AWS Direct Connect is now live at MedOne in Haifa, Israel. This is the first AWS Direct Connect location in Israel. Customers in Israel can now locally establish a dedicated network connection from their on-premises to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. With global access for AWS Direct Connect, you can reach AWS resources in any global AWS region from any AWS Direct Connect locations using global public virtual interface(s) and Direct Connect gateway. When connecting to any AWS region, your data will not hairpin via the associated AWS region for the location if it is not in the shortest path to your desired AWS region. 

AWS now offers the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Storage. MAP for Storage provides services, best practices, and tools to help our customers save costs, accelerate their migrations, and modernize their storage workloads on AWS.

AWS Firewall Manager has introduced new pre-configured rules to help customers audit their VPC security groups and get detailed reports of non-compliance from a central administrator account. This feature makes it easier for customers to centrally audit their security groups using pre-configured rules they can readily enable out of box across their accounts and resources, taking away the heavy-lifting of configuring custom audit checks manually.  

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Starting today, you can assign AWS resource tags to Spot Instance requests on creation, in addition to the tags for each individual, launched Spot Instance.. Use tags in your Spot Instance requests to more easily identify their purpose. For example, you can use tags to identify all Spot Instance requests used by a particular department, project, or application. 

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use AWS PrivateLink to access Amazon Kendra from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs or requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides secure connectivity between VPCs and AWS services, without ever leaving the Amazon network. 

Amazon EMR now supports Managed Scaling , a new feature that automatically resizes your EMR cluster for best performance at the lowest possible cost, without the need to specify scaling policies. You can reduce up to 60% cost compared with fixed-size clusters by setting the minimum and maximum compute resource limits for a cluster. 

Amazon Connect enables customers to use Amazon Polly’s latest US-English neural voice , Kevin. Built on Amazon Polly’s neural text-to-speech technology , this new voice delivers groundbreaking improvements in speech quality, making automated conversations sound more lifelike by improving the pitch, inflection, intonation, and tempo.  

AWS Storage Gateway simplifies cache management for File Gateway by enabling you to create multiple file shares for a single Amazon S3 bucket and synchronize the gateway’s local cache with an Amazon S3 bucket based on frequency of directory access. These enhancements simplify the management of your gateway by providing flexibility when configuring new file shares and streamlining the cache refresh process.  

Amazon EMR now supports encrypting log files using Customer-managed Customer master keys (CMKs) stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Amazon EMR automatically upload log files to Amazon S3 when logging and debugging is enabled With this new feature, you can associate Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS when launching a cluster. Amazon EMR will automatically encrypt logs using the Customer managed CMKs in AWS KMS. Previously you could only encrypt log files written to S3 using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3). Click here to learn more about encrypting log files please see the documentation .

With this release, Amplify CLI makes it easy to use Lambda layers to share code & assets across various Lambda functions. Amplify CLI provides a guided creation, update, and deployment process for Lambda layers designed for Node.js, and Python runtimes.