Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5a instances, featuring AMD EPYC^TM 2nd generation 7002 Series processors, are available in AWS South America (Sao Paulo) region. 

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the CloudFormation Registry to include the StackSets resource type. StackSets is a CloudFormation feature that allows you to centrally manage deployment of cloud resources to multiple AWS accounts and regions in a single operation. You can now model, provision, and manage your stack sets resources alongside other AWS resources through CloudFormation in a predictable and reliable way.

Newer patches 2.5.4 / 2.6.1 / 3.2.4 / 3.3.1 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation . You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see our technical documentation .

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now authenticate Apache Kafka clients using usernames and passwords for new clusters, secured by AWS Secrets Manager. Username and password authentication uses SASL/SCRAM (Simple Authentication and Security Layer/Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism), a popular authentication mechanism supported by Apache Kafka. By storing credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, you can reduce the overhead of maintaining a traditional Apache Kafka authentication system, including: auditing, updating, and rotating client credentials. You can also centrally and securely manage credentials for multiple clusters directly from the AWS Management console. SASL/SCRAM authentication can be used in all AWS regions where MSK is available.

AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) version 3.0 logs agent start and update events, and you can make these events trigger actions via alarms in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, in SSM Agent version 3.0, you can elect to have SSM Agent self-upgrade when the previously installed version of the agent is deprecated. 

AWS Secrets Manager has been assessed for Outsourced Service Provider Audit Report (OSPAR). This assessment demonstrates that AWS Secrets Manager has a system of controls in place that meet the Association of Banks in Singapore’s (ABS) Guidelines on Control Objectives and Procedures for Outsourced Service Providers . Secrets Manager’s alignment with the ABS guidelines demonstrates to customers AWS’s commitment to meet the security expectations for cloud service providers set by the financial services industry in Singapore. This support for OSPAR is in addition to compliance with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) announced by AWS Secrets Manager previously.  

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) on SQL Server 2016 (13.0058220.21.v1 and above), giving you the ability to host the report server web portal on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. There is no additional cost to install SSRS directly on your Amazon RDS DB instance.

Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now Open Source and included with Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). AL2 users can install the CloudWatch Agent using the yum package manager. You can also access the CloudWatch Agent source code and contribute to its development in GitHub.

Host Recovery automatically recovers instances in the event of unexpected failures (hardware failures, power or network outages etc.) on EC2 Dedicated Hosts making your instances more resilient. You can enable Host Recovery for your EC2 Dedicated Hosts using AWS Management Console, CLI or API. Additionally, the built-in integration of EC2 Dedicated Hosts with AWS License Manager helps automatically track licenses in the event of host recovery.

AWS IoT Greengrass 1.11 is now available. With this release, IoT Greengrass introduces multiple new features including System Health Telemetry, enhancements to Stream Manager, and support for Python 3.8.