On Thursday, the 30th of November 2023, an update will be applied to Stax Compliance to improve performance and reliability.

The update implements security and stability updates to the underlying software. No functional changes will be introduced.

There will be no impact to service expected as a result of this upgrade. Should you experience any issues, please raise a support case. 

To ensure you receive notice of upcoming changes to Stax, make sure you're subscribed to the status page.

Stax Workloads are now deployable in any region enabled within the Foundational Service Stax-managed AWS Regions. When initiating a new workload deployment through the Stax Console or SDK, you can choose from default and enabled opt-in regions, such as Melbourne (ap-southeast-4). Visit our help docs for a comprehensive list of all currently supported AWS regions.

Stax now supports enabling AWS opt-in Regions for your Stax tenancy. Configuring an opt-in Region, such as Melbourne (ap-southeast-4), enables the region for all accounts within your Organization and brings them in line with security and best practices through the Stax Assurance process.

See Using Stax-managed AWS Regions for details on configuring AWS opt-in Regions.

Stax Rule Bundles now provide AWS Console remediation guidance, offering organizations actionable steps to address rule violations and maintain compliance. Refer to our guide for more details.

To gain detailed insights into your AWS cost information, or to feed billing information into third-party tools, you can now opt-in to have your Stax-managed AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CURs) exported directly to an S3 bucket in your AWS Organization's logging account. To find out more, see Opt-in to Stax-managed CUR export to the Logging Account in the docs.

In addition to viewing your rule-level compliance score based on passing and failing rules, Stax Compliance users can now view compliance scores calculated by the number of passing/failing resources. This new resource-level compliance view enables resource-focused operational insights and remediation. 

Choose the vertical ellipsis (⋮) under the summary results on the Rule page to change how the compliance score is calculated. See our guide for more details.

What’s Changing?
Stax has decided to remove the chat support button from the Cost and Compliance segments of Stax. While this feature is being deprecated, you can communicate with the Stax support team by clicking the “Support” button on the lower left-hand side of the console. This change aligns with our commitment to improving our services and catering to your needs effectively.

If you have any questions, encounter any issues, or require any further assistance with this change, please do not hesitate to contact our support team using the Support button in the lower left of your console or via https://stax.io/support

Thanks,
The team at Stax

A number of Rule names have been updated to improve usability and standardize rule names across all Rule Bundles. To find out more, visit the Stax Compliance module guide.

As announced on 04 September 2023, Stax has released a fix for an issue resulting in some out-of-date RI recommendations being collected from AWS member accounts.

Stax has released a change to only show RI recommendations that are less than 30 days old making the current recommendations and savings opportunities more accurate. Customers may notice a decrease in the Total Potential Yearly Saving and a reduction in the number of savings opportunities displayed.

This change does not impact RI recommendations generated by Stax within the AWS management account which are scoped to all accounts in the organization's consolidated billing family. These recommendations cover both the management account and member accounts and are refreshed daily.

Stax Notifications now supports the ability to create multiple of the same notification types for any delivery channel. This change provides greater flexibility and personalization and makes managing your Stax Cost & Compliance notifications much easier. See Manage Notifications for more details.