Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports UpdateApplicationMaintenanceConfiguration in preview. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics periodically patches the underlying infrastructure of applications with OS and container-image security updates to meet AWS compliance and security goals during the default maintenance windows  in each region. You can use UpdateApplicationMaintenanceConfiguration via the CLI or the API to choose your preferred maintenance window start times for an application.

AWS RoboMaker, now supports ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy (ROS 2 Foxy), which is the latest long-term support (LTS) release for ROS 2, and its compatible simulation engine, Gazebo 11, and Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) operating system.

AWS Glue DataBrew announces native console integration with Amazon AppFlow to connect to data from applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, ServiceNow, and tens of other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. To get started, when you create a new dataset in DataBrew , you can pick from a list of pre-configured flows from AppFlow that load data (scheduled by, by event and on-demand) into Amazon S3 or create a new flow . The transferred data has to be in S3 before you can use them as input for DataBrew. You can then clean and normalize this data in DataBrew, and join, union, aggregate or combine with datasets from other data stores or SaaS applications. You can leverage already available 250+ transformations to prepare data for analytics of machine learning, without writing any code. Learn more about supported AppFlow sources and destinations .

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.2 includes several bug fixes and security fixes. Version 2.6.2 will replace 2.6.1 as the default recommended version for new clusters created in Amazon MSK. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.2 .

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when using Amazon SNS to send SMS to your customers, you can set a principal entity ID and a message template ID, as Amazon SNS message attributes. 

We’re excited to announce an intermediate, 150-minute, digital course: Amazon Elastic Block Store Primer. This free course provides an overview of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and explores how to balance cost and performance using different volume types. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, a self-paced lab, and a quiz to check your knowledge. 

Today, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) adds support for an AWS managed Lambda layer in Java, node.js, and Python, providing a simple getting started experience for customers to add the OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector into their AWS Lambda functions for collecting trace data. In addition, ADOT has added support for AWS Systems Manager agent, enabling customers to update, manage, and configure ADOT Collector on an EC2 instance, an on-premises server, or a virtual machine (VM). As part of this release, Zipkin and Jaeger receivers are also integrated in the ADOT collector.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds support for Recursive Common Table Expression (CTE). Starting today, you can use a Recursive CTE on your Redshift cluster to query hierarchical data such as organizational charts where employees reports to other employees (managers), or multi-level product orders where a product consists of many components, which in turn consist of other components.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve updated AWS Instance Scheduler, a reference implementation that makes it easier for customers to control their AWS compute resource capacity and cost by configuring start and stop schedules for their Amazon EC2 and RDS instances.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology. Multi-AZ helps you meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.