AWS Managed Services (AMS) launched support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4. You can now run business critical applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in your AMS Managed landing zones. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support has expanded the addressable inventory of customer applications that can be migrated to AMS for ongoing operations with minimal refactoring.

You can now use Amazon WorkSpaces in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution which runs on AWS. With WorkSpaces, you can provision virtual, cloud-based desktops for your users, providing them access to the documents, applications, and resources they need, anywhere, anytime, from any supported device. You can pay either monthly or hourly, just for the WorkSpaces you launch, which helps you save money when compared to traditional desktops and on-premises VDI solutions. 

Customers can now deploy to ECS from within a GitHub repository through the new ECS starter workflow on GitHub Actions. Whenever new code is pushed into a repository, the workflow builds and deploys it to AWS using 4 new GitHub Actions from the GitHub Marketplace. This speeds up the deployment process by automating each step and allows developers to push and test code in the cloud more efficiently.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now offers Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS) compliant endpoints. FIPS 140-2 is a U.S. and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.

You can now use Systems Manager Automation to build and share standardized operational playbooks to ensure consistency across users, accounts, and AWS Regions. With the ability to now execute scripts and add wiki-style documentation, you can reduce errors and eliminate manual steps such as navigating written procedures in wikis and running terminal commands. 

You can now assign tags to Amazon Connect users to better organize or manage access to them via API. Tags are key value pairs which enable you to control access to Amazon Connect users who are tagged by team, role, or other criteria. For example, you can grant API access to all agents, to only agents tagged to a given line of business (LOB), or if you use third-party outsources, to only agents tagged as their employees.

You can now pass variables from one action to another in your pipeline. Previously, there was no first-class support for passing metadata between actions during an execution. You can now dynamically configure your actions with variables that will be evaluated at execution time.

Amazon CloudSearch now lets you configure your domains to require that all traffic be submitted over HTTPS so that you can ensure that communications between your clients and your domain are encrypted. You can also configure the minimum required TLS version to accept, with TLS 1.0 as the default. This option helps ensure that your clients are configured correctly. For information on enabling this feature, see the documentation.

Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription for audio and video in Irish English, Scottish English, Welsh English, Dutch, Farsi, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Tamil languages.

Today, AWS CloudFormation is announcing resource import which allows you to bring existing AWS application resources into CloudFormation. With this launch, you can start managing existing resources such as Amazon S3 Buckets or DynamoDB Tables with all the benefits of CloudFormation, regardless of how they were created or managed previously. You can now leverage automation at scale with these resources instead of relying on manual processes or maintaining custom scripts.