Amazon RDS for SQL Server on AWS Outposts is now available to all AWS Outposts customers. Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

AWS Lake Formation now supports tagging data lake resources (databases, tables and columns) and creating logical access control policies based on those tags. Tag-based access control (TBAC) decouples policy creation from resource creation which helps data stewards govern large number of databases, tables, and columns by removing the need to update policies every time a new resource is added to the data lake. TBAC ensures that governance can be scaled easily by replacing the policy definition from 1000s of resources down to a small number of logical tags.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports three new application management APIs in preview. RollbackApplication allows you to restore your application to the last running version and application state from the most recent, successful snapshot. ListApplicationVersions allows you to get all application versions and a summary of the associated configurations. DescribeApplicationVersio n gives you the most comprehensive view of the application configuration of a particular version.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe now supports partial results stabilization, which further improves the live subtitling experience. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. As Amazon Transcribe processes streaming audio content, it generates partial transcription results until it provides a final transcript for a segment of continuous speech. However, some words or phrases in these partial results might change as Transcribe further understands the context of the audio. Partial results stabilization makes it easier for viewers to read the text output by defining how much the transcript will change during the transcription process.  

Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

Starting today Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to setup automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for training machine learning models. EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. EFA can significantly speed up distributed training on SageMaker at no additional cost. For example, we trained the BERT natural language processing model with SageMaker’s distributed data parallel library on 32 ml.p4d.24xlarge instances. The training was up to 130% faster with EFA compared to Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) .

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports Kantar SNAP watermarking for mezzanine and OTT content delivery. With this feature, audio streams processed by MediaConvert can now be watermarked with unique identifiers that allow for audience measurement across a variety of playback and consumption methods. When enabled, the unique identifier and Kantar account details are transmitted to Kantar during processing to automatically register each piece of media into the audience tracking system. Once the content is watermarked and logged, viewership statistics can be used to make programming decisions, track advertisement exposure, and to guide content investment decisions using Kantar audience measurement technologies.

Building a business case for the cloud can be a time-consuming process on your own. With Migration Evaluator, organizations can accelerate their evaluation and decision-making for migration to AWS. Quick Insights – a new capability of Migration Evaluator, provides customers with a one-page summary of their projected AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. This complimentary pre-migration assessment enables customers to rapidly understand the projected cost of running their on-premises estate in the AWS Cloud.

With the latest release of JDBC and ODBC drivers for Amazon Athena, you can use Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) or Ping Identity’s PingFederate for authentication with compatible business intelligence, SQL, or embedded analytics applications.