Today, we are announcing the availability of Route 53 Resolver Query Logging in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, Amazon’s Regions designed to host sensitive data, regulated workloads, and address the most stringent U.S. government security and compliance requirements. Route 53 Resolver Query Logging lets you log the DNS queries that originate in your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). With query logging enabled, you can see which domain names have been queried, the AWS resources from which the queries originated—including source IP and instance ID—and the responses that were received.  

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can easily manage Amazon Kendra resources using AWS CloudFormation.  

You can now use Amazon CloudFront to serve Brotli compressed content to your end users. Brotli is a widely supported lossless compression algorithm that often provides a better compression ratio than Gzip. The smaller file sizes improve application performance by delivering your content faster to viewers. CloudFront’s Brotli edge compression delivers up to 24% smaller file sizes as compared to Gzip.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today we are excited to announce automatic language identification in Amazon Transcribe. Until now, you were required to manually identify the dominant language in audio recordings in order to use Transcribe APIs. You can now simply provide the audio files and Transcribe will detect the dominant language from the speech signal and generate transcriptions in the identified language.  

Amazon Redshift launched native spatial data processing support in November 2019, with a polymorphic data type GEOMETRY, and more than 40 SQL spatial functions. This capability enables you to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries. Now, Amazon Redshift supports over 30 new spatial functions such as validation, simplification of geometries, new spatial relationships like “Crosses” and “ContainsProperly”. Furthermore, Amazon Redshift enhanced the spatial functionality with multiple capabilities such as ODBC/JDBC support for GEOMETRY data, support for importing spatial data in Shapefile format, and spatial join performance improvements. 

With v2.0.0 of the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Producer for Apache Flink, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now enables Apache Flink applications to send data directly to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. The new version adds support for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Assume Role credentials provider, includes bug fixes, and updates the AWS SDK and other dependencies.  

Amazon Personalize is now available in Europe (Frankfurt). Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service which enables you to personalize your website, app, ads, emails, and more, with custom machine learning models which can be created in Amazon Personalize, with no prior machine learning experience.

AWS Systems Manager Explorer now supports new service customizations to help you easily discover and personalize operational data sources based on their business needs. 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. 

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports British English. Starting today, you can build a conversational interface in British English and deploy it across a variety of use cases such as interactive voice response systems, self-service chatbots, and application bots.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Apache Beam Java SDK version 2.23. Apache Beam is an open-source, unified model for defining streaming and batch data processing applications that can be executed across multiple execution engines. This release allows you to build Apache Beam streaming applications in Java and run them using Apache Flink 1.8 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, Apache Spark running on-premises, and other execution engines supported by Apache.