AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM ) now makes it easier to identify who is responsible for an AWS action performed by an IAM role when viewing AWS CloudTrail logs. Adding the new service-specific condition , sts:RoleSessionName, in an IAM policy, enables you to define the role session name that must be set when an IAM principal (user or role) or application assumes the IAM role. AWS adds the role session name to the AWS CloudTrail log when the IAM role performs an action, making it easy to determine who performed the action.

Amazon GuardDuty adds support for AWS Organizations to simplify threat detection across all existing and future accounts in an organization. With this launch, new and existing GuardDuty customers can delegate any account in their organization as the GuardDuty administrator and manage GuardDuty for up to 5,000 AWS accounts. Customers using GuardDuty’s existing multi-account feature can transition to AWS Organizations supported multi-account management without any disruption to existing GuardDuty operations. When managing GuardDuty with AWS Organizations, customers can automatically apply GuardDuty’s threat detection to new accounts added to the organization. This support is available today in all GuardDuty supported AWS regions . To learn more, see the Amazon GuardDuty account management User Guide . 

Starting today, customers can interrupt a Lex chatbot in mid-sentence to quickly provide a voice input without waiting for it to finish speaking. Amazon Lex chatbots can be used in Amazon Connect flows to provide conversational interactions using the same machine learning technologies like Alexa, enabling companies to offer automated self-service to their customers using natural language. Today, customers who know what they want to say, can immediately speak without having to listen to the entire prompt being played. For example, when a customer calls to schedule a tune-up for their car, they no longer have to listen to a complete menu of options like “Thanks for calling our Seattle car dealership location, would you like to speak with sales, finance, parts, or service.” Instead, they can immediately say, “Put me through to service,” as soon as the prompt starts playing.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers support for adding custom dictionary files to your domains. Now you can specify synonyms, stop words, and segmentation files to improve your indexing, matching, and search relevancy. Previously, you could only include these types of customizations directly in your mapping which could make them unwieldy and difficult to manage.  

Amazon CloudWatch has added new features to the Application Insights for .NET and SQL Server capability to further enhance observability for your .NET and SQL Server based applications. Starting today, if you are running your .NET Core applications on AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Application Insights sets up automated alarms based on dynamically identified thresholds for your Lambda metrics, and provides out-of-the-box analysis for the logs and application traces associated with your Lambda functions. In addition, you can now use CloudWatch Application Insights to detect and troubleshoot problems in your applications due to AWS Health events across your AWS account, Amazon EC2 state changes, and deployment events on AWS CodeDeploy, enabling you to further reduce your mean time to resolution (MTTR) 

We are excited to announce that customers can now receive EC2 rightsizing recommendations powered by the AWS Compute Optimizer in AWS Cost Explorer. With today’s launch, Cost Explorer customers can get Amazon EC2 rightsizing recommendations across EC2 instance families, in addition to existing support for recommendations within the same EC2 instance family. The same launch also makes cost information for M, C, R, T and X instance types available in AWS Compute Optimizer.

Amazon SageMaker customers can now select Inf1 instances when deploying their machine learning models for real-time inference. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. Using Inf1 instances on Amazon SageMaker, customers can run large scale machine learning and deep learning inference applications such as image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, personalization, forecasting, and fraud detection with high performance and significantly lower costs. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the immediate availability of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region, which is the first AWS Region in Africa. The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region consists of three Availability Zones and with this launch, AWS now offers 23 Regions and 73 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries. The AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region adds to the list of AWS investments in the growth of South Africa, which include the launch of Direct Connect in 2017, the introduction of Amazon CloudFront to South Africa in 2018, and the launch of two new edge locations in Johannesburg and Cape Town.  

EC2 Image Builder, a service that makes it easier and faster to build and maintain secure Virtual Machine images now supports additional Operating Systems – Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Amazon Linux 2 and Windows Server 2019/2016/2012 R2 operating systems are already supported.