Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

Starting today Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to setup automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for training machine learning models. EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. EFA can significantly speed up distributed training on SageMaker at no additional cost. For example, we trained the BERT natural language processing model with SageMaker’s distributed data parallel library on 32 ml.p4d.24xlarge instances. The training was up to 130% faster with EFA compared to Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) .

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports Kantar SNAP watermarking for mezzanine and OTT content delivery. With this feature, audio streams processed by MediaConvert can now be watermarked with unique identifiers that allow for audience measurement across a variety of playback and consumption methods. When enabled, the unique identifier and Kantar account details are transmitted to Kantar during processing to automatically register each piece of media into the audience tracking system. Once the content is watermarked and logged, viewership statistics can be used to make programming decisions, track advertisement exposure, and to guide content investment decisions using Kantar audience measurement technologies.

Building a business case for the cloud can be a time-consuming process on your own. With Migration Evaluator, organizations can accelerate their evaluation and decision-making for migration to AWS. Quick Insights – a new capability of Migration Evaluator, provides customers with a one-page summary of their projected AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. This complimentary pre-migration assessment enables customers to rapidly understand the projected cost of running their on-premises estate in the AWS Cloud.

With the latest release of JDBC and ODBC drivers for Amazon Athena, you can use Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) or Ping Identity’s PingFederate for authentication with compatible business intelligence, SQL, or embedded analytics applications.

Today, AWS announces Incident Manager, a new capability of AWS Systems Manager that enables faster resolution of critical application availability and performance issues. Incident Manager helps you prepare for incidents with automated response plans that bring the right people and information together. The Incident Manager console provides a unified user interface to view operational data from multiple AWS services and track incident updates, such as alarm status changes and response plan progress. Incident Manager helps you improve service reliability by suggesting post-incident action items, such as automating a runbook step or adding a new alarm.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface. Starting today, you can use new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler that make it easier and faster to prepare data for machine learning including: cross-account access for Amazon S3, support for up to 1000 columns of data, distributed jobs, and a new SageMaker Data Wrangler notebook experience.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.15.15 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.14.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports cron expressions, allowing for flexibility when you schedule canaries to monitor your endpoints. For example, you can run a canary every minute on weekdays between 8 AM and 5 PM. Alternately, you can schedule a canary run for the third Tuesday of the month at 12 PM.