All news with #aws tag

⚙️ AWS now supports the latest x86 Amazon EC2 instance families — C8i, M8i, and R8i — on second-generation AWS Outposts racks. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and offer about 20% better performance, 2.5× more memory bandwidth, and 20% more compute capacity versus the prior C7i, M7i, and R7i models within the same rack footprint. They are aimed at on-premises workloads such as larger databases, memory-intensive applications, real-time analytics, high-performance video encoding, and CPU-based edge ML inference.

🔐 Amazon announced that Amazon S3 Access Grants are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. Access Grants map corporate identities in directories such as Microsoft Entra ID or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to S3 datasets, enabling scalable, identity-based data access. The feature automates S3 permission assignment for end users and simplifies data governance for enterprises operating in Taipei. Refer to the AWS Region Table and product documentation for regional availability and deployment guidance.

🔐 AWS has added Amazon DynamoDB to the set of services supported by Resource Control Policies (RCPs), enabling organizations to centrally constrain the maximum permissions available to resources. Administrators can now use RCPs to block identities outside their AWS Organization from accessing DynamoDB, helping enforce a data perimeter and baseline security standards. RCPs are available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

🌐 AI troubleshooting in the AWS Support Center is now available in seven additional languages beyond English: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional), Spanish, Portuguese, and French. The capability provides immediate, contextual recommendations while customers create support cases, helping to diagnose and remediate issues faster. It is integrated into the support experience and available to all customers regardless of support plan; users can enable it via console language settings and the "Try it now" banner.

🚀Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 X8i instances, next-generation memory-optimized VMs powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. X8i delivers up to 43% higher performance, up to 1.5x more memory capacity (to 6 TB) and 3.3x greater memory bandwidth versus the prior X2i generation, targeting SAP HANA, large databases, analytics and EDA. The family includes 14 sizes, two bare-metal options, and is available in select US and EU regions; purchase options include On-Demand, Savings Plans and Spot.

🔒 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports minor versions 18.2, 17.8, 16.12, 15.16, and 14.21. We recommend upgrading to these latest minor versions to remediate known security vulnerabilities and benefit from upstream bug fixes. The release also includes the pg_stat_monitor extension for unified query and performance metrics. Upgrades can be automated via scheduled maintenance, AWS Organizations rollout policies, or Blue/Green deployments to minimize downtime.

⚡AWS announced general availability of new Amazon EC2 M8azn instances, powered by fifth-generation AMD EPYC (Turin) processors delivering up to 5 GHz maximum CPU frequency. M8azn offers up to 2x compute versus M5zn and up to 24% higher performance than M8a, with increased memory bandwidth, a larger L3 cache, and higher networking and EBS throughput. Available in nine sizes (2–96 vCPU) including two bare-metal options, these Nitro-based instances target latency-sensitive workloads such as HFT, real-time analytics, HPC, gaming, and simulation. Regions at launch include N. Virginia, Oregon, Tokyo, and Frankfurt, and they are available via Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports single-action cross-Region copies of database snapshots directly into logically air-gapped vaults for Amazon Aurora, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon DocumentDB. This removes the previous two-step process and eliminates intermediate copy storage and related costs, enabling faster recovery point objectives (RPOs) while reducing operational complexity. The capability is available today in all Regions where AWS Backup supports these databases and air-gapped vaults and can be used via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs.

📣 Amazon Web Services announced support for partition and sort order definitions in the Amazon S3 Tables CreateTable API, allowing these properties to be set programmatically at table creation. Developers can specify partition transforms and sort order fields directly in CreateTable calls, and the same options are supported in the AWS CLI and AWS SDKs. To use the feature, upgrade to the latest AWS CLI and SDK versions. This support is available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are offered.

🔄 Amazon Relational Database Service now supports the latest Cumulative Update, CU23 (KB5078297), for SQL Server 2022 on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. We recommend that customers upgrade affected RDS instances to apply this update to obtain fixes and improvements. You can perform the upgrade through the Amazon RDS Management Console or programmatically using the AWS SDK or CLI, and consult the Amazon RDS SQL Server User Guide for detailed upgrade instructions.

🔐 Amazon Connect dashboards now offer granular access controls for analytics dashboards, enabling administrators to use resource tags to govern who can view metrics for specific resources such as agents, queues, and routing profiles. You can filter metrics by tags to view aggregates for agents or queues that share the same tags. For example, tagging agents with Department:Customer Service lets managers restrict visibility to that team. Dashboards are available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions.

🔐 Researchers at Flare Systems uncovered a botnet, dubbed SSHStalker, that brute-forces weak SSH passwords and had compromised an estimated 7,000 Linux servers by the end of January, with roughly half located in the United States. The toolkit combines fileless malware, rootkits, log cleaners and a library of kernel exploits — some dating to 2009 — and can harvest AWS credentials. Flare characterizes it as a "scale-first" operation focused on persistence; observed capabilities include DDoS and cryptomining, though monetization has not yet been seen. Immediate mitigations include disabling SSH password authentication, switching to key-based or short-lived credentials, and restricting and rate-limiting SSH access.

🔐 AWS Payment Cryptography is now approved by France’s national card network, Cartes Bancaires (CB), making it one of the first cloud-based payment cryptography services to receive this endorsement. The approval complements existing compliance credentials such as PCI DSS, PCI PIN, and ISO 27001, enabling customers to run compliant payment workloads in AWS without managing HSM hardware. The service is available in multiple AWS Regions and can be accessed via the latest AWS CLI/SDK.

⏱️ Amazon Connect now lets administrators configure After Contact Work (ACW) timeouts per channel for chats, tasks, emails, and callbacks. When an agent's ACW timer expires they are automatically returned to a ready state, enforcing time-boxed post-interaction work. Channel-level settings allow tailored behaviors — for example, shorter ACW for emails and longer for voice — to optimize agent time. This feature is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect operates.

🔔 Amazon Connect now supports configurable auto-accept for chat, tasks, email, and callback channels, expanding a capability that was previously limited to inbound voice. When enabled, incoming contacts are automatically connected to available agents, reducing manual accept/reject actions and improving response times. Administrators can set auto-accept at the agent and channel level to balance efficiency and agent readiness, for example enabling it for tasks while keeping voice manual.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has added single-Region Amazon Aurora DSQL clusters in Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), and Canada West (Calgary). Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database that provides virtually unlimited scalability, high availability, and zero infrastructure management. The service emphasizes the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes to support always-available applications. Aurora DSQL is available in multiple other Regions and can be explored under the AWS Free Tier via the product documentation.

🔍 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now provides broker logs for Express brokers at no additional cost. Broker logs help operators troubleshoot client connectivity and availability issues and reveal broker behavior during rebalances and fail‑overs. You can deliver operational telemetry to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3, and enable them via the MSK Console or AWS CLI for new and existing Express brokers. Logs are supported in all regions where Express brokers are available.

📦 AWS announced that AWS Data Transfer Terminal is now available in six additional locations: Seattle and Phoenix (US), London (UK), Paris (France), Sydney (Australia), and Tokyo (Japan), expanding its footprint beyond San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Munich. These secure physical facilities let customers upload large datasets directly to Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and other AWS services over high-throughput connections, accelerating ingestion and enabling immediate analytics and ML processing for media, automotive, financial, and industrial workloads.

🚀 AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers an official GitHub Action that automates deployments when you push code or configuration changes, simplifying CI/CD for web applications. The action creates applications and environments as needed, packages and uploads artifacts to S3, and manages application versions and environment settings. It supports health checks, deployment validation, configurable exclusions for package contents, intelligent retry logic, and integrates with IAM via OpenID Connect for secure, token-based authentication. The action is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Elastic Beanstalk is offered.

⚙️ AWS Lake Formation now supports enhanced cross-account sharing, enabling centralized permission management for catalogs, databases, tables, and columns across multi-account analytics environments. The update removes prior per-resource association limits by using a single AWS Resource Access Manager resource share with wildcard patterns; administrators should upgrade to cross-account version 5 to adopt the new behavior. Existing shares and Lake Formation APIs remain compatible.