We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports British English. Starting today, you can build a conversational interface in British English and deploy it across a variety of use cases such as interactive voice response systems, self-service chatbots, and application bots.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Apache Beam Java SDK version 2.23. Apache Beam is an open-source, unified model for defining streaming and batch data processing applications that can be executed across multiple execution engines. This release allows you to build Apache Beam streaming applications in Java and run them using Apache Flink 1.8 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, Apache Spark running on-premises, and other execution engines supported by Apache.

HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength can now be used to process Protected Health Information. If you have an executed Business Associate Addendum (BAA) with AWS, you can use HIPAA Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength to process encrypted Protected Health Information (PHI). For more information, please visit our page on HIPAA compliance. If you plan to process, store, or transmit PHI and do not have an executed BAA from AWS, please contact us for more information.

AWS Organizations added new capabilities to its existing support for tagging AWS accounts in your organization. Now you can attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to Organizational Units (OUs) , the organization’s root and policies thus enabling you to easily identify, classify, or categorize resources in your organization. You can also tag these resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to ensure that all your AWS Organizations resources are always tagged.  

Available on Coursera, the new Real-World Product Management series is a collection of four digital courses developed by Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) and sponsored by AWS. Designed for current or aspiring PMs, this series dives into product-management skills desired by top employers.  

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) direct APIs for Snapshots are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Using Amazon EBS direct APIs, customers can create snapshots of their block storage data, regardless of where it resides, including data on-premises. This enables customers to achieve business continuity in AWS at a lower cost and use the existing Fast Snapshot Restore feature to quickly recover this data into Amazon EBS volumes for use cases like disaster recovery.

AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports PartitionIndex on tables. As you continually add partitions to tables, the number of partitions can grow significantly over time causing query times to increase. With PartitionIndexes, you can reduce the overall data transfers and processing, and reduce query processing time.  

Infosys Cloud Data Validation Solution is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Infosys, an AWS Data & Analytics Competency Partner. Infosys Cloud Data Validation Solution automates the validation of data regularization and accuracy to strengthen your quality assurance processes by achieving complete data coverage during the testing phase and identifying anomalies earlier in the data life cycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers an initial meeting with key stakeholders to identify quality assurance opportunities, a detailed statement of work that includes scope or use case of data validation, and deployment of the solution.

You can now share your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards with users who do not have direct access to your AWS account. Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs of data from your AWS resources and custom metrics and logs, so that you can quickly monitor operational status and identify issues at a glance. With this new capability you can share dashboards across teams, with stakeholders, and with people external to your organization. You can even display dashboards on big screens in team areas, or embed them in Wikis and other webpages. 

AWS ParallelCluster is a fully supported and maintained open source cluster management tool that makes it easy for scientists, researchers, and IT administrators to deploy and manage High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in the AWS cloud. HPC clusters are collections of tightly coupled compute, storage, and networking resources that enable customers to run large scale scientific and engineering workloads.