AWS launches VPC Encryption Controls to make it easy to audit and enforce encryption in transit within and across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), and demonstrate compliance with encryption standards. You can turn it on your existing VPCs to monitor encryption status of traffic flows and identify VPC resources that are unintentionally allowing plaintext traffic. This feature also makes it easy to enforce encryption across different network paths by automatically (and transparently) turning on hardware-based AES-256 encryption on traffic between multiple VPC resources including AWS Fargate, Network Load Balancers, and Application Load Balancers.

To meet stringent compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS, customers rely on both application layer encryption and the hardware-based encryption that AWS offers across different network paths. AWS provides hardware-based AES-256 encryption transparently between modern EC2 Nitro instances. AWS also encrypts all network traffic between AWS data centers in and across Availability Zones, and AWS Regions before the traffic leaves our secure facilities. All inter-region traffic that uses VPC Peering, Transit Gateway Peering, or AWS Cloud WAN receives an additional layer of transparent encryption before leaving AWS data centers. Prior to this release, customers had to track and confirm encryption across all network paths. With VPC Encryption Controls, customers can now monitor, enforce and demonstrate encryption within and across Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in just a few clicks. Your information security team can turn it on centrally to maintain a secure and compliant environment, and generate audit logs for compliance and reporting.

VPC Encryption Controls is now available in the following AWS Commercial regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Milan), Europe (Zurich), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Canada West (Calgary), Canada (Central), Middle East (UAE), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town) and South America (São Paulo). To learn more about this feature and its use cases, please see our documentation.

 

​AWS launches VPC Encryption Controls to make it easy to audit and enforce encryption in transit within and across Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), and demonstrate compliance with encryption standards. You can turn it on your existing VPCs to monitor encryption status of traffic flows and identify VPC resources that are unintentionally allowing plaintext traffic. This feature also makes it easy to enforce encryption across different network paths by automatically (and transparently) turning on hardware-based AES-256 encryption on traffic between multiple VPC resources including AWS Fargate, Network Load Balancers, and Application Load Balancers. To meet stringent compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS, customers rely on both application layer encryption and the hardware-based encryption that AWS offers across different network paths. AWS provides hardware-based AES-256 encryption transparently between modern EC2 Nitro instances. AWS also encrypts all network traffic between AWS data centers in and across Availability Zones, and AWS Regions before the traffic leaves our secure facilities. All inter-region traffic that uses VPC Peering, Transit Gateway Peering, or AWS Cloud WAN receives an additional layer of transparent encryption before leaving AWS data centers. Prior to this release, customers had to track and confirm encryption across all network paths. With VPC Encryption Controls, customers can now monitor, enforce and demonstrate encryption within and across Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in just a few clicks. Your information security team can turn it on centrally to maintain a secure and compliant environment, and generate audit logs for compliance and reporting. VPC Encryption Controls is now available in the following AWS Commercial regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Milan), Europe (Zurich), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Canada West (Calgary), Canada (Central), Middle East (UAE), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town) and South America (São Paulo). To learn more about this feature and its use cases, please see our documentation.  

AWS announces general availability of Flexible Cost Allocation on AWS Transit Gateway, enhancing how you can distribute Transit Gateway costs across your organization.

Previously, Transit Gateway only used a sender-pay model, where the source attachment account owner was responsible for all data usage related costs. The new Flexible Cost Allocation (FCA) feature provides more versatile cost allocation options through a central metering policy. Using FCA metering policy, you can choose to allocate all of your Transit Gateway data processing and data transfer usage to the source attachment account, the destination attachment account, or the central Transit Gateway account. FCA metering policies can be configured at an attachment-level or individual flow-level granularity. FCA also supports middle-box deployment models enabling you to allocate data processing usage on middle-box appliances such as AWS Network Firewall to the original source or destination attachment owners. This flexibility allows you to implement multiple cost allocation models on a single Transit Gateway, accommodating various chargeback scenarios within your AWS network infrastructure.

Flexible Cost Allocation is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Transit Gateway is available. You can enable these features using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK). There is no additional charge for using FCA on Transit Gateway. For more information, see the Transit Gateway documentation pages.

 

​AWS announces general availability of Flexible Cost Allocation on AWS Transit Gateway, enhancing how you can distribute Transit Gateway costs across your organization.
Previously, Transit Gateway only used a sender-pay model, where the source attachment account owner was responsible for all data usage related costs. The new Flexible Cost Allocation (FCA) feature provides more versatile cost allocation options through a central metering policy. Using FCA metering policy, you can choose to allocate all of your Transit Gateway data processing and data transfer usage to the source attachment account, the destination attachment account, or the central Transit Gateway account. FCA metering policies can be configured at an attachment-level or individual flow-level granularity. FCA also supports middle-box deployment models enabling you to allocate data processing usage on middle-box appliances such as AWS Network Firewall to the original source or destination attachment owners. This flexibility allows you to implement multiple cost allocation models on a single Transit Gateway, accommodating various chargeback scenarios within your AWS network infrastructure. Flexible Cost Allocation is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Transit Gateway is available. You can enable these features using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK). There is no additional charge for using FCA on Transit Gateway. For more information, see the Transit Gateway documentation pages.  

AWS Security Incident Response now provides agentic AI-powered investigation capabilities to help you prepare for, respond to, and recover from security events faster and more effectively. The new investigative agent automatically gathers evidence across multiple AWS data sources, correlates the data, then presents findings for you in clear, actionable summaries. This helps you reduce the time required to investigate and respond to potential security events, thereby minimizing business disruption.

When a security event case is created in the Security Incident Response console, the investigative agent immediately assesses the case details to identify missing information, such as potential indicators, resource names, and timeframes. It asks the case submitter clarifying questions to gather these details. This proactive approach helps minimize delays from back-and-forth communications that traditionally extend case resolution times. The investigative agent then collects relevant information from various data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon EC2, and AWS Cost Explorer. It automatically correlates this data to provide you with a comprehensive analysis, reducing the need for manual evidence gathering and enabling faster investigation. Security teams can track all investigation activities directly through the AWS console and view summaries in their preferred integration tools.

This feature is automatically enabled for all Security Incident Response customers at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where the service is available.

To learn more and get started, visit the Security Incident Response overview page and console.

 

​AWS Security Incident Response now provides agentic AI-powered investigation capabilities to help you prepare for, respond to, and recover from security events faster and more effectively. The new investigative agent automatically gathers evidence across multiple AWS data sources, correlates the data, then presents findings for you in clear, actionable summaries. This helps you reduce the time required to investigate and respond to potential security events, thereby minimizing business disruption. When a security event case is created in the Security Incident Response console, the investigative agent immediately assesses the case details to identify missing information, such as potential indicators, resource names, and timeframes. It asks the case submitter clarifying questions to gather these details. This proactive approach helps minimize delays from back-and-forth communications that traditionally extend case resolution times. The investigative agent then collects relevant information from various data sources, such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon EC2, and AWS Cost Explorer. It automatically correlates this data to provide you with a comprehensive analysis, reducing the need for manual evidence gathering and enabling faster investigation. Security teams can track all investigation activities directly through the AWS console and view summaries in their preferred integration tools. This feature is automatically enabled for all Security Incident Response customers at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where the service is available. To learn more and get started, visit the Security Incident Response overview page and console.  

Amazon Lightsail now offers a new Nginx blueprint. This new blueprint has Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) enforced by default, and supports IPv6-only instances. With just a few clicks, you can create a Lightsail virtual private server (VPS) of your preferred size that comes with Nginx preinstalled.

With Lightsail, you can easily get started on the cloud by choosing a blueprint and an instance bundle to build your web application. Lightsail instance bundles include instances preinstalled with your preferred operating system, storage, and monthly data transfer allowance, giving you everything you need to get up and running quickly

This new blueprint is now available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is available. For more information on blueprints supported on Lightsail, see Lightsail documentation. For more information on pricing, or to get started with your free trial, click here.

 

​Amazon Lightsail now offers a new Nginx blueprint. This new blueprint has Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) enforced by default, and supports IPv6-only instances. With just a few clicks, you can create a Lightsail virtual private server (VPS) of your preferred size that comes with Nginx preinstalled. With Lightsail, you can easily get started on the cloud by choosing a blueprint and an instance bundle to build your web application. Lightsail instance bundles include instances preinstalled with your preferred operating system, storage, and monthly data transfer allowance, giving you everything you need to get up and running quickly This new blueprint is now available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is available. For more information on blueprints supported on Lightsail, see Lightsail documentation. For more information on pricing, or to get started with your free trial, click here.  

Today, AWS announced Address Form Solution Builder from Amazon Location Service, enabling developers to build a customized address form, without writing any code, that helps their users enter their address with predictive suggestions, autofill address fields such as postal code, and customizable layout. This guided experience allows developers to generate a ready-to-use application in minutes and download the developer package in React JavaScript, React Typescript, or Standalone HTML/JavaScript.

Developers can use address forms to improve the user experience, speed, and accuracy of collecting address information from their users. Features such as predictive suggestions helps end-users select their complete address after just a few keystrokes, reducing the data entry time and error rate. The integrated map view lets users visualize their selected address’s location and adjust the placement of the pin on the map to indicate a specific entrance. By improving the speed and accuracy of address collection, enterprises can improve their customer experience, reduce fraud, and increase delivery success rate.

Amazon Location Service’s Address Form Solution Builder is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Spain), and South America (São Paulo). Build your first address form using the Amazon Location Console or learn more about this feature in our Developer Guide. 

 

​Today, AWS announced Address Form Solution Builder from Amazon Location Service, enabling developers to build a customized address form, without writing any code, that helps their users enter their address with predictive suggestions, autofill address fields such as postal code, and customizable layout. This guided experience allows developers to generate a ready-to-use application in minutes and download the developer package in React JavaScript, React Typescript, or Standalone HTML/JavaScript. Developers can use address forms to improve the user experience, speed, and accuracy of collecting address information from their users. Features such as predictive suggestions helps end-users select their complete address after just a few keystrokes, reducing the data entry time and error rate. The integrated map view lets users visualize their selected address’s location and adjust the placement of the pin on the map to indicate a specific entrance. By improving the speed and accuracy of address collection, enterprises can improve their customer experience, reduce fraud, and increase delivery success rate. Amazon Location Service’s Address Form Solution Builder is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Spain), and South America (São Paulo). Build your first address form using the Amazon Location Console or learn more about this feature in our Developer Guide.   

AWS License Manager now provides centralized software asset management across AWS regions and accounts in an organization, reducing compliance risks and streamlines license tracking through automated license asset groups. Customers can now track license expiry dates, streamline audit responses, and make data-driven renewal decisions with a product-centric view of their commercial software portfolio.

With this launch, customers no longer need to manually track licenses across multiple regions and accounts in their organization. Now with license asset groups, customers can gain organization-wide visibility of their commercial software usage with customizable grouping and automated reporting. The new feature is available in all commercial regions where AWS License Manager is available.

To get started, visit the Licenses section of the AWS License Manager console, and the AWS License Manager User Guide. 

 

​AWS License Manager now provides centralized software asset management across AWS regions and accounts in an organization, reducing compliance risks and streamlines license tracking through automated license asset groups. Customers can now track license expiry dates, streamline audit responses, and make data-driven renewal decisions with a product-centric view of their commercial software portfolio. With this launch, customers no longer need to manually track licenses across multiple regions and accounts in their organization. Now with license asset groups, customers can gain organization-wide visibility of their commercial software usage with customizable grouping and automated reporting. The new feature is available in all commercial regions where AWS License Manager is available. To get started, visit the Licenses section of the AWS License Manager console, and the AWS License Manager User Guide.   

Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports cross-account and cross-region database fleet monitoring, enabling centralized observability across your entire AWS database infrastructure. This enhancement allows DevOps engineers and database administrators to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize databases spanning multiple AWS accounts and regions from a single unified console experience.

With this new capability, organizations can gain holistic visibility into their distributed database environments without account or regional boundaries. Teams can now correlate performance issues across their entire database fleet, streamline incident response workflows, and maintain consistent monitoring standards across complex multi-account architectures, significantly reducing operational overhead and improving mean time to resolution.

This feature is available in all AWS commercial regions where CloudWatch Database Insights is supported.

To learn more about cross-account and cross-region monitoring in CloudWatch Database Insights, as well as instructions to get started monitoring your databases across your entire organization and regions, visit the CloudWatch Database Insights documentation.

 

​Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports cross-account and cross-region database fleet monitoring, enabling centralized observability across your entire AWS database infrastructure. This enhancement allows DevOps engineers and database administrators to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize databases spanning multiple AWS accounts and regions from a single unified console experience. With this new capability, organizations can gain holistic visibility into their distributed database environments without account or regional boundaries. Teams can now correlate performance issues across their entire database fleet, streamline incident response workflows, and maintain consistent monitoring standards across complex multi-account architectures, significantly reducing operational overhead and improving mean time to resolution. This feature is available in all AWS commercial regions where CloudWatch Database Insights is supported. To learn more about cross-account and cross-region monitoring in CloudWatch Database Insights, as well as instructions to get started monitoring your databases across your entire organization and regions, visit the CloudWatch Database Insights documentation.  

Amazon OpenSearch Service, expands availability of OR2 and OM2, OpenSearch Optimized Instance family to 11 additional regions. The OR2 instance delivers up to 26% higher indexing throughput compared to previous OR1 instances and 70% over R7g instances. The OM2 instance delivers up to 15% higher indexing throughput compared to OR1 instances and 66% over M7g instances in internal benchmarks.

The OpenSearch Optimized instances, leveraging best-in-class cloud technologies like Amazon S3, to provide high durability, and improved price-performance for higher indexing throughput better for indexing heavy workload. Each OpenSearch Optimized instance is provisioned with compute, local instance storage for caching, and remote Amazon S3-based managed storage. OR2 and OM2 offers pay-as-you-go pricing and reserved instances, with a simple hourly rate for the instance, local instance storage, as well as the managed storage provisioned. OR2 instances come in sizes ‘medium’ through ‘16xlarge’, and offer compute, memory, and storage flexibility. OM2 instances come in sizes ‘large’ through ‘16xlarge’ Please refer to the Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing page for pricing details.

OR2 instance family is now available on Amazon OpenSearch Service across 12 additional regions globally: US West (N. California), Canada (Central),  Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Jakarta , Malaysia, Melbourne, Osaka , Seoul, Singapore), Europe (London), and South America (Sao Paulo). 

OM2 instance family is now available on Amazon OpenSearch Service across 14 additional regions globally: US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Europe ( Paris, Spain), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (Sao Paulo).

 

​Amazon OpenSearch Service, expands availability of OR2 and OM2, OpenSearch Optimized Instance family to 11 additional regions. The OR2 instance delivers up to 26% higher indexing throughput compared to previous OR1 instances and 70% over R7g instances. The OM2 instance delivers up to 15% higher indexing throughput compared to OR1 instances and 66% over M7g instances in internal benchmarks.
The OpenSearch Optimized instances, leveraging best-in-class cloud technologies like Amazon S3, to provide high durability, and improved price-performance for higher indexing throughput better for indexing heavy workload. Each OpenSearch Optimized instance is provisioned with compute, local instance storage for caching, and remote Amazon S3-based managed storage. OR2 and OM2 offers pay-as-you-go pricing and reserved instances, with a simple hourly rate for the instance, local instance storage, as well as the managed storage provisioned. OR2 instances come in sizes ‘medium’ through ‘16xlarge’, and offer compute, memory, and storage flexibility. OM2 instances come in sizes ‘large’ through ‘16xlarge’ Please refer to the Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing page for pricing details. OR2 instance family is now available on Amazon OpenSearch Service across 12 additional regions globally: US West (N. California), Canada (Central),  Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Jakarta , Malaysia, Melbourne, Osaka , Seoul, Singapore), Europe (London), and South America (Sao Paulo).  OM2 instance family is now available on Amazon OpenSearch Service across 14 additional regions globally: US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Europe ( Paris, Spain), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (Sao Paulo).  

Today, AWS Control Tower announces support for an additional 279 managed Config rules in Control Catalog for various use cases such as security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can now search, discover, enable and manage these additional rules directly from AWS Control Tower and govern more use cases for your multi-account environment. AWS Control Tower also supports seven new compliance frameworks in Control Catalog. In addition to existing frameworks, most controls are now mapped to ACSC-Essential-Eight-Nov-2022, ACSC-ISM-02-Mar-2023, AWS-WAF-v10, CCCS-Medium-Cloud-Control-May-2019, CIS-AWS-Benchmark-v1.2, CIS-AWS-Benchmark-v1.3, CIS-v7.1

To get started, go to the Control Catalog and search for controls with the implementation filter AWS Config to view all AWS Config rules in the Catalog. You can enable relevant rules directly using the AWS Control Tower console or the ListControls, GetControl and EnableControl APIs. We’ve also enhanced control relationship mapping, helping you understand how different controls work together. The updated ListControlMappings API now reveals important relationships between controls – showing which ones complement each other, are alternatives, or are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can now easily identify when a Config Rule (detection) and a Service Control Policy (prevention) can work together for comprehensive security coverage.

These new features are available in AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is available, including AWS GovCloud (US). Reference the list of supported regions for each Config rule to see where it can be enabled. To learn more, visit the AWS Control Tower User Guide.

 

​Today, AWS Control Tower announces support for an additional 279 managed Config rules in Control Catalog for various use cases such as security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can now search, discover, enable and manage these additional rules directly from AWS Control Tower and govern more use cases for your multi-account environment. AWS Control Tower also supports seven new compliance frameworks in Control Catalog. In addition to existing frameworks, most controls are now mapped to ACSC-Essential-Eight-Nov-2022, ACSC-ISM-02-Mar-2023, AWS-WAF-v10, CCCS-Medium-Cloud-Control-May-2019, CIS-AWS-Benchmark-v1.2, CIS-AWS-Benchmark-v1.3, CIS-v7.1 To get started, go to the Control Catalog and search for controls with the implementation filter AWS Config to view all AWS Config rules in the Catalog. You can enable relevant rules directly using the AWS Control Tower console or the ListControls, GetControl and EnableControl APIs. We’ve also enhanced control relationship mapping, helping you understand how different controls work together. The updated ListControlMappings API now reveals important relationships between controls – showing which ones complement each other, are alternatives, or are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can now easily identify when a Config Rule (detection) and a Service Control Policy (prevention) can work together for comprehensive security coverage. These new features are available in AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is available, including AWS GovCloud (US). Reference the list of supported regions for each Config rule to see where it can be enabled. To learn more, visit the AWS Control Tower User Guide.  

AWS Control Tower offers the easiest way to manage and govern your environment with AWS managed controls. Starting today, customers can have direct access to these AWS managed controls without requiring a full Control Tower deployment. This new experience offers over 750 managed controls that customers can deploy within minutes while maintaining their existing account structure.

AWS Control Tower v4.0 introduces direct access to Control Catalog, allowing customers to review available managed controls and deploy them into their existing AWS Organization. With this release, customers now have more flexibility and autonomy over their organizational structure, as Control Tower will no longer enforce a mandatory structure. Additionally, customers will have improved operations such as cleaner resource and permissions management and cost attribution due to the separation of S3 buckets and SNS notifications for the AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail integrations.

This controls-focused experience is now available in all AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is supported. For more information about this new capability see the AWS Control Tower User Guide or contact your AWS account team. For a full list of Regions where AWS Control Tower is available, see the AWS Region Table.

 

​AWS Control Tower offers the easiest way to manage and govern your environment with AWS managed controls. Starting today, customers can have direct access to these AWS managed controls without requiring a full Control Tower deployment. This new experience offers over 750 managed controls that customers can deploy within minutes while maintaining their existing account structure. AWS Control Tower v4.0 introduces direct access to Control Catalog, allowing customers to review available managed controls and deploy them into their existing AWS Organization. With this release, customers now have more flexibility and autonomy over their organizational structure, as Control Tower will no longer enforce a mandatory structure. Additionally, customers will have improved operations such as cleaner resource and permissions management and cost attribution due to the separation of S3 buckets and SNS notifications for the AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail integrations. This controls-focused experience is now available in all AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is supported. For more information about this new capability see the AWS Control Tower User Guide or contact your AWS account team. For a full list of Regions where AWS Control Tower is available, see the AWS Region Table.