Amazon Connect launches a new hours of operation UI with an enhanced user experience, AWS CloudTrail coverage and tagging. Hours of operation let you indicate when your call center is open, and are used when building flows and routing contacts to agents. Now when your operating hours are configured or modified in the Amazon Connect admin website, a record of that activity is available in AWS CloudTrail for visibility, reporting, and compliance. You can answer questions such as, “what were our hours before that change?”, and “when was that schedule deleted?” To learn more about the new hours of operations page, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide and the AWS CloudTrail Documentation .

Starting today, you can use Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Europe (Zurich), and Europe (Spain) Regions.

Today, Amazon EBS announced the availability of Snapshot Lock, a new security feature that helps customers comply with their data retention policies and add another layer of protection against inadvertent or malicious deletions of data. Customers use EBS Snapshots to back up their EBS volumes for disaster recovery, data migration, and compliance purposes. Customers can set up multiple layers of data protection for EBS Snapshots, including copying them across multiple AWS regions and accounts, setting up IAM access policies as well as enabling Recycle Bin . With Snapshot Lock, customers can configure locks on individual snapshots so that they cannot be deleted by anyone, including the account owner, for a specified period of time. Customers have the flexibility of granting certain users access to modify snapshot lock configurations per their data governance guidelines or implementing stricter controls by ensuring that the lock configuration cannot be modified by anyone, including privileged users. Customers can also rely on this feature to store EBS Snapshots in a WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) compliant format.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2022 CU9 for Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions. You can now leverage SQL Server 2022 features such as Query Store Enhancements, Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization, and SQL Server Ledger on your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens introduces Storage Lens groups, a new way to aggregate metrics using custom filters based on object metadata. Storage Lens groups help you drill-down into characteristics of your data, such as distribution of objects by age, your most common file types, and more. This information helps you to better understand and optimize your S3 storage.

AWS Cost Management services now support AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry resource tags to help customers better manage, analyze, and optimize their application related resource costs. Starting today, customers who use AppRegistry to define their applications can have the new AWS application tag applied to all their application resources. This tag is provided by AppRegistry, and allows customers to group and view resource collections across their AWS accounts as applications that they define. The application tag is automatically activated as a cost allocation tag so that it can be used in various cost management services to analyze, manage, and optimize application-related resource costs.

Today, AWS announced PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground. PartyRock is a fun and intuitive hands-on, generative AI app-building playground. In just a few steps, you can create a variety of apps to experiment with generative AI. For example, you could build an app to generate dad jokes on a chosen topic, create the perfect personalized playlist, recommend what to serve based on ingredients in your pantry, analyze and optimize your party budget, or create an AI storyteller to guide your next fantasy role-playing campaign. By building and playing with PartyRock apps, you’ll learn the techniques and capabilities needed to take full advantage of generative AI, including experimenting with various foundation models, building intuition with text-based prompting, and chaining prompts together. PartyRock is powered by Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from Amazon and leading AI companies available through an API.

Starting today, all new AWS IAM Identity Center instances will have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled by default. Enabling MFA is a security best practice we recommend, and is one of the simplest and most effective mechanisms to help you secure your user accounts.

Starting today, the memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6a instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. R6a instances are powered by third-generation AMD EPYC processors, and deliver up to 35% better price performance than comparable R5a instances. These instances offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

Today, AWS Backup announces a new jobs dashboard console experience, simplifying backup health monitoring at scale with a new visual user interface and aggregated backup, copy, and restore metrics for services supported by AWS Backup.