Tag: SysAdmin

Amazon Quick now integrates with Snowflake Cortex AI through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling teams to query their Snowflake data and documents using natural language, and automate multi-step workflows directly within their Quick workspace. After setting up the connection using Snowflake's managed MCP server with OAuth authentication, you can ask questions across structured data through Cortex Analyst and retrieve insights from unstructured documents through Cortex Search. With this integration, you can build Flows in Quick that orchestrate Snowflake Cortex Agents to execute repeatable, governed workflows with consistent structured output. This is ideal for any multi-step process that spans structured data and unstructured documents. The same MCP connection is also accessible from Quick Chat and other Quick features. For example, users can ask ad-hoc follow-up questions or explore their Snowflake data conversationally alongside their automated flows. Quick intellig

Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals introduces service health ranking on the application map and new infrastructure, logs, and traces tabs on the service overview page. These capabilities let operators triage unhealthy services and inspect the underlying compute environment, log snippets, and trace details in one place, making it easier to find root causes without switching tools. Customers use Application Signals to monitor the health of distributed applications, but identifying why a service was unhealthy often required leaving CloudWatch to correlate infrastructure data across separate tools. The application map now ranks services by health and shows runtime indicators on service nodes for Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EC2, along with a new infrastructure tab that surfaces the compute and runtime environment, its components, and curated default metrics with deep links to the relevant monitoring tools. In addition, the service overview page provides the infr

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 18, starting with version 18.3. This release brings community improvements to query performance and database management, and introduces support for pg_roaringbitmap, a new extension that performs fast, memory-efficient set operations on large collections of integers. This enables use cases such as audience segmentation, tag-based filtering, and permission checks directly in the database without application-layer processing. PostgreSQL 18 introduces B-tree skip scans, which improve query performance, and reduce index storage and maintenance overhead. Major version upgrades now retain optimizer statistics, ensuring consistent query performance immediately after upgrading without waiting for statistics to be regenerated. Logical replication can now stream large transactions in parallel, reducing replication lag and keeping downstream systems more c

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) Serverless now supports workflow and task state change events to Amazon EventBridge, enabling data engineering and platform teams to build event-driven automation for their Apache Airflow workflows. Previously, monitoring workflow execution required custom polling logic or manual observation. With this launch, MWAA Serverless can emit events when workflows transition between states, including started, running, succeeded, or failed, and when individual tasks change state, such as scheduled, succeeded, failed, or up for retry. With this feature, you can further automate your existing workflows - for example, using EventBridge notifications to trigger alerts when a production workflow fails, automatically restart dependent pipelines when an upstream workflow succeeds, or log state transitions to Amazon S3 for compliance and auditing. This feature is available in all AWS

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now provides a CloudWatch Logs integration directly in the environment Logs tab of the Elastic Beanstalk console. Previously, customers had to navigate to the CloudWatch console to find the relevant log groups and log streams for their environments. With this launch, customers can view CloudWatch log events without leaving the Elastic Beanstalk console.   The Logs tab displays log groups that an environment streams logs to, as well as log groups matching the aws/elasticbeanstalk/<env-name>/* prefix. Customers can select a log group to view its log streams, with the most recently active stream selected by default. A log stream dropdown allows switching between streams and filtering results. For deeper analysis, a View in CloudWatch dropdown provides direct links to the log group, log stream, or CloudWatch Logs Insights in the CloudWatch console. This feature is available across all Elastic Beanstalk platform branches in all

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports out-of-order sample ingestion and a workspace-level rule query offset. All workspaces have a default out-of-order time window of 1 minute, allowing the workspace to accept metric samples arriving outside strict chronological order. You can adjust this window to match your ingestion patterns or set it to 0 to disable the feature and discard out-of-order samples. You can also configure a global rule query offset that introduces a delay before rule evaluation queries run, giving late-arriving samples time to be ingested before rules execute. Together, these features reduce data loss and improve alerting accuracy for workloads with distributed collectors, batched exports, or variable network latency. Out-of-order sample support ensures late-arriving data points are ingested rather than discarded, preserving metric completeness. The rule query offset compensates for the expected in

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports ingestion, storage, and querying of Prometheus native histograms, enabling customers to capture high-resolution metric distributions with greater precision and lower cardinality than classic histograms. DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, and platform teams monitoring latency, request durations, and other distributions can now get more accurate percentile calculations without pre-defining bucket boundaries or managing high-cardinality time series. Native histograms use exponential bucketing to automatically adapt resolution to your data, storing an entire distribution in a single time series rather than requiring one series per bucket boundary. This reduces active series count, as a classic histogram with 20 buckets that previously required 22 time series now requires only one, while delivering more precise tail-latency insights from functions like histogram_quantile

AWS announces AWS Workload Credentials Provider, a lightweight client-side provider that automates deployment of exported certificates from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and local caching of secrets from AWS Secrets Manager across AWS and non-AWS workloads. Previously, customers exporting public or private certificates from ACM had to build custom automation using Amazon EventBridge to detect renewals and deploy the updated certificates. With public certificate lifetimes decreasing per the the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/B) mandate, this custom automation can become difficult to maintain at scale. AWS Workload Credentials Provider eliminates this complexity by providing a single provider that helps distribute and automate both secrets and certificates to your workloads. You configure it with your certificate ARN and specify options such as file paths and server reload behavior — the provider then handles certificate export and deployment automatically to pre

Today, AWS announces the expanded availability of OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 models, which are now available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region on Amazon Bedrock. With GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5, you can build generative AI applications across reasoning, coding, computer use, document workflows, and long-running agentic tasks. GPT-5.5 is OpenAI's most capable model, designed for advanced coding, research, analysis, software operation, document workflows, and long-running agentic tasks. It can understand open-ended goals, use tools, reason across longer workflows, navigate ambiguity, and carry complex tasks through to completion with less orchestration. GPT-5.4 brings frontier reasoning, coding, computer use, long-context workflows, and tool use to production applications that interpret context, interact with tools, operate software environments, and verify outputs across multiple steps. Both models support a 272K-token context window, accept text and image input, and are availa

Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports MCP Apps, bringing observability workflows directly into compatible agentic IDEs such as Claude Desktop and VS Code. With this capability, your AI agent in local environment can investigate incidents using logs, traces, metrics, and alerts stored in OpenSearch domains, collections and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. You can easily review and verify the results in interactive MCP App visualizations without leaving your local environment. Each MCP App tool call returns a dual response, a concise text summary for your agent to reason over and an interactive visualization rendered in the same conversation thread for you to review. You can work alongside your observability agent from firing an alert, perform root cause analysis, exploring distributed traces, service maps, PromQL metric charts, and cross-signal correlations all within a single conversation. Available MCP App tools cover log, metrics and trace investigation, service pe