Today we’re excited to release Lumberyard Beta 1.23 , featuring over 40 stability and performance improvements. Some highlights include the addition of cloth physics, EMotion FX improvements, and ease of use updates to the slice system. Let’s take a closer look:

Amazon RDS on VMware enhances custom AZ status to include a new state: Disconnected.

Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now enables you to optimize the price of throughput for predictable workloads by using provisioned capacity mode.  

The SMS channel in Amazon Pinpoint is now U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible. You can now use Amazon Pinpoint to send SMS messages that contain protected health information (PHI).

AWS Lambda now participates in Compute Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that allows customers to save money on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and now on AWS Lambda in exchange for making a commitment to a consistent amount of compute usage (e.g. $10/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term.

Customers can now sign-on to Amazon Redshift cluster with Microsoft Azure Active Directory(AD) identities. This allows customers who use Azure AD to be able to sign-on to Redshift without duplicating these identities in Redshift. 

This Quick Start automatically deploys the Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) PROTECTED Reference Architecture on the AWS Cloud in about an hour. It is for users who want to create cloud-based workloads that use AWS controls that meet the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Information Security Manual (ISM) requirements for sensitive government data handling at the PROTECTED classification level.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you enable and disable target tracking, step, and simple scaling policies. You can temporarily disable individual scaling policies during events such as maintenance windows. Once you’re ready, you can simply enable the scaling policies again to re-activate them, eliminating the need to delete and re-create the policies from scratch.

Amazon Neptune now enforces SSL connections to your database. You have the option to disable SSL in regions, such as US East (N. Virginia) or Europe (London), where both SSL and non-SSL connections are supported.

Starting today, you can now launch Z1d instance types when using Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the following AWS Regions:

North America

• US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and US West (N. California).

Europe, Middle East and Africa

• EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and EU (London).

Asia Pacific

• Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).