling the default REST API endpoint

Containers

• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.18
• Amazon EKS now supports the Los Angeles AWS Local Zones
• Amazon EKS now supports configurable Kubernetes service IP address range
• Amazon ECS extensions for AWS Cloud Development Kit now available as a Developer Preview
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Support for Running Multi-Container Applications on AL2 based Docker Platform
• Fluent Bit supports Amazon S3 as a destination to route container logs
• AWS App Mesh supports cross account sharing of ACM Private Certificate Authority
• Introducing the AWS Load Balancer Controller
• AWS Copilot CLI launches v0.5 to let users deploy scheduled jobs and more

EC2 & VPC

• AWS Nitro Enclaves – Isolated EC2 Environments to Process Confidential Data | AWS News Blog
• Announcing SSL/TLS certificates for Amazon EC2 instances with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for Nitro Enclaves
• New – Application Load Balancer Support for End-to-End HTTP/2 and gRPC | AWS News Blog
• AWS Compute Optimizer enhances EC2 instance type recommendations with Amazon EBS metrics
• AWS Cloud Map simplifies service discovery with optional parameters
• AWS Global Accelerator launches port overrides
• AWS IoT SiteWise launches support for VPC private links
• AWS Site-to-Site VPN now supports health notifications

Dev & Ops

• AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas
• AWS CloudFormation Guard – an open-source CLI for infrastructure compliance – is now generally available
• AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection now supports CloudFormation Registry resource types
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports prebuilt canary monitoring dashboard
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics launches Recorder to generate user flow scripts for canaries
• AWS and Grafana Labs launch AWS X-Ray data source plugin
• Now author AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks using Visual Studio Code
• AWS Systems Manager now supports free-text search of runbooks
• AWS Systems Manager now allows filtering automation executions by applications or environments
• Now use AWS Systems Manager to view vulnerability identifiers for missing patches on your Linux instances
• Port forwarding sessions created using Session Manager now support multiple simultaneous connections
• Now customize your Session Manager shell environment with configurable shell profiles
• AWS End of Support Migration Program for Windows Server now available as a self-serve solution for customers
• EC2 Image Builder now supports AMI distribution across AWS accounts
• Announcing general availability of waiters in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x
• Porting Assistant for .NET is now open source
• Amazon Corretto 8u272, 11.0.9, 15.0.1 quarterly updates are now available

Security

• AWS Config adds 15 new sample conformance pack templates and introduces simplified setup experience for conformance packs
• AWS IAM Access Analyzer now supports archive rules for existing findings
• AWS AppSync adds support for AWS WAF
• AWS Shield now provides global and per-account event summaries to all AWS customers
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports two subscription filters per log group
• Amazon S3 Object Ownership is available to enable bucket owners to automatically assume ownership of objects uploaded to their buckets
• Protect Your AWS Compute Optimizer Recommendation Data with customer master keys (CMKs) Stored in AWS Key Management Service
• Manage access to AWS centrally for Ping Identity users with AWS Single Sign-On
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds native SAML Authentication for Kibana
• Amazon Inspector has expanded operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10, and Windows Server 2019

Data Storage & Processing

• New – Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors | AWS News Blog
• Amazon ElastiCache now supports M6g and R6g Graviton2-based instances
• Easily restore an Amazon RDS for MySQL database from your MySQL 8.0 backup
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports concurrent major version upgrades of read replicas
• Amazon Aurora enables dynamic resizing for database storage space
• AWS Lake Formation now supports Active Directory and SAML providers for Amazon Athena
• AWS Lake Formation now supports cross account database sharing
• Now generally available – design and visualize Amazon Keyspaces data models more easily by using NoSQL Workbench
• You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers
• Amazon ElastiCache on Outposts is now available
• Amazon EMR now supports placing your EMR master nodes in distinct racks to reduce risk of simultaneous failure
• Amazon EMR integration with AWS Lake Formation is now generally available
• Amazon EMR now provides up to 35% lower cost and up to 15% improved performance for Spark workloads on Graviton2-based instances
• AWS Glue Streaming ETL jobs support schema detection and evolution
• AWS Glue supports reading from self-managed Apache Kafka
• AWS Glue crawlers now support Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MongoDB collections
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now supports Force Stop and a new Autoscaling status
• Kinesis Client Library now enables multi-stream processing
• Announcing cross-database queries for Amazon Redshift (preview)
• Amazon Redshift announces support for Lambda UDFs and enables tokenization
• New Amazon Neptune engine release now enforces a minimum version of TLS 1.2 and SSL client connections
• AWS Database Migration Service now supports Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source

AI & ML

• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now Creates Machine Learning Models up to 40% Faster with up to 200% Higher Accuracy
• Now launch Amazon SageMaker Studio in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Amazon SageMaker Price Reductions – Up to 18% for ml.P3 and ml.P2 instances
• Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks now support custom images
• Amazon Rekognition adds support for six new content moderation categories
• Amazon Rekognition now detects Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as face covers, head covers, and hand covers on persons in images
• Amazon Transcribe announces support for AWS PrivateLink for Batch APIs
• Amazon Kendra now supports custom data sources
• Amazon Kendra adds Confluence Server connector
• Amazon Textract announces improvements to reduce average API processing times by up to 20%

Other Cool Stuff

• AWS DeepRacer announces new Community Races updates
• Amazon WorkSpaces introduces sharing images across accounts
• AWS Batch now supports Custom Logging Configurations, Swap Space, and Shared Memory
• Amazon Connect supports Amazon Lex bots using the British English dialect
• Amazon Connect chat now provides automation and personalization capabilities with whisper flows
• CloudWatch Application Insights offers new, improved user interface
• CloudWatch Application Insights adds EBS volume and API Gateway metrics
• Announcing AWS Budgets price reduction
• Announcing AWS Budgets Actions
• Resource Access Manager Support is now available on AWS Outposts
• Announcing Amazon CloudFront Origin Shield
• Announcing AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry in Preview
• Introducing Amazon SNS FIFO – First-In-First-Out Pub/Sub Messaging | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SNS now supports selecting the origination number when sending SMS messages
• Amazon SES now offers list and subscription management capabilities

Nano candidates

• Amazon WorkDocs now supports Dark Mode on iOS
• Amazon Corretto 8u272, 11.0.9, 15.0.1 quarterly updates are now available
• AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management now supports new version of Chef Automate

Sponsors

Gold Sponsor Innablr

Silver Sponsors

• AC3
• CMD Solutions
• DoIT International