May 2020

Today, AWS Marketplace announced the ability to easily upgrade and renew existing SaaS Contracts and Contracts with Consumption Pricing (CCP) Private Offers. AWS Marketplace helps customers find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software that runs on AWS. With SaaS Contract Upgrades and Renewals, customers can keep up with their changing business needs and accommodate expanding workloads on AWS.

AWS Storage Gateway now consolidates monitoring of a gateway’s CloudWatch Alarms directly from the Storage Gateway console. Access to CloudWatch Alarms in the console, along with the existing CloudWatch Metrics, provides you continuous visibility into gateway health and performance all in one place. Now you can quickly take action on alarms triggered when defined metrics fall outside thresholds you configure.

We’re excited to announce the launch of three role-based learning paths for Media Services. Our AWS Training and Certification curriculum for Media Services offers over 25 courses and hands-on labs. They’re designed to help you learn to design and develop media solutions, master the skills needed for daily operations of services, and choose the solutions that best fit your needs.

You can now launch R5, M5, and T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode on-demand media for applications that are subject to Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), with Moderate baseline in standard regions, and High baselines in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This is in addition to compliance by MediaConvert with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability. 

Amazon RDS Proxy is now available in preview in eight additional AWS regions: US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London). Refer RDS Proxy pricing page for a complete list of regions where RDS Proxy is available.

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now supports CLion, PhpStorm, GoLand, and RubyMine. Customers will now be able to download the AWS Toolkit from these newly supported JetBrains IDEs by browsing the plug-in marketplace from within the IDEs.  

Customers can now connect their Okta Identity Cloud to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using Okta to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Okta experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in. AWS SSO and Okta Identity Cloud use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security. 

You can now use the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API and Amazon RDS Query editor in additional AWS Regions.

AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), now encrypts data stored on the ephemeral storage with service managed keys using industry-standard AES-256 cryptographic algorithm. Fargate provides 20 GB of ephemeral storage for applications to download and process data. Customers who choose AWS Fargate now have data stored on the ephemeral storage encrypted by default. Encryption and decryption are handled seamlessly, so you don’t have to modify your applications to access your data.  

AWS CodePipeline’s supported action types now include AWS Step Functions, making it easier for customers to invoke complex workflows as part of their release process. With the new action type, CodePipeline Stages can now trigger Step Functions state machines which support conditional branching, error-handling, asynchronous tasks, and easily invoke other AWS services through service-integrations.

In a few clicks you can take advantage of new Apache Kafka features and bug fixes by upgrading the version of Apache Kafka deployed on new and existing Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Amazon MSK uses rolling upgrade best practices to maintain high availability and support cluster I/O throughout a version upgrade. See the Amazon MSK version upgrade user guide to learn about version upgrades and how to ensure clients maintain high availability throughout an upgrade.

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announces the general availability (GA) of Amplify iOS and Amplify Android, which are part of the open source Amplify Framework. Amplify iOS and Amplify Android include libraries and tools (CLI toolchain and IDE helpers) that enable mobile developers to build scalable and secure cloud-powered applications. You can use the libraries with backends created using the Amplify CLI or with existing AWS backends. It is our recommended way to build native mobile applications powered by AWS services.

Elastic Load Balancing now supports Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN) policies on Network Load Balancers. ALPN is a TLS extension supported by all major browsers that enables negotiation of the protocol used after establishing a TLS connection, such as HTTP/2. Using ALPN policies, you can now offload your application’s TLS HTTP/2 traffic decryption/encryption to the Network Load Balancer, improving your service security posture and reducing operational complexity.

AWS SAM now supports AWS Step Functions, enabling you to integrate workflow orchestration into your serverless applications quickly and easily. Through direct support in the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), an open-source framework for building serverless applications, you can now deliver your serverless applications faster by defining your Step Functions state machine workflows alongside your application architecture and code.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) launched support for container health checks and a new user interface for load balancers in Spinnaker v1.20. You can now use container health checks through a Spinnaker deployment pipeline which is integrated with ECS services. You can also view and filter load balancers for ECS services within Spinnaker itself to see load balancers and the deployment pipeline for your ECS services in the same tool.

Last year, AWS Config launched the ability to deploy AWS Config rules and conformance packs across an organization from the master account in AWS Organizations. Starting today, you can deploy these AWS Config artifacts from any delegated member account in your organization, in addition to the master account. This option provides additional flexibility to users who want to manage these deployments centrally, from a dedicated account such as an audit, security or compliance account. 

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solution that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions for the chatbot. The solution makes use of AWS services such as AWS Lambda to implement the machine learning logic of the chatbot, and uses Amazon Polly to turn text responses into lifelike speech.

You can now select multiple blocks at the same time and rearrange them as a group within your contact flows, saving time and effort. Previously, moving a sequence of blocks would require each block to be individually dragged and dropped. This feature is replacing the repetitive task of dragging one block at a time, which was frustrating, error prone, and time consuming, replacing it with one that takes seconds. 

Starting today, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to help you improve cost and performance for your workloads. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data such as patch compliance and instance details helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. Compute Optimizer delivers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance recommendations so that you can quickly identify the most impactful optimization opportunities. You can now see all your operations data and Compute Optimizer recommendations in one aggregated view from Systems Manager Explorer.

AWS Outposts is now supported in AWS Europe (Milan) Region. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a consistent AWS experience. Outposts is ideal for applications that need to run on-premises to meet low latency requirements. You can also use Outposts to process and manage data locally and effectively meet your data residency requirements.  

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the Europe (Paris) AWS region. 

You can now access Amazon S3 objects using the IPv6 protocol via the S3 dual-stack endpoint in AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. S3’s dual-stack endpoint supports both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols and allows your applications to continue to access data without any code changes while leveraging the benefits of IPv6 protocols.

You can now provide cron expressions as the scheduling input for your Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) policies. Cron expressions provide you the flexibility to specify custom schedules in your policies.  

Amazon QuickSight now makes it easier to connect with ML models from SageMaker and also introduces an enhanced SQL editor that simplifies building custom SQL-powered data sets.  

Customers can now programmatically access information about AWS Availability Zones and Local Zones in addition to information about AWS Regions, services, and endpoints. AWS customers can now easily access the full list of AWS Availability Zones, Local Zones and find out which services are available within the regions by querying AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store.  

AWS has updated Real-Time Analytics with Spark Streaming, an AWS Solution that automatically deploys a highly available, cost-effective batch and real-time data analytics architecture on the AWS Cloud that leverages Apache Spark Streaming and Amazon Kinesis. This solution is designed to support custom Apache Spark Streaming applications, and leverages Amazon EMR for processing vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.

AWS CodeBuild's support for Test Reporting is now Generally Available for production use. Test Reporting gives you a detailed and actionable view of your test executions in CodeBuild, making it easier for you to investigate test failures.

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the Europe (Stockholm) AWS region. 

AWS Storage Gateway now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to protect sensitive information for regulated workloads. These endpoints terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions using a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic software module, making it easier for you to use Storage Gateway for regulated workloads. US Federal agencies and companies contracting with the US Federal government can now meet the FIPS security requirement to encrypt sensitive data. 

AWS Marketplace has launched data feeds that enable software vendors, data providers, and consulting partners to access accurate, timely insights from their AWS Marketplace business and that integrate directly with their favorite reporting and visualization tools. Independent software vendors, data providers, and consulting partners (sellers) can sell their software and data products to over 260,000 AWS customers worldwide through AWS Marketplace. For sellers to grow their business in AWS Marketplace, they require prompt visibility to key financial and operational data to streamline sales, finance, tax and accounting workflows. AWS Marketplace now offers sellers fast delivery of reports containing information such as product and offer listings, billing events, tax items, and transactional data securely into their AWS accounts.  

Amazon DynamoDB local, the downloadable version of DynamoDB, now supports empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes in DynamoDB tables. In addition, DynamoDB local has added support for up to 25 unique items and 4 MB of data per transactional request. With DynamoDB local, you can develop and test applications quickly in your local development environment without incurring any additional costs. 

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in GovCloud (US) to support PostgreSQL major version 12 and minor versions 11.7, 10.12, 9.6.17, and 9.5.21. This release contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.  

Amazon Chime is a communications service that lets you meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside your organization, all using a single application. Amazon Chime enterprise account administrators can now set custom retention policies on chat data in the Amazon Chime application. Retention policies can be set in daily increments with a minimum of one day, and a maximum of 15 years. These policies are applied to chat rooms created by users in the enterprise account and to conversations where all participants are users in the enterprise account. When a retention policy is set, all messages that have met the retention period will be deleted from Amazon Chime, and new messages will be deleted as they reach the end of the retention period.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now allows you to bring your own IPv6 addresses using Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP). You can choose to advertise your IPv6 addresses on to the Internet for public connectivity or use it only for private connectivity to your on-premises networks by advertising them over Direct Connect. The IPv6 addresses brought over via BYOIP work exactly the same as Amazon-provided IPv6 addresses. For example, you can associate these IPv6 addresses to subnets, Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI) and EC2 instances within your VPC.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with TensorFlow 2.2 support. You can launch the new versions of the Deep Learning Containers 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 the release notes.

We’re proud to announce the release of Getting Started with AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance, a new three-hour fundamental digital course developed by the experts at AWS. This free, on-demand course will teach you about the security pillar of the Well-Architected Framework. It also covers key services used in identity and access management, detective controls, infrastructure protection, and data protection categories.

Amazon Neptune has refreshed the console experience, which includes a single page to create a database, the ability to add Tags during cluster creation, and the ability to choose instance type for Workbench.

Starting today, you can use AWS Resource Groups and Tag Editor in AWS Africa (Cape Town) and AWS Europe (Milan) Regions.

Starting today, AWS Global Accelerator supports application endpoints in the Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS Regions, bringing the count of supported regions to 20.

Customers in the AWS Europe (Milan) region can now use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). 

AWS Backup now supports service opt-in, enabling AWS customers to opt into (or out of) AWS Backup support for supported AWS services at the account level. Service opt-in provides an easy-to-configure solution to ensure that AWS Backup service coverage reflects exactly what you need. It will also make it easy for customers to opt-in when AWS Backup introduces support for a new service, without having to change tagging strategies. Service opt-in is available in all regions where AWS Backup is available except Beijing and Ningxia.

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, when transcribing audio streams, you can instruct Amazon Transcribe to automatically mask, remove, or tag specific terms in the transcription results 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 or generating family-friendly captions. You can create a vocabulary filter once and use it when processing multiple audio streams. You can also create multiple vocabulary filters and choose which one should be used for a particular audio stream. With this launch, vocabulary filtering is now available for both Amazon Transcribe’s batch and streaming transcription APIs.

Starting today, application developers building on the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript can use data messages to send signals between clients connected to an Amazon Chime SDK meeting. Messages can be any small data payload in any format that a developer wants to transmit in real-time between meeting attendees. Developers can use data messages to indicate changes to meeting state, power custom-built collaborative features such as emoji reactions or shared whiteboards, or for other purposes appropriate to their application. 

You can now emit data stored in Amazon QLDB directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. This new QLDB streaming capability allows you to react quickly to new events (e.g., a change in account balance for a banking ledger application) and easily integrate with downstream services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Amazon QLDB customers can use the streaming capability to develop event-driven workflows, real-time analytics, and to replicate journal data to other AWS services in support of advanced analytical processing. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) directly on RDS DB instances. There is no additional cost to install SSIS directly on your Amazon RDS DB instance. 

Semiconductor manufacturers like NXP can now use AWS IoT Core Multi-Account Registration to pre-configure silicon components like secure elements with X.509 certificates and private keys, ensuring devices built using these components are pre-qualified to connect to AWS IoT by default. AWS IoT customers can then use these qualified devices together with AWS IoT Multi-Account Registration to simplify device registration and easily move devices between multiple AWS accounts in the same Region.  

AWS Client VPN is a managed, scalable virtual private network service that enables users to securely access AWS resources and on-premises networks. Federated Authentication makes it easy to integrate AWS Client VPN user authentication and authorization with a centralized, SAML based Identity Provider (IdP).  

The Game Analytics Pipeline is an AWS Solutions Implementation that helps game developers launch a scalable serverless data pipeline to ingest, store, and analyze telemetry data generated from their games and services. Player usage patterns can vary widely and a game’s success in the marketplace can be unpredictable. This can make it challenging to build and maintain solutions that scale with your player population while remaining cost effective and easy to manage. Many game developers and game publishers want to centralize data from across applications into common formats for integration with their data lake and analytics applications. The solution is designed to provide a framework for ingesting game events into your data lake for analytics and storage, allowing you to focus on expanding the solution functionality rather than managing the underlying infrastructure operations.

Amazon Fraud Detector Preview is now available in the US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions.  

You can now select the Traffic splitting deployment policy when deploying application code using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This is in addition to the four existing deployment policies that Elastic Beanstalk currently supports: All at once, Rolling, Rolling with additional batch, and Immutable.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets allows you to deploy CloudFormation stacks into multiple accounts and regions in a single operation. StackSets is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS CloudFormation is now integrated with AWS CodeDeploy to allow ECS customers with application or network load balancers to invoke blue/green and canary style deployments when performing application updates. This feature allows customers to configure the incremental traffic migration strategy for their deployments within CloudFormation templates as well as identify CloudWatch alarms to monitor the deployment.

The Live Streaming on AWS solution now includes an option that uses AWS Elemental MediaStore to provide the fundamentals you need to get started with live streaming. Designed to provide a simpler live streaming solution with fewer options for customization, this approach uses MediaStore as the live origin with AWS Elemental MediaLive.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports environment files to store environment variables for containers using the EC2 Launch type. This simplifies configuration of environment variables by editing or referencing centrally located files, instead of manual edits to environment variables as key value pairs across all your containers.

Using the Amazon Chime SDK, developers can now build applications capable of hosting audio and video conferences with up to 250 attendees. Customers that have deployed applications using the Amazon Chime SDK can access larger meeting sizes immediately without updating the client SDK version or making changes to their application. 

We're very pleased to bring you Amazon Lumberyard beta version 1.24.0.0, which contains many improvements to the Lumberyard engine and tools, particularly around quality of life with Script Canvas, the core editor, and asset bundling.

Starting today, you can use Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with EC2 Instance Connect (EIC) to define Secure Shell (SSH) access permissions based on attributes. Attribute-based access control is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on tags which can be attached to users and AWS resources.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now makes it easier to implement security best practices for Kubernetes on AWS with the Amazon EKS Best Practices Guide for Security.

AWS Artifact service introduces a new user interface (UI) that provides a more intuitive experience in searching and saving AWS compliance reports, and accepting agreements. The new UI includes AWS Artifact home page equipped with information and videos on how to use the AWS Artifact service for your compliance needs. Additionally, the Reports and Agreements console now provides keyword search capability allowing you to accurately search the artifact you are looking for rather than scrolling through the entire page. The new UI is supported on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or widescreen monitor, resizing the on-screen content dynamically.  

Starting today, pricing for AWS Outposts general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized configurations has been reduced in the country of Bahrain.  

AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Backint Agent backs up your SAP HANA database to Amazon S3 and restores it using SAP management tools, such as SAP HANA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio, or SQL commands. AWS Backint Agent supports full, incremental, differential and log backup of SAP HANA database and catalogs to Amazon S3.

AWS Outposts can be shipped and installed at customer datacenters and on-premises locations in United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Amazon DynamoDB now supports empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes in DynamoDB tables. Empty value support gives you greater flexibility to use attributes for a broader set of use cases without having to transform such attributes before sending them to DynamoDB. List, Map, and Set data types also support empty String and Binary values. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), giving you the ability to host the report server web portal on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. There is no additional cost to install SSRS directly on your Amazon RDS DB instance. 

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports S3 integration in both the Multi-AZ and Single-AZ configurations, giving you the ability to transfer files between your DB instance and Amazon S3 using features such as Bulk Insert. 

Amazon Redshift now leverages Bloom filters to enable early and effective data filtering for up to 2x faster query performance on external tables in Amazon S3. A Bloom filter is a probabilistic, memory-efficient data structure that accelerates join queries at scale by filtering rows that do not match the join relation, significantly reducing the amount of data transferred over the network. Amazon Redshift automatically determines what queries are suitable for leveraging Bloom filters at query runtime. You can power a lake house architecture with Amazon Redshift Spectrum to directly query and join data across your data warehouse and data lake, enabling you to gain unique insights not possible otherwise.  

Semiconductor manufacturers like Espressif can now use AWS IoT Core Multi-Account Registration to pre-configure silicon components like secure elements with X.509 certificates and private keys, ensuring devices built using these components are pre-qualified to connect to AWS IoT by default. AWS IoT customers can then use these qualified devices together with AWS IoT Multi-Account Registration to simplify device registration and easily move devices between multiple AWS accounts in the same Region.  

Amazon Chime Voice Connector now supports real-time audio streaming for media forked from Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) using Network-Based Recording. This makes it easy for you to build machine learning, analytics, and processing applications using real-time call audio from your on-premises Cisco phone systems. Previously, you had to integrate and deploy expensive on-premises hardware and software, or make disruptive changes to your enterprise voice network.  

Starting today, developers using the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript can run their web applications in Google Chrome browsers running on the Ubuntu LTS (version 16.04 and newer) operating system. With support across the most common web browsers and operating systems, the Amazon Chime SDK helps developers reach their customers with audio calling, video calling, and screen sharing features on their preferred devices. 

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server extends support to AWS X-Ray, to help customers get further visibility into the issues impacting the health of their applications. Starting today, customers using AWS X-Ray to instrument their .NET and SQL Server applications will be able to view trace-level metrics, including number of requests, faults, errors, throttles, and average latency, for the impacted resources on CloudWatch Application Insights. The automated dashboards created for problems detected additionally provides customers visibility into the related alarms, log errors, and events, enabling customers troubleshoot ongoing problems and reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR). Customers can also drill down into service map for this application using CloudWatch ServiceLens to investigate further.

You can now use AWS CloudFormation to easily create and manage accelerators and other AWS Global Accelerator components by using a CloudFormation template. With CloudFormation, you can use a programming language, or a simple text file to automate creating and managing accelerators, listeners, endpoint groups, and endpoints for your Global Accelerator configuration in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

We are excited to announce the launch of Exam Readiness Intensive Workshop: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, a new five-day, instructor-led classroom course. This intermediate-level workshop includes a unique combination of training and exam readiness with additional lessons and quizzes available only in this course. Designed for solutions architects with at least six months to one year of practical experience, it can help you gain confidence and get ready to take the exam. 

Amazon Forecast is a managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast is applicable in a wide variety of use cases, including product demand forecasting, inventory planning, workforce and resource planning, energy demand forecasting, and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting.  

AWS Cloud9 is now available in Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.  

AWS Direct Connect is now live at AWS Bahrain DC52, Manama, Bahrain. This is the second AWS Direct Connect location in Bahrain. Pairing the new DC52 location with existing DC53 location, customers can now establish location redundant connectivity within Bahrain. Further, with global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region from any of the above locations using global public VIFs and Direct Connect Gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the home region if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region.

You can now centrally discover, plan, and track your migrations into any commercial AWS region from the Migration Hub in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and US East (N. Virginia) Regions. 

You can now use recently launched State Manager features through AWS CloudFormation, with support for all State Manager CLI and SDK operations, such as rate control. State Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, is used to define, enforce, and report on desired state configuration compliance for your infrastructure. This integration provides additional safety, control, and flexibility when deploying desired state configurations with AWS CloudFormation.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the April 2020 Patch Set Updates (PSU) for Oracle Database 11.2 and 12.1, and April 2020 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2, 18c and 19c. 

The new AWS CloudTrail console makes it easier for you to create and manage trails. The console experience is refreshed across all CloudTrail features and now includes documentation and pricing links alongside the features so you can easily learn more while staying in the console.

We are excited to announce the support for Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud repositories to AWS CodeGuru Reviewer. Built for professional teams, Bitbucket is more than just Git code management. Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test, and deploy. 

We’re excited to announce the addition of -javaagent switch to Amazon CodeGuru Profiler that lets customers start the profiling agent using a command line. With this new change, you no longer need to modify your application’s code or add dependencies in order to run the agent.  

AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low-latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or local data storage. In this new digital course, you will learn how AWS Outposts can extend AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to your data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. The result: a consistent hybrid experience. The 80-minute course is available free and on demand.

AWS Training and Certification has released Configure and Deploy AWS Client VPN, a new digital course to help customers successfully deploy and use a client VPN. This free, 30-minute foundational course includes a step-by-step administrator’s guide for setting Client VPN using the AWS Console and the command line interface (CLI). It also provides instructions for client users to download and launch VPN from their personal hardware.

AWS Cloud9 is now available with a new default theme based on the previously experimental Jett Dark theme. Customers with existing environments can change or customize their current theme by following the instructions in Working with Themes in the Cloud9 IDE.  

Network performance metrics from Amazon CloudWatch are now available in the AWS Elemental MediaConnect console. With this update you can easily monitor your live video stream source metrics including bitrate and received packets directly in the console, helping you troubleshoot issues more quickly. To learn more, please visit the documentation page.

You can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets for applications that are subject to Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate and High baselines, in both Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This is in addition to compliance with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements announced by AWS Secrets Manager previously.  

Amazon Cognito is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West). AWS GovCloud (US) Regions are isolated AWS Regions designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, assisting customers who have United States federal, state, or local government compliance requirements.

Amazon Route 53 is now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

We are excited to announce the launch of a completely redesigned Amazon Macie with dramatic price reduction that lowers the price by 80% to over 90% with volume discounting tiers (see the New Macie Pricing). This meaningful price reduction was achieved by a multi-month effort to rearchitect Macie’s data discovery engine, deeply integrating with Amazon S3 to make better use of the underlying storage and compute resources and perform even faster and more scalable detections. In addition to the price reduction, new capabilities and enhancements have been added, including updated machine learning (ML) models for more accurate identification of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), support for customer-defined data types for proprietary or unique sensitive data, and native multi-account management through AWS Organizations that allows for management of up to 5,000 accounts from a single account.

AWS Single Sign-on (AWS SSO) administrators can now rotate the X.509 certificates they use for external identity providers (IdPs) with zero authentication downtime.

Customers in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) region can now use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). 

Amazon Web Services announces the Alpha release of Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes (cdk8s), an open-source software development framework for defining Kubernetes applications using general-purpose programming languages. cdk8s makes it easy for you to manage Kubernetes using the same tools, techniques, and workflows that you use to write applications. cdk8s generates pure Kubernetes YAML, so you can use it to define applications for any Kubernetes cluster running anywhere.

Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge locations in Kolkata, India and Hamburg, Germany. Viewers served by these new Edge locations can expect to see up to a 20% improvement in latency. In India, CloudFront has multiple Edge locations in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Similarly, CloudFront already has Edge locations in several cities in Germany such as Berlin, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, and Munich. For more information on CloudFront’s global infrastructure, go to CloudFront Features.

AWS Fargate is now available in the Africa (Cape Town) Region.  

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now provides enhanced monitoring for Apache Flink applications through new metrics sent to Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics emits 19 application metrics by default such as CPU and memory utilization. You can also easily create custom metrics in your application code using Apache Flink’s built-in metrics system.  

Android users can now use Amazon API Gateway, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service features on the Console mobile app. In addition, we have expanded Amazon CloudWatch capabilities to include logs. 

Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to deploy patches automatically to instances running Debian 8 (Jessie), Debian 9 (Stretch), and Oracle Linux 7.6, giving you more patching options for your mixed Linux environments. 

AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with the latest framework versions of PyTorch 1.5.0, with newly added SageMaker Inference, SageMaker PyTorch Inference, and the latest version of SageMaker PyTorch Training. You can launch the new versions of the Deep Learning Containers 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 the release notes for PyTorch 1.5.0.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers are available today with the latest framework versions of 1.15.2 with python 3.7 support . The release includes updates to the Amazon SageMaker Experiments package. Amazon SageMaker Experiments is a feature in Amazon SageMaker that lets you organize, track, compare, and evaluate machine learning (ML) experiments and model versions. The TensorFlow 1.15.2 python3.7 training containers now also include SageMaker Debugger, which allow data scientists to save and inspect the model tensors during training jobs.

The AWS Deep Learning Containers for Elastic Inference are available today with the framework versions PyTorch 1.3.1, TensorFlow 1.15.0, and TensorFlow 2.0.0. The PyTorch 1.3.1 upgrade includes the newly added SageMaker Inference and SageMaker PyTorch Inference. The TensorFlow 1.15.0 and TensorFlow 2.0.0 upgrades include the latest versions of TensorFlow Model Server for use with Elastic Inference. You can launch the new versions of the Deep Learning Containers on Amazon SageMaker, on Amazon EC2, and on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a complete list of packages and versions supported by these Deep Learning Containers, see the release notes.

Today, Amazon WorkMail announced that you can now control email flow of your organization using AWS Lambda functions when using Email Flow Rules. With this, you can build powerful email flow control system with completely customizable conditions. For example, you can easily create Lambda to block any specific type of inbound or outbound email, or you can add or remove recipients to all or some inbound or outbound email. 

Amazon Kendra is now generally available to all AWS customers, with exciting new feature additions. Amazon Kendra provides customers with a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Kendra offers a more intuitive way to search, using natural language, and returns more accurate answers; so your end users can discover information stored within the vast amount of content spread across your organization. Users can ask questions like "How long is maternity leave?" and get a specific answer such as "14 weeks", or "How do I configure my VPN?" and get a specific passage extracted from a document describing the process. With Kendra, you can provide pinpoint search accuracy from content within your manuals, research reports, FAQs, HR documentation, customer service guides, and more. 

The Amazon Corretto team introduces Heapothesys, an open-source benchmark which simulates fundamental application characteristics that affect JVM GC latency. Heapothesys creates scenarios with pre-determined object allocation rates, heap occupancy, and heap sizes, then reports the resulting JVM pauses. The intent is to help OpenJDK developers investigate capability boundaries of the technologies they are implementing. It provides reference points for how different collector implementations perform when these basic stress factors are dialed up and collector leeway to act shrinks. We are working on enhancing Heapothesys to better model and predict additional application behaviors (see issue-12).

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors are generally available. Amazon EC2 M6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over the current generation x86-based Amazon EC2 M5 instances for a broad set of general-purpose workloads including, application servers, microservices, gaming servers, small and mid-size databases, and caching fleets.

Amazon Connect contact center agents that have completed a call or chat and log out of the latest version of the Contact Control Panel (CCP) will now set to Offline agent status. When your agents log in to the CCP, they can set the agent status to Available to start answering calls or chats. Previously, agents had to change current status (e.g. Available, Custom statuses such as "Lunch", "Break") to Offline before logging out to not receive contacts. 

AWS Elemental MediaLive has added a few capabilities to provide added flexibility for content providers. 

Today we announced the general availability of AWS Elemental Media Event Management (MEM), a support program designed to improve the operational reliability of your business-critical video events. MEM applies a structured process specifically designed for the unique operational requirements of large-scale video events that use AWS Media Services or AWS Elemental Appliances and Software, such as the broadcast of a marquee sports or the launch of a new online video service.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing service that makes it easy to use machine learning to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text. This service API is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS Service Catalog administrators can now create service actions that use AWS Systems Manager Automation documents with more than one parameter. With this new feature, Service Catalog end users can now execute more complex operational tasks, such as creating a backup or filing a ticket based on content they provided.  

EC2 Image Builder is now integrated with AWS CloudFormation which allows customers to automate the creation, testing, and deployment of custom Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). EC2 Image Builder simplifies the creation, patching, testing, distribution, and sharing of Linux and Windows Server images.  

AWS Storage Gateway is now available in AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS Africa (Cape Town) Regions.  

Earlier this year, we launched support for Aurora PostgreSQL user authentication with Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory. In the original release, this support was based on AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory. We have now added support for user authentication using external Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directories, including those running on premises.

Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is a single database that allows 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. With today’s launch, the feature is available for the MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora in 8 AWS regions. Check out this blog to find out how to build highly available MySQL applications using Aurora Multi-Master. 

AWS Trusted Advisor Explorer is an AWS Solution that automatically provisions the infrastructure necessary to aggregate cost optimization recommendations and actively track cost optimization health across your organization over time. The solution creates a data lake that can be used to create dashboards to visually explore the data. The solution enriches the data with Resource Tags that further enhance the discovery and filtering capabilities.  

EBS direct APIs for Snapshots are now available in five additional regions: Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Middle East (Bahrain), AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 

You can now select resource groups as targets for desired state configurations in Systems Manager State Manager. This allows you to define, enforce, and report on different desired states for your resources based on logical groupings, such as applications or environments. 

You can now use AWS Lake Formation in the South America (Sao Paulo) AWS region.

AWS has updated Video on Demand on AWS, a solution that automatically provisions the AWS services necessary to build a scalable, distributed video-on-demand workflow. The solution now leverages AWS Elemental MediaConvert Accelerated Transcoding which increases the processing speed of file-based video encoding jobs by up to 25 times. With Accelerated Transcoding, you can meet the most demanding turnaround times for processing the highest quality video with confidence.

Today, Amazon CloudWatch is introducing Saved Queries, a new feature that makes it easier for CloudWatch Logs Insights users to save queries. They can organize these queries in folders and easily run them again for different purposes by team, application, or runbook.

Amazon Chime provides new access policy options for organizers to use when scheduling their meetings. Organizers need the flexibility to balance confidentiality and security while continuing to offer easy join options for experienced and first-time Amazon Chime users. The new options allow the organizer to restrict or allow user access based on the attendee’s Amazon Chime registration status including verified email address and company affiliation. Organizers can also restrict attendees from joining the meeting using in-room video systems or dialing in.

Launched at AWS re:Invent 2019, Amazon Comprehend Medical ICD-10-CM and 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. 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. Today we’re happy to announce that this API can now process batches of documents stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

We’re excited to announce the availability of pull request dashboard to Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. With this new addition, customers can now view recommendations for all code reviews in one centralized location. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 High Memory instances with instance sizes that offer 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 TB of memory will offer higher storage and network bandwidths. Each instance can drive 38 Gbps of dedicated storage bandwidth and an additional 100 Gbps of network bandwidth which equates to a performance boost of up to 2X for storage bandwidth for all sizes and up to 4X for network bandwidth for 6 TB, 9 TB, and 12 TB instances. Customers can utilize the higher storage and network bandwidths to improve workload performance and to fasten backup and recovery workflows for mission-critical enterprise applications such as SAP.

The Amazon Redshift console simplifies isolating and fixing expensive queries with the redesigned query monitoring page. You can use the redesigned query monitoring page by navigating to cluster details for a cluster and then selecting the Query monitoring tab. 

AWS Security Hub is now available in the new Europe (Milan) Region. You can now centrally view and manage the security posture of your AWS accounts in this region, which is the first region in Italy launched by a major cloud provider.  

Amazon Lightsail now supports source-IP based firewall rules, allowing you to allow or restrict the network traffic to your instances based on the source IP, port and protocol of the traffic flowing in. Lightsail firewall rules already supported port and protocol. Addition of the source-IP condition gives you more granularity in controlling who can access your instances or the applications hosted on it.  

AWS Trusted Advisor is an application that draws upon best practices learned from AWS’ aggregated operational history of serving millions of AWS customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance, and closing security gaps. 

AWS Security Hub is now available in the new Africa (Cape Town) Region. You can now centrally view and manage the security posture of your AWS accounts in the first AWS Region in Africa.  

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) now enables you to dynamically transform and manipulate data being replicated to any supported targets. You can create SQLite-based expressions as part of your replication task that will add columns to your target tables with transformed data, reducing the need for further downstream processing. For example, you can now add a target column with data aggregated from two or more source columns or record the before image of an update/delete in separate columns in the target data store. You can also add details about the commit timestamp or transaction log position of a change record from the source for consolidation purposes.

For more information on the entire set of capabilities, see “Replicating Source Table Headers Using Expressions”.

For DMS availability, refer to the AWS Region Table.

Customers in the AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS Africa (Cape Town) regions 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.  

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is isolated AWS Regions designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud, assisting customers who have United States federal, state, or local government compliance requirements. For Amazon MSK region availability, refer to the AWS Region Table. 

You can now launch R5, M5, and T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.  

Amazon Neptune introduced support for Streams, an easy way to capture changes in your graph, in lab mode in October 2019. As background Neptune Streams logs changes to your graph (change-log data) as they happen for notifying processes or creating a new copy of the graph in a different region or service such as the Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon ElastiCache, or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with AWS CodeBuild, making it faster to build continuous integration workflows for your applications. Using AWS CodeBuild integration, you can easily create workflows with primitives such as branching, parallel execution, and timeouts to handle software changes from different repository branches. AWS Step Functions supports built-in error handling, parameter passing, recommended security settings, and state management, reducing the amount of code you have to write and maintain.

Now you can include enriched metadata in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs published to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Prior to this launch, custom format VPC flow logs enriched with additional metadata could be published only to S3. With this launch, we are also adding metadata fields that provide insights about the location of the network interface on which flow logs are being captured, such as the AWS Region, AWS Availability Zone, AWS Local Zone, or AWS Outpost where it resides.

Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning is an AWS Solution that automates the detection of potentially fraudulent activity, and flags that activity for review. The solution is easy to deploy and contains an example dataset. You can also modify the solution to use your own dataset. The update improves model accuracy and now includes a model to detect anomalies in unlabeled data. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to simulate and deploy robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports account-level metrics for simulation resources through Amazon CloudWatch. This feature helps customers more easily manage their resource limits to ensure that their simulation workloads continue to run successfully.  

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) now supports the use of custom identifiers to reference Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) during instance launch. You can create these identifiers using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and use them to reference your AMI during instance launch, reducing likelihood of instance misconfiguration and simplifying maintenance of your automation. Code that references these parameters no longer needs to be modified every time a new version of an AMI is created.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service UltraWarm is now generally available. UltraWarm is a performance-optimized warm storage tier that lets you store and interactively analyze your data using Elasticsearch and Kibana while reducing your cost per GB by up to 90% over hot storage options. With UltraWarm, Amazon Elasticsearch Service supports hot-warm domain configurations. Hot storage is used for indexing and providing the fastest access to data. UltraWarm complements hot storage with less expensive, more durable storage for older data that you access less frequently, all while maintaining the same interactive analysis experience.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor Prometheus metrics from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Kubernetes clusters, now available in beta. With this new feature, DevOps teams can automatically discover services for containerized workloads such as AWS App Mesh, NGINX, and Java/JMX. They can also expose custom metrics on those services, and ingest the Prometheus metrics in CloudWatch. By curating the collection and aggregation of Prometheus metrics, CloudWatch users can monitor, troubleshoot, and alarm on application performance degradation and failures faster while reducing the number of monitoring tools required.

Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports distributed transactions using Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC). You can execute distributed transaction on DB instances that are domain joined using the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory. 

Amazon RDS Performance Insights supports SQL-level metrics on Amazon Aurora with MySQL-compatibility, a relational database built for the cloud. With RDS Performance Insights SQL-level metrics, you can identify high-frequency, long-running, and stuck SQL queries in seconds.  

Today, we announced the AWS SaaS Competency to support AWS customers looking for APN Consulting Partners with deep specialization and expertise in designing and building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions on AWS.

AWS customers want a highly scalable, durable, fast and cost-efficient relational database re-imagined for the cloud. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), including Amazon Aurora, makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. AWS customers want to focus on their applications so they can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.

AWS Elemental MediaLive now offers an Enhanced VQ AVC mode for live channel outputs. Selecting this option for an AVC output lets you improve video quality for a live channel or reduce bitrate while maintaining the same level of quality. By reducing output bitrate for your live video, you can reduce the costs of distributing and storing content.

Amazon Pinpoint is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can engage your customers by sending marketing campaigns and transactional messages through email, SMS, push notification, and voice channels.  

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, NoSQL Workbench is available for Ubuntu 12.04, Fedora 21, Debian 8, and any newer versions of these Linux distributions, in addition to Windows and macOS. 

AWS Transit Gateway now supports the ability to establish peering connections between Transit Gateways in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Transit Gateway is a service that enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. With AWS Transit Gateway, customers only have to create and manage a single connection from a central regional gateway to each Amazon VPC, on-premises data center, or remote office across their networks.  

Starting today, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of AWS Trusted Advisor checks across your AWS accounts, to help you get better visibility into cost savings, improve performance and reliability, and close security gaps. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. Trusted Advisor offers checks and recommendations across five categories based on AWS best practices: cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, and service limits.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Instance Connect is available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Amazon EC2 Instance Connect provides a simple and secure way to connect to your instances using Secure Shell (SSH). EC2 Instance Connect integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enable fine-grained access control to EC2 Instances while eliminating the need to share and manage SSH keys. Additionally, all connection requests to your EC2 instances are logged with AWS CloudTrail.

Today, we are reducing the price of the Device Jobs feature of AWS IoT Device Management by 90%+. AWS IoT Device Management is a service that enables customers to register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage their devices connected to AWS IoT Core. Device Jobs is a fully managed feature that enables customers to trigger remote actions on their connected IoT devices, such as OTA firmware updates, device reboots, factory resets, content delivery, and configuration changes.

You can now perform S3 Object Lock operations using Amazon S3 Batch Operations to apply or change legal holds or retention periods across many objects with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. S3 Batch Operations lets you perform repetitive or bulk actions like copying or updating tag sets across billions of objects. S3 Batch Operations handles all the manual work, including managing retries and displaying progress.  

AWS License Manager now supports AWS PrivateLink allowing you to access AWS License Manager’s capabilities from an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and other AWS services without traversing the public Internet. To get started, you need to create and interface endpoint in your VPC for AWS License Manager using the CLI, SDK or VPC Console. AWS License Manager makes it easier to manage your existing software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM to AWS and centrally manage them across AWS and your on-premises environments. AWS PrivateLink allows you to access License Manager while keeping your network traffic within the Amazon network using interface VPC endpoints.

We are excited to announce Route Analyzer, a new feature available through AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager that enables you to perform route analysis on Transit Gateways in your global networks. With Route Analyzer, you can easily verify routing configurations of Transit Gateways across your global network by simply running network connectivity analysis on transit gateways between the given source and the destination.

We’re excited to announce recommendation reporting changes to Amazon CodeGuru Profiler that lets customers respond to issues quickly. With this new change, recommendation reports can now be run on an hourly basis instead of once daily. 

AWS DeepComposer gives developers a creative way to learn machine learning. With DeepComposer, developers can get hands-on, literally, with a musical keyboard and the latest machine learning techniques to expand their ML skills. Developers can build generative AI models without having to write a single line of code by using the included sample models and training data. To learn the concepts of generative AI algorithms, developers can use the easy-to-consume, bite-size modules known as learning capsules. 

We’re excited to announce pricing changes to Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer that make code reviews less expensive. Now revisions to a pull request are only charged for changed or newly added lines of code. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server expands support for Windows authentication using the AWS Managed Microsoft AD service in more AWS Regions. You can now use Windows authentication in these additional Regions: US West (N. California), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), EU (Paris), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong).

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now supports manifest lists to increase choice of different CPU architectures and operating systems you can use in container applications, for example by adding AWS Graviton ARM instances to existing clusters. Using manifest lists, you can store image variants for different hardware architectures such as x86 and ARM, and operating systems such as Linux and Windows as a single container image in ECR. Clients like docker can then automatically pull the right image variant for each architecture and operating system when starting containers. This helps simplify your build and deploy workflow as you use a single image and tag instead of embedding per-architecture image references throughout your CI/CD scripts.

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS regions. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments. 

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate now supports Mexican Spanish. 

Amazon Fraud Detector Preview is now available in the AWS US West (Oregon) Region.