Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and for PostgreSQL now supports a new Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database instances. This deployment option optimizes write transactions and is ideal when your workloads require additional read capacity, lower write transaction latency, more resilience from network jitter (which impacts the consistency of write transaction latency), and high availability and durability.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) now provides managed server-side encryption using SQS owned encryption keys (SSE-SQS) to protect sensitive data. SSE-SQS helps you build security-sensitive applications to support your encryption compliance and regulatory requirements. 

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in two additional AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Europe (London).

Today, we launched usability improvements for the navigation bar in the AWS Management Console . The improvements include a customizable favorites bar, updates to the services menu, and visual updates for consistency and accessibility. The new favorites bar appears when you have selected at least one service as a favorite in the services menu. It also supports an unlimited number of favorites that can be organized with drag and drop. The updated services menu groups services by category and provides an A to Z listing of all services. 

Amazon Redshift data sharing allows you to share live, transactionally consistent data across different Redshift clusters without the complexity and delays associated with data copies and data movement. Ability to share data across clusters that are in the same AWS account and across accounts is already available. Now sharing data across Redshift clusters in different AWS regions is available for preview. Cross-region data sharing preview is supported on all Redshift RA3 node types.

Amazon Voice Focus, an industry-leading speech enhancement technology currently used for noise reduction in Amazon Chime SDK meetings, is now available packaged as an Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Machine Image (AMI). The Amazon Voice Focus AMI helps developers, media producers, and content creators reduce noise in real-time speech capture or archived speech recordings. It is a cloud component that application builders can insert into their streaming media and content production pipelines to help reduce unwanted sounds and deliver the speech that users want to be heard.

You can now set Amazon S3 Lifecycle rules to limit the number of versions of an object to retain to achieve greater storage savings, and to choose objects to move to other storage classes based on size to optimize your lifecycle transitions. S3 Lifecycle helps you optimize your storage costs by transitioning or expiring your objects as they get older or are replaced by newer versions. You can use these Lifecycle configurations for your whole bucket, or for a subset of your objects by filtering by prefixes, object tags, or object size.

AWS Lambda now supports partial batch response for SQS as an event source. With this feature, when messages on an SQS queue fail to process, Lambda marks a batch of records in a message queue as partially successful and allows reprocessing of only the failed records. By processing information at a record-level instead of batch-level, AWS Lambda has removed the need of repetitive data transfer, increasing throughput and making Amazon SQS message queue processing more efficient. 

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles now provides contact history and customer information together in unified customer profiles at no charge, helping contact center managers personalize the contact center experience. Previously, contact center managers needed to work with software development teams to build profiles of end customers and their contact history. Now, they can use Customer Profiles at no charge to automatically store Amazon Connect contact history in a customer-centric view along with customer information such as name, phone number, account number, and address. Agents can access Customer Profiles to provide more personalized customer service through either the out-of-the-box Amazon Connect agent application or through their company’s custom agent applications, enabling them to provide more personalized customer service. Contact center managers can also use the Customer Profiles contact block when designing contact flows to personalize and automate the contact center experience.

Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. With live transcriptions, developers can include subtitles in meetings and create transcripts using Amazon Transcribe  or Amazon Transcribe Medical. Using the service-side integration between Amazon Chime SDK and your Amazon Transcribe account, application builders can now help identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) from transcripts. Builders can also utilize custom language models to help improve the transcription accuracy for their use cases.