Starting today, customers can install the AWS Service Management Connector via a guided setup in ServiceNow. This guided setup simplifies the ServiceNow scoped app configurations tasks, minimizing the expertise needed to establish the connection between AWS and ServiceNow. ServiceNow administrators, or power users with permissions to the Connector scoped app, simply follow the guided steps and mark each task complete or skipped where applicable. The AWS Service Management Connector documentation also includes an AWS CloudFormation baseline permissions  template that sets up the AWS environment. Thus, the ServiceNow Guide Setup and AWS baseline permissions give customers the ability to focus on developing guardrails and detective controls via integrated AWS services and validating that connection between AWS and ServiceNow.

AWS Audit Manager now offers a dashboard to simplify your audit preparations with at-a-glance views of your evidence collection status per control. You can instantly track the progress of your audit assessments relative to common control domains. These control domains are general categories of controls, not specific to any one framework that allow customers to quickly assess status on common themes (E.g.- track overall issues in Identity and Compliance control domain).

With Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) you can now monitor the health of your live stream inputs using four new Amazon CloudWatch metrics and two new APIs. These metrics and APIs can help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues with live streams either as they happen or after the streams have ended. You can also use APIs from Amazon IVS and Amazon CloudWatch to embed data into your own dashboard or application.

To help you quickly troubleshoot your permissions in Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now includes the policy type that’s responsible for the denied permissions in access denied error messages. Amazon Sagemaker, AWS CodeCommit and AWS Secrets Manager are among the first AWS services that now offer this additional context, with other services following in the next few months. When you troubleshoot access-related challenges, the identified policy type in the access denied error message helps you to quickly identify the root cause and unblock your developers by updating relevant policies.

Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed to run container workloads is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Redshift now simplifies the use of other services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Glue by allowing customers to create an IAM role from the Redshift console and assigning it as the default IAM role while creating an Amazon Redshift cluster. The default IAM role helps simplify SQL operations such as COPY, UNLOAD, CREATE, EXTERNAL FUNCTION, CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, CREATE EXTERNAL SCHEMA, CREATE MODEL, or CREATE LIBRARY that accesses other AWS services by eliminating the need to specify the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for the IAM role .

EMR Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers to develop, visualize, and debug  big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. Today, we are excited to announce that EMR Studio is now available in the Europe (Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.

Amazon Cognito now offers a new console experience that makes it even easier for customers to manage Amazon Cognito user pools and add sign-in and sign-up functionality to their applications. Customers that wish to opt in to the new and streamlined experience can do so by navigating to the Amazon Cognito console.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now supports MySQL major version 8.0. MySQL 8.0 includes improved performance functionality from enhancements such as instant DDL to speed up the overall process of creating and loading a table and its associated indexes and SKIP LOCKED and NOWAIT options to avoid waiting for other transactions to release row locks. MySQL 8.0 adds developer productivity features such as window functions to more easily solve query problems and common table expressions to enable use of named temporary result sets. It also includes JSON functionality additions, new security capabilities, and more. MySQL 8.0 on Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition supports popular Aurora features including Global Database, RDS Proxy, Performance Insights, and Parallel Query.

Starting November 9, 2021, Amazon Rekognition Image APIs pricing has been reduced by up to 38% in all 14 supported regions . This price reduction will automatically reflect in customer bills starting from November 2021.