AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports converting Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) bitmap and SCTE-27 image-based subtitles to WebVTT captions.

AWS CloudFormation announces the launch of the CloudFormation Public Registry , a new searchable collection of extensions  that allows you to discover, provision, and manage third-party extensions, which include resource types (provisioning logic) and modules published by AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners and the developer community. You can also create and publish your own extensions on the CloudFormation Public Registry, allowing anyone to use them. Today, you can centrally search and use over 35 extensions published on the Public Registry by APN Partners and AWS Quick Starts. You can view the identity verification for each extension publisher on the Public Registry. APN Partners who collaborated on this launch include MongoDB, Datadog, Atlassian Opsgenie, JFrog, Trend Micro, Splunk, Aqua Security, FireEye, Sysdig, Snyk, Check Point, Spot by NetApp, Gremlin, Stackery, and Iridium.

The MariaDB audit plug-in is now available for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL instances using MySQL major version 8.0. The MariaDB audit plug-in is also available for instances using MySQL major versions 5.6 and 5.7, and provides event logging for database activity to help customers meet compliance and audit requirements, and troubleshoot application issues. Some of the key details for implementing the plugin are:

• Enabling and disabling the audit plug-in – Users can enable audit plug-in by creating an option group, adding MARIADB_AUDIT_PLUGIN option to the group, and attaching the option group to an RDS instance. Audit logging can be disabled by removing the option group from the instance.
• SERVER_AUDIT_EVENTS variables – These variables allow users to specify the events they want to include in the logs (CONNECTION: users connecting and disconnecting, QUERY: queries and their result, and TABLE: which tables are affected by the queries).
• SERVER_AUDIT_EXCL_USERS and SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS variables – These variables specify which users’ activity should be excluded from or included in the audit. SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS has higher priority and all users’ activity is recorded by default.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the updated one-day classroom course and new digital course, AWS Technical Essentials. These courses are ideal for technical learners who need to understand fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to make informed decisions about IT solutions based on business requirements.  

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lookout for Metrics now allows you to detect anomalies on your Amazon CloudWatch data. Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies (outliers from the norm) without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon CloudWatch provides you with actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Amazon Connect now allows you to enable Amazon Connect Customer Profiles in Canada (Central) region, equipping contact center agents with the most up to date information about the incoming contact to provide faster and more personalized customer service. Customer Profiles automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications such as Salesforce, Amazon S3 and ServiceNow into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. 

AWS Outposts is now supported in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and migration of applications with local system interdependencies.

Amazon Translate – a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation in 71 languages and variants –now supports translation of XML Localization Interchange File Format – XLIFF documents. Starting today, customers can submit their XLIFF documents for batch processing by Amazon Translate. Amazon Translate only translates sections where the target segment is empty. If the target section contains non-empty strings or pre-translated strings, Amazon Translate will not modify or overwrite the translation. You only pay for what you translate. This feature allows customers to continue using Translation Memory to translate content prior to machine translation and keep the machine translation costs low.

Starting today, you can launch additional configurations of the R5 instance class when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle. Featuring up to 4x the RAM per vCPU of existing R5 instance classes, the new configurations are available in the following AWS Regions:

North America

• US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US East), AWS GovCloud (US
  West), Canada (Central)

South America

• South America (Sao Paulo)

Europe, Middle East and Africa

• EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Milan), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town)

Asia Pacific

• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

AWS Client VPN now supports SAML based federated authentication for opening a VPN connection from a Linux Desktop Operating system (Ubuntu 64bit 18.04 and 20.04 LTS). The Linux Desktop client has feature parity with the existing Windows and macOS Desktop clients. AWS Client VPN Desktop Clients are available free of charge, and can be downloaded here.