Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

AWS Secrets Manager now supports VPC endpoint policies, making it easier for you to restrict egress of secrets from your Amazon VPC. When you create a VPC endpoint for Secrets Manager, you can attach an endpoint policy to define the Secrets Manager actions that can be performed, the secrets these actions can be performed on, the IAM users or roles that can perform these actions, and the accounts that can be accessed via the VPC endpoint. 

The Temporary Queue Client for Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is now available. The client supports common messaging patterns such as request-response, and helps you save development time and deployment costs when creating application-managed temporary queues.

Starting today, you can launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on base Red Hat Enterprise Linux Images (AMIs). Previously, only customers with existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium subscriptions could launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running RHEL (i.e. the bring your own license model). Spot Instances can now be launched through RHEL’s basic subscription model and are included in the hourly Spot Instance price.

AWS Backup now provides customers a more seamless way to manage their backups, by automatically copying tags from their resources to their backups. For customers using tags to manage their AWS resources, AWS Backup will enable them to more effectively search for source resources or conduct billing for their backups. See AWS Tagging Strategies for tagging best practices.

Starting today, you can access custom-generated Amazon EC2 resource optimization recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer. These recommendations identify idle and underutilized instances across your accounts and regions. To generate these recommendations, AWS analyzes your historical EC2 resource usage, your Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and your existing reservation footprint to identify opportunities for cost savings (e.g., by terminating idle instances or downsizing active instances to lower-cost options). For example, if your m5.2xlarge has a maximum utilization of 20% over the last 14 days, AWS may recommended downsizing that instance to m5.xlarge or m5.large and show you how much you can save based on your usage and your applicable m5 family reservations.

AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows enable you to define a time window for performing potentially disruptive actions on your instances. You can now use maintenance windows to select a resource group as the target. Resource groups make it easier to organize, manage, and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time. By selecting a resource group as the target of a maintenance window, you can perform routine tasks across different resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets within the same recurring time window.  

It’s now easier than ever for organizations to develop and validate their teams’ skills by providing them with AWS Certification exam vouchers . These vouchers conveniently eliminate the need for candidates to pay when registering for their exam.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS Europe (London) region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve your cloud architectures.  

AWS Client VPN now supports split-tunnel, which gives customers the flexibility to cherry pick the traffic that traverses over the VPN tunnel.