The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. This solution is a framework to send equipment telemetry data to your AWS account, allowing you to leverage AWS Services to conduct analysis on your equipment data instead of managing underlying infrastructure operations. The solution currently allows for robust data ingestion using either the OPC Data Access (OPC DA) protocol or the CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) Seamless Messaging Protocol (SLMP). Support for OPC Unified Access (OPC UA) protocol will follow in the next release. 

IAM helps customers with capabilities to analyze access and achieve least privilege. When you are working on new permissions for your teams, you can use IAM Access Analyzer policy generation to create a policy based on your access activity and set fine-grained permissions. To analyze and refine existing permissions, you can use last accessed information to identify unused actions in your IAM policies and reduce access. When we launched action last accessed in 2020, we started with S3 management actions to help you restrict access to your critical business data. Now, IAM is increasing visibility into access history by extending last accessed information to Amazon EC2, AWS IAM, and AWS Lambda management actions. This makes it easier for you to analyze access and reduce EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions by providing the latest timestamp when an IAM user or role accessed an action. Using last accessed information, you can identify unused actions in your IAM policies and tighten permissions confidently.  

The Amplify CLI now gives developers the ability to make multiple global secondary index (GSI) updates to their Amazon DynamoDB tables in a single deployment, enabling faster and safer data model iterations. AWS Amplify CLI is a command line toolchain that helps frontend web and mobile developers create cloud backends and connect them to their app for common use cases, like managing app data using AWS AppSync and Amazon DynamoDB.  

AWS CloudFormation StackSets extend the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and Regions with a single operation. We are now announcing the support for CloudFormation Macros and transforms in templates that are used to create a stack set. AWS CloudFormation macros perform custom processing on CloudFormation templates from simple actions such as find-and-replace, to helping transform the entire template. CloudFormation macros use the same technology that powers AWS::Include and AWS::Serverless transforms. CloudFormation transforms help simplify template authoring by condensing the expression of AWS infrastructure as code and enabling reuse of template components.

Amazon Pinpoint is now authorized as FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. This service is also approved as Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 2 (DoD SRG IL-2) in this Region.

AWS Backup extends centralized backup management for Amazon FSx to AWS Europe (Milan), AWS Africa (Cape Town), AWS Middle East (Bahrain), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can create, manage, and restore your Amazon FSx backups directly from AWS Backup. AWS Backup support for Amazon FSx file systems includes Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems.  

User Defined Functions (UDF), which enable users to apply custom operations to their data, are now generally available for Amazon Athena. While Athena provides a wide range of built-in functions, users can extend these capabilities with their own functions and use them directly within their queries. This allows users to address specific use cases, such as redacting or encrypting sensitive data, without the need for complex data processing steps elsewhere in their data pipeline.

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG) is a fully managed service that manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves. Customers can now upgrade their AMG workspaces to Grafana Enterprise with a 30-day free trial via an AWS Marketplace subscription, enabling access to Enterprise data source plugins such as ServiceNow, Splunk, and New Relic as well as support, training, and consultation directly from Grafana Labs. AMG now also supports open source Grafana version 7.5, which includes new features such as support for larger Prometheus queries via POST method, Amazon CloudWatch plugin enhancements, AWS X-Ray service map visualization, and many more. The new Open Distro for Elasticsearch data source plugin provides improved log data exploration and visualization for Elasticsearch data stored on Amazon Elasticsearch Service or clusters running Open Distro for Elasticsearch (an Apache 2.0-licensed distribution of Elasticsearch). Additionally, customers will now see their AMG usage and billing information in their AWS Billing and Cost Management console. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation, which means you can enable streaming to an Amazon Kinesis data stream on your DynamoDB tables with CloudFormation templates. By streaming your DynamoDB data changes to a Kinesis data stream, you can build advanced streaming applications with Amazon Kinesis services. For example, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics reduces the complexity of building, managing, and integrating with Apache Flink, and provides built-in functions to filter, aggregate, and transform streaming data for advanced analytics. You also can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to take advantage of managed streaming delivery of DynamoDB table data to other AWS services such as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3. 

To learn more about Kinesis Data Streams for DynamoDB, see Change Data Capture for Kinesis Data Streams with DynamoDB . For more information about working with CloudFormation, see What Is AWS CloudFormation ?

AWS CloudFormation enhances the existing dynamic referencing of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store parameters in CloudFormation templates. You can now reference the latest Systems Manager parameter values in CloudFormation templates without specifying parameter versions. If you choose not to specify the parameter versions in the template, CloudFormation will automatically fetch the latest parameter values from Parameter Store.