Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition adds support for the pg_bigm extension. pg_bigm extension provides full text search capability in PostgreSQL . This extension allows a user to create 2-gram (bigram) index for faster full text search.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition adds support for the pg_proctab extension. pg_proctab is a collection of stored functions that can access the operating systems process table so that system statistics can be queried through the database. pg_proctab functions make it easier to collect data on your PostgreSQL database including up-to-date information on processor and I/O statistics on SQL queries which makes troubleshooting easier. 

Amazon Aurora now allows you to create clones between Aurora Serverless v1 and provisioned Aurora DB clusters to enable quick sharing of data. 

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL versions 12.6, 11.11, 10.16, and 9.6.21. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. As a reminder, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 will reach end of life on January 31, 2022. 

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you monitor and improve application read/write performance and throughput by using new Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports converting Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) bitmap and SCTE-27 image-based subtitles to WebVTT captions.

AWS CloudFormation announces the launch of the CloudFormation Public Registry , a new searchable collection of extensions  that allows you to discover, provision, and manage third-party extensions, which include resource types (provisioning logic) and modules published by AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners and the developer community. You can also create and publish your own extensions on the CloudFormation Public Registry, allowing anyone to use them. Today, you can centrally search and use over 35 extensions published on the Public Registry by APN Partners and AWS Quick Starts. You can view the identity verification for each extension publisher on the Public Registry. APN Partners who collaborated on this launch include MongoDB, Datadog, Atlassian Opsgenie, JFrog, Trend Micro, Splunk, Aqua Security, FireEye, Sysdig, Snyk, Check Point, Spot by NetApp, Gremlin, Stackery, and Iridium.

The MariaDB audit plug-in is now available for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL instances using MySQL major version 8.0. The MariaDB audit plug-in is also available for instances using MySQL major versions 5.6 and 5.7, and provides event logging for database activity to help customers meet compliance and audit requirements, and troubleshoot application issues. Some of the key details for implementing the plugin are:

• Enabling and disabling the audit plug-in – Users can enable audit plug-in by creating an option group, adding MARIADB_AUDIT_PLUGIN option to the group, and attaching the option group to an RDS instance. Audit logging can be disabled by removing the option group from the instance.
• SERVER_AUDIT_EVENTS variables – These variables allow users to specify the events they want to include in the logs (CONNECTION: users connecting and disconnecting, QUERY: queries and their result, and TABLE: which tables are affected by the queries).
• SERVER_AUDIT_EXCL_USERS and SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS variables – These variables specify which users’ activity should be excluded from or included in the audit. SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS has higher priority and all users’ activity is recorded by default.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the updated one-day classroom course and new digital course, AWS Technical Essentials. These courses are ideal for technical learners who need to understand fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to make informed decisions about IT solutions based on business requirements.  

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lookout for Metrics now allows you to detect anomalies on your Amazon CloudWatch data. Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies (outliers from the norm) without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon CloudWatch provides you with actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.