You can now configure holidays and other variances to your contact center Hours of operation with “overrides” in Amazon Connect, using APIs or the admin website. Overrides are exceptions to your contact center’s standard day-of-the-week operating hours. For example, if your contact center opens at 9am and closes at 10pm, but on New Year’s Eve you want to close at 4pm to allow your agents to get home in time to celebrate, you can add an override to do so. When the holiday arrives and you close your contact center early, callers get the after hours customer experience.

Hours of operations overrides are supported in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website. To learn more about the hours of operations, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide.
 

 

​You can now configure holidays and other variances to your contact center Hours of operation with “overrides” in Amazon Connect, using APIs or the admin website. Overrides are exceptions to your contact center’s standard day-of-the-week operating hours. For example, if your contact center opens at 9am and closes at 10pm, but on New Year’s Eve you want to close at 4pm to allow your agents to get home in time to celebrate, you can add an override to do so. When the holiday arrives and you close your contact center early, callers get the after hours customer experience. Hours of operations overrides are supported in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more about Amazon Connect, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website. To learn more about the hours of operations, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide.    

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL announces Amazon RDS Extended Support minor version 11.22-RDS.20241121. We recommend that you upgrade to this version to fix known security vulnerabilities and bugs in prior versions of PostgreSQL. Learn more about the updates and patches in this Extended Support minor version in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS Extended Support provides you more time, up to three years, to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements. During Extended Support, Amazon RDS will provide critical security and bug fixes for your RDS for PostgreSQL databases after the community ends support for a major version. You can run your PostgreSQL databases on Amazon RDS with Extended Support for up to three years beyond a major version’s end of standard support date.

You are able to leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including minor and major version upgrades, in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for pricing details and regional availability. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.
 

 

​Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL announces Amazon RDS Extended Support minor version 11.22-RDS.20241121. We recommend that you upgrade to this version to fix known security vulnerabilities and bugs in prior versions of PostgreSQL. Learn more about the updates and patches in this Extended Support minor version in the Amazon RDS User Guide. Amazon RDS Extended Support provides you more time, up to three years, to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements. During Extended Support, Amazon RDS will provide critical security and bug fixes for your RDS for PostgreSQL databases after the community ends support for a major version. You can run your PostgreSQL databases on Amazon RDS with Extended Support for up to three years beyond a major version’s end of standard support date. You are able to leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including minor and major version upgrades, in the Amazon RDS User Guide. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for pricing details and regional availability. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.    

Amazon Redshift announces the general availability of auto-copy, which simplifies data ingestion from Amazon S3 into Amazon Redshift in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This new feature enables you to set up continuous file ingestion from your Amazon S3 prefix and automatically load new files to tables in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse without the need for additional tools or custom solutions.

Previously, Amazon Redshift customers had to build their data pipelines using COPY commands to automate continuous loading of data from S3 to Amazon Redshift tables. With auto-copy, you can now setup an integration which will automatically detect and load new files in a specified S3 prefix to Redshift tables. The auto-copy jobs keep track of previously loaded files and exclude them from the ingestion process. You can monitor auto-copy jobs using system tables

Amazon Redshift auto-copy from Amazon S3 is now generally available for both Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RA3 Provisioned data warehouses in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, see the documentation or check out the AWS Blog.
 

 

​Amazon Redshift announces the general availability of auto-copy, which simplifies data ingestion from Amazon S3 into Amazon Redshift in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This new feature enables you to set up continuous file ingestion from your Amazon S3 prefix and automatically load new files to tables in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse without the need for additional tools or custom solutions. Previously, Amazon Redshift customers had to build their data pipelines using COPY commands to automate continuous loading of data from S3 to Amazon Redshift tables. With auto-copy, you can now setup an integration which will automatically detect and load new files in a specified S3 prefix to Redshift tables. The auto-copy jobs keep track of previously loaded files and exclude them from the ingestion process. You can monitor auto-copy jobs using system tables Amazon Redshift auto-copy from Amazon S3 is now generally available for both Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon Redshift RA3 Provisioned data warehouses in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, see the documentation or check out the AWS Blog.    

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) F2 instances, featuring up to 8 FPGAs. Amazon EC2 F2 instances, the second-generation FPGA-powered instances, are purpose built to develop and deploy reconfigurable hardware in the cloud.

You can use F2 instances to power the next generation of FPGA-accelerated solutions in genomics, multimedia processing, big data, network security/acceleration, and cloud-based video broadcasting.

F2 instances are the first FPGA-based instances to feature 16GB of high-bandwidth memory. F2 instances provide up to 8 FPGAs paired with a 3rd generation AMD EPYC (Milan) processor with 3x processor cores (192 vCPU), 2x system memory (2 TiB), 2x NVMe SSD (7.6 TiB), and 4x networking bandwidth (100 Gbps) compared to F1 instances.

F2 instances are now available in the US East (N.Virginia) and Europe (London) AWS Regions in f2.12xl, and f2.48xl sizes.

To learn more about F2 instances, see Amazon EC2 F2 Instances.

 

​Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) F2 instances, featuring up to 8 FPGAs. Amazon EC2 F2 instances, the second-generation FPGA-powered instances, are purpose built to develop and deploy reconfigurable hardware in the cloud. You can use F2 instances to power the next generation of FPGA-accelerated solutions in genomics, multimedia processing, big data, network security/acceleration, and cloud-based video broadcasting. F2 instances are the first FPGA-based instances to feature 16GB of high-bandwidth memory. F2 instances provide up to 8 FPGAs paired with a 3rd generation AMD EPYC (Milan) processor with 3x processor cores (192 vCPU), 2x system memory (2 TiB), 2x NVMe SSD (7.6 TiB), and 4x networking bandwidth (100 Gbps) compared to F1 instances. F2 instances are now available in the US East (N.Virginia) and Europe (London) AWS Regions in f2.12xl, and f2.48xl sizes. To learn more about F2 instances, see Amazon EC2 F2 Instances.  

Amazon OpenSearch Service now adds support for Graviton3 based r7gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage in six additional regions i.e., Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Middle East (UAE), AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). AWS Graviton3-based instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage have up to 45% improved real-time NVMe storage performance compared to comparable Graviton2-based instances.

Graviton3 based r7gd instances have custom-designed processors that enable improved performance for memory-intensive workloads. They offer upto 30 Gbps enhanced networking bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

Amazon OpenSearch Service Graviton3 instances are supported on all OpenSearch versions, and Elasticsearch versions 7.9 and 7.10. Please refer to the Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing page for additional information about instance types supported in different regions and their On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing details.

To learn more about Amazon OpenSearch Service, please visit the product page.

 

​Amazon OpenSearch Service now adds support for Graviton3 based r7gd instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage in six additional regions i.e., Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Middle East (UAE), AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). AWS Graviton3-based instances with local NVMe-based SSD storage have up to 45% improved real-time NVMe storage performance compared to comparable Graviton2-based instances. Graviton3 based r7gd instances have custom-designed processors that enable improved performance for memory-intensive workloads. They offer upto 30 Gbps enhanced networking bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Amazon OpenSearch Service Graviton3 instances are supported on all OpenSearch versions, and Elasticsearch versions 7.9 and 7.10. Please refer to the Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing page for additional information about instance types supported in different regions and their On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing details. To learn more about Amazon OpenSearch Service, please visit the product page.  

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7i-flex and M7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers.

M7i-flex instances are the easiest way for you to get price-performance benefits for a majority of general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price-performance compared to M6i. M7i-flex instances offer the most common sizes, from large to 8xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize all compute resources such as web and application servers, virtual-desktops, batch-processing, and microservices.

M7i deliver up to 15% better price-performance compared to M6i. M7i instances are a great choice for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage, such as gaming servers, CPU-based machine learning (ML), and video-streaming. M7i offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge, and two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl, metal-48xl). These bare-metal sizes support built-in Intel accelerators: Data Streaming Accelerator, In-Memory Analytics Accelerator, and QuickAssist Technology that are used to facilitate efficient offload and acceleration of data operations and optimize performance for workloads.

To learn more, visit the EC2 M7i/M7i-flex instances Page.

 

​Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7i-flex and M7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers. M7i-flex instances are the easiest way for you to get price-performance benefits for a majority of general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price-performance compared to M6i. M7i-flex instances offer the most common sizes, from large to 8xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize all compute resources such as web and application servers, virtual-desktops, batch-processing, and microservices. M7i deliver up to 15% better price-performance compared to M6i. M7i instances are a great choice for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage, such as gaming servers, CPU-based machine learning (ML), and video-streaming. M7i offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge, and two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl, metal-48xl). These bare-metal sizes support built-in Intel accelerators: Data Streaming Accelerator, In-Memory Analytics Accelerator, and QuickAssist Technology that are used to facilitate efficient offload and acceleration of data operations and optimize performance for workloads. To learn more, visit the EC2 M7i/M7i-flex instances Page.  

We are pleased to announce general availability of inference optimized G6e instances (powered by NVIDIA L40S Tensor Core GPUs) and P5e (powered by NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs) on Amazon SageMaker.

With 1128 GB of high bandwidth GPU memory across 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, 30 TB of local NVMe SSD storage, 192 vCPUs, and 2 TiB of system memory, ml.p5e.48xlarge instances can deliver exceptional performance for compute-intensive AI inference workloads such as large language model with 100B+ parameters, multi-modal foundation models, synthetic data generation, and complex generative AI applications including question answering, code generation, video, and image generation.

Powered by 8 NVIDIA L40s Tensor Core GPUs with 48 GB of memory per GPU and third generation AMD EPYC processors ml.g6e instances can deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to ml.g5 instances. Customers can use ml.g6e instances to run AI Inference for large language models (LLMs) with up to 13B parameters and diffusion models for generating images, video, and audio.

The ml.p5e and ml.g6e instances are now available for use on SageMaker in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). To get started, simply request a limit increase through AWS Service Quotas. For pricing information on these instances, please visit our pricing page. For more information on deploying models with SageMaker, see the overview here and the documentation here. To learn more about these instances in general, please visit the P5e and G6e product pages.
 

 

​We are pleased to announce general availability of inference optimized G6e instances (powered by NVIDIA L40S Tensor Core GPUs) and P5e (powered by NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs) on Amazon SageMaker. With 1128 GB of high bandwidth GPU memory across 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, 30 TB of local NVMe SSD storage, 192 vCPUs, and 2 TiB of system memory, ml.p5e.48xlarge instances can deliver exceptional performance for compute-intensive AI inference workloads such as large language model with 100B+ parameters, multi-modal foundation models, synthetic data generation, and complex generative AI applications including question answering, code generation, video, and image generation. Powered by 8 NVIDIA L40s Tensor Core GPUs with 48 GB of memory per GPU and third generation AMD EPYC processors ml.g6e instances can deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to ml.g5 instances. Customers can use ml.g6e instances to run AI Inference for large language models (LLMs) with up to 13B parameters and diffusion models for generating images, video, and audio. The ml.p5e and ml.g6e instances are now available for use on SageMaker in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). To get started, simply request a limit increase through AWS Service Quotas. For pricing information on these instances, please visit our pricing page. For more information on deploying models with SageMaker, see the overview here and the documentation here. To learn more about these instances in general, please visit the P5e and G6e product pages.    

AWS Security Hub now supports automated security checks aligned to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v4.0.1. PCI DSS is a compliance framework that provides a set of rules and guidelines for safely handling credit and debit card information. PCI DSS standard in Security Hub provides a set of AWS security best practices that support you in protecting your cardholder data environments (CDE). Security Hub PCI DSS v4.0.1 includes 144 automated controls that conduct continual checks against PCI DSS requirements.

The new standard is now available in all public AWS Regions where Security Hub is available and in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To quickly enable the new standard across your AWS environment, we recommend you using Security Hub central configuration. This will allow you to enable the standard in some or all of your organization accounts and across all AWS Regions that are linked to Security Hub with a single action. If you currently use PCI v3.2.1 standard in Security Hub, but want to use only v4.0.1, enable the newer version before disabling the older version. This prevents gaps in your security checks.

To get started, consult the following list of resources:

• Learn more about Security Hub capabilities and features in the AWS Security Hub user guide
• Subscribe to the Security Hub SNS topic to receive notifications about new Security Hub features and controls
• Try Security Hub at no cost for 30 days on the AWS Free Tier.

 

​AWS Security Hub now supports automated security checks aligned to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v4.0.1. PCI DSS is a compliance framework that provides a set of rules and guidelines for safely handling credit and debit card information. PCI DSS standard in Security Hub provides a set of AWS security best practices that support you in protecting your cardholder data environments (CDE). Security Hub PCI DSS v4.0.1 includes 144 automated controls that conduct continual checks against PCI DSS requirements. The new standard is now available in all public AWS Regions where Security Hub is available and in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To quickly enable the new standard across your AWS environment, we recommend you using Security Hub central configuration. This will allow you to enable the standard in some or all of your organization accounts and across all AWS Regions that are linked to Security Hub with a single action. If you currently use PCI v3.2.1 standard in Security Hub, but want to use only v4.0.1, enable the newer version before disabling the older version. This prevents gaps in your security checks. To get started, consult the following list of resources:

Learn more about Security Hub capabilities and features in the AWS Security Hub user guide
Subscribe to the Security Hub SNS topic to receive notifications about new Security Hub features and controls
Try Security Hub at no cost for 30 days on the AWS Free Tier.  

Amazon Connect now supports push notifications for mobile chat on iOS and Android devices, improving the customer experience and enabling faster issue resolution. Amazon Connect makes it easy to offer mobile chat experiences using the Amazon Connect Chat SDKs or a webview solution using the communications widget. Now, with built-in push notifications enabled for mobile chat experiences, customers will be proactively notified as soon as they receive a new message from an agent or chatbot, even when they are not actively chatting.

Push notifications for mobile chat is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London) regions.

To learn more and get started, visit the help documentation or the Amazon Connect website.

 

​Amazon Connect now supports push notifications for mobile chat on iOS and Android devices, improving the customer experience and enabling faster issue resolution. Amazon Connect makes it easy to offer mobile chat experiences using the Amazon Connect Chat SDKs or a webview solution using the communications widget. Now, with built-in push notifications enabled for mobile chat experiences, customers will be proactively notified as soon as they receive a new message from an agent or chatbot, even when they are not actively chatting. Push notifications for mobile chat is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London) regions. To learn more and get started, visit the help documentation or the Amazon Connect website.  

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, enabling customers to deploy essential network protections for all their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).

AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that is easy to deploy. The service automatically scales with network traffic volume to provide high-availability protections without the need to set up and maintain the underlying infrastructure. It is integrated with AWS Firewall Manager to provide you with central visibility and control over your firewall policies across multiple AWS accounts.

To see which regions AWS Network Firewall is available in, visit the AWS Region Table. For more information, please see the AWS Network Firewall product page and the service documentation.
 

 

​Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, enabling customers to deploy essential network protections for all their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that is easy to deploy. The service automatically scales with network traffic volume to provide high-availability protections without the need to set up and maintain the underlying infrastructure. It is integrated with AWS Firewall Manager to provide you with central visibility and control over your firewall policies across multiple AWS accounts. To see which regions AWS Network Firewall is available in, visit the AWS Region Table. For more information, please see the AWS Network Firewall product page and the service documentation.