Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) launches new networking capability called Service Connect that simplifies service discovery, connectivity and traffic observability for Amazon ECS. Service Connect helps you build applications faster by letting you focus on the application code and not on your networking infrastructure. Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easier for you to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.

Today, we are pleased to announce AWS IoT Device Management Jobs has added a new configuration option for scheduling, which gives customers the flexibility to deploy remote operations during pre-defined time windows so regular usage of their IoT devices is not disrupted. Using the scheduling feature, customers can define the start and end time of a job rollout, and also configure the end behavior to specify what happens to job executions at the end of the job schedule. This new scheduling feature helps customers to set up a rollout schedule in accordance with their standard operating procedures, or a deployment cadence for different types of updates based on their device software development CI/CD cycles. 

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) now allows you to initiate a scalable failback process for your applications running on AWS. This process helps simplify failing back recovered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to your primary AWS Region or Availability Zone. It also allows you to perform frequent, non-disruptive recovery and failback drills for the AWS-based applications that you replicate using Elastic Disaster Recovery.

Today, AWS Backup adds centralized, multi-account reporting for AWS Organizations, making it easier for you to demonstrate compliance and meet regulatory auditing needs across your accounts and Regions. Now, you can use your organization’s management account to generate aggregated reports on your data protection policies and retrieve operational data about your backup and recovery activities from multiple accounts and AWS Regions using AWS Backup Audit Manager. AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services based on organizational best practices and regulatory standards. With AWS Backup Audit Manager, you can generate auditor-ready reports to help prove compliance of your backup policies with your defined industry-specific regulatory requirements. 

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a new preview feature of Amazon CloudWatch that helps you, as application developers and network engineers, continually monitor internet availability and performance metrics between your AWS-hosted applications and application end users. InternetMonitor monitors your application through Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon WorkSpaces directories.

Amazon Web Services launches cross-account observability across Amazon CloudWatch to help you monitor and troubleshoot applications that span multiple AWS accounts within an AWS Region. With cross-account observability in CloudWatch, you can seamlessly search, visualize, and analyze your metrics, logs, and traces without any account boundaries. Centralized security, operations, platform teams, and service owners deploying applications across multiple accounts can aggregate and correlate cross-account telemetry data in Amazon CloudWatch. They can use resulting trends and insights to efficiently monitor and troubleshoot issues affecting the health of their applications. Cross-account observability is an addition to CloudWatch’s unified observability capability.

AWS IoT Core, a managed cloud service that lets customers connect billions of IoT devices and routes trillions of messages to AWS services, announces AWS IoT Core Device Location, a new feature that makes it possible for customers to track and manage IoT devices using their location data, such as latitude and longitude coordinates. Using AWS IoT Core Device Location, customers can optimize business processes, simplify and automate maintenance efforts, and unlock new business use cases. For example, customers’ field service team can stay informed and quickly identify the location of devices that require maintenance action. In an IoT application, Global Positioning Service (GPS) is a commonly applied standard to locate an IoT device. But, not all IoT things, especially battery powered IoT devices, can be equipped with GPS hardware because of its high-power consumption. Therefore, new technologies such as cloud-assisted Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), WiFi, and cellular network have become popular alternatives to obtain location data for IoT devices. 

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, that enables organizations to provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it.

AWS Backup now offers you the ability to create legal holds on your protected data beyond your defined retention policies, for legal and auditing purposes. Legal holds prevent your backups from being deleted after the expiration of their retention period, until your backups are explicitly released from legal hold. With this feature, AWS Backup allows you to manage legal hold requests at scale and help prove compliance to outside counsel, auditors, and related third-parties. Together with AWS Backup Vault Lock , this new capability helps you meet the key criteria for data storage and preservation of electronically stored information (ESI) set forth by SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511, and CFTC Regulation 1.31. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports a 1-day Lifecycle Management Policy that allows you to automatically move files that haven’t been accessed in 1 day to the Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class. You can configure this new policy option for your file system, or you can use one of the existing policy options: 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days.