With Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Amazon DynamoDB, you can capture item-level changes in your DynamoDB tables as a Kinesis data stream. You can enable streaming to a Kinesis data stream on your table with a single click in the DynamoDB console, or via the AWS API or AWS CLI.  

You now can use PartiQL (a SQL-compatible query language)—in addition to already-available DynamoDB operations—to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB. PartiQL makes it easier to interact with DynamoDB and run queries in the AWS Management Console. Because PartiQL is supported for all DynamoDB data-plane operations, it can help improve the productivity of developers by enabling them to use a familiar, structured query language to perform these operations. 

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. You can now synthesize over 15 NTTS voices, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize the over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) as a target. Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your application’s needs. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources to Amazon Aurora Serverless (PostgreSQL-compatible edition) with minimal downtime.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to secure user access to AWS accounts and business applications using multi-factor authentication (MFA) with FIDO-enabled security keys, such as YubiKey, and built-in biometric authenticators, such as Touch ID on Apple MacBooks and facial recognition on PCs. With this release, AWS SSO now supports the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) specification to provide strongly attestable and phishing-resistant authentication across all supported browsers, using interoperable FIDO2 and U2F authenticators.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to US West (N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul), and Middle East (Bahrain). Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud.  

We are excited to announce the availability of Context Management on Amazon Lex. Conversations involve managing context across multiple turns as the interaction evolves. Similarly, bots need to understand the progression of a conversation’s context in order to respond appropriately. Previously, you had to write code to manage context via session attributes. Depending on the intent fulfilled, the code had to orchestrate invocation of the next intent. Starting today, Lex supports context management natively so you can manage the context directly from the console. With the context management capability, you can easily control when an intent should be activated. For example, consider when a user asks “What were my expenses this month?” and then maintains the same context relating to expenses in the subsequent turn “How about last month?” Utilizing the context natively allows you to create sophisticated, multi-turn conversational experience without having to write any code. In addition, it is now possible to set default slot values. You can set the default to a constant, an active context attribute or a session attribute.

AWS Glue Schema Registry , a serverless feature of AWS Glue, enables you to validate and control the evolution of streaming data using registered Apache Avro schemas, at no additional charge. Through Apache-licensed serializers and deserializers, the Schema Registry integrates with Java applications developed for Apache Kafka/Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Apache Flink/Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink, and AWS Lambda.

Today we are announcing the availability of License Included (LI) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server version 20H2 for Amazon EC2, providing customers with an easy and flexible way to get up and running with the latest version of Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. Windows Server 20H2 provides the latest fixes and performance enhancements for Windows Server.

Amazon QuickSight launched enhancements to dashboard filtering experience. When readers slice and dice dashboards with filters, QuickSight will now persist filter selection until they return to the dashboard. Readers can pick up where they left off and do not have to re-select filters. Dashboard persistence is applicable to both QuickSight Web and the Mobile app. Persistence is an optional setting on embedded dashboards where QuickSight admins can choose to make dashboards persist using the getDashboardEmbedURL API. Persistence on web and mobile dashboards is available by default. To learn how to set up persistence on embedded dashboards, see here .