Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database , we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.4. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) launched support for AWS CloudFormation (CFN) Stack Update. You can now make changes to your stack’s configurations or change it’s resources, such as new input parameter values or updated template, through the AMS request for change (RFC) process. Changes submitted are validated for safety and only nondestructive changes are automatically executed. For destructive changes, a change set is provided to you for approval before automated execution.  

Customers can now connect Azure Active Directory to AWS Single Sign-on (SSO) once, manage permissions to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable users to sign in using Azure AD to access assigned AWS accounts and applications. This makes it easier for administrators to grant access to their existing users and groups, and provides users the convenience of the sign-in experience they know from Office 365 with single-click access to assigned AWS accounts.  

Starting today, Amazon Redshift adds support for materialized views in preview. Materialized views provide significantly faster query performance for repeated and predictable analytical workloads such as dashboarding, queries from business intelligence (BI) tools, and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data processing.

Amazon WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) is a cloud-native streaming protocol that enables a consistent user experience when accessing your WorkSpaces across global distances and unreliable networks. WSP also enables additional features such as bi-directional video. As a cloud-native protocol, WSP delivers feature and performance enhancements without manual updates on your WorkSpaces. 

AWS Elemental MediaLive video processing now lets you prepare multi-program transport streams (MPTS) for broadcast distribution over satellite, cable or terrestrial networks with support for Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) outputs. This enables easy-to-use, fully managed cloud services for broadcast distribution, so you can deliver live content more flexibly and efficiently, reduce infrastructure and management costs, and distribute high-quality video with built-in reliability.

The AWS Toolkit for IntelliJ, PyCharm, Rider, and WebStorm now support Cloud Debugging (beta), which enables you to debug your cloud applications by directly accessing code running in the cloud. Previously, when you wanted to step-through debug your applications in your integrated development environment (IDE), you had to rely on features such as local emulation, which attempt to replicate complex cloud architectures on your local machine. Emulated environments cannot consistently maintain fidelity with your cloud environment, resulting in more errors found at deployment time and longer development cycles.

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, the feature is supported on the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Aurora. You can create a new Global Database cluster by adding a region to an existing MySQL 5.7 cluster.

Starting today, AWS Global Accelerator supports application endpoints in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain) AWS Regions, bringing the count of supported regions to 18.  

Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge location in Rome, Italy and two additional Edge locations in in Milan, Italy – more than doubling CloudFront’s total capacity within the Italian Peninsula. Furthermore, CloudFront announces additional Edge locations in Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Philadelphia, Newark, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Hillsboro bringing CloudFront’s global network to 210 Points of Presence in 78 cities across 37 countries. For more information on CloudFront’s global infrastructure, go to CloudFront Features .