Today we are announcing the availability of two new CloudWatch metrics for monitoring network packets on EC2 instances. The new metrics are NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut. These new metrics provide insight into the number of network packets flowing to and from an EC2 instance. These metrics are available along with the other CloudWatch metrics for all EC2 instances on the EC2 console, CLI and API.

Amazon RDS for SQL server now supports authentication using the Windows Authentication method. You can now enable your applications to authenticate against Amazon RDS for SQL Server using credentials stored in the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition). Keeping all of your credentials in the same directory will save you time and effort because you will no longer have to find and update each copy of the credentials in separate repositories. This may also improve your overall security profile. Windows Authentication support is now available for new instances as well as existing instances.

Amazon EC2 Spot instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. AWS customers in the area can now use Spot instances to save up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices by bidding on unused Amazon EC2 capacity. In addition to reducing the cost of running your applications, you can also use Spot instances to increase your computing scale and throughput for the same budget and enable new types of cloud computing applications. 

AWS continues to innovate at a rapid pace, and one of the keys to building a successful business on AWS is ensuring you can accurately explain the value and operation of AWS and its latest features. AWS Business and Technical Professional courses consist of e-learning modules and assessments designed to help you stay current. Today we’re making them available in additional languages— Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with Spanish to follow soon. These courses are available at no cost to APN Partners via the APN Portal . Once you successfully complete all course assessments, you achieve an accreditation that validates your role-specific knowledge. 

Support for multiple trails: You can now create up to 5 trails in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. Different stakeholders such as IT auditors, security administrators, and developers can create and manage their own trail. Additionally, you can prescribe granular access control to allow or deny access to specific trails for particular users. For more details, refer to the Multiple Trails section of the CloudTrail User Guide. One trail per region is free. Charges apply for additional trails. For pricing details, go to the CloudTrail pricing page.  

You can use AWS Mobile Hub to develop apps in Swift. Simply login to the AWS Mobile Hub console  to create a project and select features for your app including user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push notifications, content delivery, and analytics, then choose Swift from the build tab of your project. AWS Mobile Hub automatically provisions these features and generates a working quickstart app for iOS that you can use as a foundation for your app, or cut and paste code snippets to your existing app.

You can now scale up your existing ElastiCache for Redis clusters to a larger node type with a few clicks. Simply modify your node type by choosing from the available options and let ElastiCache manage the rest. Your existing node endpoints will persist, thus no application update is required. Scale up for Redis is designed to make a best effort to retain your existing data and requires Redis replication to succeed. For more details, please refer to Jeff Barr’s blog and ElastiCache Documentation . 

Starting today, Amazon RDS supports two new features for RDS for PostgreSQL database instances: the option to enforce only SSL connections to your instance, and near-realtime access to a set of 56 system and process metrics for your instance.

In October of 2015, we added support for the popular open source MariaDB  database in Amazon RDS and have since seen rapid adoption by customers. Amazon RDS supports MariaDB instances running in Single-AZ or Multi-AZ configurations in all AWS regions. Today we are extending the RDS Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) that covers Multi-AZ instances for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL to include Amazon RDS for MariaDB. 

You can now configure AWS WAF to block, allow, or monitor (count) requests based on Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) match conditions. XSS attacks are those where the attacker uses vulnerabilities in a benign website as a vehicle to inject malicious client-site scripts (like Javascript) into other legitimate user’s web browsers. This XSS match condition feature prevents these vulnerabilities in your web application by inspecting different elements of the incoming request.