Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Amazon EMR now offers a “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy for provisioning Spot Instances in an Amazon EMR cluster. The “Capacity Optimized” allocation strategy automatically makes the most efficient use of available spare capacity while still taking advantage of the steep discounts offered by Spot Instances. By offering the possibility of fewer interruptions, the capacity-optimized strategy can lower the overall cost of your workload. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Management Console now supports specifying a custom capacity provider strategy when you run tasks manually using the Run Task functionality. This capability has been available through the AWS CLI, SDK, and API, but is now available through the Management Console as well. For use with manually running tasks, a custom capacity provider strategy consists of one or more capacity providers with an optional base and weight specified for each provider, giving you control over how your tasks are distributed across one or more capacity providers.

AWS Backup is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS GovCloud (US) is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers with stringent U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

Starting today, AWS Organizations is now available in the China regions. AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your environment as you grow and scale your workloads on AWS. Whether you are a growing startup or large enterprise, you can use AWS Organizations to programmatically create AWS accounts, organize them in a hierarchy that reflects your current business needs, categorize them using tags, and simplify billing by setting up a single payment method for all of your accounts. You can access AWS Organizations through the AWS console, and via AWS APIs and CLI. AWS Organizations is available to all AWS customers at no additional charge.

AWS Backup now supports cross-account management, enabling AWS customers to manage and monitor backups across their AWS accounts with AWS Organizations.  

With this release, Amplify Console adds new pattern-based branch deployment features allowing developers to automatically create and delete custom sub-domains every time a branch is added or removed from a Git repository. This enables developers to access new feature branches at familiar URLs (e.g. feature.mydomain.com) without logging in to the console to set up new sub-domains. Additionally, deleting a branch from the Git repository will automatically delete the branch along with the custom sub-domain in the Amplify Console. 

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), and Canada (Central) Regions. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures.  

You can now use AWS Config to manage the compliance of resources from the CloudFormation Registry. With the AWS CloudFormation Registry, you can automate the management of private or third-party application resources alongside AWS ones. With AWS Config, you can assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your application resources. 

Amazon Honeycode, which is available in beta, is a fully managed service that allows customers to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications – with no programming required. Customers who need applications to track and manage things like process approvals, event scheduling, customer relationship management, user surveys, to-do lists, and content and inventory tracking no longer need to do so by error-prone methods like emailing spreadsheets or documents, or hiring and waiting for developers to build costly custom applications.