AWS Systems Manager enables you to manage large hybrid environments through an advanced on-premises instance management tier. With this launch, the advanced tier is now available in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. The advanced tier enables you to manage hybrid environments with over 1,000 instances. The advanced tier also enables advanced functionality, such as using interactive shell access with Systems Manager Session Manager to connect to on-premises instances. Session Manager removes the need to open inbound ports, manage SSH keys, or use bastion hosts.  

AWS Systems Manager Distributor is a new feature that you can use to securely store and distribute software packages, such as software agents, in your accounts. Distributor integrates with existing Systems Manager features to simplify and scale the package distribution, installation, and update process. 

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. Amazon Transcribe now supports transcription of audio in the following new languages: Russian and Chinese Mandarin-Mainland. These languages expand upon the existing languages already available in Amazon Transcribe: US English, UK English, AU English, Indian English, Spanish, US Spanish, French, Canadian French, Italian, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, and Modern Standard Arabic.

Amazon ElastiCache introduces online vertical scaling for Redis Cluster mode. You can now scale up or scale down your sharded Redis Cluster on demand. Amazon ElastiCache resizes your cluster by changing the node type, while the cluster continues to stay online and serve incoming requests. 

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Forecast, which has been in preview since re:Invent 2018. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. Based on the same technology used at Amazon.com, Amazon Forecast uses machine learning to combine time series data with additional variables to build forecasts.

Starting today, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) for EBS Snapshots is available in the EU (Stockholm) region. Amazon DLM provides a simple, automated way to back up data stored on Amazon EBS volumes. With this feature, you no longer have to rely on custom scripts to create and manage your EBS volume backups. 

AWS Direct Connect support for AWS Transit Gateway is now available in EU (Frankfurt) and EU (London) regions. With this feature, customers can connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) in multiple AWS Regions to their on-premises networks using 1/2/5/10 Gbps AWS Direct Connect connections.

To more easily identify the purpose of Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues and track costs associated with messaging, you can categorize queues using metadata tags. For example, you can use tags to identify all Amazon SQS queues used by a particular department, project, or application.

AWS DataSync now supports the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, providing you a simple way to automate and accelerate copying data between SMB file shares, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. With this launch, you can reduce on-premises storage infrastructure by shifting SMB-based data stores and content repositories from file servers and network attached storage (NAS) arrays to Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS for analytics, archiving, or backup use cases. 

We are excited to announce the availability of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store in AWS China (Beijing) Region operated by SINNET, and AWS China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. Parameter Store provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data and passwords. You can reference this information dynamically from your application or from other AWS services.