The ACK controller for Amazon EMR on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has graduated to generally available status. Using the ACK controller for EMR on EKS, you can declaratively define and manage EMR on EKS resources such as virtual clusters and job runs as Kubernetes custom resources. This lets you manage these resources directly using Kubernetes-native tools such as ‘kubectl’. 

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is now a System and Organization Controls (SOC) compliant service. You can now use MemoryDB for workloads that are subject to SOC compliance, allowing you to get deep insight into the security processes and controls that protect customer data. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives. The purpose of these reports is to help you and your auditors understand the AWS controls established to support operations and compliance.

AWS Organizations now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing customers to manage accounts, organizational units (OUs), and policies within their organization using CloudFormation templates. With this latest integration, customers can efficiently deploy multiple organizational elements in a stack, allowing them to more easily scale across accounts with organization policies in place.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.6.11, 10.5.18, 10.4.27 and 10.3.37. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

Today, we announce the public availability of Amazon’s state-of-the-art Alexa Teacher Model 20 Billion parameter model (AlexaTM 20B) in SageMaker JumpStart. Customers can access the AlexaTM 20B model programmatically to run inference using APIs available in SageMaker Python SDK .

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for Oracle, a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying operating system and database environment, now supports the Oracle Multitenant option on Oracle Database (DB) version 19c using Enterprise Edition. With this release, the Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle DB instance can operate as a multitenant container database (CDB) hosting one or more pluggable databases (PDBs). A PDB is a set of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects that logically appears to a client as a non-CDB.  

Amazon Web Services announces AWS Nitro System support for EC2’s previous generation of instances to extend the length of service beyond the typical lifetime of the underlying hardware. The AWS Nitro System provides modern hardware and software components for EC2 instances, allowing customers to continue running their workloads and applications on the instance families they were built on without any service life concerns. 

Amazon Translate is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation. Today, we are launching support of tagging for custom terminology and parallel data resources and then allow/restrict access on them based on the tags.

The Amazon Chime SDK enables developers to add intelligent real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. Today, the Amazon Chime SDK announces the launch of Alexa skill calling, a new feature that enables placing calls from custom Alexa skills to destinations including existing contact centers, CRMs, or telephone systems. Skill users place calls using simple voice commands. For example, a skill user can open a skill and use a command like “Call customer support” and be connected to an existing support process. 

Amazon QuickSight now supports adding Textbox objects to your Analysis. You can use text boxes for common use cases but not limited to title, subtitles, annotations, adding additional information or description for KPIs etc. You can reposition, resize and make your text stand out with various rich text formatting options like font styling, text alignment and text box styling options. Dynamic text values can be added with the help of user defined parameters and system defined parameters like date and page number. See here for more details.