Amazon SageMaker announces several enhancements to the built-in DeepAR, BlazingText, and Linear Learner algorithms. Chainer 4.1 is now supported on the pre-configured containers within Amazon SageMaker.

Starting today, you can access custom Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations for your Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch reservations via AWS Cost Explorer, in addition to viewing RI purchase recommendations for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS reservations.

Amazon API Gateway usage plans now allow you to throttle requests for individual methods at different rates by configuring method level throttling.

Amazon Transcribe  is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add a speech-to-text capability to your applications. You can use Amazon Transcribe to create text transcripts of audio and video files. Starting today, you can designate your own S3 buckets to store transcription outputs rather than S3 buckets maintained by the Amazon Transcribe service. This allows you to maintain finer-grained control of your data across your entire transcription workflow.

AWS Step Functions is now available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai). AWS Step Functions makes it easier to coordinate the components of distributed systems, serverless applications, and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly.

Starting today, AWS Secrets Manager supports AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to route data between your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Secrets Manager entirely within the AWS network.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. 

Amazon SageMaker is now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed platform that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale.

Amazon SageMaker now supports the k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) and Object Detection algorithms to address additional identification, classification, and regression use cases in machine learning. This addition expands the list of built-in algorithms for SageMaker to 15.

Details: Amazon CloudFront announces four new Edge locations: Cape Town, South Africa; Denver, Colorado; Frankfurt, Germany; and Taipei, Taiwan. Cape Town is our second Edge location in South Africa, the first being Johannesburg, launched in June 2018. Customers delivering content in South Africa are already seeing up to 75% latency improvements on average. The addition of a new Edge location in Denver, Colorado doubles our capacity in Denver. The new Edge location in Frankfurt is the seventh in the city, while the new Edge location in Taipei is the third in the city. The addition of these locations continues to expand CloudFront’s global footprint and capacity, allowing us to deliver better performance and scale for our customers.

A full list of CloudFront’s global infrastructure can be seen on the CloudFront Details webpage .