Starting today, the AWS VPN service supports custom Pre-Shared Keys (PSKs) and inside tunnel IP CIDR blocks for your VPN connection. These new features allow you to better self-manage their VPNs, avoid inside tunnel IP address conflicts, and enable support for additional devices. These features are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. 

You can now access AWS CodeBuild from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Many AWS customers run their applications within a VPC for security or isolation reasons. Previously, you could connect to CodeBuild from your VPC using an internet gateway or VPN connection. With VPC endpoints, no public IP addresses are required and traffic between the VPC and CodeBuild does not leave the Amazon network.

AWS CodeCommit now enables you to restrict who can commit changes to the master branch or any branch of your choosing. Previously, you could control who can make changes to a repository but not to specific branches within a repository. Now, you can define which actions are allowed on a branch and who has permission to perform those actions. This makes it easy to set-up a workflow where only approved users can merge pull requests or commit changes to a sensitive branch.

Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.

AWS Step Functions now supports higher throughput workflows, making it easier to coordinate applications with high event rates and variable loads. Starting today, throughput has increased from 400 state transitions per second to 1,000 state transitions per second with burst capacity of 5,000 state transitions. The default start rate for AWS Step Functions state machine executions has also increased from 25 per second to 200 per second, with burst capacity of up to 1,000 starts in select regions.

Today, AWS made it easier to manage your secrets from the console by making the AWS Secrets Manager console available in two additional languages – Italian and Traditional Chinese.  

Elastic Beanstalk environment health events can now be streamed to CloudWatch Logs. It enables you to review and debug the historical health changes of your running applications in Elastic Beanstalk.

Starting today, users can access Amazon Chime from their web browser. The new Amazon Chime web application makes it easy to join meetings from any device with a supported browser, including those running Linux or ChromeOS, without downloading or installing a client application. The web application lets users use Amazon Chime on more devices, and helps them stay connected and productive.

Amazon Inspector expanded security assessments to include Amazon Linux 2018.03 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run security assessments, simply install the Amazon Inspector Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Inspector console, and run your assessment.

In December 2015, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which helps you identify overly permissive policies attached to an IAM entity (a user, group, or role). Now, we have extended service last accessed data to support four additional regions: EU (London), Canada (Central), US East (Ohio), and EU (Paris) AWS Regions.