AWS Backup now supports cross-account backup, enabling AWS customers to securely copy backups across accounts within their AWS Organizations.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now introduces new policy defaults for passwords of IAM users. This policy improves the default security for all AWS customers by ensuring customers set stronger passwords for IAM users in their AWS accounts. 

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in Europe (London) and Canada (Central) regions. Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances for a broad spectrum of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, CPU-based machine learning inference, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, now supports automated, multi-region replication of your directory. Now you can deploy and use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD (Enterprise Edition) directory across multiple AWS Regions. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to deploy and manage your Microsoft Windows and Linux workloads globally. With the automated multi-region replication capability you get higher resiliency, while your applications use a local directory for optimal performance. 

Amazon Cognito is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and Europe (Paris) Regions. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect. 

AWS Service Catalog administrators can now add Service Catalog governance to their existing AWS CloudFormation stacks. Once imported into Service Catalog, administrators can manage stack updates, govern parameters, and enforce tagging. With this new feature, long-running stacks can be governed while leaving the underlying resources untouched.

You can now use Cruise Control to more easily scale and balance I/O in your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters. Cruise Control is a popular tool among Apache Kafka users because it drastically simplifies partition management. Cruise Control can also be used to monitor the state and health of clusters using an optional user interface dashboard.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports the ability to reload dictionary files without reindexing your data. Elasticsearch uses analyzers to convert string data into terms or tokens that power its search capabilities. These analyzers can do things like remove white space and stop words, perform stemming, handle compound words, and add synonyms. Previously, on Amazon Elasticsearch Service these analyzers could only process data as it was indexed. If you wanted to add some additional synonyms at a later time, you had to reindex your data with the new dictionary file. 

To provide enhanced performance and read scalability, Amazon RDS on VMware adds support for read replicas across Custom Availability Zones for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. You can create cross-custom-availability-zone read replicas of a DB instance to serve read traffic in one region, thereby increasing aggregate read throughput. A read replica can also be promoted to become a standalone DB instance if the source DB instance fails.