You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS region. Amazon Lex allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots that turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. These can be used to automate high volume interactions without compromising customer experience. Customers connecting to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot to perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment using natural conversational language. Customers can say things like “I need help with my device” instead of having to listen through and remember a list of options like 1 for sales, or 2 for appointments.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility supports the ANSI READ COMMITTED isolation level on read replicas. This isolation level enables long-running queries on an Aurora read replica to execute without impacting the throughput of writes on the writer node.

Amazon ElastiCache now offers R5 nodes, the next generation memory and performance optimized nodes to maximize network performance and CPU utilization in the South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. R5 nodes feature the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers nearly all of the compute and memory resources to the guest VMs.

Amazon Neptune is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region, Operated by NWCD. You can now create Neptune clusters using R5 instance types in this AWS Region for your graph applications.

AWS Device Farm now lets you test your web applications against different desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers that are hosted in the AWS Cloud.  

We are pleased to announce that customers who require the world’s most powerful professional graphics can now use EC2 G4 instances to setup NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations (Quadro vWS) at no additional cost.

AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) AWS Region along with the support for AWS Direct Connect. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway. As you grow the number of workloads across multiple AWS accounts, you need to scale your networks, better control your policies, and effectively monitor your resources.

AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog with over 230,000 active customers, has announced more pricing options for Container-based software. Starting today, you can find software that is billed on-demand based on new consumption units, such as the number of worker nodes managed. You can also purchase contracts for 1 year or longer to secure the best price for your commitment.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Access Points is a new EFS feature that simplifies providing applications access to shared data sets in an EFS file system. EFS Access Points work together with AWS IAM and enforce an operating system user and group, and a directory for every file system request made through the access point.  

You can now use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage Network File System (NFS) access for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). You can use IAM roles to identify NFS clients with cryptographic security and use IAM policies to manage client-specific permissions. This new capability provides a simplified way to manage access at scale in NFS environments and is complementary to network-based security controls. With IAM for NFS clients you can use the same tools and processes you use today for managing access to other AWS resources. Permission checks are logged to AWS CloudTrail so you can audit client access to your file system.