AWS CloudFormation announces the general availability (GA) of AWS CloudFormation Guard (cfn-guard ), which enhances the preview release of cfn-guard (June 2020) with new features. Cfn-guard is an open-source command line interface (CLI) that checks CloudFormation templates for policy compliance using a simple, policy-as-code, declarative language.  

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the waiters feature in the AWS SDK for Java 2.x . The waiters feature is an abstraction that enables you to validate that AWS resources, such as DynamoDB tables or Amazon S3 buckets, are in a specified state before performing operations on those resources. When interacting with AWS APIs that are asynchronous, such as DynamoDB CreateTable , customers often need to wait for that particular resource to become available in order to perform further actions on it. The waiter utility provides a simple API that polls a resource until a desired state is reached or until it is determined that the resource will never enter into the desired state.

AWS Secrets Manager has been authorized by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) under DoD’s Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (DoD CC SRG) at Impact Levels (IL) 4 and IL 5 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions . With this authorization, DoD Mission Owners can now use Secrets Manager to support unclassified National Security Systems (NSS) and mission critical information.

It’s now faster and easier for you to share your Amazon WorkSpaces images across your AWS accounts. With this release, you can share your Amazon WorkSpaces image in one AWS account with another account with a few simple clicks. This helps you simplify and accelerate deployment of Amazon WorkSpaces while improving consistency, compliance, and security of your Amazon WorkSpaces. 

You can now enable AWS WAF integration for your GraphQL APIs in AWS AppSync, making it easier to protect your APIs against common web exploits.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now creates machine learning models up to 40% faster with up to 200% higher accuracy, even with small and imbalanced datasets. SageMaker Autopilot is a fully managed service that makes it easy to quickly and automatically create machine learning models, without requiring any prior ML or programming experience. 

In 2019 we launched Amazon EC2’s vCPU-based limits for On-Demand Instances to simplify the limit management experience for EC2 customers. Now, we have also made the same improvements for Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. We have migrated the account limit for Spot Instances from being instance based to a vCPU based limit experience. Starting today, you will be able to manage Spot limits from the Amazon EC2 console and the Service Quotas console .

AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection now supports CloudFormation Registry resource types, so you can detect unmanaged configuration changes on additional AWS resources, as well as third-party or private ones.  

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an automated machine learning (AutoML) feature that allows customers to find objects and scenes in images, unique to their business needs, with a simple inference API. Customers can create a custom ML model simply by uploading labeled images. No ML expertise is required.

AWS Client VPN is a managed, scalable, virtual private network service that enables users to securely access both AWS resources and on-premises networks. By enabling Client-to-Client connectivity in either the AWS Console or through the AWS CLI, a VPN client can establish a secure connection to another VPN client.