You can now use the full Unicode standard (UTF-8) in your Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics SQL applications. This new feature enables you to build real-time applications using the full breadth of languages and characters supported by the Unicode standard.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch versions 6.8 and 7.1 and their corresponding Kibana versions. Elasticsearch 6.8 is the final minor 6.x release and is the upgrade path for 7.x. Elasticsearch 7.1 is a major release and provides improved resiliency and scalability, and more efficient query processing. 

Containers provide a standard way to package your application’s code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. The AWS Cloud offers infrastructure resources optimized for running containers, as well as a set of orchestration services that make it easy for you to build and run containerized applications in production.

The new APN Container Navigate track provides a prescriptive journey for APN Partners who want to build expertise in AWS Container Services, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS App Mesh, and Amazon ECR. 

Through the APN Container Navigate track, APN Partners will learn how the services work together, best practices, how to identify potential workloads and how to correctly position Containers during technical and selling motions with their customers.

Learn more about Containers on AWS, and how to advance through the AWS Partner Network while building a specialized practice in Containers on AWS. 

AWS Storage Gateway now supports adding tags at the time of resource creation, and tag-based access control. You can assign tags to all Storage Gateway resources including gateways, file shares, volumes, volume snapshots, and tapes when creating them. You can also define fine-grained access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions. Tags are simple key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize, search, and identify resources, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces presence in Israel with its first Edge location in Tel Aviv. With this new Edge location, CloudFront will deliver up to a 75% reduction in latency for content delivery to the viewers in Israel. CloudFront now has a total of 188 Points of Presence (PoPs) in 70 cities across 31 countries.

To learn more about CloudFront pricing, including pricing for the new Edge location in Israel, visit our pricing page .

We’ve updated three courses designed specifically to help APN Partners identify areas of cost savings and data center economics for their customers. Partners will learn how to utilize market data, customer engagement models, and customer use cases to identify customer opportunities to move workloads to AWS. All courses have updated APN Partner tools and resources that help partners grow their business with AWS.

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring networks, members, and peer nodes. Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks across multiple AWS accounts. CloudFormation allows you to model and provision cloud resources as code in a safe, predictable, and consistent manner. With CloudFormation support for Managed Blockchain, you can create new blockchain networks and define network configurations, create a member and join an existing network, and describe member and network details such as voting policies. You can also create and configure peer nodes for your members in the network.

Amazon Rekognition provides a comprehensive set of face detection, analysis, and recognition features for image and video analysis. Today, we are launching accuracy and functionality improvements to our face analysis features. Face analysis generates metadata about detected faces in the form of gender, age range, emotions, attributes such as ‘Smile’, face pose, face image quality and face landmarks. With this release, we have further improved the accuracy of gender identification. In addition, we have improved accuracy for emotion detection (for all 7 emotions: ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, ‘Surprised’, ‘Disgusted’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Confused’) and added a new emotion: ‘Fear’. Lastly, we have improved age range estimation accuracy; you also get narrower age ranges across most age groups. 

AWS Step Functions now allows you to orchestrate more complex processes by composing modular, reusable workflows. 

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports the creation of content protected by multiple Digital Rights Management (multi-DRM) technologies using Common Media Application Format (CMAF), and has expanded the number of audio tracks supported.