Today, Amazon announced the availability of a new CloudWatch metric called EBS Stalled I/O Check to monitor the health of your AWS EBS volumes. You can use this CloudWatch metric to monitor the status of the I/O being driven on your EBS volume to determine when your volumes are impaired. With this new volume level metric, you can now quickly detect and respond to EBS impairments that may potentially be impacting the performance of your applications. The metric will return a 0 (pass) or a 1 (fail) status based on if the EBS volume is processing requested I/O operations. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can use the new metric to create customized dashboards and set alarms that notify you or automatically perform actions based on the metric.

Today, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support for logging data event SQS APIs using AWS CloudTrail, enabling customers to have greater visibility into SQS activity in their AWS account for best practices in security and operational troubleshooting. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Starting today, AWS Graviton3E-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7gn instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Amazon EC2 C7gn instances feature the new 5th generation AWS Nitro Cards and deliver the highest network bandwidth, the best packet-processing performance, and the best price performance for network-intensive workloads. C7gn instances offer up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance per vCPU versus comparable current generation x86-based network optimized instances. Take advantage of the enhanced networking capabilities to scale performance and throughput while optimizing the cost of running network-intensive workloads. Workload examples include network virtual appliances, data analytics, and CPU-based artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) inference.

Amazon VPC allows customers to create VPCs and subnets of different sizes using IPv6 CIDRs. With this capability, customers can now create VPCs in sizes between /44 and /60, and subnets in sizes between /44 and /64, in increments of /4. Before today, AWS supported one standard IPv6 CIDR block size of /56 for VPC and /64 for subnet, whereas IPv4 CIDR block size were flexible for both VPCs and subnets.

AWS Supply Chain now offers Work Order Insights to provide order level visibility of maintenance related materials from sourcing to delivery and making it easier for customers to execute planned maintenance and repairs.

Today, Amazon Athena released a new JDBC driver that improves the experience of connecting to, querying, and visualizing data from your preferred SQL development and business intelligence applications. The new JDBC driver is simple to upgrade and can improve performance for applications that consume large query results by reading results from Amazon S3.

AWS Lambda now allows Lambda functions to authenticate with multi-VPC enabled Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters over AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). This allows you to easily establish IAM secured cross-account connectivity between Lambda functions and Amazon MSK clusters.

Today, AWS launched new IAM Identity Center APIs to manage user assignments to supported AWS and cloud applications. Together with the previously available APIs, this release allows customers to automate the management of account and application access, streamlining how customers scale with IAM Identity Center.

AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications using Java 21. This runtime is based on the latest long-term support release of AWS Corretto, Amazon’s distribution of the Open JDK. Developers can use Java 21 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, and AWS will automatically apply updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available.

Automation, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, enables you to automate routine operations tasks using runbooks. Today, AWS Systems Manager announces enhanced automation actions such as loops, runbook variables, type transformations, and output filtering. This launch simplifies the runbook authoring experience and eliminates the need to to write custom scripts to perform these actions.