AWS announces the launch of AWS AppConfig hosted configurations, a new feature that simplifies on-boarding to AWS AppConfig to enable customers to deploy configurations in seconds. AWS AppConfig makes it easy for AWS customers to quickly roll out application configurations across applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, containers, AWS Lambda, mobile apps, IoT devices, and on-premises servers in a validated, controlled and monitored way. 

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you automatically update the instances in your Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) to release new application versions or make infrastructure changes. Traditionally, customers had to write custom scripts and build systems to update ASG configurations with new AMIs. With the new Instance Refresh feature, customers can now trigger configuration updates such as moving to new AMIs and changing instance types. You can roll out these updates to the ASG by replacing instances all at once or gradually.

AWS CloudFormation announces the preview of AWS CloudFormation Guard (cfn-guard ), an open-source command line interface (CLI) that helps enterprises keep their AWS infrastructure and application resources in compliance with their company policy guidelines. Cfn-guard provides compliance administrators with a simple, policy-as-code language to define rules that can check for both required and prohibited resource configurations. It enables developers to validate their CloudFormation templates against those rules.

Amazon EMR now persists the YARN timeline server and Tez user interface (UI) along with the event and container logs outside the cluster. You can now debug and monitor your YARN applications independent of the cluster’s life cycle by logging directly into the web interfaces using the EMR console. The YARN timeline server and Tez UI are open-source applications that provide metrics and visual tools for active and terminated clusters. 

You can now use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to run containers on Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances. With EKS and the AWS Neuron Kubernetes device plugin, it’s easy combine multiple Inferentia devices in your cluster to run high performance and cost-effective inference workloads at scale.  

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS Regions. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.

Starting today, FreeRTOS offers support for new over-the-air update (OTA) job configurations. Using the job rollout configuration, you can now add all of your IoT devices to the same OTA update job, and update these devices in phases. Using job abort and job execution timeout configurations, you have better control over your OTA update process. Get started by logging into the AWS IoT console , and learn more about the OTA feature here .

Today, AWS Service Catalog is releasing delegated administrator portfolio sharing, which enables administrators to more easily distribute and manage AWS services across multiple AWS accounts. Service Catalog administrators can now share services from multiple member accounts within their AWS Organization.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow, formerly known as the AWS Service Catalog Connector. The AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow enables integration features for AWS Service Catalog, AWS Config, and AWS Systems Manager within ServiceNow. This simplifies cloud provisioning and resource management for ServiceNow administrators, and also makes it easier for ServiceNow users to request AWS products, which can be any IT service that administrators want to make available for deployment on AWS.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Building Containerized Applications on AWS , a self-paced digital course available on Coursera. Using video lectures, hands-on exercise guides, demonstrations, and quizzes, the course explains what containers are, as well as the differences between containers and virtual machines. It also covers how to use AWS services to build and deploy microservices-based applications and which AWS services to use to simplify container management.