All news with #product update tag

🔁 Amazon EC2 now offers interruptible On‑Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs), allowing reservation owners to temporarily make unused reserved capacity available to other internal workloads while retaining the ability to reclaim it. Consumers using interruptible ODCRs receive an interruption notice to allow graceful shutdown or checkpointing. The capability targets flexible, fault‑tolerant tasks such as batch processing, data analysis, and machine learning training, is available at no additional cost, and CloudFormation support is coming soon.

🔍 Amazon OpenSearch Service now makes Piped Processing Language (PPL) and natural language the default experience in the OpenSearch UI Observability workspace. The release introduces 35+ new commands for deep analysis, faceted exploration, and natural-language querying, and integrates OpenTelemetry ingestion pipelines to simplify onboarding. Users can run enterprise-grade queries, correlate events, and move directly from query to visualization to reduce mean time to detect and resolve issues.

🎥 AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports HLS Interstitials for live streams, enabling broadcasters and streaming services to insert interstitial ads using the HLS Interstitials specification. MediaTailor generates necessary metadata tags (EXT-X-DATERANGE with X-ASSET-LIST) for compatible players such as HLS.js, Shaka, Bitmovin and Apple devices, removing the need for custom client stitching. The capability integrates with MediaTailor's server-side ad insertion for frame-accurate, buffer-free transitions and preserves server-side beaconing for measurement. It supports pre-roll and mid-roll, can be toggled per playback session via a manifest query parameter, and is available in all Regions where MediaTailor operates on a pay-as-you-go basis.

🧩 Amazon Connect flow modules now support custom inputs, outputs and branching logic, plus advanced versioning and alias management. You can define flexible parameters for reusable modules—for example, an authentication module that accepts a phone number and PIN and returns customer name and authentication status with branches like authenticated or not authenticated. Immutable version snapshots and alias mapping let teams update module implementations while flows referencing an alias automatically use the new version, simplifying maintenance and reuse.

🔁 AWS Lambda now offers enhanced error handling for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) and self-managed Kafka event sources, enabling developers to define custom retry configurations and route failed messages to a Kafka topic as an on-failure destination. The update extends Kafka event source mapping (ESM) in Provisioned mode to support retry limits, time-bound retry windows, automatic discards of exceeded records, and per-message failure reporting to optimize retries. Configure these settings via the ESM API, AWS Console, or AWS CLI.

🔁 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon MSK Replicator, allowing customers to replicate streaming data across Amazon MSK clusters in five more AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Thailand), Mexico (Central), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Canada West (Calgary), and Europe (Spain). MSK Replicator offers automatic asynchronous replication, auto-scales underlying resources on demand, and replicates Kafka metadata such as topic configurations, ACLs, and consumer group offsets. You can configure replication from the Amazon MSK console or the AWS CLI.

⚡ Microsoft is testing an optional background preload for File Explorer on Windows 11 to reduce launch times and improve responsiveness. When enabled, the app loads automatically with no visible UI change; users can disable it by unchecking "Enable window preloading for faster launch times" in File Explorer's Folder Options under the View tab. The feature is rolling out to Windows Insiders on 25H2 in the Dev and Beta channels with preview build 26220.7271 (KB5070307). Microsoft also reorganized File Explorer's context menu into grouped flyouts to reduce clutter and has requested feedback via the Feedback Hub.

🚀 Amazon EMR Serverless now supports Apache Spark 4.0.1 (preview), enabling teams to build data pipelines using standard ANSI SQL and native VARIANT types for semi-structured data. The release adds Apache Iceberg v3 table format to provide transactional guarantees and audit-ready change tracking. Improved streaming controls make it easier to manage stateful, real-time applications and monitor streaming jobs.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker now supports Amazon Athena for Apache Spark, combining a new notebook experience with a fast serverless Spark runtime in a single workspace. Data engineers, analysts, and data scientists can query data, run Python, develop jobs, train models, and visualize results with no infrastructure to manage and second-level billing. The service runs Spark 3.5.6, is optimized for Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, and adds debugging, real-time Spark UI monitoring, and secure Spark Connect communication. Table-level access controls are enforced through AWS Lake Formation.

📱 AWS Device Farm now provides a fully managed Appium endpoint that developers can connect to with just a few lines of code to run interactive tests on multiple real devices from their IDE or local machine. The capability integrates with third-party tools such as Appium Inspector (hosted and local) for element inspection and debugging. Live video and log streaming deliver faster feedback in local workflows while existing server-side execution remains available for scaled, secure enterprise runs.

🔁 EC2 Image Builder now supports automatic versioning for recipes and automatic build version increments for components, removing the need to manually manage version numbers. You can place an 'x' placeholder to auto-increment any position in a recipe version and use wildcard patterns to resolve to the highest compatible version in pipelines. The feature is available across all AWS regions, including China and GovCloud, and is accessible via Console, CLI, API, CloudFormation, and CDK.

🧪 Amazon Web Services has added natural-language test Q&A generation to Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. The capability generates up to N test Q&As from input documents to accelerate creating and validating formal verification policies. Automated Reasoning checks apply formal methods to detect correct model outputs and report up to 99% accuracy in identifying correct responses and reducing hallucinations. The feature is available in multiple US and EU Regions and accessible via the Bedrock console and Python SDK.

🔎 The new AI-powered investigative agent in AWS Security Incident Response automates evidence collection, correlation, and timeline building to speed incident investigations from hours to minutes. It interactively asks clarifying questions, queries CloudTrail, IAM, EC2, and cost data, and summarizes critical findings and timelines. The capability is available now across commercial AWS Regions and is included with the service’s metered pricing.

🔧 The AWS IoT Core rules-SQL now supports a SET clause to define and reuse variables across SQL statements, simplifying complex queries and ensuring consistent content when values are referenced multiple times. A new get_or_default() function returns fallback values when encountering data encoding or external dependency failures so rules continue executing. These capabilities reduce SQL complexity and improve reliability across regions.

📧 Amazon Connect Email now lets agents send follow-up replies to existing email contacts, enabling them to add information or continue assistance without opening a new thread. The feature preserves full conversation history so agents retain context and deliver consistent support. It is available in multiple AWS regions including US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, London), Canada (Central), several Asia Pacific locations, and Africa (Cape Town). Refer to documentation and pricing to get started.

📣 Second-generation AWS Outposts racks are now supported in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. Organizations in and outside Japan can order Outposts racks connected to this region to optimize latency and meet data residency requirements while running low-latency workloads on-premises. Outposts extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools into customer data centers or colocation spaces and connects back to a home Region for centralized management.

🔔 Amazon Web Services has raised the maximum storage limit for Aurora DSQL database clusters to 256 TiB, doubling the prior 128 TiB cap. This update enables customers to store and manage much larger datasets within a single cluster, simplifying data management for large-scale applications. Storage continues to auto-scale and customers pay only for used capacity; default clusters remain limited to 10 TiB and higher limits require a Service Quotas request.

🔔 Amazon Connect now enables monitoring of contacts queued for callback, allowing supervisors and integrations to search queued callbacks and view details such as customer phone numbers and queued duration in the Connect UI and via APIs. Teams can proactively route contacts nearing promised callback windows to available agents and clear customers who have already been served to avoid duplicative work. This capability is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🔐 AWS WAF now supports Web Bot Auth, providing cryptographic verification for automated agents and crawlers that access web applications. The capability uses signed HTTP messages and a public key directory defined by active IETF drafts to authenticate bot identities. AWS WAF will automatically allow verified WBA bots by default, refining previous behavior where the AI category blocked unverified bots. This change helps operators distinguish trusted automated traffic from potentially harmful automation.

🆕 Amazon EMR 7.12 now supports the Apache Iceberg v3 table format (Iceberg 1.10) and includes Apache Spark 3.5.6. This update reduces storage and pipeline costs by marking deleted rows instead of rewriting files, while adding automatic row-level history for stronger governance and change-data capture. It also introduces table-level encryption and integrates with AWS Lake Formation. Apache Trino 476 is included, and EMR 7.12 is available in all Regions that support EMR.