Amazon EMR now supports running multiple EMR steps at the same time, the ability to cancel running steps, and AWS Step Functions. Running steps in parallel allows you to run more advanced workloads, increase cluster resource utilization, and reduce the amount of time taken to complete your workload. The number of steps allowed to run at once is configurable and can be set when a cluster is launched and at any time after the cluster has started. With the ability to cancel running steps, you now have more control over step execution, including the ability to forcefully cancel steps. Running steps in parallel is also supported with AWS Step Functions, allowing you to create and scale clusters, and orchestrate step execution using Step Functions workflows.

Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL minor versions 11.5 and 10.10 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database , we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 11.5 and 10.10 . This release contains cumulative fixes including an important security fix, bug fixes, and other improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.  

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports creating and managing Network Load Balancers (NLB) in shared VPCs. Using NLBs with VPC sharing, you can now route traffic across subnets in VPCs owned by a centrally managed account in the same AWS Organization.

You can now visualize and alarm on a custom percentile of the AWS Lambda metric for invocation duration.

We are excited to introduce the Amazon WorkSpaces 3.0 client for Linux (Ubuntu Linux 18.04). This 3.0 client also contains some new enhancements including friendly naming for registration codes (directories) and a new UI. 

AWS Managed Services (AMS) launched support for Windows 2019. You can now launch a standard and security enhanced Windows 2019 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in your AMS managed landing zones. Windows 2019 support has expanded the addressable inventory of customer applications that can be migrated to AMS for ongoing operations with minimal refactoring.  

Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database , we have updated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility to support PostgreSQL version 11.4. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) launched support for AWS CloudFormation (CFN) Stack Update. You can now make changes to your stack’s configurations or change it’s resources, such as new input parameter values or updated template, through the AMS request for change (RFC) process. Changes submitted are validated for safety and only nondestructive changes are automatically executed. For destructive changes, a change set is provided to you for approval before automated execution.  

Customers can now connect Azure Active Directory to AWS Single Sign-on (SSO) once, manage permissions to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable users to sign in using Azure AD to access assigned AWS accounts and applications. This makes it easier for administrators to grant access to their existing users and groups, and provides users the convenience of the sign-in experience they know from Office 365 with single-click access to assigned AWS accounts.  

Starting today, Amazon Redshift adds support for materialized views in preview. Materialized views provide significantly faster query performance for repeated and predictable analytical workloads such as dashboarding, queries from business intelligence (BI) tools, and ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data processing.