Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3 processors that provide up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors, and built on top of the the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed innovations that deliver efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services. Starting today, these instances are available in AWS Region Middle East (Bahrain), AWS Region Europe (Paris) and AWS Region South America (São Paulo).

A new minor version of Microsoft SQL Server is now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, offering performance and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports the new minor version for SQL Server 2022 on the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions.

Today, AWS Control Tower launched landing zone version 3.3 which includes updates to AWS Control Tower-managed resources, resource-based policies, and controls. AWS Control Tower now supports the new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) launched global condition key, aws:SourceOrgID , which enables you to scalably allow AWS services to access your resources only on your behalf. With this new IAM capability, you can simplify management of your resource-based policies to require that AWS services access your resources only when the request originates from your organization or organizational unit (OU). For example, you can use the aws:SourceOrgID condition key and set the value to your organization ID in the condition element of your S3 bucket policy. This ensures that CloudTrail can only write logs on behalf of accounts within your organization to your S3 bucket, preventing CloudTrail logs outside your organization from writing to your S3 bucket. Landing zone version 3.3 also includes a new version of the Region Deny control and improved KMS drift reporting.

Amazon Connect now provides more granular access controls by enabling you to tag your instances in the AWS console or through APIs. For example, you can now tag instances with a tag such as “Division:ConsumerCredit” and define associated Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to only let contact center administrators from the Consumer Credit division see or manage these instances. To learn more about how to add tags to a new or existing instance, see our documentation .

Amazon Connect now provides detailed billing reports and insights in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Reports aggregated and/or filtered by tags (key:value pairs). Companies can now gain more insights into their Amazon Connect bill and better organize their bill by lines of business/departments (e.g., support, banking, sales, claims), types of issues, phone numbers, environments and more. 

Amazon Connect Tasks now supports pausing/resuming of tasks, making it easier for agents to stay more organized and deliver exceptional customer experiences without losing track of work. Amazon Connect Tasks empowers you to prioritize, assign, and track all contact center agent tasks to completion, improving agent productivity and ensuring customer issues are quickly resolved. With this launch, agents can now pause/resume tasks in the Amazon Connect agent workspace when they need to switch context to focus on more urgent customer needs, or when they are awaiting external inputs (e.g,. information from the customer) and/or manager approvals, freeing up their capacity to handle new customers issues. Supervisors can monitor and track paused tasks across their agents, along with new metrics to better understand the active time spent by a agent on a task and/or total tasks paused or actively being worked on by agents. Additionally, supervisors can automate task processing in Connect flows to automatically reprioritize and/or reassign the task to an agent based on service level or external inputs. Tasks can also be paused and resumed programmatically through the new pauseContact and resumeContact APIs.

We are excited to announce that high-availability EMR on EC2 clusters are now also available with instance fleets configuration. Your high-availability instance fleet EMR cluster will have three on-demand primary nodes and support Hadoop applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, and Spark. In the event a primary node fails or critical processes like Yarn Resource Manager and NameNode crash, EMR fails over to one of the remaining primary nodes in the cluster.

Customers can now use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region to automate the creation, sharing, copying, and retention of Amazon EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs via policies. Data Lifecycle Manager eliminates the need for complicated custom scripts to manage your EBS resources, saving you time and money.

Amazon MQ is now available in the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. With this launch, Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 32 regions.

Amazon Connect Cases now allows you to programmatically manage your cases and set up escalation workflows using the rules designer in the Amazon Connect UI. With this launch, you can create rules to automatically create a task, update a case, or send email alerts to a manager whenever a case is created or updated. In addition, you can create rules leveraging Amazon Connect Contact Lens to automatically create a case for post-conversation follow-up, such as when negative customer sentiment or specific key words are detected in a conversation.