Amazon CloudWatch is introducing enhancements to the console experience, which improve data visualizations, cross-console navigation and user experience. 

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Regions.

Amazon S3 now applies two new default bucket security settings by automatically enabling S3 Block Public Access and disabling S3 access control lists (ACLs) for all new S3 buckets. This change was first announced on December 13, 2022, began deploying on April 5, 2023, and is now applied to all AWS Regions. To learn more about the change, read Heads-Up: Amazon S3 Security Changes Are Coming in April of 2023 in the AWS News Blog and Default access settings for new S3 buckets FAQ in the S3 User Guide.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Verified Access, a service that helps you provide secure access to your corporate applications without using a VPN. Built based on AWS Zero Trust principles, you can use Verified Access to implement a work-from-anywhere model with added security and scalability.

Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed service for Grafana, a popular open-source analytics platform that enables you to query, visualize, and alert on your metrics, logs, and traces. Since inception, Amazon Managed Grafana maintained a single version offering across all workspaces globally. With this release, you can select an Amazon Managed Grafana supported version to create a new workspace. Version 9.4 includes several new features to further enhance your experience in Amazon Managed Grafana including, but not limited to: plugin enhancements to support CloudWatch cross-account querying, OpenSearch serverless, querying multiple asset properties from AWS IoT Sitewise, query result reuse and async queries for Athena; Prometheus and Loki query builders make it even easier to create and modify queries for your data sources; Service accounts that provide a secure and efficient way to automate tasks within your Grafana instance.

Amazon Connect has reduced pricing for the Japan toll-free inbound minute rate by 46% from $0.1482/min to $0.08/min in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

Amazon Connect has reduced prices for direct-inward dial (DID) rates for South Korea in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. This includes claimed DID phone numbers reduced by 89% from $0.8/day to $0.0864/day and DID inbound minutes by 97% from $0.0736/min to $0.0020/min.

Today, AWS announces the expanded support of AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) for Amazon EC2 with a new SSM document to the fill disk of EC2 instances. FIS is a fully managed service which allows you to run experiments to test how your applications behaves during an impairment, and helps you improve application performance, observability, and resilience. The new disk fill document consumes disk space to see how the application behaves when disk space is unavailable.

Today, AWS announced Provisioned Capacity for Amazon Athena, a new feature that allows you to run SQL queries on fully-managed compute capacity for a fixed price and no long-term commitments. Provisioned Capacity enables you to allocate dedicated compute to mission-critical queries and control workload performance characteristics such as query concurrency and cost. You can add capacity at any time, and pay only for the amount of capacity you specify and time it is active in your account.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now offers multi-VPC private connectivity that simplifies connectivity and access to your Amazon MSK clusters from your Apache Kafka clients hosted in any VPC or AWS account.