You can now use AWS Lambda with extensions for your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance. Today, you can use extensions for the following tools: AppDynamics, Check Point, Datadog, Dynatrace, Epsagon, HashiCorp, Lumigo, New Relic, Thundra, Splunk, AWS AppConfig, and Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights.

AWS Compute Optimizer now analyzes additional Amazon EBS metrics to generate enhanced EC2 instance type recommendations. Enhanced recommendations are now available for Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer Rightsizing Recommendations customers.

Whisper flows, which allow information to be passed to an agent or customer while being connected on a call, are now available in Amazon Connect chat. For example, you can display text showing the customer’s name and membership status to an agent, inform a customer that the chat is being recorded for quality assurance purposes, or provision access to a customer relationship management system for the agent accepting the contact. Whisper flows allow you to create personalized, one-sided interactions, which only an agent or end-customer will see, by adding the ‘set whisper flow’ block to your Amazon Connect contact flow. 

Thirty-two new or updated datasets from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the First Street Foundation, Ookla, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories. 

Starting today, you can create multilevel hierarchies with AWS Cost Categories to group your cost and usage information based on your business needs. Cost Category is added as a new dimension, in addition to Tag, Account, Service, and Charge Type. Furthermore, you can now track whether your most recent cost category updates have been applied to your cost and usage data via a new “status” attribute on your Cost Categories dashboard. 

Amazon ElastiCache is announcing the launch of ElastiCache for Redis and Memcached on Graviton2 M6g and R6g instance families. Customers choose Amazon ElastiCache for workloads that require ultra-low latency and high throughput, and can now enjoy up to a 45% price/performance improvement over previous generation instances. Graviton2 instances are now the default choice for ElastiCache customers.  

Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights, now available in preview, enables you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions. With this preview, you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions that provide visibility into issues such as memory leaks or performance changes caused by new function versions.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now allows you to Force Stop a running application and reset its status to Ready, giving you more control over your applications. In addition, you can check if your application is scaling up or down through the new ‘Autoscaling’ application status.

Customers can now assess their EC2 workloads running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10, and Windows Server 2019 for CVEs and external network accessibility using Inspector. Amazon Inspector is available in the following 14 regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).  

Amazon EMR now supports a spread placement group strategy for clusters with multiple master nodes. You can now launch master nodes across separate underlying hardware to reduce the risk of simultaneous failures that might occur when instances share the same racks. Earlier, master nodes were placed within the same subnet without any placement strategies.