You can now create Amazon EMR clusters with custom Amazon Machine Images (AMI) running Amazon Linux. This enables you to preload additional software on your AMI and use AMIs that you customize and control. You can also encrypt the Amazon EBS root volume of your AMIs with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys. Additionally, you can now adjust the Amazon EBS root volume size for instances in your Amazon EMR cluster. Previously, this was fixed at 10 GiB.  

Several enhancements have been made to the functionality and user experience of the Amazon SNS console in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a flexible, fully managed pub/sub messaging and mobile notifications service for coordinating the delivery of messages to subscribing endpoints and clients. These improvements to the SNS console have made navigation and categorization of information easier, and allow you to now view up to 100,000 SNS topics, subscriptions and endpoints. You also can now run data validation for items such as resource names, ARNs and policies.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Kuala Lumpur, our first edge location in Malaysia. Each new edge location helps improve performance, and availability for end users of your application.

Amazon EC2 X1 instances are now available for use in China (Beijing) and South America (São Paulo) Regions. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) region. 

Amazon Connect is now certified as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant. Amazon Connect is a simple to use, self-service, cloud-based contact center offering you can use to deliver more engaging customer service experiences. Now you can use Amazon Connect when you need to store, process or transmit cardholder data as part of customer service.  

We are excited to announce a new edge location for Amazon CloudFront in Stockholm, Sweden. Each new edge location helps improve performance and availability for end users of your application. 

Amazon WorkSpaces is now HIPAA-eligible and is PCI compliant. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can start using Amazon WorkSpaces to deploy HIPAA-compliant cloud desktops that access Protected Health Information (PHI). With PCI compliance, Amazon WorkSpaces has been verified to conform to Payment Card Industry Security Standards and can now be used to utilize applications and files that contain sensitive Card Holder Data (CHD). For more information about HIPAA-eligible and PCI compliant services on AWS, see AWS Service in Scope by Compliance Program. If you don’t have an executed BAA with AWS, contact us and we will put you in touch with a representative from our AWS sales team.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Go 1.8 and Node.js version 8.  

Upgrading to latest platform version is easy with Managed Platform Updates. You can learn more here  about how to leverage managed updates to automatically upgrade to the latest version during weekly maintenance window. To update your existing environment to the latest platform version visit Updating your Elastic Beanstalk Environment’s Platform version . 

The Metropolitan District of Southern California has taken a step closer to developing one of the world’s largest water recycling systems.