An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS regions, enabling low latency global reads and disaster recovery from region-wide outages. With today’s launch, the feature is available for the MySQL-compatible edition of Aurora in 14 AWS regions. 

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory , also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East), Amazon’s community isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Built from actual Microsoft Active Directory (AD), AWS Managed Microsoft AD makes it easy to migrate AD-aware applications while reducing the work of managing AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use your Microsoft AD credentials to connect to RDS for SQL Server instances and to sign in to AWS applications and services such as Amazon WorkSpaces . You have the flexibility to keep your identities in your existing Microsoft AD or create and manage identities in your AWS managed directory.

AD Connector is a proxy that enables AWS applications such as Amazon WorkSpaces to use use your existing on-premises AD identities without requiring AD infrastructure in the AWS Cloud. You can also use AD Connector to join Amazon EC2 instances to your on-premises AD domain and manage these instances using your existing group policy objects.

Please see all AWS Regions where AWS Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector are available. To learn more, see AWS Directory Service .

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the activity of your Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) region.

Continuing our collaboration with edX, we are excited to announce AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things . This new intermediate-level course is available exclusively on edX and provides skills in building and deploying IoT solutions for commercial or consumer applications. Using videos and hands-on exercises, a variety of AWS services are explored, including IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon FreeRTOS, and AWS DeepLens.

Customers in the EU (Stockholm) Region can now use AWS Secrets Manager to manage secrets such as database passwords and API keys needed to access their applications, services, and IT resources.

You can now launch an EMR cluster with three master nodes and support high availability of applications like YARN Resource Manager, HDFS Name Node, Spark, Hive, and Ganglia. Amazon EMR automatically fails over to a standby master node if the primary master node fails or if critical processes, like Resource Manager or Name Node, crash. Since the master node is no longer a potential single point of failure with this feature, you can run your long-lived EMR clusters without interruption. In the event of a failover, Amazon EMR automatically replaces the failed master node with a new master node with the same configuration and boot-strap actions.

Please visit Plan and Configure Master nodes to learn more about this feature.

This feature is now available from EMR release 5.23.0 in all supported regions for Amazon EMR .

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has support for AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. When you create a AWS PrivateLink endpoint for Amazon ECR, the service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Starting today, developers of all skill levels can join the AWS DeepRacer League from anywhere in the world via the AWS DeepRacer console . Developers can put their skills to the test by competing in the Virtual Circuit World Tour, on virtual tracks inspired by famous raceways to be revealed each month. They will race for prizes and glory and a chance to win an expenses paid trip to the AWS DeepRacer Championship Cup at re:Invent 2019 .