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.

Stax has applied hardening and configuration updates to the Stax Identity service to improve security and reliability. These updates form part of an ongoing effort to achieve compliance with enterprise-grade security standards. Authentication to Stax has not changed, however, you may notice that a Web Application Firewall (WAF) (leveraging AWS WAF) has been implemented on the Identity service and that token session times have been reduced from 30min to 15min. For more details about the WAF, check out the Docs.

New DNS functionality within Stax Networks allows you to connect your on-premises infrastructure with resources in your Stax accounts.

Stax utilizes AWS Route 53 Resolver endpoints to resolve DNS requests between AWS resources and on-premises resources. For more information on DNS within Stax Networks, check out the Docs.

As part of Stax Account Assurance, AWS IAM Access Analyzer is now enabled within every region of every account in your Organization.

For more information, see IAM Access Analyzer within the Account Assurance documentation.

The Users page has been updated to provide a richer and more seamless user experience. Updates to the page include filtering, which allows you to filter by a combination of Status, Role or Corporate ID, and additional messaging for managing federated users.

For more information about Users, head to the documentation.

Stax has introduced a Knowledge Base within Stax Docs, which provides information and guidance on how to solve a wide range of Stax use cases.

The Knowledge Base can be found in the left-hand nav under Help. We will continue to add to the Knowledge Base, so keep an eye out for new articles.

We have added search functionality to Stax Docs to help you find the information you are looking for.

The search bar is located at the top of every documentation page.

Stax Workloads now supports the use of AWS Stack Policies to give you more control over your Workload’s CloudFormation resources and protect against modifications and deletions.

For information on how to enable Workload Protection, check out out our guide.