You can now specify up to 30 EC2 instance types for each of your master, core, and task node groups when using EMR Instance Fleets with allocation strategy. Previously, this was limited to 15 for tasks nodes, and only 5 for master and core nodes. This increase allows you to specify a broader range of instance sizes, generations, and families that your workloads can operate across to improve your access to both Spot and On-Demand capacity.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in three additional AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

You can now build serverless applications with new AWS-supported container images that simplify continuous integration tasks. Container images work natively with continuous integration systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and AWS CodeBuild. These make it easier to build and package serverless applications using Serverless Application Model CLI (AWS SAM CLI) – a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. 

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS announced support for Custom Images, a new capability that enables customers to customize the Docker container images used for running Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR on EKS. Custom images enables you to install and configure packages specific to your workload that are not available in the public distribution of EMR’s Spark runtime into a single immutable container. An immutable container promotes portability and simplifies dependency management for each workload and enables you to integrate developing applications for EMR on EKS with your own continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

We recently updated AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement.

AWS Network Firewall is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Starting today, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is available in the Europe (London) region. Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. You can use QLDB to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes to your data over time.

You now can further enhance the security of your applications by encrypting data in transit between your applications and your Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) clusters, and between the nodes within a DAX cluster. To use this new feature, enable encryption in transit when creating a DAX cluster and use the latest version of any of the DAX clients. If you enable encryption in transit for a DAX cluster, all requests and responses between your applications and clusters are encrypted by Transport Layer Security (TLS), and connections to the cluster can be authenticated by verification of a cluster X.509 certificate. In addition, the data in transit between the nodes within a cluster also is encrypted. You can enable encryption in transit in the DynamoDB console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation. 

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) framework launches four new templates for building machine learning inference-based applications on AWS Lambda. Now, customers can leverage these templates as a starting point to build, test, and deploy their container-based Serverless ML applications.