We are excited to announce that you can take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam from the comfort and convenience of your home or office. The exam is delivered online and supervised, or proctored, through your webcam. You can schedule to sit for the exam around the clock, on the hour and again every fifteen minutes. You’ll need a reliable internet connection, a webcam, and a quiet, private place to test.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. A1 instances, introduced at re:Invent 2018, are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. A1 instances deliver significant cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based workloads. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm community.

PostgreSQL 12 Beta 3 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the beta version of PostgreSQL 12 on Amazon RDS. 

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is now available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and US West (N. California) regions. AMS operates AWS on your behalf, providing a secure and compliant AWS Landing Zone, a proven enterprise operating model, on-going cost optimization, and day-to-day AWS operations management.

Starting today, you can now import the released Java binaries of Glue ETL libraries using Maven on your Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) locally. This feature allows you to seamlessly develop, compile, debug, and single-step Glue ETL scripts and complex Spark applications in Scala and Python locally before deploying them to your production environments on the Glue job system or Glue Development endpoints.

You can now use AWS X-Ray to trace messages that pass through Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). AWS X-Ray makes it easy to troubleshoot performance issues and errors in your distributed applications and microservice architecture.  

We are pleased to announce that starting today, your applications running on Application Load Balancers (ALB) fronted by AWS Global Accelerator can see the original source IP address of the client. This enables you to apply client-specific logic such as IP address or location-based filters by using AWS WAF, as well as gather connection statistics and serve personalized content for your applications. Additionally, you can front an internal ALB with Global Accelerator. This lets you use Global Accelerator as the single internet-facing access point while keeping your ALB private and protecting your applications running on AWS from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

You can now configure a lower threshold for rate-based rules you use with AWS WAF, allowing you to mitigate low-volume application threats. The new threshold of 100 requests per 5 minutes (previously 2000 requests per 5 minutes) gives you greater control for stopping slow brute force login attempts, limiting per-user API usage, blocking low-volume denial of service (DoS) attacks, and stopping malicious bots that consume resources and scrape content.

You can now use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to redirect traffic from any port inside a remote Amazon EC2 or on-premises instance to a local port on a client machine.

Run Command now lets you select a resource group as a command target. Resource groups make it easier to organize, manage, and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time. Resource group support as a command target enables you to automate your administrative and ad hoc tasks on all of the managed instances that belong in the resource group.