AWS announces new SAP specialty certification

What's going on with AWS this week? Instance Scheduler Version 2.0 was introduced, Amazon Fraud Detector takes center stage, CloudFormation users can now manage their applications in Systems Manager, and a new specialty certification for AWS has been announced.

Want to know more? Read on for the details!

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Earlier this week, AWS announced version 2.0 of Instance Scheduler. Instance Scheduler helps curb costs of your instances by allowing configuration of a start and stop schedule using tags to group them.

Using SSM Automation Runbooks to start and stop the instances, the scheduler allows your instances to be started when you know you'll need them and stopped when you know you won't.

Version 2.0 includes custom Systems Manager Documents, which allows state manager associations in Systems Manager the ability to start and stop EC2/RDS instances. This differs from previous versions that used Lambda to retrieve schedules and the instance state, and then act based on parameters set in the schedule such as enforced or override.

Fraud Detectors, gather around! There are all kinds of updates in Fraud Detector. I present to you the Transaction Fraud Insights model!

The low-latency model was specifically designed to better detect online card-not-present transaction fraud. This new model detects up to 30% more fraudulent transactions AND maintains performance up to 6 times longer than the previous Online Fraud Insight model.

Fraud Detector also now has event dataset storage!

This new storage capability will let you send and store your fraud data directly within Fraud Detector. You can also upload historical event data to train Machine Learning models and have those models apply that historical context to new events, automatically calculating things like purchase frequency and account age.

The event dataset is automatically updated with each new prediction, so you won't need to upload new datasets for each model retraining!

In addition to these new features, pricing was reduced up to 56% for Online Fraud Insights fraud predictions! The usage tiers allow you to reach the highest discount tier sooner. You can now reach the 75% discount tier after just 100,000 fraud predictions per month, instead of the 1.2 million required previously! That is huuuuuge savings!

More details are available here.

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CloudFormation users unite! I give you: Application Manager!

You can now view operational data, diagnose, and take action to resolve issues with your applications launched in a CloudFormation stack. (I know. It's awesome.)

You can view the application manager dashboard directly from the CloudFormation stack in the Stack Actions drop-down menu or Systems Manager where you will get an overview of information including drift status, application type, tags, status, alarms, OpsItems, runbook logs, and application insights all in one view.

AWS announced a new specialty certification for SAP on AWS.

First of all, what is SAP, you might be wondering? (If you're like me, then you immediately start making up your own meaning for acronyms if they're new to you, so let's clear that up.) SAP stands for "System Analysis Program Development" and was shortened to SAP (I know . . . I don't make the rules on acronyms.)

This exam will focus on validating skills in managing and deploying SAP workloads on AWS.

This specialty exam will allow 220 minutes to answer 50 multiple choice and multiple response questions.

So save the date, mark your calendars, and set alarms: the new SAP on AWS - Specialty Certification Beta Exam will be open to registration Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2021.

Nervous already? Don't fret. You can check out the AWS-provided exam guide and sample questions to prepare.

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That's all this week. Keep being awesome, cloud gurus!

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