As per AWS best practices, all S3 buckets created by the Stax platform in customer AWS Accounts will have enforced encryption of data in transit using HTTPS (TLS).

This change does not impact buckets created by Stax customers either within the AWS Console/SDK/API, or via the Stax Workloads service.

This change applies to the following S3 buckets in your AWS Accounts:

• stax-cloudtrail-<org-id>

• stax-cloudtrail-accesslogs-<org-id>

• stax-staxtrail-<org-id>

• stax-staxtrail-accesslogs-<org-id>

• stax-config-<org-id>

• stax-config-accesslogs-<org-id>

• stax-billing-<org-id>

• stax-billing-accesslogs-<org-id>

• stax-session-manager-<org-id>

• stax-idam-waflogs-<account-id>

A bug has been resolved with the Workloads API's Update Workload method's schema implementation.

The Update Workload schema has been adjusted to remove the CatalogueVersionId as a mandatory property. It also adds CatalogueId and Parameters to the schema documentation to reflect the implementation.

• Changed: CatalogueVersionId is now optional

• Added: CatalogueId is now defined in the schema

• Added: Parameters are now defined in the schema

Stax has released the Stax Foundation Compliance Rule Bundle which assesses the compliance of your AWS accounts against enterprise-grade security controls. The Rule Bundle is a collection of AWS Well-Architected, CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and Stax best-practice security controls, which will help you to track the safety and security of your accounts.

Head to the Stax Foundation Compliance Rule Bundle on the Rules page within the Stax Console to check it out.

Stax has made it easier to attach and detach Stax Policies to/from your Stax Account Types using the Stax API.

Changed Error Code when validating Account Type or Policy​

If you attempt to attach a Policy to an Account Type and the Account Type or Policy does not already exist, the API will return a 404 (Not Found) response, instead of a generic 400 (Bad Request) response.

Added validation for attaching and detaching policies​

When you attach or detact a Policy to/from an Account Type, the Stax API will now verify if the Policy is already attached or detached. An error will be returned if this occurs.

Added validation for Stax Policies limits​

Only four Stax Policies can be attached to any specific Account Type. If you attempt to attach Policies that would exceed this limit, the API will now validate that and reject the request.

Stax has partnered with AWS to provide Stax customers with a Stax Events AWS EventBridge integration.

Stax Events published to AWS EventBridge will allow customers to monitor and automate actions within their Stax-managed AWS accounts. Customers will be able to receive events about Stax usage, as well as, priority AWS events enriched with contextual Stax information. Leveraging the power of AWS serverless services, such as, AWS Lambda or AWS Step Functions will allow for additional actions to be taken as a result of these events.

In addition to publishing these events to AWS EventBridge, events will also be stored in your logging account's StaxTrail S3 bucket. These new event details will be available at the following path within the S3 bucket: StaxTrail/year/month/day/StaxEventId.gz.

For more details about Stax Events, check out the docs.

A bug has been resolved with the Workloads API's Update Workload method's documentation.

The Update Workload documentation has been clarified to properly reflect the capability to Protect Workloads using the Protection property, as well as mandating the CatalogueVersionId property to ensure the update process occurs correctly.

• Added: Protection property (boolean)

• Changed: CatalogueVersionId is now mandatory

• Changed: Tags now has a more defined object schema

• Removed: Name property as it was unused

There is no change to the underlying functionality of the API, this is strictly a documentation/definition update.

A number of bug fixes have been released for Stax Policies.

Reject duplicate Organization Policies​

Users will now receive an immediate failure response from the Stax API when trying to attach an Organization Policy that has already been attached to the organization. This is to prevent duplicate attachments from occurring.

Prevent duplicate Organization Policy entries​

The Stax platform will no longer allow duplicate Organization Policies to be attached to a customer's organization. This is to resolve a problem where detaching a policy from an Organization that had the policy attached more than once would result in a detachment failure.

Stax Policy error feedback​

Improvements have been made to correctly report failures when using Stax Policies. This fix will result in an accurate Failure status being returned for the relevant Task Id.

As per AWS best practices, all S3 buckets created by the Stax platform in customer AWS Accounts will have versioning enabled. This applies to both existing buckets and new buckets. This change will be progressively rolled out to all customers over the coming days.

This change does not impact buckets created by Stax customers either within the AWS Console/SDK/API, or via the Stax Workloads service.

A bug fix has been released for the PUT account-types/policies route where the Stax platform would process any requested policy attachments before policy removal. This would result in a failure if the number of requested attachments, in addition to policies yet to be removed, exceeded the policy limit of four policies per Account Type. This fix ensures that policies are removed before new policies are attached to avoid future failures.

The stax:version tag will no longer be applied to CloudFormation stacks within new Workload deployments in Stax. This change has been introduced to improve the speed and reliability of Workload deployments.

Prior to this change, the tag was applied to all CloudFormation stacks deployed as part of a Workload.

Newly deployed Workloads will notice this change immediately. Any running Workload will retain this tag until the next Workload update, at which point it will be automatically removed by Stax.

The stax:version tag did not relate in any way to the version of the Workload deployed, rather it was used for Stax-internal purposes only.