Amazon RDS for SQL server now supports authentication using the Windows Authentication method. You can now enable your applications to authenticate against Amazon RDS for SQL Server using credentials stored in the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition). Keeping all of your credentials in the same directory will save you time and effort because you will no longer have to find and update each copy of the credentials in separate repositories. This may also improve your overall security profile. Windows Authentication support is now available for new instances as well as existing instances.

Today we are announcing the availability of two new CloudWatch metrics for monitoring network packets on EC2 instances. The new metrics are NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut. These new metrics provide insight into the number of network packets flowing to and from an EC2 instance. These metrics are available along with the other CloudWatch metrics for all EC2 instances on the EC2 console, CLI and API.

The AWS Cryptography team has announced the AWS Encryption SDK. This new SDK makes encryption easier for developers while minimizing errors that could lower the security of their applications. Developers using encryption often face two problems: a. how to correctly generate and use a key to encrypt data, and b. how to protect the key after it’s been used. The library provided in the AWS Encryption SDK addresses the first problem by transparently implementing the low-level details using the cryptographic provider available in a developer’s environment. The library addresses the second problem by providing intuitive interfaces to let developers choose how they want to protect their encryption keys after use. By using the AWS Encryption SDK, developers can focus on the core of the application they’re building instead of the complexities of encryption. We’ve provided ready-to-use samples in the SDK for AWS customers who use AWS CloudHSM or AWS Key Management Service, however the open source SDK can be extended to support other key providers. 

You can now easily upgrade the engine version on your existing ElastiCache for Redis clusters to utilize Amazon ElastiCache enhancements, including increased usable memory, improved synchronization and more efficient failovers. To achieve the smoothest performance on ElastiCache for Redis, we recommend you upgrade to the latest engine version that is compatible with Redis 2.8.24. The engine upgrade process is designed to make a best effort to retain your existing data and requires Redis replication to succeed. For more details and best practices on upgrading your ElastiCache for Redis engine version please refer to the ElastiCache Documentation . 

AWS Device Farm now lets you add unmetered Android and iOS device slots to your account to run unlimited tests for a recurring monthly fee of $250 per device slot. Pricing for unmetered testing is fixed regardless of test type and device minutes used. Regardless of the number of device slots that you purchase, you can test on any number of devices and execution concurrency is simply limited to the number of slots. To learn more about device slots please visit our FAQ. 

Our new AWS Professional Services Delivery Best Practices Bootcamp is designed to help our partners develop professional services competencies at their firms. In this intensive three-day bootcamp we share our collective professional services learnings derived from important customer projects to help enable partners to deliver large, successful engagements, and to ensure that collectively we deliver a very positive customer experience. Attendees should be focused on helping enterprise customers migrate applications to AWS and have at least six months experience working on AWS implementations. Attendees are required to hold a minimum of one Associate AWS Certification. Registration for this bootcamp is available at no cost to APN Premier Consulting and Advanced Partners. Learn more at Partner Training.

Starting today, you can monitor the capacity and performance metrics of your Spot fleets via CloudWatch. You can view metrics such as total desired, fulfilled and currently launching capacity of a fleet, in addition to monitoring aggregated EC2 instance metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic for a given fleet. These metrics enable you to get visibility into the usage and performance of your Spot fleets, and to dynamically scale in response to application load.

You can now more easily set up or select your Identity and Access Management (IAM) role when connecting to an Amazon Redshift cluster from the Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) console. To streamline the process of setting up your connection to Amazon Redshift, Amazon ML now pre-populates an interactive drop-down menu of existing IAM roles that have an Amazon ML managed policy for Amazon Redshift, and other IAM roles that you might prefer. From the Amazon ML console, you have the option of dynamically creating a new IAM role, enabling you to quickly connect to your Amazon Redshift cluster. 

We are excited to announce availability of AWS Storage Gateway in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. 

AWS Storage Gateway is pleased to announce increased capacity for both gateway-virtual tape library (VTL) and gateway-stored volumes. This enables you to store more data in AWS without needing to run additional gateways, reducing your cost and operational overhead.