Astroscale UK has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the agency’s IRUS (In-Orbit Refurbishment and Upgrading Service) project. The Phase A contract has a value of €399,000 …

AWS Outposts racks can now be shipped and installed at your data center and on-premises locations in Rwanda.

AWS Outposts racks extend AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises data center or colocation space for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts racks allow customers to run workloads that need low latency access to on-premises systems locally while connecting back to a home Region for application management. Customers can also use Outposts racks to manage and process data that needs to remain on-premises to meet data residency requirements.

To learn more about Outposts racks, read the product overview and user guide . For the most updated list of countries and territories and the AWS Regions where Outposts racks are supported, check out the Outposts rack FAQs page .

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gb, M8gb, and R8gb instances in 48xlarge sizes. We are also offering C8gb and R8gb in metal-48xl sizes. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors to deliver up to 30% better compute performance than AWS Graviton3 processors. At up to 300 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, these instances offer the highest EBS performance among non-accelerated compute EC2 instances. Take advantage of the higher block storage performance offered by these new EBS optimized EC2 instances to scale the performance and throughput of a wide variety of workloads.

For increased scalability, these instances offer sizes up to 48xlarge, including two metal sizes (C8gb and R8gb only), 3 varieties of memory to vCPUs ratios, up to 300 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, up to 400 Gbps of networking bandwidth. Offering up to 1440K IOPS, these instances have the highest Amazon EBS IOPS performance in Amazon EC2. These new instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking, which enables lower latency and improved cluster performance for workloads deployed on tightly coupled clusters.

The new instance sizes are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. Metal sizes are only available in US East (N. Virginia) region.

To learn more, see Amazon C8gb , M8gb , and R8gb Instances. To begin your Graviton journey, visit the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page . To get started, see AWS Management Console , AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) , and AWS SDKs .

AWS Security Agent now supports GitHub Enterprise Cloud, enabling customers to connect their GitHub Enterprise Organization and leverage AI-powered security capabilities across their private repositories. With this expansion, development teams can integrate security analysis directly into their GitHub workflows.

Customers can now connect their GitHub Enterprise Organization to AWS Security Agent by installing the AWS Security Agent GitHub app with the required permissions. Once connected, the agent provides three key capabilities for private repositories:

Automated Code Reviews: AWS Security Agent performs comprehensive security reviews on new pull requests, identifying vulnerabilities and compliance with internal security requirements before code is merged.

Penetration Testing Integration: Leverage your GitHub Enterprise code repositories during penetration testing activities, allowing the agent to analyze your codebase for potential security weaknesses and attack vectors.

Automated Code Remediation: When security issues are identified during penetration testing, customers can choose to have AWS Security Agent automatically submit pull requests with recommended fixes, accelerating remediation workflows.

This capability is available in the US East (N. Virginia) region where AWS Security Agent operates. To get started, connect your GitHub Enterprise Organization to AWS Security Agent through the AWS Security Agent console . To learn more about AWS Security Agent, visit the product page .

AWS Config announces launch of an additional 13 managed Config rules for various use cases such as security, durability, and operations. You can now search, discover, enable and manage these additional rules directly from AWS Config and govern more use cases for your AWS environment.

With this launch, you can now enable these controls across your account or across your organization. For example, you can assess your security posture across Amazon Cognito User pools, Amazon EBS Snapshots, AWS Cloudformation Stacks and more. Additionally, you can leverage Conformance Packs to group these new controls and deploy across an account or across organization, streamlining your multi-account governance.

For the full list of recently released rules, visit the AWS Config developer guide . For description of each rule and the AWS Regions in which it is available, please refer our Config managed rules documentation . To start using Config rules, please refer our documentation .

New Rules Launched:

1. AURORA_GLOBAL_DATABASE_ENCRYPTION_AT_REST
2. CLOUDFORMATION_STACK_SERVICE_ROLE_CHECK
3. CLOUDFORMATION_TERMINATION_PROTECTION_CHECK
4. CLOUDFRONT_DISTRIBUTION_KEY_GROUP_ENABLED
5. COGNITO_USER_POOL_DELETE_PROTECTION_ENABLED
6. COGNITO_USER_POOL_MFA_ENABLED
7. COGNITO_USERPOOL_CUST_AUTH_THREAT_FULL_CHECK
8. EBS_SNAPSHOT_BLOCK_PUBLIC_ACCESS
9. ECS_CAPACITY_PROVIDER_TERMINATION_CHECK
10. ECS_TASK_DEFINITION_EFS_ENCRYPTION_ENABLED
11. ECS_TASK_DEFINITION_LINUX_USER_NON_ROOT
12. ECS_TASK_DEFINITION_WINDOWS_USER_NON_ADMIN
13. SES_SENDING_TLS_REQUIRED

Today, Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Core announce the availability of new Microsoft productivity applications for WorkSpaces instances, including Microsoft Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024, Microsoft Office LTSC Standard 2024, Microsoft Visio LTSC Professional 2024, Microsoft Visio LTSC Standard 2024, Microsoft Project Professional 2024 and Microsoft Project Standard 2024.

Microsoft Office 2024, Visio 2024 and Project 2024 applications are now part of Amazon WorkSpaces’ managed applications catalog and can be added to eligible new or existing WorkSpaces using your existing Manage application workflow. This helps you standardize on a modern, secure, productivity-focused desktop experience without changing your current bundles.

These applications are available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Core. You will be charged the applications you choose for your WorkSpaces instances. For more details on pricing, refer to Amazon WorkSpaces Pricing . To get started, refer to Administer your WorkSpaces and Manage applications for Amazon WorkSpaces.

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon Web Services announces general availability of Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances, powered by the latest Mac Studio hardware. Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances are the next-generation EC2 Mac instances, that enable Apple developers to migrate their most demanding build and test workloads onto AWS. These instances are ideal for building and testing applications for Apple platforms such as iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and Safari.

Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances offer up to 25% better application build performance compared to Amazon EC2 M1 Ultra Mac instances. M4 Max Mac instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage bandwidth. These instances are built on Apple M4 Max Mac Studio computers featuring a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 128GB of unified memory. 

Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).  To learn more about Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances, visit the Amazon EC2 Mac page.

Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides now enables managers to build more dynamic and responsive guided experiences. Managers can create conditional user interfaces that adapt based on user interactions, making workflows more efficient. For example, managers can configure dropdown menus to show or hide fields, change default values, or adjust required fields based on the input in prior fields, creating tailored experiences for different scenarios.

In addition, Step-by-Step Guides can now automatically refresh data from Connect resources such as flow modules at specified intervals, ensuring agents always work with the most current information.

Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides is available in the following AWS regions : US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), and the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon Connect webpage and documentation.

EC2 Auto Scaling is introducing a new policy condition key autoscaling:ForceDelete . This condition key is used with the DeleteAutoScalingGroup action to control whether the ForceDelete parameter can be used during deletion, which determines if an Auto Scaling group (ASG) can be deleted while it still contains running instances. You can use this condition key in IAM policies to restrict deletion permissions. This provides a safety measure to prevent accidental deletion of ASGs that still have running instances.

Furthermore, EC2 Auto Scaling now offers deletion protection at the group level. The new deletion-protection configuration can be set either when you create your ASGs or update them. This new feature lets you set enhanced controls based on your workload’s criticality, with multiple protection levels available to safeguard against accidental deletions and help maintain application availability.

Combining the autoscaling:ForceDelete condition key with deletion protection at the group level provides a layered defense against unwanted ASG termination by allowing you to both restrict IAM permissions for force-delete operations and set enhanced protection controls directly on critical ASGs.

The features now available in all AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, visit the EC2 Auto Scaling console or refer to our technical documentation for deletion protection and policy condition keys for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Today, we’re announcing that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now supports the ability to deploy multiple VMware NSX Tier-0 Gateways within VMware Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC), enabling enhanced network segmentation and more flexible routing configurations.

Multiple NSX Tier-0 Gateways allow for better performance and scale by distributing network traffic across multiple NSX Edge Clusters. This latest enhancement enables improved network segmentation, allowing you to isolate different workload environments and maintain distinct security policies for each gateway. You can also use multiple gateways to create separate test environments for validating network configurations and performing gateway upgrades with minimal impact to production workloads. This architecture flexibility helps you align your network topology with specific business requirements while maintaining operational efficiency in running your VMware workloads on AWS with Amazon EVS. 

To learn more about this newest enhancement, read this re:Post article  that walks you through the process of deploying multiple NSX Edge Clusters within your EVS environment. To get started with Amazon EVS, visit the product detail page  and user guide .