The AWS Well-Architected Tool is now available in the Stockholm, Paris, and Mumbai Regions. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps you review your workloads against AWS architectural best practices, and provides guidance on improving your cloud architectures.

This Quick Start implements Amazon FSx for Windows File Server on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 1.5 hours. This Quick Start is for IT infrastructure architects, administrators, and DevOps professionals who are planning to implement Microsoft Windows file systems on AWS. 

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service that you can use to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Starting today, you can instruct Amazon Transcribe to automatically remove sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) from your transcription results. Amazon Transcribe uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to accurately identify and remove PII. PII removed includes social security number, credit card/bank account information and contact information such as name, email address, phone number and mailing address. PII redaction enables contact centers to review and share transcripts to improve the customer service experience, coach agents, and discover new business opportunities while maintaining their standards for handling PII. 

The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for the latest generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that enables AWS to innovate faster, further reduce cost for our customers, and deliver added benefits like increased security and new instance types. On December 3rd 2019, we had announced a 36% increase in Amazon EBS-Optimized performance on the EC2 C5/C5d/C5n, M5/M5d/M5n/M5dn, R5/R5d/R5n/R5dn, P3dn , and High Memory instances (6, 9, 12 TB) instances. Today we are excited to extend this performance benefit to additional Amazon EC2 instances including EC2 G4dn, I3en, Inf1, M5a/M5ad, R5a/R5ad, T3/T3a and z1d instances.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) can now continuously stream Apache Kafka broker logs to Amazon Cloudwatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. With access to broker logs, customers can more easily troubleshoot and understand the performance of their applications that use Amazon MSK clusters as a data store. Broker Logs are available for both new and existing clusters and can be enabled from the Amazon MSK Console or AWS CLI. To learn how to setup broker log delivery, see the Amazon MSK broker logs documentation .

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB 10.3 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. MariaDB 10.3 offers improved Oracle compatibility, support for querying historical states of the database, features that increase flexibility for developers and DBAs, and improved manageability.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor metrics and logs related to AWS Chatbot. You can see metrics and create alarms for the events going to Slack and Amazon Chime via AWS Chatbot, such as the number of processed events, delivery failures, throttled events, and others. You can see details of events and troubleshoot failures by enabling Amazon CloudWatch Logs for your AWS Chatbot configurations. Using logs, you can see the raw event as well as the details of unsuccessful deliveries, throttling, and other failures that will help you troubleshoot AWS Chatbot configurations. 

You can now assign AWS resource tags to Spot Fleet requests on creation to more easily identify their purpose. For example, you can use tags to identify all Spot Fleet requests used by a particular department, project, or application. 

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification validates the ability to design and deploy well-architected solutions on AWS that meet customer requirements.  

You can now use AWS Step Functions to log workflow execution history to CloudWatch Logs, which make it faster and easier to monitor event-driven, serverless workflows. You can select different levels of logging, and also have the ability to exclude the logging of a workflow’s payload.