Category: AWS – August 2023

AWS Application Integration: What's New

AWS Application Integration: What’s New

AWS Application Integration: What’s New in August 2023

AWS Application Integration is a suite of services that helps you connect applications, data, and devices across your cloud and on-premises environments. This blog post will highlight some of the new features and enhancements announced in August 2023.

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry supports OpenAPI 3.0

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry is a service that lets you discover, create, and manage schemas for events on EventBridge. You can use schemas to validate, transform, and enrich events in your applications. With the latest update, you can now use OpenAPI 3.0 to define schemas for RESTful APIs. OpenAPI 3.0 is a widely adopted standard for describing APIs, and it offers more flexibility and features than the previous versions. You can use OpenAPI 3.0 schemas to generate your APIs’ SDKs, documentation, and mock servers.

Amazon MQ adds support for RabbitMQ 3.9

Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service that supports Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ is a popular open-source message broker that supports multiple messaging protocols and features. With the latest update, you can now use RabbitMQ 3.9 on Amazon MQ, which brings several improvements and bug fixes. Some of the notable changes include:

  • Improved performance and stability of the Raft-based distributed queue implementation.
  • Enhanced observability and monitoring capabilities with Prometheus and Grafana integration.
  • New CLI commands and API endpoints for managing policies, parameters, and definitions.
  • Support for Erlang/OTP 24 offers better performance, security, and compatibility.

AWS Step Functions Adds Support for Amazon SNS FIFO Topics

AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into workflows using a visual interface or code. Step Functions can orchestrate complex business processes like data processing, machine learning, and microservices. With the latest update, you can now use Amazon SNS FIFO topics as event sources or targets for Step Functions workflows. Amazon SNS FIFO topics are a type of Amazon SNS topic that preserves the order and deduplicates messages. You can use Amazon SNS FIFO topics to ensure your workflows receive and send messages reliably and consistently.

AWS Application Integration: Conclusion

In summary, the August 2023 updates to AWS Application Integration bring significant enhancements, including OpenAPI 3.0 support in Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry, RabbitMQ 3.9 in Amazon MQ with performance improvements and enhanced observability, and the addition of Amazon SNS FIFO topics in AWS Step Functions for reliable and consistent message handling. These updates empower users to seamlessly connect, manage, and orchestrate applications, making AWS Application Integration a powerful tool for building robust and efficient cloud and on-premises environments.

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AWS Business Applications: August 2023 Updates

AWS Business Applications: August 2023 Updates

AWS Business Applications Category Updates in August 2023

In August 2023, AWS introduced updates to its Business Applications category, which offers services for building, running, and managing applications connecting with customers, employees, and partners. This blog post will summarize some new features and enhancements AWS announced for its Business Applications category in August 2023.

Amazon Connect

This cloud-based contact center service now supports scheduling agent group activities like training sessions, team meetings, or breaks. It optimizes workforce management and enhances customer interaction handling. Schedules can be created via the Amazon Connect console, API, or CLI, and monitoring is available on the real-time metrics dashboard. Amazon EventBridge enables action triggers based on agent group activity events, such as sending notifications or updating third-party applications.

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

In August 2023, Amazon SES expanded its availability to the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region, allowing you to send emails from a region closer to your recipients. This reduces latency and ensures compliance with data sovereignty requirements. To begin using Amazon SES in this region, verify your identity and request a sending quota increase.

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-based business intelligence service, introduced the ability to schedule and programmatically export dashboards and analyses to Excel format. This simplifies sharing insights with stakeholders who prefer Excel files. You can schedule regular exports (daily, weekly, or monthly), and specify recipients, file names, and delivery methods (email or S3). Additionally, you can use the QuickSight API or SDK to trigger exports based on events or triggers.

AWS Business Applications: Summary

These August 2023 updates reflect AWS’s commitment to providing versatile solutions for businesses across various domains. These enhancements in the Business Applications category offer valuable tools to optimize operations, improve communication, and gain deeper insights into data, ultimately enhancing the customer, employee, and partner experience.

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AWS Security, Identity and Compliance Updates

AWS Security, Identity and Compliance Updates

Overview

AWS constantly innovates, launching new features and enhancements for security, identity, and compliance services. This post highlights the latest August 2023 updates to improve security, manage access, and ensure compliance.

IAM Policy Validator

In August 2023, AWS introduced the IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator). This tool automates policy validation, minimizing unwanted policies by checking syntax, compliance, and best practices before deploying with AWS CloudFormation. Integration with GitHub Actions allows policy validation as part of your CI/CD pipeline, preventing issues in production.

Machine Learning Insights

Another significant feature is generating machine learning insights for Amazon Security Lake data with Amazon SageMaker. Amazon Security Lake centralizes logs and events, and for deeper insights, Amazon SageMaker offers machine learning techniques. Analyze security data with native AWS services or use Amazon SageMaker Studio to build custom models for tasks like anomaly detection, threat hunting, and risk assessment.

Detective Finding Groups Visualizations

Detective now provides finding groups visualizations for analyzing and investigating security issues across AWS workloads. It collects log data from various services and applies machine learning to create interactive visualizations. Finding groups reduce alert fatigue by grouping similar findings, helping identify real risks. These visualizations display findings, their distribution over time, and associated resources.

Dedicated Infrastructure Options

AWS recognizes digital sovereignty’s importance and introduces two new options: Dedicated Regions powered by AWS Outposts and Dedicated Wavelength Zones powered by AWS Outposts. These options provide fully managed private cloud environments or edge computing environments with dedicated hardware, ensuring compliance and control over data and network.

AWS Security, Identity and Compliance: Conclusion

August 2023 updates offer tools to enhance security, manage access, and ensure compliance in the AWS security, identity, and compliance category. Learn more on the AWS Security Blog, AWS News Blog, or AWS re: Inforce 2023 event for insights from experts and customers.

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AWS Media Services: August 2023 Updates

AWS Media Services: August 2023 Updates

What’s New in AWS Media Services – August 2023

AWS Media Services is a family of cloud-based services designed for creating, processing, delivering, and monetizing video content. In this blog post, we’ll highlight the latest features and enhancements announced in August 2023.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Dolby Vision HDR Support

AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service, allows you to convert your media content into various formats for broadcast and multiscreen delivery. It now supports Dolby Vision, a high dynamic range (HDR) technology known for its stunning picture quality and immersive audio.

In August 2023, MediaConvert introduced support for Dolby Vision Profile 8.4, a single-layer HDR format compatible with HLS or DASH. This means you can create Dolby Vision content that works seamlessly on devices like Apple TV 4K, iPhone 12 and newer, iPad Pro and newer, and select smart TVs.

To use this feature, enable Dolby Vision in your MediaConvert job’s output settings. You’ll also need a Dolby Vision metadata file, which contains color grading and tone mapping information, generated using Dolby Vision Professional Tools or the Dolby Vision Content Mapping Tool.

AWS Elemental MediaLive: CMAF Low-Latency Streaming Support

AWS Elemental MediaLive, a live video processing service, enables high-quality video streams for broadcast and online delivery. Live streaming often faces challenges related to latency, affecting user experience and engagement. Traditionally, HLS and DASH protocols have had 30-second or longer latency.

In August 2023, MediaLive introduced support for CMAF low-latency streaming, a new standard that achieves sub-second latency. CMAF (Common Media Application Format) serves as a container format for both HLS and DASH, using chunked transfer encoding (CTE) to send small video data chunks immediately. This reduces buffering time and enables near-real-time playback.

To use this feature, enable CMAF output in your MediaLive channel configuration. Ensure your player supports CMAF low-latency streaming, like AWS Elemental MediaPackage or AWS Elemental MediaTailor.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage: Server-Side Ad Insertion Support

AWS Elemental MediaPackage, a video origination and just-in-time packaging service, securely delivers live or on-demand video content to any device. It now supports server-side ad insertion (SSAI), allowing seamless ad insertion without affecting playback quality or user experience.

In August 2023, MediaPackage added SSAI support for VOD content, enabling monetization with dynamic ads. You can insert ads from any ad decision server (ADS) supporting VAST or SCTE-35 standards. Customize ad break duration, frequency, and placement according to your business needs.

To use this feature, enable SSAI in your MediaPackage channel configuration and provide an ADS URL containing ad insertion information. You can use third-party ADS or AWS Elemental MediaTailor, a cloud-based service offering personalized ad insertion and measurement.

AWS Media Services: Conclusion

The August 2023 updates to AWS Media Services bring significant enhancements to video processing, quality, and monetization, ensuring a more immersive and seamless experience for both content creators and viewers.

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Amazon Machine Learning: August 2023 Updates

Amazon Machine Learning: Overview

Machine learning is a fast-growing field that enables computers to learn from data and make predictions. Amazon is a leader in machine learning, offering a range of services and tools for developers, researchers, and businesses. This blog post will highlight some of the new features and enhancements Amazon announced in August 2023 for its machine learning portfolio.

Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: A Free and Interactive Environment for Machine Learning Education and Exploration

Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a new service that provides a free and interactive environment for anyone who wants to learn and experiment with machine learning. Users can access pre-configured Jupyter notebooks, tutorials, datasets, and frameworks and use its features such as data processing, model training, debugging, deployment, and monitoring. Also, collaborate with others and share their work through GitHub integration. Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is ideal for students, educators, hobbyists, and anyone wanting to start with machine learning.

Amazon Comprehend Medical V2: A New Version of the Natural Language Processing Service for Healthcare and Life Sciences

Introducing Amazon Comprehend Medical V2, a fresh iteration of the natural language processing service designed to extract insights from unstructured medical text. Enhancements in this version include heightened accuracy, performance, and scalability. Additionally, it introduces novel features like entity linking, negation detection, temporal expression extraction, and medication dosage identification. Users have the flexibility to personalize the service using their medical ontologies and vocabularies. Amazon Comprehend Medical V2 helps healthcare and life sciences organizations analyze clinical notes, medical reports, and research papers.

Amazon Rekognition Video Enhancements: New Features for Video Analysis and Content Moderation

Experience the capabilities of Amazon Rekognition Video, a dynamic service that thoroughly analyzes videos to identify objects, faces, emotions, activities, scenes, and more. The latest enhancements unveiled in August 2023 introduce a multitude of valuable features:

  • Celebrity Recognition: Attain high-precision celebrity identification within videos, bolstered by enhanced confidence scores.
  • Text Extraction: Effortlessly detect and extract text elements from videos, encompassing signs, logos, captions, and subtitles.
  • Content Moderation Labels: Safeguard your content by effortlessly identifying and filtering out inappropriate or offensive video segments—encompassing nudity, violence, drugs, alcohol, and weapons.
  • Video Enhancement: Elevate the quality of videos afflicted by low resolution or noise through super-resolution and advanced denoising techniques.

Amazon Lex V3: A New Version of the Conversational AI Service for Building Chatbots

Amazon Lex V3 is a new version of the conversational AI service that allows users to build chatbots for various use cases, such as customer service, booking, ordering, and more. The new version offers improved performance, scalability, and flexibility, as well as new features such as, users can now:

  • Multi-language support: Build chatbots that support multiple languages and locales.
  • Multi-turn dialog management: Design complex conversational flows with branching logic and context management.
  • Custom slot types: Define their slot types with custom values and synonyms.
  • Speech synthesis markup language (SSML) support: Control the speech output of their chatbots with SSML tags.

Amazon Kendra Enhancements: New Features for the Intelligent Search Service

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service that uses natural language understanding and machine learning to deliver relevant and accurate answers from various sources of information. In August 2023, Amazon announced several new features and enhancements for the service, such as, users can now:

  • Document ranking: Customize the ranking of documents based on their relevance and importance.
  • Query auto-completion: Get suggestions for completing their queries as they type.
  • Expansion of Query: Generate more query results by expanding them with synonyms and related terms.
  • Faceted search: Filter their results by category and attribute.
  • Document highlighting: See the relevant portions of documents highlighted in the search results.

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Amazon Serverless Updates in August 2023

Amazon Serverless Updates in August 2023

Amazon Serverless Updates in August 2023

Serverless computing is a popular way to run applications without managing servers or provisioning resources. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers serverless services that let you build and run applications with high availability, scalability, and performance. This blog post will highlight some of the new features and enhancements AWS announced for its serverless portfolio in August 2023.

Amazon Serverless: Lambda Extensions

Amazon Lambda extensions are a new way to integrate your Lambda functions. They can work with other AWS services, third-party tools, or your own custom logic. These extensions run in the same execution environment as your function. They can perform monitoring, logging, security, or configuration management tasks. You can use Lambda extensions from AWS partners. Partners include Datadog, New Relic, or HashiCorp. Alternatively, you can build your own using the Lambda Extensions API. These are now generally available and support Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, and .NET Core runtimes.

Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs

API Gateway HTTP APIs are a fast and cost-effective way to create APIs for your serverless applications. HTTP APIs support OpenAPI specifications, JWT authorizations, CORS configurations, and custom domains. They are now integrated with AWS WAF, a web application firewall. AWS WAF helps protect your APIs from common web exploits. You can use AWS WAF to define rules that allow or block requests. Rules are based on criteria such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, or body content. Additionally, you can monitor and analyze your API traffic. This can be done using AWS WAF metrics and logs.

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry

EventBridge Schema Registry is a feature that aids in discovering, creating, and managing the schemas of events. EventBridge Schema Registry is a feature that helps you discover, create, and manage the schemas of the events that you consume or produce. Now, it supports schema evolution. This means you can update your schemas without breaking compatibility with existing consumers or producers. You can also make use of schema versioning. It helps track changes and the history of your schemas.

Amazon DynamoDB PartiQL

DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. DynamoDB PartiQL is a SQL-compatible query language. It allows you to access data in DynamoDB using familiar SQL syntax. Furthermore, it now supports transactions. This enables you to perform multiple read and write operations atomically and consistently across one or more tables. Transactions can also be used with DynamoDB Streams. These streams capture data changes in DynamoDB tables. They deliver them to other AWS services or applications.

Amazon Serverless: SQS FIFO Queues

SQS is a fully managed message queue service that enables you to decouple and scale your serverless applications. The new SQS FIFO queues are a type of queue. They are designed to preserve the order and uniqueness of messages. These queues now support content-based deduplication. This means you can send messages with different attributes but the same content without creating duplicates. In addition, you can use content-based deduplication with message groups. Message groups allow you to group related messages into ordered sub-queues within a FIFO queue.

Conclusion

AWS continues to innovate and improve its serverless offerings to help you build and run applications faster, easier, and more securely. In this blog post, we covered some of the new features and enhancements that AWS announced for its serverless services in August 2023. We hope you find them useful and exciting. To learn more about AWS serverless services, visit https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/.

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AWS IoT: New Features and Enhancements

AWS IoT: New Features and Enhancements

AWS IoT: What’s New in August 2023?

AWS IoT is a set of services that enable you to connect, manage, and secure your devices and applications on the cloud. This blog post will highlight some of the new features and enhancements AWS IoT introduced in August 2023.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN Now Supports Device Provisioning Through QR Codes

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN is a fully managed service that allows you to connect and manage your LoRaWAN devices on AWS. Now, you can provision your devices using QR codes. This simplifies device registration and reduces the risk of human error. Scan the QR code on your device using the AWS IoT Core for the LoRaWAN console or the Device Management mobile app. The service will automatically create a device certificate and assign a thing name and a LoRaWAN profile to your device.

AWS IoT Greengrass Adds Support for Python 3.9 and Node.js 14

AWS IoT Greengrass extends AWS to the edge. It allows you to run local compute, messaging, data management, sync, and ML inference capabilities on your devices. You can use Python 3.9 and Node.js 14 as the runtime for your Greengrass components. This provides access to the latest language features and security updates. Also, use the Greengrass Core SDKs for Python and Node.js to interact with the Greengrass core device and other components.

AWS IoT SiteWise Launches Asset Dashboards and Widgets

SiteWise is a managed service for collecting, storing, organizing, and monitoring data from industrial equipment at scale. With IoT SiteWise, you can now create asset dashboards and widgets. These tools let you visualize and analyze your asset data in real-time. Additionally, you have the option to share your dashboards with others or embed them in your applications. You can also share your dashboards with other users or embed them in your own applications.

Analytics Adds Support for Apache Parquet Format

AWS IoT Analytics enables you to process, enrich, store, analyze, and visualize IoT data at scale. Your processed data can now be stored in Apache Parquet format. This format offers high compression and performance benefits. You can query your Parquet data using standard SQL with IoT Analytics or other AWS services like Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, or Amazon EMR.

Device Defender Launches Audit Finding Suppressions

Device Defender continuously audits your IoT devices and policies for security best practices. It alerts you to any issues. Now, you can suppress audit findings that aren’t relevant or actionable for your use case. This reduces noise and lets you focus on critical issues. Additionally, you can specify the criteria for suppressing audit findings, such as the audit check name, the resource type, the resource identifier, or the finding severity. Also, view and manage your suppressed audit findings using the Device Defender console or API.

Conclusion

These are some of the new features and enhancements that AWS IoT introduced in August 2023. We hope you find them useful and we look forward to hearing your feedback. To learn more about IoT services and solutions, click here.

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Amazon EC2 Instance: What's New in August 2023

Amazon EC2 Instance: What’s New in August 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of EC2 instances to suit different use cases and workloads. This blog post will highlight some of the latest updates and features introduced in August 2023 for AWS EC2 instances.

Amazon Linux 2023 on Amazon EC2

Amazon Linux 2023 is a new version of Amazon Linux that provides improved performance, security, and compatibility with modern applications. The Linux 2023 is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon EC2, and it supports both x86_64 and arm64 architectures. You can launch an Amazon Linux 2023 instance using the Amazon EC2 console, the AWS CLI, or AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see Amazon Linux 2023 on Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 – Classic Networking is Retiring

EC2-Classic is the original network model for Amazon EC2 that was launched in 2006. It provides a flat network with public IP addresses assigned at launch time. However, it has limitations and does not support many of AWS’s newer features and capabilities. Therefore, AWS is retiring EC2-Classic networking and migrating all customers to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which offers more flexibility, security, and scalability for your EC2 instances. The retirement process will start on October 30, 2021, and will be completed by August 23, 2023. For more information, see EC2-Classic Networking is Retiring – Here’s How to Prepare.

M7i-flex Instances

M7i-flex instances are new general-purpose instances that offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general-purpose applications. These instances are based on the AWS Nitro System, which delivers high performance and security for your EC2 instances. M7i-flex instances also support enhanced networking with up to 25 Gbps of bandwidth and an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for low-latency, high-throughput communication between instances. M7i-flex instances are available in eight sizes, ranging from 1 to 32 vCPUs and 4 to 128 GiB of memory.

We hope these updates are helpful for your AWS EC2 instances. Stay tuned for more news and features from AWS in the future.

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