Starting today, Amazon EC2 C5n instances are available in the AWS Europe (London) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions. In addition, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, R5dn instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS Shield Advanced now allows proactive engagement from the DDoS Response Team (DRT) when a DDoS event is detected. When you turn on proactive engagement, the DRT will directly contact you if an Amazon Route 53 health check associated with your protected resource becomes unhealthy during an event that’s detected by Shield Advanced. This allows you to engage with experts more quickly when the availability of your application might be affected by a suspected attack. You can receive proactive engagement for network-layer and transport-layer events on Elastic IP addresses and Global Accelerator accelerators, and for web request floods on CloudFront distributions and Application Load Balancers.

Alexa for Business is now available on Lifesize meeting rooms systems. Lifesize meeting room systems with Alexa built-in enables Lifesize customers into a wide range of productivity-enhancing, voice-activated commands without requiring additional hardware. Users get a touch-free way to interact with Lifesize room systems and can save time by leveraging Alexa to check into rooms, join meetings, and call contacts. With the Lifesize directory integration, users can easily leverage name-based calling to reach any contact, room system, or meetings within their organization.  

We’re excited to offer our first foundational business course for new alliance teams and sales professionals at APN Technology Partner organizations. AWS Solutions Training for Partners: APN Technology Partners Co-Selling with AWS – Business will provide partners with a fundamental understanding of what it means to co-sell with AWS and how to be prepared to engage with the AWS sales organization.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports SQL Workbench and SQL CLI to run queries on Elasticsearch indexes with the conventional and familiar database language. SQL Workbench, a popular open source visual tool used to manage database environments, is now integrated in Kibana to view the results of SQL queries executed on Elasticsearch indexes. SQL CLI provides the flexibility to run ad-hoc or predefined queries from client applications written in different programming languages.

Amazon Personalize uses machine learning technology perfected from over 20 years of recommender systems development at Amazon.com. With Amazon Personalize you are can personalize recommendations for products, videos, music, ebooks, ads, marketing emails, and more, for your users, without any prior machine learning experience.

You can now write the results of an Amazon Redshift query to an external table in Amazon S3 either in text or Apache Parquet formats. The external table metadata will be automatically updated and can be stored in AWS Glue, AWS Lake Formation, or your Hive Metastore data catalog. This enables you to easily share your data in the data lake and have it immediately available for analysis with Amazon Redshift Spectrum and other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker. Amazon Redshift Spectrum enables you to power a lake house architecture to directly query and join data across your data warehouse and data lake.

Following the April 24, 2020 announcement of the availability of PostgreSQL 11 support with Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility in all commercial AWS Regions, we have expanded availability to AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. PostgreSQL 11 includes major improvements to partitioning, improvements to parallelism, and many other useful performance improvements like adding columns with a non-null column default faster. This version includes SQL stored procedures that allow embedded transactions within a procedure.

Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights launched several new features to enhance observability for customers’ applications. Starting today, CloudWatch Application Insights expands monitoring support for two databases, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server – MySQL and Amazon DynamoDB. This enables customers to easily configure monitors for these databases on CloudWatch and detect common errors such as slow queries, transaction conflicts, and replication latency.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster auto scaling is now available in seven additional regions: Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), China (Beijing), operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD.