All news with #aws tag

🚀 AWS announced that Amazon EC2 M8g instances, powered by Graviton4 processors, are now available in Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), and the Middle East (Bahrain). The M8g family delivers up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3-based instances and offers larger sizes with up to 3× more vCPUs and memory. Built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances provide enhanced networking and EBS bandwidth for general-purpose workloads such as application servers, microservices, gaming servers, and caching fleets.

🔒 AWS Transfer Family SFTP connectors can now route connections through your Amazon VPC, enabling secure file transfers between Amazon S3 and remote SFTP servers whether privately or publicly hosted. Connectors can present VPC CIDR IP addresses for compatibility with IP allowlists and leverage NAT Gateway bandwidth for higher-throughput internet transfers. All traffic is routed through existing VPC networking and security controls, including Transit Gateway and centralized firewalls to help meet data security mandates.

📈 Amazon Connect now supports configurable thresholds for schedule adherence, enabling contact center managers to set allowable early and late windows for shift starts, shift ends, and individual activities. Administrators can apply defaults and customize thresholds at the team level—for example, allowing a 5-minute early start, a 10-minute late end, or a 3-minute late break—so minor timing differences don’t hurt adherence scores. This reduces false violations, helps managers focus on real adherence issues, and improves agent satisfaction and productivity.

🚀 Amazon MSK Connect is now available in ten additional AWS Regions — Jakarta, Hong Kong, Osaka, Melbourne, Milan, Zurich, Bahrain, UAE, Cape Town, and Tel Aviv. MSK Connect provides fully managed Kafka Connect clusters for deploying, monitoring, and scaling connectors to move data between Apache Kafka/Amazon MSK and external systems without provisioning infrastructure. The service supports both managed and self-managed Kafka clusters and is accessible via the MSK console and CLI.

🛡️Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports the latest General Distribution Release (GDR) and Cumulative Update packages for Microsoft SQL Server, including SQL Server 2016 SP3+GDR (KB5065226), 2017 CU31+GDR (KB5065225), 2019 CU32+GDR (KB5065222) and 2022 CU21 (KB5065865). These updates address multiple security vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2025-47997, CVE-2025-55227 and CVE-2024-21907. AWS recommends that customers upgrade their RDS SQL Server instances using the Amazon RDS Management Console, AWS SDKs or the AWS CLI and follow the RDS SQL Server upgrade guidance.

🔤 Amazon QuickSight now extends font customization to data labels and axes across supported charts, complementing existing controls for titles, subtitles, legends, and table headers. Authors can set font family, pixel size, color, and styling such as bold, italics, and underline for analyses, dashboards, reports, and embedded scenarios. The update improves branding alignment and readability on large displays and is available in all supported regions.

🔍 AWS Resource Explorer now provides immediate access to resource search within each AWS Region without requiring prior activation. To start searching you need, at minimum, permissions granted by the AWS Resource Explorer Read Only Access or AWS Read Only Access managed policies, and you can discover resources via the Resource Explorer console, Unified Search, or AWS CLI/SDKs. To index the full inventory, including historical backfill and automatic updates, complete Resource Explorer setup so it can create a service-linked role. You can also enable cross-Region search with a single console click or the new CreateResourceExplorerSetup API, and the feature is available at no additional cost in supported Regions.

📢 AWS is updating the availability status of a range of services and features across three lifecycle categories: moving to Maintenance, entering Sunset, and reaching End of Support. Services moving to maintenance will stop accepting new customers on Nov 7, 2025, while current customers can continue using them as they evaluate alternatives. Several services, including Amazon FinSpace, AWS IoT Greengrass v1, and AWS Proton, are entering sunset with documented timelines (typically ~12 months). AWS Mainframe Modernization App Testing has reached end of support as of Oct 7, 2025. AWS provides migration guides and support resources to help customers transition.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch is generally available with Generative AI Observability, providing end-to-end telemetry for AI applications and AgentCore-managed agents. It expands monitoring beyond model runtime to include Built-in Tools, Gateways, Memory, and Identity, surfacing latency, token usage, errors, and performance across components. The capability integrates with orchestration frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, and Strands Agents, and works with existing CloudWatch features and pricing for underlying telemetry.

🚀 Amazon ElastiCache now offers vector search generally available with Valkey 8.2, enabling indexing, searching, and updating billions of high-dimensional embeddings from providers such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Anthropic, and OpenAI with microsecond latency and up to 99% recall. Key use cases include semantic caching for LLMs, multi-turn conversational agents, and RAG-enabled agentic systems to reduce latency and cost. Vector search runs on node-based clusters in all AWS Regions at no additional cost, and existing Valkey or Redis OSS clusters can be upgraded to Valkey 8.2 with no downtime.

📣 AWS Config now supports three additional resource types—AWS::ApiGatewayV2::Integration, AWS::CloudTrail::EventDataStore, and AWS::Config::StoredQuery—providing broader visibility across AWS environments. If you have recording enabled for all resource types, AWS Config will automatically begin tracking these new types. They are available for use in Config rules and Config aggregators in all Regions where the resources exist. This expansion enhances your ability to discover, assess, audit, and remediate a wider range of resources.

🔒 AWS Client VPN now supports macOS Tahoe (26.0) with client version 5.3.1. You can run the AWS-supplied VPN client on the latest macOS releases; desktop clients are provided free and can be downloaded from the AWS Client VPN download page. AWS Client VPN is a managed service that securely connects remote workers to AWS and on-premises networks and already supports macOS 13–15, Windows 10/11 (x64 and Arm64), and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04. This update helps organizations maintain secure remote access as endpoints upgrade to the latest macOS.

⚡ Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports Graviton4-based R8g DB instances in AWS Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). R8g offers larger sizes up to 48xlarge with an 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio and DDR5 memory, including new 24xlarge and 48xlarge options delivering up to 192 vCPUs, up to 50 Gbps networking, and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth. AWS reports up to 40% performance and up to 29% price/performance improvements over Graviton3 equivalents, varying by engine, version, and workload. You can launch or upgrade instances through the Amazon RDS console or AWS CLI with a simple instance type modification.

🚀 Amazon has made Neptune Analytics available in the AWS Canada (Central) and Australia (Sydney) Regions, enabling local creation and management of analytics graphs. Neptune Analytics is a memory‑optimized graph engine that supports fast, in‑memory processing, a library of optimized analytic algorithms, low‑latency graph queries, and vector similarity search within traversals. You can ingest data from an Amazon Neptune Database, snapshots, or Amazon S3, and start via the AWS Console or CLI; consult the Neptune pricing page and AWS Region Table for costs and availability.

🔔 Amazon EBS io2 Block Express is now available in AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. The service delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability with single-volume limits of 256,000 IOPS, 4 GiB/s throughput, and up to 64 TiB capacity. Volumes support multi-attach within an Availability Zone with NVMe reservations for shared storage fencing. Existing io1 users can nondisruptively upgrade via the ModifyVolume API to gain higher performance, durability, and improved cost-efficiency.

🤖 Amazon Quick Suite is now generally available as an agentic, AI-powered workspace that retrieves insights across the public internet and your enterprise data stores — including Slack, Salesforce, Snowflake, databases, and other documents — and moves instantly from answers to actions. Quick Suite can execute or trigger tasks in popular applications like Salesforce, Jira, and ServiceNow, and automate workflows from RFP responses to invoice processing and account reconciliation. AWS highlights customer privacy — queries and data are not used to train models — and administrators can enable and tailor the experience quickly; new customers receive a 30-day trial for up to 25 users.

🔒 AWS expanded 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps dedicated Direct Connect links with MACsec encryption at the Netrality KC1 facility near Kansas City, MO. Customers at this location can now establish private, direct network access to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. Direct Connect delivers a private, physical connection that can provide more consistent performance and lower latency than the public internet. AWS also notes there are over 146 Direct Connect locations worldwide.

🖥️ Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances in the AWS Europe (Spain) region, powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs. Compared with prior I4i instances, I7i delivers up to 23% better compute performance, improved price performance, and up to 45 TB of NVMe storage with notable reductions in storage I/O latency and variability. Offered in eleven sizes (including bare-metal), I7i targets I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads requiring very high random IOPS and real-time access to multi-TB datasets.

🌐 Amazon DynamoDB now allows customers to use IPv6 addresses within their Amazon VPC to access tables, streams, and DAX, including via PrivateLink Gateway and Interface endpoints. The feature simplifies network stacks, helps avoid overlapping address spaces, and supports compliance with IPv6-ready policies. It is available today across US commercial and GovCloud Regions and will roll out to remaining global Regions over the coming weeks. See the DynamoDB and DAX guides to check regional availability and connection steps.

🔒 Kantsu, a midsize Japanese logistics firm, was hit by ransomware on Sept. 12, 2024 that encrypted servers, cut communications, and halted shipping operations for hundreds of clients. The company refused to pay a ransom, shut down networks, replaced PCs, and rebuilt its cloud WMS Cloud Thomas on AWS while using analog processes to maintain critical shipments. Executives prioritized speed, cash availability, and employee welfare during an expensive recovery process that exposed gaps in cyber insurance.