AWS Chatbot now supports running AWS commands and actions from Slack. You can retrieve diagnostic information, invoke Lambda functions and create AWS Support cases right from your Slack channels, so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot supports commands using the already familiar AWS Command Line Interface syntax that you can use from Slack on desktop or mobile devices. In addition to running commands, you can also retrieve Amazon CloudWatch logs by simply clicking the “Show logs” button on CloudWatch Alarms notifications in Slack. AWS Chatbot supports actions for displaying logs for AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.
AWS IoT Device Defender Adds Four New Checks to its Audit Capability
You can now use AWS IoT Device Defender Audit to check for devices in your fleet that: (1) have overly permissive permissions (e.g., admin permissions, access to metadata actions, data plane actions, or security auditing services); (2) have access to services that haven’t been used in over 365 days; (3) use OpenSSL versions on Debian-based operating systems that have been identified as having predictable cryptographic keys making them susceptible to brute force attacks; or (4) use Infineon RSA library versions that have been identified to mishandle RSA key generation making them susceptible to hacking.
Amazon CloudWatch Now Includes Contributor Insights – in Preview
Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights, now available in preview, analyzes time-series data to provide a view of the top contributors influencing system performance. Once set up, Contributor Insights runs continuously without needing additional user intervention. This helps developers and operators more quickly isolate, diagnose, and remediate issues during an operational event.
Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics – Now in Preview
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor application endpoints more easily. With this new feature, CloudWatch now collects canary traffic, which can continually verify your customer experience even when you don’t have any customer traffic on your applications, enabling you to discover issues before your customers do. CloudWatch Synthetics supports monitoring of your REST APIs, URLs, and website content, checking for unauthorized changes from phishing, code injection and cross-site scripting. CloudWatch Synthetics runs tests on your endpoints every minute, 24×7, and alerts you when your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. These tests can be customized to check for availability, latency, transactions, broken or dead links, step by step task completions, page load errors, load latencies for UI assets, complex wizard flows, or checkout flows in your applications. You can also use CloudWatch Synthetics to isolate alarming application endpoints and map them back to underlying infrastructure issues to reduce mean time to resolution.
Access resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud using Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
You can now enable your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java applications to access resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This feature enables you to use your streaming applications to read and write data from resources within your VPCs like Amazon Elasticsearch Service clusters, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters, and more.
AWS Glue now supports the FindMatches ML Transform on Apache Spark 2.4.3 and AWS Glue version 1.0
AWS Glue now supports running the FindMatches ML Transform in ETL scripts running on Spark 2.4.3 (Glue version 1.0). Previously, you were only able to use the FindMatches ML Transform in Spark 2.2.1 (Glue Version 0.9).
AWS DataSync is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East)
AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. In June 2019 we also announced that DataSync is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. DataSync is an online data transfer service that automates and accelerates copying data between Network File System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB) file servers, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. Customers use DataSync to migrate data to AWS, to transfer data to the cloud for analysis and processing, and to replicate data to AWS for archiving or business continuity.
Amazon Aurora MySQL 5.7 Expands List of Supported Features to Improve Performance and Manageability
Starting today, a number of Amazon Aurora features like invoking an AWS Lambda function synchronously, hot row contention, Backtrack, and hash joins, will now be available on the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Aurora to improve performance and manageability. The MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora already offers enhancements such as JSON support, spatial indexes, and generated columns.
Simplify cloud provisioning with AWS Service Catalog Connector for Jira Service Desk
Today, AWS Service Catalog announces the AWS Service Catalog Connector for Jira Service Desk (JSD) version 1.0.4. With this connector, administrators can use existing AWS Service Catalog configurations, including curated products, portfolios, constraints, and tagging, and expose them to JSD administrators and users. This new connector simplifies AWS product provisioning and provides administrators with governance and oversight over their AWS resources.
Amazon Redshift Spectrum launches in five additional AWS regions
Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in five additional AWS regions: EU (Paris, Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.