Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway supports Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for simplified deployment and management of multicast applications. IP multicast on AWS Transit Gateway delivers a single stream of data to many users simultaneously. IGMP, an open standard, enables dynamic establishment of multicast group memberships allowing large groups of end users to access multicast data on demand.

Today AWS announced the availability of AWS Transit Gateway Connect, a new feature of the AWS Transit Gateway that simplifies branch connectivity through native integration of Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) appliances into AWS.

Amazon EC2 now provides additional network performance metrics to help customers gain more insights into instance network performance. Five new metrics provide customers visibility when their instances exceed network allowances defined by AWS. This visibility helps you proactively resolve application performance issues and right size your instance fleets based on your desired network performance.

Amazon QuickSight dashboards can now visualize data from Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost effectively at scale. Authors in QuickSight can select Amazon Elasticsearch Service as a data source, select the specific data domain to analyze and start visualizing in QuickSight. See here to learn more.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use custom synonyms with Amazon Kendra to improve the accuracy of their search results.

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used data warehouse, now offers the ability to move an Amazon Redshift cluster to another AWS Availability Zone (AZ). The cluster relocation feature moves a cluster to another AZ in one step without requiring application changes. You can invoke the relocation function in cases where resource constraints in a given AZ are disrupting cluster operations such as the ability to resume or resize a cluster. This feature is available for use on clusters leveraging the RA3 instance family and is offered at no additional cost.

Amazon Redshift RA3 with managed storage is the the latest generation node type and allows you to scale compute and storage independently. Today, we’re announcing RA3.xlplus – the third and smallest member of the RA3 node-family. RA3 allows you to size your cluster based primarily on your compute needs. With the introduction of RA3.xlplus, you now have even more compute sizing options to choose from to address a broader set of workload requirements. 

Amazon Redshift , a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, announces preview of native support for JSON and semi-structured data. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to store the semi-structured data in Redshift tables. Redshift also adds support for the PartiQL query language to seamlessly query and process the semi-structured data. This functionality enables you to achieve advanced analytics that combine the classic structured SQL data (such as strings, numerics, and timestamps) with the semi-structured SUPER data with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.

We announced general availability of Amazon Redshift federated query with support for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL earlier this year. With this feature, many customers have been able to combine live data from operational databases with the data in Amazon Redshift data warehouse and the data in Amazon S3 data lake environment in order to get unified analytics view across all the data in the enterprise. We now extend the federated query capability to Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL. 

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS provides a new deployment option for Amazon EMR that allows you to run Apache Spark on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). If you already use Amazon EMR, you can now run Amazon EMR based applications with other types of applications on the same Amazon EKS cluster to improve resource utilization and simplify infrastructure management across multiple AWS Availability Zones. If you already run big data frameworks on Amazon EKS, you can now use Amazon EMR to automate provisioning and management, and run Apache Spark up to 3x faster. With this deployment option, you can focus on running analytics workloads while Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS builds, configures, and manages containers.