Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Region. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into data stores and analytics tools. You can capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools you are already using today. 

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams has changed the license of the Amazon Kinesis Producer Library from the Amazon Software License to Apache License 2.0. This change allows you to easily build and integrate the Amazon Kinesis Producer Library with other Apache software projects such as Apache Flink and Apache Spark. 

Starting today, you can send diagnostic interrupts to your Amazon EC2 instances. Diagnostic interrupts help you debug unresponsive instances and conduct root cause analysis.

You can now launch Amazon RDS instances for Oracle Database 18c.  

AWS Transfer for SFTP (AWS SFTP) is now available in the Europe (Stockholm) and South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Regions. AWS SFTP enables you to easily move file transfer workloads to AWS, eliminating the need for you to build and operate Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) infrastructure. 

You can now use AWS Elemental MediaTailor for server-side ad insertion (SSAI) in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region. AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a content personalization and monetization service that lets you serve video with targeted ads to viewers while maintaining broadcast quality-of-service in multiscreen video applications.

Amazon SageMaker is now available in 4 additional AWS regions in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific. With this announcement, Amazon SageMaker is available in the South America (São Paulo), EU North (Stockholm), EU West (Paris), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS regions.

AWS Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (AWS Site-to-Site VPN) now supports digital certificates for Internet Key Exchange (IKE) authentication, so for AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections, you can now use private certificates from AWS Certificate Manager instead of pre-shared keys. This enables you to take advantage of the added security and flexibility that digital certificates offer.

Alexa for Business now enables customers to designate, at a room profile level, if voice recordings from devices they manage will be manually reviewed and used to improve our services. Using a new preference, Data Use Policy, located in the Room Profile, customers can either allow (default) or disallow Alexa for Business’s manual reviews of voice recordings which are used to improve Amazon’s services. By default, only a very small percentage of these recordings are manually reviewed in order to improve these algorithms. To learn more about this feature, and how-to create and manage Room Profiles in Alexa for Business, please see our documentation .

AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Device Management have reduced prices in the Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.