Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now allows you to scale your Redis Clusters up to 500 nodes. Redis (cluster mode enabled) configuration allows you to partition your data across multiple shards and offers better scalability, performance, and availability. With this announcement, you can double your cluster size from 250 nodes to 500 nodes, thereby supporting larger memory storage capacity of up to 340 TB of memory and improved throughput per cluster. You can choose to configure a 500-node cluster that ranges between 83 shards (one master and five replicas per shard) and 500 shards (single master and no replicas). 

Customers can now connect to meetings from the Amazon Chime app or Amazon Chime SDK in Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (Milan) AWS Regions. Additionally, Amazon Chime SDK customers can connect to meetings in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Regions. 

On Aug 12th, 2020, AWS IoT Device Defender launched Audit Finding Suppression. The new capability allows you to choose which audit findings you want to see and turn off non-compliant findings for specific resources – this can be either because you are working towards fixing related issues or because the resources are known to be non-compliant, such as test or broken devices. In addition, you can configure audit finding suppressions for a defined period of time or indefinitely.  

Amazon Cognito User Pools now enables customers to choose how long their access and refresh tokens should be valid. Access tokens can be configured to expire in as little as five minutes or as long as 24 hours. Refresh tokens can be configured to expire in as little as one hour or as long as ten years. These customizations enable Amazon Cognito customers to balance the security and usability of each application they develop. 

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and EU (Frankfurt) regions. Amazon Textract is a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. 

AWS Transfer Family now offers pre-defined security policies to control cryptographic algorithms used for communication between your end users’ file transfer clients and AWS Transfer Family server endpoints, helping you meet your organization’s requirements for security and compatibility.  

CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor your REST APIs, URLs, and website content every minute, 24×7, and alerts you when your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. CloudWatch Synthetics enables you to continually verify your customer experience even when there is no customer traffic on your applications. This lets you discover issues before your customers do and react quickly to fix them.

AWS Step Functions announces enhancements to Amazon States Language, making it easier for you to build workflows. Customers now have more flexibility within their state machine definition and allow for more dynamic behaviour within their workflow application with enhanced Choice and Task states.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances in US East (Ohio), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Tokyo). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which Amazon custom-designed to provide customers with the lowest cost-per-inference in the cloud and lower barriers for everyday developers to use machine learning at scale.  

Amazon QuickSight now supports folders for organization and sharing. Personal folders allow admins and authors to organize and manage content within their user accounts. Authors and admins can create personal folders and add dashboards, analyses and data sets in them. Personal folders are private to each author/admin and do not affect permissions of assets stored within. Shared folders allow admins and authors to simplify sharing and permissions management over 1000s of dashboards, analyses and data sets, while providing readers with a hierarchical discovery model for information within the team/organization. Shared folders must first be created by QuickSight Admins, who can then grant access to authors and readers. Assets placed in a shared folder will be shared with users at the permission level (owner or viewer) that users have to the folder. Personal and Shared folders are accessible to users from QuickSight’s new home page. This new home page has direct links to favorites and recently accessed items, folders and provides sections specific to dashboards, analyses and data sets, with choice of a new responsive thumbnail view or a list view. Read more about folders in this AWS Big Data blog post .