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April 2023 Amazon Web Services Announcements

April was another month of a lot of announcements from AWS. So we’re back with our recap of the changes, some themes, and an analysis of how things are evolving at AWS. Some themes in the April releases:

  • Updates around default security and increased controls in Guard Duty and Inspector

  • A number of new competencies being rolled out to AWS partners

  • Agent improvements in the Connect service

At over 200 updates this was the second largest month of updates this year after March. We’ll start by taking a look at the overall update metrics for the month.


April by the Numbers:

Let’s start with some high-level numbers around updates that occurred in April.


  • Total Updates: 202

  • Total Services With Feature Updates: 81

  • Average Daily Updates: 10

  • Average Updates Per Service: 2

  • Regional Service Expansions: 111


Graph of the count of service updates by month.

Graph 1: Monthly Actual and Projected Updates


Services Specifics:

Let’s analyze the updates to services and examine the details of the service updates that were released this month. The following are the top 5 services that received updates in April 2023:

  • Amazon SageMaker: 8

  • Amazon EC2: 7

  • Amazon RDS: 7

  • Amazon Connect: 5

  • Amazon Redshift: 4

Amazon released a number of new services and programs in April.

  • AWS Supply Chain: This service was previously in preview, and uses ML data and insights to help supply chain managers mitigate risks and reduce costs

  • AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for Amazon MemoryDB: Simplifies provisioning MemoryDB database instances so they can be managed and spun up fro within your Kubernetes cluster rather than as an external resource

  • AWS Cloud Operations Competency: This new program validates partners for their expertise across five areas of best practice cloud operations - Cloud Governance, Cloud Financial Management, Monitoring and Observability, Compliance and Auditing, and Operations Management

  • Amazon CodeWhisperer: This is Amazon’s offering to provide AI based on input and guidance to developers while writing software

  • Media and Entertainment Competency: Highlights partners who have experience and can help customers move their media and entertainment workloads to the cloud

  • Manufacturing and Industrial Competency: formerly the Industrial Software Competency this revised program expands the focus areas for partners in this program

  • AWS WAF Ready Partner Offerings: A program for partners who have software products that work with the AWS WAF service

  • Amazon CodeCatalyst: A streamlined service that allows for faster delivery of projects by removing the need for project setup of things like CI/CD pipelines and other application configuration

Some services get more attention each month. The following graph shows a count of updates per service during April.



Graph of count of updates by service for April 2023

Graph 2: Update Counts Per Service


Notable Service Updates:

When reviewing the April 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.


Security Position

  • S3 now applies default best practices from a security standpoint to all new buckets. This includes enabling Block Public Access and disabling Access Control Lists (ACL).

  • GuardDuty added support for lambda to it’s infrastructure security monitoring

  • GuardDuty added three new threat detections related to suspicious DNS traffic

  • Inspector adds the ability to scan custom EC2 images for vulnerabilities which is hugely beneficial for users who use Golden AMI pipelines

  • Rekognition added the ability to detect facial recognition fakes or fraud by implementing facial liveness checking

Cloud and Application Management

  • Cloudwatch added new console abilities and data visualizations to allow for better understanding and insights into the logs of your applications

  • S3 added metrics object replication to allow for increase visibility and monitoring of the status and any potential issues with S3 replication between buckets

  • RDS added the ability to enable Elasticache for an RDS instance directly from the AWS console to simplify the performance of database access for an application

General Updates

  • Connect added the ability for call center agents to concurrently work on voice calls, task and chats

  • Connect added the ability for customers to manage multiple fraudster lists expanding customers ability to protect their call centers from known bad actors

  • Lambda has added the ability to progressively stream payloads back to clients even for workloads over 6 MB allowing for building more responsive serverless applications

  • Fault Injection Simulator has added the ability to simulate a disk being filled completely in order to test application resilience in this scenario

Conclusions:

April saw another large set of updates from AWS. This month featured a number of updates to security tools for clients, observability and monitoring for workloads, and improvements in the cost and capabilities of the Connect call center service. Additionally Redshift added functionality around data access and some performance improvements. One of the other general themes was updates and the roll out of new partner competencies in industry focused areas. The complete announcement list is included below for anyone looking at specific update headlines for a service. We’ll be back next month with our analysis of April’s updates.


Total Announcement List:

  • 04/03/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Distributor supports New Relic Infrastructure Monitoring agent

  • 04/03/2023 - Amazon Textract announces updates to the AnalyzeDocument - Tables feature

  • 04/03/2023 - AWS Trusted Advisor now includes fault tolerance checks for Amazon ECS

  • 04/03/2023 - Announcing Utilization Notifications for EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations

  • 04/03/2023 - Amazon MWAA now supports Shell Launch Scripts

  • 04/03/2023 - The sixth generation of Amazon EC2 instances powered by AMD processors now support faster Amazon EBS-optimized instance performance

  • 04/03/2023 - Announcing policies validations during synthesis time with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

  • 04/03/2023 - Amazon Textract announces Bulk Document Uploader to test Textract on multiple documents

  • 04/03/2023 - AWS Config now supports 23 new resource types

  • 04/03/2023 - Amazon ElastiCache for Redis simplifies creating new clusters in the AWS Management Console

  • 04/03/2023 - Amazon SWF now supports AWS PrivateLink

  • 04/03/2023 - AWS Billing Conductor pricing change

  • 04/03/2023 - Import data from 45+ sources for no-code ML with Amazon SageMaker Canvas

  • 04/03/2023 - AWS Service Catalog announces support for Terraform open source

  • 04/04/2023 - AWS Supply Chain is now generally available

  • 04/04/2023 - Amplify Studio is now available in the Europe South (Milan) Region

  • 04/04/2023 - Amazon Kendra releases Microsoft OneDrive Connector

  • 04/04/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Feature Store now supports hard deletion in online store

  • 04/04/2023 - AWS CodePipeline is now available in three additional regions

  • 04/04/2023 - Announcing general availability for macOS Support on Amplify Library for Swift

  • 04/04/2023 - Amazon Athena adds view support for external data sources

  • 04/04/2023 - AWS Migration Hub now supports High Availability SAP HANA systems

  • 04/04/2023 - AWS CodeBuild is now available in three additional AWS Regions

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon SageMaker is now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region

  • 04/05/2023 - AWS App Runner adds 7 new compute configurations

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in additional AWS regions

  • 04/05/2023 - AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) for Amazon MemoryDB is now generally available

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon S3 adds new visibility into object replication status

  • 04/05/2023 - Announcing CSV Export for AWS Resource Explorer Search Results

  • 04/05/2023 - AWS Glue now available in AWS Europe (Spain) and AWS Europe (Zurich)

  • 04/05/2023 - AWS Network Firewall now supports IPv6-only subnets

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon AppStream 2.0 Is Now Available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon S3 beginning to apply two security best practices to all new buckets by default

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon CloudFront supports S3 Object Lambda Access Point origin

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon HealthLake now available in Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) AWS region

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon Polly offers full support in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region

  • 04/05/2023 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud now supports Bring your own IP in two additional AWS Regions

  • 04/05/2023 - AWS CloudFormation StackSets is now available in 2 additional AWS Regions

  • 04/06/2023 - Amazon CodeCatalyst Dev Environments now supports GitHub repositories

  • 04/06/2023 - Introducing AWS Cloud Operations Competency Partners

  • 04/06/2023 - AWS Proton introduces Git management of service configurations

  • 04/06/2023 - Amazon Monitron extends data stream with closure codes and status from sensors

  • 04/06/2023 - AWS Security Hub launches 4 new security best practice controls

  • 04/06/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces Core introduces Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus bundle

  • 04/07/2023 - Add an Amazon ElastiCache cache to Amazon RDS databases in the RDS console

  • 04/07/2023 - AWS Trusted Advisor introduces Engage for AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support customers (Preview)

  • 04/07/2023 - NICE DCV announces the general availability of the DCV Extension SDK

  • 04/07/2023 - AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances are available in additional regions

  • 04/07/2023 - AWS CloudTrail Lake is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

  • 04/07/2023 - AWS Lambda introduces response payload streaming

  • 04/07/2023 - Amazon SageMaker now supports sharing predictions with Amazon QuickSight

  • 04/07/2023 - Amazon RDS for MySQL supports inbound replication for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby DB instances

  • 04/07/2023 - EMR on EKS now supports Apache Spark with Java 11

  • 04/07/2023 - Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports up to 15 read replicas for RDS Multi-AZ deployment option with two readable standby database instances

  • 04/07/2023 - Amazon Aurora now supports PostgreSQL 15

  • 04/07/2023 - RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ deployments

  • 04/07/2023 - Amazon Aurora supports PostgreSQL 14.7, 13.10, 12.14, and 11.19 versions

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now supports FIPS 140-2 on AWS Fargate in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

  • 04/10/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager adds support for six additional AWS WAF features

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon Connect Voice ID now supports multiple fraudster watchlists per Voice ID domain

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty Adds Three New Threat Detections to Alert Customers on Suspicious DNS Traffic

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon Connect now enables agents to handle voice calls, chats, and tasks concurrently

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon QuickSight now supports Row Level Security tags with OR condition

  • 04/10/2023 - Announcing media metrics for AWS Elemental MediaConvert

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon RDS Optimized Reads now offers up to 2X faster queries on RDS for PostgreSQL

  • 04/10/2023 - AWS Glue visual ETL now supports new native Amazon Redshift capabilities

  • 04/10/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Inference Recommender improves usability and launches new features

  • 04/10/2023 - AWS Well-Architected Framework strengthens prescriptive guidance

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS Ground Station now supports Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager is now available in three more regions

  • 04/11/2023 - Amazon AppFlow announces 6 new connectors

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS WAF increases web ACL capacity units limits

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS Lambda supports Maximum Concurrency for Amazon SQS as an event source in AWS GovCloud (US)

  • 04/11/2023 - Amazon EC2 Serial Console is now available on EC2 bare metal instances

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS AppSync now supports publishing events to Amazon EventBridge

  • 04/11/2023 - Amazon Pinpoint now supports AWS PrivateLink

  • 04/11/2023 - Amazon MWAA now supports Apache Airflow version 2.5

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS WAF supports larger request body inspections for Amazon CloudFront distributions

  • 04/11/2023 - Amazon Rekognition launches Face Liveness to deter fraud in facial verification

  • 04/11/2023 - AWS Config advanced queries supports 27 new resource types

  • 04/12/2023 - AWS Lake Formation is now available in AWS Europe (Spain) Region

  • 04/12/2023 - AWS launches Split Cost Allocation Data for Amazon ECS and AWS Batch

  • 04/12/2023 - EC2 Image Builder supports vulnerability detection with Amazon Inspector for custom images

  • 04/12/2023 - Amazon EFS is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region

  • 04/12/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js 18 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

  • 04/12/2023 - Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.26

  • 04/12/2023 - AWS Lake Formation is now available in AWS Europe (Zurich) Region

  • 04/13/2023 - Announcing AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances, optimized for generative AI, are now generally available

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 I4i instances available in additional regions

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances, optimized for network-intensive generative AI models, are now generally available

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon CodeWhisperer is now generally available

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon Redshift enhances string query performance by up to 63x

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in three additional regions

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available in three additional regions

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon MSK is now available in Hyderabad, Spain, and Zurich Regions

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the three additional regions

  • 04/13/2023 - AWS Lambda now supports SnapStart for Java functions in 6 additional regions

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon Chime SDK updates Service Level Agreement

  • 04/13/2023 - Announcing updated video background blur and replacement in Amazon Chime SDK

  • 04/13/2023 - AWS Service Management Connector introduces AWS Support and Automation integrations in Jira Cloud

  • 04/13/2023 - Amazon GameLift adds support for Unreal Engine 5

  • 04/13/2023 - AWS IoT Core announces general availability for MQTT5 Shared Subscriptions and new CloudWatch metrics

  • 04/14/2023 - AWS Backup now available in 3 new Regions

  • 04/14/2023 - AWS Transit Gateway is now available in Europe (Spain) Region

  • 04/14/2023 - Announcing availability of AL2023 and gMSA support on Amazon ECS Linux containers

  • 04/14/2023 - Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate supports extensible ephemeral storage for Windows Tasks

  • 04/14/2023 - AWS Transit Gateway is now available in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region

  • 04/14/2023 - Amazon EMR on EKS is now available in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions

  • 04/14/2023 - Introducing the Media & Entertainment Competency

  • 04/14/2023 - AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD and AD Connector available in (Melbourne)

  • 04/17/2023 - Prepare data easily with Amazon Personalize and Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler integration

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 50 concurrent table restores

  • 04/17/2023 - AWS announces the Manufacturing and Industrial Competency

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon EFS now supports up to 10 GiB/s of throughput

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon EMR Studio now available in Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Regions

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) provides ODBC driver to connect from BI tools

  • 04/17/2023 - AWS Glue launches new capability to monitor usage of Glue resources

  • 04/17/2023 - AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now simplifies launch settings management

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now shows cases information in the agent workspace

  • 04/17/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Collections is a new capability to organize models in the Model Registry

  • 04/17/2023 - Introducing the AWS CloudFormation Template Sync Controller for Flux

  • 04/17/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager now supports Microsoft Teams for Collaboration

  • 04/18/2023 - Amazon EMR now makes troubleshooting easier with enhanced error details

  • 04/18/2023 - AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN supports public LoRaWAN network and roaming with Everynet (Preview)

  • 04/18/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.10

  • 04/18/2023 - AWS Backup announces support for SAP HANA databases on Amazon EC2

  • 04/18/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless adds job-level billed resources for efficient cost management

  • 04/18/2023 - Amazon RDS events now include tags for filtering and routing

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab combats bots with CAPTCHA

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon VPC Prefix Lists now available in three additional regions

  • 04/19/2023 - AWS Control Tower is now available in 7 additional Regions

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon Corretto April, 2023 Quarterly Updates

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon WorkSpaces Web Access with WSP is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon GuardDuty now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon Comprehend improves accuracy of document classification using layout data

  • 04/19/2023 - AWS Lake Formation and Glue Data Catalog now manage Apache Hive Metastore resources

  • 04/19/2023 - AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

  • 04/19/2023 - AWS Amplify supports Push Notifications for mobile and cross platform apps

  • 04/19/2023 - Announcing Dev Environment dashboard for Amazon CodeCatalyst (Preview)

  • 04/19/2023 - Amazon Inspector now supports deep inspection of EC2 instances

  • 04/20/2023 - Introducing AWS WAF Ready Partner Offerings

  • 04/20/2023 - Announcing Amazon GuardDuty support for AWS Lambda

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon ECS Service Connect now available in the Middle East (UAE) and Europe (Zurich) Regions

  • 04/20/2023 - AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized now supports Amazon S3 compatible storage

  • 04/20/2023 - AWS SAM CLI announces local testing support for API Gateway Lambda authorizers

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces general availability of MERGE SQL command

  • 04/20/2023 - Announcing the general availability of Amazon CodeCatalyst

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces centralized access control for data sharing with AWS Lake Formation

  • 04/20/2023 - Redesigned opportunity management experience in AWS Partner Central

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon EC2 supports Ubuntu Pro operating system in a subscription-included model

  • 04/20/2023 - AWS Amplify Flutter announces general availability for web and desktop support

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon Chime SDK now supports Hindi and Thai languages for live transcription

  • 04/20/2023 - Amazon Redshift announces general availability of Dynamic Data Masking

  • 04/21/2023 - AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location in Querétaro, Mexico

  • 04/21/2023 - AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is now available in 7 additional regions

  • 04/21/2023 - AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is now available in South America (São Paulo) Region

  • 04/21/2023 - AWS WAF Captcha launches JavaScript API support

  • 04/21/2023 - Apache Kafka support now available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

  • 04/21/2023 - Amazon Personalize now supports Kafka Sink connector to ingest real-time data with ease

  • 04/21/2023 - AWS Backup is now available in Asia Pacific (Melbourne)

  • 04/21/2023 - Amazon Personalize enables popularity tuning for similar item recommendations

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS Glue Crawlers now support creating partition indexes

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS Support in Korean is now generally available

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS IoT TwinMaker now supports data overlays and text annotations in 3D scenes

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS License Manager now supports upgrading of EC2 Instances from Ubuntu to Ubuntu Pro operating system

  • 04/24/2023 - Amazon EC2 High Memory instances are now available in the Europe (Zurich) Region

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS Firewall Manager adds support for multiple administrators

  • 04/24/2023 - AWS Systems Manager now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications

  • 04/25/2023 - Announcing AWS DataSync Discovery general availability (GA)

  • 04/25/2023 - AWS Resource Access Manager supports fine-grained customer managed permissions

  • 04/25/2023 - AWS Elemental Link UHD now supports Dolby Digital and Digital Plus

  • 04/25/2023 - Amazon SageMaker accelerates local ML code conversion to remote jobs

  • 04/25/2023 - Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) supports IN operator for SELECT queries

  • 04/25/2023 - AWS IoT Core Device Advisor announces support for MQTT over WebSocket

  • 04/26/2023 - Contact Lens for Amazon Connect evaluation capabilities is now generally available

  • 04/26/2023 - AWS Global Accelerator launches two new edge locations

  • 04/26/2023 - Amazon EC2 T4g instances are now available in Africa (Cape Town) region

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon Location Service adds support for long distance matrix routing

  • 04/27/2023 - AWS Lambda adds support for Java 17

  • 04/27/2023 - AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager console based access to Windows instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

  • 04/27/2023 - AWS Network Firewall ingress TLS inspection is now available in 8 additional regions

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon QuickSight launches two suites of data ingestion APIs

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection is now available in all AWS Commercial Regions

  • 04/27/2023 - AWS AppSync supports TypeScript and source maps in JavaScript resolvers

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon SageMaker now supports a hosted TensorBoard experience

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion

  • 04/27/2023 - Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ version 3.10.20 and 3.9.27

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon RDS now supports M7g and R7g database instances

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon Connect reduces South Korea DID rates

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon Managed Grafana now supports workspace configuration with version 9.4 option

  • 04/28/2023 - AWS Verified Access is now generally available

  • 04/28/2023 - AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports Amazon EC2 Instance disk fill

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud are now available in three new AWS Regions

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon Connect reduces Japan toll-free inbound minute rate

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon MSK now offers multi-VPC private connectivity and cross-account access

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon S3 now applies two security best practices to all new buckets by default

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon CloudWatch adds new console capabilities and data visualizations

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon EC2 C6id, M6id, R6id instances are now available in additional regions

  • 04/28/2023 - Announcing Provisioned Capacity for Amazon Athena

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon EC2 now supports AMD SEV-SNP

  • 04/28/2023 - Amazon EMR Serverless is now available in Bahrain and Hong Kong Regions

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