AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector are now available in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.  

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to provision Amplify Console resources, enabling repeatable and reliable web app deployments. CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment and simplifies the roll out across multiple AWS accounts and/or regions with just a couple of clicks.

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. It allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. 

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to specify AWS Client VPN Endpoint resources. This improvement enables you to use CloudFormation to create AWS Client VPN Endpoints, associate target subnets, create routes and rules —along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure—in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

You can now use the AWS Cloud Map service registry selectors with AWS App Mesh. This new option allows you to define a subset of endpoints (through matching on key and value selectors) that were defined in Cloud Map. You simply change your App Mesh VirtualNode configuration to use Cloud Map, add the selectors for the subset of service endpoints you want the VirtualNode to represent and register your running service (IP addresses and metadata) with the corresponding Cloud Map Service name and Namespace and keys and value metadata. When routing traffic to that Virtual Node, App Mesh will route to the endpoints that match the CloudMap key and value selectors you configured. 

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now integrated with AWS CloudFormation and HashiCorp Terraform which allows customers to describe and provision Amazon MSK resources using code. These services make it easy to provision and configure Amazon MSK clusters in a repeatable, automated, and secure manner. 

AWS CodeBuild is now available to customers in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service in the cloud. CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools. For more information, visit the CodeBuild product page .

AWS GovCloud (US) is Amazon’s isolated cloud infrastructure and services designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements of US Government agencies, as well as contractors, educational institutions, and other US customers that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

To learn more about AWS CodeBuild, visit our documentation . To see all regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS region table .

You can now use a single reader endpoint to connect to your Redis read replicas. Until today, to easily connect to your read replicas you had to manage multiple endpoints at the application level. The new feature allows you to direct all read traffic to your ElastiCache for Redis cluster through a single, cluster-level endpoint.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports z1d instance types. Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance.

Amazon QuickSight announced the launch of sheets within dashboards. Sheets allow better organization of information within the dashboard, where visuals related to specific subject areas or topics can be organized in separate sheets and distinctly identified through the tab name. As a reader, you can then navigate to a single dashboard to get a comprehensive view of all the insights related to a topic. For more information, see here .