Starting today, Amazon EC2 D3 instances, the latest generation of the dense HDD-storage instances, are available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions.

Amazon Connect Chat now provides an out-of-the-box chat widget, making it easy to begin servicing your customers through chat in just a few clicks. The widget allows you to design the customer experience to align with your corporate branding by customizing the font and color scheme in the user interface. Once configured, the widget can be easily embedded for display on a website by copying and pasting a simple code snippet. The widget also provides advanced configuration options to restrict access to authenticated users or to define specific domains where the widget can be displayed.

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions. This update enables customers to build and iterate on their chatbots faster. The new functionalities help customers scale the use of their chatbots with additional languages and support for more natural conversations.

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 US East (Ohio) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Amazon Redshift RA3.16xlarge and RA3.4xlarge nodes are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. In addition, the smallest RA3 node type, RA3.xlplus, is also now available in five additional AWS regions. RA3.xlplus is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Mumbai) and EU (Frankfurt, London, Stockholm), in addition to the previously available regions Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo), Brazil (São Paulo), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland, Paris), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (N. California, Oregon).

AWS Secrets Manager now enables you to replicate secrets across multiple AWS Regions. You can now give your multi-Region applications access to replicated secrets in the corresponding Regions and rely on AWS Secrets Manager to keep the replicas in sync with the primary secret. This feature abstracts the complexity of replicating secrets across Regions, enabling customers to leverage Secrets Manager to easily manage secrets needed to support their multi-Region applications and disaster recovery strategies. You can use this functionality through the AWS Secrets Manager console , CreateSecret and ReplicateSecretToRegions API, or via AWS CloudFormation to replicate secrets in one or more Regions.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm) AWS Regions.

AWS Step Functions now supports YAML state machine definitions within the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and in AWS CloudFormation, making it possible to define workflows in the same language as your infrastructure as code.

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to define multiple, sequential levels of approvals that are required for your operational changes. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. Now, you can further streamline your change approval process by specifying the order in which approvals are required.

The over-the-air update (OTA), AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics, and AWS IoT Device Shadow named shadow features are now generally available in AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202103.00. With this release, developers can use the C-SDK libraries to update firmware, manage device fleets, monitor fleet metrics, and create multiple shadows for their IoT device.