Registration is now open for the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate beta exam, which will be available from February 16, 2021 to March 26, 2021. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate is intended for system administrators in cloud operations roles who have at least one year of hands-on experience with deployment, management, networking, and security on AWS.

Amazon Connect has launched a new version of Contact search. You can now use an enhanced UI to search with an extended eight-week timeframe getting unlimited results, use more filters, and multi-select values such as Agent name and Queue name. Search was also rebuilt to offer faster rate of return. This means you can build queries incrementally and explore results faster. You can also bookmark commonly used search criteria and review multiple chat transcripts, call recordings, and contact categorization results from the search page. We are maintaining the previous version of search during transition period and customers can switch back and compare with the previous experience with one click. To learn more, see the Contact Search documentation .

Effective Jan 1st, 2021, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) provides tiered pricing for monthly API requests. Tiered pricing will provide discounts based on your monthly usage of Amazon SQS. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Using Amazon SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the October 2020 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 Enterprise Edition. The October 2020 PSU for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 Standard Edition and Standard Edition One will be launched in early 2021. 

Voicemail Queues for Amazon Connect is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from CloudHesive, an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner. Voicemail Queues for Amazon Connect helps solve common challenges around voicemail workflow management and provides management insight and oversight around agent responsiveness to voicemail contacts. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers evaluation of and integration with current environments, solution design, testing and deployment, and post-go-live support.

APN Navigate’s newest track for all AWS Partners, APN Foundations Advanced, is now available. This track enables AWS Select Tier Partners to achieve AWS Advanced Tier as a Consulting or Technology Partner and can be found in APN Partner Central in your existing APN Navigate Foundations Toolbox.

Accelerated Cloud Engineering FedRAMP Launchpad is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Coalfire, an AWS Government Competency Partner. Accelerated Cloud Engineering FedRAMP Launchpad can help you create an operationally secure cloud environment ready for regulatory compliance audits in as little as 60 days. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers planning workshops, architecture design and deployment, functionality and compliance validation, and audit documentation.

AWS Certificate Manager(ACM), including Private Certificate Authority(CA) is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and as FedRAMP High in GovCloud(US-West) and GovCloud(US-East). These services are also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in these regions.

APN Navigate’s newest track for all AWS Partners, APN Foundations ISV Partner Path, is now available. This track guides AWS Partners through best practices to grow an AWS business through the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, implement AWS best practices, and promote AWS-verified solutions to customers through Partner programs that best serve Partner’s business needs.

Amazon EC2 R5B Instances are now certified for SAP workloads.