Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now enables you to set a patch release cutoff date to automatically approve only the patches released before the date. For example, if you specify February 7, 2020 as the cutoff date, Patch Manager will not automatically apply patches showing a release date of February 8, 2020 or later. 

AWS AppConfig customers can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision AppConfig resources. AWS AppConfig makes it easy for customers to quickly roll out application configurations across applications hosted on EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda, mobile apps, IoT devices, and on-premise servers in a validated, controlled and monitored way. 

AWS App Mesh is now available in three additional AWS Regions: Europe (Stockholm), South America (São Paulo) and Middle East (Bahrain). 

You can now configure notification rules for AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy in two additional AWS regions: Hong Kong and Bahrain. You can create notification rules to receive notifications about events in repositories, build projects, and deployments.

We are excited to introduce the new Amazon WorkSpaces client for Windows and Mac. The client contains new enhancements including the ability to create personalized labels for registration codes, a new more intuitive UI, and includes the latest updates to the PCoIP protocol.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle OLAP – a multidimensional analytic engine embedded in the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Oracle OLAP option provides SQL access to advanced analytics, and cube-organized materialized views to enhance the performance of business intelligence solutions.  

AWS CloudFormation StackSets announces new automation features to streamline deployments of resources to multiple accounts and regions through AWS Organizations . With this launch, you can use StackSets to centrally manage deployments to the accounts in one or more organizational units (OUs) or all of the accounts in your organization. You will also be able to enable automatic deployments to any new accounts added to your organization or OUs. The permissions needed to deploy across accounts will automatically be taken care of by the StackSets service.  

Amazon Cognito User Pools now enables customers to configure case sensitivity settings for user aliases, including native username, email alias and preferred username alias. With this update, new user pools will be set to case insensitive by default and customers can change the configuration to case sensitive in the console before a user pool is created. Existing user pools will remain as case sensitive. When creating a user pool through Cognito APIs, the user pool will be case sensitive by default. We will change the default setting for the API in the future after a customer notification campaign.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights and relationships in text. Starting today, Amazon Comprehend is available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions.

We’re excited to announce updated versions of two of our digital courses, AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Amazon Connect (Technical) and AWS Technical Professional . These digital courses were designed, respectively, to help APN Partners understand how to discuss the technical advantages of creating a cloud-based contact center with Amazon Connect, and also to gain a basic technical understanding of AWS services.