To provide enhanced performance and scalability, Amazon RDS on VMware adds support for read replicas for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. You can create read replicas of a source DB instance to serve high-volume application read traffic, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. A read replica can also be promoted to become a standalone DB instance if the source DB instance fails.  

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports forensic watermarking using NexGuard . This feature enables you to watermark content for both mezzanine and OTT streaming contexts in order to enable content leak forensic workflows. You have access to an added layer of security and traceability for valuable pre-release and early release content, and a simple way for watermarking during video transcoding and OTT content preparation. NexGuard forensic watermarking in MediaConvert for pre-release content, including the recently announced NexGuard ClipMark for short form content as well as NexGuard Streaming for on-demand OTT content, enables full watermark automation when processing in AWS.

An Amazon Aurora Global Database now supports forwarding of write requests from a secondary region to the primary region, to simplify the development of your application code. 

You can now use the AWS Elemental MediaLive schedule feature to prepare a MediaLive channel input prior to switching to it. In the context of live video streaming, this functionality is also known as an ‘input cue’. Preparation of an input in advance of a switch helps reduce the latency of the scheduled switch action. For example, you may need to switch to an input for a postgame press conference that could start at any time. If the MediaLive schedule feature is used to prepare the input, you can switch to it with only a few seconds of latency.

Starting June 20, 2020, Amazon Pinpoint customers who send SMS with an alphanumeric sender ID to Indian recipients must register their use case. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recently updated the regulations on commercial SMS sending. Senders who have a local presence in India are required to register their use cases through the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system. When you successfully register your use case, you can use an alphabetic sender ID to deliver your transactional messages or numeric sender ID to deliver your promotional messages to recipients who have Indian phone numbers. Messages that you send using a registered sender ID are billed at the standard rates. For current message sending rates, see the Amazon Pinpoint Pricing page.

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s Neural Text-to-Speech Voices within their contact-center. These new voices deliver groundbreaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo. The new neural voices are available in eight US English, three UK English, one Spanish, and one Portuguese voice.

Amazon Redshift adds materialized view support for external tables. With this enhancement, you can create materialized views in Amazon Redshift that reference external data sources such as Amazon S3 via Spectrum , or data in Aurora or RDS PostgreSQL via federated queries .  

You can now use the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API and Amazon RDS Query editor for Amazon Aurora Serverless with PostgreSQL compatibility in the EU (Frankfurt) region.

Today, the Amazon Builders’ Library published a new article titled, Automating Safe, Hands-off Deployments to help readers understand how Amazon approaches software deployments. AWS Principal Engineer Clare Liguori dives deep into the strategies used at Amazon to continuously deploy software into production while balancing safety and speed. 

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports monitoring for Microsoft SQL Server High Availability (HA) workloads enabling customers to easily set up metrics, logs, and alarms for their SQL Server HA workloads, and monitor the health of these database nodes. Customers can now use CloudWatch Application Insights to configure important counters such as Mirrored Write Transaction/sec, Recovery Queue Length, and Transaction Delay, and Windows Event Logs on CloudWatch, and get automated insights whenever a fail-over event or a problem, such as a restricted access to query target database, is detected with such workloads.