We’re excited to announce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service Performance Optimization. This advanced 60-minute course explores tools and techniques you can use to optimize your Amazon S3 performance. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and a quiz to check your knowledge.  

AWS Service Catalog is now available to customers in the AWS Region in Osaka, Japan. AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create, govern, and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS.

Today, AWS announces a new feature of AWS Systems Manager Application Manager that customers can use to manage Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) clusters. This feature provides IT professionals the ability to view operational data, manage compliance, and take remedial actions on their ECS clusters.

You can now publish the Redis slow log from your Amazon ElastiCache for Redis clusters to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The Redis slow log provides visibility into the execution time of commands in your Redis cluster, enabling you to continuously monitor the performance of these operations. You can choose to send these logs in either JSON or text format to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose .

We are excited to announce that Amazon Forecast now displays the estimated time it takes to complete an in-progress workflow for importing your data, training the predictor and generating the forecast. You can now manage your time more efficiently and better plan for your next workflow around the estimated time remaining for your in-progress workflow. Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

Amazon EC2 announces the Replace Root Volume feature that enables customers to replace the root volume for a running instance. The feature restores the root volume of an instance to its launch state, or to a specific snapshot, without stopping the instance. This allows customers to fix issues, such as root volume corruption or guest operating system network configuration errors, while retaining the instance store data, networking and IAM configuration.

Today, AWS Service Catalog announces console support for AppRegistry applications. With this release, administrators can create and manage their application metadata in an easy-to-use console experience. AppRegistry is a feature of AWS Service Catalog, which is used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS.

AWS Cost Categories is a feature within the AWS Cost Management product suite that enables you to group your cost and usage information into meaningful categories for your organization’s unique needs. You can define rules to categorize your costs using dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. Once Cost Categories are set up, you can use them across various products in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. This includes AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR), and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.

AWS CodeDeploy improves support for Amazon EC2 deployments with Auto Scaling Groups by automatically detecting and updating EC2 instances that have outdated software revisions. After a deployment, CodeDeploy checks for outdated instances and creates a new deployment to bring the fleet to the intended revision of the software. In addition, as new instances are added to the Auto Scaling group, CodeDeploy checks that the updated revision is installed.

Today, AWS Secrets Manager launched the AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider (ASCP), a plugin for the industry-standard Kubernetes’ Secrets Store CSI driver. ASCP enables applications running in Kubernetes pods to retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager easily, without the need for custom code. Once installed, ASCP ensures your applications always receive the most recent version of your secrets as these are rotated. As a result, you automatically benefit from the rotation and lifecycle management features that Secrets Manager provides, without added coding effort. ASCP also enables convenient and secure access to your configurations in AWS SSM Parameter Store. AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider is available for download now. Read the blog to learn more.