We’re excited to announce the launch of a new Exam Readiness course for the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification exam. Available digitally and via classroom, this course teaches you how to interpret exam questions, apply concepts being tested by the exam, and allocate your study time. You’ll also have a chance to work through sample questions to understand the rationale behind correct and incorrect answer choices.

Amazon Textract is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) and US West (N. California) regions. 

In addition to Amazon CloudWatch, you now have the option to monitor your Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters using Prometheus , an open source monitoring system for time-series metrics. Open Monitoring with Prometheus enables you to monitor Amazon MSK using solutions like Datadog , Lenses , New Relic , Sumo logic , or a Prometheus server, and easily migrate your existing monitoring dashboards to Amazon MSK.

Amazon FSx, a service that provides fully managed Windows (Amazon FSx for Windows File Server) and high-performance Linux (Amazon FSx for Lustre) file systems, has added several enhancements to the AWS Management Console, including the ability to view Amazon FSx CloudWatch metrics and the ability to add and update tags directly from within the Amazon FSx Console .

The Amazon Builders’ Library is a collection of living articles that take readers under the hood of how Amazon architects, releases, and operates the software underpinning Amazon.com and AWS. The Builders’ Library articles are written by Amazon’s senior technical leaders and engineers, covering topics across architecture, software delivery, and operations. For example, readers can see how Amazon automates software delivery to achieve over 150 million deployments a year or how Amazon’s engineers implement principles such as shuffle sharding to build resilient systems that are highly available and fault tolerant.

Starting today, all registered sellers with a public listing in AWS Marketplace can extend a custom contract through Seller Private Offers. Additionally, starting in Q1 2020, sellers will have a simplified fee structure and reduced listing fees when an offer is extended through Seller Private Offers.

AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with over 7,000 software listings and data products, has announced Discovery API, a new API created for select partners.  

Today, the AWS Partner Network (APN) announced the APN Global Startup Program , a dedicated go-to-market (GTM) program for eligible Startup APN Technology Partners. This program is tailored for fast-scaling global startups to provide the resources they need to grow their cloud-based businesses.

Today, we announced the AWS Retail Competency for retail customers looking for highly specialized APN Partners offering retail technology on AWS. The AWS Retail Competency saves our customers time and takes the validation process out of the equation as it takes care of the heavy lifting of identifying, vetting, and highlighting industry specialized APN Partners who have proven success and deep technical capabilities when it comes to retail.

Today, the AWS Partner Network (APN) announced AWS Service Ready Program, a new way for AWS customers to identify if a tool or application will integrate with AWS services running in their cloud environment. The AWS Service Ready Program identifies and validates products from APN Technology Partners that integrate with specific AWS services to help companies find products compatible with specific AWS services. AWS Service Ready provides a way for companies globally to identify and adopt AWS service integrated tools.