You can now manage AWS Step Functions workflows from the Amazon Athena console, making it easier to build scalable data processing pipelines, execute queries based on custom business logic, automate administrative and alerting tasks, and more.

Starting today, Amazon Neptune announced the general availability of general-purpose T4g and memory-optimized R6g database instances powered by the AWS Graviton2 processor. AWS Graviton2-based instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances for a variety of workloads. Customers running graph workloads using Apache TinkerPop Gremlin , openCypher , or W3C SPARQL 1.1 query languages can expect to see significant improvements in query latency at a lower cost in comparison to x86-based instances of equivalent instance size.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Kafka multi-topic with a single task. Using AWS DMS, you can now replicate multiple schemas from a single database to different Kafka topics using the same task. This eliminates the need to create multiple separate tasks in situations where many tables from the same source database need to be migrated to different Kafka topics.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now offers an option to securely connect to Amazon MSK clusters over the internet. By enabling public access, authorized clients external to a private Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can stream encrypted data in and out of specific Amazon MSK clusters. You can enable public access for MSK clusters at no additional cost, but standard AWS data transfer costs for cluster ingress and egress apply.

You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processor. With CloudWatch Lambda Insights you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions.

Amazon Redshift now scales write queries with Concurrency Scaling . Concurrency Scaling supports virtually unlimited concurrent users and concurrent queries, with consistently fast query performance. Now your write queries such as COPY, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE can run on transient Concurrency Scaling clusters when there is queueing.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports creating backups locally on AWS Outposts with Amazon S3 support. You can create backups of your Amazon RDS databases running on AWS Outposts to the same Outpost or to the AWS Region of your Outpost, allowing you to maintain your data residency requirements while giving you flexibility for maintaining your data recovery solutions. CloudFormation support will be coming soon.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a cloud storage analytics feature for organization-wide visibility into object storage usage and activity, now includes support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can now create a unified view of your operational health to monitor any of your S3 Storage Lens metrics alongside other application metrics using CloudWatch dashboards.

Today, AWS CloudFormation StackSets  announces the capability to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set. This will let you create resources, applications or environments across your AWS Organization and AWS Regions efficiently. You can subsequently avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) today open-sourced the build scripts that Amazon ECS uses to build the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI). These build scripts are now available on GitHub as an open-source project under the Apache license 2.0. Customers can use these build scripts to build custom AMIs with security, monitoring, and compliance controls based on their organization’s requirements while using the same components as the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.