AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon EMR, making it faster to build and easier to monitor EMR big data processing workflows.

We’ve introduced an enhancement for instance metadata access requests that adds defense in depth against unauthorized metadata access. You can configure the instance metadata service to require this feature on both new and running instances. Additionally, you can choose to turn off access to instance metadata altogether.

Today, AWS announces a new Service Catalog Connector for ServiceNow (version 2.3.3). Administrators now have budget, actual, and forecast spend visibility within the connector. Using Service Catalog Budgets Visibility, administrators can create and associate budgets with portfolios and products to track spend. The new ServiceNow connector also supports FIPS endpoints, enabling enterprises and government entities operating in GovCloud West to use the connector.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets supports drift detection, which means that you can now view aggregated drift results for your StackSets and their stack instances from one view in one account. Drift detection lets you check that the actual configuration of application resources matches their configuration intent. StackSets extend CloudFormation stacks by allowing you to manage stack operations across multiple regions and accounts in one operation.  

To help you identify unused roles in your AWS accounts, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now reports the latest timestamp when role credentials were used to make an AWS request. This information makes it easier for you or your security teams to identify and analyze unused roles and remove them confidently.  

CloudWatch Embedded Metric Format enables you to ingest complex high-cardinality application data in the form of logs and easily generate actionable metrics from them. It has traditionally been hard to generate actionable custom metrics from your ephemeral resources such as Lambda functions, and containers. With this launch, you do not have to rely on complex architecture or multiple third party tools to gain insights into these environments. By sending your logs in the new Embedded Metric Format, you can now easily create custom metrics without having to instrument or maintain separate code, while gaining powerful analytical capabilities on your log data.  

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads.

FireLens is a container log router for Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate that gives you extensibility to use the breadth of services at AWS or partner solutions for log analytics and storage. FireLens works with Fluentd and Fluent Bit. This means you can use one of the many plugins, including AWS for Fluent Bit or bring your own Fluentd output plugin.  

Starting today, AWS customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region can opt in to using longer IDs using APIs or the AWS Management Console.

Amazon Chime now provides application program interfaces (APIs) that you can use to create integrations between your business processes, tools, and Amazon Chime chat rooms. For example, you can automatically sync chat rooms members with Active Directory groups, or create and populate chat rooms automatically for tickets created in your issue management tool.