August 2019

You can now monitor, isolate, and diagnose your containerized applications and microservices environments using Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights. Part of Amazon CloudWatch, a fully managed service, this new feature gives DevOps and systems engineers access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of their Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and Kubernetes clusters by pod, node, namespace, task, container, and service.

You can now view your Amazon SageMaker Notebook logs in Amazon Cloudwatch. Notebook logs provide key details such as events, metrics, and health information, which can be used to generate actionable insights about your SageMaker notebooks. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain) AWS region. 

Customers can now use AWS DataSync to transfer data into and out of Amazon S3 buckets in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports the capability for customers to lookup the runtime container IDs of containers running as part of an ECS task. Previously, customers had to stitch together multiple APIs to associate the runtime container ids of containers to the respective ECS task. This association was useful for use cases such as debugging. Now, the describe-tasks and stop-task APIs return the runtime container id for all the containers within an ECS task. This means customers have a simplified workflow to diagnose errors by searching through log files for the failed containers and mapping them to respective tasks. 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports encryption at rest using customer managed customer master keys (CMKs) in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). You can now use your own CMKs to encrypt data at rest in ElastiCache for Redis. Customer managed CMKs are CMKs in your AWS account that you create, own and manage. When you enable encryption at rest with CMKs, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis encrypts all data on disk including service backups stored in Amazon S3 with your encryption key.

AWS Chatbot now makes it easy to receive notifications from AWS Systems Manager in your team’s Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat rooms. For example, you can receive notifications about configuration compliance or status change for a Run Command. Receiving notifications in your channels or chat rooms enables your entire team to review and collaborate quickly.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity available in the AWS Cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Spot Instances are easy to launch, scale and manage through AWS services like Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon ECS and Amazon EMR, or integrated third parties like Terraform and Jenkins.

Starting today, customers can suspend and resume any of their AWS Application Auto Scaling actions.

AWS Application Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale compute and data resources such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, Amazon RDS Aurora replicas, Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EMR, and Amazon AppStream 2.0. Now you can suspend and resume the scaling actions on any of these resources without having to delete the scaling policies or scheduled actions. You can suspend and later resume any of the following scaling actions using the new feature: scheduled scaling actions, dynamic scaling-in actions, dynamic scaling-out actions.

To learn more, please visit this page.

AWS Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (AWS Site-to-Site VPN) has expanded VPN tunnel options to allow you to restrict security algorithms and configure timer settings for new and existing VPN connections. This allows you to enforce your security and compliance standards, and enables you to establish tunnels without having to change timer settings on customer gateway devices.

Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework is a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. The solution features fast and robust data ingestion; highly reliable and durable storage of equipment data; and serverless event-driven applications that help manage the factory configuration. The solution is easy to deploy, and can help drive an increase in plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility, and identify new business opportunities.

You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace messages that pass through Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). AWS X-Ray makes it easy to troubleshoot performance issues and errors in your distributed applications and microservice architecture.  

We are excited to announce that you can take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam from the comfort and convenience of your home or office. The exam is delivered online and supervised, or proctored, through your webcam. You can schedule to sit for the exam around the clock, on the hour and again every fifteen minutes. You’ll need a reliable internet connection, a webcam, and a quiet, private place to test.

Starting today, you can now import the released Java binaries of Glue ETL libraries using Maven on your Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) locally. This feature allows you to seamlessly develop, compile, debug, and single-step Glue ETL scripts and complex Spark applications in Scala and Python locally before deploying them to your production environments on the Glue job system or Glue Development endpoints.

We are pleased to announce that starting today, your applications running on Application Load Balancers (ALB) fronted by AWS Global Accelerator can see the original source IP address of the client. This enables you to apply client-specific logic such as IP address or location-based filters by using AWS WAF, as well as gather connection statistics and serve personalized content for your applications. Additionally, you can front an internal ALB with Global Accelerator. This lets you use Global Accelerator as the single internet-facing access point while keeping your ALB private and protecting your applications running on AWS from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. A1 instances, introduced at re:Invent 2018, are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based workloads. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm community.

Beginning today, you can now use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to see the number of DNS queries served for each of your Route 53 public hosted zones. With these metrics, you can see at a glance the activity level of each hosted zone to monitor changes in traffic. Using the metric functions that Amazon CloudWatch provides, you can view the number of queries per minute, or any longer time range that Amazon CloudWatch supports.

You can now configure a lower threshold for rate-based rules you use with AWS WAF, allowing you to mitigate low-volume application threats. The new threshold of 100 requests per 5 minutes (previously 2000 requests per 5 minutes) gives you greater control for stopping slow brute force login attempts, limiting per-user API usage, blocking low-volume denial of service (DoS) attacks, and stopping malicious bots that consume resources and scrape content.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to specify a single command or a sequence of commands that execute in an interactive shell experience on an Amazon EC2 or on-premises instance. This enables you to easily limit user interaction to a specific command or command sequence, which helps you manage the interactive actions a user can take. 

Run Command now lets you select a resource group as a command target. Resource groups make it easier to organize, manage, and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time. Resource group support as a command target enables you to automate your administrative and ad hoc tasks on all of the managed instances that belong in the resource group. 

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to redirect traffic from any port inside a remote Amazon EC2 or on-premises instance to a local port on a client machine.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is now available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and US West (N. California) regions. AMS operates AWS on your behalf, providing a secure and compliant AWS Landing Zone, a proven enterprise operating model, on-going cost optimization, and day-to-day AWS operations management.

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 3 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 12 on Amazon RDS. 

With EMR release 5.26.0, Spark users benefit from all the new Spark performance optimizations introduced in EMR release 5.24.0 and 5.25.0 without the need to make any configuration or code changes. The following optimizations are enabled by default in the 5.26.0 release:

• Dynamic partition pruning - Allows the Spark engine to infer relevant partitions at runtime, saving time and compute resources both by reading less data from storage and by reducing the number of records that need to be processed.
• DISTINCT before INTERSECT - Eliminates duplicate values in each input collection prior to computing the intersection, which improves performance by reducing the amount of data shuffled between hosts.
• Flattening scalar subqueries - Helps in situations where multiple different conditions need to be applied to rows from a specific table, preventing the table from being read multiple times for each condition.
• Optimized join reorder - Reorders joins to execute smaller joins with filters first, reducing the processing required for larger subsequent joins.
• Bloom filter join - Filters table joins dynamically to include only relevant rows, reducing the amount of data processed by Spark and improving query runtime performance.

Please visit Optimizing Spark Performance documentation and the EMR 5.26.0 release notes for details on these optimizations.

Also included in EMR 5.26.0, is a Beta integration with AWS Lake Formation and new versions of Apache HBase 1.4.10, and Apache Phoenix 4.14.2. Please see Integrating Amazon EMR with AWS Lake Formation (Beta) for more details on the integration.

Amazon EMR release 5.26.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

The integration between AWS Lake Formation and Amazon EMR is in Beta, and is available in the US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) regions.

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the feed for EMR release notes. Use the icon at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

Amazon ElastiCache now allows you to name your clusters up to 50 characters for cacheClusters and upto 40 characters for replicationGroups. By lifting the previous limit of 20 characters, this increase lets you use longer names that are unique to your naming standards. The cluster name must contain alphanumeric characters or hyphens, should start with a letter, and cannot end with a hyphen or contain two consecutive hyphens.

This feature is available in all regions. To get started, log in to the AWS Management Console.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region, an AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Starting today, inter-region Amazon Virtual Private Cloud peering (VPC peering) can be setup between the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region and other AWS public regions, except the AWS Govcloud (US) and China Regions.

AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now available in Canada (Central) region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see AWS Region Table.

Today, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store launched intelligent-tiering to enable automatic parameter tier selection. If you have unknown or changing patterns of parameter count, value size or parameter policies, you can use intelligent-tiering setting to allow Parameter Store to select the standard or advanced tier for you. This selection is based on the create or update request and eliminates the need for you to change your application code.  

Amazon SageMaker now supports Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems as data sources for training machine learning models on SageMaker. Amazon FSx for Lustre is a high performance file system optimized for workloads, such as machine learning, analytics and high performance computing. Amazon EFS provides a simple, scalable, elastic file system for Linux-based workloads for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Support for these file systems accelerates and simplifies using Amazon SageMaker to train models with data sets. The file system data source reduces the start-up time by eliminating the data download step of the training process and leveraging the various performance and throughput benefits of the file system to execute the training job faster.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge Location in Manama, Bahrain. With this new Edge location, viewers in Bahrain will now see up to a 40% improvement in latency when accessing content through CloudFront. CloudFront now has 189 Points of Presence spread across 71 cities in 32 countries.

A full list of CloudFront’s global infrastructure is available at CloudFront Features.

AWS Systems Manager Distributor is a new feature that you can use to securely store and distribute software packages, such as software agents, in your accounts. Distributor integrates with existing Systems Manager features to simplify and scale the package distribution, installation, and update process. 

AWS Systems Manager enables you to manage large hybrid environments through an advanced on-premises instance management tier. With this launch, the advanced tier is now available in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. The advanced tier enables you to manage hybrid environments with over 1,000 instances. The advanced tier also enables advanced functionality, such as using interactive shell access with Systems Manager Session Manager to connect to on-premises instances. Session Manager removes the need to open inbound ports, manage SSH keys, or use bastion hosts.  

Starting today, HTTPS client support in Amazon FreeRTOS is generally available. You can now use the HTTP/HTTPS protocol to easily connect your microcontroller-based IoT devices running Amazon FreeRTOS to AWS IoT and download files to your devices.  

The Nuvoton NuMaker-IoT-M487 development board is now qualified for Amazon FreeRTOS. You can take advantage of Amazon FreeRTOS features and benefits using development kits available from Nuvoton.  

AWS IoT Device Tester for Amazon FreeRTOS v1.4.0 now supports Amazon FreeRTOS 201908.00. With this release, microcontroller vendors can qualify development boards for the latest Amazon FreeRTOS with updated PKCS#11 test groups. AWS IoT Device Tester v1.4.0 also comes with actionable error messages for vendors to troubleshoot faster.

Amazon SageMaker now supports a new fully managed option called Managed Spot Training for training machine learning models using Amazon EC2 Spot instances. Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused compute capacity in the AWS cloud, and as a result, you can optimize the cost of training machine learning models by up to 90% compared to on-demand instances.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription of audio in the following new languages: Russian and Chinese Mandarin-Mainland. These languages expand upon the existing languages already available in Amazon Transcribe: US English, UK English, AU English, Indian English, Spanish, US Spanish, French, Canadian French, Italian, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, and Modern Standard Arabic.

Amazon ElastiCache introduces online vertical scaling for Redis Cluster mode. You can now scale up or scale down your sharded Redis Cluster on demand. Amazon ElastiCache resizes your cluster by changing the node type, while the cluster continues to stay online and serve incoming requests. 

To more easily identify the purpose of Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues and track costs associated with messaging, you can categorize queues using metadata tags. For example, you can use tags to identify all Amazon SQS queues used by a particular department, project, or application.

Starting today, AWS IoT Core customers can configure the quality of service (QoS) when publishing messages via the republish action of a topic rule. AWS IoT Core supports QoS levels 0 and 1 for MQTT messages, where QoS 0 means a message is delivered zero or more times and QoS 1 means message is delivered one or more times. See AWS IoT MQTT documentation for more details about AWS IoT QoS definition.

We are excited to announce the availability of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by SINNET, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. Parameter Store provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data and passwords. You can reference this information dynamically from your application or from other AWS services.  

AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway is now available in EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions. With this feature, customers can connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) in multiple AWS Regions to their on-premises networks using 1/2/5/10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections.

Starting today, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) for EBS Snapshots is available in the EU (Stockholm) region. Amazon DLM provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to create and manage your EBS volume backups. 

AWS DataSync now supports the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, providing you a simple way to automate and accelerate copying data between SMB file shares, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. With this launch, you can reduce on-premises storage infrastructure by shifting SMB-based data stores and content repositories from file servers and network attached storage (NAS) arrays to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS for analytics, archiving, or backup use cases. 

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Forecast, which has been in preview since re:Invent 2018. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. Based on the same technology used at Amazon.com, Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to combine time series data with additional variables to build forecasts.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, a service that provides fully managed native Microsoft Windows file systems, has made Windows shadow copies available to all file systems. Since launch of this feature on July 31, 2019, it was available only on newly-created Amazon FSx file systems. Now, customers can use shadow copies on any existing file system to enable end-users to easily view and restore previous versions of files. 

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region. Using MediaConnect, you can now ingest, transport, and process your high-quality video in the AWS Cloud in more locations globally.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Amazon’s isolated infrastructure and services are designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

AI-Powered Health Data Masking is a solution that helps healthcare organizations identify and mask health data in images or text. While this solution does not guarantee alignment to any regulatory framework, it has been designed to be implemented as part of a set of mitigating controls in your environment.

You can now install external Python libraries on EMR clusters at runtime using EMR Notebooks. Before this feature, you had to use a bootstrap action or use a custom AMI to install additional libraries not packaged with the AMI before you launched the EMR cluster. This feature allows you to import your preferred libraries and use them to build your Spark application, analyze data, and visualize the results from within your notebook. The Python libraries you install using EMR Notebooks are isolated to the notebook session and will not interfere with existing libraries on the EMR cluster. You can import these libraries from either public or private PyPI repositories. Please visit Using Notebook-scoped Libraries to learn more about this feature.

This feature is available starting EMR release 5.26.0.

EMR Notebooks is is available in the US East (N.Virgina and Ohio), US West (N.California and Oregon), Canada (Central), EU(Frankfurt, Ireland, and London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions

 

Amazon Redshift Advisor now recommends the most appropriate distribution key for frequently queried tables to improve query performance. The Advisor generates tailored recommendations by analyzing the cluster's performance and query patterns. You can then use the ALTER TABLE ALTER DISTKEY command to add or modify the distribution key of a table, without impacting concurrent read or write queries.

Amazon RDS for MySQL has been updated to support release 8.0.16 of the MySQL database. This release includes a number of security, account management, and other functionality improvements, along with a number of bug fixes.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports local file system redirection with the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. This feature lets your users seamlessly open or save files on their local computer from within their streaming session. To use this feature, users link the local drives and folders that they want to access from within their streaming session. After their local drives and folders are linked, users can access these resources in File Explorer when performing file system operations such as File Open, File Save, and File Save As.This feature is only available through the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. There are no additional charges for this feature. To learn more, see Enable File System Redirection for Your AppStream 2.0 Users

You can now route streaming (for example - pixel, USB, user input, audio, clipboard, file upload/download, and printer) traffic to your Amazon AppStream 2.0 streaming instances through your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. You can also use a VPC endpoint to perform API operations without relying on an internet connection. With this feature, the network connection between your users and your AppStream 2.0 streaming instances and your API operations can be restricted to private network routes, further securing your applications. VPC endpoints for AppStream 2.0 are provided by AWS PrivateLink, a highly available, scalable technology that enables customers to privately connect their Amazon VPC to supported AWS services.

Amazon EMR has introduced a new account level configuration called Block Public Access to help administrators secure their EMR clusters from unrestricted public-network access. You can enable this configuration and prevent your account users from launching clusters with security group rules that open ports for inbound traffic from IPv4 0.0.0.0/0 or IPv6 ::/0. You can configure exceptions in Block Public access configuration to allow public access on a port or range of ports before you launch EMR clusters. Please visit Using Amazon EMR Block Public Access configuration to learn more.

This feature is available now in the US East (N.Virgina and Ohio), US West (N.California and Oregon), Canada (Central), EU(Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris and Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.

This Quick Start automatically deploys a modular, highly available environment for Amazon Redshift on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Amazon Chime now shows a list of recent incoming, outgoing, and missed calls to help you quickly redial, reply with a message, or return a missed call. You can see your 1:1 voice and video calls in the call history list. If you have Chime Business Calling enabled, you can also see calls to and from your business telephone number. For each call, you can see the name or phone number of the other person, the date, and the call duration. Call history is synchronized across all of your devices running Chime, so you always have your most recent call history with you.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

Today, AWS Systems Manager announces the release of Quick Setup, simplifying the way you enable visibility and control of your instances. With Quick Setup, you can easily get started with key Systems Manager capabilities like patch compliance scanning and instance inventory collection.  

When using Amazon ECS with the EC2 launch type on Linux, you can now control the use of swap space on a per-container basis. Swap space is used by operating systems such as Linux to allow processes to use more memory than is physically available on the host; the operating system kernel will “swap” physical memory to disk as needed to meet the demands of the software running on the host. Swap space enables applications to use more memory than they otherwise would be able to access, at the cost of higher latency and lower throughput of that memory access. Applications such as those with highly varying memory requirements, but less sensitivity to latency, may benefit from the use of swap memory. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics applications, now supports configurable timeout in over-the-air (OTA) deployment. This new feature allows developers and system engineers to configure the timeout duration of a deployment job to be between 1 minute and 7 days. Being able to configure the timeout duration prevents undue delays or premature failures so that updates and deployments jobs can be completed.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotic applications, now supports log-based simulation, event driven simulation termination, and simulation event tagging. These three new features enables robotic developers to use RoboMaker to easily run a large number of automated simulations for use cases such as regression testing, parameter tuning, and ML model training.

AWS App Mesh now supports HTTP header-based routing to manage traffic between services, in addition to the previously available path prefix based and host based routing capabilities. With this feature, you can create rules and route traffic based on standard and custom HTTP headers and methods, which includes cookie data. Additionally, you can use route priorities to control the order of matching rules.

AWS Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (AWS Site-to-Site VPN) now supports digital certificates for Internet Key Exchange (IKE) authentication, so for AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections, you can now use private certificates from AWS Certificate Manager instead of pre-shared keys. This enables you to take advantage of the added security and flexibility that digital certificates offer.

Amazon Athena now supports querying data in Amazon S3 Requester Pays buckets.  

Starting today, the AWS Support API is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). The AWS Support API provides AWS GovCloud (US) customers with Business and Enterprise support plans access to the case management features of AWS Support Center, and the checks and recommendations provided by AWS Trusted Advisor.

Starting today, you can send diagnostic interrupts to your Amazon EC2 instances. Diagnostic interrupts help you debug unresponsive instances and conduct root cause analysis.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams has changed the license of the Amazon Kinesis Producer Library from the Amazon Software License to Apache License 2.0. This change allows you to easily build and integrate the Amazon Kinesis Producer Library with other Apache software projects such as Apache Flink and Apache Spark. 

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaTailor for server-side ad insertion (SSAI) in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region. AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a content personalization and monetization service that lets you serve video with targeted ads to viewers while maintaining broadcast quality-of-service in multiscreen video applications.

You can now launch Amazon RDS instances for Oracle Database 18c.  

AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Regions. AWS SFTP enables you to easily move file transfer workloads to AWS, eliminating the need for you to build and operate Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) infrastructure. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.  

Amazon SageMaker is now available in 4 additional AWS regions in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. With this announcement, Amazon SageMaker is available in the South America (São Paulo), EU North (Stockholm), EU West (Paris), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS regions.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Region. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. You can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today. 

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region.  

AWS CodeBuild now provides a managed Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) build image. Previously, CodeBuild customers had to use a custom Docker image, in order to build and test for Amazon Linux environment.

This new AL2 image supports polyglot builds. You can specify one or more programming language versions in your buildspec for your build needs. This is made possible by a concept called "runtime-versions". With runtime-versions, you can also specify which major version of the runtime should be enabled for your builds. The programming languages included in this image are listed in our documentation.

Please visit our product page or the console to learn more about how to get started with AWS CodeBuild.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in thirteen AWS regions with the addition of Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (Paris), and EU (Stockholm).  

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth now supports automated data labeling for the built-in image labeling workflow for semantic segmentation. With the addition of Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (London), SageMaker Ground Truth is available in 12 AWS Regions. 

AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management have reduced prices in the Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Amazon’s isolated infrastructure and services are designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL major version 11 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure. 

AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management are now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.  

Alexa for Business now enables customers to designate, at a room profile level, if voice recordings from devices they manage will be manually reviewed and used to improve our services. Using a new preference, Data Use Policy, located in the Room Profile, customers can either allow (default) or disallow Alexa for Business's manual reviews of voice recordings which are used to improve Amazon’s services. By default, only a very small percentage of these recordings are manually reviewed in order to improve these algorithms. To learn more about this feature, and how-to create and manage Room Profiles in Alexa for Business, please see our documentation.

Introducing the new AWS Co-Branding Guide (login required), providing APN Partners guidelines for joint marketing with AWS.

This guide provides best practices for effectively communicating your brand alongside AWS in approved joint marketing campaigns.

In the AWS Co-Branding Guide, you will find different ways to co-brand with AWS, how to qualify for an AWS Logo Lockup, design and usage guidelines, co-branding do’s and don’ts, a co-branding checklist, and more.

The AWS Co-Branding Guide is for Select tier and above APN Partners with approved co-branded activities. To see the approved co-branded activities and how to leverage co-branded materials, check out the guide here (login required).

To learn more about the new AWS Co-Branding Guide, check out the APN Blog.

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in the Middle East (Bahrain) Region. 

You can now use the full Unicode standard (UTF-8) in your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics SQL applications. This new feature enables you to build real-time applications using the full breadth of languages and characters supported by the Unicode standard.  

AWS Storage Gateway now supports adding tags at the time of resource creation, and tag-based access control. You can assign tags to all Storage Gateway resources including gateways, file shares, volumes, volume snapshots, and tapes when creating them. You can also define fine-grained access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize, search, and identify resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

Containers provide a standard way to package your application's code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. The AWS Cloud offers infrastructure resources optimized for running containers, as well as a set of orchestration services that make it easy for you to build and run containerized applications in production.

The new APN Container Navigate track provides a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in AWS Container Services, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS App Mesh, and Amazon ECR. 

Through the APN Container Navigate track, APN Partners will learn how the services work together, best practices, how to identify potential workloads and how to correctly position Containers during technical and selling motions with their customers.

Learn more about Containers on AWS, and how to advance through the AWS Partner Network while building a specialized practice in Containers on AWS. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch versions 6.8 and 7.1 and their corresponding Kibana versions. Elasticsearch 6.8 is the final minor 6.x release and is the upgrade path for 7.x. Elasticsearch 7.1 is a major release and provides improved resiliency and scalability, and more efficient query processing. 

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces presence in Israel with its first Edge location in Tel Aviv. With this new Edge location, CloudFront will deliver up to a 75% reduction in latency for content delivery to the viewers in Israel. CloudFront now has a total of 188 Points of Presence (PoPs) in 70 cities across 31 countries.

To learn more about CloudFront pricing, including pricing for the new Edge location in Israel, visit our pricing page.

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring networks, members, and peer nodes. Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks across multiple AWS accounts. CloudFormation allows you to model and provision cloud resources as code in a safe, predictable, and consistent manner. With CloudFormation support for Managed Blockchain, you can create new blockchain networks and define network configurations, create a member and join an existing network, and describe member and network details such as voting policies. You can also create and configure peer nodes for your members in the network.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports the creation of content protected by multiple Digital Rights Management (multi-DRM) technologies using Common Media Application Format (CMAF), and has expanded the number of audio tracks supported.

Amazon Rekognition provides a comprehensive set of face detection, analysis, and recognition features for image and video analysis. Today, we are launching accuracy and functionality improvements to our face analysis features. Face analysis generates metadata about detected faces in the form of gender, age range, emotions, attributes such as ‘Smile’, face pose, face image quality and face landmarks. With this release, we have further improved the accuracy of gender identification. In addition, we have improved accuracy for emotion detection (for all 7 emotions: ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, ‘Surprised’, ‘Disgusted’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Confused’) and added a new emotion: ‘Fear’. Lastly, we have improved age range estimation accuracy; you also get narrower age ranges across most age groups. 

Amazon EC2 now offers a new “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy for provisioning Spot Instances via EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet. The “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy automatically makes the most efficient use of available spare capacity while still taking advantage of the steep discounts offered by Spot Instances.

We’ve updated three courses designed specifically to help APN Partners identify areas of cost savings and data center economics for their customers. Partners will learn how to utilize market data, customer engagement models, and customer use cases to identify customer opportunities to move workloads to AWS. All courses have updated APN Partner tools and resources that help partners grow their business with AWS.

AWS Step Functions now allows you to orchestrate more complex processes by composing modular, reusable workflows. 

You can now publish logs from your Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility database instances to Amazon CloudWatch Logs in Amazon RDS. Supported logs include PostgreSQL system logs.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added several new features to the AWS Management Console to make the service easier to use. You can now export and import JSON files for your job settings, output presets, and job templates. This makes it simpler to edit and share jobs, presets, and templates, even between AWS accounts. You can also now update and duplicate job templates and presets, in addition to jobs. These features make it easy to create new presets and templates from existing ones, and to experiment and iterate to find the settings that produce the best video for your viewers. You can also now customize the fields that are displayed within the jobs list to build the view that works best for your use case. And finally, the tool tips in MediaConvert have been streamlined to help you quickly understand the function of each setting in the Console.

Amazon EMR now supports enforcing AWS Lake Formation-based fine-grained access control policies for Apache Spark. You can enforce Databases, Tables, and Columns-level policies for data stored in Amazon S3. Policies defined in AWS Lake Formation are enforced when Spark applications are submitted using Apache Zeppelin or EMR Notebooks. Also included in this release is SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) to EMR Notebooks and Apache Zeppelin, simplifying authentication for organizations using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Okta, or Auth0. With the combination of SAML-based SSO, and AWS Lake Formation policies, customers can securely run Spark applications on shared multi-tenant clusters with column-level access to data stored in Amazon S3.

Amazon WorkDocs is making generally available a migration service to help you migrate your organization's files to Amazon WorkDocs.

The Amazon WorkDocs migration service helps you move your users' files and your departmental file shares to Amazon WorkDocs. The service can migrate large amounts of data, from tens of gigabytes to multiple terabytes from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Using the Amazon WorkDocs migration service application, you can configure migration tasks, and target WorkDocs account and site to migrate data to. You can schedule the migration task to execute during a specific period as a one-time data transfer operation or have regular migrations so as to minimize downtime for your users. The migration service application provides up-to-date information and status on migration jobs including detailed reports once migration has successfully completed. The migration service application can be used by administrators of Amazon WorkDocs sites.

For file migration from network file shares, Amazon WorkDocs migration service leverages AWS DataSync which automatically handles many of the tasks related to data transfers such as network optimization and data integrity validation, which can slow down migrations or burden your IT operations. For more information about Amazon WorkDocs Migration Service see the Amazon WorkDocs Administration Guide. 

Amazon Athena now supports enforcing AWS Lake Formation policies for fine-grained access control to new or existing databases, tables, and columns defined in the AWS Glue Data Catalog for data stored in Amazon S3.

AWS Systems Manager now integrates with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server, enabling you to easily and quickly resolve problems impacting your application health. CloudWatch Application Insights helps you set up and analyze important monitors across your application resources to detect anomalies and errors with those resources and common application technologies such as Microsoft IIS, .NET framework and SQL Server. With the new built-in integration, you can now easily view, investigate, and resolve these problems using AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter, helping you further reduce your mean time to resolution (MTTR). 

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics to gain insights and guide better business decisions.

Amazon Rekognition is a deep learning-based image and video analysis service that can identify objects, people, text, scenes, as well as support content moderation by detecting unsafe content. Starting today, you can detect content related to 'Violence' and 'Visually Disturbing" themes, such as blood, wounds, weapons, self-injury, corpses, and more. Further, Amazon Rekognition's ability to identify 'Explicit Nudity' and 'Suggestive' content has been improved through a 68% lower false positive rate and a 36% lower false negative rate (on average). Additionally, Amazon Rekognition now supports detection of new categories of adult content, such as unsafe anime or illustrated content, adult toys, and sheer clothing. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en and C5n bare metal instances are generally available. Amazon EC2 bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements.

You can now use AWS Glue to find matching records across a dataset (including ones without identifiers) by using the new FindMatches ML Transform, a custom machine learning transformation that helps you identify matching records. By adding the FindMatches transformation to your Glue ETL jobs, you can find related products, places, suppliers, customers, and more.

Amazon Redshift Spectrum now supports column level access control for data stored in Amazon S3 and managed by AWS Lake Formation. Column level access control can be used to limit access to only the specific columns of a table rather than allowing access to all columns of a table.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) message filtering now supports attribute key matching. This feature lets you create an Amazon SNS subscription filter policy that matches incoming messages which contain an attribute key, regardless of the attribute value associated with this key. This feature lets you offload additional message filtering logic to Amazon SNS.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the July 2019 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2 and 12.1, and July 2019 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2.

AWS Health is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). AWS Health includes the AWS Personal Health Dashboard (PHD) and the AWS Health API. These tools give you awareness and remediation guidance for resource performance or availability issues that affect your applications running on AWS.

You can now natively encrypt EBS volumes attached to an EMR cluster. Until now, customers used LUKS over EBS volumes to encrypt data. With the current release, customers can choose either LUKS or native EBS encryption.  

AWS IoT Device Defender is now available in 2 additional regions - EU (Paris) and EU (Stockholm), extending the footprint to 15 AWS regions. AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully-managed AWS IoT service that makes it easy for customers to manage the end to end security of their IoT fleet. 

Amazon EC2 Fleet simplifies the provisioning of EC2 capacity across different instance types, Availability Zones (AZs), and purchase options to optimize for scale, performance, and cost. Allocation strategies let you determine how EC2 Fleet should select from the instance types and AZs you have specified to fulfill the desired capacity.

Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is now generally available, allowing you to create multiple read-write instances of your Aurora database across multiple Availability Zones, which enables uptime-sensitive applications to achieve continuous write availability through instance failure. In the event of instance or Availability Zone failures, Aurora Multi-Master enables the Aurora database to maintain read and write availability with zero application downtime. With Aurora Multi-Master, there is no need for database failovers to resume write operations. Check out this blog to find out how to build highly available MySQL applications using Aurora Multi-Master.

Natural conversations are dynamic and often cover multiple topics. A user could start off with a request, digress to a related topic, and may eventually return to the original query. Previously, you could manage a dynamic conversation like this only on the server-side using Lambda functions. Today, we’re announcing new Amazon Lex Session APIs to manage a dynamic conversation on the client. You can define the dialog state, slot values, prompt messages, and attributes. With this granular control on the session, you can manage the conversation flow by performing operations such as switching to a different topic or continuing from a previous point in the conversation.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 c5.12xlarge, c5.24xlarge, and c5.metal instance sizes are available in the AWS US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Tokyo) Regions. The 3 new C5 instance sizes are powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (based on the Cascade Lake architecture) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz. 

The Amplify Framework is an open-source project for building cloud-enabled mobile and web applications.  

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

AWS Training and Certification has re-launched the AWS Developer Series exclusively on edX. This digital series features three courses that help developers to continue building their skills to deepen their cloud expertise with AWS.  

Amazon SageMaker notebooks now support R out-of-the-box, without needing you to manually install R kernels on the instances. Also, the notebooks come pre-installed with the reticulate library that offers an R interface for the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK enabling you to invoke Python modules from within an R script.  

You can now define Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to specify granular resource-level and tag-based user permission in CloudFront. These new features give you increased flexibility to manage access to your CloudFront distributions.

Previously, you could apply IAM policies to manage user actions in CloudFront, but you couldn’t restrict actions to specific distributions in your account. Now, with resource-level permissions, you can configure IAM policies that reference individual CloudFront distributions—using Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) or wildcards—and specify the users and actions that have permissions on only those distributions. Similarly, with tag-based access control, you can create IAM user policies that allow or deny actions on specific CloudFront distributions based on the tags associated with them.

To get started with this new functionality, see the CloudFront Developer Guide. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, visit our product page.

End user access is coming under increased security threats and compliance requirements, accompanied by a growing workforce of mobile and contingent workers. As a result, end user access to the applications and data that’s been migrated to AWS is driving customer requirements to move or add the capability for desktop and application streaming on AWS for similar customer benefits.

Today, we are excited to announce new AWS End User Computing (EUC) Competency Partners who can support customers that need to provision, protect, and get intelligence from end-point devices, end-user apps, and data on AWS. These APN Consulting Partners provide services and offerings that help customers with strategy, professional services, managing infrastructure, repeatable intellectual property, and optimization of End User Computing technologies on AWS.

Interested in becoming an AWS EUC Competency Partner? See the requirements and next steps here.

Interested in working with one of our top validated AWS End User Computing Consulting Partners? See the launch partners here.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions. I3en global availability now includes the Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions.

AWS Elemental Appliances and Software video processing and delivery solutions are now available for purchase in the AWS Management Console. The new console presence provides you a simple, unified buying experience to complete your orders from Elemental Technologies LLC (“AWS Elemental”) alongside your access to and use of AWS Services, whether on-premises or in the cloud. It also automates the quote approval process, resulting in faster order processing times and more visibility into orders. 

AWS License Manager is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain) region. See the AWS Region Table for the list of regions where License Manager is currently available. AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charges. To learn more about this service, visit the product documentation, and FAQ page.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Management Agent (OMA) version 13.3 for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud Control 13c3. OEM 13c offers web-based tools to monitor and manage your Oracle databases. Amazon RDS for Oracle installs OMA, which then communicates with your Oracle Management Service (OMS) to provide monitoring information. Customers running OMS 13.3 can now manage databases by installing OMA 13.3.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth helps you build highly accurate training datasets for machine learning quickly. SageMaker Ground Truth offers easy access to public and private human labelers and provides them with built-in workflows and interfaces for common labeling tasks. 

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 12 on Amazon RDS.

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 can now be deployed for development and testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database. The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 12 Beta 2 on June 20, 2019. PostgreSQL 12 includes improved functionality, performance, management of indexing, improved partitioning capabilities, JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications, nondeterministic collations which support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that computes values with an expression, pluggable table storage interface, ability to enable/disable page checksums, and many more.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment. Customers can use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to import or export their databases from the preview environment.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the candidate versions of PostgreSQL 12 and the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment.
 

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Region. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports changing the server-level collation when creating a new DB Instance. If the collation is not specified the default server-level collation will continue to be SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. To learn more about which collations are supported please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server User Guide. 

AWS IoT Device Defender now supports the ability for customers to apply mitigation actions to audit findings. This feature enables customers to use predefined mitigation actions or customize them and apply them at scale. With this release, customers can choose from the following set of predefined mitigation actions to automate a response to findings from an audit: add things to thing group, enable IoT logging, publish to SNS topic, replace default policy version, update CA certificate, and update device certificate. You can use mitigation actions by using the AWS IoT Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or APIs.

AWS Fargate is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS region.  

Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling is now available in five additional AWS Regions: Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). The Amazon Redshift Management Console presents performance graphs for monitoring Concurrency Scaling activity and associated performance gains related to query concurrency, throughput, latency, and queueing on your Amazon Redshift cluster.

You can now deploy AWS DataSync within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. With this feature, data transferred between the DataSync agent and AWS service doesn’t need to traverse the public internet or need public IP addresses, increasing the security of data as it is copied over the network. VPC endpoints for DataSync are powered by AWS PrivateLink, a highly available, scalable technology that enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services.

With Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) sharing, you can now use AWS Glue, create Amazon EMR clusters and Amazon Aurora Serverless DB clusters in shared and centrally-managed VPCs. Amazon VPC sharing allows other AWS accounts to create their application resources, such as EC2 instances, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) databases, Amazon Redshift clusters, Amazon EMR clusters, and Lambda functions in shared Amazon VPCs.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for Oracle db.m5 and db.r5 instance classes are available in new 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes. With support for these new instance sizes, customers who are currently using either m4.10xlarge, m4.16xlarge, r4.8xlarge, or r4.16xlarge now have an easy upgrade path to the latest generation of instances. 

AWS DataSync now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validated endpoints in US Regions to protect sensitive information. These endpoints terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module, making it easier for you to use DataSync for regulated workloads. 

You can now use Amazon Route 53 private DNS and health checks for public endpoints in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region, an AWS Region that is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. You can now centrally and continuously manage the compliance and security of your AWS accounts in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region.  

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE DCV version 2019.0. 

Amazon API Gateway supports secured connectivity between REST APIs and Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in additional regions. Customers can now isolate traffic between their Amazon VPCs and REST APIs from the internet using Private API and VPC Link features provided by API Gateway. These features are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. AWS PrivateLink allows you to privately access services hosted on AWS in a highly available and scalable manner, without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse the internet.

Amazon DynamoDB now publishes account metrics to help you monitor capacity consumption against your account limits. You can now alarm as your capacity approaches your account limits and proactively request limit increases, helping ensure your DynamoDB tables are always available. These metrics are available in the AWS Management Console by navigating to the CloudWatch console, choosing Metrics, selecting DynamoDB, and finally Account Metrics, or via the AWS CLI. To learn more, see DynamoDB Metrics and Dimensions in the DynamoDB Developer Guide. 

Starting today, AWS Batch supports the ability to expose host devices to your AWS Batch jobs, including the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which enables you to run highly performant distributed HPC and machine-learning workloads by using AWS Batch’s managed instance provisioning and scheduling.

New model tracking capabilities for Amazon SageMaker are now generally available in all AWS regions where Amazon SageMaker is available. With these new capabilities, you can quickly and easily find and compare your machine learning (ML) model training experiments. Using either the AWS Management Console or the AWS SDK, you can quickly search through thousands of model training experiments and compare metrics to evaluate performance across different iterations, accelerating your ability to identify the best performing models.

Amazon QuickSight now allows custom color selection in supported charts types. With this enhancement, you can customize your charts with any color from the spectrum allowing better alignment with corporate or project specific color schemes. Eight most recently used colors are also saved to allow easy customization across assets. To learn more, see here.  

AWS X-Ray, a distributed tracing system that helps developers analyze and debug multi-tiered applications, is now available in AWS’ new Bahrain region.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now provides Image Assistant CLI operations, which lets you create images without any manual intervention. With these CLI operations, you can programmatically interact with the AppStream 2.0 Image Assistant to specify which applications your users can launch, manage the dynamic application framework, specify tags, and create an AppStream 2.0 image.

AWS CloudFormation has increased two limits on CloudFormation StackSets to allow you to provision resources across even more accounts and regions with a single operation. The number of stack sets you can have in your administrator account has increased from 20 to 100. The number of stack instances you can have per stack set has increased from 500 to 2000.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

You can now use Spark 2.4.3, Presto 0.220, Apache Hive 2.3.5, and Apache Tez 0.9.2 on Amazon EMR release 5.25.0.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS region.

Starting today, you can use the Python programming language to develop your functions in Lambda@Edge, in addition to currently supported Node.js. This gives you the flexibility of opting for the programming language of your choice as you author your functions.