We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Forecast, which has been in preview since re:Invent 2018. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. Based on the same technology used at Amazon.com, Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to combine time series data with additional variables to build forecasts.

Starting today, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) for EBS Snapshots is available in the EU (Stockholm) region. Amazon DLM provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to create and manage your EBS volume backups. 

AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway is now available in EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions. 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.

To more easily identify the purpose of Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues and track costs associated with messaging, you can categorize queues using metadata tags. For example, you can use tags to identify all Amazon SQS queues used by a particular department, project, or application.

AWS DataSync now supports the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, providing you a simple way to automate and accelerate copying data between SMB file shares, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. With this launch, you can reduce on-premises storage infrastructure by shifting SMB-based data stores and content repositories from file servers and network attached storage (NAS) arrays to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS for analytics, archiving, or backup use cases. 

We are excited to announce the availability of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by SINNET, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. Parameter Store provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data and passwords. You can reference this information dynamically from your application or from other AWS services.  

Starting today, AWS IoT Core customers can configure the quality of service (QoS) when publishing messages via the republish action of a topic rule. AWS IoT Core supports QoS levels 0 and 1 for MQTT messages, where QoS 0 means a message is delivered zero or more times and QoS 1 means message is delivered one or more times. See AWS IoT MQTT documentation for more details about AWS IoT QoS definition.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region . Amazon’s isolated infrastructure and services are designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements.

AI-Powered Health Data Masking is a solution that helps healthcare organizations identify and mask health data in images or text. While this solution does not guarantee alignment to any regulatory framework, it has been designed to be implemented as part of a set of mitigating controls in your environment.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region. Using MediaConnect, you can now ingest, transport, and process your high-quality video in the AWS Cloud in more locations globally.