Amazon Managed Grafana now features a new self-service plugin management experience for Grafana community plugins. With this release, Amazon Managed Grafana administrators can discover and install Grafana community plugins directly from their workspace. Plugins enable you to extend your Grafana experience, unifying data from a wider variety of data sources with visualizations tailored to analyze your unique datasets.

AWS introduces an enhanced co-sell experience for AWS Partners using APN Customer Engagements (ACE).

AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports automatic compaction of Apache Iceberg tables, making it easier for you to keep your transactional data lakes always performant. Enabling automatic compaction on Apache Iceberg tables reduces metadata overhead on your Iceberg tables and improves query performance. 

Starting today, memory optimized Amazon Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) X2iedn instances are available in Europe (Spain) region. X2iedn instances, powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Ice Lake) and built with AWS Nitro System, are designed for memory-intensive workloads. They deliver improvements in performance, price performance, and cost per GiB of memory compared to previous generation X1e instances. These instances are SAP-certified for running Business Suite on HANA, SAP S/4HANA, Data Mart Solutions on HANA, Business Warehouse on HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver workloads on any database.

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now enables you to create environments in a shared, centrally-managed Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). VPC sharing allows teams, each with different AWS accounts, to create resources in a centrally-managed VPC. This reduces the number of VPCs that you need to create and manage, while using separate accounts for billing and access control.

Today, AWS CloudTrail Lake announces a one-year extendable retention pricing option that is optimized for flexible data retention needs. CloudTrail Lake is a managed data lake that lets you aggregate, immutably store, and analyze activity logs for audit, security, and operational investigations. With the one-year extendable retention pricing, the first year of retention is included with ingestion charges. You may choose to extend the retention period to a maximum of 10 years by paying extended retention charges after the first year. Compliance, audit, security, and operations teams can use the new pricing option for cost-effective retention of auditable data sources in alignment with compliance programs such as PCI-DSS, as well as for forensic and operational investigations.

Today Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announces the availability of AWS CloudTrail Insights as a data source in AWS CloudTrail Lake. CloudTrail Lake is a managed data lake that lets you aggregate, immutably store, query and visualize your activity logs for auditing, security investigations and operational troubleshooting. CloudTrail Insights helps you identify unusual operational activity in your AWS accounts such as spikes in resource provisioning or bursts of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) actions. Until today, CloudTrail Insights were only available to customers using CloudTrail trails. Now, with CloudTrail Lake, you can analyze both your Insights events and AWS management events, helping you correlate the unusual activity with the AWS management events that could have led to it. You can also use the curated CloudTrail Lake dashboards to get an overview of anomalous behavior in your account including the type of Insights generated on your accounts or the source of these Insights.

AWS Step Functions now allows you to easily restart workflows from their point of failure, so you can recover from failure faster, increase efficiency, and pay only for what you need. AWS Step Functions is a visual workflow service capable of orchestrating 11,000+ API actions from over 220 AWS services to automate business processes and data processing workloads.

Today, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches a new capability, instance maintenance policy, for customers to define whether instances are launched before or after existing instances are terminated during instance replacement. This controls how your group replaces instances for operations such as instance refresh, health checks, and rebalancing. From the console, you can choose “policy presets” or provide unique settings that help you optimize for availability or cost.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL version 16.0 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate PostgreSQL 16.0 on Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL 16.0 was released by the PostgreSQL community on September 14, 2023. PostgreSQL 16 adds support for SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions, more query types that can use parallelism, and the ‘pg_stat_io’ view that provides statistics on I/O usage. To learn more about PostgreSQL 16, read more here .