Today, Grafana Labs introduced an updated metrics data source for Amazon CloudWatch that comes with several new features. With the latest release of Grafana (version 6.5.0 or later) you can use the updated data source to more efficiently query and visualize CloudWatch metrics.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports differential restores and log restores on to an RDS SQL Server db instance. With this enhancement you can now migrate to RDS for SQL Server while significantly increasing the availability of your application during the migration process.

Earlier today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enabled you to use your employees’ existing identity attributes such as cost center and department from your directory to create fine-grained permissions in AWS. Your administrators can use these employee attributes in AWS to implement attribute-based access control to AWS resources and simplify permissions management at scale.  

The CDK Explorer, a new preview feature in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, allows developers to visualize CDK applications. AWS CDK, launched GA in July this year, is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. CDK apps are composed of building blocks known as Constructs, which include definitions for your cloud stacks and resources within. Check out the CDK developer guide or the CDK Workshop to learn more about the CDK.  

Amazon Comprehend now supports real time Custom Classification. You can use the real time Custom Classification to understand, label and route information based on your own business rules in real time. For example, you can instantly categorize the content of support requests and route them to the proper support team. Or you can automatically moderate website comments as they’re flowing in. Prior to this launch, customers used Custom Classification with their business-specific labels to categorize documents asynchronously. Now, customers can choose real time or asynchronous Custom Classification depending on their use case. 

AWS IoT is announcing a new feature for AWS IoT Core called Fleet Provisioning, which makes it easy for customers to onboard large volumes of manufactured devices, like vacuum cleaners or construction excavators, to the cloud. For many customers, particularly those manufacturing large volumes of devices like OEM’s, the process of uniquely configuring and connecting IoT devices to the cloud (e.g. bootstrapping and provisioning) remains manual and time-consuming step in their IoT implementation process.

You can now set time based retention policies on Data Lifecycle Manager. With this launch, DLM allows you to set snapshot retention period in the following interval units: days, weeks, months and years.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now offers support for 8K UHD video encoding, which gives video providers the ability to create and monetize premium experiences for viewers and to support the latest consumer display devices. 8K encoding is available in the MediaConvert on-demand, professional tier, in resolutions up to 8192 x 4320 with HEVC encoding, 10-bit, including HDR. This capability also allows for the creation of square video at resolutions up to 4320 x 4320, a format commonly used for VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality) content. For detailed information on 8K encoding pricing, please visit the MediaConvert pricing page.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) now enables you to create and use asymmetric customer master keys (CMKs) and data key pairs. With this feature, you can perform digital signing operations using RSA and Elliptic Curve (ECC) keys. You can also perform public key encryption operations using RSA keys. The public portion of the key pairs can be used outside of the service. You can share public keys with your customers and partners so they can encrypt data or verify signatures without making a request to AWS KMS. As with all other AWS KMS APIs, asymmetric key usage is logged in AWS CloudTrail to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.

AWS Lambda now supports Parallelization Factor , a feature that allows you to process one shard of a Kinesis or DynamoDB data stream with more than one Lambda invocation simultaneously. This new feature allows you to build more agile stream processing applications on volatile data traffic.