Subscribe to AWS Daily Feature Updates via Amazon SNS

Way back in 2015 I showed you how to Subscribe to AWS Public IP Address Changes via Amazon SNS. Today I am happy to tell you that you can now receive timely, detailed information about releases and updates to AWS via the same, simple mechanism.

Daily Feature Updates
Simply subscribe to topic arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:692768080016:aws-new-feature-updates using the email protocol and confirm the subscription in the usual way:

You will receive daily emails that start off like this, with an introduction and a summary of the update:

After the introduction, the email contains a JSON representation of the daily feature updates:

As noted in the message, the JSON content is also available online at URLs that look like https://aws-new-features.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/update/2023-02-27.json . You can also edit the date in the URL to access historical data going back up to six months.

The email message also includes detailed information about changes and additions to managed policies that will be of particular interest to AWS customers who currently manually track and then verify the impact that these changes may have on their security profile. Here’s a sample list of changes (additional permissions) to existing managed policies:

And here’s a new managed policy:

Even More Information
The header of the email contains a link to a treasure trove of additional information. Here are some examples:

AWS Regions and AWS Services – A pair of tables. The first one includes a row for each AWS Region and a column for each service, and the second one contains the transposed version:

AWS Regions and EC2 Instance Types – Again, a pair of tables. The first one includes a row for each AWS Region and a column for each EC2 instance type, and the second one contains the transposed version:

The EC2 Instance Types Configuration link leads to detailed information about each instance type:

Each page also includes a link to the same information in JSON form. For example (EC2 Instance Types Configuration), starts like this:

{
    "a1.2xlarge": {
        "af-south-1": "-",
        "ap-east-1": "-",
        "ap-northeast-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "ap-northeast-2": "-",
        "ap-northeast-3": "-",
        "ap-south-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "ap-south-2": "-",
        "ap-southeast-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "ap-southeast-2": "a1.2xlarge",
        "ap-southeast-3": "-",
        "ap-southeast-4": "-",
        "ca-central-1": "-",
        "eu-central-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "eu-central-2": "-",
        "eu-north-1": "-",
        "eu-south-1": "-",
        "eu-south-2": "-",
        "eu-west-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "eu-west-2": "-",
        "eu-west-3": "-",
        "me-central-1": "-",
        "me-south-1": "-",
        "sa-east-1": "-",
        "us-east-1": "a1.2xlarge",
        "us-east-2": "a1.2xlarge",
        "us-gov-east-1": "-",
        "us-gov-west-1": "-",
        "us-west-1": "-",
        "us-west-2": "a1.2xlarge"
    },

Other information includes:

VPC Endpoints
AWS Services Integrated with Service Quotas
Amazon SageMaker Instance Types
RDS DB Engine Versions
Amazon Nimble Instance Types
Amazon MSK Apache Kafka Versions

Information Sources
The information is pulled from multiple public sources, cross-checked, and then issued. Here are some of the things that we look for:

New Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types
New Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) releases
New Amazon EMR releases
New Security Bulletins
Updates to AWS CLI v1 including new commands
Updates to AWS CLI v2 including new commands
New commands for AWS Tools for PowerShell
Services that have started to publish Amazon CloudWatch Metrics
New AWS service topics for AWS CloudTrail
New AWS managed policies
Updates to existing managed policies
New IAM permissions added to existing managed policies
IP range prefix updates
New AWS Trusted Advisor checks
New service quotas
New VPC endpoint services
New release notes for Amazon Elasticsearch Service and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
New FIPS endpoints by service
New FIPS endpoints that support at least TLS 1.2
New Amazon ElastiCache engines
New AWS Config Managed Rules
New AWS Security Hub FSBP Controls and PCI Controls
New Amazon GuardDuty finding types
New releases of AWS SDK for .NET

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things that you should keep in mind about the AWS Daily Feature Updates:

Content – The content provided in the Daily Feature Updates and in the treasure trove of additional information will continue to grow as new features are added to AWS.

Region Coverage – The Daily Feature Updates cover all AWS Regions in the public partition. Where possible, it also provides information about GovCloud regions; this currently includes EC2 Instance Types, SageMaker Instance Types, and Amazon Nimble Instance Types.

Region Mappings – The internal data that drives all of the information related to AWS Regions is updated once a day if there are applicable new features, and also when new AWS Regions are enabled.

Updates – On days when there are no updates, there will not be an email notification.

Usage – Similar to the updates on the What’s New page and the associated RSS feed, the updates are provided for informational purposes, and you still need to do your own evaluation and testing before deploying to production.

— Jeff;

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