AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snowball Edge jobs directly from the console or via APIs. Many Snowball Edge customers deploy Snowball Edge devices for one or more years. By paying the device fees upfront, Snowball Edge’s long-term pricing options enable you to use Snowball Edge devices for 1 year or 3 years at up to a 62% discount compared to on-demand per-day fees. This pricing is available for all Snowball Edge device types in all regions where Snowball Edge is available.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework, a reference architecture that makes it easier for customers to set up Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor Apache workloads running on AWS.

Amazon Connect reduces telephony rates for 3 countries in Europe: Cyprus, Belgium and Portugal. Starting April 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use omnichannel contact center service, decreased the following telephony rates in the EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions:

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the following ten additional regions:

• Africa (Cape Town)
• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
• Asia Pacific (Osaka)
• Asia Pacific (Seoul)
• Canada (Central)
• Europe (Milano)
• Europe (Paris)
• Middle East (Bahrain)
• South America (São Paulo)
• US West (N. California)

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is pleased to announce the ability for you to purchase AMS through your preferred Solution Provider, separately from your AWS infrastructure services. AMS understands the need for flexibility in how you buy AWS infrastructure services and AWS Managed Services based on the complexity of workloads and organizational needs. This new feature enables you to purchase AWS infrastructure services directly or through any AWS Solution Provider Partner  (SPP) of your choice, while utilizing an AMS partner for value-added infrastructure operations separately.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications, as a public preview. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

Starting today, you can now use the Node.js 14.x runtime to develop functions in AWS Lambda@Edge. This runtime is in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Node.js 12.x runtimes.

Node.js 14.x, the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js, uses the new V8 8.1 engine and provides better performance than the previous LTS version, 12.x. In addition, Node.js 14.x supports new features such as nullish coalescing (?? operator), options chaining (?. operator), and diagnostic reporting. For more information about the benefits and new features of Node.js 14.x, read the Node.js 14.x announcement post on the AWS Compute Blog.

To get started with Node.js 14.x, upload your code to AWS Lambda through the AWS CLI or Lambda console, and select Node.js 14.x as the runtime. If you already have existing Node.js functions in Lambda, you can switch to the new runtime by making any required code changes to ensure compatibility with the new runtime and then editing the function configuration to set the runtime to Node.js 14.x.

To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page . For more information about the Node.js programming model in AWS Lambda, read the AWS Lambda Node.js documentation .

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: AWS Network Connectivity Options. The course introduces network connectivity concepts, describes network design patterns, and demonstrates how to apply the design patterns to common use cases. This intermediate, 150-minute course includes reading modules, quizzes to check your knowledge, and an optional hands-on lab. The course is designed for network engineers, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, systems engineers, and application architects.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.8.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.8.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include connection rate limiting to avoid problems with misconfigured clients (KIP-612 ) and topic identifiers which provides performance benefits (KIP-516 ). There is also an early access feature to replace zookeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum (KIP-500 ), however this is not recommended for use in production. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.8.0 .

Amazon Redshift native support for JSON and semi-structured data is now generally available. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to ingest and store semi-structured data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouses. Amazon Redshift also includes support for PartiQL  for SQL-compatible access to relational, semi-structured and nested data. Using the SUPER data type and PartiQL in Amazon Redshift, you can perform advanced analytics that combine classic structured SQL data (such as string, numeric, and timestamp) with the semi-structured SUPER data (such as JSON) with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.