Today, we are announcing the next generation storage optimized Amazon EC2 Im4gn and Is4gen instances. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. They feature up to 30TB of storage with the new AWS Nitro SSDs that are custom-designed by AWS to maximize the storage performance of I/O intensive workloads such as SQL/NoSQL databases, search engines, distributed file systems and data analytics which continuously read and write from the SSDs in a sustained manner. AWS Nitro SSDs enable up to 60% lower latency and up to 75% reduced latency variability in Im4gn and Is4gen instances compared to the third generation of storage optimized instances. These instances maximize the number of transactions processed per second (TPS) for I/O intensive workloads such as relational databases (e.g. MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL), and NoSQL databases (KeyDB, ScyllaDB, Cassandra) which have medium-large size data sets and can benefit from high compute performance and high network throughput. They are also an ideal fit for search engines, and data analytics workloads that require very fast access to data sets on local storage.

You can now use AWS Control Tower to deny services and operations in your Control Tower environments for the AWS Region(s) of your choice. Region deny capabilities complement existing AWS Control Tower Region selection and Region deselection features, providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory requirements while improving cost efficiency of expanding into additional Regions.

We’re pleased to announce that AWS Control Tower now offers new guardrails to provide more control over the physical location of where customer data is stored and processed, a concept known as data residency. Control Tower data residency guardrails help ensure customer data, the personal data you upload to the AWS services under your AWS account, is not stored or processed outside a specific AWS Region or Regions.

AWS IoT ExpressLink  (Preview) is connectivity software that powers a range of hardware modules developed and offered by AWS Partners, such as Espressif, Infineon, and u-blox. These connectivity modules include AWS-validated software, making it faster and easier for you to securely connect almost any product to the cloud in a fraction of the time and cost, including medical devices, industrial sensors, and consumer products.

Amazon Athena users can now use AWS Lake Formation to configure fine-grained access permissions and read from ACID-compliant tables. Amazon Athena makes it simple for users to analyze data in Amazon S3-based data lakes to help ensure that users only have access to data to which they’re authorized and that their queries are reliable in the face of changes to the underlying data can be a complex task.

AWS IoT Device Management Fleet Indexing now provides integration with two additional data sources, AWS IoT Core named shadows and AWS IoT Device Defender detect violations. With this release, supported data sources for Fleet Indexing increased to 5 from 3 (AWS IoT Core registry, shadows, and connectivity lifecycle events). These two additional data sources will help IoT customers who store IoT fleet data across different services and systems and regularly access the data for fleet monitoring, health checks, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and troubleshooting.

AWS Backup now allows you to centrally protect VMware workloads, on premises and in the cloud as VMware Cloud^TM on AWS, helping you meet your business and regulatory compliance needs. You can now use a single policy in AWS Backup to centrally protect your hybrid VMware environments alongside the 12 AWS services (spanning compute, storage, and databases) already supported by AWS Backup. AWS Backup enables you to demonstrate compliance status of your organizational data protection policies by monitoring backup, copy, and restore operations, and allowing you to generate unified auditor-ready reports to help satisfy your data governance and regulatory requirements.

Today we announced the General Availability of Amazon WorkSpaces Web. WorkSpaces Web is a new capability from our End User Computing suite – a low cost, fully managed WorkSpace built specifically to facilitate secure, web-based workloads. WorkSpaces Web makes it easy for customers to safely provide their employees with access to internal websites and SaaS web applications without the administrative burden of appliances or specialized client software. WorkSpaces Web provides simple policy tools tailored for user interactions, while offloading common tasks like capacity management, scaling, and maintaining browser images.

Amazon Connect now provides an agent application for managing contacts and resolving customer issues. In the contact center, agents need a way to easily handle multiple contacts (voice, chat, tasks) while viewing the right customer information and having knowledge articles surfaced in the context of the customer’s issue they are trying to solve. After launching the agent application in their browser, agents are immediately able to sign-in and manage customer authentication, calls, and chats alongside viewing key customer insights and knowledge articles. For example, when an agent receives a call or chat, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles shares customer information, such as name, phone number, and email address. While the agent is talking to the customer, Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes the caller’s unique voice characteristics using machine learning to verify the caller’s identity in real-time, displaying a confidence score and status. Then throughout the contact, Amazon Connect Wisdom detects customer issues and proactively provides knowledge article recommendations in real-time. With the Amazon Connect agent application, you can help give your agents the right information to solve customer issues, deliver a personal experience, and improve customer satisfaction.