December 2019

The Amazon FSx for Lustre CSI driver has reached beta status and is now supported by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The CSI driver makes it simple to configure and use FSx for Lustre high performance file systems with containers on EKS and self-managed Kubernetes clusters running on AWS. 

AWS Step Functions now supports AWS PrivateLink allowing you to access AWS Step Functions from VPC-enabled AWS Lambda functions and other AWS services without traversing the public internet. By using AWS PrivateLink, you can access Step Functions while keeping your network traffic within the Amazon network using interface VPC endpoints. Your network architecture is significantly simplified as you no longer need to use an Internet Gateway, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices, or firewall proxies to connect to AWS Step Functions.

Amazon Lex is now one of the AWS services under ISO Compliance for the ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 standards. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed. You can download copies of the AWS ISO certificates and use them to jump-start your own certification efforts: AWS ISO 9001 certificate, AWS ISO 27001 certificate, AWS ISO 27017 certificate, and AWS ISO 27018 certificate. 

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with Tensorflow 2.0. This latest version provides significant updates to the existing API, simplifies eager execution, offers a new dataset manager, and more. You can launch the new versions of Deep Learning Container on Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), self-managed Kubernetes on Amazon EC2, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a complete list of frameworks and versions supported by the AWS Deep Learning Containers, see release notes.

AWS Security Hub today released updates and additions to AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF). It now supports additional resource types and these include AwsElbv2LoadBalancer, AwsKmsKey, AwsIamRole, AwsSqsQueue, AwsLambdaFunction, AwsSnsTopic, and AwsCloudFrontDistribution. Each of these resource types also includes an accompanying resource details object that identifies recommended fields for findings providers to populate. Updates were also made to the AwsAccessKey resource details object to include information on principal ID and name.

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a high performance file system optimized for workloads such as machine learning, high performance computing, video processing, financial modeling, electronic design automation, and analytics, has added functionality that makes it easier to synchronize file data and file permissions between Amazon FSx and Amazon S3. Additionally, Amazon FSx has quadrupled the speed of launching FSx file systems that are linked to S3 buckets.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility are now available to customers in the AWS Americas (São Paulo) region. Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Starting today you can monitor the traffic processed by AWS Global Accelerator via Amazon CloudWatch metrics. You can now view the total number of incoming and outgoing bytes processed by your accelerator. In addition, you can view the total number of new TCP or UDP flows from clients to your application endpoints every minute. This allows you, for example, to view the geographical distribution of your user traffic and monitor how much of it is local (e.g., North America to North America) or global (e.g., Australia or India to North America). Amazon CloudWatch metrics enable you to set alarms or automate actions based on predefined thresholds and to easily build dashboards that overlay different metrics.

You can now use Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints for hybrid cloud configurations in the Europe (Stockholm) AWS Region.

Application Auto Scaling now publishes to Amazon EventBridge when a scaling policy scales your resource to the configured maximum. You may have set a maximum bound for cost control, this event notification gives you the visibility to check in and ensure that operating at maximum bound does not pose an availability risk for your application. This notification is available for all resource types that are supported for automatic scaling by Application Auto Scaling, including Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet requests, ECS services, DynamoDB tables and global secondary indexes, Aurora replicas, EMR clusters, Sagemaker endpoint variants, AppStream 2.0 fleets, Comprehend document classification endpoints, and AWS Lambda functions with provisioned concurrency.

AWS IoT Device Tester for Amazon FreeRTOS now supports Amazon FreeRTOS 201912.00.  The latest version of device tester includes optional tests for OTA (Over-the-air) over https to qualify your Amazon FreeRTOS development boards.

Application Auto Scaling now publishes notifications to the AWS Personal Health Dashboard and AWS Health API when a scale-out operation for one of your Amazon DynamoDB Tables or Global Secondary Indexes is prevented because a DynamoDB throughput service limit has been reached. This gives you actionable feedback to request a service-limit increase.

Amazon Lex now supports the ability to store chat history. Starting today, you can configure logging of audio input to an S3 bucket and text input to CloudWatch Logs.  

AWS IoT Greengrass expands its language support to include Node.js 12, enabling you to deploy Lambda functions written using this language version to IoT Greengrass cores.  

Amazon Personalize is now available in 3 additional regions - Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central). Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience. 

Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience. Today, we’re pleased to announce support for contextual recommendations, through which you can improve relevance of recommendations by generating them within a context, for instance device type, location, time of day, etc. Contextual information is also useful in personalization for new/unidentified users even when the past interactions of these users are not known.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Starting today, when transcribing audio, you can instruct Amazon Transcribe to automatically mask or remove specific terms from the output transcripts based on a vocabulary that you specify. For example, you can use a vocabulary filter to automatically remove profane words from the transcription results for content moderation. You do not need to scrub inappropriate content from each transcript anymore. You can create a vocabulary filter once and apply it to all your transcription jobs. You can also create multiple vocabulary filters and choose which one should be used for a particular transcription job.

Automation, a feature of Systems Manager, now supports running an Automation execution that targets all instances in the account and Region. This support makes it easier to maintain consistency in your fleet when you make configuration changes or run a specific set of commands.  

You can use Systems Manager Automation to run a single task across multiple accounts and multiple Regions. With this launch, you can target a single remote resource instead of starting workflows for multiple remote resources using tags or resource groups. For example, you can centrally trigger Amazon Inspector runs across all your accounts in all Regions to discover potential security issues on your AWS resources.  

Amazon FreeRTOS is now available in the AWS China (Beijing), operated by Sinnet and AWS China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD, regions. Amazon FreeRTOS is an IoT operating system for microcontrollers that extends the FreeRTOS kernel with software libraries for security, connectivity, and updateability to make small, low-powered edge devices easy to program, deploy, secure, connect, and manage. Amazon FreeRTOS is open source, free to download and use, and provides everything you need to easily program connected microcontroller-based devices and collect data from them for IoT applications, and helps you scale those applications across millions of devices. 

Automation, a feature of Systems Manager, now supports adding tags to your Automation executions, making it easy to sort and filter executions in different ways, such as by resource, purpose, owner, or environment. For example, you can run an Automation that is a remediation for your RDS instance by adding multiple tags ('Remediation' and 'RDS'). This enables you to query for workflow-based tags and resource-based tags. Similarly, you can have different tags for environments, such as prod or test. For example, for patching your prod fleet, you can add 'Patch' and 'Prod' tags. Similarly, for patching your test fleet, you can add 'Patch' and 'Test' tags. 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to restrict access to your Kubernetes cluster’s public endpoint by specifying allowed IPv4 address ranges in CIDR notation. This allows you to implement network-based access control to your public endpoint.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 16 regions, with the addition of the Europe (Stockholm) and South America (São Paulo) regions.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to release a major update to the SharePoint Server on AWS Quick Start. This Quick Start automatically deploys SharePoint Server 2019 on the AWS Cloud in your choice of a multiple-server or single-server topology in approximately 1-2 hours.

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is a client-side application that helps developers build scalable, high-performance data models, and simplifies query development and testing. Starting today, you can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and temporary security credentials to grant users in your AWS account access to your DynamoDB resources from NoSQL Workbench. Previously, you could use only long-term AWS credentials (IAM user access key IDs and secret access keys) with NoSQL Workbench. 

We are thrilled to announce that we have released a new batch of updates just in time for the holidays that enable you to experience updated Identity and Access Management features that are consistent across all other AWS services.  

If you use Amazon Corretto, you can now use Corretto Yum and Corretto Apt repositories for a convenient and familiar way of keeping these installations up-to-date and easy to work into your existing processes. Alternatively, if you prefer tools like cURL you can now rely on the Corretto Permanent URLs to ensure your scripts always download the latest Corretto release. Finally, although you can download your Docker images from Docker Hub, if you want to remain inside the AWS cloud you can now use the Corretto Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Instance as your source of Docker images. 

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. By default, each AWS account has a service limit of 100 concurrent transcription jobs in an AWS region. Until now, when the concurrency quota was exhausted, you had to wait for existing jobs to finish before submitting more jobs. Starting today, job queuing will allow you to submit up to 10,000 jobs and queue your jobs for execution until slots become available. When slots become available, the jobs are processed from the queue in FIFO order (first in, first out).  

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS EU (Paris) Region

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now emits Amazon CloudWatch Events. CloudWatch Events delivers a near real-time stream of system events that describe changes in Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources, enabling you to react selectively to events in the cloud. With this feature you can configure alerts, build event-driven workflows, and trigger custom logic based on events that are sent for certificate issuance, revocation, and other CA operations. For example, you can send a CloudWatch Event to notify you that something unexpected occurred, such as if a certificate is issued from a protected root CA with limited access or if your certificate revocation list (CRL) fails to update. With this feature, AWS publishes CloudWatch events for CA creation, certificate issuance, certificate revocation, audit report generation , and CRL generation.

Amazon Neptune now supports copying snapshots (created either automatically or manually) across regions. AWS customers are interested in building applications that run in more than one public AWS Region. Now customers can use cross-region snapshot copies with Neptune to simplify and streamline the data manipulation operations associated with building and running global graph applications using both Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and RDF/SPARQL.

Today, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is introducing support for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles, a type of IAM role that allows you to easily delegate permissions to AWS services and gain additional transparency into when they are used on your behalf.

You can now copy snapshots across regions using Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM). You can enable policies which, along with create, can now also copy snapshots to one or more AWS region(s). Copies can be scheduled for up to three regions from a single policy and retention periods are set for each region separately.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams is now available in nine additional AWS regions: US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

You can now use AWS Glue in the AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD.  

Customers in the AWS China (Beijing) region operated by SINNET and the AWS China (Ningxia) region operated by NWCD can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.  

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.3.1 for new clusters. Apache Kafka version 2.3.1 includes several new features and bug fixes. Apache Kafka version 2.3.1 is offered in all regions where Amazon MSK is available. For more information, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.3.0 and 2.3.1.

Amazon Elastic Container Service released a new command line interface (CLI) with an emphasis on usability and developer productivity to quickly launch and easily manage applications on ECS powered by AWS Fargate. The new ECS CLI in preview provides a simple declarative set of commands including examples and guided experiences built in to help customers deploy quickly. The CLI creates all resources and artifacts required to deploy to ECS and configures best practices on behalf of the user, allowing them to focus on writing application code.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe becomes available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. 

Amazon CloudFront now offers eight additional real-time metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. These new metrics provide you even more visibility into the performance of your CloudFront traffic. You can use CloudFront’s real-time metrics to monitor, alarm, and receive notifications on the operational performance of your CloudFront distributions. CloudFront already provides six operational metrics, and four Lambda@Edge function metrics, to all CloudFront customers at no additional cost.  

AWS WAF has added a new log field, terminatingRuleMatchDetails, that allows you to identify the area within a request deemed to be suspicious by SQLi or XSS detection rules.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and ACM Private Certificate Authority (CA) now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validated endpoints in US Regions to protect sensitive information.

AWS OpsWorks CM now supports assigning tags to OpsWorks CM servers and backups for both OpsWorks for Chef Automate and OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise. You can define access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions. Tags are key value pairs you can use to organize resources, search, create cost allocation reports and control access. For example you can allow your development team full access to your staging OpsWorks CM server but restrict access to your production server. 

You can now easily connect your Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud source repository to your AWS CodePipeline, allowing for the automation of the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process every time there is a code change. 

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to securely connect to your Amazon EC2 instances directly from the Amazon EC2 console. Session Manager provides a secure browser-based interactive shell to the selected EC2 Linux or Windows instance giving authorized users additional flexibility to quickly connect from either the Amazon EC2 or AWS Systems Manager consoles. 

AWS Cloud9 is now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), and Canada (Central) regions. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.  

Amazon ElastiCache adds support for Redis open source version 5.0.6. This is a bug fix release with various improvements in stability and memory management. This release improves the stability of ElastiCache for Redis when dealing with large number of new concurrent connections and with low memory conditions. Additionally, customers can now monitor replication latency with sub-second granularity.  

Amazon EMR is now available through VPC endpoints, allowing you to access Amazon EMR within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet. VPC endpoints for Amazon EMR are powered by AWS PrivateLink, which provides secure, private connectivity between VPCs and AWS services.

Starting today, Over The Air (OTA) updates to IoT devices running Amazon FreeRTOS can be done over HTTPs. The OTA console has been updated to give users the choice of protocol between MQTT and HTTP to deliver SW updates, leveraging the HTTPS client feature delivered in Amazon FreeRTOS earlier this year. Additional changes in our 201912.00 release can be reviewed in our Changelog. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in two additional AWS regions: Canada (Central) and South America (Sao Paulo). Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in fifteen AWS regions.

AWS Security Hub now integrates with AWS Firewall Manager. AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service which allows you to centrally configure and manage AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and Amazon VPC Security Group rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations. AWS Firewall Manager’s integration with Security Hub will send four types of findings to Security Hub: (1) resources that are not properly protected by WAF rules; (2) resources that are not properly protected by Shield Advanced; (3) Shield Advanced findings that indicate a Distributed Denial of Service attack is underway; and (4) security groups that are being used incorrectly. AWS Security Hub will automatically enable this integration if you are already using Firewall Manager, and you will begin receiving findings from Firewall Manager without any action needed on your end.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that makes it easy and quick to retrieve text and structured data like tables and forms using our DetectText or AnalyzeDoc APIs, without requiring any custom configuration or templates. One advantage of a managed service like Amazon Textract is that customers benefit from continuous improvement over time. Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon Textract is now PCI DSS certified. This means that you can now use Amazon Textract for all workloads that require Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) information security standard, such as cardholder data (CHD) or sensitive authentication data (SAD). Also starting today, AWS launched a set of quality enhancements that make Amazon Textract even more accurate for our tables and forms features. 

Today, AWS Service Catalog announces support for the deprecation of product versions. With the release of product version guidance, administrators can prevent new launches of a product version while allowing their use and updates in existing stacks.

You can now build and run streaming applications using Apache Flink 1.8 in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Apache Flink 1.8 capabilities include exactly once connectors for Amazon S3 and Apache Kafka, improvements to the Amazon Kinesis Data Streams connector, a new Amazon DynamoDB streams connector, eight new SQL functions, SQL pattern detection, improvements to recovery speed and memory usage, and more.  

Starting today, you can configure EC2 Fleet to utilize On-Demand Capacity Reservations first when launching On-Demand instances. EC2 Fleet will then look for available Capacity Reservations within the instance pools specified, and will fully utilize available Capacity Reservations before launching On-Demand instances on net new capacity.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Starting today, Amazon Lex is available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region. 

AWS Training and Certification has launched AWS Computer Vision: Getting Started with GluonCV, a new self-paced digital course available exclusively on Coursera. Using video lectures and demonstrations, you will develop foundational knowledge about computer vision (CV) on AWS and skills to build and train CV models with Apache MXNet and GluonCV.

AWS Ground Station expands to the Europe (Stockholm) Region. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations.

We're excited to announce new digital versions of two APN Partner classroom courses that we launched in November 2019. Designed to help APN Partners use AWS solutions for their customers and organizations, these courses provide a technical understanding of how VMware and containers work in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to seven. The expansion into a new AWS Region provides you more options to provision your Amazon Connect cloud contact center with the other AWS services you use.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Europe (London) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to six. The expansion into a new AWS Region provides you more options to provision your Amazon Connect cloud contact center with the other AWS services you use. You can now claim toll free and direct inward dial (DID) telephone numbers from twelve new countries.

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds dual-monitor support for streaming sessions that are started on web browsers. For dual monitors, a maximum display resolution of 2560x1440 pixels per monitor is supported. If you want to use more than two monitors, or you require a display resolution that is greater than 2560x1440 pixels per monitor, you can download and use the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows.

Now, you can use Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for Amazon DynamoDB (Preview) in 15 additional AWS Regions around the world.  

The Windows Web Application Migration Assistant for AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an interactive PowerShell utility that migrates ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core applications from on-premises IIS Windows servers to Elastic Beanstalk.

As part of both re:invent related launches, as well as community-prioritized requests from our public coverage roadmap, we are pleased to announce support for over two dozen new and updated CloudFormation resource types. You can now use CloudFormation templates to configure and provision additional features for AWS CodePipeline, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and more AWS resources. CloudFormation periodically releases additional support, making it easier for developers to configure and provision AWS services. 

Amazon MQ supports throughput-optimized message brokers, backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store. Throughput-optimized brokers reduce the number of required brokers and the cost of operating high-volume applications.

AWS Security Hub now integrates with Amazon Detective (preview). Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of security findings or suspicious activities. Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from your AWS resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to help you visualize and conduct faster and more efficient security investigations. The initial AWS Security Hub integration with Amazon Detective allows you to pivot from Amazon GuardDuty findings in Security Hub directly into Amazon Detective to investigate them. DNS-related findings are not supported in this initial integration release. AWS Security Hub automatically enables this integration for customers that are whitelisted in Amazon Detective's gated public preview, but you first need to sign up and get access for Amazon Detective's preview. To learn more, visit the Integration page in the Security Hub console and click on the "Configuration" link for Amazon Detective.

Medical ontologies, such as ICD-10, make it possible to classify unstructured medical information into standardized codes that downstream healthcare applications, such as revenue cycle management tools (medical coding) can read. Amazon Comprehend Medical ICD-10-CM RXNorm Ontology Linking extracts medical condition and medication entities from medical text and links them to the relevant ICD-10-CM and RXNorm concepts respectively.  

We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.22, which includes 97 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch.

AWS CodeBuild now allows you to securely share your CodeBuild resources, such as Projects and Report Groups, across AWS accounts or within your AWS organization. Previously, you couldn't share your build details or test reports generated in one account with other AWS accounts.

You can now automatically resolve to the private Amazon EKS cluster endpoint when using a peered VPC. This allows you to easily access a cluster using AWS Direct Connect from on-premises to an EKS cluster that is only accessible within a VPC.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now includes a feature called Bring Your Own DKIM (BYODKIM), which allows you to use your own public-private key pair to configure DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) for your email-sending domains.

Starting today, launch events for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances will be available via Amazon CloudWatch Events CLI.  

Amazon Connect now logs all API calls to AWS CloudTrail, a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Using AWS CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, retain, and respond to Amazon Connect API activity. For example, you can define a workflow to get notified when an agent’s security profile is changed via API.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now in scope under AWS’s latest System and Organizational Controls (SOC) audit cycle. This SOC compliance certification applies to all AWS Regions where Amazon AppStream 2.0 is available.  

Amazon CloudFront access logs provide detailed information about every user request that CloudFront receives. Starting today, seven additional data fields will now appear in your CloudFront access logs to improve visibility into the delivery of your content. For example, with the x-edge-detailed-result-type field you can identify the specific type of error and with the sc-range-start/sc-range-end fields you can determine the requested range details. These new fields are appended to the end of each log entry to maintain backwards-compatibility with the previous log file format. The seven new data points include:

You can now attach multiple Amazon Elastic Inference accelerators to a single Amazon EC2 instance. With this capability, you can use a single EC2 instance in an auto-scaling group when you are running inference for multiple models. By attaching multiple accelerators to a single instance, you can avoid deploying multiple auto-scaling groups of CPU or GPU instances for your inference and lower your operating costs.

Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth added the auto-segment feature to the semantic segmentation labeling user interface. This feature increases labeling throughput, improves accuracy, and mitigates labeler fatigue. It simplifies the task by automatically labeling areas of interest in an image with only minimal input. You can accept, undo, or correct the resulting output from auto-segment. 

This Quick Start deploys an end-to-end .NET serverless continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 40 minutes.

Amazon Athena is now available in the AWS South America (São Paulo) region.  

This Quick Start deploys an end-to-end .NET continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 40 minutes.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now available in the Canada (Central) region.  

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5ad and R5ad instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. In addition, 8xlarge and 16xlarge sizes of M5ad and R5ad instances are now also available in the Canada (Central) Regions.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now publishes 1-minute metrics to Amazon CloudWatch, providing you more granular monitoring for queue status with continuous visibility into operations of your queues in order to quickly respond to changes in your workloads. Previously, Amazon SQS published metrics to Amazon CloudWatch in 5 minute intervals. 

Starting today, AWS Security Token Service is announcing support for AWS PrivateLink in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm), South America (Sao Paolo), and US West (N. California) regions, enabling you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Security Token Service entirely within the AWS network. 

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. NTTS voices, which deliver ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, are also available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland). Customers in these four regions can now synthesize 13 NTTS voices (8 US English, 3 UK English, 1 US Spanish and 1 Brazilian Portuguese) in the Polly portfolio. In addition, 2 speaking style voices - Newscaster and Conversational, built using NTTS technology are also available in US English (Matthew and Joanna) starting today.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures. 

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

Alexa for Business now supports new meeting room capabilities that help employees end meetings on time, automatically free up reserved but unused meeting rooms, and provide meeting room utilization insights for your organization. 

Amazon Lex is now a U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible service. Customers can now use Amazon Lex to process user input that contains protected health information (PHI). 

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and US West (N. California) regions. 

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new Exam Readiness course for the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification exam. Available digitally and via classroom, this course teaches you how to interpret exam questions, apply concepts being tested by the exam, and allocate your study time. You’ll also have a chance to work through sample questions to understand the rationale behind correct and incorrect answer choices.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 I3en Instances are Now Available in AWS Canada, Brazil (São Paulo), and Europe (Paris) AWS Regions.

In addition to Amazon CloudWatch, you now have the option to monitor your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters using Prometheus, an open source monitoring system for time-series metrics. Open Monitoring with Prometheus enables you to monitor Amazon MSK using solutions like Datadog, Lenses, New Relic, Sumo logic, or a Prometheus server, and easily migrate your existing monitoring dashboards to Amazon MSK.

Amazon FSx, a service that provides fully managed Windows (Amazon FSx for Windows File Server) and high-performance Linux (Amazon FSx for Lustre) file systems, has added several enhancements to the AWS Management Console, including the ability to view Amazon FSx CloudWatch metrics and the ability to add and update tags directly from within the Amazon FSx Console.

The Amazon Builders’ Library is a collection of living articles that take readers under the hood of how Amazon architects, releases, and operates the software underpinning Amazon.com and AWS. The Builders’ Library articles are written by Amazon’s senior technical leaders and engineers, covering topics across architecture, software delivery, and operations. For example, readers can see how Amazon automates software delivery to achieve over 150 million deployments a year or how Amazon’s engineers implement principles such as shuffle sharding to build resilient systems that are highly available and fault tolerant.

AWS Amplify announces Amplify DataStore: a queryable, on-device data store for web, IoT, and mobile developers using iOS, Android, and React Native. Amplify DataStore provides a programming model for leveraging shared and distributed data without writing additional code for offline and online scenarios, which makes working with distributed, cross-user data just as simple as working with local-only data - allowing developers to create rich app experiences.

Amazon API Gateway announced HTTP APIs, enabling customers to quickly build high performance RESTful APIs that are up to 71% cheaper than REST APIs also available from API Gateway. HTTP APIs are optimized for building APIs that proxy to AWS Lambda functions or HTTP backends, making them ideal for serverless workloads.

The Amazon EKS developer preview for Amazon EC2 A1 instances has been updated with support for the latest Kubernetes versions, global AMI availability, and bug fixes. 

Starting today, Slack users can use the Amazon Chime Meetings App for Slack to start and join Amazon Chime online meetings directly from their Slack workspace channels and conversations. With Amazon Chime Basic, users can start one-to-one audio and video calls and join group meetings as an attendee. With an upgrade to Amazon Chime Pro, Slack users can access advanced meeting features from their Slack workspace like hosting group meetings with up to 100 attendees and 16 video streams, guest access from a meeting link, conference dial-ins, and support for SIP in-room video systems. The Amazon Chime Meeting App for Slack automatically registers new users the first time they use the app so they can start using Amazon Chime without having to create or manage a new account.