Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports joining DB instances to an AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory residing in a different AWS account or VPC. This makes it easier and cost-effective for you to deploy your directory-aware database workloads by reducing the manual configuration to domain join your DB instances and, the need to deploy directories in each account and VPC. Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances can now seamlessly join to a directory from any AWS account and any Amazon VPC within an AWS Region.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) and AD Connector now communicate more securely with self-managed Active Directory when using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) . With support for client-side LDAP signing and client-side secure LDAP (LDAPS), customers using AWS Directory Service-enabled applications like Amazon WorkSpaces and AWS Single Sign-On can now better protect their organization’s identity data and meet security requirements.

AWS Security Hub now supports automated security checks aligned to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 3.2.1 requirements. Security Hub’s PCI DSS standard includes 32 automated rules designed to help you with your ongoing PCI DSS security activities by conducting continuous checks against 32 PCI DSS requirements across 14 AWS services. These 32 security checks are in addition to Security Hub’s existing 43 automated security checks for the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark. Security Hub’s documentation provides details on how Security Hub’s PCI DSS checks map to specific PCI DSS requirements.  

AWS Config now supports Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships changed over time.

Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin version 1.6 is now available for use by Kubernetes clusters running on AWS.

AWS Shield Advanced now uses the health of your applications to improve responsiveness and accuracy in attack detection and mitigation. You can now define a health check in Amazon Route 53 and then associate it with a resource that is protected by Shield Advanced through the console or API. You can apply health-based detection to all resource types that Shield Advanced supports: Elastic IP, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, or Amazon Route 53. 

Today we are announcing general availability of Multi-Attach on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. You can now enable Multi-Attach on Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS io1 volumes to allow a single volume to be concurrently attached to up to sixteen AWS Nitro System-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within the same Availability Zone. Each attached instance has full read and write permission to the shared volume. For applications that manage storage consistency from multiple writers, Multi-Attach makes it easier to achieve higher application availability.

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the China (Ningxia) Region.  

Amazon ECS Optimized Linux 2 Amazon Machine Images(AMI) now come with the AWS System Manager (SSM) Agent pre-installed. The SSM Agent makes it possible for Systems Manager to update, manage, and configure EC2 instances in a customer’s ECS cluster. ECS customers that used to manually install the SSM agent into thier ECS optimized AMI will now get these features out of the box.

You can now enable Amazon EC2 Hibernation for On-Demand and Reserved Instances through AWS CloudFormation, a service that allows you to easily provision and update a collection of AWS resources in an orderly and predictable fashion. Launching EC2 instances with Hibernation enabled has become easier than ever as now you just need to add a single “HibernationOptions ” property with “Configured: true” parameter within the AWS::EC2::Instance resource in your CloudFormation template. With this new feature, you can easily make Hibernation a part of your EC2 instance setup through CloudFormation, provided your EC2 instance meets the Hibernation Prerequisites .