Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports the ability to redirect audio from Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments to a customer service agent’s local device. Audio redirection improves voice quality and reduces latency for voice calls handled on virtual desktops, providing a better experience for both end customers and agents.

For region availability, please see the availability of Amazon Connect features by Region. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon Connect agent workspace webpage or see the help documentation.

 

​Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports the ability to redirect audio from Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments to a customer service agent’s local device. Audio redirection improves voice quality and reduces latency for voice calls handled on virtual desktops, providing a better experience for both end customers and agents. For region availability, please see the availability of Amazon Connect features by Region. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon Connect agent workspace webpage or see the help documentation.  

Today, we are announcing the availability of AWS Backup in the Mexico (Central) Region. AWS Backup is a fully-managed, policy-driven service that allows you to centrally automate data protection across multiple AWS services spanning compute, storage, and databases. Using AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage backups of your application data, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions with immutable recovery points and vaults, and restore your data in the event of a data loss incident.

You can get started with AWS Backup using the AWS Backup console, SDKs, or CLI by creating a data protection policy and then assigning AWS resources to it using tags or Resource IDs. For more information on the features available in the Mexico (Central) Region, visit the AWS Backup product page and documentation. To learn about the Regional availability of AWS Backup, see the AWS Regional Services List.

 

​Today, we are announcing the availability of AWS Backup in the Mexico (Central) Region. AWS Backup is a fully-managed, policy-driven service that allows you to centrally automate data protection across multiple AWS services spanning compute, storage, and databases. Using AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage backups of your application data, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions with immutable recovery points and vaults, and restore your data in the event of a data loss incident. You can get started with AWS Backup using the AWS Backup console, SDKs, or CLI by creating a data protection policy and then assigning AWS resources to it using tags or Resource IDs. For more information on the features available in the Mexico (Central) Region, visit the AWS Backup product page and documentation. To learn about the Regional availability of AWS Backup, see the AWS Regional Services List.  

Today, Amazon Redshift announced the launch of three new SQL features for zero-ETL integrations: QUERY_ALL_STATES, TRUNCATECOLUMNS, and ACCEPTINVCHARS. Zero-ETL integrations enable you to break down data silos in your organization and run timely analytics and machine learning (ML) on the data from your databases. With the launch of these new features, Amazon Redshift further enhances the functionality and reliability of zero-ETL integrations, allowing customers to work more efficiently with their data while maintaining data integrity.

The new SQL features provide significant benefits and further enhance the experience of using zero-ETL integrations. QUERY_ALL_STATES allows you to query tables in all states, including during updates, ensuring continuous data availability. TRUNCATECOLUMNS automatically truncates VARCHAR data that exceeds Amazon Redshift’s length limit, preventing replication errors and ensuring smoother data ingestion. ACCEPTINVCHARS enables you to replace invalid UTF-8 characters with a specified character of your choice, which is particularly useful when dealing with data from various sources that may contain non-standard characters. You can modify the existing integrations or create new ones using these features.

To learn more and get started with zero-ETL integration, visit the getting started guides for Amazon Redshift. To learn more about these features, see the documentation.
 

 

​Today, Amazon Redshift announced the launch of three new SQL features for zero-ETL integrations: QUERY_ALL_STATES, TRUNCATECOLUMNS, and ACCEPTINVCHARS. Zero-ETL integrations enable you to break down data silos in your organization and run timely analytics and machine learning (ML) on the data from your databases. With the launch of these new features, Amazon Redshift further enhances the functionality and reliability of zero-ETL integrations, allowing customers to work more efficiently with their data while maintaining data integrity. The new SQL features provide significant benefits and further enhance the experience of using zero-ETL integrations. QUERY_ALL_STATES allows you to query tables in all states, including during updates, ensuring continuous data availability. TRUNCATECOLUMNS automatically truncates VARCHAR data that exceeds Amazon Redshift’s length limit, preventing replication errors and ensuring smoother data ingestion. ACCEPTINVCHARS enables you to replace invalid UTF-8 characters with a specified character of your choice, which is particularly useful when dealing with data from various sources that may contain non-standard characters. You can modify the existing integrations or create new ones using these features. To learn more and get started with zero-ETL integration, visit the getting started guides for Amazon Redshift. To learn more about these features, see the documentation.    

Amazon EventBridge Event Bus now allows you to deliver events directly to AWS services in another account. This feature enables you to use multiple accounts to improve security and streamline business processes while reducing the overall cost and complexity of your architecture.

Amazon EventBridge Event Bus is a serverless event broker that enables you to create scalable event-driven applications by routing events between your own applications, third-party SaaS applications, and other AWS services. This launch allows you to directly target services in another account, without the need for additional infrastructure such as an intermediary EventBridge Event Bus or Lambda function, simplifying your architecture and reducing cost. For example, you can now route events from your EventBridge Event Bus directly to a different team’s SQS queue in a different account. The team receiving events does not need to learn about or maintain EventBridge resources and simply needs to grant IAM permissions to provide access to the queue. Events can be delivered cross-account to EventBridge targets that support resource-based IAM policies such as Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon SNS, and Amazon API Gateway.

Direct delivery to cross-account targets is now available in all commercial AWS Regions. To learn more, please read our blog post or visit our documentation. Pricing information is available on the EventBridge pricing page.

 

​Amazon EventBridge Event Bus now allows you to deliver events directly to AWS services in another account. This feature enables you to use multiple accounts to improve security and streamline business processes while reducing the overall cost and complexity of your architecture. Amazon EventBridge Event Bus is a serverless event broker that enables you to create scalable event-driven applications by routing events between your own applications, third-party SaaS applications, and other AWS services. This launch allows you to directly target services in another account, without the need for additional infrastructure such as an intermediary EventBridge Event Bus or Lambda function, simplifying your architecture and reducing cost. For example, you can now route events from your EventBridge Event Bus directly to a different team’s SQS queue in a different account. The team receiving events does not need to learn about or maintain EventBridge resources and simply needs to grant IAM permissions to provide access to the queue. Events can be delivered cross-account to EventBridge targets that support resource-based IAM policies such as Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon SNS, and Amazon API Gateway. Direct delivery to cross-account targets is now available in all commercial AWS Regions. To learn more, please read our blog post or visit our documentation. Pricing information is available on the EventBridge pricing page.  

AWS Graviton3-based R7g database instances as well as R7i database instances are now available for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region. AWS Graviton3 instances provide up to 30% performance improvement and up to 20% price/performance improvement over Graviton2 instances for Amazon Aurora, depending on the database engine version and workload. R7i instances offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge and features an 8:1 ratio of memory to vCPU, and the latest DDR5 memory.

You can spin up an R7g or R7i database instances in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Upgrading a database instance to either option requires a simple instance type modification. For more details, refer to the Aurora documentation.

Amazon Aurora is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services. To get started with Amazon Aurora, take a look at our getting started page.

 

​AWS Graviton3-based R7g database instances as well as R7i database instances are now available for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region. AWS Graviton3 instances provide up to 30% performance improvement and up to 20% price/performance improvement over Graviton2 instances for Amazon Aurora, depending on the database engine version and workload. R7i instances offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge and features an 8:1 ratio of memory to vCPU, and the latest DDR5 memory. You can spin up an R7g or R7i database instances in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Upgrading a database instance to either option requires a simple instance type modification. For more details, refer to the Aurora documentation. Amazon Aurora is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services. To get started with Amazon Aurora, take a look at our getting started page.  

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now offers Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) with the License-Included (LI) purchase option in additional AWS Regions for R6i instance class. RDS for Oracle R6i LI instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) and Canada West (Calgary).

In the LI service model, you don’t need to separately purchase Oracle licenses. Amazon RDS for Oracle LI pricing includes the software license, the underlying hardware resources, and all database management capabilities. Simply launch an Oracle SE2 instance in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI and specify the License-Included option. Configuration details for available instance types can be found on the Amazon RDS for Oracle Instance Types page.

Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to set up, operate, and scale Oracle database deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for Oracle Pricing for up-to-date pricing and regional availability.
 

 

​Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now offers Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) with the License-Included (LI) purchase option in additional AWS Regions for R6i instance class. RDS for Oracle R6i LI instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) and Canada West (Calgary). In the LI service model, you don’t need to separately purchase Oracle licenses. Amazon RDS for Oracle LI pricing includes the software license, the underlying hardware resources, and all database management capabilities. Simply launch an Oracle SE2 instance in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI and specify the License-Included option. Configuration details for available instance types can be found on the Amazon RDS for Oracle Instance Types page. Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to set up, operate, and scale Oracle database deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for Oracle Pricing for up-to-date pricing and regional availability.    

Today, we are announcing the support of the open-source GraphRAG Toolkit, a new capability that enhances Generative AI applications by providing more comprehensive, relevant and explainable responses using RAG techniques combined with graph data. The toolkit provides an open-source framework for automating the construction of a graph from unstructured data, and composing question-answering strategies that query this graph when answering user questions.

Previously, customers faced challenges in conducting exhaustive, multi-step searches across disparate content. By identifying key entities across documents, GraphRAG delivers insights that leverage relationships within the data, enabling improved responses to end users. For example, financial analysts can ask a financial analysis chatbot for the sales forecast of a manufacturing company. Developers building Generative AI applications can enable GraphRAG via this new open-source Python toolkit by specifying their data sources and choosing Amazon Neptune Database or Neptune Analytics as their graph store and Amazon OpenSearch serverless as the vector store. This will automatically generate and store vector embeddings in the selected vector store, along with a graph representation of entities and their relationships in the selected graph store.

The GraphRAG Toolkit is an open source project. Its code base is open for inspection, modification, and extension, and is therefore highly adaptable for specific or niche requirements. With its initial release, the toolkit provides graph store implementations for both Neptune Analytics and Neptune Database, and vector store implementations for Neptune Analytics and OpenSearch Serverless, and it uses FMs hosted in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, visit the User Guide.
 

 

​Today, we are announcing the support of the open-source GraphRAG Toolkit, a new capability that enhances Generative AI applications by providing more comprehensive, relevant and explainable responses using RAG techniques combined with graph data. The toolkit provides an open-source framework for automating the construction of a graph from unstructured data, and composing question-answering strategies that query this graph when answering user questions. Previously, customers faced challenges in conducting exhaustive, multi-step searches across disparate content. By identifying key entities across documents, GraphRAG delivers insights that leverage relationships within the data, enabling improved responses to end users. For example, financial analysts can ask a financial analysis chatbot for the sales forecast of a manufacturing company. Developers building Generative AI applications can enable GraphRAG via this new open-source Python toolkit by specifying their data sources and choosing Amazon Neptune Database or Neptune Analytics as their graph store and Amazon OpenSearch serverless as the vector store. This will automatically generate and store vector embeddings in the selected vector store, along with a graph representation of entities and their relationships in the selected graph store. The GraphRAG Toolkit is an open source project. Its code base is open for inspection, modification, and extension, and is therefore highly adaptable for specific or niche requirements. With its initial release, the toolkit provides graph store implementations for both Neptune Analytics and Neptune Database, and vector store implementations for Neptune Analytics and OpenSearch Serverless, and it uses FMs hosted in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, visit the User Guide.    

Amazon SNS now supports high-throughput mode for SNS FIFO topics, with default throughput matching SNS standard topics across all regions. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the de-duplication scope to the message-group level. With this change, you can leverage up to 30K messages per second (MPS) per account by default in US East (N. Virginia) Region, and 9K MPS per account in US West (Oregon) Region and Europe (Ireland) Region, and request quota increases for additional throughput in any region.

Amazon SNS FIFO topics provides message ordering, message grouping, and de-duplication when delivering to Amazon SQS queues. By default, SNS FIFO topics provide 300 MPS per message group ID, and 3K MPS per topic, and topic level de-duplication. To get higher throughput, you can distribute your messages across message groups, and enable high-throughput mode by setting the FifoThroughputScope topic attribute to MessageGroup.

We now have increased default limits for SNS FIFO topics across all commercial and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

To get started, see the following resources:

• High Throughput FIFO topics, in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide
• Service Quotas for Amazon SNS, in the AWS General Reference.

 

​Amazon SNS now supports high-throughput mode for SNS FIFO topics, with default throughput matching SNS standard topics across all regions. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the de-duplication scope to the message-group level. With this change, you can leverage up to 30K messages per second (MPS) per account by default in US East (N. Virginia) Region, and 9K MPS per account in US West (Oregon) Region and Europe (Ireland) Region, and request quota increases for additional throughput in any region. Amazon SNS FIFO topics provides message ordering, message grouping, and de-duplication when delivering to Amazon SQS queues. By default, SNS FIFO topics provide 300 MPS per message group ID, and 3K MPS per topic, and topic level de-duplication. To get higher throughput, you can distribute your messages across message groups, and enable high-throughput mode by setting the FifoThroughputScope topic attribute to MessageGroup. We now have increased default limits for SNS FIFO topics across all commercial and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, see the following resources:

High Throughput FIFO topics, in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide
Service Quotas for Amazon SNS, in the AWS General Reference.  

You can now split your tests and run them across multiple, parallel-running compute environments. Based on your sharding strategy, CodeBuild will divide your tests and run them across the specified number of parallel environments. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages.

As the number of tests in a project grows, the total testing time also increases when using a single compute resource. Running tests in parallel across multiple compute resources reduces the overall testing duration in your CI/CD pipeline. This leads to faster feedback cycles and improved developer productivity.

The parallel testing feature is available in all regions where CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page.

To learn more about CodeBuild’s test splitting, please visit our documentation. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page.

 

​You can now split your tests and run them across multiple, parallel-running compute environments. Based on your sharding strategy, CodeBuild will divide your tests and run them across the specified number of parallel environments. AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy software packages. As the number of tests in a project grows, the total testing time also increases when using a single compute resource. Running tests in parallel across multiple compute resources reduces the overall testing duration in your CI/CD pipeline. This leads to faster feedback cycles and improved developer productivity. The parallel testing feature is available in all regions where CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page. To learn more about CodeBuild’s test splitting, please visit our documentation. To learn more about how to get started with CodeBuild, visit the AWS CodeBuild product page.  

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Connect screen recording is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), expanding its reach to government and public sector customers. This feature, which enables customers to record their agent screens during customer interactions for quality assurance purposes, was previously available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is live. With this launch, we’re bringing the same powerful capabilities to our AWS GovCloud (US) customers.

Amazon Connect screen recording is a valuable tool for contact centers looking to enhance their quality assurance processes. By capturing agent desktop activities during customer interactions, supervisors and quality assurance teams can gain deeper insights into agent performance, adherence to procedures, and opportunities for improvement. This feature helps organizations maintain high standards of customer service, ensure compliance with regulations, and identify areas for agent training and development.

To get started with Amazon Connect screen recording in AWS GovCloud (US-West) or any supported region, visit the Amazon Connect console or refer to our documentation. For more information about Amazon Connect and its features, please visit the Amazon Connect product page.
 

 

​Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Connect screen recording is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), expanding its reach to government and public sector customers. This feature, which enables customers to record their agent screens during customer interactions for quality assurance purposes, was previously available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is live. With this launch, we’re bringing the same powerful capabilities to our AWS GovCloud (US) customers. Amazon Connect screen recording is a valuable tool for contact centers looking to enhance their quality assurance processes. By capturing agent desktop activities during customer interactions, supervisors and quality assurance teams can gain deeper insights into agent performance, adherence to procedures, and opportunities for improvement. This feature helps organizations maintain high standards of customer service, ensure compliance with regulations, and identify areas for agent training and development. To get started with Amazon Connect screen recording in AWS GovCloud (US-West) or any supported region, visit the Amazon Connect console or refer to our documentation. For more information about Amazon Connect and its features, please visit the Amazon Connect product page.