Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to 3x faster query performance through continual table optimization compared to unmanaged Iceberg tables, and up to 10x higher transactions per second compared to Iceberg tables stored in general purpose S3 buckets.

S3 Tables integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog is in preview, allowing you to stream, query, and visualize data using AWS Analytics services such as Amazon Data Firehose, Athena, Redshift, EMR, and QuickSight. Additionally, S3 Tables perform continual table maintenance to automatically expire old snapshots and related data files to reduce storage cost over time.

S3 Tables are now generally available in eight AWS Regions. For pricing details, visit the S3 pricing page. To learn more, visit the product page, documentation, and AWS News Blog.

 

​Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to 3x faster query performance through continual table optimization compared to unmanaged Iceberg tables, and up to 10x higher transactions per second compared to Iceberg tables stored in general purpose S3 buckets. S3 Tables integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog is in preview, allowing you to stream, query, and visualize data using AWS Analytics services such as Amazon Data Firehose, Athena, Redshift, EMR, and QuickSight. Additionally, S3 Tables perform continual table maintenance to automatically expire old snapshots and related data files to reduce storage cost over time. S3 Tables are now generally available in eight AWS Regions. For pricing details, visit the S3 pricing page. To learn more, visit the product page, documentation, and AWS News Blog.  

Amazon Redshift extends support for Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System, H3 for short, by adding two new H3 functions to Amazon Redshift’s previously announced H3 Indexing support in February 2024. H3 Indexing increases the performance of spatial queries at scale since the location information is pre-indexed. See this Amazon Big Data Blog on Amazon Redshift H3 Indexing for more information on the benefits and use-cases of H3 Indexing.

H3_Center returns the centroid of an H3 cell ID from an input index, which can be used to compute the geometric center of an arbitrary area that can be represented by H3 indexed cells, for example by finding the H3 cell with the smallest average distance to all other cells in the set representing the arbitrary area. While, H3_Boundary returns the boundary of an H3 cell ID from an input index.

With this announcement, Amazon Redshift now supports two new H3 Indexing related spatial functions: H3_Center, H3_Boundary, which are now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Redshift is available.

For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift spatial analytics, see the documentation and the tutorial.

 

​Amazon Redshift extends support for Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System, H3 for short, by adding two new H3 functions to Amazon Redshift’s previously announced H3 Indexing support in February 2024. H3 Indexing increases the performance of spatial queries at scale since the location information is pre-indexed. See this Amazon Big Data Blog on Amazon Redshift H3 Indexing for more information on the benefits and use-cases of H3 Indexing. H3_Center returns the centroid of an H3 cell ID from an input index, which can be used to compute the geometric center of an arbitrary area that can be represented by H3 indexed cells, for example by finding the H3 cell with the smallest average distance to all other cells in the set representing the arbitrary area. While, H3_Boundary returns the boundary of an H3 cell ID from an input index. With this announcement, Amazon Redshift now supports two new H3 Indexing related spatial functions: H3_Center, H3_Boundary, which are now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Redshift is available. For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift spatial analytics, see the documentation and the tutorial.  

AWS User Notifications is now supported on AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to easily provision and manage User Notification resources as part of your application’s infrastructure-as-code (IaC). You can easily use User Notification to Configure Notifications to be sent via the Console Notifications Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App to keep you informed about important events like Amazon CloudWatch Alarms.

With this new capability, you can define Notification Configurations as part of your IaC practices. Specify notification configurations for specific resource types within your CloudFormation templates. For example, set up notifications to trigger when an Auto Scaling group scales out, an ELB is provisioned, or an RDS database is modified. You have granular control over which events will trigger notifications and who should receive them.

This integration simplifies cloud operations by consolidating monitoring configuration right alongside your IaC templates. No more context switching between services – your notifications are defined declaratively within your infrastructure code.

Setting up stack notifications is easy – just add the Notifications or NotificationContacts resource type (e.g., AWS::Notifications::NotificationConfiguration) in your CloudFormation template to configure the desired events and channels. For more information, visit the Notifications and NotificationsContacts resource type reference. To learn more about User Notifications, visit the product page and documentation.
 

 

​AWS User Notifications is now supported on AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to easily provision and manage User Notification resources as part of your application’s infrastructure-as-code (IaC). You can easily use User Notification to Configure Notifications to be sent via the Console Notifications Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App to keep you informed about important events like Amazon CloudWatch Alarms. With this new capability, you can define Notification Configurations as part of your IaC practices. Specify notification configurations for specific resource types within your CloudFormation templates. For example, set up notifications to trigger when an Auto Scaling group scales out, an ELB is provisioned, or an RDS database is modified. You have granular control over which events will trigger notifications and who should receive them. This integration simplifies cloud operations by consolidating monitoring configuration right alongside your IaC templates. No more context switching between services – your notifications are defined declaratively within your infrastructure code. Setting up stack notifications is easy – just add the Notifications or NotificationContacts resource type (e.g., AWS::Notifications::NotificationConfiguration) in your CloudFormation template to configure the desired events and channels. For more information, visit the Notifications and NotificationsContacts resource type reference. To learn more about User Notifications, visit the product page and documentation.    

Amazon Connect outbound campaigns can now be configured to connect a customer who has picked up a campaign call to an available agent in under two seconds while also supporting automatic call classification. This enhancement helps organizations support regulatory compliance with telemarketing laws such as the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), while increasing customer engagement and agent productivity. Call classification automatically categorizes the outcome of a call using machine learning (ML), rather than requiring agent input, helping improve agent productivity and drive efficient customer engagement. To optimize outbound call performance, customers are encouraged to follow Amazon Connect’s best practices to reduce connection latency.

With Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, companies only pay-as-they-go for outbound campaigns processing and for associated channels usage. Amazon Connect outbound campaigns is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (London) AWS regions. To learn more, visit our webpage.

 

​Amazon Connect outbound campaigns can now be configured to connect a customer who has picked up a campaign call to an available agent in under two seconds while also supporting automatic call classification. This enhancement helps organizations support regulatory compliance with telemarketing laws such as the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), while increasing customer engagement and agent productivity. Call classification automatically categorizes the outcome of a call using machine learning (ML), rather than requiring agent input, helping improve agent productivity and drive efficient customer engagement. To optimize outbound call performance, customers are encouraged to follow Amazon Connect’s best practices to reduce connection latency. With Amazon Connect outbound campaigns, companies only pay-as-they-go for outbound campaigns processing and for associated channels usage. Amazon Connect outbound campaigns is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt) and Europe (London) AWS regions. To learn more, visit our webpage.  

Amazon Connect now offers the ability to maintain an open communication channel between your agents and Amazon Connect, helping reduce the time it takes to establish a connection with a customer. Contact center administrators can configure an agent’s user profile to maintain a persistent connection after a conversation ends, allowing for subsequent calls to connect faster. Amazon Connect persistent agent connection makes it easier to support compliance requirements with telemarketing laws such as the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) for outbound campaigns’ calling by reducing the time it takes for a customer to connect with your agents.

Amazon Connect persistent connection preview is now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered, and there is no additional charge beyond standard pricing for the Amazon Connect service usage and associated telephony charges. To learn more, visit our product page or refer to our Admin Guide. Sign up for the preview here.
 

 

​Amazon Connect now offers the ability to maintain an open communication channel between your agents and Amazon Connect, helping reduce the time it takes to establish a connection with a customer. Contact center administrators can configure an agent’s user profile to maintain a persistent connection after a conversation ends, allowing for subsequent calls to connect faster. Amazon Connect persistent agent connection makes it easier to support compliance requirements with telemarketing laws such as the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) for outbound campaigns’ calling by reducing the time it takes for a customer to connect with your agents. Amazon Connect persistent connection preview is now available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered, and there is no additional charge beyond standard pricing for the Amazon Connect service usage and associated telephony charges. To learn more, visit our product page or refer to our Admin Guide. Sign up for the preview here.    

Developers can now use the AWS Encryption SDK for Go to help protect their data. This open-source release makes it easier for developers to encrypt and decrypt their data when building applications using the Go programming language.

The AWS Encryption SDK is a client-side encryption library designed to make it easy to encrypt and decrypt data based on industry standards and best practices. The AWS Encryption SDK is available in multiple languages and all implementations of the SDK are interoperable, allowing you to encrypt data in one programming language and decrypt it with any other. The AWS Encryption SDK is developed under open source projects on GitHub where you can inspect the code and contribute to the project.

You can get started by visiting the AWS Encryption SDK for Go on GitHub. To learn more, see What is AWS Encryption SDK in the developer guide.
 

 

​Developers can now use the AWS Encryption SDK for Go to help protect their data. This open-source release makes it easier for developers to encrypt and decrypt their data when building applications using the Go programming language. The AWS Encryption SDK is a client-side encryption library designed to make it easy to encrypt and decrypt data based on industry standards and best practices. The AWS Encryption SDK is available in multiple languages and all implementations of the SDK are interoperable, allowing you to encrypt data in one programming language and decrypt it with any other. The AWS Encryption SDK is developed under open source projects on GitHub where you can inspect the code and contribute to the project. You can get started by visiting the AWS Encryption SDK for Go on GitHub. To learn more, see What is AWS Encryption SDK in the developer guide.    

Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region. You can now use this additional Region to continuously monitor and detect anomalous behavior, security threats, and sophisticated multi-stage attack sequences targeting your AWS accounts to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data.

Tens of thousands of customers across many industries and geographies use GuardDuty. GuardDuty can identify unusual or unauthorized activity like cryptocurrency mining, access to data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) from unusual locations, or unauthorized access to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. GuardDuty Malware Protection adds file scanning for workloads using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes or Amazon S3 to detect the presence of malware. GuardDuty continually evolves its techniques to identify indicators of compromise, such as regularly updating machine learning (ML) models, adding new anomaly detections, and growing integrated threat intelligence to identify and prioritize potential threats to your AWS resources.

You can begin your 30-day free trial of Amazon GuardDuty with a single click in the AWS Management Console. To receive programmatic updates on new GuardDuty features and threat detections, subscribe to the Amazon GuardDuty SNS topic.
 

 

​Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region. You can now use this additional Region to continuously monitor and detect anomalous behavior, security threats, and sophisticated multi-stage attack sequences targeting your AWS accounts to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. Tens of thousands of customers across many industries and geographies use GuardDuty. GuardDuty can identify unusual or unauthorized activity like cryptocurrency mining, access to data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) from unusual locations, or unauthorized access to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters. GuardDuty Malware Protection adds file scanning for workloads using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes or Amazon S3 to detect the presence of malware. GuardDuty continually evolves its techniques to identify indicators of compromise, such as regularly updating machine learning (ML) models, adding new anomaly detections, and growing integrated threat intelligence to identify and prioritize potential threats to your AWS resources. You can begin your 30-day free trial of Amazon GuardDuty with a single click in the AWS Management Console. To receive programmatic updates on new GuardDuty features and threat detections, subscribe to the Amazon GuardDuty SNS topic.    

Amazon Connect Contact Lens now offers a new dashboard that lets you monitor real-time agent activity and take immediate actions such as listen-in to a contact, barge (take over) a contact, or change an agent state in a few clicks from a single interface. With this dashboard, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Now, you can track how long an agent has been on after contact work, color code time in specific statuses, and listen into live contacts that need immediate attention. For example, you can automatically highlight in red if an agent is an error state to give a quick visual indicator of where agents might need additional help to change their status back to available.

This dashboard is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about dashboards, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
 

 

​Amazon Connect Contact Lens now offers a new dashboard that lets you monitor real-time agent activity and take immediate actions such as listen-in to a contact, barge (take over) a contact, or change an agent state in a few clicks from a single interface. With this dashboard, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Now, you can track how long an agent has been on after contact work, color code time in specific statuses, and listen into live contacts that need immediate attention. For example, you can automatically highlight in red if an agent is an error state to give a quick visual indicator of where agents might need additional help to change their status back to available. This dashboard is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about dashboards, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.    

AWS announces the general availability of two new larger sizes (12xlarge and 16xlarge) on Amazon EC2 Flex (C7i-flex, M7i-flex) instances. The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio, providing additional compute options to scale-up existing workloads or run larger sized applications that need additional memory. These instances are powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, that are available only on AWS, and offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers.

Flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits and lower prices for a majority of compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price performance than comparable previous generation instances and are a great first choice for applications that do not fully utilize the compute resources. Flex instances are ideal for web and application servers, batch processing, enterprise applications, databases, and more. For compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads that need even larger instance sizes (up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB memory) or continuous high CPU usage, you can leverage Amazon EC2 C7i and M7i instances.

The new C7i-flex sizes are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Spain, Stockholm), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

The new M7i-flex sizes are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Spain, Stockholm), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West).
 

 

​AWS announces the general availability of two new larger sizes (12xlarge and 16xlarge) on Amazon EC2 Flex (C7i-flex, M7i-flex) instances. The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio, providing additional compute options to scale-up existing workloads or run larger sized applications that need additional memory. These instances are powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, that are available only on AWS, and offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers. Flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits and lower prices for a majority of compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price performance than comparable previous generation instances and are a great first choice for applications that do not fully utilize the compute resources. Flex instances are ideal for web and application servers, batch processing, enterprise applications, databases, and more. For compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads that need even larger instance sizes (up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB memory) or continuous high CPU usage, you can leverage Amazon EC2 C7i and M7i instances. The new C7i-flex sizes are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Spain, Stockholm), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). The new M7i-flex sizes are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Spain, Stockholm), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West).    

Amazon Connect Contact Lens dashboards now allow you to define widget level filters and groupings, re-order and re-size columns, and delete or add new metrics. With these dashboards, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Now, you can further customize specific widgets to create dashboards that best fit your business needs. For example, you can create a single line chart that combines contacts queued, average queue answer time, and abandoned contacts, filtered for your most important queues, so you can quickly see how increasing contact volumes impact both wait time and customer abandonment rates.

These dashboards are available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about dashboards, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
 

 

​Amazon Connect Contact Lens dashboards now allow you to define widget level filters and groupings, re-order and re-size columns, and delete or add new metrics. With these dashboards, you can view and compare real-time and historical aggregated performance, trends, and insights using custom-defined time periods (e.g., week over week), summary charts, time-series chart, etc. Now, you can further customize specific widgets to create dashboards that best fit your business needs. For example, you can create a single line chart that combines contacts queued, average queue answer time, and abandoned contacts, filtered for your most important queues, so you can quickly see how increasing contact volumes impact both wait time and customer abandonment rates. These dashboards are available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about dashboards, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.