Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability. 

Customers can now connect their Okta Identity Cloud to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using Okta to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Okta experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in. AWS SSO and Okta Identity Cloud use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security. 

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now supports CLion, PhpStorm, GoLand, and RubyMine. Customers will now be able to download the AWS Toolkit from these newly supported JetBrains IDEs by browsing the plug-in marketplace from within the IDEs.  

In a few clicks you can take advantage of new Apache Kafka features and bug fixes by upgrading the version of Apache Kafka deployed on new and existing Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Amazon MSK uses rolling upgrade best practices to maintain high availability and support cluster I/O throughout a version upgrade. See the Amazon MSK version upgrade user guide to learn about version upgrades and how to ensure clients maintain high availability throughout an upgrade.

AWS CodePipeline’s supported action types now include AWS Step Functions, making it easier for customers to invoke complex workflows as part of their release process. With the new action type, CodePipeline Stages can now trigger Step Functions state machines which support conditional branching, error-handling, asynchronous tasks, and easily invoke other AWS services through service-integrations .

AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), now encrypts data stored on the ephemeral storage with service managed keys using industry-standard AES-256 cryptographic algorithm. Fargate provides 20 GB of ephemeral storage for applications to download and process data. Customers who choose AWS Fargate now have data stored on the ephemeral storage encrypted by default. Encryption and decryption are handled seamlessly, so you don’t have to modify your applications to access your data.  

Amazon RDS Proxy is now available in preview in eight additional AWS regions: US West (N. California), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London). Refer RDS Proxy pricing page for a complete list of regions where RDS Proxy is available.

You can now use the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Data API and Amazon RDS Query editor in additional AWS Regions.

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announces the general availability (GA) of Amplify iOS and Amplify Android , which are part of the open source Amplify Framework. Amplify iOS and Amplify Android include libraries and tools (CLI toolchain and IDE helpers) that enable mobile developers to build scalable and secure cloud-powered applications. You can use the libraries with backends created using the Amplify CLI or with existing AWS backends. It is our recommended way to build native mobile applications powered by AWS services.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) launched support for container health checks and a new user interface for load balancers in Spinnaker v1.20. You can now use container health checks through a Spinnaker deployment pipeline which is integrated with ECS services. You can also view and filter load balancers for ECS services within Spinnaker itself to see load balancers and the deployment pipeline for your ECS services in the same tool.