AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas – template size, resources, parameters, mappings, and outputs. The maximum size of a template that can be passed in an S3 Object is now 1MB (previously 450KB). The new per template limits for the maximum number of resources is 500 (previously 200), parameters is 200 (previously 60), mappings is 200 (previously 100), and outputs is 200 (previously 60).

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of Oracle Data Guard physical standby DB instances which run in mount mode. It fully manages the configuration of Oracle Data Guard, and asynchronously replicates data over secured network connections between a primary DB instance and its physical standby mounted DB replicas. Amazon RDS for Oracle Data Guard mounted DB replicas require Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) but not Oracle Active Data Guard.  

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and enables options to tune for high-availability of your applications. App Mesh has now increased the default limits for a set of resources – virtual nodes, and virtual gateways. These limit increases make it easier for you to manage larger applications with App Mesh.

In August 2020, Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) launched a feature to share Certificate Authorities (CA) between AWS accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). With today’s launch, App Mesh customers will be able to use a certificate authority shared with their AWS account while configuring TLS between services in their mesh.  

You can now use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) FIFO topics , in combination with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queues , to build applications that require messages to be sent and processed in a strict sequence and without duplicates. SNS FIFO is intended for customer use cases where it is critical to maintain the consistency in processing messages across multiple independent services in a strictly ordered manner. Example use cases include bank transaction logging, stock tickers, flight trackers, news broadcasting, inventory management, vote tabulation, and price updates.

Amazon Redshift now allows you to schedule your SQL queries for executions in recurring schedules and enables you to build event-driven applications by integrating with Amazon EventBridge. You can now schedule time sensitive or long running queries, loading or unloading your data, or refreshing your materialized views on a regular schedule.

Amazon CloudFront announces that you can now manage public keys used for signed URLs and signed cookies through Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) based user permission, without requiring the AWS root account. With the IAM user permissions based public key management, you get more flexibility and API access to manage your public keys.

You can now export Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora snapshots to Amazon S3 as Apache Parquet format in additional regions. Parquet is an efficient open columnar storage format for analytics and is up to 2x faster to export and consumes up to 6x less storage in Amazon S3, compared to other text formats. You can analyze the exported data with other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker.

AWS announces the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights, a fully integrated, interactive, and pay-as-you-go log analytics service for CloudWatch in the Asia Pacific (Osaka-Local) Region. CloudWatch Logs Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your logs instantly, allowing you to troubleshoot operational problems with ease. With Logs Insights, you only pay for the queries you run. Logs Insights scales with your log volume and query complexity giving you answers in seconds. In addition, you can publish log-based metrics, create alarms, and correlate logs and metrics together in CloudWatch Dashboards for complete operational visibility.  

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights, adds additional storage volume metrics to provide further insights to your storage performance and health along with the new ability to monitor your API Gateway functions. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps enterprise customers easily setup application monitoring and enhanced observability for AWS resources. The new Elastic Block Store (EBS) metrics provide further details on storage volumes. The integration with the API Gateway service provides insights to the various API commands run through the gateway.