Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the immediate availability of the Middle East (Bahrain) Region, which is the first AWS Region in the Middle East and consists of three Availability Zones. With this launch, AWS now offers 22 Regions and 69 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries.  

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology, which delivers ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. The 8 US English and 3 UK English voices in the Polly portfolio are now available in both the previous Standard technology, as well as in the new Neural TTS technology. In addition, 2 of the US English voices also feature a Newscaster speaking style, which sounds like a TV or radio newscaster. 

Amazon EC2 expands Hibernation support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. You can now hibernate newly launched EC2 Instances running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, in addition to Amazon Linux 1 OS.

The EBS default volume type has been updated to gp2 when a block storage volume type is not specified within AWS API calls for volume, image, and instance creation.

You can now attach multiple target groups to your Amazon ECS services that are running on either Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. Target groups are used to route requests to one or more registered targets when using a load balancer. Attaching multiple target groups to your service allows you to simplify infrastructure code, reduce costs and increase manageability of your ECS services.  

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotic applications, now supports offline logs and metrics for its CloudWatch cloud extension.

You can now share Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations with another AWS account or within your AWS Organization. When a Capacity Reservation is shared, EC2 instances launched by one AWS account can utilize EC2 capacity reserved by another account. This feature is enabled by AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), a service that allows you to easily and securely share AWS resources.

Starting today, you can now add tags to your AWS Elemental MediaStore containers . MediaStore tags allow you to categorize your containers in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation for live origination and endpoints.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert has added the ability to prioritize transcoding jobs. You can now specify a priority setting when submitting jobs in either on-demand or reserved queues. With this feature, you have more control over the order in which jobs are processed, so that jobs that require shorter turnaround times can be added to the queue with a higher priority and started before other jobs with a lower priority. To learn more, please see the documentation .

AWS Training and Certification has launched AWS Fundamentals: Addressing Security Risk , a new self-paced digital course available exclusively on Coursera. This course provides an overview of security best practices when developing and managing applications on AWS.