Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.2 includes several bug fixes and security fixes. Version 2.6.2 will replace 2.6.1 as the default recommended version for new clusters created in Amazon MSK. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.2 .

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when using Amazon SNS to send SMS to your customers, you can set a principal entity ID and a message template ID, as Amazon SNS message attributes. 

We’re excited to announce an intermediate, 150-minute, digital course: Amazon Elastic Block Store Primer. This free course provides an overview of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and explores how to balance cost and performance using different volume types. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, a self-paced lab, and a quiz to check your knowledge. 

Today, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) adds support for an AWS managed Lambda layer in Java, node.js, and Python, providing a simple getting started experience for customers to add the OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector into their AWS Lambda functions for collecting trace data. In addition, ADOT has added support for AWS Systems Manager agent, enabling customers to update, manage, and configure ADOT Collector on an EC2 instance, an on-premises server, or a virtual machine (VM). As part of this release, Zipkin and Jaeger receivers are also integrated in the ADOT collector.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds support for Recursive Common Table Expression (CTE). Starting today, you can use a Recursive CTE on your Redshift cluster to query hierarchical data such as organizational charts where employees reports to other employees (managers), or multi-level product orders where a product consists of many components, which in turn consist of other components.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve updated AWS Instance Scheduler, a reference implementation that makes it easier for customers to control their AWS compute resource capacity and cost by configuring start and stop schedules for their Amazon EC2 and RDS instances.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology. Multi-AZ helps you meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

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: