2018

Amazon IoT Device Management is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet. Amazon IoT Device Management is a managed service that lets you securely onboard, organize, monitor, and remotely manage your IoT devices at scale throughout their lifecycle. With Amazon IoT Device Management, you can upload device information and configuration, organize your device inventory, monitor your fleet of devices, and remotely manage devices deployed across many locations including updating device software over-the-air (OTA). Amazon IoT Device Management helps you scale your device fleets and reduce the cost and effort of managing large IoT device deployments.  

You can now create alarms on metric math expressions such as +, -, /, *, and mathematical functions such as Sum, Average, Min, Max, and Standard Deviation. This enables you to create thresholds and set automated actions to fix operational issues. 

Amazon EC2 P3 instances are now available at lower prices than before, making them an even more cost-effective solution to meet your machine learning training and HPC needs. Effective immediately, we are reducing the 3-year Standard Reserved Instance pricing by 15% for the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD.

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) repositories with custom metadata. This makes it easier for you to organize, manage, search, and allocate costs.  

Amazon EC2 Fleet now supports a new request type “Instant” that you can use to provision capacity synchronously across instance types & purchase models and CreateFleet will return the instances launched in the API response. EC2 Fleet now offers 3 types (instant, request, and maintain) that can be used to indicate whether EC2 Fleet should return instance information synchronously, launch instances asynchronously until the fleet reaches your desired capacity, or attempt to maintain your desired capacity.

Now when you set your fleet type to Instant you can rely on a synchronous API response, providing instance details including instance id, instance type and subnet rather than describing a fleet ID. When using Instant type fleets EC2 Fleet will not attempt to replenish instances if interrupted. Following the create-fleet synchronous response EC2 Fleet will take no further action enabling you to control if and when instances are launched.

Amazon EC2 Fleet is a feature that simplifies the provisioning of large amounts of EC2 capacity, including provisioning across different EC2 instance types, Availability Zones and across On-Demand, Reserved and Spot purchasing models. With a single API call, you can provision capacity that delivers the best mix of instance types and purchasing models to achieve your desired performance and cost. To get started with EC2 Fleet, visit this page.

The Amazon Web Services Price List API provides you with the ability to query for the current and historical prices of Amazon Web Services services, as well as receive alerts via Amazon SNS when pricing changes are detected.

You can now quickly resize your Amazon Redshift cluster in minutes by adding nodes to get better performance and more storage for demanding workloads or by removing nodes to save cost.

Amazon RDS now includes enhancements to the Auto Minor Version Upgrade feature for Amazon RDS database instances in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Auto Minor Version Upgrade is a feature that you can enable to have your database automatically upgraded when a new minor database engine version is available.

You can now easily see when a minor version upgrade is scheduled to be applied to your database instance in the Amazon Web Services Console or through the DescribePendingMaintenanceActions API. You can also choose to apply an available minor version upgrade immediately with a few clicks or via the ApplyPendingMaintenanceAction API.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service revamped cluster health monitoring to provide detailed cluster and node-level metrics that help you understand the health of your Elasticsearch domains. With 22 new metrics, including indexing rate, query latency, and HTTP response codes, it is easy to track query and indexing performance, request success rates, and JVM health. Additionally, with node-level metrics, you can quickly see the health of all of the Elasticsearch nodes in your domain and drill down on any potential issues. To complement the new metrics, we have integrated with CloudWatch Dashboards to enable one-click dashboards creation, enabling you to create fully customizable dashboards and easily set up CloudWatch Alarms on your domain and instance metrics. All of the new metrics are available in the updated Amazon Elasticsearch Service console. To learn more, please refer to our documentation. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers self-service updates, giving you the flexibility to control when to update your domains. You can now update your domain with a single click. Previously, new product features and enhancements were deployed on a rolling schedule. With self-service updates, you can adopt new features as they arrive and update your domains at the time of your choosing. To see when an update is available for your domain, you can simply log in to the Amazon Elasticsearch Service console or check with the REST API. 

You can now use Amazon  PrivateLink in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD, and Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Amazon  PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on Amazon Web Services, in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet.

Amazon  PrivateLink is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (London), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), Amazon GovCloud (US), China (Ningxia) operated by NWCD and China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet Amazon Web Services regions. To learn more, view PrivateLink Product Page and get on Amzon Web Services Management Console for trial.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now allows you to scale your Redis Cluster environment up to 250 nodes and 250 shards. This increase lets you store over 16.6x more in-memory data and enables configurations with higher write throughput by lifting the previous 15 shard limit. This increase also enables a maximum in-memory data size of 170.6 TB. 

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has a dedicated management console.  

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports auto-failover and backup/restore for T2 node types. This launch enables you to build development and test environments based on T2 nodes that have comparable setups as production general-purpose M and compute-optimized R node environments.

Customers can now get Amazon S3 Inventory reports in Apache Parquet file format. Amazon S3 Inventory provides flat file list of objects and selected metadata for your bucket or shared prefixes. You can use S3 Inventory to list, audit and report on the status of your objects or use it to simplify and speed up business workflows and big data jobs.  

Amazon DynamoDB Backup and Restore provides the capability to easily create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables and restore from these backups, if needed. You can back up tables from a few megabytes to hundreds of terabytes of data, with no impact on the performance or availability of your production applications.

With on-demand backup and restore, you can create full backups of your DynamoDB table for data archiving and retention, helping you meet your corporate and governmental regulatory requirements. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) provides continuous backups of your DynamoDB table data, protecting you against accidental writes or deletes. When you enable PITR, you can recover that table from backup at any point in time from the moment you enable it to a maximum of the 35 preceding days.

You can enable backup and restore for your DynamoDB table data with a single click in the Amazon Management Console, a simple API call, or with the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more about DynamoDB backup and restore, see Backup and Restore.

Today we are announcing a 60% improvement in performance of General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes from 10,000 IOPS to 16,000 IOPS and from 160 MB/s to 250 MB/s of throughput per volume.

Amazon DynamoDB on-demand is a flexible new billing option for DynamoDB capable of serving thousands of requests per second without capacity planning. DynamoDB on-demand offers simple pay-per-request pricing for read and write requests so that you only pay for what you use, making it easy to balance costs and performance.

Amazon S3 now supports three new features to reduce your storage costs by making it even easier to build archival applications using the Amazon S3 Glacier storage class and by enabling one-click data replication to S3 Glacier in another Amazon Web Services Region. S3 PUT to Glacier, S3 Restore Notifications, and S3 Restore Speed Upgrade are available using the S3 APIs, Amazon Software Development Kits (SDKs), and Amazon Web Services Management Console for simpler integration with your archival workloads and applications.

Amazon S3 Object Lock is a new S3 feature that blocks object version deletion during a customer-defined retention period so that you can enforce retention policies as an added layer of data protection or for regulatory compliance. You can migrate workloads from existing write-once-read-many (WORM) systems into Amazon S3, and configure S3 Object Lock at the object- and bucket-levels to prevent object version deletions prior to pre-defined Retain Until Dates or Legal Hold Dates. S3 Object Lock protection is maintained regardless of which storage class the object resides in and throughout S3 Lifecycle transitions between storage classes.

Amazon DynamoDB now offers native, server-side support for transactions, simplifying the developer experience of making coordinated, all-or-nothing changes to multiple items both within and across tables. With support for transactions, developers can extend the scale, performance, and enterprise benefits of DynamoDB to a broader set of mission-critical workloads.

Today we are announcing 2x improvement in peak performance of Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes from 32,000 IOPS to 64,000 IOPS and from 500 MB/s to 1,000 MB/s of throughput per volume when attached to Nitro system EC2 instances.

S3 Batch Operations is a new feature that makes it simple for customers to manage billions of objects stored in Amazon S3, with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. Now, all Amazon Web Services customers can make changes to object properties and metadata, and perform other storage management tasks – such as copying objects between buckets, replacing tag sets, modifying access controls, and restoring archived objects from Amazon S3 Glacier – for any number of S3 objects in minutes instead of months.

With S3 Batch Operations, customers can save up to three months of development time and resources, typically required to write custom application software, in order to perform desired API actions on S3 objects in bulk. Customers can also use the feature to run custom Amazon Lambda functions across billions, or even trillions, of S3 objects to execute more complex tasks, such as processing data or transcoding image files. S3 Batch Operations manages retries, tracks progress, sends notifications, generates completion reports, and delivers events to Amazon CloudTrail for all changes made and tasks executed.

To get started, customers can specify a list of target objects by using an S3 inventory report, which lists all objects within an S3 bucket or prefix, or by providing their own list of target objects. Then, in the S3 Management Console, a customer can select the desired API action from the pre-populated menu of options. S3 Batch Operations then makes the requested changes against the list of target objects. When complete, S3 Batch Operations sends the customer a notification and automatically generates a completion report that itemizes the changes made.

S3 Batch Operations will be available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 T2 Unlimited instances are available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by SINNET and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. T2 Unlimited instances, first introduced in November 2017, extends the burst model that was pioneered with the T2 instances, giving customers the ability to sustain high CPU performance for as long as a workload needs it. For most general-purpose workloads, T2 Unlimited instances will provide ample performance without any additional charges.

With these additional regional launches, T2 Unlimited instances are now available in the following Amazon Web Services Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), South America (São Paulo), Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by SINNET and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

T2 Unlimited instances are available in 7 sizes and are purchasable as On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances.

To get started, visit the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI), and Amazon SDKs.

 

You can now retain Amazon RDS automated backups (system snapshots and transaction logs) when you delete a database instance in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. This allows you to restore a deleted database instance to a specified point in time within the backup retention period even after it has been deleted, protecting you against accidental deletion of data. 

Amazon IoT now supports Basic Ingest, a new feature that allows Amazon IoT customers to securely send large amount of data to over 10 Amazon Web Services services such as Kinesis and S3 via Amazon IoT Rule Actions, without incurring additional messaging charges.   

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) resources such as services, task definitions, tasks, clusters and container instances . This will enable you to better allocate cost, improve visibility into your workloads, easily search and identify your containerized applications, implement programmatic infrastructure management actions, and define fine-grained resource-level permissions.

Many ECS customers are managing thousands of resources such as task definitions, services, tasks, and clusters, spread across different teams, products, business units, and environments. Without tagging, it was difficult to manage the entire infrastructure and the underlying cost in a systematic manner. Now, you can tag your ECS resources at creation or at runtime using the ECS APIs, Resource Groups APIs and Console. ECS now provides detailed ECS Tasks usage data in the Cost & Usage Report, which customers can use to allocate the cost of the underlying EC2 instances.

To take advantage of tagging, you will need to opt-in to the new Amazon Resource Names (ARN) and resource identifiers (ID) format for tasks, container instances, and services. These new ARNs and IDs are necessary to introduce the new tagging functionality and all its underlying benefits.

Additional information about the new ARN and ID formats can be found in the documentation or in the FAQ. If you have questions, please reach out to your account team or contact Amazon Web Services Support on the community forums or through Amazon Web Services Premium Support. If you are ready to opt in, please visit the ECS page on your Amazon Web Services console. Resource tagging is currently not available in the GovCloud (US-East) region.
 

With the introduction of Amazon S3 Block Public Access, securing your S3 data has never been easier. With a few clicks in the S3 management console, you can apply S3 Block Public Access to every bucket in your account – both existing and any new buckets created in the future – and make sure that there is no public access to any object. By default, new S3 bucket settings do not allow public access, but customers can modify these settings to grant public access using policies or object-level permissions. The Amazon S3 Block Public Access settings override S3 permissions that allow public access, making it easy for the account administrator to set up a centralized control to prevent variation in security configuration regardless of how an object is added or a bucket is created. These settings are auditable, providing a further layer of control, using Amazon Web Services Trusted Advisor bucket permission checks, Amazon CloudTrail logs, and Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech and enables you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products by adding a voice. Starting today, Amazon Polly is available in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 

Your real-time applications can now benefit from Amazon ElastiCache for Redis support of Redis 5.0. Now you can take advantage of new Redis 5.0 features such as Redis Streams, enhanced sorted sets with pop operations, improved HyperLogLog algorithm, and better memory management.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you provision and automatically scale instances across purchase options, and instance families in a single application to optimize scale, performance, and cost. Now you can include Spot Instances with On-Demand and RIs in a single Auto Scaling group (ASG), to save up to 90% on compute in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.

Earlier this year, we announced EC2 Fleet, an API to provision capacity across purchase options, AZs and instance types. Now this EC2 Fleet functionality is available via EC2 Auto Scaling. Powered by EC2 Fleet, you can now create an ASG by defining which EC2 instance types work for you and how much of the desired capacity should be filled using On-Demand, RI and Spot purchase options. EC2 Auto Scaling continues to optimize and maintain the mix as and when the ASG scales out or scales back, simplifying capacity provisioning and cost optimization with automatic scaling across instances and purchase options.

When setting up an ASG, now you can specify what percentage of your ASG capacity should be fulfilled by On-Demand instances, and what percentage with Spot Instances. You can also indicate instances types or instances with specific amount of RAM or vCPU in the ASG configurations. EC2 Auto Scaling then provisions the lowest price combination of instances to meet the desired capacity based on these preferences.

To learn more about provisioning and automatically scale instances across purchase options, and instance families with EC2 Auto Scaling, visit the FAQs.
 

Starting today, you can create Amazon RDS for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL database instances with up to 32 TiB of storage in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon Snowball available to help customers migrate data to the cloud faster and more cost effectively in China.

Amazon Snowball is a data transport solution that accelerates moving terabytes to petabytes of data into and out of Amazon Web Services using storage appliances designed to be secure for physical transport. Using Snowball helps to eliminate challenges that can be encountered with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Beyond large-scale data transfers, Amazon Snowball also supports importing data from a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Log in your Management Console now to start using Amazon Snowball.

You can now specify two new docker flags as parameters in your Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Task Definition. These flags are pidMode and ipcMode.

The pidMode parameter allows you to configure your containers to share their process ID (PID) namespace with other containers in the task, or with the host. Sharing the PID namespace enables for example monitoring applications deployed as containers to access information about other applications running in the same task or host.

The ipcMode parameter allows you to configure your containers to share their inter-process communication (IPC) namespace with the other containers in the task, or with the host. The IPC namespace allows containers to communicate directly through shared-memory with other containers running in the same task or host.

This feature is currently supported with EC2 launch-type. For more information about ECS, visit the Amazon ECS page.

Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Oracle now allow you to stop and start database instances that are running in a Multi-AZ configuration in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. This makes it easy and affordable to use databases for development and test purposes that match the configuration of your production databases but are not required to be running all of the time.

Stopping and starting a database instance requires just a few clicks in the Amazon Management Console, or a single call using the Amazon API or Amazon Command Line Interface, and takes just a few minutes. While your database instance is stopped, you are charged for provisioned database storage and backup storage, but not for database instance hours.

While a database instance is stopped, Amazon RDS does not delete any of your automatic backups or transaction logs. This means you can do a point-in-time restore to any point within your specified automated backup retention window, even after an instance is re-started. Starting an instance restores it to the same configuration as it had when stopped, including its endpoint, DB parameter group, security group, and option group membership.

You can stop a database instance for up to 7 days at a time. After 7 days, it will be automatically started. For more details on stopping and starting a database instance, please refer to Stopping and Starting a DB Instance in the Amazon RDS User Guide.  

You can now assign tags to your Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts upon allocation in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. Tags enable you to categorize your Amazon Web Services resources in different ways such as by purpose, by owner, or by environment. You can quickly identify a host based on the tags you have assigned to it.

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses. By tagging hosts at the time of allocation, you can eliminate the need to run custom scripts later on.

To learn more about tagging your Amazon EC2 Dedicated hosts, visit the EC2 user guide.
 

You can now reserve Amazon EC2 capacity for any duration with On-Demand EC2 Capacity Reservations in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types to run your applications. Some customers however have very specific requirements for portions of their applications around instance type, size, and capability, as well as the Availability Zone within the Region the instance needs to run in, and need very high levels of assurance that they will always be able to launch that specific capacity when they need to. Previously in order to achieve a capacity reservation, customers had to leverage Zonal Reserved Instances and commit to that capacity for a minimum of one year. Now with On-Demand Capacity Reservations, customers can reserve the exact capacity they need, in the location they need, and can keep it only for as long as they need it.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations are activated as soon as they are requested, and they stay active until cancelled by you. A Capacity Reservation is tied to a Region - Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, or Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD – and an Availability Zone within the Region, and by default automatically utilized by running instances in that Availability Zone. Instances you have placed Capacity Reservations for are charged at the normal instance rate for as long as you maintain the reservation. Should you no longer need them, you can cancel your Capacity Reservation at any time to stop paying.

If you have Regional RI discounts, they will automatically apply to any matching Capacity Reservation. This gives you the flexibility to selectively add capacity reservations and still get the Regional RI discounts for that usage.

To get started, you can create an On-Demand Capacity Reservation by simply choosing an Availability Zone within the Region and quantity (number of instances) along with other instance specifications such as instance type and tenancy. Once created, the Capacity Reservation will ensure that you will always be able to launch that specific EC2 configuration.

You can create and manage Capacity Reservations through the Amazon Management Console or automate your capacity management using the Amazon SDK and CLI. To learn more about On-Demand Capacity Reservations and how to use them, visit our FAQs, Linux or Windows technical documentations.  

We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon Elasticsearch Service in the China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet. With the addition of this region, Amazon Elasticsearch Service is now available in 18 regions globally: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), Amazon Web Services GovCloud (US), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Paris), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai), China (Ningxia) operated by NWCD and China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 F1 instances are available for preview in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. This expansion allows customers to run FPGA based accelerators in China to meet data governance requirements and allow our China developers to connect FPGA accelerations with in-region services. If you're interested in participating in the private preview, please contact your account manager.

Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 

You can now view, manage, and monitor your serverless applications directly from the Amazon Lambda console using the new Applications menu. This allows you to perform application level actions such as viewing all resources that together make up your application, and monitoring performance, errors, and traffic metrics for the application.

Serverless applications built using Amazon Lambda are a combination of Lambda functions, event sources, and other resources that work together and are defined using the Amazon Serverless Application Model (Amazon SAM) or Amazon CloudFormation. You can now view application templates and a list of all the resources in an application from the Overview tab. The Monitoring tab, available in beta, features Amazon CloudWatch metrics for the Lambda functions in an application. You can customize the default metrics dashboard in the Monitoring tab to display your preferred metrics by defining CloudWatch dashboards in your application template.

To learn more about managing your applications directly through the Amazon Lambda console, visit our documentation. For more information about Amazon Lambda, visit our product page.

The Applications menu in the Lambda console is available in all regions where Amazon Lambda is available, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. For more information on where Lambda is available, see the Amazon Web Services region table.

Customers can now use Jumbo Frames for traffic between their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and on-premises networks over Amazon Direct Connect.

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network connection is the size, in bytes, of the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. The larger the MTU of a connection, the more data can be passed in a single packet. Until now, traffic over Amazon Direct Connect was limited to 1,500 MTU.

With this release, customers can use Jumbo Frames for their Amazon Direct Connect traffic. Jumbo Frames allow more than 1,500 bytes (up to 9,001 bytes) of data by increasing the payload size per packet, and thus lowering the packet overhead. As a result, you need fewer packets to send the same amount of data, which improves the end-to-end network performance. In addition, this release enables new use cases, such as supporting network overlay protocols, for on-premises connectivity over Amazon Direct Connect.

Support for Jumbo Frames over Amazon Direct Connect is available in all Amazon Web Services Regions. For more information see the Amazon Direct Connect documentation.

You can now configure your Amazon Lambda functions to run up to 15 minutes per execution. Previously, the maximum execution time (timeout) for a Lambda function was 5 minutes. Now, it is easier than ever to perform big data analysis, bulk data transformation, batch event processing, and statistical computations using longer running functions. 

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.14, 9.4.19, and 9.3.24. It is now available in Amazon Web Services china (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services china (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. This release fixes PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities included in current and previous minor releases by PostgreSQL community and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

With this update, we have also added support for extensions pglogical version 2.2.0 and pg_similarity version 1.0 in PostgreSQL 10.5 and 9.6.10; pageinspect version 1.6 extension is supported with PostgreSQL 10.5; libprotobuf has been updated to 1.3.0 in PostgreSQL 10.5; wal2json has been updated to 01c5c1ec in PostgreSQL 10.5 and 9.6.10; pg_hint_plan has been updated to 1.3.1 and 1.2.3.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

 

Starting today, Amazon API Gateway supports importing and exporting APIs using the OpenAPI 3.0 API specification.

The OpenAPI specification is a widely adopted standard for documenting APIs. OpenAPI 3.0 is the latest version of the OpenAPI specification and offers a number of improvements over OpenAPI 2.

Support for this specification will allow our customers to improve API development and better compatibility with other tools in the API ecosystem.

The OpenAPI 3.0 support is available in all regions where API Gateway is available, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. To see all regions where API Gateway is available, see the Amazon Web Services region table. To learn more and for a sample of the OpenAPI 3.0 specification, please visit the documentation here.

Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon API Gateway.

Amazon GameLift is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet.

Amazon GameLift is a managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. You can deploy your first game server in the cloud in just minutes, saving up to thousands of engineering hours in upfront software development and lowering the technical risks that often cause developers to cut multiplayer features from their designs. Built on Amazon Web Services’s proven computing environment, Amazon GameLift lets you scale high-performance game servers up and down to meet player demand. You pay only for the capacity you use, so you can get started whether you’re working on a new game idea or running a game with millions of players.

Amazon GameLift is also available in US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon and N. California), Central Canada (Montreal), EU Central (Frankfurt), EU West (London and Ireland), Asia Pacific South (Mumbai), Asia Pacific Northeast (Seoul and Tokyo), Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore and Sydney), and South America East (São Paulo). Please visit the Amazon GameLift product page for more information.

Amazon RDS enables you to use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage database access for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instances. Database administrators can now associate database users with IAM users and roles. By using IAM, you can manage user access to all Amazon Web Services resources from a single location, avoiding issues caused by permissions that are out of sync on different Amazon Web Services resources.

You can choose to use IAM for database user authentication simply by selecting a checkbox during the DB instance creation process. Existing DB instances can also be modified to enable IAM authentication. Once this feature is enabled, database administrators can associate new and existing database users to IAM users and roles. Credentials can then be managed via IAM without needing to manage users in the database. This includes expanding and restricting permission levels, associating permissions with different roles, and revoking access. IAM authentication also allows easier and safer integration with your applications running on EC2.

After configuring the database for IAM authentication, client applications authenticate to the database engine by providing temporary security credentials generated by the IAM Security Token Service. These credentials are used instead of providing a password to the database engine.

Database IAM authentication is available for Amazon RDS database instances running PostgreSQL versions 9.5.13, 9.6.9, and 10.4 (and higher).

To learn more about enabling IAM authentication for your database instance, please refer to the Amazon RDS documentation. To learn more about IAM, refer to the Amazon Identity and Access Management page.

You can now enable deletion protection for your Amazon RDS database instances and Amazon Aurora database clusters. When a database instance or cluster is configured with deletion protection, the database cannot be deleted by any user. Deletion protection is available for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database instances in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Deletion protection is now enabled by default when you select the "production" option for database instances created through the Amazon Web Services Console. You can also turn on or off deletion protection for an existing database instance or cluster with a few clicks in the Amazon Web Services Console or the Amazon Command Line Interface. Deletion protection is enforced in the Amazon Web Services Console, the CLI, and API.

When you request the deletion of a database instance with deletion protection in the Amazon Web Services Console, you are blocked and may not continue without first modifying the instance and disabling deletion protection.

Amazon Aurora database clusters can also be enabled for deletion protection. You will get an error when you attempt to delete the final database instance attached to a protected database cluster in the Amazon Web Services Console. You may not continue unless you modify the DB Cluster and disable deletion protection.

Read more in the Deleting a Database Instance section of the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon Aurora now allows you to stop and start database clusters in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. This makes it easy and affordable to use database clusters for development and test purposes where the database is not required to be running all of the time.

Stopping and starting a database cluster requires just a few clicks in the Amazon Management Console, or a single call using the Amazon API or Amazon Command Line Interface, and takes just a few minutes. Stopping a database cluster stops the primary instance and any Aurora Replicas. While your database cluster is stopped, you are charged for cluster storage, manual snapshots and automated backup storage within your specified retention window, but not for database instance hours.

While a database cluster is stopped, you can do a point-in-time restore to any point within your specified automated backup retention window. Starting a database cluster restores it to the same configuration as it had when stopped, including its endpoint, replica instances, parameter groups, VPC security groups, and option group settings.

You can stop a database cluster for up to 7 days at a time. After 7 days, it will be automatically started. For more details on stopping and starting a database cluster, please refer to Stopping and Starting a DB Cluster in the Amazon Aurora User Guide.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis adds support for adding and removing read replica nodes for Redis Cluster, the sharded Redis. Now you can easily scale your reads and improve availability for your Redis Cluster environments without requiring manual steps or needing to make application changes. Amazon ElastiCache already supports adding and removing read replicas for unsharded Redis (non-Redis Cluster mode). 

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs are now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. The AMIs are now globally available in 18 Amazon Web Services regions.

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with newer versions of the following deep learning frameworks and interfaces in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet: TensorFlow 1.10 optimized for Amazon Web Services for higher performance, Horovod 0.13.11 with OpenMPI 3.1.0 optimized for distributed multi-GPU TensorFlow training on Amazon EC2 P3 instances, PyTorch with CUDA 9.2 optimized for model training on Amazon EC2 P3 instances, Chainer 4.3.1, and Keras 2.2.2.

Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) now supports object filtering based on S3 object tags. This allows you to identify individual objects using S3 object tags for automatic replication across Amazon Web Services Regions for compliance and/or data protection.

Amazon CodeBuild is now available to customers in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD 

Amazon Config, a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your Amazon Web Services resources, is introducing a new tiered pricing model for Amazon Config rules, effective immediately.

You can now specify three new docker flags as parameters in your Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Task definition. These flags are sysctl, interactive, and tty.

The sysctl parameter allows you to have fine grained control on your application's namespaced kernel parameters. Therefore, you can optimize the kernel's behavior to your application's needs without having to configure those parameters at the host-level or worry about impacting other applications.

The interactive and tty parameters, allow you to deploy containerized applications that require stdin or a tty to be allocated. This allows you to run some legacy applications that require these flags if you wanted to containerize them.

This feature is currently supported with EC2 launch-type. To learn more about ECS, please visit our product page.

Amazon S3 announces feature enhancements to S3 Select. S3 Select is an Amazon S3 capability designed to pull out only the data you need from an object, which can dramatically improve the performance and reduce the cost of applications that need to access data in S3.

Today, Amazon S3 Select works on objects stored in CSV and JSON format. Based on customer feedback, we’re happy to announce S3 Select support for Apache Parquet format, JSON Arrays, and BZIP2 compression for CSV and JSON objects. We are also adding support for CloudWatch Metrics for S3 Select, which lets you monitor S3 Select usage for your applications.

Amazon ElastiCache adds support for in-place version upgrades for Redis Cluster, the sharded and highly-available Redis. Now you can upgrade your Redis Cluster environments to the latest version without manual steps or application changes. Amazon ElastiCache already supports in-place version upgrades for non-Redis Cluster mode Redis. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now lets you easily upgrade your Elasticsearch clusters to newer versions without any downtime, using in-place version upgrades. With this new feature, you no longer need to go through the hassle of taking a manual snapshot, restoring it to a new cluster running the newer version of Elasticsearch, and updating all of your endpoint references. Instead, you can easily trigger the in-place version upgrade and Amazon Elasticsearch Service takes care of all the necessary steps in the background, ensuring that your cluster continues to operate while the upgrade is in process. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports versions 5.6 and 6.3 for both open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana. Elasticsearch 5.6 includes a number of bug fixes and optimizations to improve search performance. Elasticsearch 6.3 offers autocomplete for Kibana queries and improvements to aggregation and ranking APIs. 

You can now use Amazon CloudFormation templates to quickly deploy solutions that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) message filtering. 

Amazon DynamoDB Backup and Restore provides the capability to easily create on-demand and continuous backups of your DynamoDB tables and restore from these backups, if needed. You can back up tables from a few megabytes to hundreds of terabytes of data, with no impact on the performance or availability of your production applications.

With on-demand backup and restore, you can create full backups of your DynamoDB table for data archiving and retention, helping you meet your corporate and governmental regulatory requirements. Point-in-time recovery (PITR) provides continuous backups of your DynamoDB table data, protecting you against accidental writes or deletes. When you enable PITR, you can recover that table from backup at any point in time from the moment you enable it to a maximum of the 35 preceding days.

DynamoDB backup and restore is now available in 16 Amazon Web Services Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris), South America (Sao Paulo), and China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet.

You can enable backup and restore for your DynamoDB table data with a single click in the Amazon Management Console, a simple API call, or with the Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more about DynamoDB backup and restore, see Backup and Restore.
 

You can now easily configure your containerized application to access storage volumes backed by Local instance storage or Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes through the use of Docker volume drivers and volume plugins such as Rex-Ray and Portworx.

Previously, if you wanted to deploy containerized applications that required access to storage volumes, you had to manually manage your storage volume using custom tooling such as bash scripts, lambda functions, and manual configuration of Docker volumes.

Now, with the support for Docker volumes, you can deploy stateful and storage-intensive applications on Amazon ECS. You have the flexibility to configure the lifecycle of the Docker volume and specify whether it is a scratch space volume specific to a single instantiation of a task, or a persistent volume that persists beyond the lifecycle of a unique instantiation of the task. You can also choose to use a pre-provisioned Docker volume that you have created before launching your Task.

To get started with this feature, first install your preferred Docker volume plugin (if needed) and simply specify the volume name, the volume driver, and the parameters when setting up a task definition via the Amazon Web Services management console, CLI or SDK.

To learn more, visit the Amazon ECS product page.

Today, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) made it easier for you to manage your IAM resources by enabling you to add tags to your IAM users and roles (also known as IAM principals) principals in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, Operated by Sinnet and in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. Tags enable you to add customizable key-value pairs to resources, and many Amazon services support tagging of Amazon Web Services resources.

Now, you can use tags to add custom attributes such as email address, project, and cost center to your IAM principals. Additionally, tags on IAM principals simplify permissions management. For example, you can author a policy that allows a user to assume all roles for a specific project by using a tag. As you add roles with that tag, users gain permissions to assume those roles automatically. To learn more about how to add tags to IAM users and roles, please visit Amazon Web Services Identity and Access Management.

Amazon Redshift now enables Short Query Acceleration by default to speed up execution of short-running queries such as reports, dashboards, and interactive analysis. Short Query Acceleration uses machine learning to provide higher performance, faster results, and better predictability of query execution times.

Short-running queries can be delayed when entering a queue behind a long-running query like an extract, transform, and load (ETL) operation. Short Query Acceleration (SQA) uses machine learning to predict the execution time of a query, and move short-running queries to an express ‘short query’ queue. With SQA, short-running queries begin executing more quickly, and users see results sooner. The acceleration varies based on workload, though we have observed 3x improvements in short query performance for internal workloads.

In the latest release, SQA is enabled by default. To learn more, please refer to our documentation.

This feature is available in all regions where Amazon Redshift is available. For more information on where Amazon Redshift is available, see the Amazon Web Services region table.

Amazon EC2 P3 instances are now available in the EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and China (Ningxia) Amazon Web Services region operated by NWCD, bringing the total number of available regions to 14.

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports delayed replication in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. This feature allows you to set a configurable time period for which a read replica lags behind the source database. In a standard MySQL replication configuration, there is minimal replication delay between the source and the replica. With delayed replication, you can introduce an intentional delay as a strategy for disaster recovery.

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.6.40 and 5.7.22 in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MySQL database engine.

Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with an optimized build of TensorFlow 1.9 custom-built directly from the source code and fine-tuned for high performance training, Horovod for TensorFlow multi-GPU scaling, the latest Apache MXNet 1.2 performance and usability improvements, the new Keras 2-MXNet backend with high performance multi-GPU training support, a new MXBoard tool for improved debugging and visualization of MXNet training models, an upgraded NIVIDA stack, and support for Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) for framework interoperability.  

Network Load Balancer, designed to handle millions of requests per second while maintaining ultra-low latencies, is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Network Load Balancer is optimized to handle volatile traffic patterns while using a single static IP address per Availability Zone. It operates at connection level (Layer 4), routing connections to Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses based on IP protocol data. It also preserves the client-side source IP, allowing applications to see the IP address of the client that can then be used by applications for further processing.

With this regional launch, Network Load Balancer is now available in 16 Amazon Web Services Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), EU (Paris), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), Amazon GovCloud (US) Regions and Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD.

Learn more about Network Load Balancer by visiting Elastic Load Balancing.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now lets you enable Elasticsearch error logs, providing you valuable information for troubleshooting your search and indexing operations quickly and easily. These logs are published to the Amazon CloudWatch Logs service and can be turned on or off at will. You only need to pay for the CloudWatch charges that you incur based on your usage. No additional Amazon Elasticsearch Service fees apply.  

Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS) and Amazon Web Services Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) are now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.

Starting today, the Amazon Web Services Management Console makes it easier to find services, access them quickly, and discover learning content that helps you get started with Amazon Web Services services.

When you access the Amazon Web Services Management Console, you can search for Amazon Web Services services using keywords that describe what the service does, even if you don't remember the actual service name. You can create shortcuts to your favorite services by clicking on the “pin” on the top of the Management Console, or you can let the Management Console create shortcuts for you automatically each time you visit a service.

If you are new to Amazon Web Services services, the “Build a Solution” feature helps you get started with popular Amazon Web Services services.

These improvements are available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. To start using these features, login to the Amazon Web Services Management Console.

Starting today, Elastic Volumes extends support to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) magnetic (standard) volume type. You can now dynamically increase capacity or change the type of magnetic (standard) volumes with no downtime or performance impact using a simple API call or a few console clicks. You can streamline and automate changes using Amazon CloudWatch with Amazon Lambda.

Amazon API Gateway increased the default limit of APIs per account to 600 regional APIs.

Amazon S3 now provides increased performance to support up to 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data, which can save significant processing time for no additional charge. Each S3 prefix can support these request rates, making it simple to increase performance exponentially.

Applications running on Amazon S3 today will enjoy this performance improvement with no changes, and customers building new applications on S3 do not have to make any application customizations to achieve this performance. Amazon S3’s support for parallel requests means you can scale your S3 performance by the factor of your compute cluster, without making any customizations to your application. Performance scales linearly per prefix, so you can use as many prefixes as you need in parallel to achieve the required throughput.

This S3 request rate performance increase removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes to achieve faster performance. That means you can now use logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications. This improvement is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD and Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. For more information, visit the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

Today, we released a new Amazon Identity & Access Management (IAM) feature that makes it easier for you to delegate IAM permissions management to trusted employees. 

Starting today, Application Auto Scaling can be used to add scaling to any services that you build on Amazon Web Services.

You can now develop your Amazon Lambda function code in C# using the .NET Core 2.1 runtime which will soon be the Long Term Support (LTS) version of .NET Core. You can use any of the new runtime features like the more performant HTTP client implementation and types for representing contiguous regions of arbitrary memory. For more details, read the Lambda documentation.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports setting lifecycle policy rules for all images, without requiring a tag value. This makes it easier to set rules to automate container image cleanup in your Amazon ECR repositories.

Previously, when creating a rule to filter tagged container images, you were required to specify a tag value. This made it difficult to select images that were automatically tagged with a computer generated value, a common situation for images pushed to Amazon ECR from a CI/CD pipeline.

Now, Amazon ECR allows you to select all images (tagged and untagged) in a single rule and filter on other image properties without needing to specify a tag value. You can enable this by adding a rule with tagStatus = “Any” for your Amazon ECR lifecycle policies.

See the Amazon ECR documentation to learn more about image lifecycle policies.

Amazon ECR is available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.0.35, 10.1.34, and 10.2.15 in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and  Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

Amazon Snowball available to help customers migrate data to the cloud faster and more cost effectively in China

Amazon Snowball is a data transport solution that accelerates moving terabytes to petabytes of data into and out of Amazon Web Services using storage appliances designed to be secure for physical transport. Using Snowball helps to eliminate challenges that can be encountered with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Beyond large-scale data transfers, Amazon Snowball also supports importing data from a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Log in your Management Console now to start using Amazon Snowball.

Starting today, Amazon CloudTrail’s event history will automatically log all read and write management events for supported Amazon Web Services services. Event history lets you view, filter, and download your recent Amazon Web Services account activity. This new release allows you to gain additional visibility into your account actions taken over the past 90 days without setting up a trail.

Amazon Lambda now supports Amazon SQS as an event source. This allows you to build serverless applications with Lambda using message queues as the event source. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices.

Amazon Lambda and Amazon API Gateway are now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

Amazon Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to triggers and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. Amazon Lambda starts running your code within milliseconds of a trigger such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device. You can also use Amazon Lambda to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. With Amazon Lambda you pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run your code. Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the Amazon Web Services Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), code running on Amazon Lambda, or any Web application. Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Lambda and API Gateway are also available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Amazon Web Services GovCloud (US), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet. Please visit the product pages for Lambda and API Gateway for more information. 

Amazon Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as Amazon Web Services Managed Microsoft AD, is now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. Amazon Web Services Managed Microsoft AD enables you to use a highly available managed Microsoft Active Directory in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.

Following on the launch announcement from EC2, we are excited to announce Optimize CPUs for RDS Oracle in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Optimize CPU provides customers greater control of their RDS Oracle instances on two fronts. First, customers can specify a custom number of cores when launching new instances to save on vCPU-based licensing costs. Second, they can disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology) for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, today announced support for Redis 4.0.10. Now you can take advantage of the new caching improvements and better memory management capabilities in Redis 4.0 and improve performance and memory usage of your in-memory data processing workloads.

You can now provision Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by SINNET. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and can also help you meet license compliance requirements.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) when using subscription filter policies. 

Auto Recovery is an Amazon EC2 feature that is designed to increase instance availability. Auto Recovery is now available for Dedicated Instances in all Regions, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. You can now automatically recover Dedicated Instances when a system impairment is detected. This feature recovers the instance on different underlying hardware and reduces the need for manual intervention. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Reserved Instances, an additional pricing option that offers significant savings on usage costs for the C4, M4, R4, and I3 instance families. Reserved Instances require a one- or three-year commitment, and have three payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. 

The Amazon Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface (CLI), also referred to as SAM Local, lets you locally build, test, and debug serverless applications defined by Amazon SAM templates. Now, you can use the SAM init command to initialize a ready-to-deploy SAM application in your preferred runtime.  

Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two Amazon Web Services Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

You can now launch with X1 instance types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Today, we are announcing the availability of Optimize CPUs for Amazon EC2 instances. This feature provides customers greater control of their EC2 instances on two fronts. First, customers can specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to save on vCPU-based licensing costs. Second, they can disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology) for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like certain high-performance computing (HPC) applications. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) are now available in the China (Ningxia) region operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD).

Customers are now able to use three Availability Zones (AZs) in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. We launched the third AZ to provide customers with additional flexibility to architect applications across multiple AZs in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region for high availability and fault tolerance. With this launch, Amazon Web Services services are now available in 55 Availability Zones across 18 technology infrastructure regions globally.

Starting today, customers with consolidated billing will receive linked account bills that show each account’s unblended rates and costs.

Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) now reports the time stamp when an IAM user last used their access key in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs now include advanced optimizations for TensorFlow 1.7 that are tailored to deliver higher-performance training across Amazon EC2 instances.

For CPU-based training scenarios, the AMIs now include TensorFlow 1.7 built with Intel’s Advanced Vector Instructions (AVX), SSE, and FMA instruction sets, to accelerate vector and floating point computations. The AMIs are also fully configured with Intel MKL-DNN to accelerate math routines used in neural network training on Intel Xeon processors powering Amazon EC2 C3 and C4 instances. 

In addition, to improve training performance for GPU-based scenarios, the AMIs include an optimized build of TensorFlow 1.7 fully configured with NVIDIA CUDA 9 and cuDNN 7 to take advantage of mixed precision training on Volta V100 GPUs powering Amazon EC2 P3 instances.

The AMIs automatically deploy the build of TensorFlow optimized for the EC2 instance of your choice when you activate the TensorFlow virtual environment for the first time.

You can find the Deep Learning AMI of your choice in the Quick Start section of the Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the EC2 instance launch wizard. Also visit our Documentation guide for help with selecting the right AMI for your project, simple tutorials and more resources.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon S3 now includes storage metrics for Amazon Glacier and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage classes. Storage that has been uploaded to S3 One Zone-IA or transitioned to S3 One Zone-IA or Amazon Glacier from S3 Standard or S3 Standard-IA storage classes using S3 Lifecycle policies will be available in CloudWatch storage metrics. These storage metrics will also include object overhead bytes applied to objects in Amazon Glacier and small objects in S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA.

You can monitor bucket storage using CloudWatch, which collects and processes storage data from Amazon S3 into readable, daily metrics. These storage metrics for Amazon S3 are reported once per day and are provided at no additional cost.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon S3 is available in all commercial Amazon Web Services Regions starting today, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

To learn more about CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon S3, please visit the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

[Beijing]—April 28, 2018–Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, has achieved multi-level protection scheme (MLPS) Level III certification in China for cloud storage services, cloud computing services, and cloud infrastructure network. MLPS is the country's most authoritative security certification for information products and systems, based on the Regulations of the Protection of the Computer Information System Security of the People's Republic of China, Administrative Measures for the Security Protection of the International Access of Computer Information Networks, and Administrative Measures for the Information Security Protection Classification.

Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) now enables simplified permissions management in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, Operated by Sinnet and in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. IAM allows you to use a single IAM policy condition across all Amazon Web Services services to control access to a specific region. By adding the new global condition key ‘aws:RequestedRegion’ in the condition element of your IAM policy, you can control access to the region in which an IAM principal (user or role) can perform Amazon Web Services actions.

Windows with SQL Server Enterprise Edition is now available on t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge instance types in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. Amazon EC2 T2 instances are the lowest-cost Amazon EC2 General Purpose instance type that provides a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline. T2 instances are ideal for a variety of general-purpose applications like micro-services, small and medium databases and product prototypes. 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, today announced the availability of a new metric - EngineCPUUtilization which provides access to the Redis process CPU utilization to gain better insights into your Redis workloads. As Redis is single threaded and uses just one CPU core at any given point in time, the new metric provides more precise visibility into the load of the Redis process itself.

Amazon EC2 X1 instances, designed for running large-scale, in-memory applications and in-memory databases in the Amazon Web Services cloud, are now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now allows users to dynamically get the latest ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID when creating an Amazon ECS cluster made up of Amazon EC2 instances.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math to perform calculations across multiple metrics for real-time analysis. You can visualize these computed metrics through the console, add them to CloudWatch Dashboards, or retrieve through the newly launched GetMetricData API. Metric Math enables you to easily derive insights from your existing CloudWatch metrics and better understand the operational health and performance of your infrastructure.  

You can now develop your Amazon Lambda functions using Node.js v8.10. In addition to the leveraging new features in Node.js v8.10 such as the new V8 6.0 engine, Lambda functions written in Node.js 8.10 can now use the async/await pattern to specify error or return values for the function execution. 

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots at the time of creation. You can do this from the Amazon EC2 console or through the CreateSnapshot API. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation. 

You can now use an Amazon Lambda function from a different Amazon Web Services account as the Lambda Authorizer or Integration backend for your Amazon API Gateway API Methods. This allows for better management and security controls when working across different teams that may have their own Amazon Web Services accounts.

You can now attach resource policies to APIs in Amazon API Gateway, making it easier to set access controls for invoking your APIs.

You now have a number of new Amazon S3 features to augment data protection and simplify compliance in Amazon Web Services China Regions including Default Encryption, encryption status in S3 Inventory reports, and additional object age groups in S3 Storage Class Analysis.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) has added new Amazon CloudWatch Events to notify customers when volume creation or deletion is accomplished. Instead of having to continuously poll describe-volume API to determine whether the volume has been created or deleted after issuing the command, customers can use these events to track the volume state. 

Amazon Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. Amazon SMS is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to Amazon Web Services. It allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations. 

Now, you can enable your applications and federated users in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD to complete longer running workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud using a single session by increasing the maximum session duration up to 12 hours for an IAM role. You can extend the maximum session duration for an IAM role to up to 12 hours using the IAM console or CLI. Once you increase the maximum session duration, users and applications assuming the IAM role can request temporary credentials that expire when the IAM role session expires.

Amazon SNS message filtering now supports both numeric and string matching. Specifically, string matching operators allow for exact, prefix, and “anything-but” comparisons, while numeric matching operators allow for exact and range comparisons. You can leverage this new set of operators to further simplify pub/sub messaging architectures by offloading to SNS message filtering logic from subscribers, as well as routing logic from publishers. 

Today, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is introducing support for using Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles, a new type of role that allows you to easily delegate permissions to Amazon Web Services services.

Amazon RDS now supports MariaDB Server minor versions 10.0.34, 10.1.31 and 10.2.12 in in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) now supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) enabled EBS snapshots for Windows Server AMIs in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by SINNET, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Regions, operated by NWCD.

With this launch, you can now take VSS-enabled EBS snapshots of your running Windows instances without the need to create custom scripts, or shutting down the instances. To read more about this capability go to the Amazon Web Services documentation.

Amazon RDS now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.5.59, 5.6.39 and 5.7.21 in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MySQL database engine.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances receive a two-minute notification when these instances are about to be reclaimed by Amazon EC2. Starting today, the two-minute warning for Spot Instances is available via Amazon CloudWatch Events CLI and will continue to be available by accessing the Instance Metadata service.  

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs provide pre-configured environments for machine learning developers and data scientists to quickly start experimenting with deep learning models. The AMIs now come with support for Chainer, a flexible and intuitive framework for neural networks. Chainer uses a "define-by-run" approach that enables developers to define their deep learning network architecture on the fly. Such dynamic computational graphs are especially helpful while working with recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and with inputs of variable length like in natural language processing. This release also includes PyTorch 0.3.1 and Apache MXNet 1.1 which provide performance enhancements and bug fixes.

You can find the Deep Learning AMI of your choice in the Quick Start section of the Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the EC2 instance launch wizard. Also visit our Documentation guide for help with selecting the right AMI for your project, simple tutorials and more resources.

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

You can now provision Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts in the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Dedicated Hosts are physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and can also help you meet license compliance requirements.

Introducing corporate bank redirect online payment method to Amazon Web Services China. This is a popular method for corporations to pay and for merchants to collect payments from corporate clients in China. 

Amazon Direct Connect provides private, high bandwidth connectivity between customers’ network and Amazon Web Services Cloud. The traffic sent over Amazon Direct Connect connection stays within Amazon Web Services private network instead of traversing the public internet.

We are excited to announce the new ListShards API which makes it easier for your Kinesis Data Streams KCL applications to scale. Many Kinesis Data Streams customers use the KCL to process records from their data streams. Starting in version 1.9.0 or later, key KCL API functions now use the ListShards API, which supports a 10x higher call rate limit compared to the DescribeStream API, which was used for these functions in earlier KCL versions.

The Amazon Deep Learning AMIs provide pre-configured environments for machine learning developers and data scientists to quickly start experimenting with deep learning models. The Conda-based Deep Learning AMI, which provides pre-installed pip packages of popular deep learning frameworks in separate virtual environments, now supports Caffe, includes TensorFlow version 1.4.1, Keras 2.1.2, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.3.1, and Theano 1.0.

The Conda-based AMI also provides TensorFlow Serving for developers to quickly create an inference end-point for their TensorFlow models, as well as the TensorBoard visualization tool. The AMIs come with easy-to-follow MNIST-based tutorials for both TensorFlow Serving and TensorBoard. Apache MXNet users can benefit from the MXNet Model Server to quickly deploy an HTTP-based inference endpoint for their models.

The CUDA 9 Source Code AMI, which provides pre-installed deep learning frameworks and their source code in a shared python environment, now includes TensorFlow 1.5.0-rc0 version. This version of TensorFlow works with CUDA 9 and cuDNN 7, making it the first version of TensorFlow that leverages the computing power of NVidia Volta GPUs powering Amazon EC2 P3 instances. Since the version is still pre-release, test before you use it in production.

All the Amazon Deep Learning AMIs for both Ubuntu and Amazon Linux platforms are updated with the latest NVidia GPU drivers and operating system versions that include security patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities discovered earlier this month.

You can find the Deep Learning AMI of your choice in the Quick Start section of the Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) in the EC2 instance launch wizard. Also visit our Documentation guide for help with selecting the right AMI for your project, simple tutorials and more resources.

Amazon Config now supports Config rules in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet. Config provides you with pre-built rules for evaluating the configuration of your Amazon Web Services resources as well as software within managed instances, including Amazon EC2 instances and servers running on-premises. You can customize pre-built rules to evaluate your Amazon Web Services resource configurations and configuration changes, or create your own custom rules that define your internal best practices and guidelines for resource configurations. Using Config, you can assess your resource configurations and resource changes for compliance against the built-in or custom rules.

To learn more about Amazon Config rules, visit here. 

Amazon Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet. Amazon  Server Migration Service is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to Amazon Web Services . Amazon SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS Read Replicas for MySQL and MariaDB now support Multi-AZ deployments in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Combining Read Replicas with Multi-AZ enables you to build a resilient disaster recovery strategy and simplify your database engine upgrade process. 

Starting today you can easily create a new Amazon RDS for MySQL database instance from a backup of your existing MySQL database in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. This includes MySQL databases running on Amazon EC2 or outside of Amazon Web Services services. This is done by creating a backup of using the Percona XtraBackup tool and uploading the resulting files to an Amazon S3 bucket. You then create a new Amazon RDS DB Instance from the backup files in Amazon S3, directly through the RDS Console or Amazon Command Line Interface. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Docker version 17.09.01-ce. The Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) now includes the ECS Agent 1.16.2 as well as Docker version 17.09.01-ce. 

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD, when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL. 

You can now publish logs from your RDS for MySQL and MariaDB databases to CloudWatch Logs. Supported logs include general log, slow query log, audit log, and error log. Publishing these logs to CloudWatch Logs allows you to maintain continuous visibility into database activity, query performance, and errors in your RDS for MySQL and MariaDB databases. For example, you can set up CloudWatch Alarms to notify you on frequent restarts which are recorded in the error log. Similarly, alarms for events recorded in general or audit logs can be created to alert on unwanted changes made to your databases. You may also create alarms to monitor the slow query log and enable timely detection of long-running queries.

Amazon EC2 simplified the Spot pricing by moving to a model which delivers low, predictable prices that adjust gradually, based on long-term trends in supply and demand. You will continue to save up to 90% off the On-Demand instances price and you will continue to pay the Spot price that's in effect at the beginning of each instance-hour for your running instance. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 Spot instances - low cost EC2 instances - are now available in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. Spot instances are ideal for fault tolerant or stateless workloads such as big data & analytics, containers & stateless web servers, batch, high performance computing, CI/CD and test workloads. 

Launch Templates are now available in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. Launch Templates is a new capability that enables a new way to templatize your launch requests. Launch Templates streamline and simplify the launch process for Auto Scaling, Spot Fleet, Spot, and On-Demand instances. 

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL and MariaDB in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. 

Starting today, Amazon API Gateway supports multiple headers and query string parameters with the same name in the API Request.

Amazon API Gateway gives you the capability to quickly create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at scale. You can now pass multiple values for the same key in the header and query string when calling the API. This feature also supports returning multiple headers with the same name in the API response, for example sending multiple “Set-Cookie” headers.

This feature is available in all regions where API Gateway is available and China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD. To see all regions where API Gateway is available, see the Amazon Web Services region table.

To learn more about this feature, please visit the documentation here.

Please visit our product page for more information about Amazon API Gateway.