Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Innovation Release 8.3 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the latest Innovation Release on Amazon RDS for MySQL. You can deploy MySQL 8.3 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment that has the benefits of a fully managed database, making it simpler to set up, operate, and monitor databases. MySQL 8.3 is the latest Innovation Release from the MySQL community. MySQL Innovation releases include bug fixes, security patches, as well as new features. MySQL Innovation releases are supported by the community until the next major & minor release, whereas MySQL Long Term Support (LTS) Releases, such as MySQL 8.0, are supported by the community for up to eight years. Please refer to the MySQL 8.3 release notes for more details about this release.  The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment.  Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.

Amazon Redshift now supports Multi-AZ deployment for zero-ETL integration on RA3 clusters, enabling customers to run near real-time analytics on a highly available data warehouse. With a Multi-AZ deployment, your zero-ETL integration can automatically recover from any infrastructure or Availability Zone (AZ) failures ensuring your workloads remain uninterrupted. Amazon Redshift zero-ETL integration helps you derive holistic insights across many applications and break data silos in your organization, making it simpler to analyze data from different operational databases. A Multi-AZ deployment raises the Redshift Service Level Agreement (SLA) to 99.99% and delivers a highly available data warehouse. A zero-ETL integration with a Multi-AZ deployment on an Amazon Redshift cluster enables you to continue replicating the data without interruptions even in the face of unexpected events, ensuring that your near real-time insights are always accessible. To learn more and get started with zero-ETL integration, visit the getting started guides for Amazon Redshift. To learn more about Amazon Redshift Multi-AZ, see the Amazon Redshift Reliability page and Amazon Multi-AZ documentation page. 

Starting today, AWS WAF is available in the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. This is the second Region in Canada where AWS WAF is available, joining the AWS Canada (Central) Region, and giving customers more choice and flexibility. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps you protect your web application resources against common web exploits and bots that can affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. You can protect Amazon CloudFront distributions and Application Load Balancer in the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. Support for other AWS resource types, such as Amazon API Gateway REST APIs, is expected later. With AWS WAF, you can control access to your content. Based on conditions that you specify, such as the IP addresses that requests originate from or the values of query strings, your protected resource responds to requests either with the requested content, with an HTTP 403 status code (Forbidden), or with a custom response. To see the full list of regions where AWS WAF is currently available, visit the AWS Region Table. For more information about the service, visit the AWS WAF page.

Today, AWS Security Hub announces the release of the AWS Resource Tagging standard. The standard contains 85 new controls which can be used to identify if any of your AWS Resources are missing tag keys required by your organization. With the release of this standard, Security Hub now offers 386 security controls that automatically check the compliance of your AWS resources against pre-defined security principles and best practices. To quickly enable the new standard across your AWS environment, you should use central configuration. This will allow you to enable the standard in some or all of your organization accounts and across all of AWS Regions that are linked to Security Hub with a single action. Furthermore, you can use central configuration to centrally define the requiredTagKeys parameter that specifies the tag keys that the new controls check for. Alternatively, if you are not using central configuration, you may enable the standard and define the tags that the controls will check for on an account-by-account and Region-by-Region basis. To learn more about using central configuration, visit the AWS security blog. To get started with Security Hub, consult the following list of resources: Learn more about Security Hub capabilities and features, and the Regions in which they are available, in the AWS Security Hub user guide Subscribe to the Security Hub SNS topic to receive notifications about new Security Hub features and controls Try Security Hub at no cost for 30 days

Amazon Titan Text Embeddings V2, a new embeddings model in the Amazon Titan family of models, is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock. Using Titan Text Embeddings V2, customers can perform various natural language processing (NLP) tasks by representing text data as numerical vectors, known as embeddings. These embeddings capture the semantic and contextual relationships between words, phrases, or documents in a high-dimensional vector space. This model is optimized for Retrieval-Augmented Generations (RAG) use cases and is also well suited for a variety of other tasks such as information retrieval, question and answer chatbots, classification, and personalized recommendations. Amazon Text Embeddings V2 is a light weight, efficient model ideal for high accuracy retrieval tasks at different dimensions. The model supports flexible embeddings sizes (256, 512, 1,024) and prioritizes accuracy maintenance at smaller dimension sizes, helping to reduce storage costs without compromising on accuracy. When reducing from 1,024 to 512 dimensions, Titan Text Embeddings V2 retains approximately 99% retrieval accuracy, and when reducing from 1,024 to 256 dimensions, the model maintains 97% accuracy. Additionally, Titan Text Embeddings V2 includes multilingual support for 100+ languages in pre-training as well as unit vector normalization for improving accuracy of measuring vector similarity.  Amazon Titan Text Embeddings V2 is available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions. To learn more, read the AWS News launch blog, Amazon Titan product page, and documentation. To get started with Titan Text Embeddings V2 in Amazon Bedrock, visit the Amazon Bedrock console.

Today, Amazon Transcribe announces the general availability of generative AI-powered call summarization available through the Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics API. Generative call summarization delivers a concise summary of contact center interactions, capturing key components such as why the customer called, how the issue was addressed, and what follow-up actions were identified. Contact center agents spend precious time after each call manually summarizing the notes. Supervisors also spend significant time listening to call recordings or reading entire transcripts while investigating caller issues. With generative call summarization, Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics can now automatically condense the entire call recording into a concise summary. For example, this is a sample summary of a 10-minute call: “Customer reported a missing order 10 days after the expected delivery date. The agent offered a free replacement and $10 credit. The agent will follow-up with the customer in 2 days to confirm the receipt of the replacement order”. After completing a customer interaction, agents can directly proceed to help the next customer since they don’t have to summarize a conversation, resulting in reduced customer wait times and improved agent productivity. Further, supervisors can review the summary when investigating a customer issue to get a gist of the conversation, without having to listen to the entire call recording or read the transcript. The generative call summarization capability is currently supported in English language and is available in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon). You will incur additional charges as described in pricing. To learn more, see the blog post and documentation.

We are excited to announce public availability of an enhanced dataset discovery workflow for AWS Mainframe Modernization File Transfer with BMC. This new capability makes it easier for users to discover and select mainframe data sets for conversion and transfer to AWS. Users can now browse the mainframe data set catalog directly from the AWS Mainframe Modernization service console, select data sets from one or multiple mainframe volumes for transfer, view extended data set metadata, and choose data set codepage conversions. The enhanced workflow provides an intuitive and unified mechanism for mainframe data access and transfer. AWS Mainframe Modernization File Transfer allows customers to seamlessly discover, copy and convert mainframe data sets for a variety of use cases such as mainframe application modernization and migration, and mainframe data driven augmentation using AWS. Using advanced compression, conversion of source mainframe encodings, and automation, mainframe data sets can be transferred to Amazon S3 storage. Once the mainframe data is on AWS, it can be harnessed for application modernization, analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence enabling agility, cost savings, and innovations. AWS Mainframe Modernization File Transfer is available through the AWS Mainframe Modernization service console. To learn more, visit AWS Mainframe Modernization service product and documentation pages.

We are excited to announce AWS HealthOmics now supports the ability to share HealthOmics workflows across AWS accounts. AWS HealthOmics is a fully managed service that empowers healthcare and life science organizations to store, query, analyze omics data, and generate insights to improve health and drive scientific discoveries. With this release, customers can now develop analyses within a single AWS account and share them with other AWS accounts in the same organization or across organizations. With this feature, customers can now share analyses that are defined as HealthOmics private workflows with both internal and external collaborators. Users can then start runs without having to configure any of the underlying workflow script or having to know the specific bioinformatics languages they’re written in. By running from the same workflow, bioinformaticians can enable reproducible science and validate experiments more easily. Cross-account workflow sharing is supported in the following AWS HealthOmics regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Israel (Tel Aviv). To get started, see the AWS documentation.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports an AWS Fault Injection Service action to pause replication for global tables. FIS is a fully managed service for running controlled fault injection experiments to improve an application’s performance, observability, and resilience. Global tables replicate your Amazon DynamoDB tables automatically across your choice of AWS Regions to achieve fast, local read and write performance. Customers can use the new FIS action to observe how their application responds to a pause in regional replication, and tune their monitoring and recovery process to improve resiliency and application availability. Global tables are designed to meet the needs of high availability applications, providing you 99.999% availability, increased application resiliency, and improved business continuity. This new FIS action reproduces the real-world behavior when replication to a global table replica is interrupted and resumed.  This lets customers test and build confidence that their application responds as intended when resources in a Region are not accessible. Customers can create an experiment template in FIS to integrate the experiment with continuous integration and release testing and to combine with other FIS actions. For example, DynamoDB Pause Replication is combined with other actions in the Cross-Region: Connectivity scenario to isolate a Region. DynamoDB Pause Replication is now available in all AWS commercial Regions where FIS is available. To learn more, visit the DynamoDB FIS actions documentation.

Amazon Location Service has released a Places plugin for MapLibre GL JS Geocoder, simplifying the integration of Amazon Location Places Service with MapLibre. Along with the authentication libraries, this plugin provides a frictionless experience to use Amazon Location Places with MapLibre GL JS.  This plugin integrates Amazon Location Places APIs into Search Control that can be added to a map in MapLibre, enabling developers to expedite their application development. Web developers can use the integration library (Amazon Location for MapLibre GL Geocoder) to seamlessly call Places APIs (SearchPlaceIndexForText, SearchPlaceIndexForPosition, GetPlace, SearchPlaceIndexForSuggestions) and easily integrate location-based features into their applications with minimal additional code and without introducing new dependencies. To learn more, visit to the Amazon Location Service Developer Guide. Amazon Location Service is a fully managed service that helps developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications without compromising on data quality, user privacy, or cost. Amazon Location Service is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-West).