Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) launches a new master class and AWS Labs to get you started using the service and hone your skills with best practices. The new Amazon MSK Master Class, created by Stephane Maarek, AWS Hero, gives you six hours of hands-on learning in the most comprehensive content available for Amazon MSK. New AWS Labs take you through getting started, a use case example of ingesting and analyzing real-time clickstream data, and best practices for migrating your self-managed Apache Kafka cluster to Amazon MSK. By completing the class and labs, you will learn how to apply your knowledge to your own use cases.  

AWS Lake Formation now supports Active Directory and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) identity providers such as OKTA and Auth0 for Amazon Athena . You can now easily manage data access for Amazon Athena users with fine grained privileges using existing identity management tools.

You can now take all AWS Certification exams from home or any private space with online proctoring when you schedule with either test delivery provider, Pearson VUE or PSI. Online proctoring is available anywhere AWS Certification offers testing. For candidates in mainland China and South Korea, online proctored exams are available only via PSI.

AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author, and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code, a free code editor built on open source. You can now use the editor to author runbooks faster and be more productive by starting with pre-built templates, auto-completing the code with snippets, and validating the runbook for syntax errors in real time. Once built, you can publish the runbooks from the editor to the cloud with a single click.  

The AWS Snowball service is now available in the AWS Europe (Milan) Region. AWS Snowball, a part of the AWS Snow Family, is an edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device that comes in two options. Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices provide 80 TB of Amazon S3 object storage and optional compute with 40 vCPUs. They are well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices provide 52 vCPUs, 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage, 42 TB of HDD storage, 256 GB of RAM, and an optional GPU for use cases like advanced machine learning and full motion video analysis in disconnected environments. You can use these devices for data collection, machine learning and processing, and storage in environments with intermittent connectivity (like manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (like military or maritime operations) before shipping the devices back to AWS. These devices may also be rack mounted and clustered together to build larger temporary installations.

AWS DeepRacer allows you to get hands-on with machine learning (ML) through a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, a 3D racing simulator on the AWS DeepRacer console , a global racing league, and hundreds of customer-initiated community races.

Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 19 regions, with the addition of the Europe (Milan) region.

Starting today AWS Transit Gateway supports internet protocol (IP) multicast in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now has a developer preview module in the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which implements an extendable service construct. Instead of writing JSON task definitions for your services by hand, you can model and provision ECS resources using familiar programming languages. The new ECS service construct for CDK supports extensions that automatically add additional capabilities such as App Mesh or FireLens to your containerized services.

AWS Marketplace Independent Software Vendors are now able to create new or update existing product listings to control product availability to specific countries. Since launch in 2012, AWS Marketplace products have been available globally. Some Independent Software Vendors need to control where their software can be purchased for tax, compliance, support, or marketing purposes. With the launch of Geo-Fencing, Independent Software Vendors now have the flexibility to create and surface their product offerings in line with their business needs across geographies.