Amazon Athena is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) region.

Starting today, Amazon Connect pricing for US Inbound Direct Inward Dial (DID) has decreased from $0.0030 to $0.0022 per minute, and US Outbound has decreased from $0.0065 to $0.0048 per minute.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use, self-service, cloud contact center service you can use to deliver more engaging customer service experiences. The self-service graphical interface makes it easy to design contact flows, manage agent utilization, and track performance metrics. You can create an Amazon Connect cloud contact center with just a few clicks in the Amazon Connect console , allowing your agents to be up and ready to take calls within minutes.

For a list of regions where Amazon Connect is available, see the AWS Region table . First time Amazon Connect customers can try the service by using the AWS Free Tier . Visit the Amazon Connect website to learn more about Amazon Connect.

Amazon DynamoDB  now applies adaptive capacity in real time in response to changing application traffic patterns, which helps you maintain uninterrupted performance indefinitely, even for imbalanced workloads. In addition, instant adaptive capacity helps you provision read and write throughput more efficiently instead of overprovisioning to accommodate uneven data access patterns. Instant adaptive capacity is on by default at no additional cost for all DynamoDB tables and global secondary indexes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of AWS Ground Station, a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, uplink, downlink, process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations. Ground stations are facilities that use antennas to provide communications between the earth and your satellite.  

This Quick Start automatically deploys an Aviatrix Controller to enable Aviatrix Orchestrator for AWS Transit Gateway on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in about 10 minutes.

Metric filters in CloudWatch Logs allow you to turn log data into numerical CloudWatch metrics that you can graph or set an alarm on. With metric filters, you can, for example, create CloudWatch metrics that count the number of errors in your logs, or that represent a latency value from your web servers. You can then visualize those metrics in CloudWatch Dashboards or use them to define alarm thresholds in CloudWatch Alarms.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server 2017 which enables you to improve availability and durability of your SQL Server deployments by automatically replicating databases between two AWS Availability Zones (AZ). This feature is now available for SQL Server 2017 latest minor version (14.00.3049.1.v1) for the Enterprise Edition database engine. Previously, in November 2018, we announced support for this feature for SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.

Amazon GuardDuty is now a Service Organization Control (SOC) compliant service. This compliance certification applies to all AWS Regions where Amazon GuardDuty is available. 

AWS IoT Device Tester v1.2, a Windows/Linux/Mac test automation tool for connected devices, is now available for Amazon FreeRTOS 1.4.8. You can download the latest release here .

You can now enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Encryption by Default, ensuring that all new EBS volumes created in your account are encrypted. Encryption by Default opt-in settings are specific to individual AWS regions in your account. With increasingly strict regulations on data, this feature makes it easier for you to encrypt data on EBS so that you achieve your compliance and security goals.