The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. The AWS Well-Architected Tool was introduced in Nov 2018 to help you review your workloads against the latest AWS architectural best practices, and get guidance on how to improve your cloud architectures.  

Today, we are announcing AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway. With this feature, customers can connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) in multiple AWS Regions to their on-premises networks using 1/2/5/10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections. Until today, AWS Transit Gateway only supported AWS Site-to-Site VPN and Amazon VPC attachments. You can now use Direct Connect gateway as an attachment with your Transit Gateways.

We are excited to announce AWS Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections can now be moved from a virtual private gateway to an AWS Transit Gateway without having to make any changes on your customer gateway. Transit Gateways enable you to easily scale connectivity across thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), AWS accounts, and on-premises networks. 

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, the feature is available for the MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora in 14 AWS regions. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory , also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East), Amazon’s community isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Built from actual Microsoft Active Directory (AD), AWS Managed Microsoft AD makes it easy to migrate AD-aware applications while reducing the work of managing AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use your Microsoft AD credentials to connect to RDS for SQL Server instances and to sign in to AWS applications and services such as Amazon WorkSpaces . You have the flexibility to keep your identities in your existing Microsoft AD or create and manage identities in your AWS managed directory.

AD Connector is a proxy that enables AWS applications such as Amazon WorkSpaces to use use your existing on-premises AD identities without requiring AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use AD Connector to join Amazon EC2 instances to your on-premises AD domain and manage these instances using your existing group policy objects.

Please see all AWS Regions where AWS Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector are available. To learn more, see AWS Directory Service .

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the activity of your Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) region.

Continuing our collaboration with edX, we are excited to announce AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things . This new intermediate-level course is available exclusively on edX and provides skills in building and deploying IoT solutions for commercial or consumer applications. Using videos and hands-on exercises, a variety of AWS services are explored, including IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon FreeRTOS, and AWS DeepLens.

Customers in the EU (Stockholm) Region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.

You can now launch an EMR cluster with three master nodes and support high availability of applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, Spark, Hive, and Ganglia. Amazon EMR automatically fails over to a standby master node if the primary master node fails or if critical processes, like Resource Manager or Name Node, crash. Since the master node is no longer a potential single point of failure with this feature, you can run your long-lived EMR clusters without interruption. In the event of a failover, Amazon EMR automatically replaces the failed master node with a new master node with the same configuration and boot-strap actions.

Please visit Plan and Configure Master nodes to learn more about this feature.

This feature is now available from EMR release 5.23.0 in all supported regions for Amazon EMR .

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