AWS Weekly Roundup – EBS Status Check, Textract Custom Queries, Amazon Linux 2, and more – October 16, 2023

With just 41 days until AWS re:Invent 2023 opens, I’m doing my best to stay heads-down and focused on working with the entire AWS News Blog team to create plenty of awesome new posts for your reading pleasure! I’ll take a short break this morning to share some of the most exciting launches and other news from last week. Here we go!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some of the launches that captured my attention:

Amazon EBS – The new Attached EBS Status Check CloudWatch metric lets you monitor the status of all of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes attached to a particular Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, verifying that the volumes are reachable and able to complete I/O operations.

AWS Systems Manager – You can now enable AWS Systems Manager by default for all EC2 instances within an Organization. This lets you confirm that core Systems Manager capabilities are present on all new and existing instances.

Amazon EC2 – You can now set unused or obsolete AMIs to a disabled state. This makes the AMI private if it was previously shared, hides it from DescribeImages by default, and prevents new instances from being launched from it.

Amazon Textract – You can now use Custom Queries to adapt Textract’s Queries feature to improve extraction accuracy for business-specific documents. You upload sample documents, label the data, and generate an adapter, which you then use in calls to the AnalyzeDocument function.

Amazon OpenSearch Service – You can now create Search Pipelines for easier processing of queries and results. Each search pipeline can contain multiple processing steps: query rewriters, natural language processors, result rerankers, and filters; several standard processors are also included.

Amazon Linux 2 – The latest quarterly release (AL2023.2) of Amazon Linux 2 includes a core set of Ansible features as well as a curated set of community collections. It also includes Amazon Corretto 21, and many other new features and capabilities.

Amazon Rekognition – You can now train custom adapters to reduce the number of false positives and false negative flagged by Amazon Rekognition, giving you the power to tailor the deep learning model to improve performance for your specific use case.

Amazon RDS – Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB databases on M6in, M6idn, R6in, and R6idn database instances.

X in Y – We launched existing services and instance types in additional regions:

• M6in and M6idn instances in Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Europe (Stockholm).
• C7gd, M7gd, and R7gd instances in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo).
• C7gd instances in Asia Pacific (Sydney).
• Unified settings for the AWS Management Console in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
• AWS Direct Connect in Seoul, South Korea.
• AWS Global Accelerator in Hanoi, Vietnam (second location).
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in Asia Pacific (Osaka).
• AWS Organizations Service Control Policies in AWS China Regions.
• AWS Verified Access in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Tokyo).
• Private Access to the AWS Management Console in Israel (Tel Aviv).
• Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle in Asia Pacific (Jakarta).

Other AWS News
Here are some other blog posts and news items that you might like:

On the Community.AWS Blog, Seth Eliot listed Twelve Resilience Sessions at AWS re:Invent You Won’t Want to Miss, Brooke Jamieson explained How to Learn Generative AI from Scratch, and Daniel Wirjo shared some Patterns for Building Generative AI Applications on Amazon Bedrock.

On the AWS Insights blog, fellow news blogger Irshad Buchh explained why Two billion downloads of Terraform AWS Provider shows value of IaC for infrastructure management.

The AWS IoT Blog explained How to build a scalable, multi-tenant IoT SaaS platform on AWS using a multi-account strategy.

The Amazon SES Blog showed you how to Automate marketing campaigns with real-time customer data using Amazon Pinpoint.

The AWS Big Data Blog showed you how to Orchestrate Amazon EMR Serverless jobs with AWS Step functions.

The AWS Compute Blog talked about Filtering events in Amazon EventBridge with wildcard pattern matching.

The AWS Storage Blog talked about Retaining Amazon EC2 AMI snapshots for compliance using Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive.

The AWS Architecture Blog talked about how Internet Travel Service ITS adopts microservices architecture for improved air travel search engine.

Some other great sources of AWS news include:

• AWS Open Source Newsletter
• AWS Graviton Weekly
• AWS Cloud Security Weekly
• Last Week in AWS

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Community Days – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Italy (October 18), UAE (October 21), Jaipur (November 4), Vadodara (November 4), and Brasil (November 4).

AWS Innovate: Every Application Edition – Join our free online conference to explore cutting-edge ways to enhance security and reliability, optimize performance on a budget, speed up application development, and revolutionize your applications with generative AI. Register for AWS Innovate Online Americas and EMEA on October 19 and AWS Innovate Online Asia Pacific & Japan on October 26.

AWS re:Invent (November 27 – December 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Browse the session catalog and attendee guides and check out the re:Invent highlights for generative AI.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

And that’s a wrap. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Jeff;

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!