Today, Amazon Lightsail announces the addition of managed databases to its easy-to-use cloud platform, allowing you to create a fully configured database in minutes for a low, predictable price. Lightsail databases bundle together a database instance, SSD-backed storage, a data transfer allocation, and management tools, starting at $15/month.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Athena uses the Glue Data Catalog, a managed repository, integrated with Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Glue ETL, to store metadata information, and automate schema discovery and schema version history. With the recent release of resource-based policies and resource-level permissions for the AWS Glue Data Catalog, you can restrict or allow Athena access to Data Catalog Objects such as databases and tables. Please note that you still need S3 policies to govern access to data stored in Amazon S3. Click here to learn more

AWS Marketplace announces the launch of Flexible Payment Scheduler, a new feature that enables you to negotiate details such as the number of units, payment amounts, payment dates, and end-user licensing in their payment schedule.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory , also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now gives you an additional option to implement the principle of least privilege by reducing the scope of access through the Active Directory (AD) trusts between AWS Managed Microsoft AD and your existing Microsoft AD. As an alternative to forest-wide trust, you can now use external trusts to connect to specific child or tree domains in your existing Microsoft AD forest.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces two new Edge locations: Fujairah, United Arab Emirates and Paris, France. Fujairah is our second Edge location in the United Arab Emirates; the first, Dubai, was launched last month. Customers delivering content within the United Arab Emirates can expect to see up to 90% latency improvements on average. The addition of a new Edge location in Paris, France increases our capacity by 50% within the area. A full list of CloudFront’s global locations is available on the CloudFront Details webpage.

Amazon WorkMail now provides real-time diagnostic checks for configuring custom domains, making using your own domain with Amazon WorkMail even easier. Customers can already use their own domain for their WorkMail organization. To do so, you need to configure your DNS records with your DNS hosting provider, which can be difficult to do and is sometimes error prone. Now, Amazon WorkMail lets you verify your DNS settings directly from the Amazon WorkMail console. If the DNS settings are incorrect, Amazon WorkMail will prompt you with the information you need to correct the errors.

In addition, we are also providing deeper, automated checks for Autodiscover configuration, so administrators can verify that their endpoint is working correctly before asking their users to configure their email clients. This immediate feedback can save customers hours of debugging email domain issues due to typos, missing records, and differences between DNS hosting providers.

These troubleshooting features are available today for Amazon WorkMail domains hosted by any provider and available in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkMail is offered. To learn more about Amazon WorkMail, or to start your trial, please visit Amazon WorkMail.

Starting today, you can specify a database parameter group when you restore an Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora database from a snapshot or restore a database to a specific point in in time. Previously, restoring a database used the default parameter group and you had to wait until the restore was finished before changing it to the desired configuration.

You can now restrict access to specific AWS Glue Data Catalog objects with resource-based policies and resource-level permissions. You can set up a resource-based policy on your AWS Glue Data Catalog to give AWS Identify and Access Management (IAM) users and roles granular access to metadata definitions of databases , tables , connections , and user-defined functions . You can also restrict access to specific objects in the AWS Glue Data Catalog using resource-level permissions in identity-based policies (IAM policies).

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