Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2019 CU5 for Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions on the Windows operating systems. You can now leverage SQL Server 2019 features such as accelerated database recovery (ADR), Intelligent Query Processing (IQP), intelligent performance features, and resumable index rebuilds on your Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instances. 

New Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS volume, io2, features higher durability of 99.999%, and supports provisioning 500 IOPS for every provisioned GB. This means that with io2, customers get 100x better volume durability and a 10x higher IOPS to storage ratio – all at the same price as io1. io2 is ideal for performance intensive, business critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 that will benefit from higher uptime.

AWS CloudFormation has expanded the availability of StackSets to AWS GovCloud (US-East), EU (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). StackSets allows you to centrally manage deployments of resources to multiple accounts and regions in a single operation enabling you to easily deploy a baseline level of functionality to your accounts before they are actively used. StackSets is also integrated with AWS Organizations so you can take advantage of automatic deployments whenever an account enters an Organization.

CloudTrail Insights now helps you correlate user identities, user agents, and error codes associated with unusual levels of API activity. Now, you can identify the IAM users and roles with the highest levels of API activity during both periods of anomalous activity, and normal activity. This capability helps you analyze and act on anomalies without manually searching through a large number of CloudTrail events.

We are pleased to announce the first blockchain course from AWS Training and Certification. This new course, Introduction to Blockchain , is a free, on-demand, 60-minute digital course for both technical and non-technical learners.

The AWS App Mesh controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh directly using Kubernetes. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and ensuring high-availability for your applications. 

Starting September 21, 2020, the price of sending SMS messages to India will be updated from $0.00223 to $0.00303 per message. This price increase is driven by Indian regulatory and carrier changes affecting all SMS messages sent to India.

With CloudWatch Logs integration in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, developers working in VS Code can now interact with CloudWatch log groups in an AWS Region that are available to the active credentials profile. After listing and filtering the CloudWatch log streams for a selected log group, they can view a stream’s most recent 10,000 lines/1 MB of log data, with the option of loading older data or new event that occurred after the initial loading. The interface for the log stream editor also allows you to download log data to files stored on your local machine.

AWS OpsWorks for Configuration Management (CM), a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef Automate and Puppet Enterprise, now has updated their AWS CloudFormation support for OpsWorks resources, including supporting all AWS CLI and SDK operations, as well as opening up the implementation to allow for community feedback and contributions. 

We’ve introduced the following 5 fields to the instance metadata service: region, placement group name, partition number, host ID, and availability zone-ID. You can use these fields after launch or while your instance is running to understand your instance location. This is useful for populating the region for your AWS environment. Additionally, these fields help you identify your instance placement information within an availability zone.