AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in three additional AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS announced support for Custom Images, a new capability that enables customers to customize the Docker container images used for running Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR on EKS. Custom images enables you to install and configure packages specific to your workload that are not available in the public distribution of EMR’s Spark runtime into a single immutable container. An immutable container promotes portability and simplifies dependency management for each workload and enables you to integrate developing applications for EMR on EKS with your own continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. 

AWS Network Firewall is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

We recently updated AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement.

You now can further enhance the security of your applications by encrypting data in transit between your applications and your Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) clusters, and between the nodes within a DAX cluster. To use this new feature, enable encryption in transit when creating a DAX cluster and use the latest version of any of the DAX clients. If you enable encryption in transit for a DAX cluster, all requests and responses between your applications and clusters are encrypted by Transport Layer Security (TLS), and connections to the cluster can be authenticated by verification of a cluster X.509 certificate. In addition, the data in transit between the nodes within a cluster also is encrypted. You can enable encryption in transit in the DynamoDB console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation. 

Starting today, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is available in the Europe (London) region. Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. You can use QLDB to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes to your data over time.

Amazon Connect now provides an API to programmatically create and manage quick connects. Quick connects are a way for you to create preconfigured destinations for common transfers and make them available for agents to use. Using this API, you can programmatically configure thousands of quick connects to agents, queues, and phone numbers. Additionally, you can now delete quick connects that are no longer required using the delete API. To learn more, see the API documentation . The quick connects API also comes with support for AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see Amazon Connect Resource Type Reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) framework launches four new templates for building machine learning inference-based applications on AWS Lambda. Now, customers can leverage these templates as a starting point to build, test, and deploy their container-based Serverless ML applications.

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Math now supports 14 new functions including RUNNING_SUM, TIME_SERIES, and DATAPOINT_COUNT. Two new FILL variants, two logarithmic functions, two functions for calculating the difference between each datapoint, and five time functions are also now supported. With CloudWatch Metric Math, you can aggregate and transform metrics to create custom visualizations of your health and performance metrics. The new functions announced today allow you to view the logarithmic values of your metric, better visualize the change in latency over time, and calculate the cumulative sales of a product.