You can now use Spark 2.4.3, Presto 0.220, Apache Hive 2.3.5, and Apache Tez 0.9.2 on Amazon EMR release 5.25.0.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS region.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.

AWS CloudFormation has increased two limits on CloudFormation StackSets to allow you to provision resources across even more accounts and regions with a single operation. The number of stack sets you can have in your administrator account has increased from 20 to 100. The number of stack instances you can have per stack set has increased from 500 to 2000.

Starting today, you can use the Python programming language to develop your functions in Lambda@Edge, in addition to currently supported Node.js. This gives you the flexibility of opting for the programming language of your choice as you author your functions.

The Amplify Framework is an open source project for building cloud-enabled mobile and web applications.  

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to specify AWS IoT Events resources. This improvement enables you to use CloudFormation to deploy AWS IoT Events resources—along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way. You can use CloudFormation templates to specify IoT Events Inputs and Detector Models.

You can now view pipeline status from the pipeline listing in AWS CodePipeline. Previously, you had to look at the detail page of a pipeline to obtain its status. Now, you can see the status of the most recent execution for each pipeline directly on the pipeline listing. You are now able to monitor status across multiple pipelines in a unified interface.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the immediate availability of the Middle East (Bahrain) Region, which is the first AWS Region in the Middle East and consists of three Availability Zones. With this launch, AWS now offers 22 Regions and 69 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in over 190 countries.  

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) technology, which delivers ground-breaking improvements in speech quality through a new machine learning approach. The 8 US English and 3 UK English voices in the Polly portfolio are now available in both the previous Standard technology, as well as in the new Neural TTS technology. In addition, 2 of the US English voices also feature a Newscaster speaking style, which sounds like a TV or radio newscaster.