AWS has expanded its HIPAA Compliance Program to include Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration , AWS WAF, and AWS Shield as HIPAA eligible Services. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Amazon CloudFront to accelerate the delivery of protected health information (PHI), Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster transfers of PHI to and from Amazon S3, AWS WAF to protect your web applications from common web exploits, and AWS Shield to safeguard your web applications running on AWS from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Information on HIPAA eligible services on AWS can be found at our HIPAA Compliance page.

Today we launched the public beta of new features for Amazon Cognito User Pools that enable web and mobile app developers to easily add a sign in user experience and integrate SAML-based identity providers (IdPs). Now Amazon Cognito provides built-in user forms for sign up and sign in along with OAuth2 support. You can customize the built-in user experience and add it to your app with just a few lines of code. Your users can sign-in with your own user directory provided by Cognito User Pools or through corporate IdPs such as Microsoft Active Directory through SAML 2.0 federation.

Starting today, Amazon QuickSight customers can leverage Amazon Redshift Spectrum to visualize and analyze vast amounts of unstructured data in their Amazon S3 “data lake” – without having to load or transform any data. In addition, customers can now visualize combined data sets that include frequently accessed data stored in Amazon Redshift and bulk data sets stored cost-effectively in Amazon S3 using the same SQL syntax of Amazon Redshift. 

AWS is pleased to release a major update to the Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) Quick Start. This release supports the deployment of up to four RD Gateway instances in an Auto Scaling group on the AWS Cloud. The update also includes portability enhancements to make it easier to customize the Quick Start for your specific scenario. 

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in EU (Frankfurt) and GovCloud (US) regions. AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations. 

AWS Config now supports tracking of Amazon CloudWatch alarm configurations. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use CloudWatch to access up-to-the-minute statistics, collect metrics, and set alarms for your metric data to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment. With this integration, you can now use Config to view the historical configuration of your CloudWatch alarms and review all changes that occurred to them. For example, you can now determine why CloudWatch alarms did not get triggered and receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications when your alarm configurations change. 

AWS Certificate Manager is a new service in the AWS GovCloud (US) region that lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services. SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. AWS Certificate Manager removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates. With AWS Certificate Manager, you can quickly request a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources such as Elastic Load Balancers or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle certificate renewals. SSL/TLS certificates provisioned through AWS Certificate Manager are free. You pay only for the AWS resources you create to run your application.

You can now use the SELECT INTO OUTFILE S3 SQL statement to query data from an Amazon Aurora database cluster and save it directly into text files in an Amazon S3 bucket. This means you no longer need the two-step process of bringing the data to the SQL client and then copying it from the client to Amazon S3. It’s an easy way to export data selectively to Amazon Redshift or any other application.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers a Free Tier for first time Workspaces customers, designed to allow hands-on experience of the service at no cost. The Free Tier offer provides two Standard bundle WorkSpaces for up to 40 hours of combined use per month, for two calendar months, from the time you create your first WorkSpace.

The company’s latest Consumer Confidence Report indicated water quality surpassed regulatory standards.