AWS Storage Gateway increases performance for reading data from AWS for Tape Gateway, and for reading data and listing directories for File Gateway, providing you faster access to data managed through these gateways. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in all commercial AWS regions except China regions. With this launch, Amazon EFS is now also available in the regions below:

• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
• Europe (Stockholm)
• Middle East (Bahrain)
• South America (São Paulo)  

You can now use AWS DataSync to transfer data into and out of 5 additional AWS Regions: Europe (Stockholm), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and AWS GovCloud (US-East). 

Amazon FSx is announcing two new features that make it easier to deploy shared Windows storage for High Availability (HA) Microsoft SQL Server deployments: support for Continuously Available (CA) file shares and support for smaller file systems.

Starting today, customers that use AWS Support services (Developer, Business, and Enterprise levels) will now have these expected costs included in their monthly cost forecasts when using AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets. With this enhancement, customers no longer need to manually adjust their expected monthly costs to include premium support costs.

You can now enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, ensuring that EBS volumes restored from FSR-enabled snapshots instantly receive full provisioned performance. You can enable FSR for an additional hourly charge to your regular snapshot cost for each Availability Zone (AZ) in which FSR is enabled. This new capability enables you to restore multiple volumes from a snapshot without the need to initialize volumes yourself. Improved and predictable performance helps with use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup & restore, test/dev volume copies, and booting from custom AMIs.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the South America (Sao Paulo) region to securely share your AWS resources across AWS accounts or within your AWS organization. You can centrally create resources in a multi-account environment, and use AWS RAM to share those resources across your accounts. This reduces operational overhead while maintaining the benefits of a multi-account strategy. At this time you can use AWS RAM to share Amazon VPC subnets and traffic mirror targets in South America (Sao Paulo) region, eliminating the need to create duplicate resources in each of your accounts and driving down costs. To learn more see AWS Resource Access Manager .

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the Middle East (Bahrain) region. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations.

This Quick Start deploys a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) endpoint for downloading and managing updates on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for system administrators and IT engineers who need to use WSUS as the endpoint where Windows servers and other Microsoft applications are authorized to acquire updates.

You can now reference Organizational Units (OUs), which are groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations , in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies , making it easier to define access for your IAM principals (users and roles) to the AWS resources in your organization. AWS Organizations lets you organize your accounts into OUs to align them with their business or security purpose.