New – Fully Managed Blue/Green Deployments in Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS

When updating databases, using a blue/green deployment technique is an appealing option for users to minimize risk and downtime. This method of making database updates requires two database environments—your current production environment, or blue environment, and a staging environment, or green environment. You must then keep these two environments in sync with each other so you may safely test and upgrade your changes to production. Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) customers can use database cloning and promotable read replicas to help self-manage a blue/green deployment. However, self-managing a blue/green deployment can be costly and complex to build and manage. As a result, customers sometimes delay implementing database updates, choosing availability over the benefits that they would…

New for AWS Backup – Protect and Restore Your CloudFormation Stacks

To define the data protection policy of an application, you have to look at its components and find which ones store data that needs to be protected. Those are the stateful components of your application, such as databases and file systems. Other components don’t store data but need to be restored as well in case of issues. These are stateless components, such as containers and their network configurations. When you manage your application using infrastructure as code (IaC), you have a single repository where all these components are described. Can we use this information to help protect your applications? Yes! AWS Backup now supports attaching an AWS CloudFormation stack to your data protection policies. When you use CloudFormation as a…

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor Preview – End-to-End Visibility into Internet Performance for your Applications

How many times have you had monitoring dashboards show you a normal situation, and at the same time, you have received customer tickets reporting your app is “slow” or unavailable to them? How much time did it take to diagnose these customer reports? You told us one of your challenges when monitoring internet-facing applications is to gather data outside of AWS to build a realistic picture of how your application behaves for your customers connected to multiple and geographically distant internet providers. Capturing and monitoring data about internet traffic before it reaches your infrastructure is either difficult or very expensive. I am happy to announce the public preview of Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor, a new capability of CloudWatch that gives…

New for Amazon Transcribe – Real-Time Analytics During Live Calls

The experience customers have when interacting with a contact center can have a profound impact on them. For this reason, we launched Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics last year to help you analyze customer call recordings and get insights into issues and trends related to customer satisfaction and agent performance. To assist agents in resolving live calls faster, we are introducing today real-time call analytics in Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics. Real-time call analytics provides APIs for developers to accurately transcribe live calls and at the same time identify customer experience issues and sentiment in real time. Transcribe Call Analytics uses state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities to automatically assess thousands of in-progress calls and detect customer experience issues, such as repeated requests to…