AWS Lambda functions that are triggered from Amazon MSK topics can now access MSK clusters secured by IAM Access Control. This is in addition to SASL/SCRAM, which is already supported on Lambda. To get started, customers who select MSK as the event source for their Lambda function can configure their function’s execution role to allow Lambda to connect to their clusters and read from their topics. This feature requires no additional charge to use, and is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK is supported as an event source for AWS Lambda.

We are excited to announce a new recipe in Amazon Personalize that, when given an item, will recommend similar items based on both user-item interaction data and item metadata. The combination of your users’ historical interactions and the information you have about your items increases the relevance of recommendations and ensures similar items capture your users’ attention. To assess the similarity of items we measure how frequently the items are found together in users’ histories. As a benchmark, we found that the new recipe is 10.2% more accurate in identifying similar items than recipes that use interactions data alone. This means your users will be more likely to find the items most related to what they are viewing.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Fast File Mode for accessing data in training jobs. This enables high performance data access by streaming directly from Amazon S3 with no code changes from the existing File Mode. For example, training a K-Means clustering model on a 100GB dataset took 28 minutes with File Mode but only 5 minutes with Fast File Mode (82% decrease).

Amazon QuickSight now supports pixel-perfect dashboards with the new free-form layout mode. Free-form layouts provide authors with precise, pixel-level control over the size and placement of visual elements on QuickSight dashboards, including support for overlapping content. In addition, authors can also set additional attributes for QuickSight visuals in free-form layout, including background color, transparency, border color, selection color as well as visibility of the loading animation, visual context menu and on-visual menu. Free-form layout also supports conditional rendering of visual elements, which allows authors to show or hide content based on QuickSight parameter values, enabling context sensitive display of text, visuals and images. The combination of these options allows QuickSight authors to showcase their creativity by creating complex, interactive dashboards that allow end-users to understand key insights from their data.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Kendra is adding support for 34 languages for keyword-based search over documents and FAQs. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Customers with content in one or more of the supported languages can now use Amazon Kendra to index and search their content with native language support.

AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in the Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 11 AWS Regions.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. With media capture pipelines, developers can capture the contents of their Amazon Chime SDK meeting and save them to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice. Starting today developers can configure APIs to customize the media capture experience for their applications, by easily switching the way they capture audio, video and content streams.

We have updated the Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) management console to improve your overall experience with configuring and managing your OpenSearch and Elasticsearch clusters on the service. The new console helps you create and update domains, as well helps you get information about your domains, more easily.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available in Europe (Stockholm), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes. EC2 Mac enables developers to dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to develop, build, test, sign, and publish their apps.

Suspicions that the chip shortage is being exacerbated by hoarding have led to the US government asking chip companies to respond to a questionnaire. Washington has mandated November 8th as the date when chip companies must answer a series of questions including information on inventories, production capacity and  key customers  for specific products. The questionnaire …

This story continues at US Acts On Chip Hoarding

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