Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic.

Starting today, you can use a new Amazon CloudFront capability called Field-Level Encryption to further enhance the security of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers. CloudFront’s field-level encryption further encrypts sensitive data in an HTTPS form using field-specific encryption keys (which you supply) before a POST request is forwarded to your origin. This ensures that sensitive data can only be decrypted and viewed by certain components or services in your application stack.

Lumberyard Beta 1.12 adds over 400 updates, including a new Fur Shader, Gems for rain, lightning, water, and snow, plus updates to Script Canvas and the Text-to-Speech Gem. Head over to the release notes to learn more.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. AWS Managed Microsoft AD enables you to use a highly available managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.  

The ability to migrate Hyper-V VMs to AWS using AWS Server Migration Service is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. 

You can now define and require OAuth2 scopes as part of the method-level authorization when using an Amazon Cognito Authorizer in Amazon API Gateway. This simplifies building APIs that support Cognito Oauth2 scopes by removing the need to create an AWS Lambda function that performs the authorization. A scope defines the level of access to a resource that an application has permission to. For example, if you have a resource server for storing photos, you could define two scopes: one for read access to the photos and one for write/delete access. You can require applications to request access to your APIs by including a token with one or more scopes embedded inside it. API Gateway will then use it to determine whether the API caller is authorized to access the API. 

AWS Service Catalog, used by enterprises, system integrators, and managed service providers to create, govern, and manage a catalog of IT services, is announcing enhancements to the Service Catalog console. These changes provide a simplified user experience to find and launch products in the catalog.  

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) are now available in South America (São Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions. 

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is now available to customers in the US West (Northern California) Region. AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations.

Agencies work together to assist drinking water systems disrupted by Hurricane Maria.