Apr 2018

The Serverless Bot Framework is a solution that helps AWS customers implement chatbots in other languages without having to develop their own backend platforms that support language analysis and abstraction, and knowledge training. The solution integrates with managed services such as AWS Lambda, to apply machine learning algorithms, and Amazon Polly, to turn text into lifelike speech.

The solution deploys an Amazon API Gateway endpoint where customers can send requests, AWS Lambda functions that apply machine learning algorithms, Amazon Polly to turn text into lifelike speech, an Amazon DynamoDB table to store conversation logs and interaction context, and Amazon S3 buckets to store configuration files. The solution also includes a sample web application that you can use as a reference framework to create your own application that fits your business need. For more information, see the solution webpage.

The AWS Solutions team communicates AWS architectural best practices and develops standardized, automated solutions for the platform. Our offerings currently live on the AWS Answers webpage, where customers can browse common questions by category to find answers in the form of succinct Solution Briefs or comprehensive Solutions, which are AWS-vetted, automated, turnkey reference implementations that address specific business needs.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface (CLI) lets you locally build, test, and debug serverless applications defined by AWS SAM templates. You can now use the sam logs command to fetch, tail, and filter logs generated by your AWS Lambda functions. You can also use the sam local start-lambda command to invoke local Lambda functions from your automated tests.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, for PostgreSQL major version 10. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.

Oracle Patch Set Updates contain critical security updates and other important updates. The April 2018 PSUs are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about the Oracle PSUs supported on Amazon RDS, visit the Amazon RDS patch update documentation. 

Starting today, you can use your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium subscription with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. With this launch, it is easier for enterprise customers to migrate workloads into the cloud and immediately take advantage of the deep cost savings offered by Spot Instances. 

You can now use AWS IoT Core in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. This expansion increases the number of AWS Regions where AWS IoT Core is available to twelve. Running AWS IoT Core in your local region can help to minimize latencies and may help you meet your local data compliance obligations.

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT Core, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.

For the full list of regions where AWS IoT Core is available, see the AWS Regions table. Visit the getting started page to start using AWS IoT Core, and visit the pricing page to view pricing for Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and other regions.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface (CLI), also referred to as SAM Local, lets you locally build, test, and debug serverless applications defined by AWS SAM templates. Now, you can use the SAM init command to initialize a ready-to-deploy SAM application in your preferred runtime.

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon SQS as an event source. This allows you to build serverless applications with Lambda using message queues as the event source. Amazon SQS is a fully managed message queuing service for reliably communicating between distributed software components and microservices.

We have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 9.6.6, 9.5.10, 9.4.15, and 9.3.20 in AWS GovCloud (US). This release fixes three PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities and contains additional bug fixes and improvements.

With this update, we have also added support for the ‘orafce’ extension to emulate a subset of common functions and packages in version 9.6.6; and the ‘prefix’ extension to provide prefix range functions capability in version 9.6.6 .

To use the new versions, you can create a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instance with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, or upgrade an existing instance using point-and-click upgrades. An upgrade operation involves a short period of unavailability for your database instance. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for regional availability.

Amazon EC2 Fleet is a new feature that simplifies the provisioning of Amazon EC2 capacity across different Amazon EC2 instance types, Availability Zones and across On-Demand, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI) and Amazon EC2 Spot purchase models. With a single API call, now you can provision capacity across EC2 instance types and across purchase models to achieve desired scale, performance and cost. 

September 2018 --  This Quick Start has been updated for TIBCO Cloud Integration - BusinessWorks (TCI-BW). For more information, see the Quick Start for TIBCO Cloud Integration - BusinessWorks on AWS.

Amazon WorkSpaces now provides you with the ability to control the IP addresses from which your WorkSpaces can be accessed. Using IP address-based control groups, you can define and manage groups of trusted IP addresses, and only allow users to access their WorkSpaces when they're connected to a trusted network. This feature helps you gain greater control over your security posture. 

With this update, you can now schedule recurring security assessments through the Amazon Inspector console. You can also now install the Inspector Agent directly from the Inspector console using the Systems Manager Run Command.

You can now access Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources for training and hosting workflows in Amazon SageMaker. With this new feature, you can use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets that are only accessible through your VPC to store training data, as well as to store and host the model artifacts derived from the training process. In addition to S3, models can access all other AWS resources contained within the VPC. Support for VPC resources in training and hosting also allows you to use VPC Flow Logs to monitor all traffic flowing in and out of the Amazon SageMaker algorithms and models.

Amazon DynamoDB global tables is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to an Amazon DynamoDB table for fast read and write performance. You can also use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics for Amazon S3 now includes storage metrics for Amazon Glacier and S3 OneZone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage classes. Storage that has been uploaded to S3 One Zone-IA or transitioned to S3 One Zone-IA or Amazon Glacier from S3 Standard or S3 Standard-IA storage classes using S3 Lifecycle policies will be available in CloudWatch storage metrics. These storage metrics will also include object overhead bytes applied to objects in Amazon Glacier and small objects in S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA.

With AWS Elemental MediaPackage, you can now add Common Media Application Format (CMAF) fragmented MP4 HLS endpoints to live channels. This is in addition to the Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and DASH endpoints already supported. Support for CMAF HLS endpoints allows you to ingest a single live stream and format it to play on connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles while also sending High-Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) content to Apple devices with improved video quality, including High Dynamic Range (HDR) and content protection with the potential to reduce distribution costs.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are now available in 5 additional regions: US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (London), and EU (Paris). The AMIs are now globally available in 16 AWS regions.

Your self-managed MySQL database, located on premises or in the cloud, can now be securely migrated to Amazon Aurora. You can migrate a large database by creating an encrypted database backup file in Amazon S3 and restoring it to Aurora, or replicate your data over an encrypted connection.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs now include advanced optimizations for Chainer 4 and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) 2.5.1 that are tailored to deliver higher-performance training across Amazon EC2 instances.  

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is now available in the US East (Ohio) Region. DAX delivers fast read performance for your Amazon DynamoDB tables at scale by enabling you to use a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache.

AWS Fargate is now available in three new AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) now allow you to convert and migrate IBM Db2 databases on Linux, UNIX and Windows (Db2 LUW) to any DMS supported target. This can accelerate your move to the cloud by allowing you to migrate more of your legacy databases.

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) for easing workload migration to AWS is now available in the AWS South America (Sao Paulo) Region. 

You can now record configuration changes to AWS Lambda using AWS Config. AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Config, you can track changes to the Lambda function, runtime environments, tags, handler name, code size, memory allocation, timeout settings, and concurrency settings. You can also record changes to Lambda IAM execution role, subnet, and security group associations. In addition, you can now use a managed Config rule to check whether your Lambda functions prohibit public access.

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge and db.t2.2xlarge instance types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

This updated Quick Start builds a highly available, secure global transit network on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 5 minutes. It deploys Aviatrix Controller and Aviatrix Gateways in a central virtual private cloud (VPC) on AWS to manage routing between remote networks (spoke VPCs) in a hub-and-spoke model. A central transit hub VPC that connects spoke VPCs facilitates communication between the spoke VPCs and an on-premises network.

Random Cut Forest (RCF) is the latest built-in algorithm now available for Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale.

You can now encrypt AWS X-Ray data with your own keys that you manage through AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now enables simplified permissions management by allowing you to use a single IAM policy condition across all AWS services to control access to specific regions. By adding the new global condition key ‘aws:RequestedRegion’ in the condition element of your IAM policy, you can control access to the regions in which an IAM principal (user or role) can perform AWS actions.

AWS CodeCommit, a fully-managed source control service, is now available in the Europe (Paris) Region. CodeCommit makes it easy for companies to host secure and highly scalable private Git repositories.

 

Amazon CloudFront announces the addition of a third Edge Location in Singapore and second Edge location in Taipei, Taiwan. Every Edge Location that we add to the AWS infrastructure increases CloudFront's capacity to serve secure content with low latency and high availability, around the world. A full list of CloudFront’s global infrastructure can be seen on the CloudFront Details webpage. 

 

You can now launch Amazon Redshift clusters on our second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. DC2 nodes deliver up to twice the performance as the previous generation DC1 nodes, at the same price.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. The Text-to-Speech API is now an AWS HIPAA Eligible Service

You can now use AWS IoT Analytics to cleanse, process, enrich, store, and analyze IoT data at scale. AWS IoT Analytics is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to run sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of data from IoT devices and sensors, empowering customers to uncover insights that lead to more accurate decisions for their IoT and machine learning applications.

You can now record configuration changes to AWS Elastic Beanstalk resource types using AWS Config. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed in multiple languages. You upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. With Config, you can track changes to Elastic Beanstalk applications, application versions, environments, and all the resources configured within that environment. For example, you can view changes to your environment platform version, deployment and scaling policies, health policies, and tags. This information is useful for audit and compliance use cases in enterprises.

You can now use AWS Glue in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS region.

Today, AWS Auto Scaling is introducing two enhancements to provide more flexibility and visibility when you scale application resources: scaling plans based on resource tags and a new scaling dashboard.

The AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam is here. This new exam allows experienced cloud security professionals to demonstrate and validate their knowledge of how to secure the AWS platform.

About the exam
The security exam covers incident response, logging and monitoring, infrastructure security, identity and access management, and data protection. It validates understanding of specialized data classifications, data encryption methods, and secure Internet protocol, and the AWS mechanisms to implement them.

The exam is open to anyone who currently holds a Cloud Practitioner or Associate-level certification. We recommend candidates have five years of IT security experience designing and implementing security solutions, and at least two years of hands-on experience securing AWS workloads.

Learn more and register >>

Please contact us if you have questions about exam registration.

Good luck!

Announcing new localization support in the AWS IoT console. Additional locale support has now been added to the AWS IoT console to make it even easier to use in IoT regions. New languages include German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Traditional Chinese.

The AWS IoT console is the primary tool for interacting with and monitoring AWS IoT services like IoT Core, IoT Device Management, Greengrass, and Amazon FreeRTOS.

AWS IoT console is now available in the five new languages in addition to existing languages of English, French, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese.

 

AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With this launch, CloudHSM is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs.

AWS Blockchain Templates provides a fast and easy way to create and deploy secure blockchain networks using open source frameworks. Blockchain is a technology that makes it possible to build applications where multiple parties can record transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority to ensure that transactions are verified and secure. Blockchain enables this by establishing a peer-to-peer network where each participant in the network has access to a shared ledger where the transactions are recorded. These transactions are by design, immutable and independently verifiable.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Today, we are releasing a new JDBC driver with features such as Array data type support, bug fixes, and performance improvements.

The 2.x version of the driver is a major version upgrade from the last version. A complete list of enhancements is available in the release notes. We recommend that you review the changes between the old (1.x) and the new (2.x) driver documented in the migration guide before using it on production systems. In addition to the JDBC driver, customers can connect to Amazon Athena using an ODBC Driver, an API, or via the AWS Console.

 

Starting today, you can access custom Amazon RDS RI purchase recommendations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to Amazon EC2 recommendations.

Starting today, you can access custom Amazon RDS RI purchase recommendations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to Amazon EC2 recommendations.

Starting today, Amazon DynamoDB encryption at rest is available in 10 additional regions: US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), and South America (Sao Paulo). With the latest release, DynamoDB encryption at rest is now available in 14 regions including EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).

Amazon EC2 now offers License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Microsoft SQL Server 2017 with Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2. These AMIs add to the list of previously launched SQL Server 2017 AMIs with Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, giving you more flexibility to run SQL Server workloads on your preferred operating system in Amazon EC2. To get started with SQL Server on Linux, you can follow the steps listed here. 

Starting today, AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, simplifies Domain Name System (DNS) troubleshooting by enabling access to its DNS Audit event logs. You can now audit your AWS Managed Microsoft AD DNS events, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot DNS issues.

AWS Config and AWS Firewall Manager now support new multi-account features by integrating with AWS Organizations. With the new AWS Config multi-account data aggregation capability, Organizations administrators can now get an organization-wide view of their compliance status. AWS Firewall Manager enables Organizations administrators to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across accounts in their organization.

Today at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Brussels, we announced that AWS EdStart, a program that helps startup educational technology (EdTech) companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available to customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)1.

The Registry of Open Data on AWS (RODA) makes it easy for people to find datasets that are publicly available through AWS. When data is shared on AWS, anyone can analyze it without needing to download or store it, which allows users to spend more time on analysis rather than acquisition. RODA is available now at https://registry.opendata.aws/

The AWS Amplify JavaScript Library introduces GraphQL support and a new set of data capabilities with AWS AppSync integration.

Web and React Native developers can now easily integrate multiple AWS data sources into their apps via AWS AppSync, and utilize real-time data synchronization capabilities in their apps using the new GraphQL capabilities of the API category in AWS Amplify.

GraphQL is a descriptive data query language for APIs, and it simplifies creating frontend applications that interact with backend services. AWS Amplify can integrate with any GraphQL provider to perform queries and real-time data subscriptions via it's easy to use GraphQL client.

AWS AppSync extends GraphQL's capabilities even more by offering enterprise-level security, real-time data synchronization, and orchestration of backend data resources. AWS Amplify's built-in support for AWS AppSync comes with new React components for working with GraphQL data, and an update to the AWS Mobile CLI which enables configuring AWS AppSync for JavaScript apps with a single command.

GraphQL support is the latest addition to AWS Amplify's service categories, which help developers to build cloud-connected apps easily, iterate quickly and deliver world-class user experiences.

Read more about AWS Amplify GraphQL support in the AWS Amplify Developer Guide.

AWS Amplify is a Javascript library that can be used from any region where there is availability of the AWS services that are invoked through the library. For more information on AWS service region availability, please see the region table.

Starting today, AWS AppSync is generally available (GA). AWS AppSync is an enterprise ready GraphQL service with realtime data and offline programming capabilities.  

We are excited to announce the addition of four new free digital courses to our online training portfolio. These courses introduce security and machine learning services launched at April's AWS Summit in San Francisco. 

Users of the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora can now create quick, efficient database clones. Cloning is useful for a number of purposes including application development, testing, database updates, and running analytical queries.

Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon SQS FIFO enabling you to natively route events to SQS FIFO queues. To learn more about using Targets with CloudWatch Events, please visit documentation here. 

AWS Glue now enables you to set a timeout value on extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs as a safeguard against runaway jobs.

AWS Glue updated its Apache Spark infrastructure to support Apache Spark 2.2.1. This allows you to take advantage of stability fixes and new features available in this version of Apache Spark.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with advanced optimizations for TensorFlow 1.7 tailored to deliver higher-performance training across Amazon EC2 C5 and P3 instances. 

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now supports AWS PrivateLink. This feature helps to protect your messages from internet traffic by enabling you to use Amazon SNS inside your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now allows you to dynamically get the latest ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID when creating a cluster made up of EC2 instances.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets now allows you to create multiple roles in which your users can perform stack set operations in target accounts. This allows you to restrict specific sets of users from using stack set operations such as creating or updating stack sets in specific target accounts. Please see the documentation to learn more about creating multiple roles.

You can now use Apache Spark 2.3.0, Apache HBase 1.4.2, and Presto 0.194 on Amazon EMR release 5.13.0. Spark 2.3.0 adds several new features and updates, including continuous processing mode in Structured Streaming for lower end-to-end latency, an improved ORC file format reader that supports vectorized reads and improves scan throughput, PySpark and Pandas interoperability improvements. improvements. HBase 1.4.2 and Presto 0.194 includes various bug fixes and improvements. Additionally, the AWS SDK included on your Amazon EMR clusters is now updated to 1.11.297. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports creating Application Load Balancers through the AWS Elastic Beanstalk console. Previously, you could only create an Application Load Balancer using AWS SDKs, AWS CLI, and EB CLI. In the Elastic Beanstalk console, you can now choose Application Load Balancer in addition to Classic Load Balancer when you configure your environment. To learn more about configuring an Application Load Balancer on Elastic Beanstalk console, please see the documentation.   

Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) and AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. C5 instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances powered by 3.0 GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Skylake), were introduced in November 2017. C5 instances are built using a new light-weight hypervisor, Nitro Hypervisor, which provides practically all of the compute and memory resources to customers’ workloads.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo) Regions. M5 instances, the next generation of the Amazon EC2 General Purpose compute instances, were introduced in November 2017 to offer a balance of compute, memory, storage and networking resources for a broad range of customers' workloads.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, today announced the availability of a new metric - EngineCPUUtilization which provides access to the Redis process CPU utilization to gain better insights into your Redis workloads. As Redis is single threaded and uses just one CPU core at any given point in time, the new metric provides more precise visibility into the load of the Redis process itself.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink in the EU (Paris) Region. AWS PrivateLink allows customers to securely and privately access services hosted on AWS from their Virtual Private Cloud and from on-premises. AWS PrivateLink also allows customers and partners to share services with other accounts and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks in an easy and scalable way.  

Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate 2 is the latest release candidate of the next generation Amazon Linux operating system. It incorporates feedback received for the first LTS Candidate (2017.12 build) that was released on December 13, 2017. LTS Candidate 2 provides an updated version of the Linux Kernel (4.14) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), systemd support, a newer compiler (gcc 7.3), an updated C runtime (glibc 2.26), newer tooling (binutils 2.29.1), and the latest software packages through the extras mechanism.

You can now share mailboxes among your team members. All users that have been granted access to a shared mailbox can send and receive emails using this mailbox without the need to manually share access credentials. Shared mailboxes make it easy to use email addresses that need to be monitored and used by multiple people. For example, a company could create a single email address for sales inquiries (such as sales@yourcompany.com), and provide access to all sales people so that they can respond.

To create a shared mailbox, create a mailbox in the Amazon WorkMail management console and select the Permissions tab. Then, add users and groups, and select whether they have Full Access, Send As, or Send on Behalf permissions for the mailbox. Full Access allows a user or group to access the entire mailbox, and create folders that only certain users can access. Send As allows users to send emails using the mailbox's email alias, and Send on Behalf allows users to send emails using the mailbox’s email alias but still be identified as the actual sender. Visit our documentation for more information. 

Now you can use QuickSight to directly connect to, analyze and report on data from popular business applications such JIRA, GitHub, ServiceNow, Adobe Analytics, and Twitter. For example, engineering teams using JIRA to track issues such as tasks and bugs can now use QuickSight to report on developer efficiency and bug burndown. Marketing organizations can integrate QuickSight with Adobe Analytics to build consolidated dashboards on their online and web marketing data. Brands can plug in to Twitter to analyze and understand their customers’ sentiment. These connectors make it easy for non-technical business users to easily connect to the 3rd party application sources using OAuth, easily ingest and report on the data with a few simple clicks and eliminates the need to export the data to an intermediate store.

AWS Batch now supports the ability to automatically terminate your jobs at execution level. With job execution timeout, you can set a timeout duration per retry attempt in your job definition or provide it as an override when you submit the job, and AWS Batch will terminate your job once the job has been running for the specified duration. Note that the time out duration must be at least 60 seconds and the timer will start when the job reaches a running state. 

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the latest release of Thinkbox Deadline, v10.0.13.6. This maintenance release includes greater control over Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet instances as well as bug fixes. With Deadline 10.0.13.6, customers have greater control over their Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet instances, with the option to either maintain the number of instances you’ve requested, or to automatically shut them down when they’ve been idle for a period of time. This option can be found under the Settings tab in the Spot Fleet Configuration window.

Amazon Transcribe is available for all customers. Powered by deep learning technologies, Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed and continuously trained automatic speech recognition service that automatically generates time-stamped text transcripts.

Amazon Translate is now available for all customers. Powered by deep-learning technologies, Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation.

AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. Using Secrets Manager, you can secure, audit, and manage secrets used to access resources in the AWS Cloud, on third-party services, and on-premises.  

AWS Firewall Manager is a security management tool to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across your accounts and applications. Using Firewall Manager, you can roll out WAF rules all at once for your Application Load Balancers and Amazon CloudFront distributions and also ensure new applications and resources comply with a common set of security rules from day one. 

You can now backup to AWS in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region using the Tape Gateway virtual tape library (VTL) configuration of AWS Storage Gateway. Tape Gateway emulates a physical tape library, so instead of backing up to physical tapes, you can backup to virtual tapes stored in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier, using common backup applications such as Veeam, Veritas Backup Exec and NetBackup, Dell EMC NetWorker and Commvault.

Starting now, Amazon S3 Select is available for all customers. S3 Select is a new Amazon S3 capability designed to pull out only the data you need from an object, which can dramatically improve the performance and reduce the cost of applications that need to access data in S3. 

At re:Invent 2017, we introduced a preview of the AWS Greengrass ML Inference, a new feature of AWS Greengrass that allows you to run machine learning inference on IoT edge devices, even without cloud connectivity. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of AWS Greengrass ML Inference. Since we launched our preview at re:Invent, we have added feature enhancements to improve your experience while using AWS Greengrass ML Inference. We have made it easier for you to deploy and run machine learning models on your IoT devices. In addition to Apache MXNet, AWS Greengrass ML Inference now includes a pre-built TensorFlow package so you don’t have to build or configure the ML framework for your device from scratch. These ML packages support Intel Atom, NVIDIA Jetson TX2, and Rasperry Pi devices. For more information on Greengrass ML Inference, please visit here.

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA; Z-IA) is a new storage class designed for customers who want a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data, but do not require the multiple Availability Zone data resilience model of the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA; S-IA) storage classes. S3 One Zone-IA is intended for use cases with infrequently accessed data that is re-creatable, such as storing secondary backup copies of on-premises data or for storage that is already replicated in another AWS Region for compliance or disaster recovery purposes. With S3 One Zone-IA, customers can now store infrequently accessed data within a single Availability Zone at 20% lower cost than S3 Standard-IA. In addition, S3 One Zone-IA can offer customers higher availability and durability than self-managed physical data centers, with the added benefit of having to pay only for what they use.

AWS Config now includes multi-account, multi-region data aggregation, enabling centralized auditing and governance. This feature reduces the time and overhead needed to gather an enterprise-wide view of your compliance status.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math to perform calculations across multiple metrics for real-time analysis. You can visualize these computed metrics through the console, add them to CloudWatch Dashboards, or retrieve through the newly launched GetMetricData API. Metric Math enables you to easily derive insights from your existing CloudWatch metrics and better understand the operational health and performance of your infrastructure.  

The AWS Storage Gateway service expanded the list of Amazon S3 storage classes supported by File Gateway to include S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA). With this addition, you can now store and access your files as objects through the File Gateway using the S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA storage classes.

You can now use TensorFlow version 1.6 and Apache MXNet version 1.1 with the Amazon SageMaker pre-built deep learning framework containers. Now released as open source on GitHub, these containers can now be downloaded to your local environment for testing before deployment. You can also now use more instance types in Amazon SageMaker, including all Amazon EC2 M5 instance types for training and hosting, 11 more instance types for notebook instances, 3 more instance types for model training, and 16 more instance types for model hosting. 

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) is a managed private CA service that enables you to easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates. ACM Private CA provides you a highly-available private CA service without the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of operating your own private CA. You can now use ACM’s certificate management capabilities to manage public and private certificates centrally. With ACM Private CA developers can now deploy private certificates for internal resources programmatically using APIs. You get the flexibility to create private certificates for applications that require custom certificate lifetimes or resource names.

Apache MXNet Model Server (MMS) is an open source model-serving tool designed to simplify the deployment of deep learning models at scale. MMS version 0.3 allows developers to set up a scalable serving infrastructure for production, using pre-built container images pre-configured and optimized for deep learning workloads on Amazon EC2 instances. 

You can now order and deploy AWS Snowball Edge in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. This expansion enables you to put a Snowball Edge cluster onsite in remote locations for data collection and analysis. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now allows you to encrypt data in transit between your file system and its clients. The Amazon EFS encryption of data in transit feature uses industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 to encrypt all data sent to and from connected clients. To further simplify using EFS, a new mount helper utility is available that can be used to establish encrypted client connections to either encrypted at rest or unencrypted file systems. With this launch, Amazon EFS now offers a comprehensive encryption solution, allowing customers to encrypt their data both at rest and in transit.

You can now attach resource policies to APIs in Amazon API Gateway, making it easier to set access controls for invoking your APIs.

You can now tag your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots at the time of creation. You can do this from the Amazon EC2 console or through the CreateSnapshot API. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation.

You can now use an AWS Lambda function from a different AWS account as the Lambda Authorizer or Integration backend for your Amazon API Gateway API Methods. This allows for better management and security controls when working across different teams that may have their own AWS accounts.

You can now use AWS Glue in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS region.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now integrates with Amazon Cognito to provide user-level authentication for Kibana, without the need to configure and manage a proxy server. With today’s release, you can sign-in to the service through enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Active Directory using SAML 2.0, and through social identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. You can also set up a secure, scalable, and simplified sign-up experience using Amazon Cognito User Pools. Once you sign-in, Amazon Cognito establishes a session using the appropriate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, which provides access to the Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain. 

You can now develop your AWS Lambda functions using Node.js v8.10. In addition to the leveraging new features in Node.js v8.10 such as the new V8 6.0 engine, Lambda functions written in Node.js 8.10 can now use the async/await pattern to specify error or return values for the function execution. 

Amazon WorkDocs Drive is now available for Microsoft Windows PC users. Amazon WorkDocs Drive is a native desktop application that combines the ease of working in Windows File Explorer with the scale of Amazon WorkDocs. With Amazon WorkDocs Drive, all of your files are available on-demand from your device without consuming valuable disk space on your PC. You can use Amazon WorkDocs Drive as your user drive, and no longer need to use network shares to store your content.

Amazon Rekognition has improved real-time facial recognition and verification accuracy for even more accurate facial authentication and people search use cases. For face verification applications, Rekognition is now up to 80% more accurate in distinguishing between people who look very similar to each other, and up to 35% more accurate in recognizing the same person with substantial changes in their appearance (hairstyle, hair color, facial hair, glasses, etc.). This reduces both false accepts and false rejects when matching pairs of faces.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) implementation is now available under the Apache 2.0 license. AWS SAM extends AWS CloudFormation to provide a simplified way of defining the resources needed by your serverless application. The SAM implementation is the code that translates SAM templates into AWS CloudFormation stacks. Previously, you could submit feature requests to the SAM specification and AWS would need to make corresponding updates to the SAM implementation. Now, you can contribute new features and enhancements to all of SAM. You can fork the SAM repository and propose changes to the implementation by creating a pull request.