Today we announced AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Control for Amazon MSK. IAM Access Control is a security option offered at no additional cost that simplifies cluster authentication and Apache Kafka API authorization using IAM role or user policies to control access. By using IAM Access Control, customers no longer need to build and run one-off access management systems to control client authentication and authorization for Apache Kafka, and MSK clusters are secured using least privileged permissions by default.  

Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts of up to 36% in India and up to 26% in Asia Pacific region (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, & Thailand) for Regional Data Transfer Out to Internet rates. The new CloudFront prices in these regions are effective May 1st, 2021. You can find CloudFront’s updated on-demand pricing on the CloudFront Pricing Page . 

Starting today, AWS Transit Gateway Connect is now available in the Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Africa (Cape Town), and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers instances from the AWS Graviton2 instance family. Instance types include general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g, R6gd). Customers can enjoy up to 38% improvement in indexing throughput, 50% reduction in indexing latency, and 30% improvement in query performance when compared to the corresponding x86-based instances from the current generation (M5, C5, R5).

FreeRTOS version 202104.00 includes a new managed over-the-air update (OTA) library, coreMQTT-Agent library and the AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics feature as generally available. Developers can use these libraries to update firmware, manage IoT device fleets, design multi-threaded applications, and monitor fleet metrics for their IoT devices.

Amazon QuickSight can now notify users of changes to important metrics in their dashboards with threshold-based alerts. Readers and authors can set up personalized rules on key metrics in their dashboards and be automatically notified via email when data crosses the defined thresholds, highlighting important changes in their business. For instance, a manager might want to track the sales of their business and know when weekly sales drop below $100,000. To set up an alert, users can go to any QuickSight dashboard and click on a KPI or gauge visual and then use the ‘alert’ icon in order to configure the alert. Threshold alerts are billed per metric processed (which means each time an alert rule is checked) at tiered rates starting at $0.50 per 1000 metrics processed. See details on alerts pricing.

Porting Assistant for .NET is now available as a Visual Studio IDE extension. With this release, developers can access Porting Assistant for .NET directly from the Visual Studio IDE to assess incompatibilities and be more productive with an integrated experience for porting their .NET applications. Along with rich source code editing features provided by the IDE, this extension provides developers with feedback on lines of code that need to be modified to make the source code compatible with .NET Core. Developers can now run automated porting and take advantage of continuous assessment of incompatibilities as they make updates to the code.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data at scale.

Today we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Amazon DevOps Guru – a machine learning (ML) powered service that gives you a simpler way to measure and improve an application’s operational performance and availability and reduce expensive downtime.

Amazon Personalize  enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, using the same machine learning technology as used by Amazon.com, without requiring any prior machine learning experience. Using Amazon Personalize, you can generate personalized recommendations for your users through a simple API interface. Amazon Personalize now offers a new set of APIs to enable customers to export the data present in their Users, Items and Interactions Datasets to their own S3 buckets.