Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can leverage Kendra’s intelligent search capabilities across a broader range of content repositories by using Kendra’s custom data source feature.  

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds a new instance size to the General Purpose instance family. This new instance size, stream.standard.small, offers 1 vCPU and 2 GiB of memory. It is ideally suited for streaming lightweight, non-graphics applications such as browsers for secure web browsing and bastion host administration tools, and applications that are not resource intensive. To use the new instance size, create a new AppStream 2.0 fleet or modify your existing fleet by using the AppStream 2.0 console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI.  

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, allowing you to build workflows that queries data on your S3 data lake. AWS Step Functions support built-in error handling, parameter passing, recommended security settings , and state management, reducing the amount of code you have to write and maintain.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of Oracle Data Guard physical standby DB instances which run in mount mode. It fully manages the configuration of Oracle Data Guard, and asynchronously replicates data over secured network connections between a primary DB instance and its physical standby mounted DB replicas. Amazon RDS for Oracle Data Guard mounted DB replicas require Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) but not Oracle Active Data Guard.  

AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas – template size, resources, parameters, mappings, and outputs. The maximum size of a template that can be passed in an S3 Object is now 1MB (previously 450KB). The new per template limits for the maximum number of resources is 500 (previously 200), parameters is 200 (previously 60), mappings is 200 (previously 100), and outputs is 200 (previously 60).

In August 2020, Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) launched a feature to share Certificate Authorities (CA) between AWS accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). With today’s launch, App Mesh customers will be able to use a certificate authority shared with their AWS account while configuring TLS between services in their mesh.  

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and enables options to tune for high-availability of your applications. App Mesh has now increased the default limits for a set of resources – virtual nodes, and virtual gateways. These limit increases make it easier for you to manage larger applications with App Mesh.

Amazon Redshift now allows you to schedule your SQL queries for executions in recurring schedules and enables you to build event-driven applications by integrating with Amazon EventBridge. You can now schedule time sensitive or long running queries, loading or unloading your data, or refreshing your materialized views on a regular schedule.

You can now use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) FIFO topics , in combination with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queues , to build applications that require messages to be sent and processed in a strict sequence and without duplicates. SNS FIFO is intended for customer use cases where it is critical to maintain the consistency in processing messages across multiple independent services in a strictly ordered manner. Example use cases include bank transaction logging, stock tickers, flight trackers, news broadcasting, inventory management, vote tabulation, and price updates.

You can now export Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or Amazon Aurora snapshots to Amazon S3 as Apache Parquet format in additional regions. Parquet is an efficient open columnar storage format for analytics and is up to 2x faster to export and consumes up to 6x less storage in Amazon S3, compared to other text formats. You can analyze the exported data with other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker.