We’re excited to announce the launch of three role-based learning paths for Media Services. Our AWS Training and Certification curriculum for Media Services offers over 25 courses and hands-on labs. They’re designed to help you learn to design and develop media solutions, master the skills needed for daily operations of services, and choose the solutions that best fit your needs.

AWS Storage Gateway now consolidates monitoring of a gateway’s CloudWatch Alarms  directly from the Storage Gateway console. Access to CloudWatch Alarms in the console, along with the existing CloudWatch Metrics, provides you continuous visibility into gateway health and performance all in one place. Now you can quickly take action on alarms triggered when defined metrics fall outside thresholds you configure.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced the ability to easily upgrade and renew existing SaaS Contracts and Contracts with Consumption Pricing (CCP) Private Offers. AWS Marketplace helps customers find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software that runs on AWS. With SaaS Contract Upgrades and Renewals, customers can keep up with their changing business needs and accommodate expanding workloads on AWS.

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaConvert to transcode on-demand media for applications that are subject to Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), with Moderate baseline in standard regions, and High baselines in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This is in addition to compliance by MediaConvert with U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), System and Organizational Controls (SOC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements.

You can now launch R5, M5, and T3 instance types when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now enables you to deploy your instances across three Availability Zones (AZs) providing better availability for your domains. If you enable replicas for your Elasticsearch indices, Amazon Elasticsearch Service distributes the primary and replica shards across nodes in different AZs to maximize availability. 

Customers can now connect their Okta Identity Cloud to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using Okta to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Okta experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in. AWS SSO and Okta Identity Cloud use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security. 

The AWS Toolkit for JetBrains now supports CLion, PhpStorm, GoLand, and RubyMine. Customers will now be able to download the AWS Toolkit from these newly supported JetBrains IDEs by browsing the plug-in marketplace from within the IDEs.  

In a few clicks you can take advantage of new Apache Kafka features and bug fixes by upgrading the version of Apache Kafka deployed on new and existing Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Amazon MSK uses rolling upgrade best practices to maintain high availability and support cluster I/O throughout a version upgrade. See the Amazon MSK version upgrade user guide to learn about version upgrades and how to ensure clients maintain high availability throughout an upgrade.

AWS CodePipeline’s supported action types now include AWS Step Functions, making it easier for customers to invoke complex workflows as part of their release process. With the new action type, CodePipeline Stages can now trigger Step Functions state machines which support conditional branching, error-handling, asynchronous tasks, and easily invoke other AWS services through service-integrations .