You can now enable Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, ensuring that EBS volumes restored from FSR-enabled snapshots instantly receive full provisioned performance. You can enable FSR for an additional hourly charge to your regular snapshot cost for each Availability Zone (AZ) in which FSR is enabled. This new capability enables you to restore multiple volumes from a snapshot without the need to initialize volumes yourself. Improved and predictable performance helps with use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), backup & restore, test/dev volume copies, and booting from custom AMIs.

You can now use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) in the South America (Sao Paulo) region to securely share your AWS resources across AWS accounts or within your AWS organization. You can centrally create resources in a multi-account environment, and use AWS RAM to share those resources across your accounts. This reduces operational overhead while maintaining the benefits of a multi-account strategy. At this time you can use AWS RAM to share Amazon VPC subnets and traffic mirror targets in South America (Sao Paulo) region, eliminating the need to create duplicate resources in each of your accounts and driving down costs. To learn more see AWS Resource Access Manager .

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces expansion of AWS Ground Station to the Middle East (Bahrain) region. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations.

This Quick Start deploys a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) endpoint for downloading and managing updates on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 30 minutes. This Quick Start is for system administrators and IT engineers who need to use WSUS as the endpoint where Windows servers and other Microsoft applications are authorized to acquire updates.

You can now reference Organizational Units (OUs), which are groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations , in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies , making it easier to define access for your IAM principals (users and roles) to the AWS resources in your organization. AWS Organizations lets you organize your accounts into OUs to align them with their business or security purpose.  

Amazon Cognito now supports Sign in with Apple, making it easier for customers who use Cognito for identity and authentication to reach a broad base of Apple users. This feature is available now in Amazon Cognito User Pools at the same cost as other social identity providers.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe returned transcriptions with the highest confidence score only. Starting today, you can specify that Amazon Transcribe return additional transcriptions as well. You can use these alternative transcriptions to see different interpretations of the transcribed audio, giving you added optionality and flexibility to select the most suitable text results for your application. For example, in media asset management (MAM) applications that enable users to review and splice together subtitles, users can now select from up to ten alternative transcriptions. Alternative transcripts are available across all languages supported by Amazon Transcribe.

You can now block merging pull requests until specified rules are met. Previously, you could only block merging a pull request through custom IAM permissions. You can now create an approval rule specifically for a pull request, or create approval rule templates to be applied to all future pull requests in a repository. You can specify rule requirements, such as the total number of approvals or approval from a specific user, that must be met before code is merged. Approval rules and approval rule templates help ensure that only high quality code changes are merged into your codebase.

AWS Lambda now supports Amazon SQS FIFO as an event source. This allows you to use Lambda for building event-driven applications where ordered events and operations are critical. For example, you can build an application that displays the correct product price by sending price modifications in the right order.  

You can now add tags while copying snapshots. Previously, a user had to first copy the snapshot and then add tags to the copied snapshot manually. Moving forward, you can specify the list of tags you wish to be applied to the copied snapshot as a parameter on the Copy Snapshot API.