The AWS Toolkit for VS Code now provides developers with convenient IDE functionality to connect to Amazon ECS containers and issue commands using Amazon ECS Exec . This allows VS Code users to directly interact with containers, such as running commands in or get a shell to an ECS container running on an Amazon EC2 instance or on AWS Fargate, without leaving their IDE. ECS Exec uses the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Session Manager under the hood to establish a connection with the running container.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.5.13, 10.4.22, 10.3.32, and 10.2.41. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

AWS EMP now supports packaging for end-of-support (EOS) Windows Server applications where installation media is not available, through a guided user interface (UI) experience. With today’s release of the Guided Reverse Packaging (GRP) feature, customers can input files and folders related to the application and the tool will automatically search for dependencies such as registry keys and related files and present to the user for confirmation. Next, customers will have the ability to simulate typical application workflows to ensure the full scope of dependencies is captured. Customers can then generate the compatibility package needed to then be deployed onto a newer, supported version of Windows Server in EC2 with the running application.

You can now cache responses returned by your Custom Authorizer Lambdas when using AWS IoT Core Custom Authentication workflow for HTTP connections. Customers can now define a caching duration (i.e. refreshAfterInSecs) for responses returned by customers’ custom authorizer lambdas when using long-lived HTTP connections. Customers can set a “refreshAfterInSecs” between 5 mins and 24 hours to reduce custom authorizer lambda invocations. This feature enhancement helps customers reduce their custom authorizer lambda cost and makes the behavior for HTTP match with that of other protocols supported by AWS IoT Core.

Today, Amazon Location Service is adding Suggestions functionality.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5n instances are available in AWS Africa (Cape Town) region.

Amazon DevOps Guru now supports enhanced analysis for Amazon Aurora databases, a new Machine Learning (ML) powered capability, as part of Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS.

In April 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create IAM policies based on access activity found in your AWS CloudTrail. IAM Access Analyzer has now increased policy generation quotas to 50 per day to help you right-size permissions for more roles in your account. As you right-size permissions across multiple workloads in your account, you can now use policy generation across your roles to grant just the required permissions. To use IAM Access Analyzer policy generation, visit your role’s detail page and select “generate policy” to get started. When you request a policy, IAM Access Analyzer reviews your CloudTrail logs to identify the actions used and creates a fine-grained policy. Read the blog  to learn more.

You can now use AWS Launch Wizard to lead you through a best practices deployment of self-managed Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) on Amazon EC2. AWS Launch Wizard uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework to guide you through the sizing, configuration, and deployment of RD Gateway on the AWS Cloud, without the need to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources. RD Gateway employs Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) over HTTPS which helps establishes a secure, encrypted connection between remote users and Amazon EC2 instances running Windows, without needing to configure a virtual private network (VPN). This helps reduce the attack surface on your Windows-based instances while providing a remote administration solution for administrators.

Today, Amazon Location Service added metadata for tracking position updates to help developers reduce cost, improve accuracy, and simplify the development of tracking applications. Amazon Location Service Trackers already make it easy for developers to build highly scalable device-tracking applications by enabling them to retrieve the current and historical location of their tracked devices, and automatically evaluate device-positions relative to linked areas of interest (geofences). With the new metadata feature, developers can enrich these applications with additional information about each device’s position, for example the speed, direction, or engine temperature of vehicles, by including three user-defined key-values pairs with each position update. They can retrieve this information for a device’s current or historical position directly from the Amazon Location Service Tracker, for example to analyze engine performance, without building additional systems and code to track this data. Developer can also receive this metadata in the Amazon EventBridge Entry and Exit event when tracked devices cross a geofence.