Author: Jeff Barr

We are launching three new voices for Polly. Powered by a new long-form engine, the voices are natural and expressive, with appropriate pauses, emphasis, and tone. New Voices The new long-form voices are perfect for blog posts, news articles, training videos, and marketing content. The underlying Machine Learning model extracts meaning from the text, learning […]

If you are ready to learn more about Generative AI while having fun and building cool stuff, check out PartyRock.aws . You can experiment, learn all about prompt engineering, build mini-apps, and share them with your friends — all without writing any code or creating an AWS account. You can also start with an app […]

You can now lock individual Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots in order to enforce better compliance with your data retention policies. Locked snapshots cannot be deleted until the lock is expired or released, giving you the power to keep critical backups safe from accidental or malicious deletion, including ransomware attacks. The Need for […]

You now have the ability to disable public sharing of new, and optionally existing, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots on a per-region, per-account basis. This provides you with another level of protection against accidental or inadvertent data leakage. EBS Snapshot Review You have had the power to create EBS snapshots since the launch […]

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports the use of pre-snapshot and post-snapshot scripts embedded in AWS Systems Manager documents. You can use these scripts to ensure that Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots created by Data Lifecycle Manager are application-consistent. Scripts can pause and resume I/O operations, flush buffered data to EBS volumes, and […]

Effective mid-2024, newly released Amazon EC2 instance types will use only version 2 of the EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDSv2). We are also taking a series of steps to make IMDSv2 the default choice for AWS Management Console Quick Starts and other launch pathways. Background This service is accessible from within an EC2 instance at […]

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow government agencies, regulated industries, and the independent software vendors (ISVs) that support them to store sensitive data and run critical workloads on AWS infrastructure that is operated and supported by AWS employees located in and residents of the European Union (EU). The first Region will be located in […]

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 […]