Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option that makes it simple for data analysts and engineers to run open-source big data analytics frameworks like Apache Spark and Apache Hive without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters or servers. Starting today, you can call the EMR Serverless APIs to view the Application UIs e.g. the live Spark UI or Tez UI for running jobs and the Spark History Server or the persistent Tez UI for completed jobs.

AWS NAT Gateway is now available in the AWS US West Phoenix Local Zone. AWS Local Zones is a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today.

Amazon Connect scheduling now offers new time off balance and group allowance features empowering contact center managers and agents to handle time offs more efficiently. Before this launch, managers had to manually cross-verify time off balances before approving or declining requests, and agents had to contact their managers via email or third party tools to request or change their time off schedule. With this launch, managers can easily import agent time off balances and group allowances in bulk from third party HR systems (for e.g., 120 hours vacation time, 40 hours sick time), and select either an automated or manual approval workflow for their groups. Agents can request time off and receive automatic approvals (or declines) based on their time off balances and group allowances in addition to other time off rules.

Amazon Connect scheduling now allows managers to generate agent schedules with an appropriate number of activities including breaks or meals, based on the duration of agent shifts. Before this launch, schedules were generated with a fixed set of shift activities, leading to numerous shifts needing time consuming manual adjustments based on agent’s work duration. With this launch, Amazon Connect scheduling automatically generates the required number of breaks and meals according to configured inputs reflecting shift durations and labor/union labor rules, saving time for managers.

Amazon Connect scheduling now allows contact center managers to automatically generate agent schedules with a combination of fixed and flexible working days each week, i.e. agents will have certain mandatory work days while other days are scheduled based on demand. Before this launch, managers had to manually adjust a subset of agent schedules to align with their flexible work contracts and regional labor laws. With this launch, the system automatically proposes flexible schedules allowing managers to create more optimized labor/union compliant agent schedules, freeing up valuable time for more important tasks.

Today, AWS Clean Rooms launches two new capabilities that give customers flexibility to generate richer insights: custom analysis rule and analysis templates. These capabilities enable customers to bring their own custom SQL queries into an AWS Clean Rooms collaboration based on their specific use cases. With the custom analysis rule, customers can create their own queries using advanced SQL constructs, as well as review queries prior to their collaboration partners running them. This workflow gives customers built-in control of how their data is used in collaborations upfront, in addition to reviewing query logs after analyses are complete. Using analysis templates, customers can create queries with parameters that provide reusability and flexibility to those running queries in a collaboration. This helps customers expand and automate types of analyses they run frequently with multiple partners, minimize the need to write new SQL code when analyzing collective data sets. 

Amazon Connect flow designer now includes a toolbar with shortcuts to new editing capabilities such as undo (including a history of previous actions) and redo, along with existing shortcuts such as copy and paste. You can also now add notes to a flow, allowing you to document things like what the flow is doing or a to-do list of what updates you want to make. You can attach notes to a specific flow block and search notes using the toolbar.

Amazon Connect now supports restricting the use and access of attributes to a single flow. Now, you can granularly control when an attribute is associated with a contact (and shows up in the contact record) or if it can only be accessed by a specific flow (used only when that flows is executing a customer experience). For example, if your flow is automatically authenticating your customer’s identity using personally identifiable information (PII), you can use flow attributes to prevent the PII information from showing up in contact records or to an agent.

Amazon Connect now supports archiving and deleting flows from the flow designer UI, making it easier to manage flows that are not in use or no longer needed. For example, flows used only during certain times of the year can be archived when not in use and then unarchived when needed. When a flow has been archived, you can then permanently delete the flow so it is no longer available within your list of flows.

Customers can now use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager in the AWS Asia (Hyderabad) Region to automate the creation, sharing, copying, and retention of Amazon EBS Snapshots and EBS-backed AMIs via policies. Data Lifecycle Manager eliminates the need for complicated custom scripts to manage your EBS resources, saving you time and money.