AWS Firewall Manager now supports account inclusion or exclusion when defining the policy scope. This allows customers to enforce AWS WAF rules only on a subset of accounts instead of all accounts in their AWS Organizations.

Amazon Neptune is now a HIPAA Eligible Service and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA).

This Quick Start deploys SIOS Protection Suite for Linux on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The Quick Start was created by APN Partner SIOS in collaboration with AWS.

Amazon Connect now provides a new contact API that lets you update or add attributes to a contact. Contact attributes are key-value pairs of data about a contact, such as the name of the caller, why they called, or the quality of service they received. Until now, these attributes could only be set within a contact flow which ran before the call was connected to an agent. With this API, you can add or update attributes programmatically from your business apps like CRM, either during or after the customer interaction occurs. For example an agent might add an attribute to indicate the caller should be called back, or a manager might update an attribute after the call ends to grade the quality of service. You can even update the contact attributes months later to flag contacts for training or legal reviews. To learn more, see the API documentation.

Encryption at rest helps enhance the security of your Amazon DynamoDB data by encrypting your data at rest using the service-default AWS Key Management Service  key. Encryption at rest greatly reduces the operational burden and complexity involved in protecting sensitive data.

If you’re a king, your smartphone can now replace your taster. The rest of us can use it for allergens, cholesterol, calories, or other dietary detections.

The Smart City Protocol whitepaper describes the basics of how municipalities can adopt a standardized abstraction layer above proprietary SSL-based network protocols enabling smart-city applications to operate across products and systems from multiple vendors.

Seoul Semiconductor has filed a patent infringement suit against big-box retailer Fry’s Electronics, while Signify continues to repurchase shares, Nichia wins a round with Everlight, and Sensor Electronic Technology Inc files against companies selling UV sterilizers.

AWS AppSync is a serverless backend for web and mobile applications that supports real-time data synchronization and offline capabilities at enterprise scale. AWS AppSync simplifies data access across AWS services to a single endpoint and supports multiple data storage options, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS (using Lambda resolvers), and HTTP data sources. AWS AppSync is powered by GraphQL, an open standard allowing applications to request, change and subscribe to the exact data they need in a single network request.

With today’s launch, AWS AppSync is now available in 10 AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (Ireland).

To learn more, see the AWS AppSync webpage.

You can now launch Amazon EMR clusters with the next generation of Compute Optimized C5d instances, General Purpose M5d instances and Memory Optimized R5 and R5d instances from the Amazon EC2 family. These instances are available for EMR clusters with release 5.13.0 and later. Compute Optimized C5d instances feature cost-effective high-performance compute processors and also comes equipped with local NVMe-based SSD storage. They are ideal for compute-intensive big-data applications that require ultra-low-latency local storage. General Purpose M5d instances offer a balance of compute, memory and networking and comes equipped with high-throughput local NVMe-based SSD storage to cater to a broad range of workloads. Memory Optimized R5 instances have high memory to vCPU ratio and are ideal for memory-intensive analytics workloads. R5d instances share their specs with R5 instances and also include local NVMe-based SSD storage. These instances are available in various sizes. To learn more about these instances please visit the Amazon EC2 instance page . For Amazon EMR pricing for these instances, visit the Amazon EMR pricing page .

Amazon EMR supports these instances in the following regions:

C5d and M5d instances are supported in US East (N.Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe(Ireland), and Canada regions.

R5 instances are supported in US East (N.Virginia and Ohio), US West(Oregon), and Europe(Ireland) regions.

R5d instances are supported in US East (N.Virginia and Ohio) and US West (Oregon) regions.