Now, Amazon Cloud Directory makes it easier for you to develop applications faster with the Managed Schema. Instead of defining and setting up your own schema, you can now use the Managed Schema to create a directory and start creating and retrieving objects immediately.

Amazon RDS Read Replicas for PostgreSQL can now be deployed in a Multi-AZ configuration.

Amazon RDS offers Multi-AZ deployments and Read Replicas to support availability, scalability, and disaster recovery requirements for production databases. Now, with the ability to deploy Read Replicas in a Multi-AZ configuration, you can have more resilient Read Replicas, improved DR strategy, and a simplified engine upgrade process with high availability.

For many read-heavy workloads, including analytics and OLTP, serving read requests is considered business critical. Having a standby Read Replica in a Multi-AZ configuration ensures high availability for the Read Replica. In the event of the Read Replica host failure or even an AZ failure, the Multi-AZ standby is activated automatically, and the read requests are served from the new server.

In the event of source production database failure, a Read Replica with Multi-AZ can be promoted to become the new production database, and the new production database is instantly highly available, as it is already configured with Multi-AZ.

During the database upgrade process, a Read Replica in a Multi-AZ configuration can be first upgraded to a new database engine version, and then promoted to a production database instance. Since that instance is configured with Multi-AZ, it already has high availability to serve your mission critical application requirements.

For more information, see the Amazon RDS User Guide .

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory , also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, is now available in AWS China (Beijing) region, operated by Sinnet, and AWS China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD. AWS Managed Microsoft AD enables you to use a highly available managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.

You can now use Amazon Lex chatbots with Amazon Connect in the US West (Oregon) AWS region. Using Amazon Lex, a service that allows you to create intelligent conversational chatbots, you can turn your Amazon Connect contact flows into natural conversations. Callers to your Amazon Connect contact center can interact with an Amazon Lex chatbot and perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting a balance on an account, or scheduling an appointment, without needing to speak to an agent.

A three-year demo wraps up, and, after some lessons learned, scores a respectable 6 on a scale of 9. Still not ready for primetime, though.

The Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Producer SDK is now available as a Gstreamer-plugin, and as Docker-images for Ubuntu, MacOS, and Raspberry Pi devices to help you stream video into AWS in minutes.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are now available in AWS GovCloud (US) , an isolated region 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.

Starting today, you can create and co-author Microsoft Office files in real time in the Amazon WorkDocs web application using collaborative editing powered by Hancom Thinkfree Office Online. Users can now create new documents, worksheets, and presentations, share with co-workers, and have them make changes to files directly from a web browser. Users can also collaboratively edit Microsoft Office files from the WorkDocs web application using Hancom Thinkfree Office Online. 

Amazon Sumerian is now available in six new AWS regions: North America (Montreal), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and EU (Paris). This expands the number of AWS regions where Sumerian is available to 15. Please visit the AWS region table for more information.  

Amazon QuickSight Authors can now replace datasets in an analysis with a single click. This allows Authors to create analyses and publish dashboards using test data sets from spreadsheets or sample databases, and then easily replace these data sets as necessary. More details here .