AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course. If you’re new to the cloud—whether you’re in a technical or nontechnical role—this course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of the AWS Cloud. As a result, you can build your skills and confidence while contributing to your organization’s cloud initiatives.  

You can now create custom endpoints for Amazon Neptune to access your workload. Custom endpoints allow you to distribute your workload across a designated set of instances within a Neptune cluster.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs now offer Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS) compliant endpoints in the US Commercial and Canada (Central) AWS Regions. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.

Amazon Personalize now allows you to apply business rules to your recommendations on the fly; without any extra cost. Dynamic filters save you time by removing the need to define all possible permutations of your business rules in advance and enable you to use your most recent information to filter recommendations. You control the recommendations for your users in real-time while responding to their individual needs, preferences, and changing behavior to improve engagement and conversion. Based on over 20 years of personalization experience, Amazon Personalize enables you to improve customer engagement by powering personalized product and content recommendations, and targeted marketing promotions.

Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to run containerized workloads on the cloud with little-to-no prior cloud experience. With this native service, called Lightsail Containers, you can now deploy containerized applications to the cloud using the Docker images directly from your desktop or from the ones in public registries like DockerHub – with just a few clicks, through an easy to use interface. Lightsail takes care of all the infrastructure management complexities and allows you to focus on your application code. Lightsail Containers come with the same predictable pricing as its other offerings with prices starting at $7/month for a Container Service.

Today, Amazon Athena announced general availability of a new query engine version, Athena engine version 2. 

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams adds client metrics support to its WebRTC SDK in C. Kinesis Video Streams with WebRTC enables developers to build web, mobile, and IoT devices application for real-time media and data streaming. Developers can use this capability to build applications for use cases such as home security and monitoring, camera-enabled doorbells, baby and pet monitoring, smart appliances, and more. Kinesis Video Streams WebRTC SDK in C enables IoT devices to securely connect with Kinesis Video Streams for peer discovery and media streaming. The client metrics allows developers to monitor and track performance of the applications built using the WebRTC SDK in C.  

Amazon QuickSight has added a powerful new data governance feature: Column Level Security (CLS). This feature compliments the existing Row Level Security (RLS) feature and, in combination, gives authors control over who can access what data within their visualizations. CLS enables dataset owners to apply restrictions on a per column basis. This ensures that users only see columns that they are allowed to see. For example, a dataset owner could set up their dataset so that only members of a Human Resources group could see salary information, while everyone can see less sensitive information, like first and last name. CLS can be configured on a dataset through the QuickSight interface and through APIs. See here to learn more.  

Federated queries in Amazon Athena enable users to run SQL queries across data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources. The feature, which is now generally available in the us-east-1, us-west-2, and us-east-2 regions, enables customers to submit a single SQL query that scans data from multiple sources running on-premises or hosted in the cloud.  

Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). With this launch, you can now configure NLB to operate in dual-stack mode, accepting both IPv4 and IPv6 client connections.