Starting today, Amazon EC2 A1 instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. A1 instances, introduced at re:Invent 2018, are the first EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton Processors that feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS. A1 instances deliver up to 45% cost savings for scale-out and Arm-based workloads. These include applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, caching fleets, and distributed data stores that are supported by the extensive Arm ecosystem. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm developer community. 

Amazon Lex now supports sentiment analysis by natively integrating with Amazon Comprehend. Up until now, you had to implement custom logic using Amazon Comprehend APIs to assess user sentiment. Starting today, you can enable sentiment analysis for your bot with a single-click in the Amazon Lex Console. Amazon Comprehend uses natural language processing to detect the overall sentiment in text and returns value as positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. 

Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription for audio and video in Gulf Arabic, Swiss German, Hebrew, Japanese, Malay, Telugu, and Turkish languages. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add speech-to-text capability to applications. Organizations can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files quickly.

Amazon EC2 G4 instances which provide industry’s most cost-effective GPU platform for deploying machine learning models in production and graphics-intensive applications are now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Middle East (Bahrain) AWS regions, bringing the total number of available regions to 19. 

AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service that simplifies application development by letting you create a flexible API to securely access, manipulate, and combine data from one or more data sources. Today we’re releasing two important features to improve performance and consistency for applications using AppSync APIs. 

Tag-on create is now available for AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and Private Certificate Authority (CA). Upon creation, you can tag your ACM certificates and private certificate authorities (CAs). By tagging resources at time of creation you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation. 

Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 introduces new streaming instances based on the EC2 z1d family. EC2 z1d instances deliver high single-thread performance using custom Intel® Xeon® processors with a sustained all-core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance. Z1d provides both high compute and high memory performance, which is ideal for electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and software with high per-core licensing costs. Z1D instances are also built on the new AWS Nitro System, which offloads many traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware to improve performance, availability, and security.

Amazon Transcribe is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add a speech-to-text capability to applications. Organizations can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files quickly.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is now available in the AWS Canada (ca-central-1) region.

With the addition of a new polymorphic data type, GEOMETRY, Amazon Redshift now provides the ability to natively process spatial data. This capability enables customers to store, retrieve, and process spatial data so you can enhance your business insights by integrating spatial data into your analytical queries.