Amazon Connect now supports custom contact attributes as search filters on the contact search page. You can now add up to 15 custom contact attributes to the search filter and use them to build your search queries. For example, if you have created “AgentLocation” as a custom contact attribute , you can now use it as a search criterium, and search for contacts handled by Agents based in “Seattle”, by specifying “Seattle” as the target value. To learn more, see the Contact Search documentation .

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today open-sourced the build scripts that Amazon ECS uses to build the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI). These build scripts are now available on GitHub as an open-source project under the Apache license 2.0. Customers can use these build scripts to build custom AMIs with security, monitoring, and compliance controls based on their organization’s requirements while using the same components as the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.

Today, we are announcing the public preview of Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022), Amazon’s new general purpose Linux for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run your cloud applications. Starting with AL2022, a new Amazon Linux major version will be available every two years and each version will be supported for five years. Customers will also be able to take advantage of quarterly updates via minor releases and use the latest software for their applications. Finally, AL2022 provides the ability to lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository giving customers control over how and when they absorb updates.

Starting today, customers can dynamically attach and detach Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes on their running Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Prior to today, customers attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances needed to reboot their instances for revised EBS configuration to be reflected within their macOS guest environments. Now with this capability, customers do not need to trigger an instance reboot and wait for it to complete when attaching or detaching EBS volumes on EC2 Mac instances.

Starting today, customers can run macOS Monterey (12.0.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Apple macOS Monterey is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. macOS Monterey supports running Xcode versions 13.0 and later, which include the latest SDKs for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now supports AWS Graviton2-based T4 instances. T4g is the next generation burstable general-purpose DB instance type that provides a baseline level of CPU performance, with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. This instance type offers a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Proxy now supports RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – Compatible Edition major version 12. PostgreSQL 12 includes better management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, and many other additional features.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 R6i instances. Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). These instances are SAP-Certified and are ideal for workloads such as SQL and noSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases like SAP HANA, and real time big data analytics like Hadoop and Spark clusters.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports the AWS Graviton2-based T4g instance family in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Frankfurt), South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Canada (Central), and mainland China (Ningxia, Beijing). Customers choose ElastiCache for workloads that require accelerated performance with microsecond latency and high throughput. T4g instances are ideal for running applications with moderate CPU usage that experience temporary spikes in usage.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6i and C6i bare metal instances are available. M6i and C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over M5 and C5 instances respectively, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). M6i instances are well suited for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments. C6i instances are well suited for compute-intensive applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.