AWS Service Catalog , used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS, now supports CloudFormation Change Sets. This also includes CloudFormation Transforms, which provides capability for the Serverless Application Model (SAM).

Now, you can use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) r4 instance types in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region. r4 instance types are the latest generation of DAX nodes and are designed to support production applications and workloads.

DAX provides you a fully-managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that is capable of accelerating reads from Amazon DynamoDB tables by up to 10x, even at millions of requests per second. You can use DAX without making changes to your existing application logic and using your current DynamoDB API calls. DAX manages cache invalidation and data population on your behalf.

DAX is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions.

For DAX r4 instance type pricing in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region, see DAX Pricing .

Amazon RDS now provides automated recommendations for your database resources. Amazon RDS recommendations provide best practice guidance for customers by analyzing configuration and usage metrics from database instances. The resulting recommendations are presented in the AWS Console in an easy-to-use interface.  

AWS Deep Learning AMIs now come pre-installed with Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), an open source format for neural network computational graph supported by popular deep learning frameworks , including Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Chainer, and Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK). ONNX gives developers the flexibility to migrate between frameworks. For example, developers can use PyTorch for prototyping, building and training their models, and then use ONNX to migrate their models to MXNet to leverage its scalability for inference. To learn more about using ONNX, see our blog post and tutorials .  

Starting today, AWS Batch is available in South America (São Paulo) AWS Region. In addition, customers can start using the AWS Batch console to run jobs on August 1st.

AWS Greengrass now allows you to deploy executables written in C, C++ and any other language that supports importing of C libraries. Executable code has the benefits of greater legacy support as customers can more easily re-use code that is already written in C or C++, minimal resource footprint as no language interpreter is required, and an absolute minimum of compute latency for very high-performance use cases such as computer vision or algorithmic trading. Starting today, your executable code acts much like an AWS Lambda function, can be invoked by events or invoke other Lambdas, and can take advantage of other Greengrass functionality such as Local Resource Access. You can mix and match executable code together with Lambda functions written in interpreted languages such as Python or Node.js.

Amazon Redshift announces Advisor, a new feature that provides automated recommendations to help you optimize database performance and decrease operating costs. Advisor is available via the Amazon Redshift console at no charge.

The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin version 1.1 is now available.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux now come with a custom build of TensorFlow 1.9 optimized for high performance training, the latest Apache MXNet 1.2 that includes several performance and usability improvements, the new Keras 2-MXNet backend with high performance multi-GPU training support, and the new MXBoard tool for improved debugging and visualization of MXNet training models.  

We are pleased to announce the launch of our two newest edge locations for Amazon Route 53 in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. Today’s launch represents the first physical presence of Route 53 on the African continent. The addition of these two locations brings the global network of Route 53 to 53 cities across 26 countries and six continents.

The expansion of Amazon Route 53 into South Africa further improves availability and performance for customers and end users in the region. We expect that two these new edge locations will help clients see improvements of as much as 75% in DNS query latency.

For more information and to get started with Amazon Route 53, visit the product page .