Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of EC2 Image Builder, a service that makes it easier and faster to build and maintain secure images. Image Builder simplifies the creation, patching, testing, distribution, and sharing of Linux or Windows Server images. 

AWS now provides a new BYOL experience for software licenses, such as Windows and SQL Server, that require a dedicated physical server. You can now enjoy the flexibility and cost effectiveness of using your own licenses on Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, but with the simplicity, resiliency, and elasticity of AWS. You can specify your Dedicated Host management preferences, such as host allocation, host capacity utilization, and instance placement in AWS License Manager. Once set up, AWS takes care of these administrative tasks on your behalf, so that you can seamlessly launch virtual machines (instances) on Dedicated Hosts just like you would launch an EC2 instance with AWS provided licenses. License Manager also integrates with EC2 Image Builder to automate maintenance of installation media. 

The Amazon EventBridge schema registry stores event structure – or schema – in a shared central location and maps those schemas to code for Java, Python, and Typescript so it’s easy to use events as objects in your code. Schemas from your event bus are automatically added to the registry when you turn on the schema discovery feature. You can connect to and interact with the schema registry from the AWS console, APIs, or through the SDK Toolkits for Jetbrains (Intellij, PyCharm, Webstorm, Rider) and VS Code.

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of Amazon Transcribe Medical, a new speech recognition capability of Amazon Transcribe, designed to convert clinician and patient speech to text. Amazon Transcribe Medical makes it easy for developers to integrate medical transcription into applications that help physicians do clinical documentation efficiently. It can automatically and accurately transcribe physicians’ dictations, as well as their conversations with patients, into text. Moreover, the service enables automatic punctuation and capitalization, allowing physicians to speak naturally when transcribing voice notes.

AWS has launched a new program that helps customers migrate their legacy Windows Server applications to the latest, supported versions of Windows Server on AWS, without any code changes. Many organizations struggle with migrating their legacy applications due to tight dependencies on older, unsupported operating system (OS), limited in-house expertise, and/or missing access to installation media or source code. Moreover, getting extended support for these applications does not resolve the inevitable end of support problem, it just delays the inevitable. To mitigate these challenges, AWS offers the End-of-Support Migration Program (EMP) for Windows Server.

AWS License Manager now allows administrators to automate discovery of ‘bring your own license’ (BYOL) usage across their AWS and on-premises environments. With few simple clicks, administrators can now specify product information along with licensing rules for BYOL software. This enables License Manager to automatically track the instances that have the specified software installed and notify the administrator of any licensing rule violations. Administrators thus stay informed of all software installations across their environments, and can prevent usage that is not compliant with your defined licensing rules. 

Today, we are announcing five new features and updated pricing for AWS IoT SiteWise (preview). The new features provide additional capabilities in AWS IoT SiteWise to collect data from your industrial equipment, add context to the data using asset models, use the data in your custom applications, and view the data in near real-time through a fully-managed web application.

Amazon Redshift now provides an efficient and automated way to maintain sort order of the data in Redshift tables to continuously optimize query performance. The new automatic table sort capability offers simplified maintenance and ease of use without compromising performance and access to Redshift tables. Automatic table sort complements Automatic Vacuum Delete and Automatic Analyze and together these capabilities fully automate table maintenance. Automatic table sort is now enabled by default on Redshift tables where a sort key is specified.

Customers can now use Helm charts to install the AWS App Mesh Controller and Inject Webhook for use with Kubernetes services.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ deployments in the following AWS regions: Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), EU (Stockholm) and China (Beijing).