Starting today, Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports read replicas using Distributed Availability Groups within an AWS Region. Amazon RDS for SQL Server makes it easy to create replicas in the same AWS Region as the primary DB instance by fully managing the configuration of the Distributed Availability Group and maintaining secure network connections between a primary DB instance and its replicas. 

AWS RoboMaker, a service that makes it easy to run robotics simulations at cloud scale, now supports configurable Simulation Unit limit, to help control robotics application testing costs. With AWS RoboMaker simulation, you only pay for the time your simulation job takes to run, and you are charged an hourly rate based on the number of Simulation Units (or SUs) required to run your simulation job – which you can now limit.

AWS IoT Device Defender is now available in the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. AWS IoT Device Defender is a fully managed service that helps you secure your fleet of IoT devices. It continuously audits device configurations for security vulnerabilities. It also continuously monitors security metrics from devices and AWS IoT Core for deviations from what you have defined as appropriate behaviors for each device. AWS IoT Device Defender publishes alerts to AWS IoT Console, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon SNS when an audit fails or when behavior anomalies are detected. AWS IoT Device Defender also supports the ability for customers to use predefined mitigation actions to respond to audit findings and apply them at scale.  

Starting today, you can use Glue Spark ETL jobs to read, transform, and load data from Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and MongoDB collections into services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for downstream analytics.

Authors who publish serverless applications to the AWS Serverless Application Repository (SAR) can now make their applications publicly available from all commercial AWS regions (except China) where the service is available.

AWS Glue now supports the ability to create new tables and update the schema in the Glue Data Catalog from Glue Spark ETL jobs. Previously, you had to run Glue crawlers to create new tables, modify schema or add new partitions to existing tables after running your Glue ETL jobs resulting in additional cost and time.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) now enables you to replicate ongoing changes from any DMS supported sources such as Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible), Oracle, and SQL Server to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka clusters.

Now you can launch your Amazon Neptune RDF/SPARQL or Apache TinkerPop graph application with an db.r5.8xlarge instance type in all regions where Amazon Neptune is available.

Amazon Transcribe Medical is HIPAA eligible automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their healthcare and life science applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe Medical has been available as a streaming API whereby users can pass realtime audio for transcription. Starting today, customers of the service can conveniently transcribe recorded medical audio files too.

Starting today, Amazon EBS crash-consistent snapshot ability is available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now take crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes in an EC2 instance with a single API call. Backup data across multiple volumes is in sync and the restore of EBS volumes is accurate. Since snapshots are automatically taken across multiple EBS volumes, you no longer need to stop your instance or coordinate between volumes to ensure crash-consistency.