AWS Organizations now offers a new console experience that provides you with a more intuitive way to manage your multi-account environment on AWS. You can now more easily navigate through your Organizational Unit hierarchy and perform AWS account management tasks in a streamlined way. The updated interface also gives you easy access to documentation, product information, and resources to assist you in managing your multi-account environment.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver is now generally available. The EBS CSI driver makes it simple to configure and use block storage for applications running in both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and self-managed Kubernetes clusters running on AWS using standard Kubernetes interfaces.

Today, we are launching Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS support for Pod Templates to make it simple to run Spark jobs on shared EKS clusters. A Pod is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage and network resources, and a specification for how to run the containers. Pod Templates are specifications which determine how each Pod runs. Customers often consolidate multiple applications on a shared EKS cluster to improve utilization and save costs. However, each application may have different requirements. For example, you may want to run performance intensive workloads such as ML model training jobs on SSD-backed instances for better performance, or ad-hoc workloads on Spot instances for lower cost. You can also schedule a separate logging container to forward logs to your existing monitoring application. With this release, you can use Pod Templates with EMR on EKS to configure how to run Spark jobs on shared EKS clusters.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning enables you to find the best version of a model by finding the optimal set of hyperparameter configuration for your dataset. Starting today, SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports running up to 100 parallel training jobs for hyperparameter tuning, which gives you a 10X increase of parallel training jobs so you can complete your tuning faster. Additionally, for “Random” search strategy, SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports exploring up to 10,000 hyperparameter configurations, a 20x increase over previous limit of 500, enabling you to improve coverage of search space leading to potentially better predictive performance of your model.

AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass is a test automation tool for your IoT devices running AWS IoT Greengrass.

AWS Audit Manager now offers three new prebuilt standard frameworks: NIST Cybersecurity Framework version 1.1, AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, and AWS Well-Architected framework. These frameworks add to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from any of these frameworks with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in the framework you choose and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

Today we announced AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Control for Amazon MSK. IAM Access Control is a security option offered at no additional cost that simplifies cluster authentication and Apache Kafka API authorization using IAM role or user policies to control access. By using IAM Access Control, customers no longer need to build and run one-off access management systems to control client authentication and authorization for Apache Kafka, and MSK clusters are secured using least privileged permissions by default.  

Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts of up to 36% in India and up to 26% in Asia Pacific region (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, & Thailand) for Regional Data Transfer Out to Internet rates. The new CloudFront prices in these regions are effective May 1st, 2021. You can find CloudFront’s updated on-demand pricing on the CloudFront Pricing Page . 

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Connect is now available in the Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Africa (Cape Town), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers instances from the AWS Graviton2 instance family. Instance types include general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g, R6gd). Customers can enjoy up to 38% improvement in indexing throughput, 50% reduction in indexing latency, and 30% improvement in query performance when compared to the corresponding x86-based instances from the current generation (M5, C5, R5).