Amazon Connect reduces telephony rates for 3 countries in Europe: Cyprus, Belgium and Portugal. Starting April 1st, Amazon Connect, an easy to use omnichannel contact center service, decreased the following telephony rates in the EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions:

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is pleased to announce the ability for you to purchase AMS through your preferred Solution Provider, separately from your AWS infrastructure services. AMS understands the need for flexibility in how you buy AWS infrastructure services and AWS Managed Services based on the complexity of workloads and organizational needs. This new feature enables you to purchase AWS infrastructure services directly or through any AWS Solution Provider Partner  (SPP) of your choice, while utilizing an AMS partner for value-added infrastructure operations separately.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications, as a public preview. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

Starting today, you can now use the Node.js 14.x runtime to develop functions in AWS Lambda@Edge. This runtime is in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Node.js 12.x runtimes.

Node.js 14.x, the current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js, uses the new V8 8.1 engine and provides better performance than the previous LTS version, 12.x. In addition, Node.js 14.x supports new features such as nullish coalescing (?? operator), options chaining (?. operator), and diagnostic reporting. For more information about the benefits and new features of Node.js 14.x, read the Node.js 14.x announcement post on the AWS Compute Blog.

To get started with Node.js 14.x, upload your code to AWS Lambda through the AWS CLI or Lambda console, and select Node.js 14.x as the runtime. If you already have existing Node.js functions in Lambda, you can switch to the new runtime by making any required code changes to ensure compatibility with the new runtime and then editing the function configuration to set the runtime to Node.js 14.x.

To learn more about Lambda@Edge, visit the product page . For more information about the Node.js programming model in AWS Lambda, read the AWS Lambda Node.js documentation .

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: AWS Network Connectivity Options. The course introduces network connectivity concepts, describes network design patterns, and demonstrates how to apply the design patterns to common use cases. This intermediate, 150-minute course includes reading modules, quizzes to check your knowledge, and an optional hands-on lab. The course is designed for network engineers, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, systems engineers, and application architects.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.8.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.8.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include connection rate limiting to avoid problems with misconfigured clients (KIP-612 ) and topic identifiers which provides performance benefits (KIP-516 ). There is also an early access feature to replace zookeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum (KIP-500 ), however this is not recommended for use in production. For a complete list of improvements and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.8.0 .

Amazon Redshift native support for JSON and semi-structured data is now generally available. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to ingest and store semi-structured data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouses. Amazon Redshift also includes support for PartiQL  for SQL-compatible access to relational, semi-structured and nested data. Using the SUPER data type and PartiQL in Amazon Redshift, you can perform advanced analytics that combine classic structured SQL data (such as string, numeric, and timestamp) with the semi-structured SUPER data (such as JSON) with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.

Database Activity Streams is now available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora provides a near real-time stream of database activities in your relational database. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in AWS Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio. Nimble Studio is a managed service that empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable. With Nimble Studio, artists can accelerate digital content creation with virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure footprint.