Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the EU (Milano) and Africa (Cape Town) AWS Regions. This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in Italy and South Africa where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES.

Amazon CloudFront announces reduced billing granularity for Lambda@Edge function duration from 50ms down to 1ms. This will lower the price for most Lambda@Edge functions, more so for functions of short duration. Now, compute duration will be billed in 1ms increments per invocation instead of being rounded up to the nearest 50ms increment per invocation as before.

Lightweight functions such as header manipulations or URL rewrites tend to have a short duration. With this change, it will now be even more cost effective to run these functions on Lambda@Edge. For example, a function that runs in 10ms on average used to be billed for 50ms. Now, that function will be billed for 10ms resulting in a 80% reduction in duration spend. This change applies to all four Lambda@Edge event triggers – viewer request, viewer response, origin request and origin response. This change will be effective starting April 1, 2021. For more information, visit the CloudFront Pricing Page .

Amazon Redshift now supports managed VPC endpoints (powered by AWS PrivateLink) to connect to your Amazon Redshift cluster in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With an Amazon Redshift-managed endpoint, you can now privately access your Amazon Redshift data warehouse within your (VPC) from your client applications in another VPC within the same or another AWS account and running on-premises without using public IPs or requiring traffic to traverse the Internet.

AWS Backint Agent version 1.03 is now available in all commercial regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the recently announced AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region .

AWS announces a new feature of AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store that helps you discover public parameters more easily.

Amazon Lightsail now offers PrestaShop and CentOS 8 blueprints. Lightsail provides a curated selection of blueprints that specify the operating system and software that is preinstalled on your instance bundles when they’re created. With the addition of PrestaShop and CentOS 8, Lightsail makes it easier to create an e-commerce site or custom application with a few clicks.

You can now use the AWS Glue Schema Registry , a serverless and free feature of AWS Glue, in the Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions to validate and control the evolution of streaming data using registered Apache Avro schemas.  

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Forecast Weather Index is now also available in the CA region. Weather Index can increase your forecasting accuracy, by automatically including the latest local weather information to your demand forecasts with one click and at no extra cost. Weather conditions influence consumer demand patterns, product merchandizing decisions, staffing requirements and energy consumption needs; however, acquiring, cleaning, and effectively using live weather information for demand forecasting is challenging and requires ongoing maintenance. With this launch, customers who have been using Weather Index for US and Europe locations, can now also use Weather Index for the Canada region to include a 14-day weather forecasts with one click to your demand forecast.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports using HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) packages as input. HLS is a streaming format used for video distribution across a wide range of devices including smart phones, desktop browsers, and connected TVs.

AWS Security Hub is now athorized as FedRAMP High in AWS GovCloud (US) and is available for security posture management on high-impact workloads. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to the security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP follows the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800 series and requires cloud service providers to receive an independent security assessment conducted by a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) to ensure that authorizations are compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).