AWS Backup now offers you the ability to create legal holds on your protected data beyond your defined retention policies, for legal and auditing purposes. Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold. With this feature, AWS Backup allows you to manage legal hold requests at scale and help prove compliance to outside counsel, auditors, and related third-parties. Together with AWS Backup Vault Lock , this new capability helps you meet the key criteria for data storage and preservation of electronically stored information (ESI) set forth by SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511, and CFTC Regulation 1.31. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports a 1-day Lifecycle Management Policy that allows you to automatically move files that haven’t been accessed in 1 day to the Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class. You can configure this new policy option for your file system, or you can use one of the existing policy options: 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days.

Today, AWS Backup is announcing application-aware data protection that enables you to add AWS CloudFormation stacks to backup policies, making it easier for you to back up and restore your entire applications. AWS Backup automates the data protection of applications that are defined using AWS CloudFormation stacks to create immutable application-level backups using AWS Backup Vault Lock.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments to help you with safer, simpler, and faster updates to your Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS databases. Blue/Green Deployments create a fully managed staging environment that allows you to deploy and test production changes, keeping your current production database safe. With a single click, you can promote the staging environment to be the new production system in as fast as a minute, with no changes to your application and no data loss. 

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, that enables organizations to provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is announcing support for several new migration and modernization features, including application and wave management, custom modernization actions, and launch template configuration. Application Migration Service helps minimize time-intensive manual processes by automating the conversion of your source servers to run natively on AWS with optional modernization features. 

AWS Backup now supports organization-wide delegation of backup administration to member accounts within AWS Organizations. This enables delegated backup administrators to create and manage backup policies and monitor backup activity across accounts within the organization.

Amazon CodeWhisperer now provides AWS administrators the ability to enable CodeWhisperer for their organization with Single Sign-On authentication. Administrators can easily integrate CodeWhisperer with their existing workforce identity solutions, provide access to users and groups, and configure organization-wide settings. Additionally, individual users who do not have AWS accounts can now use CodeWhisperer with their personal email using AWS Builder ID. The sign-up process takes only a few minutes and enables developers to start using CodeWhisperer immediately without any wait-list. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now supports Amazon RDS Optimized Reads for up to 50% faster query processing compared to previous generation instances. Optimized Read-enabled instances achieve faster query processing by placing temporary tables generated by MySQL on the local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage that’s physically connected to the host server. Complex queries that utilize temporary tables, such as queries involving sorts, hash aggregations, high-load joins, and Common Table Expressions (CTEs) can now execute up to 50% faster with Optimized Reads on RDS for MySQL. 

We are excited to announce data protection in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, a new set of capabilities that leverage pattern matching and machine learning capabilities to detect and protect sensitive log data-in-transit. Amazon CloudWatch Logs enables you to centralize the logs from all of your systems, applications, and AWS services, in a single, highly scalable service. With log data protection in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you can now detect and protect sensitive log data-in-transit logged by your systems, and applications.