Amazon CloudWatch Logs is excited to announce support for account level data protection policy configuration, you can now create a data protection policy that will be applied to all existing and future log groups within your AWS account. 

Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory customers can access directory administrative EC2 instances easily from the AWS Directory Service console. Now, within minutes you can deploy a preconfigured domain-joined EC2 instance with Microsoft Active Directory administrative tools.

Today, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces support for dead-letter queue redrive via AWS SDK or Command Line Interface (CLI). Dead-letter queue redrive is an enhanced capability to improve the dead-letter queue management experience for Amazon SQS customers. Now, customers can use AWS SDK or CLI to move messages from the dead-letter queue to programmatically manage the lifecycle of their unconsumed messages at scale. 

Amazon Athena for Apache Spark now supports open-source data lake storage frameworks Apache Hudi 0.13, Apache Iceberg 1.2.1, and Linux Foundation Delta Lake 2.0.2. These frameworks simplify incremental data processing of large data sets using ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) transactions and make it simpler to store and process large data sets in your data lakes.

Amazon Athena for Apache Spark now allows you to use your own Java libraries and customize the Spark configurations for your Spark workloads. You can use Java libraries as custom JARs with Athena Spark to analyze data from multiple sources or use functions in custom jars for more flexibility with calculations.

Amazon Timestream announces the general availability of Customer Defined Partition Keys, providing additional flexibility for customers to partition their data based on their needs, and optimizing data collocation for lower query latency.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now supports real-time data export of unified customer profiles to Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. Companies can enable data streaming and automatically receive data for new profiles and updates to existing profiles into their Amazon Kinesis Data Stream.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized is a new configuration that provides improved price performance and predictable pricing for customers with I/O-intensive applications. Aurora I/O-Optimized offers improved performance, increasing throughput and reducing latency for customers’ most demanding workloads. With Aurora I/O-Optimized, there are zero charges for read and write I/O operations—you only pay for your database instances and storage usage, making it easy to predict your database spend up front.

AWS is retiring IAM actions for AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles under aws-portal service prefix, purchase-orders:ViewPurchaseOrders, and purchase-orders:ModifyPurchaseOrders on July 6, 2023. Today, we are launching bulk migration scripts to allow customers to update policies containing the above old actions on the retirement path to include new fine-grained actions securely and quickly. Customers can execute these scripts from their management accounts and update all affected policies in their Organization to include new actions, while maintaining their current access to AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles.

Starting today, AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java is available in 7 additional AWS Regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Jakarta, Osaka), Europe (Milan, Paris) and Middle East (Bahrain).