Amazon Location Service adds a new data option to the Maps feature, Open Data, based on data from OpenStreetMap (OSM), a geospatial data source supported by a global community. Developers can now easily access reliable and up-to-date OSM data with no upfront investment or specialized geospatial knowledge. In addition to the high-quality data provider options from Esri and HERE, Open Data Maps now provides developers with more choices to integrate maps into their applications, enabling developers to leverage OSM’s flexible licensing terms and continuously improving data quality.  

Amazon AppFlow announces the release of 4 new data connectors for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. The new connectors for HubSpot, LinkedIn Pages, Productboard, and Recharge provide customers with even more data access capability for use cases such as data lake hydration, analytics and machine learning, and data retention.

Amazon QuickSight is now available in Stockholm and Paris regions. New accounts are able to sign up for QuickSight with Stockholm or Paris as their primary region, making SPICE capacity available in the region and ensuring proximity to AWS and on-premises data sources. Existing users can switch regions with the region switcher and create SPICE datasets in those regions.

AWS Trusted Advisor now helps customers improve fault tolerance with new checks for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, and AWS CloudHSM. AWS Trusted Advisor evaluates your AWS account with automated best practice checks and provides cloud optimization recommendations to reduce costs, improve performance, increase security, and monitor service quotas. You can find more information about the checks here .

AWS launches Amazon EKS managed node groups for Windows containers to automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of Windows nodes (running on Amazon EC2 instances) for EKS Kubernetes clusters. With this launch, Windows-based applications will automatically provision and register the Amazon EC2 instances that provide compute capacity. Now customers can create, automatically update, or terminate the Windows nodes for their cluster with a single operation. 

With Amazon Athena, you can run SQL queries on data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources without the need to pre-process or move data to another storage solution. Starting today, you can use Athena to query real-time streaming data held in Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka.

AWS Backup now supports schedule-based network bandwidth throttling for VMware. This allows you to optimize network bandwidth used for backups and restores between your VMware environment and AWS. You can throttle the network bandwidth used by the Backup gateway for VMware backups, based on a schedule you set on the Backup gateway. This enables you to regulate network bandwidth use during peak hours to minimize network congestion and prevent you from using all your available bandwidth during peak hours.

AWS Backup adds support for VMware vSphere tags, enabling you to protect your VMware virtual machines (VMs) using tag-based policies, simplifying data protection across your on-premises vSphere and AWS environments. This allows you to import your VMware vSphere tags to AWS, where they can be automatically associated with a backup plan via tag-based policies.

Customers can now create file systems using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region.

The Amazon Chime SDK now offers a new resource for builders to get started with CodeSandbox. The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers embed intelligent real-time communication capabilities into their applications. CodeSandbox is an online code editor and prototyping tool that makes creating and sharing web apps faster. In one-click, builders using the Amazon Chime SDK for virtual meetings can review ready-made code required to set up a meeting, at the same time, seeing a prototype of the meeting experience in real-time.