Starting today, you can access custom-generated Amazon EC2 resource optimization recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer. These recommendations identify idle and underutilized instances across your accounts and regions. To generate these recommendations, AWS analyzes your historical EC2 resource usage, your Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and your existing reservation footprint to identify opportunities for cost savings (e.g., by terminating idle instances or downsizing active instances to lower-cost options). For example, if your m5.2xlarge has a maximum utilization of 20% over the last 14 days, AWS may recommended downsizing that instance to m5.xlarge or m5.large and show you how much you can save based on your usage and your applicable m5 family reservations.

AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows enable you to define a time window for performing potentially disruptive actions on your instances. You can now use maintenance windows to select a resource group as the target. Resource groups make it easier to organize, manage, and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time. By selecting a resource group as the target of a maintenance window, you can perform routine tasks across different resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets within the same recurring time window.  

It’s now easier than ever for organizations to develop and validate their teams’ skills by providing them with AWS Certification exam vouchers . These vouchers conveniently eliminate the need for candidates to pay when registering for their exam.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS Europe (London) region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve your cloud architectures.  

AWS Client VPN now supports split-tunnel, which gives customers the flexibility to cherry pick the traffic that traverses over the VPN tunnel.  

Predictive Maintenance Using Machine Learning is a solution that automates the detection of potential equipment failures, and provides recommended actions to take. The solution is easy to deploy and contains an example dataset of a turbofan degradation simulation from NASA. But, you can modify the solution to use your own dataset.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. This regional expansion extends the global availability of ACM Private CA, increasing the number of regions to 18.

You can now enable AWS X-Ray for your messages passing through Amazon SNS, making it easier to trace and analyze messages as they travel through to the downstream services. AWS X-Ray provides more insights to developers troubleshooting performance issues and errors for their distributed applications and microservices. 

AWS Systems Manager Distributor provides simplified package creation, enabling you to deploy your software packages across instances quickly. Distributor will package your installers so they can be easily used to install and update your software across multiple operating systems.

AI-Driven Social Media Dashboard is a solution that monitors and ingests specified tweets using stream processing and leverages a serverless architecture and machine learning services to translate and extract insights from those tweets. The solution is easy to deploy and contains a data lake you can use to quickly and easily perform additional analytics on tweet data.