Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Polly standard voices in the Middle East (BAH) and Asia Pacific (HKG) region. Customers in these regions can now synthesize 60+ standard voices available in 29 languages in the Polly portfolio.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in two additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain). Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is now available in seventeen AWS regions.  

AWS Security Hub now allows you to disable specific compliance controls, if they are not relevant for you. For example, if the control 2.3 from the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark (“Ensure that the S3 bucket used to store CloudTrail logs is not publicly accessible”) is not relevant in a particular account or region because you have a centralized logging bucket set up in another account or region, you can disable that control either via the Security Hub console or via the API. Disabled controls are not counted against your compliance readiness score for that standard, and they have a mandatory field to explain why the control has been disabled. Disablement actions are logged to AWS CloudTrail. Security Hub’s documentation provides specific examples of controls that you may want to disable depending on your account setup.  

AWS Security Hub has added 4 new external partner integrations bringing its total 47 integrations, including 41 external partner integrations and 6 AWS service integrations. AWS Security Hub now supports integrations with IBM QRadar (a Security Information and Event Management or SIEM platform), Slack (a chat and instant messaging product), ServiceNow ITSM (a ticketing system), and ServiceNow SecOps (a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response or SOAR system). Each of these integrations helps Security Hub customers take action on findings and provides a simple way to send findings from Security Hub to the partner’s product. Setting up the integration only requires deployment of a AWS CloudFormation template. The IBM QRadar integration with AWS Security Hub also supports sending findings from QRadar to Security Hub. To learn more, visit the Integration pages in the Security Hub console and click on the “Configuration” link for the partner to learn more about the integration and how to set it up.  

This Quick Start automatically deploys a production-ready instance of IBM FileNet Content Manager version 5.5.3 on the AWS Cloud into a virtual private cloud (VPC) that spans multiple Availability Zones.

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS region. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility supports the ANSI READ COMMITTED isolation level on read replicas. This isolation level enables long-running queries on an Aurora read replica to execute without impacting the throughput of writes on the writer node.

Amazon ElastiCache now offers R5 nodes, the next generation memory and performance optimized nodes to maximize network performance and CPU utilization in the South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. R5 nodes feature the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers nearly all of the compute and memory resources to the guest VMs.

Amazon Neptune is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. You can now create Neptune clusters using R5 instance types in this AWS Region for your graph applications.

AWS Device Farm now lets you test your web applications against different desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers that are hosted in the AWS Cloud.