AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With this launch, CloudHSM is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs.
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Today, we are releasing a new JDBC driver with features such as Array data type support, bug fixes, and performance improvements.
The 2.x version of the driver is a major version upgrade from the last version. A complete list of enhancements is available in the release notes. We recommend that you review the changes between the old (1.x) and the new (2.x) driver documented in the migration guide before using it on production systems. In addition to the JDBC driver, customers can connect to Amazon Athena using an ODBC Driver, an API, or via the AWS Console.
Starting today, you can access custom Amazon RDS RI purchase recommendations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to Amazon EC2 recommendations.
Starting today, Amazon DynamoDB encryption at rest is available in 10 additional regions: US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), and South America (Sao Paulo). With the latest release, DynamoDB encryption at rest is now available in 14 regions including EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).
Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, simplifies Domain Name System (DNS) troubleshooting by enabling access to its DNS Audit event logs. You can now audit your AWS Managed Microsoft AD DNS events, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot DNS issues.
AWS Config and AWS Firewall Manager now support new multi-account features by integrating with AWS Organizations. With the new AWS Config multi-account data aggregation capability, Organizations administrators can now get an organization-wide view of their compliance status. AWS Firewall Manager enables Organizations administrators to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across accounts in their organization.
You can now launch Amazon Redshift clusters on our second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. DC2 nodes deliver up to twice the performance as the previous generation DC1 nodes, at the same price.
Google has made technical changes to its cloud infrastructure that have caused collateral damage to an anti-censorship technique called domain fronting.…
The operator of the .uk internet registry has outlined the changes it plans to make to its Whois domain registration system in order to bring it in line with new European privacy legislation.…
BT is forging ahead with plans to shut its traditional telephone network, with the intention of shifting all customers over to IP telephony services by 2025.…
Roundup Cisco leads the networking roundup this week, with news that there's one fewer way to avoid its WebEx brand: as part of a product reorganisation, what was Cisco Spark is to become WebEx Teams.…
You may have heard this one before, but we have now really run out of IPv4 address blocks.…
The Registry of Open Data on AWS (RODA) makes it easy for people to find datasets that are publicly available through AWS. When data is shared on AWS, anyone can analyze it without needing to download or store it, which allows users to spend more time on analysis rather than acquisition. RODA is available now at https://registry.opendata.aws/
Hidden dependencies in Microsoft's on-premises Dynamics 365 can leave users open to cloudy outages.…
Data management biz Hortonworks has lifted the covers off a service that aims to make it easier for enterprises to identify, secure and connect data stored both on-premises and in the cloud.…
The US government has weighed in on the omni-shambles that is the internet infrastructure industry's failed effort to comply with European privacy laws.…
With AWS Elemental MediaLive you can now output live channels as RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) and RTMPS, which is the encrypted version of the protocol (Secure, over SSL/TLS). RTMP is the preferred protocol for sending live streams to popular social platforms which means you can send live channel content to social and sharing platforms in a secure and reliable way while continuing to stream to your own website, app or network.
We are excited to announce the addition of four new free digital courses to our online training portfolio. These courses introduce security and machine learning services launched at April's AWS Summit in San Francisco.
The US Supreme Court has dodged a critical legal question about the reach of America's courts in the internet era, deciding to drop a test case between Microsoft and the Department of Justice.…
The US Department of Defense (DoD) still intends to choose just one vendor for its multibillion-dollar cloud contract – amid complaints from Oracle's co-CEO that such a plan "makes no sense".…
T-Mobile US will be a bit lighter in the wallet today thanks to a $40m penalty the carrier has been served by the FCC.…
An effort to pass net neutrality legislation at the California state level is in doubt after an official analysis of the proposed bill recommend pulling out two key measures.…
The Whois public database of domain name registration details is dead.…
America's comms watchdog has served notice to would-be satellite network providers that it won't abide any more unauthorized launches.…
The AWS Amplify JavaScript Library introduces GraphQL support and a new set of data capabilities with AWS AppSync integration.
Web and React Native developers can now easily integrate multiple AWS data sources into their apps via AWS AppSync, and utilize real-time data synchronization capabilities in their apps using the new GraphQL capabilities of the API category in AWS Amplify.
GraphQL is a descriptive data query language for APIs, and it simplifies creating frontend applications that interact with backend services. AWS Amplify can integrate with any GraphQL provider to perform queries and real-time data subscriptions via it's easy to use GraphQL client.
AWS AppSync extends GraphQL's capabilities even more by offering enterprise-level security, real-time data synchronization, and orchestration of backend data resources. AWS Amplify's built-in support for AWS AppSync comes with new React components for working with GraphQL data, and an update to the AWS Mobile CLI which enables configuring AWS AppSync for JavaScript apps with a single command.
GraphQL support is the latest addition to AWS Amplify's service categories, which help developers to build cloud-connected apps easily, iterate quickly and deliver world-class user experiences.
Read more about AWS Amplify GraphQL support in the AWS Amplify Developer Guide.
AWS Amplify is a Javascript library that can be used from any region where there is availability of the AWS services that are invoked through the library. For more information on AWS service region availability, please see the region table.
Starting today, AWS AppSync is generally available (GA). AWS AppSync is an enterprise ready GraphQL service with realtime data and offline programming capabilities.
Fibre-building minnows passed nearly one million FTTP connections last year – more than double the amount BT's Openreach managed, according to a report from an industry body.…
Public cloud services will be a $302bn-plus global market by 2021 and ten vendors will account for nearly three-quarters of those sales, if the mystics at Gartner have read those tea leaves correctly.…
Ofcom has delayed plans to force incumbent telco BT's Openreach to open up its dark fibre network. For now.…
The vast majority of punters are potentially leaving themselves exposed to miscreants by failing to change the password and security setting on their routers - according to a survey.…
Users of the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora users can now create quick, efficient database clones. Cloning is useful for a number of purposes including application development, testing, database updates, and running analytical queries.
AWS Glue now enables you to set a timeout value on extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs as a safeguard against runaway jobs.
The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with advanced optimizations for TensorFlow 1.7 tailored to deliver higher-performance training across Amazon EC2 C5 and P3 instances.
You can now use Apache Spark 2.3.0, Apache HBase 1.4.2, and Presto 0.194 on Amazon EMR release 5.13.0. Spark 2.3.0 adds several new features and updates, including continuous processing mode in Structured Streaming for lower end-to-end latency, an improved ORC file format reader that supports vectorized reads and improves scan throughput, PySpark and Pandas interoperability improvements. improvements. HBase 1.4.2 and Presto 0.194 includes various bug fixes and improvements. Additionally, the AWS SDK included on your Amazon EMR clusters is now updated to 1.11.297.
Angry members of Australia's .au internet registry have called for the scalps of its CEO and three Board members as part of an ongoing dispute over how the organization is being run.…
Google looks set to expand its horizon according to reports that claim the ad giant is in talks to buy Nokia's airplane broadband biz.…
The internet's domain name system is going to miss a May 25 deadline to become complaint with new European privacy legislation by, um, a year or so.…
The internet's domain name system is going to miss a May 25 deadline to become complaint with new European privacy legislation by, um, a year or so.…
AWS Glue updated its Apache Spark infrastructure to support Apache Spark 2.2.1. This allows you to take advantage of stability fixes and new features available in this version of Apache Spark.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now supports AWS PrivateLink. This feature helps to protect your messages from internet traffic by enabling you to use Amazon SNS inside your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now allows you to dynamically get the latest ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID when creating a cluster made up of EC2 instances.
AWS CloudFormation StackSets now allows you to create multiple roles in which your users can perform stack set operations in target accounts. This allows you to restrict specific sets of users from using stack set operations such as creating or updating stack sets in specific target accounts. Please see the documentation to learn more about creating multiple roles.
Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo) Regions. M5 instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 General Purpose compute instances, were introduced in November 2017 to offer a balance of compute, memory, storage and networking resources for a broad range of customers' workloads.
Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. C5 instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake), were introduced in November 2017. C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, Nitro Hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customers’ workloads.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has gobbled Brit cloud consultancy and app developer Red Pixie for an undisclosed sum.…
The London Waterloo to Southampton train line is today named the worst major commuting route for frustrated wage slaves desperate to get a signal on their way to and from the office.…
So this is awkward: last week Microsoft trumpeted its new Australian Azure region for government clients. But a couple of days later Australian authorities said it needs extra security controls before it’s sufficiently secure.…
CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon SQS FIFO enabling you to natively route events to SQS FIFO queues. To learn more about using Targets with CloudWatch Events, please visit documentation here.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports creating Application Load Balancers through the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console. Previously, you could only create an Application Load Balancer using AWS SDKs, AWS CLI, and EB CLI. In the Elastic Beanstalk console, you can now choose Application Load Balancer in addition to Classic Load Balancer when you configure your environment. To learn more about configuring an Application Load Balancer on Elastic Beanstalk console, please see the documentation.
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.
You can now use AWS PrivateLink in the EU (Paris) Region. AWS PrivateLink allows customers to securely and privately access services hosted on AWS from their Virtual Private Cloud and from on-premises. AWS PrivateLink also allows customers and partners to share services with other accounts and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks in an easy and scalable way.
Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate 2 is the latest release candidate of the next generation Amazon Linux operating system. It incorporates feedback received for the first LTS Candidate (2017.12 build) that was released on December 13, 2017. LTS Candidate 2 provides an updated version of the Linux Kernel (4.14) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), systemd support, a newer compiler (gcc 7.3), an updated C runtime (glibc 2.26), newer tooling (binutils 2.29.1), and the latest software packages through the extras mechanism.
You can now share mailboxes among your team members. All users that have been granted access to a shared mailbox can send and receive emails using this mailbox without the need to manually share access credentials. Shared mailboxes make it easy to use email addresses that need to be monitored and used by multiple people. For example, a company could create a single email address for sales inquiries (such as sales@yourcompany.com), and provide access to all sales people so that they can respond.
To create a shared mailbox, create a mailbox in the Amazon WorkMail management console and select the Permissions tab. Then, add users and groups, and select whether they have Full Access, Send As, or Send on Behalf permissions for the mailbox. Full Access allows a user or group to access the entire mailbox, and create folders that only certain users can access. Send As allows users to send emails using the mailbox's email alias, and Send on Behalf allows users to send emails using the mailbox’s email alias but still be identified as the actual sender. Visit our documentation for more information.
Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. To more easily enable the voicing of longer text input, Amazon Polly has doubled its character limit for the SynthesizeSpeech API operation. The maximum length of input text can be up to 3000 billed characters, or 6000 total characters including non-billed SSML tags.
We are pleased to announce the general availability of the latest release of Thinkbox Deadline, v10.0.13.6. This maintenance release includes greater control over Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet instances as well as bug fixes. With Deadline 10.0.13.6, customers have greater control over their Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet instances, with the option to either maintain the number of instances you’ve requested, or to automatically shut them down when they’ve been idle for a period of time. This option can be found under the Settings tab in the Spot Fleet Configuration window.
Promo Amazon Web Services (AWS) has spent years working with thousands of companies across all industries to create the most comprehensive collection of best-practices and guidance known as the Well-Architected Framework.…
Several political websites using the NationBuilder platform have been down for almost 24 hours – perfect timing for the launch of the UK’s local election campaign.…
AWS Batch now supports the ability to automatically terminate your jobs at execution level. With job execution timeout, you can set a timeout duration per retry attempt in your job definition or provide it as an override when you submit the job, and AWS Batch will terminate your job once the job has been running for the specified duration. Note that the time out duration must be at least 60 seconds and the timer will start when the job reaches a running state.
Now you can use QuickSight to directly connect to, analyze and report on data from popular business applications such JIRA, GitHub, ServiceNow, Adobe Analytics, and Twitter. For example, engineering teams using JIRA to track issues such as tasks and bugs can now use QuickSight to report on developer efficiency and bug burndown. Marketing organizations can integrate QuickSight with Adobe Analytics to build consolidated dashboards on their online and web marketing data. Brands can plug in to Twitter to analyze and understand their customers’ sentiment. These connectors make it easy for non-technical business users to easily connect to the 3rd party application sources using OAuth, easily ingest and report on the data with a few simple clicks and eliminates the need to export the data to an intermediate store.
Twitter removed more than 270,000 accounts for terrorism-related violations in the last six months of 2017 – and most of these were detected by internal tools.…
It seems Microsoft's Office 365 is having an unscheduled nap as users across the world report difficulties logging into the administration portal.…
Amazon Web Services is letting punters store objects in S3 for $0.01 per GB per month. The catch? The data will be held in one region, meaning there is less resiliency baked into the service in the event of an outage.…
UK mobile operators have collectively forked out £1.3bn on boosting spectrum following regulator Ofcom's latest auction.…
You can now backup to AWS in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region using the Tape Gateway virtual tape library (VTL) configuration of AWS Storage Gateway. Tape Gateway emulates a physical tape library, so instead of backing up to physical tapes, you can backup to virtual tapes stored in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier, using common backup applications such as Veeam, Veritas Backup Exec and NetBackup, Dell EMC NetWorker and Commvault.
The AWS Storage Gateway service expanded the list of Amazon S3 storage classes supported by File Gateway to include S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA). With this addition, you can now store and access your files as objects through the File Gateway using the S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA storage classes.
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.
Apache MXNet Model Server (MMS) is an open source model-serving tool designed to simplify the deployment of deep learning models at scale. MMS version 0.3 allows developers to set up a scalable serving infrastructure for production, using pre-built container images pre-configured and optimized for deep learning workloads on Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now allows you to encrypt data in transit between your file system and its clients. The Amazon EFS encryption of data in transit feature uses industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 to encrypt all data sent to and from connected clients. To further simplify using EFS, a new mount helper utility is available that can be used to establish encrypted client connections to either encrypted at rest or unencrypted file systems. With this launch, Amazon EFS now offers a comprehensive encryption solution, allowing customers to encrypt their data both at rest and in transit.
The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) implementation is now available under the Apache 2.0 license. AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the resources needed by your serverless application. The SAM implementation is the code that translates SAM templates into AWS CloudFormation stacks. Previously, you could submit feature requests to the SAM specification and AWS would need to make corresponding updates to the SAM implementation. Now, you can contribute new features and enhancements to all of SAM. You can fork the SAM repository and propose changes to the implementation by creating a pull request.
The outgoing CEO of nbn™, the company building and operating Australia’s national broadband network (NBN), has implored the company’s staff to “keep our costs down” in the “note to employees” announcing his departure.…
The 2018 AWS Summit in San Francisco began on Wednesday with shock and awe, a chest-thumping bass beat accompanying a fusillade of testimonials from business customers that have cozied up to Amazon's cloud infrastructure.…
You can now order and deploy AWS Snowball Edge in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. This expansion enables you to put a Snowball Edge cluster onsite in remote locations for data collection and analysis.
Amazon Transcribe is available for all customers. Powered by deep learning technologies, Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed and continuously trained automatic speech recognition service that automatically generates time-stamped text transcripts.
Amazon Translate is now available for all customers. Powered by deep-learning technologies, Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation.
AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Using Secrets Manager, you can secure, audit, and manage secrets used to access resources in the AWS Cloud, on third-party services, and on-premises.
AWS Firewall Manager is a security management tool to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across your accounts and applications. Using Firewall Manager, you can roll out WAF rules all at once for your Application Load Balancers and Amazon CloudFront distributions and also ensure new applications and resources comply with a common set of security rules from day one.
S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA; Z-IA) is a new storage class designed for customers who want a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data, but do not require the multiple Availability Zone data resilience model of the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA; S-IA) storage classes. S3 One Zone-IA is intended for use cases with infrequently accessed data that is re-creatable, such as storing secondary backup copies of on-premises data or for storage that is already replicated in another AWS Region for compliance or disaster recovery purposes. With S3 One Zone-IA, customers can now store infrequently accessed data within a single Availability Zone at 20% lower cost than S3 Standard-IA. In addition, S3 One Zone-IA can offer customers higher availability and durability than self-managed physical data centers, with the added benefit of having to pay only for what they use.
AWS Config now includes multi-account, multi-region data aggregation, enabling centralized auditing and governance. This feature reduces the time and overhead needed to gather an enterprise-wide view of your compliance status.
You can now use TensorFlow version 1.6 and Apache MXNet version 1.1 with the Amazon SageMaker pre-built deep learning framework containers. Now released as open source on GitHub, these containers can now be downloaded to your local environment for testing before deployment. You can also now use more instance types in Amazon SageMaker, including all Amazon EC2 M5 instance types for training and hosting, 11 more instance types for notebook instances, 3 more instance types for model training, and 16 more instance types for model hosting.
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is a managed private CA service that enables you to easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates. ACM Private CA provides you a highly-available private CA service without the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of operating your own private CA. You can now use ACM’s certificate management capabilities to manage public and private certificates centrally. With ACM Private CA developers can now deploy private certificates for internal resources programmatically using APIs. You get the flexibility to create private certificates for applications that require custom certificate lifetimes or resource names.
Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz was reportedly set to enjoy a slap-up meal with US president mop-haired windbag Donald Trump last night, giving the pair a chance to compare Amazon-bashing notes.…
The four-year court battle between the US government and Microsoft over the release of emails held in the software giant's data centre in Ireland has finally come to an end – of sorts.…
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 develop your AWS 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.
The US government has issued Microsoft with a new warrant to get access to emails held on the firm's Irish servers, while asking the Supreme Court to dismiss the existing legal battle.…
Citrix has extended its cloud to Australia, with a new “Asia-Pacific South” region joining its US-based and EMEA efforts as of April 4th, Sydney time.…
Microsoft is working on a new class of disk-based storage appliance for its Azure cloud service, because tape is proving too hard and too slow to use in some situations.…
Amazon Rekognition has improved real-time facial recognition and verification accuracy for even more accurate facial authentication and people search use cases. For face verification applications, Rekognition is now up to 80% more accurate in distinguishing between people who look very similar to each other, and up to 35% more accurate in recognizing the same person with substantial changes in their appearance (hairstyle, hair color, facial hair, glasses, etc.). This reduces both false accepts and false rejects when matching pairs of faces.
Amazon WorkDocs Drive is now available for Microsoft Windows PC users. Amazon WorkDocs Drive is a native desktop application that combines the ease of working in Windows File Explorer with the scale of Amazon WorkDocs. With Amazon WorkDocs Drive, all of your files are available on-demand from your device without consuming valuable disk space on your PC. You can use Amazon WorkDocs Drive as your user drive, and no longer need to use network shares to store your content.
You can now attach resource policies to APIs in Amazon API Gateway, making it easier to set access controls for invoking your APIs.
You can now use an AWS Lambda function from a different AWS 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 AWS accounts.
Amazon CloudWatch Vended logs now support Route 53 logs. Vended logs are logs that are natively published by AWS services on behalf of our customers.
You can now use AWS Glue in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS region.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now integrates with Amazon Cognito to provide user-level authentication for Kibana, without the need to configure and manage a proxy server. With today’s release, you can sign-in to the service through enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory using SAML 2.0, and through social identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. You can also set up a secure, scalable, and simplified sign-up experience using Amazon Cognito User Pools. Once you sign-in, Amazon Cognito establishes a session using the appropriate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, which provides access to the Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain.
Amazon Connect federated single sign-on using SAML 2.0 is now generally available. This allows contact center agents and managers to access Amazon Connect using their existing corporate credentials. As an administrator, you can enforce password policies, and use your existing SAML 2.0 user directory to control access to Amazon Connect, based on your agents’ location, the device they are using, and their role.
You can enable federated access and controls via any SAML 2.0 compliant identity provider, such as Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, Okta, Ping Identity, and Shibboleth. Once this is done, agents and managers can sign in to Amazon Connect through your identity provider portal with a single click, and without a separate username and password for Amazon Connect. To learn more, see Configure SAML for Identity Management in Amazon Connect.
You can use federated single sign-on using SAML 2.0 in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered, and there are no additional Amazon Connect charges for using SAML 2.0. To learn more about Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
The Amazon Connect outbound contact API for automating calls to customers is now generally available. You can schedule automated calls for appointment reminders, like doctor appointments and payment due notifications. You can also trigger automated notification calls in response to events, like notifying a customer about credit card fraud on their account. In addition, you can use the outbound contact API to initiate calls from other applications, such as CRM systems, using specific contact flows to inform customers about important information, such as when a service outage occurs. To learn more, see the outbound contact API documentation.
You can use the Amazon Connect outbound contact API in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered. There is no additional charge for using the outbound contact API, but standard pricing for service usage and associated telephony rates do apply. Please see Amazon Connect Pricing for more information. To learn more about Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect website.
AWS Systems Manager now allows you to select and deploy patches automatically for instances running CentOS Linux version 6.5 and higher.
You can now use launch templates with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet in your AWS CloudFormation templates. Launch templates are a new capability for templatizing your EC2 instance launch requests.
